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Peter Funch: Last Flight

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Peter Funch is a New York–based photographer from Denmark whose new series, Last Flight, is a investigative portrait of life in Atchison, Kansas, at the moment of an explosion. Working with a local photojournalism school, Funch planted 15 cameras at different locations in the small town to record what was going on at the exact moment of the implosion of Amelia Earhart Bridge, a recently condemned structure named for the town's long disappeared favorite daughter. Funch is interested in creating a document that provides no definite answer, rather a set of unanswered questions that require the viewer to piece events together into an unclear narrative. Under a billboard-size print of swirling gray smoke in Funch's Greenpoint, Brooklyn, studio we talked about his perspective on America as an outsider, the possibilities of documenting a liminal space, and the symbolic power of a bridge being blown to bits.
 
Vice: Tell me what your show at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen is about.
Peter Funch: The show was called Last Flight, and it’s based around an event in mid America, in the middle between A and B in America. It's based around the implosion of a bridge. They were taking down a bridge because it was too old, no longer safe. I was fascinated by this event because it is a scenario in between two states of being. It's a bridge to becoming a ruin, so it’s in a transitional state.
 
 
What interests you about transitional states?
It’s about becoming something new or something different, something we can’t define. It’s about finding a new way of looking at things or defining things. There’s not a word for what state the bridge is in now. It’s not a bridge, it’s not a ruin, it’s something else. I photographed this event from many angles in a very small town in America, and then photographed a lot of other elements, objects, people, and events to illustrate that same in-between state.
 
There was another dimension to the bridge; it was named Amelia Earhart Bridge because the bridge is in the city where she was born.
 
 
She was born in this town?
She was born in this small town called Atchison, Kansas. She disappeared in 1937, and in 1939 when construction of the bridge was done she was declared dead. So, in a way, she also went through that same transition of becoming something else; first she is a pilot and then she becomes the myth. So she’s also in a transitional state.
 
 
You photographed the instant of the bridge imploding from many angles at the same instant, with the help of a local school.
Yeah. I came to Atchison with four people, a producer, and two camera assistants. Then I had help from a college that had a journalism program. There were 26 students helping me out, releasing all these cameras at that moment when the bridge was imploded.
 
How many cameras again?
I had 13 cameras and two drones with cameras; 15 cameras all photographing that same event.
 
 
So you had many photos of the moment that the bridge goes down, but then you also did investigative work photographing archival materials in the town.
Yes, I went back a number of times. I tell the narrative story of the moment when the bridge was taken down, but it’s also the narrative of Amelia Earhart, and the evolution of this city, becoming smaller and smaller. It is also about change in a way that hasn’t been defined. I’m trying to have all these narratives overlapping each other. It's involved the passage of time in a small town, this small society that is quite isolated.
 
Why is photography a good way to talk about that kind of transition?
I’m leaning up against investigative journalism: a very well researched journalistic approach to photography. My background is in photojournalism, and  I’ve been tearing that apart in my own way. I like the tradition of the way you tell a story: You can research, you can tell some aspect of truth. You can really frame it in a way and hold the hand of the viewer and tell a certain story. 
 
 
 
Photography is a moment where you don’t get the before and after.  I imagine a film of this event being a straight narrative, but it seems you are doing something more complicated and nonlinear.
That’s my fascination with photography. It’s all about breaking those rules of how you usually understand photography and how you usually use narrative. It's very much about the Cartier-Bresson approach to photography; it’s the moment. Photography can also not be one moment but many moments.
 
 
This story is about America, but you are from Denmark. I think Robert Frank believed that he brought a more objective perspective to America than Americans could have on it.
The whole story about being an outsider, being an immigrant is definitely something I work around. I love being the stranger. I don’t think I’m objective at all; I'm just observing things in a very unromantic way, as little nostalgia as possible because I don’t have the reference of being born here to be nostalgic about.
 
 
 
So it’s a book and it’s a show and the show was installed in a nontraditional way.  It reflects the in progress, in between state that you’re talking about.
I see so many photo shows where the two dimensional aspect of photographs takes over: it hangs on the wall and that’s it. I wanted to integrate the gallery space a little more. Since the project is about transitional space, I was thinking about demolition and renovation. So I started adding these temporary walls where you see the aluminum, you see the cheap plywood. I also added images lying on the floor and standing up against the wall, as if they are about to be put up.
 
 
So it’s a lot of things that add up to an unclear answer on purpose it seems.  It appears in flux, in a plastic state.  What are you chasing? What are you hoping the pictures are grappling with?
I have always loved the idea that when you go into something you are never going to find the answer. It’s not a treasure map. You’re not going to find the gold or anything like that. It’s not a one-liner. As a viewer you can approach or understand the story in the way you want to, you can read the text and get information about the relation between Amelia Earhart and the bridge and understand something out of that. There are so many ways in and so many ways out.
 
 
It would seem that photojournalism usually provides almost an answer, a document of something. 
Photojournalism is usually framed to understand a conflict. It is good debate and good conversation, but I am not saying there is a clear answer. It’s always going to be your understanding of the pictures.
 
It does put some of the work onto the viewer, to investigate. You are asking people to look at things in a more active way.
I think it is nice to challenge the viewer, to expect a little more of the people watching it. My last project, Babel Tales, was such a very blog-friendly project. It was everywhere because the approach was almost gimmicky in terms of concept.
 
 
There is still something about Last Flight where at the heart of everything there is an explosion. There is a hook, y’know?
Sure, it's almost like a Hollywood trick. That’s part of why I’ve always been fascinated by these kinds of events. You have this thing that looks ostensibly very beautiful, but it tells the story of that moment where we’re not quite sure what’s going on, that’s not defined, that doesn’t have a word.  
 
Last Flight: An American Anthology will be on view at V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark, from July 30 to August 9, 2014. 
 
Peter Funch is a New York–based photographer from Denmark. He studied photojournalism at the Danish School of Journalism and has shown his work internationally.
 
Matthew Leifheit is photo editor of VICE. Follow him on Twitter.

A Few Impressions: Adapting 'Blood Meridian'

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I have always dreamed of adapting Cormac McCarthy’s great novel into film. Many have tried and failed. There were discarded screenplays from dead adaptation attempts scattered about Los Angeles even back when I was an up-and-coming actor.

Tommy Lee Jones came closest to making it, I think. He was a close friend of McCarthy’s—maybe because of his attempt at making this very project—and later he would act in a McCarthy film, the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men. Healso directed a strange, but valiantly attempted TV movie based on McCarthy’s two-character play called The Sunset Limited. It was just too hard to make the film feel dynamic with all that dialogue. One thing about McCarthy is his great descriptions of nature, and in this play, all that energy was infused into the dialogue—the dialogue had to carry the weight that the description in books like Blood Meridian did. Maybe it would work on stage—I think the Steppenwolf Theatre Company put it on decades before. That sounds interesting.

I was cast opposite Tommy Lee Jones for two days in a great but little-seen film by Paul Haggis shot in New Mexico about violent Iraq war veterans. I spent a lunch with Tommy, along with the other young actors, some with no professional experience because they had been hired for their military experience—one had actually killed in Afghanistan. He showed us a picture of a mangled pile of flesh and clothing that had—five minutes before the picture was taken—been a man. Over lunch, Tommy told us that he would, the next day, go visit Cormac at his house in Santa Fe.

When I asked him about his attempts to make Blood Meridian, Tommy said that ultimately he couldn’t make the movie because it was too violent. “I was going to make it just like the book,” he said, “But studios get a little scared when a black guy cuts off a white guy’s head and the shooting jets of blood douse the fire. I wasn’t going to cut it back.”

In fact, Tommy’s script wasn’t just like the book because it was only the first third or so. But of all the scripts—the later one by Monahan, Oscar-winning writer of The Departed—Tommy’s was the most loyal. He also said that he had talked to Nicholson about playing the Judge. I see the Judge as Marlon Brando circa Apocalypse Now. But if you could take  Brando’s Kurtz character and throw in Nicholson’s smile, then yes, baby.

I dreamed about adapting that film, never thinking that it would happen. If Tommy Lee Jones couldn’t do it and Ridley Scott couldn’t do it—Scorsese and Oliver Stone were even rumored to have attempted it—how could I? But maybe those guys were making it too big. I had recently made a film about the poet Hart Crane who lived in New York in the 1920s. He went to Paris, Mexico, and Cuba, and we shot it all for less than half a million. So why couldn’t I do Blood Meridian for a good price and keep it bloody as hell? I also saw that the great director and former actor Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children) had recently been attached and then pulled out of Blood , and then by coincidence had been talking to Andrew Dominik about another McCarthy, Cities of the Plain, the third in the Border Trilogy.

Dominik came to visit me in Utah when I was shooting 127 Hours. He witnessed the arm-cutting scene, and then had a chat with me in my trailer. “Weird playing pain, isn’t it?” I said that it was. He wanted me to do Cities of the Plain. As much as I loved McCarthy, Dominik’s film Chopper, and much of The Assassination of Jesse James, the prospect didn’t have the right glow about it.

Dominik continued to court me, and one time during the long courtship I was outside the Columbia University library, late at night, on a break from studying, and Andrew mentioned that he too had once pursued Blood. He said he liked that the characters were basically apes out on the plain, and then everything would be punctured by dark eloquence of the Judge.

I said that the Judge would be a tricky thing to do in a film, because he was basically Satan but couldn’t be played as Satan. Some of the Judge’s speeches were not exactly realistic, at least not for a film—like how a film version of some of Ahab’s speeches in Moby-Dick, if done as they are in the book, would seem highfalutin. But that’s when I realized that Blood was just sitting there to be adapted. All I had to do was convince the producer with the rights (who, for now, will go unnamed) to let me adapt it.

I shot a test on my own dime (or on my agent’s dime—she, out of her belief in me, gave me her commission from 127 Hours to fund the test) in order to convince the producer that I could make the film where Ridley Scott, Tommy Lee Jones, and everyone else couldn’t. We shot the sequence where Tobin relates the first time they met the Judge, out on the range, running from Apaches and out of ammunition. We had Scott Glenn as Tobin, my old acting teacher, Mark Pellegrino, as the Judge (in a bald cap), and even Luke Perry from 90210—he was great in the silent moments. Our test was awesome and I got permission to do the adaptation.

It was a dream-come-true but, for various reasons, it fell apart. The unnamed producer got mad at me and he took the rights back, so, bam, that’s it. I don’t get to do it. I did another McCarthy adaptation based on his slim but great third book, Child of God, about a necrophiliac—another one of my running themes.

As time went by, I realized that McCarthy took much of his material for Blood from other sources—mainly an actual 19th century memoir called My Confession, by a guy named Samuel Chamberlain. Chamberlain participated in the Civil War and even rode with the actual Glanton gang depicted in Blood. There was even a character like the Judge—A tall man with alopecia who propounded on nature and history. I think My Confession is a future film for me.

In the meantime, I thought I would go through a little of Blood Meridian and rewrite it to see what’s in a word and what’s in a story.

Click through to read James Franco’s alternate draft of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

Introduce the Kid. He is lean and mean. He is sitting by a stove, stoking it. His father is there. He is poor. His wife died long before, at the child’s birth, this is what was exchanged for that: a lean, illiterate runt, 14 years of age, for the woman who had chosen to track through this delirious world of waste with him, only to leave him for the blackness after first bequeathing him with a daughter—off wandering the world, and dying in it, never to be seen by father or brother again, swallowed like a morsel in the maw of earth—and this son, her death knell and her successor. They speak nothing of this, ever, and he, the son, is nothing of her, instead he is a silent, brooding, knuckle of flesh and violence, a killer birthed on the scorched earth to fulfill its destiny.

The stars fell that year. We talk of 1933.  A recorded falling of stars, like Lucifer and his minions outcast and damned, except that this is the new domain of their damnation, a planet inhabited by man in dubious battle with his own kind and self, a race who would use its superiority over the other creatures of this earth to but build engines of its own destruction.

The father is a teacher, although his family is of the Tennessee logging tradition, something rough and hard, men and women living on the essentials of the new Eden, harborers of small traditions of humor and song—but mostly beaten down like proud flags in the dust, white folk ground into nothing, and bitter for it. He, the father, ground into dust by the grain alcohol that he spends his dwindling hours consuming while quoting from the poets, whose names and words are lost on the boy and forgotten as the natural power of the earth arises before him like a lord and master.

This is no country for old men. And aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick. My soul is fastened to a dying animal and it knows not what it is; gather me into the artifice of eternity.

It’s a long, hard road and soon the son makes for new parts, the father not much of a memory, certainly not any vestige of emotion, a vessel and ragged instrument that made one final gesture, hardly, of the human imperative of passing something on, but only passing on the flesh. And the deep-seated hate, which was the animus and the vessel, the child, who passed on. See him on the road. He walks into a single sunset that is all sunsets on this trek unto darkness, for be sure—there will be darkness and there will be heat. The blood will serve as the mixture and there will be scalding. The men in the fields work and are dark silhouettes in the background screen of his life story.  It is darkness and the work continues in the sightlessness, with beasts and hackings. The boy moves on, he is walking into manhood, and engagement with the ambulation of the world of importance, read: conflict and power.

Glimpses of the boy in the old days of St. Louis before he is taken by ship to New Orleans, down the great river, old grandfather, for over 40 days, until he is amongst the great old pirate city, and, a regular, inducted in the mix-cultural soup of derangement, swilled liquor and prostitution.

He boards above a tavern and a square, where, for whatever reason, he descends from and faces of with the transitory sailors who challenge him. He is still a boy, but we are not allowed to see him clearly. He is a kid, but also a kind of killer, a creature trained to lock with others in bouts of fist, knife, and otherwise; pressing their faces down into the suffocating mud, he is champion and satisfied. He fights and for no reason.

In a bar he is pressed by the pistol muzzle of a Maltese sailor, no reason need be given, and shot through his back. He turns on his attacker and pierced by a second ball below his heart and bleeds away half of his life while comprehending nothing, heavy breathing on the floor.

That tavern he lived above? The wife of the tavern master takes him on, after he wandered through the streets holding in the precious serum of his own blood. She spends her mornings on her family and the days on him, extracting the metal from his ribs and then cleaning and tending his wounds, making one extra plate per day, gumbo and rice, and sometimes a little sauce; and in the evenings he takes away the pan and disposes of it in the sewer. When he sweats, she mops his brow. When his strength allows he rises in the night and hunches to the river and, four hours later, at sunrise, he is taken on by a boat that is bound to Texas.

Aboard are the cretins found in myths of caves, men cast out from civilized circles, the ones who fled from the light of the fires when that was the center of life, the men with wayward eyes when women and children are about, and lowered glances amongst men, in order to disguise their deep imbedded intentions, the actions that have marked their eyes from the inside. And he is among them, and of them; his father and the songs he sung, and whatever decency and order they could weave, are lost and faded under layers of time and distance, the boy is now the man, that was planted in the howling and restless nexus of his spirit, fertilized by the drift of his life. And the country he rounded, on the rough and robust sea, an old companion to the coast, nuzzled in his shape, canines, of different color and make, but cohorts nonetheless, was still young, and roughhewn, an open theater where men of his untested temper could roam and cut themselves on it, and allow it to cut them. Scars and molding on both sides.

In the port of his landing the earth had dried so dust was of the temper, it was about men and inside men, creating them, wizening them into beings like the old trees banished to this land from paradise and sucked of their verdure, a land of craggy beings, sentient and insentient, and even then, knowing—knowing and no telling.

He is amongst men and built dwellings once again, and from labor, organized and executed in the tacit understandings of men and women just trying to comport themselves thorough this vale, clean and unmolested, and trusting this wayward beast for the few days and efforts. He wanders. In each town the tacit mold has been stamped on the order, so that in the dark night wanderings, the cries of the whores becomes familiar, as if they were creatures not bred of such societies, but extorted from the ground in one great rising of damned souls, pleading for his succor.

There is a hanged man, one who killed the father, the father rightfully killed for his ignorance and bequeathing of ignorance to the animal that would learn the one lesson that would kill them both, and the minute battle that was waged ended and choked in the dust as the hanged man’s friends fall in to pull his legs as he dangles, helping the passage to the blackness at the end of an ill-dropped rope, he pants are soiled and then they cut him down.

See the portraits: he, in a sawmill, sweat amongst the chips and dust, he works in a diphtheria pesthouse, what this is and what he does, not even he is aware, but he is silent and gets money. Along the way he obtains a mule after working the yard for an old man. This is his life, an aimless piece of energy rounding an unseen beacon. The mule he takes into the land of Fredonia, and centers on the town of Nacogdoches. He is 16.

The Reverend Green has pitched a tent amidst the rain that falls like a solid sheet, and his preaching has drawn crowd in amongst themselves, the tent interior so hot groups brave the rain for periods before pulling back in through the wet flaps and the preaching, a gathering of the spiritual amongst the outlands, civilization and god, tripping lightly after the vanguards where white men have infiltrated the broken consortiums the peoples of the Americas. Here is the man with the cross abreast the backs of the men with the guns and the swords. The kid stood at the back.

My people, said the Reverend at the front, I could not keep away, this being my place, my place, my home, which is amongst the people, and what do we call hell? Hell is among us if it is among us, but I am home when I am amongst my people, where my people go is my house and my home. And I will brave hell, and round out hell, for these people are my home.

Next to the kid, a man with heavy mustache leans over and breathes down thick breath on him, he is as weathered as the rest, the kid included, sogged with rain, the hat brim hung, and the crown stove.

What a land for rain. And his eyes expectant.

Yeah. The kid, but for his lack of arms, is amongst the outlaws akin to his own self.

In from the rain, a flap of the tent’s membrane is pushed through, steam rising from his shoulders and head—a man, large, a giant. Removing his hat in the dim light he reveals his head, round and hairless as marble, carved long ago, his lips also free of hair, his eyebrows and lids hairless. He resets his hat and mounts the stage. His face is placid and content like a child’s, the hint of a smile, his hands, a child’s hands.

This man before you is an imposter. He is neither who he claims nor does he represent the institution he poses in front of. He quotes a few lines learned from campfires of the damned, and repeats them across these open lands in order to take in unsettle people such as yourselves. He is wanted in Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

This man is the imposter, he but claims I own his own guilt. He turned his head into his bible and began reading as quick as he could while the bald giant continued.

His crimes are but the worst exposed by man, but doubly so when they are perpetrated by a man posing of the cloth: a child of 11, one sired by those taken in by his spiels across the states, he was discovered with such lamb en flagrante, in the very robes you see across his back now.

The crowd was audible. Women’s voice rising above the deep grunts of the men.

I’ll kill that son of bitch, from one side of the tent.

This man is the devil. See him before you. He stands Satan.

There was a twinkle of a smile on the great man’s face. The crowd began to move like water, or a unified beast and the shouts became distinct and independent. One woman was seen to collapse to her knees.

Sodom. Sodom. Was heard from the crowd, and in the same area a man unholstered his gun and shot the Reverend Green in the chest. The mustachioed man unbuckled his knife and cut upwards a hole in the tent and pulled the kid through after him, they moved across the rain-pelted road, behind them the tent exploded inward from shots and cries, other expellees pushed through holes as the whole thing began to move like an animal, desperate, until it finally crumbled on one side and then the other, an elephant brought to its knees.

The man with the bald egghead was at the bar when they entered. He had a drink before him and two finger-lengths of coins by his arm. The kid and the mustache man moved behind him and down the bar. The bar is tall, built for a land of giants, but the bald man meets it with ease, leaning over it and planting himself in half poise.

When the kid pushed forward coin to the bartender it was pushed back.

This is on the judge, yonder.

The bald man didn’t look over, but the tooth in his back mouth revealed itself.

Just then a crowd from the tent entered, mud-caked and bloodied, like creatures from the bog. They had organized a posse to relinquish the false preacher.

Judge, how did you know of him?

Who?

The Preacher Green, when was you last at Fort Smith?

Fort Smith, you say?

Yes, such perpetrations of the preacher, he was last seen at Fort Smith, before this, when did all this come down? When was he met before this?

I’ve never seen that man in my life.

But…

There is a silence among the men and the room, and then laughter arose from one, then two, and then the group. All and the judge were laughing and it filled the room with a clapping exaggeration, like barkings of seals out from mustached portals full of blackened teeth.

(Things happen. He meets Toadvine, a man without ears, as they were cut from his head. He does other things. Then meets up with Captain White and goes hunting for Apaches. After days of traveling in the desert the company finally has their showdown.)

They are on the plain, far to the south there is something. The captain stops the troop with a raised hand and pulls a collapsible glass from his saddle bag, there is a small rupture in the surface of the horizon, but far, so that it looks like smudged haze, just on the surface of the earth. He hands the glass to the sergeant.

Looks like cattle, he says.

It’s not buffalo.

Bring Candelario up here.

The Mexican comes to the front of the line and the sergeant hands him the glass, then he lowers it and looks with his naked eye.

They not buffalo.

We know, horses most likely.

Si.

The captain takes back the glass and collapses it, then motions and they move forward.

The herd comes into focus, a motley of horses, mules, and cattle, running with a handful of riders at the edges, Indians, ragged on small ponies and others with hats, possibly Mexicans. The captain hands the sergeant the glass again.

What do you reckon?

Horsetheives?

So do I. Think they’ve see us.

Yes, they’ve seen us.

They don’t seem concerned.

Nope.

Well, we might have a bit of fun this day.

As the head of the heard passed the company stands by, first a raw bevy of mismatched cattle, long and twisted horns, no two of the same color or size, and amongst them black coated mules with their dumb anvil heads, lifted above the dustcloud mass, forward moving and of the crowd, working their lot, and then the vanguard of the riders is there, parallel to the mass of ponies, hundreds in breadth, thin and muscular, of the plains, dried and mean; the riders, when abreast the company, peel back to the back of the stampeding beasts.

The captain is up and down the collection of his company pointing at the flanking riders and yelling above the pounding of hooves. There, on the sides of the ponies were the passing collage of markings, drawn up from ancient stores of symbols, fish, and antelope, forked spears, black points, idealized forms that rose from the dust and endured and fell by the hands of man, ancient, regressive, and wild, a civilization based on the essential, passing in zoetropic motion, when amidst the thunderous rumbling round and round, annular systems, the piecing and very straight sound of the quena, the sharp familiar of the pipe made from men’s bones, high and shrill.

From the back of the heard emerges a host of warriors, hundreds strong, riding the waves of dust, some of the riders popping up from suicide positions, revealing their numbers at the last minute, the legendary death bands, horrible, their shields bedecked with shards of mirror, clasping and refracting millions of shards of light into the eyes of the onlookers bestride their hoof-shifting horses.

They, the animals aware of the superior threat bearing down in a nightmare swoop; on the demons, at first unified and riding the sounds of the routing flute pitch, painted faces like fairground horrors, and voodoo grandfathers, skulls of white and black slashes, bold and thick, projecting perennial grins of death; lank bodies of muscles, begird in nothing at all beneath the thick and wild skins of various beasts, tanned and flapping, condoning the stripped beasthood upon the new wearers, and on some the scrapings of the kills of whites and Mexicans: fun house jewelry, decadent and sun dazzling, uniforms of cavalry, braided but torn and worn open and rebellious, bedecked with feathers and twisted braids of hair, both human and animal, and black nuggets that would be skin, ears, and noses, curled and shrunken in the days of sun without relent, and flowing like haunting wraiths on the hosts of greater demons, wisps of white and colored cloth stripped from dresses and undergarments, a full wedding veil, streaked with blood like a prop from a night of virginal horror, and one in a top hat like the nightmare spoof of a doctor come to call, and a pair on one side bareback abreast two black beasts, they calico companions: one bare-assed in white stockings, the other in a white dress raised above his knees, their black hair trailing off behind in ropy tails, like pythons, two sisters of death, animal and man connected and driven; a whole race emerged from the dry cauldron of the earth, where the heat and cracked earth fostered demons, and the rolling-eyed, slack-mouthed madness of fighters were the animal norm, and meat was planted on the earth to be torn from beasts and beings and torn by sharp teeth.

Lord, help us, says the sergeant.

The horde lets loose a cloud of arrows that pass through the company, men pause and then drop from their horses, the mounts trip about and fall forward or sit on their haunches, arrows like matador piercings sticking from their bare sides and faces, the men fire but too soon—the dust of panicking beasts is about them, blinding and encompassing, as if the raised elements were functions of the savages, now howling and whipping their hair about, they ride on the falling company with lances, and gallop over the shrieking faces of the white men; the Kid’s horse sinks down like a deflated balloon figure and he leaps from the doomed beast, all around him men shriek and try to reload their pistols and rifles amidst the cutting feet of horses and the reaching hands that would on horseback pull men to their feet and scalp them standing and drop them like denuded offal, the Kid’s own rifle is expended and he can’t make amidst the rounding to reload.

A confused horse comes within the swirling cries of dust and kicks and bites at him like a dog, the other men mad and confused, in efforts to retreat or just exercise the last agency they would have on this earth, staggering about and walking into the exterminating points of their foes who felled them like paper targets on a range.

And then the warriors dismount, leaping from their mounts midstride, and taking up the momentum in barefooted beelines they race toward the staggering cavalrymen and rip their knives about throats like can openers, or stick and up thrust bellies so that intestines are twisted into each other into impossibly tangled bunches of cut seaweed falling in lumps on the wrong side of the epidermal walls, some men pulling their wasted guts back inside only to be yanked into kneeling backbends and have a knife worked around their crowns in bloody excavations of their heads, blessed and tonsured to the skull bone. Ambling about, dead on their feet but for the bleeding out; the screeching, grounded Apaches whirl about the fallen whitemen and cherry-pick their victims, taking scalps from the living and dead, cutting noses, lips, ears, and genitals from the living and dead.

One man, already scalped watched with wide-open eyes as he is held down by his forehead, fringed by the remaining hair on the browline and the native, with three quick blows, knocks in his teeth and then claws the chicklets from between the man’s empty gums.

Some of the warriors wear the blood and grime like clothing, one wears a man’s stomach on his head and all around dead and squirming bodies alike are choked with their own severed cocks, their pants with holes pouring blood like vaginal passages erupting; and some howl as they sodomize their victims, slashing and stabbing as they ride, screeching and leaping about, from body to body as the men lay dead or dying in the settling dust and the pathetic cries of horses.

Here Be Dragons: Stop Freaking Out About Facebook's 'Psychological Experiments'

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Photos via and via

The last time I wrote about Facebook it was under an image depicting Mark Zuckerberg as a fleece-wearing Satan. Since then, the company’s image has taken a bit of a blow. The "revelation" last weekend that the business performed "psychological experiments" to manipulate the moods of its users led to an outpouring of emotion on Facebook walls up and down the land.

But the truth is there’s nothing new or even particularly interesting about the now infamous study, titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” Researchers tweaked the algorithm that chooses which stories are displayed in people's feeds, so some users were shown more posts deemed to be "negative" by virtue of the words they contained—sad stuff, break-up stuff, war, famine... that kind of thing, I guess. The subjects—by a barely significant amount—then tended to be more likely to use the same, sad language in their own posts. This is the "emotional contagion" the researchers were looking for.

You could extrapolate this to mean that if you show people their friends’ more depressing posts, they get depressed themselves. Whether you would sign up to that theory depends on how much faith you put in sentiment analysis, which tries to mark pieces of text according to how many positive- or negative-sounding words they contain—love, hate, good, bad, etc.

It’s the sort of thing PR people do to impress bosses who aren’t very tech savvy. It also tends to be less accurate the shorter the text being analyzed is, which means it's not great for things like tweets and Facebook updates.

The media response to this is neatly summed up by the headline of Laurie Penny’s New Statesman article: “Facebook can manipulate your mood. It can affect whether you vote. When do we start to worry?” Of course, the trite answer is that Laurie Penny can manipulate your mood and that Laurie Penny can affect whether you vote, so when do we start to worry about her, or all the other journalists out there doing the same? That’s maybe a little unfair, but it gets to the heart of the issue, which is that Facebook is simply one player in a far larger game of algorithms and data, the implications of which Penny and other non-technical pundits are only just beginning to grasp.

Most online media brands worth anything are doing something similar all the time. Huffington Post was a pioneer of automated A/B testing in the 00s, testing different version of headlines in real time to see which would gain more traction with audiences. “But Martin,” someone who types in all caps is about to email me, “that’s nothing like Facebook’s experiment!” Except it is. Huffington Post experimented on its users, exposing them to different content in an attempt to find the text that created the strongest emotional response. The two major differences are that HuffPo used the results to boost profits in real time, and that nobody really gave a shit.

Should they have? The Coding Conduct blog has a fascinating post looking at the study and the ethical approval the researchers may have needed to obtain. Dave Gorski at Science Based Medicine pointed out that the policies of PNASthe journal that published the research—require that, “Research involving Human and Animal Participants and Clinical Trials must have been approved by the author’s institutional review board.” Since Facebook (like most companies) doesn’t have an IRB, that leaves everyone in a bit of an ambiguous state.

The problem is, it just doesn’t make sense for this kind of study to have to go through ethical approval processes. A vast amount of what you see on the internet is controlled in some way by algorithms similar to those Facebook uses to dictate what appears on your wall, from suggested videos on YouTube to the headlines on Google News. Much of the rest is controlled by humans—the front page of VICE, for example. It’s hard to imagine how you’d bring Facebook’s research into an ethics regime without dragging half the internet into a farce.

Not that Facebook really need the scientific community, in any case. Back in February I wrote about deep learning, warning that companies like Facebook seizing a monopoly over data and expertise would sideline scientists. Here we have a case in point—Facebook can live without PNAS, but the academic community doesn’t have an alternative source of vital social network data. The power in this situation is entirely one-sided.

That’s the real story here. The idea that Facebook should have sought ethical approval to tweak the ranking of stories is a technologically-illiterate fantasy; but people are absolutely right to be skeptical about the sheer brute power that Facebook and its peers wield over our data, and the means of analyzing it. 

There’s another big problem with the study that, to my knowledge, nobody else has raised, and that’s repeatability. If you wanted to test the findings by doing the same research yourself, pretty much your only option would be to go back to Facebook and ask them nicely. That should tell you everything you need to know about the health of an information economy, where one company holds all the data and scientists are left begging for scraps.

Follow Martin Robbins on Twitter.

These Scottish Truthers Think Pretty Much All Laws Are Invalid

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Members of the Scottish Sovereigns

The Scottish Sovereigns are here to save you from your government. Only they don’t really know how.

A 4,000-strong group of “truth seekers,” the Sovereigns congregate online—both on their Facebook page and official website—to “learn fundamental freedoms and human rights.” This can mostly be translated to mean a general disdain for the establishment, profile pictures involving Anonymous masks, and lots of radical ideas about the law, i.e., that members don’t really have to follow it.

“A law only becomes a law with the consent of the people,” said one member who wished to remain anonymous. “Most of these laws they bring in these days are just in place to oppress people or raise revenue for the government.” 

Much of the group's activity can be checked off as optimistic but naive activism—a kind of Occupy approach that consists of identifying a problem and talking about it a lot. But it’s the idea that they are outside the law that has pissed off the Sovereigns’ critics the most. The group's claims that you can get out of trouble by using odd, unreliable legal quirks have been criticized as misleading and potentially dangerous. 

The Sovereigns' thought process works according to the same kind of principles that the American “freeman on the land” hold dear. Freemen believe they can opt out of being governed and that laws (all created to line the pockets of the elite) only apply if they personally consent to them, or if the law involves the subject directly harming someone. If they’re charged with breaking one of these laws, they say they have the right to refuse arrest. When the case comes to court, they reckon they can just talk their way out of punishment by using all sorts of pseudo-legalese and claiming that the only "true" law is their interpretation of the term "common law."

The freeman argument has never been successful in an American court. In fact, it can get defendants into more trouble, including contempt convictions and fines, though that hasn’t stopped enthusiasts from claiming that it works.

Sovereigns advise not disclosing your legal name for similar reasons, because identifying as whatever’s on your official ID is supposedly a tacit admission that you consent to the legal system. Instead, members use nicknames, or—for the dedicated—go feudal, only referring to themselves as “James, son of William,” or “Kathy, daughter of Margaret.” 

“I am more than the name on the birth certificate,” one member told me. “A birth certificate is Crown copyright, and it refers to the legal person, not you as a man.”

A Scottish Sovereign using the "I don't have a name" defense after being stopped for using his cell phone while driving.

Spreading the message that you can escape criminal convictions using this line of reasoning is clearly not a good thing. Tax is a huge inconvenience, but if nobody paid it because they never “consented” to being taxed, the National Heath Service would end up completely privatized and the citizens of the UK would have to start living like Americans. Plus it's highly unlikely that any court is going to take the Sovereigns' principles seriously in a tax evasion case.

I was advised not to speak to lawyers because they’ve “sworn an oath to the Crown”, but I thought I’d take my chances. I called Peter Nicholson—editor of the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland—to check the Sovereigns’ claims and find out whether their line of defense is just as ineffective as their freemen brothers’. He told me they're talking bullshit.

“There is no question of opting whether to be subject to the law or the courts or not, irrespective of whether you choose to take part in the democratic process,” he said. “And copyright in birth certificates doesn't give the Crown or anyone else any rights over your name, or any other aspect of your self. You’re allowed to change your name whenever you want.”

Another legal expert who asked not to be named, added, “It’s easier to believe all these grand conspiracies than accept that the world’s just a bit shit. They misunderstand the law, the procedures, and the language. Whatever you say they will twist it to suit the ideas they already have. It’s called confirmation bias.”

A Scottish Sovereign confusing a police officer with some pseduo-legalese

The group also deal in a very internet-oriented brand of paranoia—a subreddit about chemtrails and cabals brought to life. Of course, not every member subscribes to the idea that the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation, or that Pitbull knew MH370 was going to disappear. But I was told that a story about the Sovereigns would never be published because the Rothschild family controls the world and its media.

When I pointed out that the NSA revelations (something that, following the Sovereigns' thinking, the Rothschilds would presumably want to keep secret) were published and reported by the establishment press, I was reminded that stories like that are merely “controlled distractions.”

According to former member Chris McClelland, this nutter contingent is relatively new. Chris was a Scottish Sovereign for five years, but left after becoming disillusioned with “weirdos and chancers trying to take over the group.”

“Personally, I only use Scots Law,” he told me. “You can’t go into [Scottish] courts and challenge them using English common law or anything else. That’s like trying to play a game of draughts using the rules of chess. I don’t want to be associated with these weirdos and their fantasy shit. There’s loads of new members ruining the group; one guy even said he wanted to ‘do a Raoul Moat.’ I don’t want to be associated with that.”

Sovereigns member Freeborn Jaffa

I was interested to see how the current members’ outlook plays into the sovereignty debate going on in Scotland, so I met a few Sovereigns to ask.

Bill—also known as “Freeborn Jaffa”—is a veteran member of the Scottish Sovereigns, not one of the new breed of keyboard conspiracists. “People are fed up of the mainstream political parties in this country, which is why I’m voting to leave Britain in the referendum," he told me. "I’ve got nothing against the English whatsoever. I’ve got family in England, and they love the Scots, too. But the UK won’t say why they want us to stay. Is it so they can keep control over our oil and industry and leave us with nuclear dumps up here?”

His was the view you’d expect, but it’s not one shared by all Sovereigns. One member, Bri, said, “Scotland’s been independent since 1314—since the Battle of Bannockburn—and that’s never been overturned. The problem is that if we vote for independence and get a new constitution we might lose this fundamental freedom.”

Gary, another member, added, “The Declaration of Arbroath and the Claim of Right 1689 show we are an independent people. I phoned up the National Archive of Scotland (NAS), who hold the documents, and they told me I’m right.”

After a number of phone calls, emails, and a Freedom of Information request, the NAS told me that they don’t interpret the contents of the documents—they just hold them.

Sovereigns member Bri

There are a number of groups similar to the Sovereigns around the UK. England, for example, has the People’s United Community, whose website is run by Ben Hudson from Birmingham. “We started off as a freeman group, but over time we found out it wasn’t working. So we stepped back from that and decided to build a community of freethinkers for people who want to know more about the world they live in,” he told me.

“So many people are just in it to get out of paying council tax and road tax,” he continued. “The biggest one right now is weed growing; I get hundreds of emails a day from people asking how I can get them off [after being caught] growing weed.”

Another, the British Constitutional Group, tried to storm a County Court in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 2011. The aim was to arrest the judge "for contempt of court and treason," but a number of protesters ended up getting arrested themselves while the judge was escorted to safety by the police. 

Unsurprisingly, given both the passion and the paranoia, there’s a lot of infighting among truth groups. Kev Baker from Truth Frequency Radio told me, “It’s disillusioning when people who I consider my peers are more interested in focusing on their own agendas instead of pulling together and sharing our common goal. But we can’t be naive—there will also be an involvement from security services. Truth groups will be a target for agent provocateur to cause some of the disruption.”

Sovereigns member Nala

The Scottish Sovereigns are currently working on a document to “call out” the powers that be in Scotland. The idea is to hand a document into the Court of Session that will force the country’s top politicians to “state their intentions.”

One of the architects behind the plan, who goes by the name Nala, explained: “The Court of Session guarantees to guard the sovereignty of Scottish people—not in the legal realm, but in the lawful realm. We are going to petition these people who are supposed to be running this country for our benefit to make them take notice that we’ve caught on to what they’re doing and that it must stop.”

It’s easy to see why the Sovereigns are an attractive group; lots of people don't like being governed by politicians who don't seem remotely capable of doing what they've been elected to do, and nobody likes paying for shit. So if some recklessly confident guy comes along and tells you there’s a way to get out of following the rules you don't want to follow, and to avoid losing 20 percent of your income every month, you’re going to listen to him. But you really shouldn’t.

Embedded: Fightland Takes You Behind the Scenes with Ronda Rousey

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Embedded: Fightland Takes You Behind the Scenes with Ronda Rousey

How Gross Is Your Phone?

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How Gross Is Your Phone?

A Night Out with the Foreign Tourist Police in Thailand's Seediest City

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Photos by Aaron Joel Santos

Thailand’s most sinful city, Pattaya is famous for getting men a little hot under the collar. And discontent is boiling over at the police mobile unit stationed at the entrance to the resort town’s infamous Walking Street. A giant Pakistani man is stating his case vociferously to the volunteer foreign cops who patrol the red-light district on a nightly basis. Beside him, a feminine Asian form on skyscraping stilettos chews gum and shoots him sour looks. “I am not a homosexual,” cries the man. “This thing deceived me,” he says, jabbing a finger at his companion, whose perceptibly manly features and guttural tones make it obvious she was born a he. 

“He refused to pay her,” says Andros Plocins, an English member of the Foreign Tourist Police Assistants (FTPA), as we watch the scene unfold. “So now we have to sort it out.” The situation is soon defused. The man, who it transpires, had got a degree of value for the transaction before he realized the reality of the situation, has to pay the agreed price. The ladyboy, meanwhile, is hit with a 200 baht ($6) fine for soliciting. “He should have just paid in the first place,” continues another policeman, laughing. “She was pretty hot.”

Taking care of such misunderstandings is among the many responsibilities of the FTPA. Foreign volunteer police have been pounding Walking Street since 2002, when Pattaya’s Tourist Police Division invited foreigners to assist them. At first, their primary role was to help Thai officers with translation and to provide an informal tourist information service. The FTPA still provides support to foreign visitors, but its scope has been widened to include duties such as stopping bar fights and apprehending thieves. Although volunteer officers don’t have powers of arrest (approval is needed from a supervising Thai officer), they carry handcuffs, batons and cans of pepper spray. Indeed, with their black SWAT-esque uniforms, they cut imposing figures. 

The FTPA numbers around 60 members from 20 different countries while its reach extends across the greater Pattaya area thanks to the recent introduction of motorbike patrols. Despite this diversification, however, Walking Street, which they patrol every evening from 9PM to 3AM, remains the primary beat for volunteer officers. 

To a legion of visiting men, the thoroughfare is something approaching paradise. Extending a little over a mile from the center of town to the ferry port, the pedestrianized strip is a neon-lit playground of wall-to-wall go-go bars. Teams of mini-skirted girls patrol the exterior of the larger venues hoping to lure in johns. Smaller operations rely on the age-old tactic of employing impressively vocal barmaids whose throaty cries of “welcome handsome man” can be clearly deciphered over the thumping techno that is the street’s constant mating call.

Pattaya is not just about sex tourism however. The city’s proximity to Bangkok’s Suvarnhabumi Airport (it is a short two hour hop away) makes it one of Thailand’s most popular destinations for package tourists. Russians in particular flock here, as do Chinese, Indians and Arabs. The town’s civic leaders have gone to great lengths to rid the city of its reputation for sleaze and many of these new visitors are families, couples or tour groups who seem blissfully unbothered by the trade in flesh that is as integral to Pattaya as its slightly shabby beach. 

It is an eclectic mix of people, and the various nationalities generally rub together peacefully. However, for all the efforts of the local authorities, it will take more than a few Siberian families to burnish Pattaya’s image.  Bar fights, drug crime and tensions between tourists and sex workers are regular currency on Walking Street. Elsewhere hundreds of freelance prostitutes ply their wares; drivers donate their lives to one of the worst road death tolls in Thailand and scores of methamphetamine pills fuel further craziness.

Keeping a lid on the mayhem would be a tough job for the most hardened police team. The fact that much of the grunt work is carried out by foreign volunteers is therefore even more remarkable.

“This place isn’t what it used to be, that’s for sure,” laments Dave Eke, another British member of the FTPA. He should know. A one-time security manager at tough East London nightclubs during the era of mobsters like the Kray twins, Eke left the UK for Thailand over thirty years ago and has been living in Pattaya since 1979. For the last twelve of those years he has devoted most of his nights to pounding the streets of the city as a volunteer officer. 

A lugubrious character anyway, Eke’s hangdog features droop visibly as he reflects on the nightly parade of humanity on Walking Street. “I wouldn’t say that Pattaya is exactly a magnet for bad eggs,” he says, “but there’s definitely a good proportion of idiots that come here. They will get uncontrollably drunk and then refuse to pay a bar bill or something. The Thais used to be very friendly, but they have been worn down and now it is a lot more cynical. What a lot of visitors don’t realize is that it is very dangerous to anger Thais. And if you cause trouble in one of the go-go bars or you get into an argument with a girl or the management, you face the prospect of a beating from a bouncer, most of whom are trained in muay thai.”

If Eke seems weary, his FTPA colleague Plocins is clearly living the dream. He came to Pattaya on holiday following his retirement from a police career in Befordshire and fell in love with lifestyle. The novelty clearly has not worn off. “Pattaya has its moments of course, but it still feels like a dream to me,” he beams. “I could be back in England, retired and bored with a retired and bored wife. Yet here I am, the sun is shining and I’m surrounded by hundreds of beautiful women. It is a no-brainer.”  

Despite his downbeat disposition, Eke is clearly a well-known and well-liked figure in Pattaya. We join him and Plocins as they leave the mobile unit to patrol the length of Walking Street. Eke, resplendent in his military beret, leads the way, stopping frequently to exchange wais—the traditional Thai greeting—with mama sans, bar girls and ladyboys. “It is not enough to walk around in a police uniform to get people to respect you,” he says. “You have to build up a relationship with everyone over time. That means everything here.”

It is certainly not a good idea to cross the locals on Walking Street. Use of ya ba, a methamphetamine derivative which translates literally as “madness drug” is prevalent in Pattaya, especially among sex workers and other nightowls. Originally given to horses to give them energy to pull carts up steep hills, the drug, which comes in tablet form, typically engenders euphoria but it is highly addictive and its side-effects are unpredictable. “If there wasn’t so much ya ba doing the rounds, there wouldn’t be half as much trouble,” claims Plocins. “Booze can make people leery and aggressive but the drugs can really step things up a notch.”

Unsurprisingly, catching dealers is a top priority for the regular Thai police and there are stiff sentences for those busted. To avoid being nabbed in possession, pushers have devised a number of hiding spots for their product in the vicinity of Walking Street. 

Eke takes pride on being able to sniff out these nooks and crannies. “You’ll need to get away from there,” he instructs a group of confused-looking Russian teenagers who are drinking by a wall at the port end of Walking Street. Eke removes a loose stone from the lower part of the wall and lowers himself onto his haunches to perform closer investigation. “I find bags in here all the time,” he says as he stretches his arm into the space vacated by the rock. On this occasion, however, he comes away empty handed. 

Back at the mobile unit the atmosphere is relaxed. FTPA volunteers give directions to lost tourists and have their photos snapped by jovial vodka-fuelled Russians. To pass the time they share some of their Pattaya horror stories. Ladyboys brandishing stiletto heels as a weapon seems to be a common occurrence, while gruesome motorbike accidents and dead bodies washing up on the beach attest to the city’s darker underbelly. 

This particular evening, however, is something of a non-event. “It is one of the quiet evenings,” admits Eke. “Thankfully these are the most common nights but we always have to be ready and on our toes. It is Pattaya. You never know what might happen next.”

Follow Duncan Forgan on Twitter

I Went to the Dyke March and Remembered What Pride Was About

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Photos by James Emmerman

Finding a group of about 10,000 women is more difficult than it seems. When I first arrived at Bryant Park for the Dyke March, I thought I had missed it altogether. But after an internal game of Follow That Lesbian to the Parade, I discovered a sea of proud dykes creating rolling waves of estrogen and rainbows behind the New York Public Library. The march was supposed to start at five, but by the time I arrived it was 5:07 and they had already walked an entire block. Say what you want about lesbians, but they really know how to get their shit together.

The Dyke March website promised me giant dyke puppets and a swimming pool full of naked ladies carried by other naked ladies, but I only saw slow-walking women in tank tops and shorts, holding hands.

I’ll be honest—at first, I was a little disappointed. Coming from the Drag March the night before, I wanted an afternoon filled with glitter and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow" sing-alongs. In retrospect, I’m glad that wasn’t the case. Unlike at other Pride events, which are basically glorified beauty pageants, women celebrated freedom of choice, whatever that choice may be.

Some giant vagina puppets would have been cool too, though.

If you know the history of the Dyke March, you’re probably not surprised by the lack of vagina puppets. At the Lesbian Avengers’ first march in 1993, OG lesbians marched in Washington, DC, because they'd had enough of the sexism, discrimination, and objectification that are essential to our capital's personal brand. Over the past 22 years, the movement has spread. Chicago hosted its first march in 1998, Mexico City had its first march in 2003, and Berlin decided to join in on the fun in 2013.

The protest is unregulated, and the organizers do not get a permit for the thousands of dykes to march to Washington Square Park. Based on the number of people and the minimal police presence, I was shocked that nothing happened. I did see two women yelling at each other as they tried to determine which one of them did, in fact, own the sidewalk, but they quickly agreed on joint custody and went on with their day.

It’s hard to tell what the original protest must have looked like other than a few grainy photos I saw on Google Images, but I found a woman, Karen, who sat on this amazing rainbow bike and wore a shirt from the original march, with her woman, Donna, by her side.

It looked like the ultimate lesbian fantasy, or at least my ultimate lesbian fantasy, and I wanted to find out about the changes that they’d seen through the years.

“It’s important for women to have their event like this,” Karen said. “They didn’t want us to be a part of Pride, so this is about women coming to together—it’s completely different now, though. It’s a lot easier to be out now at work and other places, but there need to be more changes made and for everyone to be accepted, and women still need to keep fighting for their rights.”

“I think all we can really hope for is economic equality and not to be afraid,” Donna added.

Amen. This march wasn’t just about lesbianism, but also about women’s rights in general. Different groups handed out stickers like “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology!” One woman walked around selling rainbow rape whistles. Every woman I talked to had the same agenda: lesbian visibility, equal opportunity, equal pay, and birth control.

These statements separated the Dyke March from the Pride Parade. Sure, it’s fun to see naked men covered in glitter dance with girls wearing weed-leaf pasties on a float sponsored by a major corporation, but the Dyke March didn’t focus on celebration, because women don’t always have something to be happy about. (Shout out to Hobby Lobby!) The sparkly boas and beads (anal or otherwise) seemed irrelevant compared to the necessity of raising awareness and initiating change.

The need for change was hard to forget since Christians protested the march along the way.

They all looked sad and sweaty as they stood along the streets waving their Bibles and screaming for the dykes' salvation. I asked one guy if he thought his methods of shouting nonsense at strangers was an effective way to spread the good word of the Lord. “You’re all going to burn in hell,” he told me. “Every single one of you.” I don’t know whom he was referring to, but I could assume that he meant basically everyone who’s ever come without crying.

A cross-dressing choir mocked Christian homophobes, singing, “Maria and Victoria / They’ll lick clit on the floor with ya / God is a Dyke” over and over again until it was stuck in my head for good.

It was getting hot, so I stopped marching to breathe and ran into an old woman who was sporting rainbow hair and a G pen. She was standing with her French friend as they both watched the parade. She told me that she’s been to all 22 marches and participated in the Stonewall Riots back when lesbianism was considered as alien as bestiality. Despite being there year after year, she’s still optimistically pushing for change.

“It’s much more accepting now… This is a protest, this is a march for lesbian visibility, and all I can hope is for this to become commonplace,” she said, taking another drag.

After two hours of marching and discussing women’s issues, I was physically and emotionally exhausted, so I decided to sit by the fountain in Washington Square Park. As I dipped my feet in the water, I watched as the real fun began. Girls exercised their legal right to show their boobs in public and got wet together in the fountain.

Others made out passionately with their loved ones.

Some girls wanted to show off their massive tits, which was fine by everyone.

I started off feeling anxious about being surrounded by so many women because a lot of girls weren’t very nice to me in school—which is a light way of putting it—and sometimes it’s hard to leave those stereotypes behind. But seeing so many women coming together in unparalleled unity to raise awareness both for gay rights and for women’s rights gave me a sense of sorority I didn’t think I had in me. All I wanted to do was take off all of my clothes and jump in—if only I didn’t have my period that day. Welcome to womanhood. Nothing is ever easy, is it?


A Scientist Has Developed a Flu Strain Your Immune System Can't Fight

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A Scientist Has Developed a Flu Strain Your Immune System Can't Fight

This Former Drug Dealer Came Up with Europe's Answer to Soylent

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Joey van Koningsbruggen pouring himself a glass of Joylent

It's 2014 and we still have no idea what we should be eating. The food pyramid turned out to be a lie and the whole gluten debate continues to rile up anyone who chooses to get involved; while seeds have been lionised, cocoa solids could apparently save the world and you're now categorized as a fucking n00b if you have to ask someone what spelt is. 

I'm guessing this neurosis about what we put in our mouths had something to do with Rob Rhinehart coming up with his food replacement drink, Soylent—the thought being that we can just shut up about food already, start subsisting on a liquefied regimen of nutrients and get on with our lives. Unfortunately, that remedy currently only works for Americans, as Soylent isn't yet shipped outside of the US.

However, for any Europeans who feel like trading in pizza, pasta and burritos for three daily doses of beige liquid, Dutch artist Joey van Koningsbruggen has taken it upon himself to help. Conveniently, Soylent list all of their ingredients on their website, so Joey just ordered each individual component and smashed them all together himself.

He wasn't planning on selling the stuff, but people began taking an interest as soon as he started blogging about his experiment. And after his first video was shared by a Dutch celebrity—the writer Ronald Giphart—Joey officially went into business. When I spoke to him he had 20 people drinking his powdered nutrient mix, which he's dubbed "Joylent."

“I'm trying to upscale it," he told me. "I have all these 25 kg bags of maltodextrin, soy flour, fine Scottish oats and shit like that in my bedroom.”

Nobody put a lot of faith in Rhinehart when he first started Soylent—probably because he used to be a software engineer and didn't really have any experience when it came to completely redesigning the way humans survive. However, everything began to change for him when he successfully survived on Soylent alone for an entire 30 days in a row and started blogging about it. He then crowd-funded millions of dollars and Soylent became a legitimate product that people trust.

Joey's story is a little different to Rob's. Before he started selling his food replacement powder he enjoyed a brief period of local fame after releasing a song about a man with a pink bag; ran a popular website dedicated to erotic literature; and successfully made the switch from drug dealer to full-time visual artist.

“I got robbed of £1,700 worth of cocaine," he told me. "I took a risk to make it back, but I got locked up, lost my house and support from my parents.”

After losing his house Joey slept rough for two weeks—not because he had nowhere to go, but because he "liked the drama" of sleeping on the street. After finding himself a new flat, his art—mostly portraits based on Facebook profile pictures – caught on, and before long he was making a living purely through painting.  

His nickname on the Soylent forums is "Hosselman," which is Dutch for "hustle man."

Besides Joylent's banana flavor, there's really not a lot of difference between Joey's product and the original Soylent. But he's not afraid of a lawsuit. “That would be funny, actually," he said, chuckling at the idea of being sued. "I think our products are very much alike, but the difference is in the fun. I try to make it tasty. Maybe I'll add some color in the future. I'm just trying to have some fun with it.”

Rob Rhinehart once said that his vision was of a world in which every water tap has a Soylent tap next to; that way, he hopes, nobody should ever have to be hungry again. This grand vision is probably the only thing the two entrepreneurs have in common.

“I'd like to be a big multinational that's able to duck taxes and pay my own fictional taxes in the form of me giving Joylent to poor countries," Joey told me. "I fantasize about that sometimes.”

Even with Gang Connections, Begging on the Beijing Subway Is Rough

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Photos by the author
 
Gong Xiaoye is a beggar. She bows on Beijing’s subway daily. She rents a small apartment in the center of the city, and said she manages on the approximately 40 yuan ($10) she collects per day begging. After the 2009 earthquake rocked her Gansu home into a pile of rubble, Gong was left homeless and without a job. In early May, unemployment spurred her 500-mile train ride to Beijing. Now the single mother dreams of rebuilding her childhood home, and creating a space for her daughter to grow up in and grandparents to grow old. How’s she going to achieve this? Begging, she said. 
 
Beijing’s subways are swarmed with people like Gong—The Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post recently estimated the number at 78,000. But Gong isn’t just any beggar.
 
The 25-year-old can't tell me the day she arrived in Beijing, the name of the tinny song looping on her portable radio, and isn’t sure about the exact date the earthquake shook Gansu province. By her own estimates, she survives on almost a third of the salary of the average Chinese person, and provides for her daughter and grandparents on that same income. Gong’s story doesn’t add up, but her greatest invention is one of omission: gangs that govern the city’s vagrant population are big business in Beijing.
 
Gong is likely in cahoots with a senior member.
 
These officials disfigure, manipulate and kidnap children to work in their crews. They create boundaries for their triad, such as what portion of their earnings are returned, who they can accept food from and where they can beg. Gong isn’t bowing on just any of Beijing’s 17 subway routes. 
 
 
The 25-year-old is banging her head, blasting her music and shaking her basket on Line 2, one of the richer lines, where only senior beggars grant permission to work. On this, and other lines that intersect the center of the city, senior beggars hold rank, and designate when to get on, get off and how vagrants can beg. Men and women found soliciting without official permission could face a violent beating from those in higher-ranks.
 
If caught begging at all by police, Gong also faces a 1,000-yuan fine or 15-days jail time. Theoretically, subway attendants are supposed to stop vagrants from entering train platforms. But, with the knowledge that they're holding down one of the least respected jobs in the city, anyone who pays the train’s 2 yuan ($0.30) fare is basically free to ride.
 
Besides, Gong doesn’t look like a beggar. Her hair is washed, clothes clean and her plump baby is swathed in multiple layers. If Gong weren’t bowing her head in front of every commuter, she could be one of them—a mother enrolling her infant in Montessori, a waitress riding to work, or even a tour guide offering her view of the city.
 
Instead, I watch Gong collect a few yuan per carriage. One mother gives her a package of bread. Another donates a carton of cookies.
 
Today’s earnings could be credited to Gong’s incredible bowing skills or her adorable baby. At just 9 months, the little girl apparently calls the shots. Gong didn’t beg yesterday because her baby was sick. Today she’ll beg for maybe two hours because the baby’s skin is a little brighter. Gong admits the constant bowing isn’t the healthiest way for the child to grow up, but daycare is expensive.
 
She gives her little girl milk to pacify her during what are sometimes long, strenuous hours on the job. But milk is a luxury for someone earning 40 yuan per day. In China one liter is nearly three times as expensive as a liter in the United States. 
 
While there are stories of female beggars “renting” children to take soliciting—in 2010, a man famously cataloged a Shanghai woman begging with a new child everyday for one week—I’m not convinced this is the case with Gong. After I put 5 yuan in the woman’s basket, she only paid me notice when I asked, “Ta duo da le?” (“How old is she?”).
 
 
But not everyone is charmed by the baby’s chubby cheeks. One middle-aged man started yelling when Gong passed. People like Gong are bad for Beijing’s environment, he said. She should get a real job. He found it impossible to believe that my translator and I weren’t part of the Gong’s begging routine.
 
Gong's choice of words doesn't help my case. When she’s not bowing, she’s calling my translator and I “Jiejie” (“older sister”). We offer to buy her and the baby dinner, but “it’s not correct,” she protests. 
 
The more we ask, the more closed off Gong becomes. People give her money because they feel bad for her, she says. In one of China’s most expensive cities, begging is the only way she can make ends meet. She has no other option.
 
After nine stops, I offer to buy her dinner once more. Gong refuses. I give her another 10 yuan. The Gansu woman thanks me, bowing slightly. Then, she turns on her heel and exits the carriage. Her next stop? That’s anyone’s guess.
 
Follow Nona Tepper on Twitter. 

 

The VICE Guide to Europe 2014: The VICE Guide to London 2014

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

In many ways, London is the worst city in the world: it’s expensive, cruel, bitter and twee. But in many ways it’s also the best: a cultural powerhouse where people know how to stay up really fucking late, invent new forms of dance music on a minute-by-minute basis and, over the last 20 years, have finally understood how to make nice food. We’re big on gays, low on racists and love to drink; but we’re also big on oligarchs, low on social mobility and love to drink at infantilizing corporate street festivals. Anyway, this is your guide to the decent bits (and a few shitty ones).

Jump to sections by using the index below:

WHERE TO PARTY
WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?
POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?
   Racists and Lack Thereof | Protests
WHERE TO EAT
WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?
WHERE TO DRINK
WHERE TO STAY
LGBT LONDON
WHERE TO HANG OUT AND WHO TO SPEND TIME WITH WHEN YOU'RE SOBER
HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP
HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST
PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID
TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES
A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF QUESTIONABLE LOCAL MUSIC
VICE CITY MAP

Photo by Will Coutts

WHERE TO PARTY

Bussey Building, Peckham
133 Rye Lane, SE15 4ST
The Bussey is a bar, venue and gallery space spread across four floors, but it’s best known as a club with one of the broadest musical remits in the city. It’s usually less than £5 to get in, everyone's beautiful and the smoking area alone is bigger than most other clubs. If you're lucky, your stay here will coincide with Soul Train, a disco and good-vibes house night that the Bussey hosts twice a month and is basically like being trapped at a wedding party in a car park on drugs, even if you're not on any drugs. A nearby alternative is Canavan’s, a karaoke pool bar with a recently upgraded soundsystem and loads of old Irish blokes who don't know what feminism is. It hosts Rhythm Section—the first night you should come to if you're visiting London—once or twice a month.

Dance Tunnel, Dalston
95 Kingsland High Street, E8 2PB
Of all the basement clubs in Dalston, and there are plenty, Dance Tunnel is probably the best, thanks to its jet-engine soundsystem. Located beneath Voodoo Ray’s pizza place (don't eat there, the pizza is more expensive than war), this is where you’ll hear some of the world's best new house, techno and other types of dance music that don't have names yet at nights like Trouble Vision, Principals and FWD>>.

Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle
4/5 Elephant Road, SE17 1LB
Tucked away behind a knackered shopping center on the Elephant & Castle roundabout, Corsica Studios mostly deals in house and nosebleed techno. But depending on the night you’re at, you could also hear grime, disco or the kind of guitar music that The Wire would write about without a gun held to their head. Their booking policy means the dancefloor always feels like a dancefloor, not just a space for DJs to play to a series of well-dressed mothers' meetings, and the shit plumbing keeps yuppies away. There’s also a 24-hour bagel shop—Bagel King—just down the road, which is a fucking godsend at 5 AM on a Sunday morning when you realize the only thing you've eaten since Friday lunchtime is chewing gum.

Oval Space, Bethnal Green
29 - 32 The Oval, E2 9DT
This is basically just a big empty rectangular room, but whichever promoter is tasked with filling it usually does a pretty great job. Music-wise, you’re best off just checking the listings because the events are always changing. But if you prefer having absolutely no idea what you’re going to be turning up to, I’d say just go along anyway because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be disappointed. Pro tip: don’t bother instagramming a photo of the sunset over that big old gasometer next door—it’s already the most photographed thing in London bar Big Ben and all the terrible graffiti along Brick Lane.



Photo by Jake Lewis

Boiler Room
A few years ago the idea of watching someone DJ online was fucking ridiculous, but Boiler Room changed all that. Basically, if you’re into pretty girls in oversized rap tees, handsome men with undercuts and the best DJs in the world, you should definitely check out what they have coming up.

Plan B
418 Brixton Road, SW9 7AY
Good for garage, dancehall and bashment, as well as hands-down the best house bookings in South London. Has nothing to do with the rapper or the morning-after pill.

Birthdays
33 - 35 Stoke Newington Road, N16 8BJ
Not that many people stick around to watch bands in 2014, but Birthdays book the right ones. The DJs and MCs they bring in aren't bollocks either and, along with Dance Tunnel, they've got the best soundsystem in East London. There’s a bar/restaurant upstairs with a revolving kitchen. So, if you get tired of jumping around in the basement, you can head up there and inhale poutine, or fried chicken, or whatever it is they have in that month.

Fabric
77A Charterhouse Street, EC1M 6HJ
This is a bit of a love-hate one, because it's basically a super club but without the euphoria. However, considering it’s normally the first club pilgrimage anyone makes to London, and because they have a soundsystem capable of rupturing your internal organs, it's worth a visit. Entry is pricey, drinks are extortionate and stairs are overcrowded with gurning Italians. BUT the line-ups can't be fucked with and it’s without doubt the best place in the capital to spot 35-year-old marketing managers chewing their top lips to shreds as the sun rises and DJ Hype wraps up his three-thousandth two-hour set in the main room.

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Photo by Bruno Bayley

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?

The UK has the highest levels of cocaine, ketamine and opiate use in Europe, and we’ve all taken an oath to try to smoke more weed and take more MDMA so it's a full house next year. In London, the news that we snort so much gak that trace amounts of it can now be found in the water supply was greeted more with civic pride than shock.

British people have always liked getting fucked off their faces, but as London has become more and more of a gentrified pop-up pleasure palace, cocaine use has gone mental. Most people from the city get it delivered, but sometimes people do walk around pubs and clubs trying to push the stuff. In places like Camden and Brixton people walk up and down the street offering their gear around, and they’ll happily tell anyone who wants to listen that the bag of white powder in their fist is definitely whatever the buyer wants it to be. No one who’s lived in London for more than 45 minutes talks to these people.

Lots of people take ket here as well, but fuck knows why. It doesn't take a genius to realize that falling into a K-hole outside the Peckham Burger King isn't much fun, plus if you do too much of it, your bladder explodes. There’s little meth beyond gay slamming parties and no one seems to take speed any more. Mephedrone had a period of ascendancy back when that chemical factory in China burned down and no one could get any MDMA, but since the Mandy returned, everyone—bar some in the gay scene and the occasional student—forgot that mephedrone ever existed. Hallucinogens aren't all that prevalent, essentially because London is like a massive cold prison yard, i.e. not really the best place to kiss the sky.

Like everywhere else, a lot of people smoke weed here. The majority of dealers stick with the most coma-inducing skunk they can find, but—very generally speaking—the Ladbroke Grove area is the home of Thai stick and Jamaican bush weed, and in South London there's tons of hash. There are also plenty of shops that sell weed under the counter, but I’m obviously not going to disclose their locations on the internet because I'm not a narc.

Of course, no matter how much we get high, it’s all still very much illegal. And even though bouncers at clubs are generally more likely to bin or pocket your stash than turn you over to the police, the cops have the right to stop and search you, and it’s not unheard of for people to end up with criminal records for possession. 

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Photo by Jake Lewis

POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

RACISTS AND LACK THEREOF

London is an astoundingly successful monument to cultural integration. At the recent European elections it was widely noted that UKIP’s manifesto preaching the dangers of mass immigration was least successful here in the capital, where mass immigration is most prevalent. Still, you get idiots everywhere, and since the murder of soldier Lee Rigby by a mentalist screaming about jihad in 2013, the anti-Muslim far right have been trying to make inroads in London. So far, all this has led to is a quasi-religious turf war between some dickhead ex-EDL members calling themselves Britain First and some other dickheads from the entourage of Anjem Choudary, a radical Muslim cleric. You can watch our film about it here, actually.

Generally, far-right and nationalist parties like the BNP and the EDL are given short shrift in London; while there is some anti-EU feeling in the country at the moment, this is a multicultural city and it likes it like that. Occasionally the right-wingers will decide to march somewhere and, without fail, anti-fascist protesters will turn up in at least equal numbers to stop them in their tracks. Usually, these guys end up getting arrested—in September last year, for example, 286 anti-fascist protesters were arrested in Whitechapel as they tried to stop the EDL marching through Tower Hamlets. Many interpreted this as an attempt by the Met to dissuade people from taking their grievances to the streets.

Photo by Henry Langston

People from different cultural backgrounds can get along fine, but that doesn’t mean everyone's equal. Displays of overt racism are mostly confined to lone ranters on public transport and the terraces of certain football clubs, but the police are way, way more likely to hassle you if you’re black. In fact, there’s an unspoken bias that pervades the whole of English society to make sure that, decades after mass immigration started—and despite the rise of pop-feminist blogs—pretty much everything is still run by (and for) white people with penises and middle-class accents. The only place where this is not the case is Tower Hamlets, where controversial Mayor Luftur Rahman has carved out an enclave in which it’s much easier to get a decent council position if you’re Bangladeshi.

Somewhat ironically, thanks to all this immigration a bunch of Polish neo-Nazis have settled in the capital. They’re called Zjednoczeni Emigranci Londyn, (that's Emigrants United London, for those of you who've never seen letters put together in that order before) and they hang around Tottenham wearing Blood & Honour T-shirts. They recently turned up to a family music festival and stabbed someone, which is obviously a weird thing to do, but realistically they’re very easy to avoid, and there are a load of anti-fascists currently trying to make them fuck off forever.

All of that aside, the main political battleground in London these days is over whether ordinary people can actually afford to live here any more. With rents designed purely for the amusement of landlords and the tiny cabal of crooked bankers and overseas oil tycoons who can afford them, more and more people are being evicted and squeezed out to the suburbs. Despite this, squatting is no longer as common as it was in the 1960s, perhaps because it's been a criminal offence to squat a residential property for the past two years.

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Photo by Henry Langston

POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

PROTESTS

Back in 2010, it looked like London was moving into a great period of social upheaval, but eventually everyone gave up and went to Pret for lunch. The students mobilized in order to protest against the coalition government’s raising of the cap on tuition fees, and over one exciting winter it all played out in a series of marches and riots, which reached their most insane level of mischief when protesters took over and smashed up the headquarters of the Tory party. It was kind of hilarious but someone almost killed a cop with a fire extinguisher. You can watch our film about it here, mate.

Eventually, all the protests stopped and people started talking excitedly about how the schoolkids who’d been involved in these riots would now perhaps become politicized, and how London would never be the same again. However, what actually happened was that everyone got kettled in the snow for hours and hours and it didn’t change the government’s mind at all. Following that brutal anti-climax, the wind was knocked out of the movement and now students have returned to being mostly viewed as loutish dickheads.

These days most protests are quiet, disgruntled things that police don’t feel the need to charge at on horses. But even when shit gets real here it’s nothing compared to many European countries—there is no tear gas and police don't fire rubber bullets at people. London mayor Boris Johnson just bought some water cannons from Germany (thanks, Germany!) but he isn’t allowed to use them yet. So, for now, there are just good old-fashioned truncheons and more fucking kettles, which are so much worse than tear gas because they last for hours.

The widespread rioting that pock-marked the country in 2011 originated in a London protest against the police killing of Mark Duggan. It has been interpreted by some as a protest against the Metropolitan police's ongoing targeting and persecution of the city’s poorest communities (and by others as opportunistic looting, so take your pick). But the punishments meted out were so harsh—four years for Facebook posts saying some crap about starting a riot that never came to be, for instance—that it feels as though this won’t be happening again any time soon. Which is probably a good thing for everyone other than journalists.

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Photo by Bruno Bayley

WHERE TO EAT

St John
26 St John Street, EC1M 4AY
At first glance, St John’s aggressively British menu—which includes bone marrow and devilled kidneys—does have a touch of the dry heaves to it. In reality, though, it’s one of the best restaurants London has, of any cuisine. Unfortunately, managing to make all things offal delicious is a rare skill, and this is reflected in the prices. But, unlike everywhere else in London, you get to sit on a chair rather than a kooky, upturned milk crate, so it’s worth it.

Needoo Grill
87 New Rd, E1 1HH
There’s a legendary Punjabi joint in Whitechapel called Tayyabs—so legendary that everyone in London knows it's responsible for some of the best curries in the country, which means there’s always a massive line to get a table. For that reason smart people go round the corner to Needoo Grill. It’s very nearly just as good, and you won’t have to wait in a snaking trail of people in the rain for an hour. It’s actually run by a defector from Tayyabs, so it’s not surprising that it’s basically a mini version of the definitive London curry establishment.

Bone Daddies
31 Peter St, W1F 0AR
As London follows dutifully in the food footsteps of the Big Apple Crumble, ramen places are regularly springing up—most of them densely packed into the culinary grid of Soho. Around here you can find udon at Koya, takeaway ramen at Shoryu Go and a few nice Korean places minutes away on Tottenham Court Road. Bone Daddies, however, serves the best broth, as well as consistent sides, like chicken karaage and chashu pork. Just try to ignore the anti-osteopathic bar-style seating and overbearing dad-rock soundtrack. Not one for the headache crew.

Negril
132 Brixton Hill, SW2 1RS
Let's face it: most hot food isn't great. For all the flavour and nutrition that makes its way through the average vindaloo, you may as well just pay an Indian man £25 to taser your asshole. But things don't have to be this way; find out for yourself by visiting Negril, a Jamaican jerk place situated right on Brixton Hill. Unlike most restaurants with garden views of A-roads, Negril is the fucking bomb, and the staff don't seem like murderers. Share their signature platter—two quarters of jerk chicken, plantain, rice and peas, coleslaw, salad, salt fish fritters and chips—and bring your own bottle/can to arrange a tryst between their amazing hot sauce and some cold, cold beer.

Mangal 2
4 Stoke Newington Rd, N16 8BH
It’s an East London Turkish staple with great food, and Gilbert and George eat there every single night. But most important is its Twitter feed. Example tweets include: “It's Gay Pride Day. It's Armed Forces Day. It's the first day of Ramadan. Gay Muslim soldiers must be delighted today,” and: “Man walks in to order a takeaway wearing a Mumford & Sons t-shirt. Speaks and acts every bit as a twat as you’d expect.” And who could ever forget: “Do you sometimes crave a dirty, juicy kebab after a night out in the town? A proper dodgy doner when you're drunk? Yeah? Well, fuck off.” When a man is tired of the Mangal 2 Twitter feed, he is tired of life.

Silk Road
49 Camberwell Church St, SE5 8TR 
This Chinese restaurant in Camberwell is considered one of the city's best. But it looks like a total shithole, which can make it hard to find for first timers. Don't expect tablecloths, waiters who speak English or sweet and sour pork. But if you want to flush your horrible system out with an industrial amount of fresh chilli, unusual delicacies, barbecue skewers and endless bottles of ice cold Tsingtao, then this place does the job. Don't expect to get a table for ten at short notice, though, because it’s popular. Tip: One order of pig feet is really enough for a large group, don't go nuts on that.

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Photo by Bruno Bayley

WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?

Full English
We’re not famous for our food, us Brits, and we accept that. However, we still kicked the shit out of everyone else when we first had a crack at breakfast. A proper English one of them is a full cooked meal of sausages, bacon, beans, eggs, toast and a handful of other variables, sometimes including cakes made out of fried blood, ideally washed down with a milky mug of tea. You can blow a tenner having your full English sullied with kale or gluten free bread, but if you want the real deal The Regency in Pimlico represents a dying breed of authentic greasy spoon cafes. Or you can head over to its pokier East End counterpart, E Pellicci, famously frequented by the Krays but now filled with builders, personable staff and Capital FM. Or, if you’ve got access to a kitchen, just cook it yourself (after all, all those Tescos you seem to be walking past every day have the shit you need for this pretty much stacked at the front).

Jerk Chicken
Notting Hill Carnival is one of the best street parties in the world, let alone the capital. But if you’re not a hardened West Londoner the reality of Carnival weekend can mean cursing whatever polystyrene box of jerk you panic bought as you touch cloth looking for a kind local flogging £5 entry to their personal shitter. Thankfully, Yum Yum in Ladbroke Grove—who specialize in comfortingly luminous yellow patties—Jerk City in Soho and the aforementioned Negril can be enjoyed all year round, minus the fear of getting tased by an overzealous police officer for taking a dump in a phone box.

Sunday Roast
An important weekly staple of British cuisine: roasted meat and potatoes with stuffing, vegetables, gravy and a Yorkshire pudding. These days every pub with a motivational quote on their chalkboard sign will do one for about £15 (which is an insane amount of money, considering that the only cooking you really have to do is turning on the oven and carving). You won’t have to look hard to find one, but when you do just know that the plate should be PILED with shit; this is not a subtle meal. The dream, of course, is to invite yourself to a local's home-cooked roast and while away the rest of Sunday in a haze of meat farts and Sunday supplements. Thankfully, London is a very friendly city—just knock on someone's door, ask for some lunch and they'll wave you through to their kitchen.

Chicken Tikka Masala
India looms large in England’s vision of itself, from the horrors of the Empire to the exported benefits of the Industrial Revolution, through the adoption of cricket by the Indians to the embracing of Indian food by the British. Chicken tikka masala is one of the most popular curries here—it’s red, it’s creamy, it's looked down upon by food snobs and it was invented in Britain. It’s basically the Heinz Tomato Soup of curry. It’s also totally banging, and when it drips off the end of your naan it’s going to stain the shit out of that £700 Nasir Mazhar jumper you just bought in a frenzy after reading a copy of i-D.

Brick Lane Beigels
If you’re pissed and it's late at night, the odds are you’ll end up eating some food cooked by someone with an avant garde concept of edibility. Perhaps you’ll choose a kebab intent on quite literally kicking the shit out of your stomach, or maybe fried chicken that changes the pH level of your skin. But if you’re anywhere near Brick Lane, you can forget these. Instead, you should go into either of the two adjacent bagel shops, order two hot salt-beef sandwiches and one salmon and cream cheese, then swan off like the alt-fast food connoisseur that you are.

A Kebab Intent on Quite Literally Kicking the Shit Out of Your Stomach, or Maybe Fried Chicken That Changes the pH Level of Your Skin
Because they're pretty good, really.

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Photo by Jake Lewis

WHERE TO DRINK

Soho

Soho is a maze that’s resisting gentrification with greater success than most parts of London. If you want to get pissed there, Sam Smith’s have many boozers in the area. They're one of the last truly independent brewery-run pub chains in the city, so while you can’t expect to see any branded lagers or even Coca-Cola on sale here, you can expect to pay shockingly little for good beer. The Glasshouse Stores on Brewer Street is a dimly lit basement bar, if you're into that kind of thing, and the The John Snow is a good one to stand outside on a sunny day if for some reason you want to socialize with bike couriers. The Cross Keys is a meeting place for obese Freemasons and is decorated with all sorts of wonky knick-knacks, like brass diving helmets and other similar detritus. Try to avoid it between the hours of 5 and 7PM though because, like all city pubs, it will be full of city cunts.

The Old Blue Last
38 Great Eastern St, EC2A 3ES

This is our pub—we own it. It’s called The Old Blue Last and it’s the best fucking pub in the whole fucking world. It’s got three floors, it’s on the site of Shakespeare’s first theater, it’s older than America, it puts on gigs (everyone from Winehouse and Lil B to The Arctic Monkeys and Wiley), there’s a secret bar on the top floor, it’s near our office and you should come. (But please don’t steal our glasses, and don’t do gak in our toilets.) You can learn all about it’s blotted history here.

The Holly Bush
22 Holly Mt, NW3 6SG
Back in the day, Hampstead was full of people like John Keats and Lord Byron. Then it was full of people like Richard Burton and Peter Cooke; then it was full of Arsenal players; and now it’s gone full blown wank and is rammed with Russian plutocrats who order women from their iPads and leave their corpses in Hampstead pond. That said, there’s still nothing better than trekking through the Heath and ending up here to get really, really pissed on the quietest street in London.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

Queen's Head

144 Stockwell Road, SW9 9TQ
Fat White Family are the most exciting live band in London at the moment, and they use this place as a sort of base camp in which to play shows, get fucked up and pursue their agenda against the yuppies who are currently busy turning Brixton into one gigantic piece of expensive Italian cheese. They'll probably hate us for putting what is basically their house in a travel guide, but if there's one place in London to see a screaming man windmilling his cock and glassing a drummer in the face, it's here.

Clerkenwell

It’s a weird netherworld of yuppies, upmarket kitchen shops and other detestable things, but if you go to Clerkenwell on a weekend you get to enjoy some of the best pubs in the city. The Three Kings has a great name and a great sign, and if it’s a sunny day you can get a pint and walk into the churchyard across the road. I’m certain you’re not supposed to do it, but no one’s ever stopped me. The Jerusalem Tavern round the corner has a bit of a 14th century feeling to it and is attached to its own brewery—so no, you can’t get a fucking Foster's here. The Gunmakers is another great old-as-shit boozer, then there's The Betsey Trotwood, Ye Old Mitre... In fact, there are too many to list, but just ignore The Crown—it’s got a wanker thing going on.

Frank’s Cafe
95 Rye Lane, SE15 4ST
This place is only open during the summer months, which is a good thing because it’s on top of a multi-storey car park and would be fucking miserable in December. It’s also probably the only bar-cum-art-gallery-cum-restaurant in London with both an incredible view of the city and cocktails capped at £7.50, AKA half the price of any other rooftop drinking spot. The only thing is, you’re going to want to head there early—straight after work or, if you’re unemployed, just after Tipping Point finishes—because it’s rammed by half 7 and they generally stick to a pretty strict one-in, one-out policy.

New Cross
While New Cross may well just be an A-road propped up by kebab shops and Christian bookstores, it does have some great pubs. The Hobgoblin has my favourite beer garden in London and is usually full of fine art students, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much you care about intercontextuality and microethnographic discourse. Also, Shia LaBeouf has gotten into two fights here. If this Venn diagram of fine art and public celebrity meltdowns doesn't excite you, go to The Royal Albert for quality beers and dependable pub food, or the Marquis of Granby for pool, cheap pints and arguments with elderly men.

Clapton FC
The Old Spotted Dog Ground, 212 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, E7 9NP
Obviously everyone here loves football, but let’s face it—the Premier League is designed to be watched on TV; they should just ship the fucker to Oman already. In its absence, we’ll spend more time watching our local non-league clubs and starting anarcho-syndicalist ultra groups, like first Clapton and then Dulwich have done (much to the surprise of the players, who’d never seen an anarchist or a fan before the black bloc showed up).

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

WHERE TO STAY

Living in central London is like shitting thousands of pounds into a bucket that keeps telling you to fuck off to some Zone 5 housing estate. As such, we need help with our rent, so we’re pretty big on AirBnb. The flats will be tiny, but by gum we can absolutely guarantee that there’s a Tesco Metro round the corner.

Australians are a real problem here. They’re our huge, attractive, cultureless cousins, and our hostels are full of them vomiting on terrified Japanese people. So if you’re in the market for a dorm bed where you might actually get some sleep, Palmers Lodge are a pretty good bet (dorm beds from £19 per night). Their two sites (at Swiss Cottage and Hillspring) are a little outside the center of town, but they make up for that by being clean, providing free WiFi and giving you the peace of mind that comes from knowing you won't end up covered in Antipodean bodily fluids.

More central is Generator (beds from £10). It's right next to Russell Square, which is the kind of place Americans think that all Londoners live in because it’s beautiful and reeks of Penguin Classics. We don’t live here, though—we live in prefab shit-shells eight miles down the road.

If you’re going to cough up for a hotel, Russell’s of Clapton (£98 per room per night) has the mix of taste and efficiency you'd expect from somewhere run by a former music manager. It’s well into East London too, which is obviously where all of the VICE UK office live, so you can fuck us all off by clogging up the line at Tesco, complaining about the times we slagged off The Matrix and asking for Clive Martin's number.

If you’ve got money to burn, Ace Hotel (£199 per room per night) is pretty fun. Bands stay there and the club beneath it has decent nights with sets by people like Boiler Room and Young Turks. The website says it's a place for "landmark creatives and renegade artists" but in truth we're neither of those things and we've never been refused entry.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

LGBT LONDON

These days Vauxhall is the huge fuck-off gay area. There are a series of clubs here where you can fuck, swallow and beat anything you fancy, and cum and vodka rain from the sky (meaning lesbians feel slightly left out). Fire and Barcode are good bets for dancing and fucking, and there are also some leather bars and bear nights in the area. If you do just fancy a quiet pint, though, The Royal Vauxhall Tavern is one of the city’s most famous gay pubs. If it’s plain banging you’re looking for, there are a myriad of saunas around where you can get yourself seen to. But yeah, unfortunately Vauxhall is really all about the men.

Woman or man, though, Soho has long been London’s gay mecca, and it’s full of places to drink, dance and pull. Clustered around Brewer Street and Old Compton Street are the most well known spots, including the triple-decker G-A-Y club and Madame Jojo’s burlesque bar. Hit up G-A-Y any day but go Friday or Saturday and you'll find the stupidest soundtrack, purplest decor and some of the cheapest drinks in London.

While Soho is home to the more mainstream spectrum of gay bars and clubs, East London provides some fun alternatives. The Joiners Arms is a cherished dive bar where your feet will stick to the floor, and The George and Dragon is a typically cosy English pub, only full of gays and drag queens. Both are on Hackney Road in Shoreditch, and both have fairly early doors, so after they close you can head over to East Bloc, Old Street's underground labyrinth of seedy corners and pulsating dance music.

Head as far as Dalston and you'll find Dalston Superstore and Vogue Fabrics, two raucous clubs that throw sweaty, fashionable gay parties. While Superstore drags in a younger and better-dressed crowd, Vogue Fabrics is a glorious melting pot of weirdness with no toilet doors. Both of these venues are welcoming to women any day of the week, but look out for Superstore's lesbian nights, which are better than anything ever going on in Soho.

Generally speaking, gay couples should feel safe enough to be affectionate with each other in public in most parts of the city, but sadly there’s always one homophobic bigot, so it’s not impossible that some idiot will take it upon themselves to shout abuse. At which point expect everyone standing around you to call him a fucking cunt and pat you on the back. Because this is London and we don’t like bigots here.

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Photo by Bruno Bayley

WHERE TO HANG OUT AND WHO TO SPEND TIME WITH WHEN YOU'RE SOBER

The British Museum
Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG
As you well know, we used to own this planet. But then, at some point in the 40s, we were magnanimous enough to give it back. We did keep all the best stuff though, obvs—we’re not idiots. So come and bask in the glory of our plundering! Marvel at our beautiful Elgin Marbles! See the mighty pharaohs eunuched in a plastic box 200 yards from a Wetherspoons! Gaze in awe as the oldest and most noble of antiquities are filed into some dark drawers in the private archive because we just don’t have enough bloody space for all this awesome foreign stuff!
LINK

Edgware Road
The long stretch of road between Paddington and Marble Arch is home to a vast Asian community, so don’t expect many bars, but do expect great food, sweets and shisha. Almost every establishment on Edgware Road will serve shisha, mostly to wealthy young Arab men who are socialising and watching shit on their tablets. The shisha places open very late, most till around 3AM, so if you want to relax, watch some Lamborghinis speed by and give yourself grape-flavoured lung cancer then be sure to hit up Little Bahrain. This is also a great place to escape the onslaught of mindless drunkenness and potential violence that will no doubt pervade your visit; everyone on this road is courteous as fuck.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Bit of a genius one, this. It's right behind The Royal Courts of Justice, so it’s where all the lawyers hang out eating Itsu, but it’s also home to three of the best things in London: 1) The Hunterian Museum—a collection of medical curiosities in the Royal College of Surgeons, which has babies in jars, the skeleton of a giant and an entire circulatory system ironed into a big table; 2) Sir John Soane's Museum—one man’s insane collection of artefacts from around the globe, all displayed in his house—from Hogarth cartoons in his study, to Egyptian mummies in the basement and Roman shit everywhere else. And finally 3) The Seven Stars—the best pub for daytime drinking in Central London and if some lawyers win a case over the road, you can probably have some of their champagne.  

Hampstead Heath
It’s a huge swathe of countryside within the city, which means it’s where most teenage North Londoners go to take acid and smoke weed. There’s also a thriving dogging scene for those of you who want to fuck dangerous strangers in the woods.

Photo by Bruno Bayley

The Canals
Walk from Camden to Notting Hill, or from Bow to Islington—or from Little Venice to Brentford, if you really want to. The canals are a weird, outmoded series of veins connecting the city, which thanks to technology have been abandoned to real ale-drinking fans of fantasy fiction, who pootle along them in their barges, refusing to acknowledge the 21st century.

Obscure Political Groups
The harder it is to find a political group is, the cooler they probably are. So, people ramming their socialist newspaper down your throat are likely to be insufferable bores and are to be avoided. Meanwhile, if a group has a weird name and you don’t really know who they are, they’ll be way more fun. A recent example is a group called The Imaginary Party—I don’t know if they still exist, or if they ever really did beyond a tumblr, but their headache-inducing graphics are enough to tell you that they’re not staid leftie beard-strokers. London Antifascists have been known to put on decent club nights and spend the proceeds on a year’s worth of beating up racists, but that’s a pretty rare occurrence. Then there are the London Black Revolutionaries, or Black Revs for short, who go around pouring concrete over spikes designed to stop homeless people from bedding down for the night, or saving illegal immigrants from deportation. They’re good guys. Head to a demo, hit a pub or student bar afterwards, and see if you make friends with someone interesting.

Photo by Luke Overin

Gillett Square, Dalston
A while ago Stoke Newington High Street lost its charm beneath the weight of several thousand pairs of Air Max—but just off it Gillett Square retains something. It’s basically a pedestrianized square with a jazz club, a few food stalls and a slight air of instability. NTS Radio broadcasts everything from sludge shows and doom shows, to ragga and house shows from a hut there, and if you’re pretty you can probably sidle up to the DJ, give them a tin of lager and get on air. Basically, bring a blue plastic bag full of beer and sit about in the sun (which is actually the best thing you can do anywhere in London but but we had to make up some other shit to fill out a 10,000-word travel guide).
LINK

Greenwich
It’s literally the exact opposite of The Land That Time Forgot. It’s the Home of Time. If you stand there, you are, by definition, on time. And once the jokes about Greenwich Meantime get boring, there’s a big hill, a couple of decent second-hand stores and some nice pubs.

Primitive London
73-75 Shacklewell Ln, London E8 2EB
If you’re into pretty girls in obscure British sportswear brands and tall, handsome men who literally only ever wear black, check out Primitive London—a boutique on Shacklewell Lane that also throws the occasional party. They used to sell necklaces made out of kangaroo balls, which went down really well when they took the shop over to Tokyo for a couple of weeks, but haven’t taken off in quite the same way over here.
LINK

Anarchist Bookshops
Freedom, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX / Anarchist Bookfair
Brits aren't great at smashing the system but we're great at pontificating about it. To avoid becoming a Russell Brand acolyte, check out Freedom, an Anarchist bookshop that must be worth a shit because it recently survived its second firebomb attack. And once a year the Anarchist Bookfair comes to town and the UK’s anarchists gather to sell anarchist books and T-shirts to other anarchists. You’d think it’d be a convivial affair but they usually manage to disagree with each other about something. Anyway, you can catch some interesting talks about how not to get arrested in a riot, but sit by the door so you can leave if it becomes boring.
LINK / LINK

The Institute of Contemporary Art
The Mall, SW1Y 5AH
The ICA is on the Mall, which is the road that leads up to Buckingham Palace. So, if you come here to see an exhibition of outsider art by Costa Rican mental patients, or whatever, you can have a few drinks at the bar, watch a band and then stumble out, squint into the distance and chalk the Queen’s house off your list of stupid shit you’re supposed to see when you visit London.
LINK

Royal Parks
Like swans, these are owned by the Queen, which mean they’re a bit poncey and closed at night—but they are uniformly pretty. Regent's Park, Hyde Park, Green Park, Richmond Park—they’re all full of beds of roses and weeping willows and incongruous groups of teenagers playing football topless across about 50 groups of stoned, picnicking 40-year-olds. You’re going to spend a lot of time in London hellholes, so these are a nice, posh respite.

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP

It’s worth finding a cab company phone number and calling one to pick you up if you’re staggering around late at night. Waiting for a black cab can be a pain in the ass, and obviously taking some random unlicensed taxi (which is just a man in a car) home in the small hours is a stupid thing to do.

Frankly, London’s been gentrified to the point of almost numbing safety, which is exactly the kind of thing we’ll all appreciate when we have kids (provided we can still afford to live here), but right now is just boring. Of course, you should still watch out for the same sort of crime you’ll find in any city; handbags and laptops can and will be lifted from beneath your table while you sit there, so keep an eye on them.  

Sure, there are gangs and turf wars and guns and all that shit, but unless you’re planning on embedding inside some Polish coke crew or intervening in the E3 turf war you’ll probably be OK. That said, this is the country that produced Richard III, Jimmy Savile, Harold Shipman, Joffrey, Henry VIII, the Child Catcher and all the rest of history’s greatest monsters, so you can never be too careful.   

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Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete

HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST

No one likes it when tourists are slow everywhere, but you‘d have to be a real dick not to understand that they’re lost in our ridiculous, unplanned, chaotic city. Oyster Cards (what you need to ride the tube, mate) are a real fucker, and I’m always impressed that any tourist has managed to work out where to get one. So kudos on that, you lovable, slow-moving bastards.

We won’t necessarily be pissed off with you if you get sucked into the tourist vortex that is Leicester Square and its surrounding bars, but you might get pissed off with us for not warning you. I’ve never quite worked out what people do there; there are a couple of bars that are less nice than every other bar in the center of town, a few multiplex cinemas—but who the fuck goes to see Maleficent when they’re on holiday?—and a fucking massive shop selling M&Ms memorabilia to idiots. I think that's pretty much it. I guess there are the guys who'll do a funny portrait of you in ten minutes, but I thought you had them in your country too? Maybe I was wrong.   

The shittiest of shitty tourists, however, are the ones who come to London for the shopping. The fucking shopping. You don’t have clothes at home? ASOS won’t deliver to your country? Ultimately, there are two kinds of shops that shitty tourists go to—the ones they can afford to shop in (all of whose stock is available online) and fancy ones they can’t afford to shop in, which are essentially just museums for the dumb. Who cares if the Rosetta Stone is round the corner in the British Museum? Here’s a £60 Harrods tennis ball!

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Photo by Tom Johnson

PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID

Bankers
Nobody likes bankers anywhere, right? London’s no different, except we’ve got a lot more of them because The City of London—the central square mile of real, old London—is pretty much the financial brain of the planet. This means that pubs around there are full of young men who are basically financial hooligans in suits. It’s like being at a Millwall game in the 80s, only with lots of posh people who make their money defrauding rogue nations, before using it to buy huge swathes of London and leasing that back to the rest of us. I have no evidence for this, but I bet they’re all pick-up artists. 

Anyone Barefoot
It’s London, not the beach. Are you impervious to tetanus as well as ridicule?

Stylish Heroin Users
It’s been a decade since the fucking Libertines exploded in a shit-show of hats and misery, and there are still people out there who think that junk is a decent fashion accessory. Frankly, it beat Kurt Cobain, it beat Coco Chanel, it beat Basquiat, Chet Baker and fucking GG Allin. It will beat you—you guitar-playing turnip. Choose life; choose E.

Comedians
Armando Iannucci, Chris Morris, Stewart Lee and Steve Coogan are all old as shit, and they’re still the funniest people in this country. These days, British comedy is basically people with haircuts repeating shit they heard in the Union bar, yet they’re all millionaires playing to ginormous, giggling crowds of morons and get more BBC airtime than ISIS. Fuck these guys.

Camden Town
Every city in Europe has a market area where crusties sell John Lennon posters and i-Pood T-shirts next to rudeboys hawking fake hash, but this is the only one so unpleasant that it’s tried to burn itself down twice in half a decade. Camden Town is the place where scenes goes to die. It is a machine designed to prove parents right about youth culture—it’s tacky, cheap, commercial and self-important. About a decade ago, it had a last hurrah thanks to the tireless good vibes of certain DJs and a few fun bands, but they’ve moved on now, and the place has been left in the hands of the steampunks, the cybergoths and the 50-year-old gakheads. Just walk up the road for ten minutes and you’ll get to Kentish Town, where you can drink at any of these pubs.



Photo by Holly Lucas

Kensington and Chelsea
A stupid place that has become so remarkably wealthy over the last decade that its new residents have managed to make Mohamed Al-Fayed, the bonkers Harrods owner, look like a loveable local cad—like Del Boy but with more conspiracy theories. There are 72 billionaires in London and they all live here. Most of them have come for the tax breaks, state protection and unbearable aura of "cool"  that London touts abroad; these are bored rich men who want to eat in restaurants where Lily Allen or Nicholas Serota may be at the next table. You can’t afford these restaurants, so why bother visiting?

The Bars Inside the O2
You may, for reasons of blind tribal loyalty, find yourself attending a gig at the O2 arena, a space at least three times the size of your home country. This is unfortunate, but these days it's the only place big pop acts (Rihanna, Kate Bush, Prince, etc) play. If you do end up going, then a) sorry it’s so far away from everything (stupid, right?) and b) don’t show up early just to loiter in the atrium and pay £200 for a microwaved steak in TGI Friday's. Oh, and also c) I was in a car with Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran once and he said the O2 was actually the best venue in London, because of the convenient parking. So, if you've driven to London, you'll be happy as a pig in shit here.

Oxford Street
All the exact same shops you know and love from every other high street in Britain, but at twice the price and with 45 times more customers. Ignore the bin drummers; find a Sam Smith’s pub.

Westfield Shopping Centers
Like Oxford Street but on multiple levels, just like Dante's Inferno.

Photo by Joe Ridout

The Strip
This is what everyone calls the long stretch of tarmac that runs from Kingsland Road to Stoke Newington High Street and it’s an absolute fucking nightmare. That said, you will inevitably end up there at some point and so it’s worth knowing that the back garden at The Haggerston is about as bearable as it gets and Birthdays [as mentioned above] puts on as good gigs as anyone else in town. In general though, these days weekends here are a fuckfest of people disappearing into basement drugs vortices and thousands of students spending so much money so noisily that they’re simultaneously driving house prices both up and down.

The Tube
One mistake lots of people first make when they come to London is relying too much on the tube. It may seem convenient, but it’s also deeply unpleasant during any sort of rush hour and is the only consistently hot part of Britain. Aware of how nasty it is down there, the London Mayor once ran a competition offering thousands of pounds to anyone who could work out how the fuck to cool it down in the summer; the competition eventually closed without a winner and we’re all still sweating. Buses are a lot nicer and actually, if you’re in central London, everything’s in walking distance anyway.

Upper Street
The worst street in the world. It’s a mile and a half of expensive chain stores, posh people ploughing their inheritance into doomed boutique cake shops, unfathomably charmless pubs and overpriced restaurants. It wasn’t always like this, but as London has grown and as transport to the center has improved, places like Covent Garden reached peak dickhead and they had to spill out somewhere. Islington Council opened its arms and turned this long stretch into a mecca of consumption with all the personality of a helipad. It’s a shame because The King’s Head Theatre Pub is a great place, but these days if you find yourself on Upper Street, you should GTFO and head for Holloway Road.

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Photo by Joe Ridout

TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES

Tipping
For the most part, if a tip is included in a restaurant's bill it will seem like far too much for the service you've received. But there's not a lot you can do about that, unless you don't mind shouting down a master's student who's trying to make rent with a minimum-wage waiting job. If it's not already included, 10 percent of the total price is about right—but that's not hard and fast; scale it down a little if your waitress has coughed on your food or addressed you using a racist slur. Round up in cabs and don't bother tipping at bars—nobody who lives here does, and handing a hot barmaid an extra fiver just makes you look like a sleaze.

Handy Phrases
Aggy: When someone is being aggressive or irritating. 
Mate: Don't assume this means what you think it does. In the same way that "cunt" can be used affectionately, "mate" can also be used to preface you being glassed in the neck.
Moist: If someone directs this word at you, they're calling you a bellend, mate.
Allow: Basically means "don't". As in shouting "Allow that!" when someone's stealing your chips. 
Taking the piss: Americans seem to have a hard time both understanding this and saying it without sounding like idiots, but it can mean a) to mock someone, or b) that something is unreasonable, i.e: "He wouldn't lend you £50 for another gram? That's a piss take, mate."

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A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST WHICH SUMS EVERYTHING UP

All the other offices made a playlist of questionable local music, but this is actually really good and pretty much sums London up right now.  

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VICE CITY MAP

Alright then, that just about wraps it up. We'll see you in the British Museum laughing at the mummies.

Yours sincerely,

VICE UK 

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VICE Special: The Vicar of Baghdad - Part 3

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For more than a decade, Vicar Andrew White has been risking his life to preach for peace on the streets of Baghdad, driving through bombed-out war zones to spread his message. In his quest, White has become the primary liaison between the Sunni and Shia Muslims. 

Enter a World of Mystery, Magic, and High Finance

Comics: Band for Life - Part 20


Ignore or Engage? The Rob Ford Conundrum

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Rob Ford hangin’ with some cool dudes on Canada Day. via Facebook.
Toronto’s crack-smoking, racial-slur-spouting, allegedly rehabilitated mayor is back in action, and it seems as if there are two competing schools of thought on how to deal with it: ignore him completely, or confront him aggressively.

Rob’s only been back at work for five days, but there have already been two surprise opponents that jumped out of the woodwork to publicly confront Toronto’s highly flawed mayor. One is Joe Killoran, better known as the “shirtless jogger,” who ran up on Robbie during a Canada Day parade wherein the mayor was flanked on either side by his brother Doug, his spokesman Amin Massoudi, and a handful of other staffers. The Ford posse’s presence obviously set the shirtless jogger off, who unleashed a cathartic rant on behalf of many Torontonians who are tired of dealing with the Fords’ constant flow of bullshit:

“What about my taxpayer dollars you give to your own business? I thought you were out for the taxpayer… yeah right! Answer one of the million questions people have for you!... People have a million questions about your lying, your corruption. You’re a corrupt, lying, racist homophobe!”

The jogger’s focus on Ford’s sketchy business dealings, that appear to bleed too often into the affairs of his duties as mayor, is especially needed, given the tired narrative of addiction-to-redemption that Robbie has been ramming down the throats of the media. While Rob’s admission that he’s tried every drug you could ever think of (in an interview with the CBC earlier this week) sparked unsurprising headlines across the country, and made people question what Rob Ford is like on mushrooms, the deeper issue of corruption and abuse of his position as Toronto’s supreme leader is a more relevant, and underreported angle.

Another sticking point that the jogger picked up on is Ford’s racism, which is a worrying issue, especially considering a quote the Toronto Star published in May, that was pulled from a clandestine recording of Robbie driving while hammered: “Nobody sticks up for people like I do, every fucking kike, nigger, fucking wop, dago, whatever the race. Nobody does. I’m the most racist guy around. I’m the mayor of Toronto.”

Hard to get more offensive than that!



Change is sweeter when it's shirtless. via Twitter.
The shirtless jogger’s outburst has made him somewhat of a cult hero in a very short time. As you can see from the Shirtless Jogger HOPE meme posted above, some people see a likeness between his energy and Obama’s first run to the Oval Office. Then, this morning, a “horde” of shirtless protesters (#ShirtlessHorde) took to demonstrating outside the CFRB 1010 studios where Robbie was live on air for an interview.

The #ShirtlessHorde. Expect them. via Twitter
But it's not just shirtlessness interrupting Rob Ford’s campaign! On the very same day that Team Ford was accosted by the jogger, Rob had to deal with another justified confrontation at Ribfest, of all places. At the now infamous BBQ’d meat festival, Andray Domise, a candidate for City Council in Ward 2 (a seat that’s currently held by Doug Ford, who may not run this year, so he can let his nephew Mike Ford run instead) approached the mayor and asked if he planned on apologizing “for referring to African Canadians as "niggers" and referring to youth programs as ‘Hug a thug.’"

Sadly, Rob Ford responded with a derisive non-answer, saying only: “It’s complicated.” Then he walked away—presumably to chow down on some dope ribs.

In a written response to the confrontation on his blog, Andray Domise expands on the issue of Rob Ford’s racism:

“I wish I could have asked him why he takes no responsibility for the wreckage the investigation into his drug transactions has left behind in the Somali community. Why he hasn’t looked upon the faces of the men and women forced to the ground by police in the middle of the night, and offered an abject apology for helping to bring this down on their heads.”

These are the kinds of questions that are much more relevant than how many mollys Rob Ford has popped, but with insulting responses like “it’s complicated” being offered from an elected official to a completely relevant and necessary question, it’s no surprise that there’s a tangible movement to simply ignore the continuous tornado of manure that is Rob Ford.

That’s likely why Daniel Dale, a reporter for the Toronto Star (who Rob Ford once accused of being a pedophile), suggested to the entire city hall press gallery that the media simply boycott Rob Ford’s return-from-rehab press conference where only a select group of journalists were permitted to attend—and those who made the cut weren’t able to ask any questions.

This VIP-nightclub approach to holding a press conference at City Hall understandably outraged the municipal reporters who had become accustomed to, you know, being able to ask questions of a democratically elected official in a public building. But Daniel’s attempt to boycott the presser received mixed responses in the papers.

Royson James, while writing for the Star, wrote that journalists in Toronto are a “gutless lot” and should have taken a tougher stance against Robbie’s “bullying behaviour.” Whereas Chris Selley, in the National Post, referred to a hypothetical media boycott as an “empty gesture,” while noting that the media has been anything but kind to Rob Ford (and rightly so). In his piece, he asks: “What good would it do for readers, viewers and listeners—for media consumers, for voters” if reporters simply ignored Rob Ford?

The point is well taken. Rob Ford is still, somehow, the mayor of Canada’s largest city, and the readership of the big Canadian media outlets have an obvious interest in keeping up to date with his latest gaffes, fuck-ups, and catastrophes. And yet, there is a small movement called FIRM (Ford Idiocy Resistance Movement), coined by Andrew Mitrovica for iPolitics, which strives to ignore Rob Ford regardless.

FIRM’s 41-point manifesto has such directives as: “We will not give a damn about anything the Fords say or do—unless, of course, they’re in handcuffs being escorted into a police cruiser,” “We will not believe anyone in or outside the media who utters these silly words: ‘Rob looks like a changed man.’ or ‘Rob’s ready to go back to work,’” and “We will not use the term ‘Ford Nation’ ever again.”

While such a philosophy is certainly tempting—especially since the thought of how much nonsense Robbie can potentially spew between now and the October election is dizzying—Rob Ford has an uncanny ability to vacuum the media's attention into his bulbous orbit. The man has only been back at work for a few days, and he's already attracted the very public ire of an angry, shirtless man, who in turn became a national news story, which deflected the root of the shirtless man’s rant into a meme about shirtlessness itself.

Rob Ford is highly skilled at the martial art of being a media-manipulator savant. That’s a gift. And such a gift is hard to avoid noticing.

So if ignoring him isn't reasonable, then the hard questions should be asked continuously until the guy either resigns or gets voted out in October. Toronto deserves better than a racist crack-smoker who can’t be bothered to discuss his hateful rants, his association with criminals, his impact on Toronto’s Dixon neighbourhood, and so on.

But, if he does manage to win another election, then I’ll be voting for the Shirtless Jogger in 2018! Because Toronto’s had to deal with mayors who wear shirts for far too long.
 

@patrickmcguire

Happy Fucking Birthday, America

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Photo via Flickr user Mike Mozart

America is the greatest fucking country on Earth. It may as well be the only fucking country on Earth. It’s the only fucking country that matters, anyhow. After all, giving us free reign over the entirety of His Kingdom was the last thing God did before He died. That’s right–our complete and utter dominance over the rest of the world is Divine Right, baby! Which explains why we’re so fucking good at it! We run this bitch (and by “this bitch,” I mean, “the world”)…like a boss!

In honor of the birth of the nation that allowed D. W. Griffith’s wildly racist Birth of a Nation to be the first motion picture ever screened at the White House, let us now take a break from setting shit on fire and pounding piss-weak macrobrews to praise everything that makes the good ol’ U.S. of A. the proverbial tits.

We Get Other Countries to Make Our Shit for Us

We’re, like, constantly on the go, workin’ double shifts at our service industry jobs to pay for childcare, which means we no longer have the time to manufacture our own products like ancestors did in generations past. It doesn’t matter, though, ‘cause China’s totally got our backs. They’re all, like, “Dude, we get it. You guys are busy. Don’t worry, we’ll totally make all your shit. T-shirts? Done. Electronics? On it. Food? Oh, fuck yeah. We’ve got this.” And we’re all, like, “Thanks, brah. We were worried we’d have to manufacture things again and, in the process, earn more than eight dollars an hour. We don’t wanna join a union or whatever like our dads did back in the day… LOL.”

We Get Other Countries to Answer Our Phones for Us

Dude, how baller is that? It’s like India’s our fucking butler!

Photo via Flickr user Shine 2010

We Can, Apropos of Nothing, Decide That We’re Super Into Soccer

Hell yeah, we competed in the World Cup. Should we have? Fuck no. Soccer is the World’s Game, and the world, by and large, despises us. In other countries, up to and including Brazil, the World Cup’s current host country, soccer is a game primarily played by impoverished slum dwellers. In America, it’s a game primarily played by upper middle class autistic kids (all that running gives ‘em the opportunity to blow off some steam!). There are no geopolitical aspects to our newfound love of soccer—it’s just an excuse for frustrated fathers to scream “Hustle, Brayden!” from the sidelines and, in the case of the World Cup, start drinking at 9 AM on a weekday.

The best part about America’s newfound World Cup fever, of course, is the fact that it gives us the opportunity to arbitrarily start hating countries we previously didn’t even know existed. We can’t tell you where Belgium is on a map, or even what language they speak, but we can tell you they should go fuck themselves. ‘Cause they beat our boys, goddamnit!

We Have the Freedom to, Like, Talk or Whatever

We can say whatever the fuck we want, whenever we fucking want. So long as, in doing so, we don’t upset our corporate overlords or get ourselves sued for slander. The richer we are, the more we can say, which gives us an incentive to work hard, make that paper, and go on racist tirades!

Photo via Flickr user Erik Hersman

We Can Vote and Shit (Even if We Have Pussies)

Listen, toots—this ain’t Saudi Arabia. Women have had the right to vote in this country for, like, a hella long time. As is the case with any right, they totally have the right to, like, not vote, too. Which is tight, because voting doesn’t really matter anyway. Our sick-ass Supreme Court ultimately makes all of our decisions, up to and including what broads can do with their bods. Having our lives and rights determined for us frees us from having to research and care about the issues, which in turn gives us more time to care about the shit that really matters, like professional sports and those kooky Kardashians.

We Solved Racism

Whenever some hater approaches us with that “America is still hyper fragmented by race” mumbo jumbo, we can just point at a picture of our fuckin’ POTUS, lookin’ non-white as fuck, and be all, like, “Uh… read ‘em and weep, dipshit.” The same thing applies when it comes to class. Whiny-ass motherfuckers are all like, “Boo hoo, the rich are only getting richer and the poor poorer, soon there won’t be a middle class at all, blah blah blah” and we’re, like, “Uh… bootstraps much? If you don’t wanna be poor all your life, do something about it. Develop an app or something. Look at that 24-year-old over there. He was just a college kid, eating ramen at Yale, and now he’s a billionaire. All ‘cause he found the right angel investor.”

Photo via Flickr user 5chw4r7z

We Use Other Countries’ Cultures as Excuses to Party

While it’s bomb and all that Cinco De Mayo is some kind of tight-ass holiday in Mexico, that isn’t why we get crunk at Chevy’s Fresh Mex once a year. We just love to drink while wearing funny hats. We also love to attend outdoor music festivals while wearing funny hats, which is why our Facebook profile is filled with pictures of us in headdresses and short shorts at Coachella.

We Have Hella Religious Freedom

Listen, there’s no room for religious discrimination in this land of the free, home of the Atlanta Braves. If you wanna be super Christian, or just only kinda Christian, that’s your choice. We’re not here to harsh your buzz, bro. Unless, I mean, you don’t want to pray before a town meeting. If that’s the case, we’re sorry, but our bois and broads down at the Supreme Court have to put the hammer down on your ass.

Photo via Flickr user Simon Shek

We Have Hella Food

We have so much food, we joyfully, remorselessly stuff foods in other foods. So much food, as a matter of fact, that we don’t even eat all of it. Thirty-one percent of our food, 133 billion pounds of shit, is thrown out yearly. That’s $161.6 billion worth of hot dogs—hot dogs filled with cheese, liquid cheese, cream cheese and that cheese shit that comes in a can. We DGAF, though, ‘cause we’ve got money the fuck to spare, what with us being ballers and all.

It makes sense that we’d have so much food, on account of how much we love it. The only thing we love more than eating, in fact, is talking about where we’re gonna eat next, and what we’re gonna eat when we get there. How much do we love eating? Enough to talk about eating while we’re eating.

Photo via Flickr user Pål Joakim Olsen

We Love Our Guns

And our guns love us. Which is why we polish ‘em up, real nice like. We cradle them in our arms, caress them like we used to caress our ex-wives, before they got all fat and we had to kick their asses to the curb. You want our guns? You can take them from our cold, dead fingers. We'll no longer need them, having been fatally shot by another gun-toting patriot minutes prior. 

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

Cry-Baby of the Week

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: Ginny Griffith

The house where the fire took place. Screencap via Google Maps

The incident: A woman found a spider in her house. 

The appropriate response: Ignoring it, killing it or putting it in a glass and throwing it outide. Varies from person to person and spider to spider, really.

The actual response: She started a fire to kill the spider, almost burning down her duplex.

Last Friday, Hutchinson Fire Department in Hutchinson, Kansas were called out at 1:36am to deal with a fire in a duplex.

According to Hutch News, when firefighters arrived, they found smoke coming from under a woman's front door. When they entered the residence, they found a pile of smoldering clothes. The blaze was quickly extinguished.

Nobody was injured in the fire, but there was some smoke damage to the building. Obv it could have been a lot worse had the fire department not arrived and dealt with it. 

The woman living in the apartment, 34-year-old Ginny Griffith, was arrested and charged with aggravated arson.

According to local police, Ginny told officers that she'd set fire to a pile of towels in order to kill a spider. She is currently being held on a $7,500 bond. 

It's unclear whether Ginny was succesful in killing the spider. 

Cry-Baby #2: Cracker Barrel

The incident: A man who worked in a restaurant gave a free muffin to a homeless person. 

The appropriate response: Asking him to pay for the muffin and not to do it again, if it bothers you. 

The actual response: He was fired. 

Until recently, 73-year-old Vietnam veteran Joe Koblenzer was a server at Cracker Barrel in Venice, Florida.

About 2 weeks ago, a "homeless looking" man entered the restaurant and asked Joe if he could have some condiments. "He looked a little needy. He asked if I had any mayonnaise and some tarter sauce. He said he was going to cook a fish,” Joe told CNN

Joe gave him the condiments, and also threw in a free corn muffin. Speaking to Fox and Friends, Joe said, "He was happy, I felt good about it."

This didn't sit too well with his bosses. “The general manager called me in and said he had some bad news for me,” said Joe. “We are going to have to let you go.”

Joe had worked at the restaurant for three years. 

According to Joe, had previously received two warnings from his bosses for similar things. Once for taking a sip of coke while working, and another time for giving a free cup of coffee to a customer. "The lady had eaten there and was on her way out and the table was cleared and she asked if she could get a coffee to go," explained Joe. 

Joe says he understands why the restaurant fired him, “It's a rule. They legally can do this because I did break the rule. I completely forgot about it. I am a host at Cracker Barrel with a little above minimum wage job." 

"They have their rules and I broke their rules, a moral issue comes in," he added.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Cracker Barrel said: "Mr. Koblenzer received multiple counselings and written warnings reminding him about the company's policies and the consequences associated with violating them. On the fifth occasion, again per company policy, Mr. Koblenzer was terminated. Cracker Barrel is grateful for and honors Mr. Koblenzer's service to our country as we honor all service men and women and their families."

The other two warnings that Cracker Barrel say they gave to Joe were not specified.

During his interview with Fox and Friends, Joe was asked if he felt giving the man the muffin was worth it, and he responded "yes, it was worth it. I would do it again." 

Which of this lot is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A woman who got a man fired for dancing vs. a guy who burned down a bakery because he locked himself out of his car.

Winner: The woman who hates dancing!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter

VICE Unflooded at Sled Island

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This year for Sled Island, we teamed up with Topman to take over an old folks rec centre to throw a good old-fashioned rock 'n' roll party. We rounded up Toronto and Halifax's Crosss and Sudbury's Strange Attractor to set the stage for our headliners, Kalamazoo-based punks the Spits, who made up for missing their performance at last year's flooded out Sled Island show in spades.

The Spits took the stage in cloaks to ratchet up the creepy, and the VICE Unflooded at Sled Island attendees returned that energy in kind by apparently lighting off some of their own fireworks in the crowd. Reckless fire hazards aside, here's a collection of the best shots from our favourite Sled Island party of the year.

This Guy Quit Psychotherapy to Become a Hardcore Buddhist Monk

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All illustrations via Drew Shannon.
One September in the early ‘90s, a Canadian psychotherapist came across a flyer for a meditation class on University of Toronto campus. He never imagined that taking this aforementioned course would lead him on a path to becoming a Buddhist monk.

Being in his 40s, Sean Hunt was already well settled into his life, had a family, and had started a successful addiction recovery program called Crossroads. Then in ’91, he went through a divorce, and as a recovering drug and alcohol addict, he relapsed and began looking for meaning in life that he hadn’t found in psychology. That’s when he found what he calls his “kind of psychology”—New Kadampa Tradition Buddhism.

“Being a monk and sort of channeling all of my energies into meditation would get more results,” Hunt says. “I just decided that in order to make any serious results or changes in my life, it would be better—I’m sort of an extremist.”

Hunt was ordained as a Buddhist monk for the first time in May of 1996. Surrounded by about 20 other people (including a man who is supposedly a reincarnation of Buddha, Dorje Shugden) at a colourful spring festival in Manchester, UK, he shaved his head, donned his new maroon-and-yellow robes, and officially renounced everything he previously believed in and all of his worldly possessions. Before he went to England on this trip, he took his 15-year-old son, Aaron*, to his storage facility in Toronto and gave him one of the eight guitars he had collected over the years—a 1950 Martin—and a leather jacket. Hunt sold the rest of the instruments (including two mandolins and a banjo) and the rest of his belongings. Hunt was even given a new name as is customary in ordination—he was no longer Sean Hunt, he was Kelsang Gyaltsen.

After his ordination, Hunt spent the next four months at a Buddhist retreat in Scotland in complete isolation. Imagine an eight-by-eight-foot hut in the woods, a round cushion for meditation, a mat for sleeping, and a shrine of Buddha. Hunt had no contact with other humans at this time with the exception of a monk that would silently bring him daily meals.

His new austere way of living was a far cry from how he lived before. Aaron explains that during his childhood, Hunt was really into gambling and taught himself—and his son—how to count cards for Blackjack. Aaron described how his father would have briefcases full of cash from his casino trips to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and that he once nabbed $1,400 from dad’s stash to run away from home for a few weeks. His dad was also into fishing, cooking, folk music festivals, painting, carpentry, photography, and running marathons. He bought motorcycles, a speedboat, and even got his pilot’s licence.

“He was actually flying to meet [Crossroads] clients in PEI, Montreal, just flying his own plane,” Aaron says. “He took my mom and I up [in the plane] one time and shut the engine off and just went into a nosedive.”

Aaron says that his dad was always chasing something, always running after life.

“I guess after having me live with him and getting into Buddhism and me ripping him off and all of that, I think he finally had enough and he just cracked and he’s like, ‘I’m going to be ordained,’” Aaron says.

In 2000, Hunt took his religion one step further and moved to a monastery on the Bristol Channel in England. It was a 56-room castle that was over 500 years old where royal weddings used to be held. Less than a year later, Aaron joined his father at the monastery in order to escape a meth addiction he had developed in his late teens when he was going to raves in Toronto.

“I had burned every bridge; even my best friends wouldn’t hang out with me,” Aaron says. “I saw one of my closest drinking-buddy friends and he said ‘go see your dad in England, drop everything and go see your fucking dad.’”

Religion is one of the ways that some people try to rid themselves of addiction. Dr. Wiplove is an addiction psychiatrist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. He says that he’s “all about whatever works for a person” when it comes to battling addiction. “In North America there’s been a craze with mindful meditation since the ‘90s… I think there’s a lot of value with that,” he says.

Hunt found value in Buddhism, which he considers to be more of a psychology or philosophy rather than a religion. “The things I used to think made me happy—stimulation, traveling, or gambling or excitement, relationships—they were actually the opposite of happiness,” Hunt says. “It’s changed my whole view on where you can find happiness—substances are not the place.”

Aaron tapped into meditation after stubbornly refusing mandatory daily morning teachings for the first two weeks at the monastery.

“In a way it’s kind of good because it can teach you to focus, which is the only thing I’ll credit to Buddhism: it will teach you to use your mind as a muscle,” Aaron says.

In addition to teachings, those living on the monastery weren’t allowed to eat meat or dairy, smoke, or drink alcohol. Aaron thought it was completely bizarre when he saw that the monks kept Jack Daniels in a closet only to fill tiny bowls in front of Buddha statues as part of offerings.

Three months in, he started sneaking off to the only pub in town to drink. His girlfriend at the time scraped together money to fly over from Ontario and stayed with him on the monastery briefly. Soon enough, they began hitchhiking to a nearby village where Aaron quickly was able to find meth. After a night of partying and doing speed in this adjacent town, his diabetic girlfriend landed herself in the emergency room with an enlarged heart. During her hospital stay, Aaron moved out of the monastery and in with a party friend.

Hunt described the time when his son stayed with him at the monastery as a very happy time in his life. After “things got complicated” with Aaron and his girlfriend, Hunt moved to Spain. He developed and managed a retreat just outside of Madrid on a mountain.

Meanwhile, Aaron and his girlfriend made a quick decision to fly back to Canada when 9/11 happened in 2001, fearing that a third world war was about to break out. After relapsing, Aaron went to rehab and got off hard drugs in 2005. He had little contact with his father, who was still completely immersed in Buddhism. Their relationship still continues to be strained. Aaron is now 34.

“It is hard to know what those relationships would have been like had I not ordained and lived for many years quite distant from them… it is unlikely that they would have been the same,” Hunt says. “[My children] are still young and I may have a few years left so I am optimistic about the future. We are still together on the planet and have potentialities.”

Years later in ’09, Hunt made the decision to disrobe, saying that he “just wanted to be an ordinary guy” again. His son says that his dad also spoke of interest in dating women and “monk’s disease” as a reason for disrobing—this refers to a painful condition that can sometimes develop in men after being completely celibate for a number of years (you can’t jerk off if you’re a monk).

Hunt, who will be 64 in July, is now retired, single, and living in the UK (he has dual citizenship). He spends his days playing ukulele and taking care of an ill monk who is a revered teacher. Hunt still practices Buddhism and is going on a retreat in mid-June in Scotland.

“One thing I have learned is that I can't predict myself too well—any prediction would be sort of arrogant and foolish on my part about what I'll do in the future,” he says. “What I do know is that I'll be pursuing the same kind of interests that I've been for the last 20 years, which is trying to learn how to understand and control my mind and the reality that I'm experiencing.”

*name has been changed to protect anonymity 

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