Anthony McIntyre (right) outside his cellblock with Pat Livingstone in 1992

On July 21, 1972, the Provisional IRA detonated 19 bombs across Belfast in the span of an hour. Known as Bloody Friday, the attacks claimed the lives of nine people and injured 130 others. At the time, it was one of the most violent acts that had happened during the Troubles. If you were the one who planned it, you’d probably want to keep quiet, right?

Three decades later, the man who claims to have been behind that day felt differently. Speaking to researchers who were compiling the “Boston College Tapes,” an oral history of the Troubles, Brendan Hughes, former Officer Commanding of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade admitted to being in charge.

Part of the reason behind his decision to revisit the past was that his interviewers—academics based at Boston University between 2001 and 2006—had been given guarantees from their institution that testimonies from their work would not be published until after their subjects, who were republican and loyalist paramilitaries, were dead and that the police and politicians would never be allowed access to them. The promise didn’t quite work out.

In 2011, the British government tried to get access to 85 tapes, including Hughes’s interview, with the assistance of the US Department of Justice. They were looking for an interview that purportedly implicated Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, by the IRA. Three years later they were successful. In April Gerry Adams was arrested on the basis of this evidence. He was later released without charge.

I spoke to one of the three men behind these tapes, Anthony McIntyre, himself a former commander in the IRA. Speaking from his home in the Republic of Ireland, he told me more about his background, and why, as a former Provo, he decided to create an archive of people admitting to grizzly acts of political violence.

VICE: Hi, Anthony. Stupid question, but why did you join the IRA in the first place?
I joined in 1973 when I turned 16. I’m from South Belfast and I didn’t come from a republican background, but I romanticized the movement nonetheless. Growing up, you’d see people being arrested or shot in the street. If a foreign army did the same in London, what would people who lived there do?

Your activity landed you imprisoned in Long Kesh for 18 years, four years of which were on blanket protest, alongside the 1981 hunger strike. What did you do?
I was convicted of shooting a member of the Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in 1976, for which I was given a life sentence. When it happened I was the leader of the IRA in South Belfast, and I’d been given impetus to shoot this man under the auspices of senior command because our intelligence believed he was an armed member of the UVF.

What was it like in Long Kesh?
It was tough. It was a battle against the prison administration. We were locked in cells 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without reading material except the bible, which was used as toilet and cigarette paper. During that time, the hunger strikes confirmed my hatred for the British, but I’ve since also learned of disputed evidence suggesting Sinn Fein had the opportunity to broker a deal, which I’m inclined to believe.

When were you released from prison?
I was released in 1992 when they were releasing life sentence prisoners. Ten months later I started a PhD in history at Queen's University in Belfast. I’d already completed a degree via the Open University while still in prison after punitive measures had eased. I also did some freelance journalism and wrote about how the republican project had disintegrated.

Anthony McIntyre

In an article you wrote in 2009, you said that Sinn Fein’s subsequent endorsement of the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which affirmed the right of Northern Ireland to self-determination, marked the “capitulation” of republicanism. This declaration arguably led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which you have endorsed. Aren’t these two positions inconsistent?
It was a republican capitulation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing—the IRA surrendered in 1916 as well, don’t forget. I no longer believe there's any justification for an armed campaign, but I'm not going to pretend that the Good Friday Agreement was a victory for republicanism. It was a serious defeat. What the British government did was strategically include republicans but exclude republicanism. Today, it seems to me that all Sinn Fein has done is chase office, when what they should have done is stayed out of such institutions and pursued their radical position through lobbying and protest—not by becoming the people they previously opposed, and not through armed conflict.

The Boston College project began in 2001, three years after Good Friday. Why did it start?
It just needed to be done. It felt like the armed conflict was over, even though the IRA had yet to announce it, which they did in 2005. It seemed a good time to capture these people’s stories before they died and a dominant “official” history could suppress the multiplicity of narratives that these voices represent.

How did you select interviewees?
Many of the people I interviewed I knew or had previous experience with. Nonetheless, whether they were pro or anti-Sinn Fein, what mattered was that I could trust them not to tell anyone about the project, particularly members of Sinn Fein’s leadership.

Who did you imagine would listen to these tapes?
I hoped that whoever got access to them would use them to create a reconstruction of republicanism so as to examine its motives. Each interview we did was embargoed until after the interviewee had died, and we were given a cast-iron guarantee by Boston College that they would not hand over the tapes—a guarantee that turned out to be worth fuck all.

And Gerry Adams got arrested because of that broken guarantee. How do you feel about that?
It's not a good feeling. It causes me great anguish that people have been arrested, because this was not what the project was about. The project was about gathering historical evidence, not prosecution evidence. I did not want to make a political intervention. Whether other people wanted to use it for that purpose is another matter. I didn't want to use it to have a go at Gerry Adams.

Surely you were aware of the potential risk that the material would be used in this way?
I wasn't, no, absolutely not. Why would I have done them in the first place if this was the case?

Sinn Fein has claimed these tapes were compiled in order to get people in trouble. What's your response?
The argument that it was "maliciously compiled" would have to show that there was some intellectual dishonesty, and that we prompted people to say things that weren't true to maliciously present Gerry Adams as a member of the IRA.

So you didn't do that?
No. I reject the idea that people were chosen simply because they would have a go at Gerry Adams. I don't see the historical value of doing that. Perhaps there was a structural tendency to get people who were not sympathetic to Sinn Fein, but I don't believe that undermines their testimony, because Sinn Fein should not be allowed to determine what the truth is.

Anthony McIntyre visits his former cell block with his son in 2007

The Good Friday Agreement drew a line under crimes committed during the Troubles by treating them as acts of war, but some of the wounds haven't healed and crimes are unsolved. Do you think this will ever be resolved?
I don’t, no. There’s never going to be a way of appeasing everyone. I don't see how it can be done. All I think you can do is recover as many narratives as possible so that historians can arrive at judgments. But a more just society has to be based on the future, because ultimately the dead don’t vote.

What do you hope happens in Northern Ireland? Are you still a republican?
To me, republicanism is over. But can I see a future for republicans if they behave in a rational manner and pursue justice and politics. Unfortunately, there are still people who think that political violence is the way forward, but for me it's an absolute waste.

Thanks for speaking with me, Anthony.

@HuwNesbitt

The author's stash

On the first night of my return to smoking pot, after the kids are asleep, my husband tells me, “I think you’re good; you can probably stop now.” I look down and find I’ve blown through half the joint I’ve been nervously puffing at like a cigarette. I’m annoyed with him for micromanaging me because I am not at all stoned—and then, of course, I am in an instant waaaaaayyyyy toooooooo stoned and grateful for his kindness in a mute, fairly immobile way.

As I wonder (fuzzily, not entirely silently) at the extreme potency of the marijuana I have just smoked, I notice that the remote I’m holding is pointed at the Amazon on Demand screen, and it’s frankly terrifying to realize that inside the neon-bright little boxes—boxes that move, to my awe and horror—are hundreds of movies, and the whole thing is organized in a way that I cannot parse but that I know is based on my preferences. MACHINE, MY PREFERENCE IS TO HAVE ONE PERFECT MOVIE ON THIS TV. I don’t want to look at hundreds of titles, many of which are cartoons or shows my children like, which is sending me into a guilty, bad-mothering place. (NO, I DO NOT WANT TO WATCH DORA THE EXPLORER, AMAZON, YOU GUILT-TRIPPING ASSHOLE!)

“I’m kinda lost here,” I mumble to my husband. He thinks I’m joking. I toss the remote at him, hunch further into the couch, and wait for my magic movie to appear on the magic box. Mad Men! Over the next week, as I watch my regular shows stoned, I’ll come to understand how wooden and artificial most dialogue is, but Mad Men really holds up and deepens, you guys! I audibly groan during instances of sexism, my husband looks over at me, and I feel a little self-conscious because I think I am mouth breathing. The pauses are so pregnant on this show! About halfway through the episode, I look down at the Google doc I have open and realize there is no reason for me to be recapping and analyzing the show as I am, and also that I am not good at typing while stoned.

Oh, the non-crisis of my bourgeois existence! I’m a mother of two small children, comfortably inhabiting the sort of suburban life I once defined myself by rejecting. When you’re younger, you separate yourself from the imagined mainstream crowd by your taste in music, fashion, and humor—but most of that fades away when everybody’s kids are in school together, everybody goes to Whole Foods for gluten-free cereal, everybody’s too tired to wear anything but MomClothes™, and everybody’s music tastes have been washed away by the Frozen tsunami. Once you have children, many of the markers that signified your Totally Unique Being are lost to you, and it’s easy to find yourself wondering, as you look admiringly at your friends’ Honda Odysseys with their impressive capacity, how, or if, or why, you are who you are—then a child throws themselves into your arms and demands your full attention and love, and you are too grateful to ponder questions of existence.

Nostalgia is the most powerful and pervasive of thirtysomething habits, though, and lately I’ve found myself wondering what could make me feel transgressive again. There’s nothing subversive about drinking; it’s just a minor tweak on the same suburban-mom stereotype (“Mommy’s Time Out Pinot Grigio” is a real thing). I’ve weaned myself off the mild antianxiety meds and antidepressants I once took, and though I absolutely needed them at times, I wonder at their strength and influence. At the risk of sounding like a dirty hippie, wouldn’t the occasional toke be better than the scrips-and-wine relaxation method adopted by so many of my fellow once-hip surburbanites? And couldn’t weed—countercultural, Costco-incompatible weed--connect me to a younger, hipper, less stereotypically mommish version of myself?

My decision to adopt weed as my drug of choice wasn’t random. I used to be the kind of stoner who owned a pair of four-foot bongs (christened the Godfather and Apollonia) and smoked from them using a camping lighter, clearing bowls with the flourish that comes from spending long Southern California days practicing such skills. The year after college, which I spent in a Hollywood apartment with my boyfriend and a guy friend on a diet of In-N-Out, weed, and 2:00 AM burritos, was my habit’s peak, or nadir, depending on how you view that sort of lifestyle. After that, I took a break from pot. In 2001 I moved to New York, where I drank more, went on antidepressants, and smoked mostly at parties. My husband—who grew up in New York and thus was over his stoner period at a frighteningly young age—got a job in DC, and in the six years since we started our family my pot intake has been limited to the very occasional joint shared during rare trips without the kids.

So I knew weed; knew it in the same deeply nostalgic way that I knew the taste of Animal-Style at In-N-Out, more than a decade after leaving California. Except I didn’t know how to get any.

Not a good place to try to get weed, as it turns out. Photo via Flickr user Bearden

Before beginning my experimental return to stonerdom I figured it would be easy to score weed, but I underestimated the depths of my uncoolness. Between snack duty and kindergarten orientation, I don’t know many open smokers, or anyone who sells pot. Every day “buy some marijuana” remained on my to-do list next to “Costco run” made me more nervous that I wouldn’t be able to find any, which I know is not good. Preliminary paranoia is not cool.

Employees at my local Whole Foods smoke, as I know from marijuana-centric conversations among shelf stockers I’ve interrupted. Maybe during one of these interactions, or at check-out, after we’ve established a connection—HAHAHAHA WE BOTH HATE YOUR CORPORATE OVERLORDS BUT MY FEELINGS ARE COMPLEX BECAUSE I’M SUPPORTING THEM LET’S NOT GET INTO IT—I could, very subtly, ask, WHERECANIGETSOMEWEED? Foolproof plan, right?

My lowest point comes in the Kinko’s parking lot, when I spot a dreadlocked black guy in a Bob Marley T-shirt and think, Hey! I should ask that guy! Follow-up thought: What is wrong with me? Why has the pursuit of drugs brought out my basest assumptions? This man should sell me a bag of expensive oregano and then arrest me for criminal stupidity and racism.

I consider asking the dad next door who I’m friends with, but it’s tricky, because in our corner of DC suburbia there’s a complicated tangle of cladestine vices: Some of the dads smoke pot semi-openly but the moms just… don’t. We are the primary caregivers, charged with keeping constant vigilance over our broods using problem-solving skills and speedy reflexes to manage crises. These responsibilities don’t make it easy to develop a weed habit.

Clearly, there’s some sexist shit at play here. At some point, our circle of parents came to an unspoken understanding about who does the smoking and who does the caregiving. Moms can’t get stoned and stare into fire pits, because they’re making sure children don’t run into the fire; they can’t get stoned and vibe out on some music, because they’re putting the babies to bed. And since I’ve been more than a little judgmental about the dads I know who get stoned and chill while their wives do the parenting, going to these same dads for a weed connect feels a little hypocritical. But I finally text my friend and awkwardly ask if her husband, THE pot-smoking dad, can hook me up.

He graciously offers me a joint, gratis, but I’ve come to realize that back in my stoner period I rarely bought my own stash—so in an entirely symbolic effort to correct my earlier etiquette failures, I insist on buying an eighth. I’m an adult, and I buy my own weed!

Little boxes on a hillside, little boxes full of parents secretly getting high... Photo via Flickr user Frank Maurer

For a few days, until I get a simple faux-cigarette one-hitter, I struggle to smoke enough to get a little high, but not so much that I get blotto. This is a delicate balance. With the benefit of decades of experience, I can gauge how much alcohol will take the edge off or get me buzzed or give me a hangover. I don’t have the same control when it comes to smoking pot. While drinking wine, I can answer work and school emails, take care of household issues, plan my son’s medical visits, and talk normally with those around me. Being stoned, on the other hand, closes off certain parts of modern life to me. I cannot deal with much of the internet, smartphones, the goddamn Roku machine. With the amount and quality of pot I am smoking, I can look at Twitter for no more than five minutes at a time, intently watch Mad Men or Gravity, laugh at grotesque cakes on Pinterest, fall into obsessive music holes, mutter things about Mad Men/music/horrible cakes/Twitter to my husband, and eat avocados whole. That’s pretty much it.

One afternoon, when I have an uninterrupted block of three hours to myself, I take a few hits, put on some Harry Nilsson, sit in a rocking chair in my sunny living room and pretend I’m a lady of the Laurel Canyon, circa the year of my birth. Then I do pretty well on the Slate News Quiz. Why am I taking the Slate News Quiz? Because I am a grown-ass woman who likes doing news quizzes, and indulging in substances I have not enjoyed during the day for over a decade will not make me a decade younger, or a decade different.

Clearly I still know how to smoke pot and how to be stoned, but it doesn’t make me any less momlike. If anything, I feel more deeply entrenched in a particularly middle-aged furrow of weird old music, cultural criticism, and NPR. Smoking pot may change your experience of the things you like, but it doesn't change you. I’m not suddenly able to relate to Miley Cyrus and her 4/20 Bangerz 4 Lyfe thing with some of the Youngs, because I am not, nor was I ever, someone who would relate to Miley Cyrus. Even at the height of my stonerdom, I rejected the dumb, deeply embarrassing aspects of weed culture—drum circles, pot leaf icons, that whole murder-jester pipe aesthetic—so why would I engage with that shit now that my age has liberated me from it? In hindsight, now that I’m actually high, it seems bizarre that I would seek out pot in a quest to be less defined by the cliches of adult life. If I wanted to meaningfully challenge the codes and boundaries of my bourgeois suburban life, developing a weed habit is maybe not the best way to go about that.

I am coming down from this afternoon of epiphany, Harry Nilsson, and News Quiz crushing when my five-year-old comes home. This day marks the one time I have smoked pot when either of my kids have been awake and in the same zip code as I am, and while I’m not stoned anymore, I still feel nervous. Does he sense this? Is that why he looks up from his Legos, fixes his huge blue eyes on me, and suddenly asks me to CHOOSE BETWEEN HIM AND HIS SISTER?

The Sophie’s Choice question, for the first time ever, on an afternoon of illicit activity, is a lot to take in, and I react like I’ve been hit by a very cute, very crazy truck. Finally, I reply with the expected script: I love you both, I could never choose. He keeps pushing: If you had to choose between me and her, who would it be? I become more insistent—I will never have to choose, it would be impossible. You and your sister are like parts of my body, my limbs! I couldn’t choose between parts of my body! He will not let it go: Well then, if you had to choose your right arm or your left arm, which would you choose? Oof. Bravo, sir.

Any other day, this conversation would have been approached carefully, lightly, with more attention paid to the reassurance and love he was asking for. But it felt unbearably fraught and intense in the wake of the pot, and served as a very definite admonition from the universe to absolutely never, ever smoke pot anytime my children are conscious and in the same county, ever.

The last night of my experiment before we go on vacation, I find the sweet spot: I inhale just the right amount from my one-hitter and decide to fix myself some Costco chicken salad left over from my son’s pre-K graduation. The tastiness of the food makes me do a little dance, which might have made me self-conscious as a younger person. But I’m in my home, surrounded by people I love, and who love me even in my most pathetic moments, and I’m an adult lady who can dance in her house and squeal about the gloriousness of adding grapes to mayonnaise-based prepared foods without fear. My husband and I are about to watch some MasterChef Junior, which is just right, and I will make lots of hilarious, perfectly-timed jokes that will amuse us both to no end, and I know there are avocados left for later, because I am an adult, and I bought them.

Jessica Roake lives and writes in the DC suburbs.

Screencap via YouTube.
If you’re a woman with a uterus who likes to control said uterus, or a person of any gender who supports women’s reproductive rights, you need to never work in/step foot in a Hobby Lobby—an American retail chain that appears to specialize in silk flowers and picture frames—again. That’s because a pack of Christians determined last week that another pack of (particularly wretched) Christians has the right to deny contraception to women. A complete lack of basic scientific wherewithal was exhibited by all, obviously.

And the other thing you need to know about this week is that men aren’t done masturbatorily blathering about young women’s literary successes. So without further ado:

Screencap via EdRants.
Edward Champion Does Not Know What’s Going On In The World

Unless you enjoy reading overlong, woman-hating articles, you may not have heard that some guy named Edward Champion wrote a long-ass opinion piece bashing so-called “middling millenials.” It is, in essence, a thoroughly misogynistic denial of the importance of women’s writing.

The edrants.com blog is a poorly formed, ranting, impossibly hateful epistle no fewer than 11,000 words long. Don’t worry, I read the whole thing so you don’t have to. It took me an entire afternoon to force myself to finish it. I made 100 trips to the fridge, shopped for shoes, did my brows, wrote a bit, and read at least 20 other articles before I could get to the end.

The thing is blatant woman-hating vitriol. Champion attacks “largely white women” between the ages of 25 and 33 (with “some of the more pathetic specimens” being closer to 40), accusing them of confusing “the act of literary engagement with coquettish pom-pom flogging.” He repeatedly refers to women’s writing as being trivial, banal, ignorant, or all three—alongside repeated accusations of narcissism. Essentially, Champion says, women shouldn’t write about their lives or write in any way Champion himself doesn’t relish. He goes so far as to define what “real” feminism is (I’m sorry?), and what a “real” writer is.

But he focuses the majority of his “critique” on Emily Gould. He chastises Gould for having the gall to name her blog and company after herself (gauche! attention-seeking! self-centred!). He calls her a “dim bulb [who] believed that she was entitled to everything,” “a mangy dog,” and one of her books a “heap of shit.” He rips on her for thinking herself to be “extraordinary.” He critiques her choices of romantic partners by calling her past relationships “a string of careerist bedhopping.” (Champion’s own partner is also a writer). It doesn’t make much sense until we learn the whole thing is personal—Gould wrote something about Champion that Champion didn’t like. Further, he has yet to write a book, while Gould has written three. Could somebody be a wee bit jealous?

There is no mention of men’s work he finds mediocre. Only women’s. He calls lady millennial writers “disproportionate tadpoles” who “must ‘have it all’ and announce their hyphenates, even when untrue. Thus, unremarkable people believe that they should be the center of attention, presenting themselves as superheroes committed to supererogatory tasks.”

Excuse me? Why aren’t they remarkable? Because you don’t find their work relates to you? Guess what? It doesn’t have to. Quite ironic that a piece aiming to shed light on narcissism in the literary arena should include such pronouncements, and such a lofty opinion of its own author.

Gould is not the only attractor of Champion’s ill-directed ire. He calls another woman “a dumb-as-dirt, insufferable publicist” and a “thoroughly mediocre woman in her early thirties isn’t chirruping like a red-billed quelea who doesn’t understand that 1.5 billion other birds are twittering the same tune.”

These run-on ramblings are little more than tirades of sheer envy. Is there a lot of narcissistic crap on the internet right now? Yup. Overt preening and bragging is thinly veiled as “personal branding,” and thoughtlessly using someone for their connections is masked as “networking.” It’s ugly. But women aren’t the only perpetrators of said ugliness, and no matter how much Champion may hate young female success stories, he certainly can’t take away their right to write whatever the fuck they want about their own lives and experiences. They might seem naval-gazing to Champion, but the truth is women’s stories haven’t been told for far too long. And now that they are, the menz don’t like it.

Let this be known: women’s stories are stories worth telling, and they need not be legitimized by men. Our experiences don’t need to be told in such a way as to be backed up by research. Living life as a woman is research enough. Women are writing personal pieces about breast feeding, race, and class relations—their own relationships with their bodies, challenging media, love, and, yes, feelings.

Gould herself offers the perfect counter to Champion in a 2008 essay whose apparent “trite” ness Champion, self-identified gatekeeper of all that is worthy in media, could not believe was published by the New York Times:

“At some point I’d grown accustomed to the idea that there was a public place where I would always be allowed to write, without supervision, about how I felt.”

She writes about past entitlements, which she says are now humiliating for her, in the same essay. But she is right: she is allowed to write, without supervision, about how she feels. The bottom line is, Champion is jealous of Gould and others like her, even as he (weakly) claims not to be. Case in point:

“A true cri de coeur should come from the knowledge that irredeemable scumbags like Emily Gould are not only rewarded for pushing honest heads under the water and fucking the right people, but are lavished with the kind of media attention incommensurate with their middling abilities.”

Who, I ask, is the real “torrid hoyden hopped up on spite”? In a word: if you do not like to read confessional, autobiographical, personal essays of this ilk—don’t read them. If you are jealous, maybe stop polluting the internet with such negative novels about others’ style of writing and hone your own style.

Oh, and Champion? “Middling Millenials?” It’s never going to happen.



Screencapture via YouTube.
Stop Having Premarital Sex and Praise Jesus Instead, Lady Slut Bags!

In Washington last week, the Supreme Court ruled that insurance coverage for contraception doesn’t apply, provided a woman works for a corporation run by a family of hyper-religious assholes. Their line of thinking? The family’s religious freedom needs to be protected, first and foremost.

And some companies, like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Store, believe forms of birth control like IUDs and emergency contraception (such as Plan B) are essentially abortion, because they prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus.

It scares me that people this stupid are not only moving around on the planet doing things like operating heavy machinery—they are influencing the highest decision-making bodies to dictate women’s health and well-being, in 2014.

Under the Affordable Care  Act, contraception should be covered. But the 5-4 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision is spurning the importance of women’s rights and freedoms for religious rights and freedoms, wading into seriously dangerous territory.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the justices to vote against, and she made a fierce dissent:

"It bears note,” she said, “in this regard that the cost of an IUD is nearly equivalent to a month's full-time pay for workers earning the minimum wage."

But, though there were three other dissenting justices, she may have been the only sensible voice in the room. The decision, authored by Samuel Alito, reads:

“Any suggestion that for-profit corporations are incapable of exercising religion because their purpose is simply to make money flies in the face of modern corporate law.”

Wait, what? Corporations don’t exercise religion. People do. And if you own a company, but don’t want to control your reproductive functioning, then good on you! Remain a virgin until you are wed, and then, only fuck to procreate. Perfect. But don’t foist your extremism onto your innocent employees who know what’s best for them, hmmkay? Because someone else’s use of contraception doesn’t actually affect you in any way.

As the Guardian’s Jessica Valenti puts it: “…let's be clear: While Monday's US supreme court ruling in favor of Hobby Lobby was officially about religious freedom, the real issue at stake is sex—namely, if women should be able to have it as freely as men.”

If you’re as mad about this as I am, check out this hilarious list of cheap and easy birth control options you can purchase at Hobby Lobby, as detailed by New York, to cheer you up. Or, this list of other laws which, given this preposterous decision, could be just as easily fucked with. Or, if you’re more auditory, here is the glorious Ginsburg’s dissent in song.

All I know is I will never, ever be purchasing so much as a pack of embroidery floss from these extremist maniacs ever again. 


@sarratch

All photos via the author and Tatyana Kondratenko.
My introduction to dumpster diving happened at the hands of two of my floormates, shortly after I moved to Denmark from Toronto. I'd always been intrigued by the idea but never actually got to try it out, so when my thoroughly Danish pals—Anders and Rasmus—asked me if I'd like to go dig through the local grocery store's trash with them late one night, I figured, why the hell not?

The amount of stuff we found blew me away: fresh vegetables, pastries, whole loaves of bread, and cookies. They weren’t festering, larvae-encrusted, rotting piles of half-composted food either. The produce was totally fine—for the most part. It looked like stuff was tossed because it had a few bruises, or if it was a bunch of food packaged together, because one grape in the whole box had some mould on it. All freshly-baked goods also had to be thrown out every night regardless of the state they were in. (I probably shouldn't have been so surprised—according to the United Nations Environment Programme, about 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted every year. So, basically, the world throws away one third of the food it produces.)

As the months went by, a few classmates and I began to develop a system for efficient dumpster dining while slowly growing immune to the sickly-sweet stench that seems to settle over all garbage. If you’d like to try it yourself, here’s the ethos we developed:

1. Wait about 20 to 30 minutes after the last grocery store in the mall by our dorm closed.
2. Put on clothes we don't mind getting putrid, strange liquids on (for me, old black jeans and a sweater).
3. Grab a couple of bags (at least one just for bread and pastries) and flashlights.
4. Get free food.

The only rule seemed to be "throw everything we didn't want back in." If we didn't, whoever had to clean up the mess in the morning would get pissed and lock the dumpsters for a week or two. For poor students in a notoriously expensive country, it was like hitting a treasure trove as I gradually began including more and more dumpster-rescued food into my diet.

And so, in May of this year, I decided to test my love for aesthetically damaged and salvaged food: Could I survive off dumpster food for two weeks and not hate every moment of it?

From May 5 to 18, I held myself to three rules:

1. I could only eat food I picked out of the dumpster.
2. Spices/condiments/oil do not count as food.
3. Alcohol does not count as food.

I also decided to document everything I found, to see how much everything I foraged with my fellow dumpster shoppers was worth.

Here's what I was able to salvage:

May 4

-2 cauliflowers
-2 bouquets of flowers
-3 boxes of strawberries
-2 boxes of green grapes
-box of mushrooms
-live rosemary plant
-3 bananas
-8 oranges
-8 red peppers
-4 yellow peppers
-7 chocolate muffins
-7 croissants
-2 pop tarts
-5 lemon rolls
-2 pain au chocolat

Total: 355.50DKK

May 6

-3 leeks
-1 broccoli
-box of mushrooms
-3 red peppers
-18 buns
-1 chocolate muffin
-2 loaves of bread

Total: 179.50DKK

May 8

-box of salad
-2 eggplants
-2 zucchinis
-5kg bag of potatoes
-2 heads of lettuce
-9 oranges
-a grapefruit
-5 and a half loaves of bread
-3 buns

Total: 298.50 DKK

May 11

-4 boxes of grapes
-half a box of strawberries (found a whole box, but half were mush)
-3 small bags of mini carrots
-1 box of cherry tomatoes
-1 pack of vine tomatoes
-1 broccoli
-1 celery
-1 lemon

Total: 175DKK

May 14

-5 platters of assorted cheese (goat, brie, emmental, blue and cheddar)
-tub of “salat” cheese (think shitty feta)
-6 limes
-1 cucumber
-1 avocado
-2 eggplants
-3 loaves of bread
-15 buns
-2 cinnamon rolls
-3 poptarts
-4 lemon rolls
-10 croissants
-9 muffins

Total: 573.50DKK

May 17

-3 1kg bags of potatoes
-7 vine tomatoes
-2 1kg bags of carrots
-2 ears of corn
-27 buns
-9 muffins
-3 pain au chocolat
-5 croissants
-2 loaves of bread
-3 honeydew melons
-6 peppers
-1 mango
-2 mini heads of lettuce
-1 rake
-1 plant (Princess Ariane Red)

Total: 504DKK

GRAND TOTAL: 2086 DKK

That evens out to roughly $413 (Canadian), or just over a month's worth of rent at my dorm.

To be fully honest though, I did slip up. Over the two weeks of a supposedly dumpster-devoted diet, I ate two pieces of a chocolate bar, then I scarfed down a chocolate ball, and I went to town on a falafel ball (all given to me by friends). I also found myself getting cravings for rice and eggs about five days in, but I quenched the former by making cauliflower “rice” and the latter went away after I chowed down on eggplant, which tastes and feels oddly protein-y if you cook it right.

But by the end of the two weeks, I think I was actually healthier than before I started since I was eating mostly vegan, and junk food was hard to come by. Knowing how to cook also helped because I managed to whip up stuff that looked and tasted pretty decent:

Even though my most hardcore dumpster diving phase has run its course, a big chunk of what I eat is still coming out of the garbage. I haven't had to pay for bread in months and it's working wonders for my wallet. Trust me, give it a try. Stake out your local grocery store after hours and take a peek into what they throw away. You may encounter a bunch of decaying waste—surrounded by ravenous rats with beady little eyes—but more often than not, you'll probably be able to find something for lunch the next day.

@xjackiehong

The Greenhouse app highlighting how much money each industry gave Republican Congressman Mike Simpson before the last election

With US politics swimming in so much corporate money that it's pretty much an oligarchy, it can be hard to keep track of which particular set of lobbyists is trying to milk more cash out of healthcare, fossil fuels and other very important issues from one week to the next.

But thanks to 16-year-old Nick Rubin, keeping track of just how much politicians have sold out has become a lot easier. He created Greenhouse, a new browser plugin which operates under the motto, "Some are red. Some are blue. All are green." The plugin aims "to shine light on a social and industrial disease of today: the undue influence of money in our Congress." It sounds like a bit of a lofty aim for an app, but it's actually pretty simple and effective—it provides a break down of a politician’s campaign contributions when that politician's name comes up in an article. It is currently available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and is completely free. As you can imagine, reading about how your Member of Congress voted in a recent health bill becomes all the more enlightening if you know how much money the health industry showered him in at the last election.

I spoke to Nick Rubin about the plugin, politics and what he calls the "money stories" behind what you read in the news.

VICE: Hi Nick. So how did you come up with the idea for Greenhouse?
Nick Rubin: Back in seventh grade, I gave a presentation on corporate personhood and ever since then I’ve been really interested in that issue. I think the one problem is that the sources of income for members of congress haven’t been simple and easily accessible when people have needed it. More recently, I’ve been teaching myself how to code and I thought that something like Greenhouse that puts the data at people’s fingertips would be a perfect solution. It really is the intersection of these two passions of mine—coding and politics. I made it after school and on weekends on my computer.

Why the name?
Well, green is the color of money in the US, and house refers to the two houses of Congress [the Senate and House of Representatives]. The name also implies transparency; greenhouses are see through and they are built to help things thrive.

Where did you get the information on the politician’s donations?
It uses the data from the last full election cycle which was 2012. This is simply because it’s just the most complete set of data that we have. But, the browser does provide access to the most up to date 2014 information by just clicking the name of the politician on the top of the window or the OpenSecrets.org link in the popup. So the 2014 data is just one click away.

I’m intending to update the data as a whole later in the election cycle as the 2014 contributions are more complete. These are updates I’m currently working on, as well as thinking of other ways I can expand the tool.

Nick Rubin

What are your political views and how are they relevant to the tool?
I want a system that works and so do other kids my age. I want Greenhouse to be a non-partisan tool. What concerns me is the sheer amount of money being pumped into the system because there really is a lot. During the development of Greenhouse and looking over these numbers and seeing how much is being donated—it’s really scary.

How does Greenhouse work?
It works by highlighting the name of any member of Congress on any website and when you hover over these names a little box appears which shows detailed contribution information with amounts and where those amounts have come from. It’s basically a list of the top ten industries from which they receive their money. My goal was to create something that promotes transparency. It would be great if people used it on sites where they’re reading about politics everyday. For example, if you’re reading a piece on Congress votes for energy policy, you might see that a sponsor has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. I like to say that Greenhouse allows people to see the money story behind the news story.

What money stories have you personally uncovered?
I’ve noticed a lot of trends. I’ve been working on something called the “Story of the Day,” which is me tweeting everyday a story where if people used Greenhouse on the story they’d learn something very interesting and see the money story for themselves. These stories are all over. People who use it will be able to form their own opinions about the possible influences of money in politics. 

What do you hope from Greenhouse?
I just want it to educate people because that’s really the first step toward a solution. That’s exactly why I designed Greenhouse with simplicity in mind so that everyone—even kids—are able to understand it. In terms of whether Greenhouse will solve this issue—well, education is the first step. I really do believe that increased transparency will help fix the problem. Easy access to data empowers voters to make better decisions. Once people are informed, they will reject elected officials who are motived by money instead of principles. But for now, I’ll leave the solution to others.

What are you going to do next?
At the moment, Greenhouse is my focus and I want to keep it fully updated and keep improving. One aim of mine has come out of the phenomenal response I’ve had from people that have downloaded the browser. People have got in contact asking to work with me to make versions of the tool for them. This is absolutely something I want to do.

So could you make a Greenhouse app for other parts of the world?
The first thing would be finding a reliable data source. But sure, why not?

Cool. Thanks, Nick.

Follow Hannah Ewns on Twitter

Here's an unsettling NSFW short film from Canadian body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. Watch this one out after office hours, so no one will be quietly judging you as you watch a naked woman in an unbroken 9-minute short ask to have an unlicensed mastectomy from a creepy unseen doctor.

The Nest was commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam for a retrospective exhibition at EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. In the short,  Cronenberg continues to explore familiar themes—from the relationship of body and mind to the fear of authority. The film opens up with a topless Celestine (Evelyne Brochu) sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a metal table and speaking directly to one Dr. Molnar, played by Cronenberg himself. The setting, which appears to be a garage or unfinished basement, is obviously an unorthodox place to have major surgery. Celestine does not mention the setting and instead questions the doctor’s credentials and convictions. She grows more troubled as the conversation progresses, revealing the purpose of her visit, stating that she believes insects have infested her left breast. The work maintains a pitch black humor in its exchanges. Frank conversations about the value of an entomologist and ways to eradicate the nest of insects by removing her nipple and creating a sort of “hatch” for them to escape into some sort of jar they would prepare drive the emotions, if not a plot. Dr. Molnar is there to play the devil’s advocate, noting that the insects may not wish to come out. They may cower in fear or may be unable to fly. All shot in one take, point-of-view from Cronenberg’s head-cam, The Nest builds in complexity as each character’s beliefs and intentions remain uncertain in a state of reality and Cronenbergian sci-fi horror. 

The film will be online until September 14, coinciding with the end of the exhibit in Amsterdam. Watch, share, and be well. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Photo via Flickr user marineperez.
VICE recently reported that in Ontario this June, over 100 people detained on immigration hold decided to boycott their detention reviews, a standard administrative process that determines whether detention should continue.

By boycotting a detention review, you forgo the opportunity to be released from immigration detention that month. VICE managed to speak with Robert (last name withheld), who boycotted his review on June 26. He spoke to us hours afterwards about why.

Robert came to Canada on a work visa after getting shot in his home country. His voice came through the phone lines clear and strong despite the background noise in Central East Correctional Centre, a maximum security prison in Lindsay, Ontario, an hour an half away from Toronto. He had 20 minutes to speak before the phone went dead. 

VICE: Why did you decide to boycott your detention review this month?
Robert: Because, [long sigh], what’s really happening with the detention review and the immigration—they have so much power. They do what they want, they say what they want, they look at you and lie in your face and there’s nothing you can do about it.

I’ve been here [in detention] for three years. I have kids here. They tell me if I cooperate and they don’t get my travel documents by six months, they’re going to give me the bail program. It’s been eight months now and the bail program looks like it’s not happening. They’re just keeping me in jail, just like that.

I just keep going back [to the detention review every] 30 days and no results. It’s been eight months now since I’ve been cooperating.

Why did you and the others on immigration hold decide to stage a month-long boycott?
The reason why we decided to do a boycott, some people [have been] here ten years, some guys here [are] at five years, four years… I’m on immigration for three years now. They just keep you as long as they can keep you until you either get deported or stay in jail and rot. There’s no other alternative.

I think they’re breaking the law in some way because there’s no way you can just keep somebody in jail eight months after they agree, if you can get them deported, deport them, but you still just have them in jail because you can’t get the travel documents.

[When] I was out on the outside, I was working, I have my G2, I was doing good, I’d never been in trouble and then I had a summary offense and I’m in jail for three years. It’s crazy.

Do you have a lawyer?
The problem is I can’t get ahold of the lawyer... I really want to talk to her, it’s so important right now, but I can’t get ahold of her.

You hardly see a lawyer face-to-face because they bring us all the way up here in Lindsay, so most of the time it’s phone. And these lawyers, they maybe answer one or two calls, cause everytime you call it’s $20. I haven’t talked to my family in five months because it’s so expensive.

What did you boycotting your detention review look like?
A boycott, basically, I [don’t] go to the hearing and they just send a service ticket and tell you when your next hearing is. They don’t really care. Nothing really happens when you go to these hearings... It’s just people making money and not really caring. Honestly, they treat us like dogs in here. Anybody that’s an immigrant, that’s from a foreign country, they treat them like dogs. They don’t care about us.

Are you with others on immigration hold?
No, right now I’m with criminals. They should have a better facility for immigration people. They don’t have nowhere to hold us… I’m not facing no charges or nothing, and I’m sitting with criminals. People with gun charges, violent charges, murder—I’m with them. And I’m on immigration.

Were some people afraid to boycott their detention review?
People were afraid because they use every single little thing against you. If you don’t go to your detention review, they say you’re not cooperating.

Why did you feel the boycott of your detention review was going to be worth it?
We boycott the detention review so that people outside could hear our voice. But I guess, when we do that, it’s not even coming in the paper.

The federal government tries to keep everything on the quiet with what’s going on with people here because what they’re doing... I don’t think they have the right to hold people this long on immigration. Especially having them with criminals.

Do you have any message for people outside like family?
I just want to let the people out there know there are kids that are suffering because some people are here… They have a life; they have kids here. This immigration system… they don’t care about people close to you. They don’t care. They just do what they’re doing and that’s it. 


@ek_hudson

In our attention-deficit throw-away society, very seldom is there room for the little guy (or gal) to say their piece in the spotlight. Our new series, Profiles by VICE, aims to change that. Profiles by VICE is a weekly distillation of our eccentric and idiosyncratic world. In each episode we take an intimate look at issues, people, and communities that burrow deep into the underbellies of society.

If this piques your interest—and we can't see why it wouldn't, unless you're one of those humans who's not interested in other humans, in which case we don't know what to tell you other than, "Get your head out of your ass"—watch the series trailer here, and check out this handy episode guide:

• Slut-Shaming Preacher: We travel to Arizona to meet up with campus preacher Brother Dean Saxton, a student at the University of Arizona, whose "You Deserve Rape" sign has caused outrage among the student body.
   
• An Inside Look at the Exotic Animal Trade: We travel to Ohio to rescue a cougar, then to Texas for an exotic livestock auction and undercover visit to a gaming ranch where the animals are sold and hunted for up to $15,000 a piece.


• Reserection: The Penis Implant: We travel to Miami (obviously) to speak to one of the leading penis doctors in the country and find out what it scosts to get your penis operated on.


• My Homie Sells Homies: We travel to New York City's forgotten borough, Staten Island, to find out how a guy named Sugarman created a small vending-machine empire—and how he subsequently lost it, one quarter at a time.


• Blind Gunslinger: We travel to North Dakota to meet Carey McWilliams, the first completely blind person in the US to acquire a concealed-carry permit.


• Prison, Bling Ring, and Redemption: We travel to Los Angeles and talk to Alexis Neiers about her struggles with addiction, her criminal involvement in the real-life Bling Ring, and her new life as a sober mother.


• Teenage Bullfighters: We travel to Merida, on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, to meet Michelito Lagravere, who at 14, became the youngest bullfighter ever.

Profiles by VICE airs every Monday on VICE.com.

Cruiser bikers doing their thing on the streets of Denver. Photo via Flickr user Nick Nunns

Like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury in the sixties, or select swaths of Brooklyn in the early 2000s, Denver’s Baker neighborhood is currently in the midst of a familiar transition: a poor but artistically vibrant community has suddenly been “discovered,” attracting big money and changes to the landscape. Now it’s poised to end up a decaffeinated version of the culture that originally made it famous. The two most iconic villains in Baker’s story are the Denver Cruiser Ride (a weekly faux-Burning Man parade of costumed bros riding the bicycle equivalent of an SUV) and The Punch Bowl Social (a Costco-sized bowling alley that attracts upper-class beer pong enthusiasts). As a Baker resident, I have a readied list of grievances against this crowd that I can deliver at a moments notice—but whenever I do, I can't help but sound like a bigot attempting to rally a mob with my hate speech.

In 2012, I wrote an editorial for Denver’s alt weekly, Westword, calling cruiser bikes antiquated cartoon tanks, and argued that anyone who rides one was not a “serious bicyclist.” I accused them of being too drunk and dangerous on the roads, unaccustomed to the silent rules of riding a bike in the city. The Denver Cruiser ride was, to me, “the most unenlightened bunch of Philistines that our city has ever been forced to contend with,” and I self-aggrandizingly appointed myself the Carrie Nation of cyclists, stating that “someone needs to speak up and tell them to go the fuck home.”

The story received a plethora of comments, all but one or two exhibiting an impressive level of scorn and vitriol. In my eight years as a journalist, I have yet to receive hate mail with this kind of passion. One choice example: “Your writer is a fuckin’ prick. HE is the dude who is ruining cycling for everyone! I bet he’s the doucher riding in the middle of traffic like he owns the road….GTFO BRO.”

"Now you've got a target on your back you miserable piece of shit," read another.

One of the editors at Westword said that the volume and venom of the comments reminded him of reactions to immigration policy stories. Reading these angry replies was a visceral experience for me, strengthening my resolve to despise cruiser bikes all the more. I ignored pleas for bicycle bipartisanship. Hating cruisers became a part of my identity, and I found myself smugly staring down these motorcycle-sized bikes as they rode down the sidewalk (the fucking sidewalk!) of Broadway Avenue. “I don’t think I could seriously date anyone who attends the Denver Cruiser Ride,” I’d say, repeatedly bringing up the subject at dinner parties, pontificating about how they were ruining the neighborhood. 

If you replaced “cruiser bikes” with “Jews” or “blacks,” I sounded just like Edward Norton in American History X.

I wasn’t alone in this. Throughout the Baker neighborhood a general tension was felt about The Punch Bowl Social, which had become the hive of the weekly Cruiser Ride. With their 900-seat capacity and club-remix DJs, the bowling alley/restaurant was attracting swarms of wealthy meatheads who, up until then, mostly remained in the Lower Downtown neighborhood (LoDo)—the site of Real World Denver and countless disturbing anecdotes involving roofies.

Bumper stickers began popping up around the neighborhood reading “Keep LoDo Off Broadway,” referring to the main strip of Baker containing all our favorite bars, boutiques and bookstores. The Punch Bowl and Cruisers were responsible for an increase in crime, I’d say—without any statistical proof. The neighborhood had been getting steadily more popular over the last decade, causing rent to skyrocket. One by one the musicians, artists and writers that had made the neighborhood what it was were unable to afford it, and relocated to cheaper and more dangerous neighborhoods (which will, no doubt, experience a similar fate once the locusts drift that way in ten years time). Thankfully, we had an easily identifiable demographic toward which to channel our hate.

If you were a service-industry artist who rented a house in Baker, the changes were an economic nightmare. If you were a business owner on Broadway Avenue, the fiscal boom was worth the cultural bloodletting. Soon other bars were inviting the cruisers to come in for a pit-stop, where they would guzzle down expensive cocktails like Ken & Barbie versions of the Hells Angels for an hour or two, before collectively hopping on their whale-wheels and riding to the next alcoholic pillage down the road, cheering and belching all the way as “Blurred Lines” thumped from someone’s rolling speaker system.

I’d been DJ’ing off and on at a Broadway Avenue bar for the last year or so, and was recently disappointed to learn that the bar owners had offered their hospitality to the Denver Cruiser Ride. The bar’s architecture carried a certain Bukowski romanticism, sprinkled with the Tarantino aesthetic of vintage movie posters and rockabilly danger. And now, for two hours on a Wednesday night, it would be home to a crowd who probably consider The Hunger Games a challenging piece of literature.   

As an underfunded writer with an ever-increasing rent to pay, last Wednesday I reluctantly agreed to take the Cruiser Ride DJ gig.

I arrived early, setting up my gear before the troops arrived, then went outside to smoke the customary joint in an alley. But once outside I stopped, noticing a Denver Policeman foot-patrolling the area, a phenomenon I'd never witnessed there before. Damn cruisers, bringing cops into our neighborhood, I thought, walking the extra block to another alley to smoke. (Despite what you may think, public consumption of marijuana is even more illegal in Denver than it used to be.)

Killing time while flooding my skull with THC, I read arecent editorial by Ann Coulter on my phone, where the manically divisive conservative argued that America’s increased interest in soccer was due to immigrants and socialism, and “can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay.”

“If more ‘Americans’ are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law,” Coulter writes. “I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.”

The essay was wildly, beautifully, unintentionally ridiculous; perfectly illustrating the transparent xenophobia and racism of those who fight against the inevitable shifts of national demographics. It reminded me of a bit I’d seen days earlier on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where the British comedian strung together clips of Europeans expressing anti-immigrant sentiments.

“The French want to preserve their way of life, and don’t want to adopt the culture’s, traditions and customs of these foreigners,” one woman grumbled.

“You haven’t seen crime yet, but if you let the Bulgarians come here, you will,” lectured another man with a stabby finger.

“Me and my wife used to go out on a Saturday night, have a few drinks with the locals,” complained an Englishman in one vintage clip. “We can’t go down to the locals anymore, they’re full-up with noisey foreigners.”

My blood went cold and I dropped my smoldering joint on the ground, realizing (perhaps through a THC-induced widening of neurochemistry) that I sounded exactly like these bigots whenever I moaned about cruiser bikes and The Punch Bowl Social.

They drive up crime.

They drink too much and can’t be trusted on the road.

They caused the increase in rent (the economic equivalent of “driving down property-value” for the renting-classes).

They should go back to LoDo where they belong.

Walking back into the bar and turning on my DJ equipment, I looked out at the crowd of Denver Cruiser Ride patrons that were beginning to file in. Scanning them with my judgy eyes, I realized that a lot of them probably weren’t the wealthy residents I’d originally pegged them to be—they just dressed as though they wanted to be mistaken for entitled brats. This made me think of Arthur Miller’s 1946 novel, Focus, where a Gentile man buys glasses that cause him to be mistaken for a Jew, which results in him being ostracized while living in an anti-semitic part of New York City.

The persecution he endures would be reprehensible whether he was Jewish or not, but the fact that a new pair of glasses can inspire all kinds of assumptions against his character highlights how trivial, reactionary and childishly dangerous a racist or anti-immigrant mentality can be. And how easy it is to get blindly caught up in it.

Suddenly I felt like the diner rednecks in Easy Rider, who sized up Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper with their long-hair and beads, calling them inhuman “troublemakers” who should be “put in a cage,” and threatening that they wouldn’t make it out of the city-limits. The crewcut diners eventually catch up with the hippies late at night, murdering one and injuring the other two in their sleep.

Thankfully, I’d never encouraged any kind of violence against the cruisers or Punch Bowl patrons, and would gladly condemn anyone who did as a petty asshole. (Admittedly, I have daydreamed of spraying them with my garden hose when they ride past my house.) Still, this epiphany broke my heart. Having grown up in a conservative, working-class town where I used to wear make-up and drop ecstasy before sauntering into the local cowboy bars, I always identified with the hippies in Easy Rider, not the intolerant bigots.      

Earlier in the day, I’d been told that the cruiser-crowd had been requesting the DJs play more “party music,” instead of the obscure indie and psych-rock they’d been spinning each week. I’d whined about this at the time, citing the indignity of a budding professional music critic like me succumbing to the shallow tastes of these people. But once the bar was full and I began flipping through LPs, I found that our musical ven-diagrams were more intimate than assumed.

There was plenty of blues, punk and country that I’m sure they wouldn’t have cared for, but I also had Jay-Z, Daft Punk, Outkast, and The Gorillaz—party music for everyone. They may not have been familiar with my Lykke Li, Janelle Monae or Yelle selections, but they danced to them just the same.   

The bar was typically empty when I’d DJ on Wednesday nights, but now there was a large crowd having a blast to the music I’d picked out for them (a heartwarming dynamic for even the most bitter of DJs).

Suddenly the divisions between myself and the cruiser scene began to appear a bit silly. They ride a different type of bike than I do, attend different concerts, order fancier drinks and have different social rituals. The classist in me wanted to point out that they have more money, and hence drive cars for transportation and bikes only for fun, but it was difficult to sustain this attitude while looking into the mass of humanity assembled on that dancefloor.

After riding my bike home later that night, I looked up the old story I’d written about the scourge of Denver Cruisers, attempting to recapture the sharp antagonism I’d once held for these modern yuppies. Scrolling through the comments—so venomous, so hungry to despise—I came across one reader with a very practical message of diplomacy for both myself and my detractors: 

“I have had two road bikes and now have a cruiser,” she wrote. “It has a four speed hub. After reading your article I think we should have a course on writing without the negative comments. There is too much hate and egotistical correspondence on the internet. Perhaps we should just start being nice to each other on the roadways. I have seen bikes blocking the roads on Saturday morning rides. They are courteous and wave me by when the way is clear. Most of the cruiser rides are not recreational users of the road. Some of us haul groceries or ride to work. Please play nice as we are all in the same sandbox."

In the hope of never feeling like Ann Coulter or an English racist again, I will try.

I promise.

Josiah Hesse is a journalist from Denver, Colorado, covering the local music, comedy, marijuana, and political landscapes. Follow him on Twitter.

Return to The VICE Guide to Europe 2014 homepage

Photo by Patrick D Bortz

Edinburgh might have the castle, the parliament, the Japanese tourists, the neo-classical architecture, and the advantageously low murder rate, but Glasgow has all the fun. Scotland’s largest city is pretty drunk, yes, but we also punch above our weight culturally, with a dynamic music scene, one of the world's most iconic art schools, and some of the best pubs and clubs in Britain. So taps aff ya dafties, 'cos here we fucking go.

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?
   Self-Important Sectarian Bigots | Glaswegian Authority Issues | Immigration
– WHERE TO EAT
– WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?
– WHERE TO DRINK
– WHERE TO STAY
– LGBT GLASGOW
– WHERE TO HANG OUT 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 Patrick D Bortz

WHERE TO PARTY

The beauty of Glasgow nightlife is that most clubs exist on the awkward Z-shape formed by Sauchiehall Street, Union Street, and the Clydeside, so you can roll between it all—the last, desperate gasps of indie, top 40 R&B, taps aff techno, eccie-fuelled happy hardcore and the welcoming thud of underground house—in less than 20 minutes. What it also means, though, is that any arsehole can pop his head in, so Glasgow tries to get round this by booking DJs to play the smallest, loudest spots possible.

One of the finer small, loud spots that people have been diving into in recent years is La Cheetah. They say the capacity's 200 (I swear I've seen nearly double), but you suffer the ceiling drips and disco-tarred shoes because it comes with Funktion 1 as standard and books heroes like Theo Parrish, Moodymann, and Legowelt. That, and you can get a drink for £2 ($3). And you wonder why we want independence.

Though not strictly in Glasgow, any house and techno fan worth their chip-in has been to Club 69: the notorious basement club under a curry house in Paisley. Seriously, if Paisley didn’t have a cathedral and a university, it would probably put 69 on the tourist brochure, it's that fucking good. Punters are bussed out from the center for low-key parties that, since the 90s, have been the old guard’s bragging rights and the newcomers' initiation ritual. Basically, you haven’t seen acid house played live until you’ve seen dozens of kids with eccie masalas in their guts sweating aggressively at a DJ shoved inside a chicken cage.

Glasgow’s licensing laws mean that alcohol is only served in shops until 10PM, in bars till midnight and clubs till 3AM. What this means, other than Dial-A-Booze making a killing on £30 ($50) bottles of Morgan Spiced rum, is that afterparty culture reigns supreme in Glasgow. One of the few illegal club spots to have gone legit is the Unit. It’s better now as well—honest. No more dogs, corrugated iron, and police shutdowns. It’s got lights and everything. One night, make the trip over the motorway. It’s a feat of communal endeavor to keep-the-fuck-going that Glasgow relishes in.

Because of the quirks of our subway system—it's one line that circles through the city center, South Side, and West End—subcrawls have become pretty popular, particularly among students. The rules of the subcrawl are simple: buy an all-day ticket for £4 ($7), get off at every stop (there are 15), and have a drink at the first pub you see. Things usually get interesting once you arrive in the less-than-salubrious environs of Ibrox, Govan, and Kinning Park, and by the time you get to the later stops, you'll be doing well to make it past the bouncers, but if you've got ten hours and a liver to kill, it's pretty fun.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?

Although it may not be the case for much longer, Glasgow is still a part of the UK, and so our drug laws are the same as everywhere else in Britain. Weed is still technically illegal, but the only people who give a shit are passing police officers. There’s not a huge amount within town, though, and unlike many cities, being offered drugs on the street is very rare in Glasgow.

Doormen here are notoriously strict, and anyone caught—or even just suspected of—taking drugs in a pub or club will be thrown out. The Arches club came close to losing its license back in February, when a 17-year-old schoolgirl collapsed and died after taking a bad pill on the premises. This came in the wake of a similar scare last summer, when green "Rolex" pills killed six people around Glasgow in the space of a couple of months, so people should exercise real caution when putting stuff in their body.

Crack and meth are rare, but Glasgow was once renowned—if that’s the right word—for being the heroin capital of the UK. That title always had more to do with the quantity of addicts than the quality of product, though—one dead user tested positive for anthrax a few years ago. In any case, most Glaswegians are under no illusions about the "glamour" of heroin, and it’s certainly not regarded as socially acceptable, so don't do it, basically. And frankly, how awful a cunt must you be if you want to spend your holiday on smack?

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POLITICS, PROTESTS, AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

SELF-IMPORTANT SECTARIAN BIGOTS

Religion has been in decline in Scotland for years—just 54 percent of the population identify as Christian, down from 65 percent in 2001—but because it’s become so entangled with football and politics, we seem unable to rid ourselves of its sectarian trappings, even though many on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide will only ever enter a church to be married or buried.

The most obvious manifestation of this occurs every summer, when, for a host of arcane and impossible-to-defend reasons, a certain stripe of Glasgow's Protestant community takes it upon themselves to dust off their woodwind instruments, dress up like dicks, and parade through the city to commemorate William of Orange's victory over the Catholic King James II in a battle that took place (in Ireland) so long ago, you'd struggle to believe they can count so high using only their fingers. These parades are known as Orange walks, and not only are they offensive and inflammatory to Catholics (particularly when their route passes through traditionally Catholic areas), but they’re an embarrassment to everyone else who lives here: Traffic slows to a crawl to accommodate these lamentable conga lines of self-important bigots, while hangovers citywide are exacerbated by their flute-based hymns of hatred wafting through open windows.

Rangers and Celtic, the local football teams whose rivalry has become symbolic of—and symbiotic with—the tension between Protestants and Catholics, have both made efforts to curb the singing of sectarian songs on matchdays, but progress is slow. You’ll still hear Rangers fans going on about being “up to our knees in Fenian blood," for example, while members of Celtic’s "Green Brigade" of ultras still sing pro-IRA songs. Sometimes, of course, we are able to laugh at the pettiness of it all: A few years ago, in the Rangers-supporting stronghold of Larkhall, the local branch of Subway was forced to repaint its storefront black, because locals interpreted the original color—green—as a tacit expression of support for Irish republicanism (no, seriously).

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Photo by Liam Turbett

POLITICS, PROTESTS, AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

GLASWEGIAN AUTHORITY ISSUES

Glasgow has always been highly politicized: Russian communists once believed that the British revolution would begin on the streets of Glasgow, and it almost did during the battle of George Square in 1919, when the army was called in to deal with 60,000 Red Clydeside workers who briefly managed to raise the red flag over the city chambers. Seventy years later, similar numbers took to the streets in protest against the poll tax and were ultimately victorious in repealing it (to the surprise of absolutely no one, Glasgow was one of the first cities in the UK to host a Margaret Thatcher "death party" last year).

For years, the relationship between protesters and police remained cordial, but with the gradual erosion of civil liberties in the UK, that’s changed: Anti-austerity activists at the University of Glasgow were forcibly evicted from (and then allowed back into) the building they were peacefully occupying, and a few weeks later, a royal wedding street party in Kelvingrove park (less a celebration of Will and Kate’s nuptials than a collective thumbing-of-the-nose at the city’s stringent new legislation regarding public assembly) was ruined by violence. The most common protests these days are against austerity cuts, fascist political organizations, and sexism.

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Photo by Chris O'Neil

POLITICS, PROTESTS, AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

IMMIGRATION

Immigration is on the rise here, but it's hardly a new phenomenon: During the potato famine of the mid 19th century, the arrival of thousands of Irish Catholics into a city that was overwhelmingly Protestant became a source of huge civil unrest, and even today, tensions linger between the knuckle-headed on both sides. The truth, of course, is that Glasgow's history and culture was tremendously enriched by that influx—we've got them to thank for Arthur Conan Doyle, Billy Connolly, Frankie Boyle, and Celtic's 1967 European Cup win—and while only about 2 percent of Glaswegians self-identify as "ethnically Irish" today, that figure doesn't come close to telling the true story of their impact.

There are loads of people of Pakistani origin, many of whom can trace their roots back to the first wave of arrivals in the 1950s, after Pakistan won its independence from the British Empire. Those early generations faced the same problems here—suspicion, discrimination, and lack of employment—as they did in the rest of the UK, but today, Pakistanis play an increasingly important role in business and local politics—many, in fact, have become ardent supporters of Scottish independence.

We also have around 10,000 Chinese, who arrived after the collapse of the agricultural economy under Mao and settled in the Garnethill area, where our very own Chinatown is located (don't get your hopes up: It's literally just a supermarket with a Paifang facade) and similar numbers of Polish and African immigrants. The question of Scottish independence will have a huge impact on Glasgow's future demography: If we vote in favor of it, the SNP plans to introduce a far more liberal and open immigration policy.

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WHERE TO EAT

Sarti
42 Renfield Street, 121 Bath Street, and 133 Wellington Street
There’s little to choose between these three family-run Italian restaurants, which all offer great food, friendly service, and some Italian shit strewn around the place.

The Squid & The Whale
372 Great Western Road
OK, so it takes its name from a minor mumblecore “classic” and calls itself a "cantina," but honestly, it’s really not that annoying. The food (a mix of Mexican, American, and Creole), the extensive selection of beers, and the decent DJs make it pretty fucking real, actually.

Stereo
22 Renfield Lane
Glasgow has three dedicated vegan restaurants—the 78 and Stereo’s sister establishment, Mono, are the others—but this place gets the nod for its tapas menu.

The Ubiquitous Chip
12 Ashton Lane
Traditional Scottish fare that's well worth the expense. Like every other establishment on Ashton Lane, however, it crowds up quickly.

Hanoi Bike Shop
8 Ruthven Lane
This West End Vietnamese joint is becoming insanely popular—it's relatively cheap, a bit weird, and somehow it made its way onto Beyonce's Instagram recently. Which, frankly, is probably the sexiest thing to ever happen in Scotland.

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Photo by John Beck

WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?

Chippies
Sadly, Glasgow is no longer the heart-disease capital of the UK, but we’ll still deep-fry anything with molecules. Old-fashioned fish-and-chip shops are growing scarce these days, having been edged out by the inexorable rise of "street food," but places like the Blue Lagoon and the Philadelphia still do suppers so greasy they’ll turn your guts translucent.

Buckfast
Commotion Lotion. Wreck the Hoose Juice. Coatbridge Table Wine. Like Beelzebub, whose viscous micturition it tastes like, it’s been distilled from, Buckfast goes by many names. This highly-caffeinated tonic wine, brewed by monks in Devonshire and blamed by politicians for most of Scotland’s societal ills, has an awful reputation, yet we stubbornly go on consuming it, without irony or apology. Why? Because Buckfast gets you fucked fast.  

Square Sausage
For some reason, non-Scots always seem to regard square sausage—or Lorne sausage, to give it its proper name—as some kind of outrageous affront to the principles of meat geometry. The appeal for us, however, has always been quite simple: Stick a slice in a buttered roll, add a fried egg, slather some ketchup on top, and hey, presto—you've got a burger you can eat for breakfast.

Munchy Box
Ever find yourself standing in a takeaway thinking, Chips or naan? Onion rings or pakora? Kebab meat or chicken tikka? Glaswegians don't. For us, where fast food is concerned, there is no "or," there is only "and," which is how the munchy box—a cardboard pizza box stuffed to the gills with all of the above, and containing as many as 3,000 calories—came into being. It usually includes a desultory scraping of salad, but it's bad form to eat that decorative shit.

Irn-Bru
OK, there are a few hard-and-fast rules to stick by when it comes to consuming Scotland's national soft drink. Cans (chilled, obviously) are acceptable if you've no other option, but never drink it from plastic bottles—it just doesn't taste right. A 75cl glass bottle—known as a "ginger boatil"—is always the optimum delivery method, and if you're hungover, it's a near-guaranteed cure.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHERE TO DRINK

The West End isn’t great for clubbing: The Queen Margaret Union is a ball ache to get into unless you’re with a member, ditto for the Glasgow University Union—which is historically populated by rugby-playing misogynists anyway—and Viper is pretty much the last-chance saloon. It does, however, have some great pubs.

The Halt Bar (160 Woodlands Road) is a traditional Glasgow local, where old soaks and young folks commingle happily, and which hosts a range of popular open-mic nights. The Stravaigin (28 Gibson Street) is a little younger, hipper, and—crucially—open until 1AM, which gives you an extra hour of binging time, should you need it.

The Oran Mor, a converted church at the top of Byres Road, is pricey and often overcrowded, but you should try and make it to one of their "A Play, a Pie, and a Pint" events, where, for the reasonable sum of £11 ($20), you will get exactly what's advertized.

Over on the other side of Kelvingrove Park, the Finnieston area has undergone a remarkable gentrification process. Ten years ago it was all slumlords and understocked 24-hour shops; today, it boasts boutiques, bistros and cool little bars like Big Slope (36 Kelvingrove Street) and Lebowskis (1008 Argyle Street).

And so to the city center. You’re going to end up on Sauchiehall Street at some point, so you may as well familiarize yourself with the place. Firstly, it’s pronounced Saw-kee-hall, and the eastern end is basically a shopping precinct, but as you head west towards Charing Cross, the bars, clubs, and venues take over. The best of these are probably Nice 'n' Sleazy’s (421 Sauchiehall Street)—a Glaswegian institution renowned for its well-curated jukebox, preponderance of local indie luminaries, and selling Buckfast by the glass—and Broadcast, which is literally next door and caters to much the same crowd (there are more than enough indie kids to go around in Glasgow). Sleazy’s is open till 3AM every night while Broadcast only opens late from Thursday to Saturday, but both offer live music, DJs, and serve great food.

Finally, if you’re looking for something a little more different, try the The Grand Ole Opry (2 Govan Road). It’s a country and western club, but there’s no dress code, and the booze is criminally cheap—always a perk of partying with the senior citizenry. On Gun Club nights, the septuagenarian alphas will assert dominance over their rivals by demonstrating their prowess with a six-shooter, and once this bizarre ritual is over, everyone stands in a circle and sings "Dixie" while solemnly folding a confederate flag. It’s profoundly fucking weird.

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Photo by Jonathan Tollan

WHERE TO STAY

The usual chain hotels are all present in Glasgow city center, but if you’re looking for somewhere affordable and well located and a bed that doesn’t feel like several salarymen have topped themselves in it, your best bet is to look elsewhere. The citizenM (60 Renfrew Street) is great and rooms are sometimes as little as £55 ($95) a night. If you’re looking to go cheaper still, the Euro Hostel (318 Clyde Street) is basic, but at £10 ($17) a night for a dorm or £20 ($34) for a private (en-suite) room, basic is more than you deserve.

The Art House (129 Bath Street), The Grand Central Hotel (99 Gordon Street), and the Blythswood Square Hotel (11 Blythswood Square) are good options for those with a fatter wallet, and anyone looking to base themselves in the West End could do worse than the Hilton Grosvenor (1 Grosvenor Terrace), which looks onto the botanic gardens and is handy for Byres Road and Great Western Road. If your money-to-sense equilibrium is really out of whack, Hotel Du Vin (1 Devonshire Gardens) is the city’s swankiest destination.

One thing to bear in mind about all these places, of course, is that Glasgow is hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014, and during that two-week period every local hotelier and Airbnb hustler with an empty broom cupboard or spare coffin will be out to bleed you dry.

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Photo by Flickr user Spider.Dog

LGBT GLASGOW

Back in January, UKIP's Scottish chairman fumed that Glasgow was "for gays, Catholics, and communists," an endorsement so ringing we should have put it in letters 20ft high on a billboard over the Kingston Bridge. Yet while we’ve come a long way in a short space of time—homosexuality was only decriminalized in Scotland in 1980—the gay scene here is still relatively small and concentrated around a few long-running local institutions.

The Polo Lounge and AXM (formerly Bennets) are the biggest and best-known of these, and handily, they’re just around the corner from each other, a few streets south of George Square. Wednesdays are student nights, and they’re generally the most popular.  The Polo is perhaps the more upmarket of the two, and it also operates the Riding Room, which hosts live music, burlesque shows, and magicians. Delmonica’s is another stalwart, though it’s more of a bar than a club, and is famous for its karaoke nights.

With the addition of Speakeasy and FHQ, the city’s first (and so far only) female-only club, as well as Lock Up Your Daughters, a local collective who publish queer zines, host filmmaking workshops and stage a club night at the Flying Duck, the scene is growing, although gay clubs in Glasgow are more about camp, easygoing fun than bacchanalian debauchery. There was an infamous night at the Arches (it’s always the Arches) a few years ago when Glasgow briefly turned into a Police Academy movie and two policemen on a routine inspection walked in on a 30-strong orgy and were mistaken for strippers, but that sort of thing is pretty rare. Homophobia, however, isn’t much of a problem: gay bars have been a fixture of Glaswegian nightlife for more than 30 years—some, like the Waterloo, have been serving the community for even longer than that—and even the most yokel-minded ned generally knows better than to start any trouble.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHERE TO HANG OUT WHEN YOU'RE SOBER(ISH)

Kelvingrove Park
In summer (not that we get much of one), Glaswegians often gather here to eat, drink, and make merry. The police tend to be officious pricks about the drinking part—it’s been illegal in public places since 1996—but if you can find an out-of-the-way spot, there’s no better way to spend a sunny day.

The West End
Glasgow's bohemian enclave is really a second, more chilled-out city centre, its skyline dominated not by shopping malls and nine-story Cineworlds but the gothic spires of the university and Kelvingrove art gallery. Despite the continual presence of pissed students and Waitrose mums, the West End never loses its charm.

The South Side
You'll probably spend most of your time in the West End and city center by default, but it's worth heading South to check out the Burrell art collection, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's House for an Art Lover, and the Shawlands area, which contains plenty of good bars and restaurants.

Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow's art and music scenes are what attract all those North American students (and their parents' money) to the city, and despite the recent fire at the School of Art, things are more vibrant and exciting on those fronts than they have been in years. You'll encounter all sorts there: geniuses, weirdos, Marxists, crustafarians, conspiracy theorists, even the occasional normal. You don't even have to be studying there to hang out: unlike other student unions in Glasgow, the Vic is open to anyone, and many people who've never even taken a class end up becoming weirdly attached to the place.

The Barras
"Hang out" might be a bit strong, but it's certainly worth paying a visit to this East End fleamarket, if only because it's one of the last authentic "Old Glasgow" landmarks. It's gone downhill in recent years, but you can still find a bargain or two, and the adjacent Barrowland Ballroom is the best live music venue in Scotland.

Mono
A bar that’s also a venue, that’s also a vegan restaurant, that’s also one of Glasgow’s best record shops, Mono is beloved by local artists and musicians. The staff can be a bit up themselves, but if you pulled pints in a place like this, you probably would be, too.

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HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP

Glasgow has the highest homicide and violent-crime rate in the UK, but that statistic is slightly misleading: knife crime, which was once widespread enough to qualify as a civic pastime, has dropped by 67 percent since 2007, and homicides are also decreasing at a rate faster than the national average. Are there parts of the city that would make your eyes pop out on stalks? Sure, but the chances of you accidentally wandering into places like Govan, Possilpark, or Castlemilk are pretty slim.

The city center can be rowdy, but it’s rarely unsafe: Sauchiehall Street, for example, has a bad reputation, but even at weekends, the only real danger you’re likely to encounter is a pissed hen party squawking at you from the window of a passing fire-engine limo. More troubling is the recent spate of sex attacks on women, most of them occurring on the South Side, which prompted thousands of residents to march through the area in protest. The attacks aren’t related, but some of the suspects are still at large, so obviously don’t stumble around pissed on your own.

Finally, Glasgow has a longstanding problem with poverty, and if you’re in the city center, you will almost certainly be panhandled by beggars, alcoholics, and drug addicts. Whether or not you want to give them money is entirely up to you, but don't feel threatened by them. If you sense anyone getting pushy or aggressive, just walk away.

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Photo by Jonathan Tollan

HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST

In the same year that Glasgow was ranked as the UK’s most violent city, we were also voted its friendliest, and we do tend to be quite welcoming of tourists, even if we secretly question the wisdom of going on holiday to somewhere world-renowned for its terrible weather. Life is literally too short (North Korea has a higher life expectancy than certain parts of the city) for us to get too worked up about the behavior of outsiders, but we do find some stereotypes more offensive than others. As a general rule, therefore, try not to make a big deal about the following: deep-fried Mars bars; how much prettier Edinburgh is; your own nation’s superiority at football; how creepy the Krankies are; the length of time since our last fix... you know, the basic stuff.

There isn’t space to get into the finer points of "Glesga patter" (the local dialect) here, but it's always worth remembering that the word "cunt"—whilst verboten everywhere else in the English-speaking world—can actually be a term of familiarity, even endearment, in Glasgow. Should someone refer to you as such (e.g. "Here mate, ken the way tae tha Necropolis? This cunt's askin''), don't be offended, just go with it.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID

Jakeys
Whereas junkies will simply sidle up to you, ask for a weirdly specific amount of change, and be on their way, jakeys—older, drunker, and more persistent—want to be your friend. They'll tell bad jokes, bum your cigarettes, regale you with boring tales of their night's exploits, make some well-intentioned-but-kinda-lecherous comment about the female members of your group… and then ask for a weirdly-specific amount of change. Basically, if a pissed old man taps you on the shoulder and says, "Knock knock" just shout something like, "ICH KANST NICHT SPRECHEN SIE ENGLISCH!" and run away.

Neds
Neds are the classic Glaswegian archetype, and you'll find them pretty much everywhere: aimlessly roaming the streets in packs, pissing in your garden, cruising around town blasting Avicii with the windows down, giddily writing "FANNY" on your windshield the morning after a snowfall, you name it. However, city center and West End neds, having been exposed to art students and gay people, tend to be worldlier and more tolerant than their provincial kin, and if they do decide to engage you, it’ll almost always be in a mockingly verbal, rather than physical, manner. Don’t rise to the bait and you’ll be fine. The trade-off is Guy Fawkes Night—it belongs to them, like The Purge with Roman candles.

Rangers and Celtic Fans
The Tartan Army (supporters of the Scottish national team) are awesome, and fans of Partick Thistle—the city's "third" team—are chill too. Old Firm fans, however, are a fucking nightmare. It was bad enough when Rangers and Celtic were half-decent footballing forces, but in these bleak days of Scottish football, their rivalry boils down to a bald man and a severed head bickering over a broken comb, and each set of supporters have only their hatred of each other to define them. Owing to Rangers’ recent financial turmoil and subsequent relegation, they haven't played each other for more than two years now, but when they do, the city center will inevitably become a warzone.

The North Side
The similarly poverty-stricken East End has improved in recent years, but despite pockets of regeneration in places like Ruchill, vast swathes of North Glasgow remain post-industrial, post-employment, and, in many cases, post-hope shitholes.

The Merchant City
The Merchant City was built on the profits of slavery, but these days, it turns a profit by overcharging aspirational drinkers and diners, whose main requirement for a good night out is being able to boast about spotting minor Scottish showbiz entities. If you're not going for the gay clubs, avoid.

The Savoy Centre
Here’s the thing: As a Glaswegian, I’m glad that the Savoy still exists, because by rights, our oldest, shabbiest shopping center ought to be a multi-story Westfield Shopping Thingy by now. Its persistence is a tribute to the purchasing power of the city’s pensioners, who stubbornly haunt its tawdry tat stalls, beauty salons, and Chinese-medicine centers like ghosts of a bygone age. But let's face it: Unless you've got an urban renewal photography Tumblr, you don't want to go anywhere near it.

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Photo by Jonathan Tollan

TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES

Tipping
Much the same as in London and the rest of the UK—10 percent in restaurants and taxis—except we tend to give homeless people money more often because we're not yet as frigid and as heartless as the English.

Handy Phrases
Hello: Hawl
Goodbye: Catch ye after
Please: Gies it, fuck sake
Thank you: Sound
Idiot: Dafty
Yes, I was very drunk: Aye, I were mad wae it
A good person: Goodcunt
Someone: Somecunt
Everyone: Everycunt

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A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF QUESTIONABLE LOCAL MUSIC

This playlist should be enough to persuade you to sack off Edinburgh for Glasgow.

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VICE CITY MAP

So there you go. When you get here, don't blame me if you have a shitty time—we've done our best.

Love,

VICE Glasgow

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Return to The VICE Guide to Europe 2014 homepage

Photo via US National Archives and Records Administration

Andrew Worthington was born in 1987 in Akron, Ohio. His first novel Walls comes out on Wednesday from Coping Mechanisms. He lives in New York City with his girlfriend. What we like about his writing is that it feels honest. He doesn't ham it up, or try to capitalize on his idiosyncrasies. He also has some weird effects that would have been beaten out of him in a creative writing class, or by a New York City book editor, if he'd been in contact with one. He uses big words and is occasionally unguarded. In short, he's a natural writer, telling a story because he has to—he's not somebody reading the latest so-and-so and seeing a reflection of his own life, and then copying the so-and-so's shape. 

I spent most of the time during that week thinking about those things. We split into groups to follow one of the instructors on hikes, and when Julia wasn't in my group I waited at the intersections of trails hoping to glimpse of her baby blue jacket. I sat in my top bunk in the camping lodge, slowly humping the mattress. I had seen it in the movies. Wet patches showed up on my underwear. I noticed in the morning, but I was too tired to care, because I hadn’t fallen asleep until two hours before.

Most of the guys wanted Samantha Terry, as I had expected from the start. Initially I was intrigued to hear them vocalize it in a really roundabout way, through games of truth-or-dare and other recess excuses for gossip and disclosure, although eventually I became annoyed for the same reason.  It was also almost exclusively guys that announced their likes.  Brian, the most talented basketball player and the presumed prince of our grade, had pronounced his like for Samantha Terry, the presumed princess of our grade. Unfortunately, his best friend Kyle had the same crush, and he decided to announce it soon after Brian. I offered what I considered to be risky hints about Julia Darrows, but everyone was so lost in their dawning pubescent terror that what I considered a big deal didn’t even register for them.

They had us play a game every day during free time. It was called scouting. It was like hide-and-go-seek, except that the seeker had to stand in one place, and the hiders could only hide in a certain area. Most of us hid behind trees, and the goal was to sit still and not be seen. I don’t know how any of us lost. CVEES was the week that we learned more than ever before about nature: our own nature. None of us went home that week feeling that we had gotten what we wanted.

In the weeks after CVEES, I began writing my first journal. At first, it consisted mostly of inane lists, and poems inspired by Will Smith. Eventually, I dedicated a page in my journal to Julia Darrow. I titled it “The Julia Page.” It was actually three and a half pages long. I wrote about my previous likes, including one to our fourth grade teacher the year before, as well as a detailed history of my thoughts on Julia. It restated much of what I have already said, but as I saw those thoughts on the page—“The Julia Page”—they stopped bouncing around my skull. I kept the journal under my mattress, but I knew I would let someone see it. I showed it to Nicole Delmedico, who worked the same crossing guard shift as me, and who I considered to be a close, nonsexual friend. I approached her locker, where she was putting on her crossing guard uniform.

            “What is this?” she asked.

            “It is something I wrote,” I said, “I would just like to hear what you think about it.”

            “OK…”

She stood there reading it. She didn’t make a facial expression the entire time. She seemed to be concentrating. I wanted her to smile or frown or raise her eyebrows or grunt a laugh, I didn’t care which, but I couldn’t stand the blankness. When she finished she folded the pages and held them at her side.

            “This is crazy,” she said, and she placed the pages in her hoodie pocket.

            “Give it back.”

            “No.”

            “What are you doing?”

I grabbed at her back pocket but she shifted away. I kept trying to reach it, and she kept moving away. Our old second grade teacher Mrs. Black came out her classroom.

            “What are you people doing?” she asked.

            “Nothing,” said Nicole, and she began walking away.

I smiled mechanically at Mrs. Black and began walking backward, before turning around to follow Nicole. She was outside, telling the other two crossing guards about it as they walked to the four-way stop. I ground my teeth. When I said hello to the other two, it was evident that they knew that I knew that they knew something I didn’t want them to know. I hoped that Nicole wouldn’t do anything more with “The Julia Page,” but I also knew that wasn’t likely, and I was right. She gave it to Kyle, who shared it with Brian, who shared it with my close friend John.  I sat next to the three of them at the lunch table as they talked about me in the third-person. They were making plans to type it up and print out copies, and then sell those copies. I realized I was faced with a choice: either I could tell on them, and lose their friendships, or I could go along with it, and lose my dignity. I decided to go along with it. John was the only one of them with a computer at his house, and so his parent’s dining room became the headquarters for the operation. At first, they seemed surprised with my willingness to help them with the project, but I acted like it didn’t matter.

            “Are you sure you won’t get in trouble?” asked John’s mom. We were huddled around his family’s computer.

            “Yeah,” said John.  He stopped typing and turned to her briefly.  “He’s sitting right here.  He’s fine with it, aren’t you, Tom?”

            “Yeah, I’m fine with it,” I said.

They typed up “The Julia Page” and I also gave them my lists and poems to publish, too.  It was agreed that we would charge $7 per copy, and would split all the profits four ways. I didn’t take into account the fact that I was both the author and a partner in their venture, and they didn’t, either. We sold 13 copies that Monday before the AM school bell even rang: $7 a copy, $91. I had a feeling that it was selling too fast. I started making restrictions on whom it would be sold to, and, of course, that only helped to increase its popularity.

Word of “The Julia Page” spread across the lunchroom like the plague, and by the time recess came it had scandalized our playground, infecting even the introverts who sat by the fence under the shade. I should have quarantined myself the moment I put the pen to the page. Julia Darrow knew about it. I saw her reading it by the jungle gym. I only glanced at her a couple times, but I knew she was gazing at me with dizzy anger. I couldn’t think. The worst part was I didn’t care. I wrote these things, and there wasn’t any slander, and if there was, it was against myself. I looked over to the other side of the playground and saw Kyle fighting with Danny, who I wasn’t friends with yet at the time. Apparently, Kyle had refused to sell a copy to Danny. Now Danny was ripping off Kyle’s shirt. Recess ended, and our gym teacher Mr. Guzman came over, and then he grabbed Danny’s shirt. I made my way to the lines that were forming for our return to class. Mr. Guzman escorted Danny and Kyle into the building. Our teacher Mr. Blair came out and opened the doors and we filed inside. I locked eyes with him, although his spectacles were in the way, which only intensifies the act of locking eyes with another person.

            “Mr. Maddox,” he said, “Can I have a word?”

I shrugged. He pulled a copy of “The Julia Page” out of his back pocket. 

            “Can you explain this?”

            “No.  And I didn’t do anything wrong.”

He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. His face got red and he motioned for me to go to the empty art room across the hall. I looked at the art on the walls; it must have been from kindergarteners because they couldn’t even color within the lines.

A few minutes later, I was joined by John, Kyle, and Brian. Mr. Blair came in and slammed the door. “What the hell is this?”

None of us said anything.

            “You wrote this Mr. Maddox?”

            “I did.”

            “And you let them sell it?”

            “I am selling it, too.”

            “You guys never thought you were doing anything wrong?”

            “We didn’t do anything wrong,” yelled Kyle.

            “How much money did you guys make?”

            “About $168,” said John.

            “Where is it?”

            “It’s our money,” said Kyle, “We earned it.”

            “Did you know it is illegal to sell materials on school property without permission?”

            “That’s not true,” said Brian.

            “Where is it?”

            “It’s right here, in my pocket,” said Kyle. He pointed to a pocket in his cargo shorts.

Mr. Blair walked over and ripped the button off the pocket. He put the money in his shirt pocket. We were sent to the principal’s office. The principal must have gotten sick of seeing us in her office, because she left soon after we arrived. Mr. Blair sat in her office. He called us in one by one. I was last.

            “I see a guy before me with so much potential,” said Mr. Blair, “But you’re just wasting it all away.  You have no ambition.”

            “I do,” I said.  “I don’t know. Whatever.”

He shook his head. Whatever. I was glad when the day was over. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt embarrassed. We got detention. My parents got called. I got grounded. I didn’t care about getting disciplined, but what I did care about was that the topics in “The Julia Page” were discussed so abstractly and so remotely by the people who were telling me it was wrong. It was as if the problem was immediately evident and there was no need to discuss whether it was a problem, and why. Erections were never discussed. Romance was never discussed. It seemed like the problem was more in their own unwillingness to acknowledge what had occurred.

The Columbine shootings took place a week later. I didn’t find out until two days after, because I was so distracted with the fallout from “The Julia Page.” Everyone wondered what could make anyone do that. Theories were postulated, but everyone wanted to just not think about it, to just make sure it didn’t happen in our town. For the next ten years, we had school shooting drills every month or so.  During those drills, we turned off the classroom lights, and sat in the corner, and the principal spoke in code over the loud speakers.

Nicole Delmedico apologized to me for handing over “The Julia Page” to Kyle.  She said she had liked him, and had hoped that would make him like her. It hadn’t. I called Julia 19 times one day until her father answered. I asked for Julia. He put her on the phone. I asked her if she wanted to go out. She said OK. We never went out.  We never really even talked. I was dating her but nothing happened. The next fall I didn’t talk to her at junior high, either.  She started wearing nicer clothes.  She started putting on make-up.  I wasn’t as drawn to her after that. One day at lunch someone asked me what had happened with us.

            “We broke up,” I said.

            “Who broke up with who?”

            “We just broke up.”

            “So she broke up with you, right?”

            “No.”

I looked at her across the lunchroom, but I didn’t stare.

I constantly had to find something new to look at, or else my eyes got sore.

Last February, stylist and producer Jamie Ortega published Sumzine. The biannual zine can be found in print at boutiques like Opening Ceremony and The Voyager Shop. It's named after the concept that everything we buy should add up and revolve around sustainability and slow fashion. Growing up with a conscientious lifestyle in California, Jamie hopes the zine will foster a discussion about buying less and buying better in a world consumed by fast fashion.

The first issue of the zine was a passion project that was completely self-funded. But this time around, Jamie has launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise $15,000 by July 13 for the second issue, due to drop in September. The new issue, which has a  uniform theme, features interviews with Brianna Lance (The Reformation) and Marina Polo and Brit Cosgrove (Svilu). It also boasts photography by Bob Jeusette, Sam Crawford, and Shanita Sims. 

We called up Jamie to talk about how the new issue, the importance of buying sustainable fashion, and why caring about how your clothes are produced is cool.

VICE: How did Sumzine start?
Last year, I had the idea of doing it as a blog just to show people how to buy less and buy better. I wanted to introduce this hodgepodge idea of sustainability, whether it is buying an ethically sourced designs or organic fabrics or something up-cycled. Then I thought it wasn’t really a concept that could compete in the blog-arena, because blogs are all about endorsements. After I left my job at Saks, I did a lot of freelance and I met the right people. The synergy of everyone made me think that it could work in a print format.

How did you get interested in sustainable fashion?
Being from California, recycling, and doing things mindfully is my second nature. My first shopping trips were not at the mall, they were at Savers. So I have always been in that mindset of being resourceful. Seeing that I did fashion for so long, I saw so much waste, especially in luxury fashion. It is just an extension of my lifestyle. I saw what happened with the slow food movement, but there wasn’t that excitement with slow fashion. 

What was the reception of the first issue?
The first issue I wanted people to see the concept behind the zine. Whether you’re middle class or you’re not, we have seen the hysteria behind fashion evolve so rapidly, especially in downtown New York. We have seen all the boutiques replaced by H&M and Forever 21 in SoHo. It is this fast fashion palace instead of the chic shopping destination that it was before and that is because people can’t afford to buy at a high price point anymore. [This zine] is speaking to the moment that needs to happen. Everyone feels the same way, but until you synergize it into one voice and make it tangible, people forget it's something we should be doing.

Is this issue different? What are you excited about?
This issue is different because it has a theme, which is the uniform. Also, I am collaborating with some really cool artists. The first issue I had such a short timeline, because I wanted to publish it for Fashion Week. I had a three-month timeline to get all of the content in, so I didn’t have a lot of time to collaborate with others. A lot of the content I produced myself. So this time, we have a creative energy, a theme, and a really cool cover star, Charlotte Carey.

Are the pieces you style with only vintage or sustainably made?
It’s a mix, because it is not realistic to say you can never buy a new piece of clothing. I think it is more about the relationship you have with clothing. It is more about getting out of the mentality of going out and buying an outfit just for one night.

Why is it important to support Sumzine?
We are trying something new, and the Kickstarter is for people who want to join a team and come along the ride with us. It is not just about creating cool imagery. It is about challenging how we think about fashion. The editorials have nothing to do with trends or specific designers. We don’t have an agenda other than reminding people to buy less and buy better. 

Follow Erica on Twitter

All photos courtesy Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)

When David Lee steps before several dozen guests to introduce his once-in-a-lifetime take on North Korean cuisine, he sounds almost sorry. After all, as the executive chef of Barn Joo, a (South) “Korean-inspired gastropub” in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, Lee admits he makes “pretty Americanized” versions of his own national dishes, and his attempt at North Korean fare will inevitably have to take some liberties, too. Born in South Korea, Lee couldn’t visit his estranged countrymen to the North if he tried, let alone taste what they’ve been eating lately.

But tonight, somewhat unbelievably, everybody in Barn Joo’s private dining room can. Joo Yang, a 23-year-old defector and the evening’s guest of honor, has brought along some smuggled ingredients from her home country’s black market. She’s here courtesy of Liberty in North Korea, the nonprofit for which this dinner is supposed to raise a bunch of cash. With a team spread across Asia and the United States, LiNK is committed in part to challenging perceptions of the country—typically colored by nuclear rhetoric and Kim family nonsense—and drawing attention to the 25 million human beings still tethered to its soil.

Tonight’s menu is probably their most creative project yet. LinK’s Sarah Lee (no relation to the chef) speculates that this may well be “the first meal of its kind in North America,” which is probably true by token of the authentic dishes alone. Take into account those that are a more hepcat, Manhattan-gentrified take on a cuisine largely still locked within what is still the world’s most notorious police state, and this might be the first meal of its anywhere.

Joo Yang reassures Chef Lee that his food reminds her of home—a compliment he receives like a badge of honor—but he is correct that one of Manhattan’s hippest South Korean restaurants is an incongruent place to try the food of their frequently famished kin. “SoulCycle” buzzes by my ears more than once, and one sheepish diner at my table only grazes on the assorted platters, explaining she is technically in the middle of a juice cleanse. A modelesque, Slavic-looking waitress offers me a glass of “our North Korean drink,” a dose of Pyongyang-made soju cut by the type of ginger beer not likely found much outside of artisanal stores in Brooklyn.

At a cafe the next day, Joo Yang tells me a bit about what mixology is like in North Korea proper. While she spent the last few years of her teens alone in North Hamgyong province after her parents and two younger siblings successfully defected in 2008, she subsisted partially off of the illegal alcohol trade, procuring the strictly contraband machinery needed to produce homebrew soju, and making an acorn moonshine in her otherwise empty home. Eventually, after the secret police claimed the house on suspicion of her family’s true whereabouts, she moved her operation to the warehouse where she spent her final year in the country.

“You don’t sell your alcohol direct to the consumer, but to a middleman,” she says. “That person buys from different producers, so if you make alcohol you start to become known locally...You kind of develop your own little brand name, like, ‘Oh, the soju Joo Yang makes is good, it tastes good.’”

As I’m downing the last fizz of the delicious cocktail at the North Korean gala, out come the “defected” foods of the night. Their presence is a logistical marvel as much as moral quandary; why should we be making edible curios of actual food lifted from a country that hasn’t had enough to eat in two decades? Joo Yang assures me these ingredients are among the nation’s most common, however, and that the 27,000 refugees now living in South Korea have created a large market for authentic northern flavors—“the taste of it, the feel of it”—no matter how much more nutritious and robust their South Korean counterparts might be. The plates before us, then, are perhaps just one drop of gochujang in a sea of kimchi—especially as the genuinely North Korean items are limited to the single-bite hors d'oeuvres.

And every one of them does, in fact, contain distinct cultural information. To circumvent the upper-class cost of pork in North Korea, there is injokogi, an oil-sapped compression of soybeans that creates a flattened protein substitute quite similar in taste and texture to tempeh (North Koreans like to add hot pepper paste to re-moisten and spice). Served in triangular swatches, the artificial meat follows a comparably chili-burned bean and corn compound with an almost tofu mouthfeel. The diners around me share smiling analogies to different vegan restaurants around town, though the innovations we’re eating came not from a multi-billion dollar industry built around moral convictions and dietary guilt, but instead sheer, starving necessity.

Joo Yang explains to me the onset of the Arduous March’s famine aspect in 1994, and the revolutionary shift in perspective it engendered among the nation’s Millennials. Born a healthy, even chubby child just a few years prior, she says it was quickly apparent that a lean life laid ahead. Her family hastened to the countryside, where they could at least forage the mountains for roots and other digestible miscellany. Relatives soon followed, until there were 13 of them living in a single home. It was in these cramped quarters that she, like her peers across the country, began to develop an epochal disbelief for the widely espoused Kim regime dogma of nationwide support—strangely resistant to revision, even once the crucial government rations ceased altogether in the mid-90s. Joo Yang tells me that those closest to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were in fact hit the hardest.

“Those people got preferential treatment and extra rations for so long that, when all of a sudden everything stopped, they were the least prepared to survive,” she says. “It was especially difficult for those in the cities.” Throughout the remainder of the decade, it was common for people to die in the streets or their sleep. In just four years, an estimated quarter million to 3.5 million Koreans died, out of a population of just 22 million—a famine body count unprecedented in the 20th century for a literate, urbanized society. Much of Joo Yang’s mother’s side didn’t make it.

A major theme of the night is corn, a crucial rice substitute North Koreans developed for its cost and nutrition efficiency. It’s central to the last of the smuggled samples—the remarkable corn ddeok ball, a resourceful rendition of rice cake lacking any rice at all—and the first of the more interpretive mains, a summer corn soup. The segue is almost comical: anchored by organic jumbo crabmeat from the Union Square farmers’ market down the street, and buoyant up top with parsley confetti and an olive oil Rorschach, it’s more reminiscent of Martha’s Vineyard chowder than any survivalist broth. Less apocryphal than anachronistic was the delicious mullet, which was once an abundant treasure in Pyongyang’s increasingly lonely Taedong River; Kim Il-sung was lamenting its loss of diversity, thanks to industrialization, as early as 1964.

Moreover, ours were stuffed to the gills with beef, a gravely forbidden delicacy in modern North Korea. Joo Yang tells me that, because of their agricultural utility, killing a cow is an act punishable by public execution. She once knew someone who was slaughtering cattle and selling the meat for proportional reward, and when the authorities noticed that person went into hiding inside the Yang household. The amateur butcher attempted to defect shortly thereafter, but Joo Yang isn’t sure what happened to her.

It wasn’t impossible to use cows to get food more indirectly, however. When I ask Joo Yang how her family survived during those harshest years, she smiles, remembering a story she’s never shared before. She was just eight years old when she stayed to watch over the house with her grandmother while her parents and two younger siblings left to try and earn some money for food.

“Basically, my mother and father put a bunch of tools and things for sale on a government cow…and they just wandered away with it, trying to make some money. They started at our house and walked in a giant circle out of town, by foot, which lasted fifteen days. That was one of my most difficult memories—I don’t really have that many memories of being really, really hungry, but that time in particular…”

15 days later her family returned, successful—they were able to bring back a lot of white rice, especially rare during the famine. Their homecoming happened to coincide with Seollal, the Korean New Year, which traditionally calls for the enjoyment of sweet ddeok, a celebratory rice cake.

“But everyone in the neighborhood was starving,” she says. “So my father took all the rice, made it into ddeok, and shared it with the entire neighborhood—especially the elders,” who had been suffering the most. Joo Yang, in revisiting the moment, struggles to admit that as a desperate child, she had a hard time accepting her father’s decision. But their neighbors all hailed him a great man, and her family felt a new appreciation among the community. She could better understand it a little bit later in life.

For dessert, coincidentally, we are served sweet ddeok as well. In chef Lee’s hands, of course, it takes a more decadent form: a dense, mapled hockey puck of pancakey sugardough, flecked with black and white sesame and a pine nut pendant. They come so abundant in their saucers that, compensating for the diet-conscious demurs around my table, I swallow three or four to minimize the waste—a task their deliciousness abets.

Waiting that fortnight for her parents to return, at age eight, was the nadir of Joo Yang’s life. She was alone with her grandmother, who was blind, so she had to handle a lot herself. All they had to eat were soybeans, which quickly made Joo Yang sick; she vomited regularly for days on end, but continued to force them down in absence of an alternative. Gradually her own vision blurred, yellowed, faded in and out. At one point, she got so disoriented that she stumbled over her grandmother’s face, as she had been sleeping on the floor. On the very worst night of those 15, Joo Yang says she learned what it feels like to die—and, barely, come back again.

After we’ve all finished eating, she rises from her table to give a little speech. She touches briefly on many of the things she’ll elaborate in our subsequent conversation, and on how listening to pirate foreign radio as a child helped her to fathom the outside world. She mentions what it was like living alone for three years after her family defected, and all the lies she told and things she sold to get by. She talks a bit about finally escaping across the Tumen River herself at age 20, only to be imprisoned by Chinese patrolmen, and ultimately liberated by a bribe from a South Korean nonprofit.

She says all of these things with a tentative but promising grasp of English, sometimes speaking instead through an interpreter. As she concludes, Joo Yang urges us to support the North Korean public in any way we can, emphasizing her deep faith in their potential as a people. Perhaps well convinced by all that she has just shared—perhaps for shame of the sweet flavors still settled on our lips—everyone seems to know what she means.

Joo Yang now lives in Seoul, where she is preparing to enter college, appears on a popular variety program about defectors called Now On My Way to Meet You, and interns for Liberty in North Korea.

Follow Jakob Dorof on Twitter.

People break bones every day. In the US, 6.8 million people break a bone each year; while in Sweden (where I'm from) 11 people break a bone every hour. I recently became one of those lucky 11 when I fell over and broke my foot, which sucked, because smashing a body part to pieces and quickly becoming immobile is both sore and very inconvenient.  

However, there are upsides to destroying your metatarsals. Morphine, for example. Or crutches, which instantly give you carte blanche to do basically whatever you want; turn up late for meetings, skip the lines at supermarkets, or have your friends and colleagues fetch you warm towels and feed you wine. 

Forty percent of you will end up with a broken bone at some point in your life. So I thought I'd help you prepare for this exciting time by sharing some of the ups and downs I've experienced since being forced to take up crutches, because, having broken my foot, I have absolutely nothing better to do.

CRUTCHES

 Walking with crutches is great. Your arms get stronger, plus you can accessorize your new sticks with stencils, charms, stickers and/or flecks of your own blood. They're also an ideal conversation starter at parties, but be wary of handing them over to people to have a go on; you do actually need them to stay upright, and once one person's had a crack, every dickhead there is going to want their turn. 

What's more, your hands are already full when you walk, meaning you don't have to smoke or stare at your phone to avoid looking like the Tin Man (arms awkwardly stuck to your sides, the rest of your body rigid in the fear that you're walking weirdly) while going about your daily business. Consider this rehab for your ailing self-esteem.

BLOOD-THINNERS

 Sticking needles into your own body sucks. It's one reason I never understood heroin's appeal. But wearing a cast and generally not moving around very much can give you blood clots, which suck even more, in that they can lead to deep vein thrombosis and, if you're really unlucky, death. To avoid death, it's common practice to take a "blood-thinning" shot in the stomach every evening—a low-molecular-weight-heparin that makes you tired, sensitive, and more prone to bruising. 

Mind you, I'll repeat my point again here: Being grumpy is much more preferable to dying because you couldn't deal with a little prick once a day.

KIDS


 Kids are assholes. They don't pay any attention to anything that doesn't involve them and they shouldn't be allowed to move freely around cities. Whoever invented the child harness is a saint. Fuck them and their tiny paws knocking over my crutches.

OLD PEOPLE

 These guys are your new best friends. You know that bit in Curb where Larry lets the audience in on the secrets of the bald community? The same rules apply to anyone with decreased mobility; sympathetic head nods on public transportation, lots of conversations with strangers on zimmer frames, and plenty of unprompted tips from pensioners on how to make life slightly easier—ike peeing on plants instead of going back and forth with a watering can, or guilt-tripping others into doing your grocery shopping for you.

Photo by Y+M

COMMUTERS

 Walking around on crutches is fine on the weekends, because weekend people are generally pretty chill; they'll help you out and let you on and off the bus before them. However, getting from A to B in peak hours during the week is a fucking nightmare. I know this because until about three weeks ago I was just like that self-absorbed dickhead who stomped on my foot to make sure he got through the train doors and secured a seat before anyone else. 

CONVERSATIONS

 There is literally no better way for someone to break an awkward silence than asking you, "Why are you in a cast?" Plus, if you don't like that person and want to make sure they hurry out of your personal space as promptly as possible, just make up a really boring explanation and they'll inevitably wander off to talk to someone about the weather or stand alone in the corner of the club until the lights come up.

CRUTCH AND CAST FETISH

  Take this opportunity to make some extra cash by modeling for a cast and sprain fetish website. Who knows—a broken bone might signal the start of an exciting, sexy new future.

Follow Caisa Ederyd on Twitter.

Screenshot of cop knocking down a man in a wheelchair via WLFI

On the afternoon of October 1, 2013, police in Lafayette, Indiana, were called to an adult education center after receiving reports about a man with a gun. When they got there, they found only a wheelchair-using 25-year-old student carrying a pocket knife. The man, Nicholas Kincade, reportedly told school security he had a gun for reasons that are still unclear, then angrily informed them that they needed a warrant to search his bag. When the police arrived, they went through his things, found only the pocket knife, and told Kincade to leave the area. At that point, it was an odd but not particularly notable encounter.

Then, as seen on dashcam footage, Kincade ran over the foot of Lieutenant Tom Davidson, who promptly shoved him out of his chair and onto the sidewalk. Davidson and the other officers then pulled Kincade off the road and back into his wheelchair and arrested him for battery, a charge that was later dropped. The video is cringe-worthy, and it also answers the question, “What does a cop have to do for his superiors to fire him?”

On Tuesday, July 1, Lafayette Police Chief Patrick Flannelly told the press that Davidson’s “use of force in this case could have been avoided just by different positioning, by offset positioning, by moving out of the way, by not standing where he was standing.” According to Flannelly, the command staff soon reached a unanimous decision: Davidson was guilty of using excessive force and conduct unbecoming of an officer; they also recommended that he be fired. The mayor of Lafayette agreed. And then, on appeal, a review board decided that a 30-day unpaid suspension and a demotion of rank would do instead. No criminal charges will be brought against Davidson either.

Activists working to combat police misconduct tend to focus on corruption and incompetence within departments, and for good reason. But there have been plenty of instances where it’s civilians—lawyers and juries and the public at large—who are responsible for letting cops get away with crimes.

Think of the killing of Kelly Thomas, an ugly incident that occurred three years ago this month in which the homeless schizophrenic man was beaten to death by Fullerton, California, officers Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli. The district attorney charged the officers with second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and excessive force; the Fullerton chief of police didn’t want them back on his force, ever—and a jury of 12 let Ramos and Cicinelli walk free.

Or think back further, to the Rodney King beating—one of the first police brutality incidents to be captured on video—and the deadly riots that resulted after the three cops who did it were acquitted.

Research by the Cato Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project suggests that cops are less likely to be charged with and convicted for crimes than the average citizen, and when they are found guilty they are generally given more lenient sentences. Part of that can be chalked up to the “blue line” of silence, the unwritten rule that says cops shouldn’t snitch on other cops, but part of that blame lies with weak civilian oversight, timid grand juries, and a generalized societal respect for police that does none of us any favors.

Cops remain a special class of people who are given guns and the authority to hurt, detain, and even kill—yet too often, we refuse to cops to a higher standard of behavior that their status should demand.

Now on to this week’s bad cops:

-In case we weren’t sick of the NSA yet, this week brought two new revelations to add to the pile of 1,675 revelations that have already come out about the futuristic spy agency: Firstly, it turns out that just about every user of the IP-address-hiding Tor Project has their IP address flagged by the NSA through its XKeyscore program, and even visitors to the website that explains what Tor is aren’t safe from this treatment. Secondly, a Washington Post investigation that came out over the Fourth of July weekend revealed that up to 90 percent of the individuals whose information was captured by the NSA weren’t actually targets of the agency. The silver lining here is that the bureaucrats charged with monitoring our every move don’t actually seem very good at their jobs, I guess?

-On May 27, a small-time pot dealer named Jason Westcott was shot and killed by a SWAT team in Tampa, Florida, after the cops busted down the door and the 29-year-old reached for his gun. What could make that story bleaker? Well, the raid was over a piddling amount of drugs—the police got a warrant after an informant bought $200 worth of weed in four months. You want it to get more awful? Well according to a July 5 Tampa Bay Times story on Westcott’s death, the dealer bought the gun after the cops told him to get one for his protection. Christ.

-Sometimes, the headline is informative enough that you barely need to read the article. “Cop Rats Out His Daughter-in-Law After Helping Her Grow Marijuana for His Cancer-Stricken Granddaughter” is one of those times, unfortunately. At least the officer waited until his granddaughter passed away from that brain tumor.

-More awfulness: A video reportedly recorded last Tuesday shows an officer with the California Highway Patrol (CHP) straddling a 51-year-old black woman and punching her in the head repeatedly. The incident took place after the woman, Marlene Pinnock, was apparently walking barefoot beside the highway near West Los Angeles and occasionally wandering into traffic. The CHP officer restrained Pinnock, who struggled, and then began pummeling her. The passerby who filmed it was appalled, telling the local media, “If you look at the video, there are 15 hits. To the head, and not just simple jabs. These are blows to the head. Blows. Really serious blows. And this is ridiculous to me.” That cop, who has yet to be named, is on administrative leave while his conduct is investigated.

-Speaking of the CHP, last week VICE contributor Colby Tibbet reported that as part of a “what are you high on, son?” training program, the CHP has begun forcing local homeless people to participate, essentially serving as practice material for cops, or face arrest for minor crimes. One woman Tibbet interviewed even said the cops forced her to leave work and take part after they accused her of being high. “I felt like I was under their shoe, like some gum,” she told him.

-On Friday, a seven-year-old slipped on some mossy rocks and fell into the Brazos River in Waco, Texas—but wait, this story actually has a happy ending: Two police officers were present and acted fast, one jumping in to grab the boy, the other helping them both to shore. Our two Good Cops of the Week are detectives Dennis Taylor and Daniel Harper, who quickly turned a potential tragedy into a fun story for the boy to tell his classmates.

Lucy Steigerwald is a freelance writer and photographer. Read her blog here and follow her on Twitter.

All photos by Elizabeth Whitman. Laila lives in a sparsely furnished home in the Jordan Valley. Her eldest son, 12-year-old Abdullah, works full-time at a nearby body shop, while her four other children stay at home. None are in school.

About three months ago, a car mechanic in a dusty town in the Jordan Valley decided to do a neighboring Syrian family a favor. From 8 am until 8 pm, six days a week, their eldest son, 12-year-old Abdullah, could toil in his shop, in heat that locals describe as "fire." The boy would earn four Jordanian dinars ($5.64) a day.

"It's illegal for us to employ children," the man, who did not want his name used, said matter-of-factly as Abdullah and his parents sat nearby, tentative, as if beholden to him. "But Abu Abdullah [Abdullah's father] has to change his blood every 15 days"—he has thalassemia, a blood disorder—“they have small kids, and his mother has to stay home with them. So who's going to work?"

The mechanic was adamant that Abdullah (whose name was changed to protect his identity) did only light work. "If I need a bottle of water, I tell him to get it. We can't make them do more than that." But Abdullah's green plaid shirt and faded jeans, dark with grease stains, belied the mechanic's claims.

Nothing was unusual about the circumstances the shopkeeper described. Impoverished Syrian family fleeing war? Check. Male head of household unable to work? Check. Local employer who saw an opportunity for himself to pay a low wage of a third of a Jordanian dinar ($.47) per hour? Check.

The Jordanian government estimates that of the 600,000 Syrians officially taking refuge in the country, 10 percent are laboring children. Aid workers, government officials, and Syrians interviewed portrayed child labor as a desperate coping mechanism for refugee families dependent on an overwhelmed humanitarian aid system. Ultimately, such an overburdened system and economic and social conditions create a perfect storm in which child laboring seems all but inevitable.

Humanitarian organizations and the government are trying to reduce child labor through a variety of approaches, but aid workers say any sustainable solution would have to be multi-faceted and comprehensive, and none so far are imminent.

Laila, Abdullah's mother, blanched when Abdullah proudly gestured no when I asked him if he missed being in school or wanted to return. Another employee chuckled. "He wants to go to school. He's just afraid that if he says so in front of his boss, he'll lose his job."

"I'm comfortable," Abdullah countered stubbornly. "Here is better." Laila looked confused, her eyebrows moved closer together and the lines around her eyes became more prominent. Just that morning, she had emphatically stated that her children wanted to be in school. After Abdullah, she had two daughters and then two more sons. The eldest three hadn't attended school since 2011, when Abdullah would was nine and they still lived in Idlib, Syria. A neighbor had told her—falsely—that government schools do not accept Syrian children, and Laila did not investigate further.

When it comes to child labor, children missing schoolwork concerns aid workers more than anything else. "Children are dropping out of school and working due to economic necessity—not from lack of interest," said Salam Kanaan, Jordan country director for CARE International, a humanitarian organization.

"The major [danger] is the loss of education," Maha Homsi, chief of child protection at the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) in Jordan told me. "You will have a community of uneducated kids, and in the 21st century; they've lost it all if they've lost their education." The longer children are out of school, Homsi added, the less their desire to return.

Although aid groups, from international organizations to local charities, strive to provide cash, coupons, and essential materials to refugees, they cannot provide enough for everyone. "They tell us there's aid for rent for the house," Laila said, but "we see nothing." It is illegal for adult Syrians to work in Jordan without a costly and elusive work permit, though many do so anyway, especially in low-skill sectors, earning about a third of what Jordanians make, according to one source, or sometimes next to nothing at all if employers refuse to pay. In 2011, the average wage for low-skilled laborer in Jordan was 10 JD ($14) per day. When Laila worked on a local farm, she earned 5 JD ($7.06) per day.

When adults don't or can't work, the burden of earning falls on children. A recent study by the International Labor Organization on child labor in the informal sector in three Jordanian governorates found children's income "to be a significant source of income for many households."

"It seems that business owners prefer children," Kanaan added, as they are less likely to negotiate for better wages, hours, and working conditions. But children also face greater risk of danger, exploitation, or abuse. "We find them in the streets, sellingfood made by their family," said Kanaan. "They roam the streets day and night, trying to sell these products."

Akram, left, and Qais, are 13 years old. They attend school but work during vacations, for 3 JD ($4.23) per day, and their earnings go to rent and other necessities. 

"Child labor is part of a bigger, more complex issue, which is of course being a refugee," noted Kanaan. As long as refugee families are in desperate circumstances, child labor is likely to be a problem.

Laila used to earn a couple of dollars more than her son, picking tomatoes and eggplants on a nearby farm. She quit two weeks ago, worn out by the conditions and her own high blood pressure and anxiety, leaving Abdullah the sole breadwinner of 80 JD ($112.87) per month (the shopkeeper said he paid Abdullah a wage amounting to 96 JD ($126.98) per month). Monthly rent was 70 JD ($98.76). From Laila'sperspective, the family had exhausted all other options for income, and if her two daughters could work, they would too.

Last fall, Unicef and partner organizations experimented with giving families 30 JD ($42.33) per month per child in exchange for taking children out of work and keeping them in school. "The results were amazing," Homsi said, citing one dropout. Unicef will continue toimplement that program, butshe admitted that the system is imperfect and won't last forever.

"How much can you continue to give cash assistance to the family?" she asked, calling for livelihood programs that would be more sustainable, or for the government to give work opportunities to Syrians.

"When we try to design projects to tackle [child labor], one of the key solutions is to provide alternatives for families," namely, additional income, MahaKattaa, Syrian refugee response coordinator for the International Labor Organization,said. But she noted that an amount of 30 JD per month was "not enough" in a conditional cash assistance program. "If these alternatives do not cover basic needs, [children] will go back to the labor market," she warned.

The Ministry of Labor approaches child labor by trying to crack down on employers. Punishing Syrians—children or adults—working illegally is not viable, said AymanKhawaldeh, chief of the inspection department at the ministry. "We respect the uniqueness of the situation that the Syrian people are going through," he told me. "We don'tdeport [Syrian] workers or kids or their families who break the law." Instead, they fine or close establishments with labor violations. But those measuresdon't concentrate solely on child labor, nor do they diminish a Syrian family's need for income or employer's desire for cheap, obedient labor.

For the two weeks between the end of school and the start of the fasting month of Ramadan, Akram, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee, worked for the owner of a coffee cart in the shade of a large birch tree in downtown Amman. He delivered trays of coffee and tea to shops in the area and also washed glasses. "Sometimes I make coffee or tea," he added. He lived with his parents and 11 brothers and sisters on one of the hills east of downtown. He was enrolled in school and will enter seventh grade in the fall, just like another 13-year-old Jordanian boy, Qais, who works at the same stand and also attends school.

Both of their fathers are friends with Ahmad, the coffee cart's owner, and Ahmad saidthat the fathers asked him to employ their sons to keep them out of trouble. "We don't have places here for entertainment, or summer educational programs," he said, insisting, "they're not under pressure to work and bring in money." He said the boys work 10 hours (12, the boys said) and earn 5 JD ($7.06) (only 3 JD ($4.23), according to Qais and Akram) per day, with a day off on Friday.

Contrary to what Akram said, the boys weren't working solely for personal improvement. At the end of every day, both drop their earnings into a household jar. And at the end of every month, money is taken out of that jar, to be used for the same purposes as Abdullah's earnings: rent, water, electricity, and food. 

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