Dr. Nitschke addresses attendees over the death of murder suspect Nigel Brayley.

Philip Nitschke is the 66-year-old doctor spearheading Australia’s legalized euthanasia debate. He sells cylinders of nitrogen for self-suffocation and advises people on how to get a banned drug called Nembutal, which can cause respiratory arrest. Back in May, we made a documentary in which Nitschke explained how he screened his potential customers to make sure he wasn't providing assistance to suicidal young people. According to him, he’d only provide advice to individuals over 50, and even then only after they were found to be sane.

Recently, these measures have been called into question. In early July Nitschke admitted that he’d given advice to a man named Nigel Brayley, who was neither old—45, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)—nor particularly sane. As it turned out, Brayley was being investigated over two mysterious deaths, including that of his former wife.

As might have been expected, a good deal of controversy has ensued. Jeff Kennett, the chairperson for mental health advocates Beyond Blue, described Nitschke’s actions as “absolutely abhorrent,” while a scathing segment on 7:30 Report, a show on the ABC, concluded that the doctor is basically helping vulnerable people commit suicide. This accusation has now prompted the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency to try and suspend Nitschke’s medical registration.

So what does Nitschke think about all this? Has he changed his position since the last time we spoke? We went to a conference of his in Melbourne on Wednesday where we found him signing up swaths of new elderly members.

A woman signs up for Nitschke's non-profit, Exit International

VICE: Last time we spoke you assured us that your operation had safety nets in place. What happened with Nigel Brayley?
Philip Nitschke: He attended a workshop and that’s not a crime. I mean, the question is, where’s the cut-off point? He gave a very good account of himself in the very brief conversation that we had, and there wasn’t anything about him that suggested he didn’t know what he was doing. And he did know what he was doing!

But you told him how to get Nembutal, although you’d only just met.
He didn’t actually get any advice from me. He talked to me and then he bought his own drugs. He didn’t ask me anything. He didn’t ask me a single question. So, no, he didn’t get any advice.

Why didn't you try to stop him? You’re not a psychologist. How did you know he was sane?
Oh come on. I’m a doctor. You’re not, and certainly the 7:30 Report journalist wasn’t. And she came to the conclusion that he was depressed based on an interview. Anyway, this idea that only a psychologist can decide whether a person should receive information brings out the worst elements of medical paternalism. This idea that unless you’re a very experienced psychologist, absolutely anyone could be harboring a yet-to-be diagnosed psychiatric malady is rubbish. I am also a person who can decide if someone is of sound mind, and Nigel was.

Why do you get to decide?
Why do I get to decide? I simply said he could stay. I didn’t chuck him out of the meeting. Is that a decision? We try to get as many people to these meetings as we can. That’s all.

An empty box of Nembutal, the animal tranquilizer used by Brayley to commit suicide

It seems that you're saying you don’t need a psychologist to determine whether someone can receive suicide information. So where is the age cut-off? What is the safety net that you speak about?
Well, we say 50, but that’s an arbitrary benchmark. It makes sense for every adult to know how to end their life. I don’t just mean when you’re 50, 40, or 35. Everybody should have access to this information.

Even if they’re not sick?
Oh, hell no. In fact, do it before you’re sick. Once you leave it until you’re sick, then you’re leaving it up to that point where you might need assistance and then you’ll really run into trouble with the law. Plan ahead while you’re not sick.

So let's say a young person who is perfectly healthy but suicidal comes to you. They should have access to suicide info?
Of sound mind is the criteria. If they then lapse into depression after that diagnosis, that’s a risk, but it’s not a good reason to be unprepared. And people say that could happen to someone, so therefore no one should have access to this information. And that’s why it’s a false argument and I dispute it. But of course, much of the opposition that’s coming in is predominantly from doctors. And they’re saying that no one should have access to this information except for doctors. It’s just medical paternalism. And that stuff has prevailed for 100 years where doctors know what’s best for everyone. They pat everyone on the head. There, there. We know what’s best. People want to be empowered. They want to make their own decisions and the best that a doctor can do is give out accurate information, but not to judge it. And this judgment by the medical profession is actually offensive, yet it goes on all the time.

Sanity aside, Brayley was being investigated for murder. Doesn’t his suicide get in the way of justice?
Well, I don’t think you can tell someone to stay alive to face 20 years of jail if he doesn’t want to. He made that decision. Should we have stopped him from making that decision because we wanted him to rot in prison? I don’t know. That’s a very hard question to answer.

Do you now regret having anything to do with him?
Oh, only because of the media reports. And especially the ABC. In the case of Nigel, I simply talked to him and he decided he was going to get his own drugs. As was pointed out, Nigel was a person who loved guns. If he hadn’t taken his Nembutal, he would have shot himself or hung himself. He was not going to jail.

Follow Julian Morgans on Twitter.

GIFs by Daniel Stuckey

A Malaysia Airlines plane flying Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and through Ukrainian airspace, was shot down. The plane was carrying 298 people when it crashed. No survivors have been found as of now.

Jason Biggs, star of most of the movies you hate (and Orange Is the New Black) thought that it was a good time to crack a joke about the tragedy. Of course, people got upset, and he had to apologize publically. This marks the 700th time Biggs has said something offensive on Twitter this month. People wiser than I say that comedy equals tragedy plus time, but no one has ever acccused Jason Biggs of being great at math.

Controversy-ridden New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, not one to give up on the challenge of an all-you-can-eat buffet nor a seemingly impossible quest to achieve the Republican presidential nomination, will be making the rounds (emphasis on round) in Iowa this week, presumably in an attempt to generate support from ordinary, non-news watching folk who are blissfully unaware of the fact that Christie's currently embroiled in three criminal investigations.

His chances of becoming the next president, however, are as slim as the chances of him becoming slim. You get it? 'Cause he's fat. It's OK for me to make fun of his weight, because he's an awful person.

Welp, it looks like those kooky kids in Israel and Palestine are goin' H.A.M. on each other again. After a brief cease fire, both parties picked up where they left off, and Israel has sent ground troops into the Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian death toll rose above 260 this week, with no signs of the conflict improving.

More than 20 people have been killed since Israel began its ground offensive. The Palestinians estimate that around 2,000 people have been injured.

Marvel Comics recently announced that Thor will be recast as female in a new series, launching in October. According to series writer Jason Aaron, "This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR. This is the THOR of the Marvel Universe. But it's unlike any Thor we've ever seen before." He then went on to clarify, "It's Thor. With tits. Like, super big tits. And a small-ass waist. And long, flowing blonde hair. Basically, it's a Norse God you wanna put your dick inside."

An iPhone video of Charlie Sheen loaded at a Taco Bell drive-thru is currently going viral, hitting over 1,000,000 YouTube views in its first day of upload. In the 50-second, fan-shot clip, Sheen apologizes for being "so fucking hammered" before showing off his Charlie Brown and Cincinnati Reds tattoos. Yo quiero #TIGERSBLOOD, baby!

Shannon Guess Richardson, the former actress who sent President Obama ricin-laced letters, then attempted to blame her estranged husband, was sentenced to 18 years in prison. She was, of course, pregnant at the time. Hormones, am I right, fellas? At her sentencing, she told the court that she "never intended for anybody to be hurt." Other than her husband and the leader of the free world, but who's counting?

Holler If You Hear Me, the Broadway musical "inspired by the music of Tupac Shakur," is set to close for good on Sunday. This does not bode well for future hip-hop efforts on the Great White Way (unless you count the rapping kitty from the Cats revival). The producers cited poor attendance for their decision to shut the show down, which begs the question: If you holler and no one is around to hear you, does it make a sound?

OMG MATTHEW LESKO. HE'S HERE TO SAVE YOU MONEY.

Follow Dave, Megan, and Daniel on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. This week, an Egyptian court handed down life sentences in sex assault cases, Mexican police raided a group home amid sexual abuse allegations, Russia agreed 'in principle' to reopen a spy base in Cuba, and an ancient Chinese town was submerged in floodwaters.

Photos by Amy Lombard

I’m in a parking lot in New Jersey at the Vans Warped Tour, watching a rapper ask a crowd of teenagers to put their middle fingers in the air if they don’t give a fuck. He's standing under a sign that says "no moshing." The kids toss black balls around. At one point, a DJ stops playing EDM to blast Jay Z’s “Dirt Off Your Shoulders.” Then the EDM comes back on.

In case you haven’t already realized, Warped Tour is no longer the summer event Blink-182 described in their song "Rock Show." A lot has changed.

From a distance, the event looks the same it probably did in the early days, when skateboarders who called me "faggot" made up most of the audience. These days, the crowd is different. In the parking lot, I meet a former Marine tailgaiting with his co-workers and baby sister, who wears a bandana and chugs tequila. They blast hardcore from their car speakers and the marine shows me his manliest scream.

People still attend Warped Tour in hoardes, but once upon a time, it meant something to attend or play here: It meant you were emo, pop-punk, or scene, or you belonged to a band that had a ridiculous name like Bowling for Soup or Cute Is What We Aim For. But now, at least at this weekend’s Camden stop, I see kids dancing—not moshing—to EDM, rap, pop, hardcore, and pop-punk—a variety of genres encompasing, well, everything. 

Green, black, and yellow tents still fill the parking lot where the event takes place. My favorite tent was the one raising awareness about testicular cancer as Yellowcard plays "Ocean Avenue."

Where, in previous years, bands like Paramore, Fall Out Boy, and No Doubt played the show both before they were famous and after they had become superstars, the biggest act I recognized on this year’s roster was Yellowcard—a one-hit wonder. In the history booth, the most recently famous musician on the wall is Skrillex. He performed at the Warped Tour when he was an emo band called From First to Last, which never took off. 

I never went to Warped Tour when I was a teenager—or if I did, I must have gotten too drunk to remember—but my friends went, filling my Facebook feed with pictures of emo kids while I shopped at Hot Topic and listened to My Chemical Romance at home. When they got back, they talked about waiting for hours—I mean, like, six hours—through terrible opening acts to see one good band, but at this year’s Warped Tour, nobody waits for bands. Instead, kids sit against fences, texting.

What does it mean to play and attend Warped Tour? I'm unsure, so I decide to ask the bands.

My first stop on the Warped Tour is the Maine’s tour bus. The Maine has played the Warped Tour several times. I remember scene girls listening to them in high school. As I drove to Warped Tour, I received text messages from someone on their team who somehow found my contact info, asking me to interview the guys. I've never heard their music, but since middle school, I’ve fantasized about five smelly, emo guys gangbanging me on a tour bus. So I agreed to meet them.

Luckily for me, their bus smells like a used condom wrapped in a dirty sock. Twelve guys live on the bus, and the living room space feels hot (temperature-wise). I expected their bus to look this sexy and gross—Alexa Aimes, a porn star I know, was engaged to a member of a Warped Tour band, and she said one year she had a queef contest on a bus. Bands lined up to have a queef-off with her. Great, right?

At the same time, living on a bus with 12 dudes doesn't sound fun. I sit down with the Maine and ask how they manage to masturbate when they live in a glorified hallway, beds piled ontop of each other. They all say they're used to life on the road and typically wait to bust a nut until they make a stop at a hotel, which means they might go days without ejaculating.

"The problem on this bus is the curtains don't hang down to the bottom of your bunk," one of them says. "You have to know what your angle is [if you masturbate on the bus]."

I pretend to be the Barbara Walters of Warped Tour as they talk—but really I'm just thinking about having a gay bukkake with all the guys in the Maine.

After a brief absence from the Warped Tour, the Maine decided to play the event again to gain new fans and attention. Their song "Birthday in Los Angeles" is a catchy song I'll probably listen to the next time I fall in love. That said, it’s unclear if the Warped Tour can launch any of their songs to the top of the Billboard charts, considering that, in the purple press room behind the amphitheater, I see no legitimate members of the press—only teenagers with flip-cams who claim to run blogs.

One blogger stops me. “Mitch!” she screams. I look up, unsure who she is. She tells me she met me when I was reviewing an Aaron Carter concert at a Mexican restaurant last fall, because she’s the “manager” of Aaron’s opening act.

Moments later, I hear an Australian musician tell a blogger, “My idols played [the Warped Tour]. Legends.”

The only band who seems to realize that no career breaks are coming out of the Warped Tour is the Protomen, a rock band that smells terrible and paints their faces silver. One of them hears I’m from VICE and asks, “Why is VICE here?” After a brief interview, they pick me up and throw me over their shoulders.

The only band I meet with radio potential is Hunter Valentine, a (mostly) lesbian rock band best known for opening for Cyndi Lauper and appearing on The Real L Word. They’re also competing in the new VH1 talent show Make It or Break It from Linda Perry, the songwriter and producer behind P!nk and Christina Aguilera's biggest songs, which makes sense considering their songs are catchy. 

Kiyomi McCloskey, the lead singer, is also media-savvy. She tells her bandmates to remember I have a recorder on. If the band does take off, they'll succeed because of their social media presence and reality TV appearances, not the Warped Tour. 

Like most girl-fronted bands at the tour, Hunter Valentine are playing on the Shiragirl Stage.

The terrible press room hasn’t stopped Shira, the 32-year-old Warped Tour veteran, who created the Shiragirl stage. Performing as “Shiragirl,” she’s basically the Penny Lane of the Warped Tour—a veteran believer of the movement who has lived a life of being almost famous.

In 2003, she joined the tour as a TRUTH MC, encouraging kids to avoid cigarettes. She noticed there were no girls performing and proposed to Kevin Lyman, the tour’s founder, that they start a girls-only stage. He said no, because the next year was the tenth anniversary. In an act of defiance, Shira drove a pink RV onto the tour ground the next year and set up performances across from the stage.

“Girls saw pink and came running,” she says.

The stage was so successful, the next year Lyman invited her to set up the Shiragirl Stage, a stage where only girls could perform. Shira played with her band, Shiragirl, and both Paramore and Joan Jett played the stage.

After several years without the Shiragirl Stage, Shira has returned this year for Warped Tour’s 20th anniversary—but now she’s singing EDM instead of pop-punk.

At the Camden tour stop, she dances with chains and climbed over her dancers, while wearing a cheap-looking Lady Gaga rip-off outfit better suited to 2008 than 2014.

"I wanted to do something with my dance training," she says. But considering EDM is trending right now and she used to sing pop-punk, it seems like she's trying to cater to the market. 

Shira says Limey's smart to make sure the tour adapts to the changing market, but also admits she's nostalgic for old aspects of the Warped Tour, like NoFx and the skate ramp—nevertheless, she still believes in the tour. To her, genre doesn't matter. The Warped Tour is a "punk-rock summer camp."

The teens treat Warped Tour more like a mall encompasing 2014's biggest trends than a punk rock event. Vendors try to sell them hats with the word swag on them and weed shirts, but the kids would rather sit around and gossip. 

The teens have different theories about Warped Tour's failures. One kid with very spikey hair tells me that the influx of younger crowds—and the need to appease them, has ruined the tour.

“Warped used to be awesome,” he says. “Now [there's] no moshing because kids are coming.”

The only person who seems to need the tour is the marine veteran I met outside the venure. While serving in Afghanistan twice, he says, he listened to hardcore and pop-punk because it was one of the few ways he could get through his difficult emotions both during and after the war. 

"My first deployment it was all heavy shit," he says. "I will fucking be [harcore and pop-punk] un I fucking die." 

These two girls from New Jersey love the Warped Tour—they think their generation has no use for the labels like emo, pop-punk, and scene that made the Warped Tour thrive during the Bush years.

“There’s no labels,” one says.

“Besides nobodies,” the other corrects her.

In the history booth, this sign hangs about the birth of the Warped Tour and why the tour matters, but the quote contradicts itself. The internet has formed an accepting generation that, for the most part, doesn't need subcultures, because everything they could ever want is on the internet, and they listen to rap, EDM, and hardcore.

If kids have the internet and EDM, do they really need punk rock?

Follow Mitchell Sunderland and Amy Lombard on Twitter

Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the fear that a family of black bears will drag us out of our garages, or maybe it’s just all the damn mosquitoes in the humid cesspool some people call Florida. Whatever it is, it makes us crazy. While most Americans hide weed in seat cushions or backpacks, us Floridians prefer to shove our drugs in our asses.

Now this might be practical—even commendable—if we didn’t get caught, but try asking 23 pairs of inbred chromosomes to abide by the law. Florida’s drug laws may be stupid, but our methods of evasion are decidedly stupider.

Of course, come November, all of this could be irrelevant, when Florida votes on medical marijuana legalization, meaning in the future some Floridians could get off with a small fine or even offer a celebratory toke to their neighborhood patrolmen.

This law could be great for stoned Floridians, but will undoubtedly be bad for newspapers, bloggers and Florida haters who practice the timeless tradition of reading and writing about Floridians stuffing weed in their crotches. In honor of this legendary custom, here’s a comprehensive recent history of Floridians hiding our weed in our assholes, pussies, and other awkward orifices.

The Thank-God-It’s-Not-That-Time-of-the-Month Club

2012

After pulling over a friend of Naples resident Vida Golac for drifting between lanes, police officers found a bag of weed next to where Golac, 18, was sitting. Golac allegedly told cops the weed didn’t belong to her because she was “a medical student.” But after a thorough strip search at the jail, cops found additional marijuana stuffed up Golac’s cooch—pretty much confirming that the weed was hers.

Golac said she was just trying to protect the other passengers, but still faced charges of smuggling and possession, according to Sherriff’s Office records.

2013

Jayme Nicole Poma, 23, was originally arrested for a traffic violation, but police sent her to jail after finding an active warrant for her arrest. At the jail, a purple sock in Poma’s pants clued the pat-down officer in on the Port St. Lucie woman’s stash. The officer removed the sock and found a small plastic bag of weed. She then asked Poma to cough and squat, causing another baggy to fall out—this one full of cocaine.

2014

In May, Palm Beach County resident Jessica Johnston, 25, admitted to officials she had 2.6 grams stashed in her ­­­­gash after authorities told her bringing contraband into a jail is considered a felony.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Eat Them

2010

Police arrested Anthony Ramsey, a 25-year-old Gainesville resident, because he allegedly refused to answer the officer’s questions. When he finally opened his lips, he asked the officer why he was being arrested—with his mouth full of marijuana.

2013

“When’s the last time you smoked marijuana?” a Florida state trooper asked 35-year-old Johnny Fischer after chasing his weaving SUV down the Florida turnpike.

“I don’t smoke no marijuana.”

“You don’t smoke marijuana?”

“No, man.”

“Can I ask you a question then? Why is there marijuana in your beard?”

2014

In January, former University of Florida football player Jarvis Moss allegedly told police he was eating “food” after running a stop sign in Gainesville. He opened his mouth to reveal chunks of weed, prompting the officer to arrest the 29-year-old for possessing weed and tampering with the evidence.

2014

But what if you dispose of the evidence all together? That might have worked for Brevard county resident Tavish Smith if police hadn’t caught her crime on camera last month. After being arrested for driving the wrong way and crashing her truck, Smith allegedly slipped out of her handcuffs in the back of the police car and grabbed her confiscated sandwich bag of bud. She giggled and then ate her drugs.

There were reportedly enough crumbs left in the bag, and all over her face, to prove she possessed marijuana. Her disappearing trick also upgraded her misdemeanor for possession up to a felony.

“Bags of weed just don't go missing inside a police car,” the trooper said.

Don’t Hide Weed by Your Cox

2012

After responding to a crowd-control call at a Brevard County Denny’s, police saw smoke “pouring out into the air” from a black Toyota Camry, so Suzanne Japorica Baker made the mistake of hastily stuffing the weed into her bra. Unfortunately, breasts are the first place cops are going to look, even if they’re not looking for weed.

2014

After a non-fatal gunfight on April 15, police confronted Gainesville resident Tarris Cox at an apartment, where he consented to a weapons search. Cops didn’t find the gun, but they did notice an “unfamiliar bulge,” the police report called it, hidden in the 22-year-old’s underwear. That “unfamiliar bulge” was 19.6 grams of ganja, stashed by Cox’s cock. Moral of the story: If you’re carrying drugs in your underwear, it’s probably not the best idea to get in a gunfight, consent to a search, or, you know, have a small cock.

It’s a little unfair, though, that women get an extra hole for hideaway. What’s a Florida guy to do?

Ass Crack: the Great Equalizer

2010

“I then searched his immediate person and felt a soft object in the crack of his buttocks,” police wrote in a report about 25-year-old Marion County resident Raymond Roberts. After pulling Roberts over for speeding, the officer smelled the smoke and searched the suspect. He found both 4.5 grams of “a green leafy substance” and 27 pieces of white cocaine in his crack.

“The white stuff is not mine, but the weed is,” Roberts said.

He was charged possession of both pot and cocaine, cause, you know, it doesn’t matter what you say. If the drugs are in your butt, they’re yours.

2014

In May, cops reported finding an Osceola County couple with meth, a half-ounce of cocaine, and numerous packets of marijuana in their BMW, much of it hidden in an energy drink with a “false screw-on top.” At first, the couple only allegedly admitted to the weed.

“The blunt is in my underwear and I'll get it,” Angel Suazo, 26, said before he “voluntarily reached into his underwear between his buttocks and recovered an approximate two to three inches of a smoked brown in color cigar,” according to the police report.

He probably just wanted to get the blazing thing out of his ass, but at least he admitted to possessing the cigar.

2014

A two-to-three inch blunt is one thing, but try squeezing an inch-thick cylinder between your cheeks—and keeping it there, as 23-year-old Joshua Paul Manley did while Gainesville police pulled him over from a broken headlight in April.

He had somehow stuffed more than 11 grams of weed in the bottle and managed to finagle it into his butt crack – yet he left the rest on the passenger floorboard and in a visible blunt.

All that discomfort, only to get caught.

2014

Then again, when you can’t legally own it, how do you define property? Couldn’t you just say you’re someone else? That’s what 22-year-old Sammy Lee Simmons thought he could get away with after he ran a red light in Gainesville. The Delray Beach native told police he didn’t have a license, could not share his social security number, and could not give his address.

While some cops aren’t exactly known for their intelligence, Simmons’s ploy was pretty fallible. His car smelled strongly of weed, and after his 1.1 grams were discovered at the Alachua County Jail, he admitted to keeping the kush “behind his nuts.”

Whether our weed is behind our nuts, between our boobs, or in our butts, Floridians have a rich history of hiding cannabis contraband—and getting caught.

These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue.

Kevin Zucker creates analog color Polaroids of sunsets by shooting through gray sheets of translucent plastic. They’re meant to convince us of something impossible: a color photo of a black-and-white sunset. Using Polaroid film emphasizes that each photograph in the ongoing series is a unique object, and the repetition of the subject leaves us wondering whether this is kitsch or appropriation, the sublime or the picturesque, fiction or nonfiction, nostalgia or forecast.

See more of Zucker's work here. Installation views available here, from a recent show of this work at Linn Lühn Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany.

As the Israeli bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip continues—and militants continue to launch crude rockets into Israel—there's relative quiet in the other Palestinian territory, the West Bank. Since the conflict is focused on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, it's easy to forget the West Bank used to be one of the focal points of resistance against the state of Israel. That may still be the case, but today in the West Bank, there are few demonstrations and no rockets being fired into Israel.

Palestinian security forces, activists, and ordinary Palestinians say this could change. VICE News brings you to the restive city of Hebron, which has historically supported Hamas, to find out if, how, and for how long things can stay this way.

Photos courtesy of Vivid Entertainment

When we think about porn sets, we automatically picture white leather couches, nauseating pieces of art tacked up on the (also white) walls, and a stray shag carpet. A million porn clichés burn in our heads, revolving around aesthetic choices secondary to sex, but thanks to Vivid’s parody films and successful Vivid Superheroes imprint, the porn industry is undergoing a production design renaissance.

Most of Vivid’s farces are directed by modern day porn legend Axel Braun. In AVN award-winning pornos like Batman XXX and Star Wars XXX, which X-Critic called “The mother of all porn parodies,” the performers fuck and suck on sets that look like the bastard children of George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic. Cum shots still take precedence to narrative, but the budgets are bigger, the costumes often look like the superheroes they’re mimicking, and the sets are less janky than you’d expect.

One married couple designs most these sets, winning AVN Awards for films like Star Wars XXX in the process. Kylie Ireland, a former performer who belongs to the AVN Hall of Fame, and Andy Appleton, a former nightclub manager, have been married for five years, and together they have made recreations of the Fortress of Solitude and other iconic sets. Like many couples, they talk over each other and have firm beliefs in their ideas—like their theory that their designs extend parody porn’s fantasies, allowing viewers to believe parody porn is as close to watching Princess Leia blow Darth Vader as they’ll ever get.  

Interested in learning more about the design duo’s artistic sensibilities and the process that goes into designing a porn parody, I called Ireland and Appleton to talk about their artistic process, making icebergs for porn stars to fuck on, and why they put so much effort into making set pieces that get less screen time than superheroes' jizz.

VICE: How did you start working in production design and art direction?
Kylie Ireland: I was dating a director named Eli Cross in the industry before I met Andy, and Eli was doing a lot of big movies, like $350,000 budgets—this doesn’t sound like a lot but it was. I started doing production design because we were working together. I started by directing things—a lot of gonzo—but I started art directing because it was a small budget and they couldn’t hire production, but I personally wanted the set to look cute or neat. I never really was officially into interior design; I just have a knack for it. 

What makes a sex scene more interesting or vibrant in terms of design?
Andy Appleton: We don’t try to date the films, so it’s like, “Oh, that was shot in 2014.” If we were doing a scene with a lawyer fucking his secretary, then we’d take into account that he’d have money.
Ireland: Or he’d have a bookshelf because he’s smart. Does that matter? Maybe not. But I care about it. If you give me a small space, I can make magic with it.
Appleton: We’ll have one location that’s first a living room, then a dentist’s room, then a moon base. We always manage to pull it off, but it’s always that little thing we spot that no one else spots.
Ireland: I think the attention to detail makes porn visually pleasing. 

How does adult film production follow the Hollywood structure?
Appleton: We have a lot of pre-production meetings. We have a lot of background on characters on the set—especially for superheroes. Like we’ll actually research their enemies, their costume, how they appeared in the comics over time.
Ireland: Once we had to build a castle for a shoot. You know what we did for that? I gutted my house. I gathered everything that was on my shelves that looked vaguely witch-like or dark art-related. Another time, we had to shoot the Superman parody in the desert because of Measure B—we had to be shooting out of LA County—so we go all the way out to an aircraft hanger that was empty.
Appleton: We storyboarded it because we had seen the movies. Everyone knows what the Fortress of Solitude looks like—it’s at a 45 degree angle. We had to construct icebergs.
Ireland: We’re getting really good at building things. Fans want it to be as close as humanely possible; the geeks and fans will notice and pick it apart.
Appleton: This is my fifth year in the industry, and every year we’ve been nominated for a production design award. Last year we won for Underworld, and also the year before for Star Wars XXX.

Haven’t you won some awards yourself for acting?
Ireland: I was Best New Starlet in 95. I didn’t win for ten years, and then I was inducted into the Hall of Fame. I was also a producer on a lot of big movies like Upload and the The 8th Day. I have a bunch of awards now! I stopped performing about three years ago.

Why did you stop?
Nowadays you get labeled as a MILF, and you have to start working with younger girls or younger guys—and younger guys are boring. After a couple scenes, I walked away feeling dirty because the actress looked 15 even though she was 18. And around that time I had met Andy. We do cam shows and clips for sale, so I’m still out there.

What’s poorly done in porn production?
Ireland: I notice bad editing a lot.
Appleton: Yes that!
Ireland: I don’t watch that much porn because at this point we know everyone in them. I know if the guy is struggling, or if the girl is bored. I loathe the studio look, maybe because I worked in it. In the 90s they were shot in one of three different studios. They were dingy, and had the same crappy couches, and had the same crappy walls, and it just had that empty porn look. Something that drove me nuts in the gonzo era, the 2000s, was the Valley houses. All the houses look the same—all white. 

In terms of production design and costumes, do you think colors subconsciously matter to the audience?
Appleton: We do a lot of stuff with Digital Playground, and they say colors matter. We did a World Cup scene in a locker room, and they made specific requests [outside the uniform color] about which colors sell. There are supposedly statistics that say colors do sell. The companies monitor it all online and figure out what sells better and why. Apparently certain colors and certain sex positions do sell more. 

Over the course of your career, what was the hardest set to design?
Appleton: The Land Speeder [from Star Wars XXX] was the most complicated. Fortress of Solitude was a close second. Someone will often ask us to design something, and then Kylie will have to explain why the idea is not feasible.
Ireland: I’m the best support for the performers because I did it all myself. Someone on the directing side will pitch something, and I’ll say, “No that will be impossible to have sex on,” because I’ve been there. I take into account the height of objects, the angle, the material, and every specific aspect.

If you could make any porn parody, what would you do?
Appleton: I would love to do The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars was so much fun, but making Yoda’s home planet would be amazing—it would be a nightmare, but I’d love it.

Is it ever frustrating that so much time goes into the design of these sets and they are always secondary to sex?
Ireland: People ask me, “Why do you do it?” Like for Thor XXX, we had to make a big hole in the desert, a crater, for when he slams the hammer. It took a few days, and in the movie you see it for less than two seconds. Often we spend hours building things and they’re on screen for just a second, but it’s that moment like finishing the Cantina [in Star Wars XXX], and all the lighting guys have done their thing, and you walk behind the camera, and it looks like the Cantina—exactly like it. That’s why you do it.
Appleton: And for the Instagram pics. 

Follow Zach Sokol on Twitter.

A recent Israeli attack on Gaza. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Israelis on a hilltop overlooking Gaza cheered as missiles flashed before them on Thursday.

“It is an astonishing, macabre, and awful thing, really, to watch this display of fire in the air,” CNN Correspondent Diana Magnay remarked in a live broadcast when a missile erupted—along with applause from Israelis who had gathered on the hill outside Sderot, a city that sits just a mile away from northern Gaza.

Shortly after she signed off, Magnay tweeted, “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to 'destroy our car if I say a word wrong'. Scum.”

Though she quickly deleted the tweet, many saw it as unprofessional and questioned whether Magnay could report on the conflict in an objective manner. CNN reassigned her to Moscow on Friday, though a network spokesperson told The Huffington Post, “She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew” and not everyone present at the scene. Regardless, Magnay seemed to have been taken aback by the hostile behavior of those on the hill.

496 Palestinians, including nearly 100 children, have been killed by Israeli forces so far in this latest round of fighting which began on July 8, according to health officials in Gaza. Israel, which began a ground operation into the Gaza Strip on Thursday, says that 18 of its soldiers along with two civilians have been killed in the conflict.

Snacking on popcorn and dragging on hookahs, Israelis continue to turn out to what Dutch journalist Allan Sørensen sardonically dubbed “Sderot cinema,” in a tweet that’s been shared more than 12,000 times since he sent it out last week. Social media denizens expressed outrage, calling the image—which notably features one young woman flashing a thumbs up—“sickening,” “gruesome,” and “so pathetic and fucked up.”

In a post offering context to the vitriolic image, Sørensen writes, “For me, this attitude wasn't to provoke anyone. The people there sincerely didn't think there was anything wrong with what they were doing.”

That’s part of what makes the scene so chilling. Sørensen, a veteran Middle East correspondent, points out that the sort of callous enmity on display at the “Sderot cinema” can be seen amongst Palestinians as well. “On both sides, there's a total lack of empathy that I've never seen before.”

“It’s not a new thing,” says Ben Hartman, a journalist with the Jerusalem Post. He says Israelis have been dragging lawn chairs and love seats to the hills outside Sderot for at least the last ten years. “Whenever there’d be some kind of operation or air raid, people in that part of Israel would go to those hills overlooking Gaza and watch.”

For people living in and around Sderot, the conflict cuts close to home.

It might not seem this way to outsiders because the Israeli army is so much more powerful than Hamas-led forces, but Hartman says Israelis living alongside Gaza feel particularly vulnerable to attack. For them, “There’s probably a psychological way they feel like they’re hitting back.”

That’s because “Sderot cinema” isn’t just a front-row seat to a war saga, it’s also on the frontlines of an actual battle—even if the foes are dramatically misaligned.

Aid workers make their way through rubble in Gaza City. Photo via Flickr user Joe Catron

“You’re just kind of on this exposed hilltop and there’s nothing you can do,” Hartman, who’s been up to the hill numerous times to report on Gaza over the years, tells me from Tel Aviv. “If a rocket siren goes off, all you can do really is hit the dirt because there’s no real shelter up there. You can hide behind your car, but of course, you really wouldn’t want to be next to a car that’s hit.”

While they’re often intercepted or deflected, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) believe Hamas has several thousand rockets capable of reaching Sderot from Gaza.

That sort of danger might be part of the appeal. "It's great to be here,” Aaron Dew, a Jerusalem resident who travelled nearly 100 miles to see the rockets fall, told Nikolaj Krak, one of Sørensen’s colleagues. “You can feel the thunder and see the rockets. It is a quest for excitement. Yesterday a rocket landed just below the hill.”

But the thrill doesn’t sidetrack from the primary intrigue of the outdoor cinema. “We sit and look at Israel creating peace," Eli Chone, 22, an American living in Israel, told Krak.

Including a 16-year-old who was burnt alive in a suspected revenge attack, more than 100 Palestinians have now been killed for each of the three Jewish students whose murders were exploited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to justify this latest incursion into Gaza. Hamas officials on the ground claim that three-quarters of those that have been killed were civilians. The militant group has already launched retaliatory attacks to counter the Israeli ground offensive and thwart Jerusalem's renewed efforts to destroy underground tunnels the territory relies on for artillery—as well as goods that meet basic human needs amid a blockade. Israeli officials often refer to the structures simply as “terrorist tunnels.”

Israeli troops search for what they call "terror" or "terrorist" tunnels in Gaza. Photo via Flickr user Israel Defense Forces

"Today, we have come to see the rockets hitting our cities occupied since 1948 and to see these moments of dignity and pride carried out by the resistance in Gaza," a Palestinian man in the West Bank city of Hebron told Reuters as Hamas launched rockets at the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv from Gaza last weekend.

After Hamas announced that the salvo would take place on television, Palestinians gathered by the hundreds to cheer on the rockets, shouting chants of “Allah Akbar!”—God is Greatest—as if to push them along. Almost none of them wrought damage or causalities on their Israeli targets due, in part, to the nation's new Iron Dome shield.

Another video in which three men excitedly shout in Arabic about rockets sweeping over East Jerusalem led to their arrests earlier this week.

“There it is! There it is!” a man working in East Jerusalem tells a coworker. “Lower your voice!” another hisses. The men were accused by area police of incitement to racism, violence, and terrorism, though the grounds appear to have been too tenuous for a formal indictment. The three were released within hours of their arrest. Still, the video gained a wide circulation on social media, and caused, among Israelis, the same sort of vitriol that the “Sderot cinema” tweet aroused in people who support the Palestinian cause. 

Though he says he's “filled with anger” when he hears of Israelis celebrating attacks on Gaza where he lives, 17-year-old Hossam Alfarra, has very different feelings about Hamas' attempts at retaliation. “It gives us hope to know we can still fight back,” he writes me from the city of Khan Younis.

Palestinian missiles intercepted over the city of Sderot, near Gaza. Photo via Flickr user Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs

For Sørensen, the shock associated with these viral photos and videos points to a broader issue that underlines the conflict outside of the domain of social media.

"Almost no one sees the obvious link there exists between the Arabic demonization of Jews and the Israeli demonization of Arabs. For both parts, it's a matter of maintaining the myth that there is a difference,” he wrote in an article.

"Most importantly, some Israelis and some Palestinians try every day not to face the enemy in the mirror."

Follow Beenish Ahmed on Twitter.

In 1998 the journalist Ron Rosenbaum published Explaining Hitler. Contrary to what the title might suggest, it is not an explanation of Hitler, per se, but rather a 500-page meta-analysis of different theories intended to explain Hitler. Ron Rosenbaum traveled from the ruins of Hitler's Austrian birthplace to meet the historians, psychologists, and Nazi-hunters who have promoted different explanations for Hitler's evil. Whether the basis of the theories are plausible (Hitler's Jewish ancestry) or extremely unlikely (Hitler's penis was bitten off while he attempted to pee into the mouth of a billy goat) they are all presented with a relentless skepticism that makes reading Explaining Hitler a unique and destabilizing experience. (For a near comprehensive investigation of Hitler's evil that rises to address human evil as a whole it is also surprisingly funny.) This week a new, updated edition of Explaining Hitler was released, so I called up Ron Rosenbaum for a chat about Hitler, evil, and despair.

VICE: I just finished reading the afterword to the updated edition of Explaining Hitler. I was really glad to see that you formally introduced an analysis of the Downfall parodies.
Ron Rosenbaum: You know, it’s so interesting how resilient the Downfall parodies are, because they can somehow take any cultural meme and apply Hitler and trivialize it, and yet he remains embodied as this evil presence, not diminished by being in a Downfall parody. The Downfall parodies don’t trivialize Hitler’s evil, instead they trivialize the trivializations.

It seems to be a unique sort of Hitler joke that is immune to anti-Semitic misappropriation—no matter what Hitler never looks good or reasonable. When Sacha Baron Cohen released Throw the Jew Down the Well, the Anti-Defamation League released an open letter expressing concern his song would be taken at face value i.e., as an incitement to throw Jews down wells, and if you go by the responses in YouTube comments they may have been right.
I’ve not really paid much attention to the YouTube comments. What is the attitude you’re talking about?

Many viewers are enjoying the song on a purely anti-Semitic level. For them the joke is not about how normal Americans will passively join a call for racial violence but rather, ‘Haha serves those Jews right for taking everybody’s money.’
I think YouTube commentators generally are recognized as the lowest of the low, really the bottom of the barrel of internet commenters, and that’s saying a lot. YouTube is almost like a magnet that pulls all the moronic iron filings of the world toward it. I’m not surprised that anti-Semites show up there.

I agree completely, but it’s easy to marginalize anti-Semitism and assume that it’s just self-identifying neo-Nazi groups, yet all over YouTube there is Holocaust denial and extreme racial hate seething within many otherwise “normal” people. 
That’s certainly a downside of the internet. It also allows the publication and spread of all these anti-Semitic books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or unauthorized copies of Mein Kampf, but occasionally there are flashes of wisdom. I read about Godwin’s Law, that at a certain point every conversation online will devolve into Nazi or Hitler comparisons—if someone says vegetarianism is good the response is ‘Well, Hitler was a vegetarian.’ Godwin’s Law is really interesting. I don’t think you should ban comparisons to Hitler, but on the other hand comparisons to Hitler do overstate things most of the time. You can respond to a ban on soda by saying ‘It’s just like Nazi Germany,’ but it’s not.

Do you really think the free availability of Mein Kampf is problematic? Obviously it’s a core historical text in anti-Semitism, but it’s not something that I see anyone, anti-Semites included, referencing to justify their beliefs. Aside from its geographical specificity, the book just doesn’t seem like a very convincing argument.
Here in America probably there are not going to be many people who find Mein Kampf a convincing argument, but worldwide studies show that many people believe in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is a conspiracy theory about Jews ruling the world that Mein Kampf was based on and that has certainly been circulated on the internet and also been published in many languages. But I think that Holocaust denial has superseded pure Nazism—it’s a Truther theory in a way, and you can see how in some ways almost all conspiracy theories share elements with Holocaust denial. It starts with the outrageous ‘I bet you can’t possibly believe I can prove it’ premise, but the fact that it’s so outrageous allows people to argue that the truth about it has been suppressed. It’s fascinating how tenacious Holocaust denial is.

I’m amazed by the persistence of the theories that you deconstructed when Explaining Hitler was first published 15 years ago. Even then they were often 30 or 40 years old, yet they are still written about in tabloids and widely shared on Facebook today. News stories about Hitler having escaped to South America, etc.
In some ways Hitler has survived through these survival conspiracy theories. There’s a fascination with the Hitler survival myth—the idea that Hitler lives or Hitler could be revived. I went into a bookstore the other day and picked up a new edition of The Boys from Brazil, which is one of the first Hitler recreation stories. It’s almost as if there’s a necessity to believe that he’s still with us. Maybe it’s easier to believe a lie than confront the uncertainty of what actually happened. Sir Richard Evans wrote an interesting article recently in the London Review of Books about the Reichstag fire. The conventional wisdom is that it wasn’t set by this lone Dutch communist, Van Der Lubbe, but that Nazis set fire to the Reichstag in 1933, falsely accused the Communists, and that allowed Hitler to declare a state of emergency, bar civil liberties, and basically seize dictatorial powers. But Richard Evans, who’s one of the most respected historians of the Third Reich, traced all the evidence and makes a very convincing argument that it truly was this lone Dutch communist, Van Der Lubbe, and that Hitler promoted it as a large Communist conspiracy so he could seize power supposedly to protect the nation from Communist attacks. There is one very striking sentence in his article where he says, ‘The Third Reich was founded by a conspiracy theory.’ That is certainly important to know. Conspiracy theories aren’t just laughable fantasies, they can be used by malicious powers.

There’s a great line in your article about Danny Casolaro where you are arguing against the possibility Casolaro was assassinated by clandestine government operatives. You wrote: “Danny was not the victim of a conspiracy but rather of conspiracy theorists…”
Yes. People are disoriented by conspiracy theories, damaged by them, and in Danny Casolaro’s case you could argue they drove him to suicide, which is not to say that there are no conspiracies. There are conspiracies––conspiracies to assassinate Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln for instance––but you have to judge them case-by-case. The problem is people who respond to any uncertainty by building these castles-in-the-air conspiracy theories before they find any evidence, which often obscures the search for truth. When I was researching the tragic death of Danny Casolaro I found that really he had fallen victim to a group of predatory conspiracy theorists who fooled him into thinking he had found the solution to all the bad things that had happened in the last half century, and when he couldn’t prove it, he proclaimed he was about to prove it and, I believe, committed suicide in order to create the illusion that people wanted to silence him about this imaginary conspiracy.

After the Santa Barbra shooting there were conspiracy theories that suggested Elliot Rodger’s apparent homosexuality might have been a sign that he was actually an 'actor,' which only served to obscure the fact that Rodger had been bullied for years for appearing gay. A psychologist went on Fox to talk abut the possibility that Rodger was gay and provoked vicious debates between different factions of explainers. There is something universal in Explaining Hitler’s themes, they reappear in almost every instance of contemporary evil—clashes between schools of explanation, conspiracies that only serve to distract from the search for truth. 
Oh my God, there are so many terrible psychological attempts to explain Hitler. I think the subject brings out the worst in talk show psychologists. There’s a lot of 'psychopathic narcissism' among those psychologizing Hitler. The examples in my book were two psychoanalysts—one wanted to claim that Hitler became Hitler because he was beaten by his father, and the other psychoanalyst was equally determined to believe that Hitler had a malignant mother who was over-protective. As if everyone who has an over-protective mother or abusive father turns into Hitler. If everyone who has been struck by their father turned into Hitler we would be in a lot more trouble than we are. The failure of psychoanalysis, psychohistory, pyscho-everything to really understand what made Hitler is a kind of indictment of the whole profession because they unthinkingly take their pet theories and try to project them on Hitler. They think if their theory can prove what made Hitler Hitler then they’ve demonstrated their great wisdom.

Elliot Rodger’s manifesto concludes with a fantasy about building concentration camps to exterminate all women so men can live together in a utopian single-gender society free from sexual temptation. Reading material like that does raise the question of whether Hitler’s evil was unique, or rather his ability to execute that evil, and whether the attitudes in Nazi Germany were fundamentally different from anything that exists today, as was proposed by Daniel Goldhagen. 
What makes me skeptical about the Goldhagen thesis, which is that an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" existed that primed Germans to willingly participate in mass executions, is that there were Germans who did refuse to go along with this eliminationist ideology. The chapter in my book that I feel closest to was about the anti-Hitler journalists of the Munich Post. The Munich Post was a socialist newspaper that covered Hitler from 1920, when he first appeared on the streets, through his takeover. It was extremely brave for them to take on Hitler, who had no compunction about beating up and killing the opposition. It was fascinating to me that they are not recognized in Germany—they should be. You’d think they’d be heroic figures and yet even German journalists had not recognized them until I found their archives and wrote about them. There was very little, if anything, in post-war Germany about them, and I think the reason is that it demonstrated it was possible for Germans not to robotically follow Goldhagen’s eliminationist anti-Semitism, but to resist it. There were also resisters like Martin Niemöller and the White Rose. These people are heroes and also a refutation of the idea that the German people were somehow victims.

When I was taking your class at the University of Chicago, you mentioned that you’d spent a decade writing the book and became increasingly depressed in the process, that your editor had to forcibly take the manuscript away from you because you wanted to continue working on it.
I’m not sure if it was that dramatic, but it’s a book that I worked on for ten years and could have worked on for ten years more. I think my editor was wise in telling me that I’d actually produced a book that did its job, and that to try to do everything would mean the book would never be completed.

Since the first edition's publication there have been major new pieces of historical information uncovered—like diaries from Hitler's sister or Hitler's medical records—does any of it strike you as having significant explanatory value?
The most striking and disheartening thing I came across was in Daniel Blatman's book The Death Marches in which he documents the way, even after the war was all but lost and the death camps dismantled, the guards put the remaining tens of thousands of Jews on the road to be tormented and slaughtered even if it meant losing the chance to save their own lives. The Hitler spell prevailed. The other new thing that I find repulsive in the postwar cultural response to Hitler and the Holocaust is the emergence of what I call 'the feel good Holocaust genre,' where films must have uplifting tributes to the human spirit like Life Is Beautiful—these films do not confront the true depths of human nature Hitler revealed.

There is a great section in the book were you classify the types of despair people encounter when they attempt to explain Hitler: evidentiary despair, epistemological despair, and then a third level where the despair turns into hostility directed toward the process of explaining itself.
That’s a key point. The final type of despair is the position of Claude Lanzmann. He believes that all explanation ultimately becomes exculpation. If you try to explain Hitler then you’re really moving away from the acts of Hitler, and who Hitler was, and you're saying it was some set of psychological factors: he had a Jewish grandfather, he read the wrong books, his mother died under the care of a Jewish doctor, you blame these sources as the problem. Lanzmann says all explanation is an excuse, like the way people explain serial killers by saying ‘Oh, they were psychopaths’ or ‘Oh, they were sociopaths,’ as if that explains anything. It explains nothing. I actually think some of the reductionist conclusions from neuroscience and neuroimaging studies do give support to the Lanzmann position. If we had an fMRI of Hitler it might show abnormal functioning in some region of the brain and then we could all blame it on a simple neural defect. My feeling ultimately is that there are dangers in the explanation that Lanzmann has outlined, but we shouldn’t be forbidden from the attempt, we shouldn’t stop searching for evidence. I don't claim to have a unified field theory of Hitler, no Higgs boson of Hitler, but Lanzmann wants to shut people up and not allow them to discuss the question ‘why?’ and I think there’s no more important question than why, even if there’s still no answer.

I suppose part of it also has to do with self-preservation. It's easier to settle on an explanation or refuse to ask why than engage with one or more of these three levels of despair, or with the depth of the uncertainty. 
Yeah, well, I guess most of the time I feel all three levels of despair.

Follow Hamilton on Twitter.

Photographer Bradley Scott takes pictures of sex workers. Sometimes it's for his own work and sometimes it's for their own promotional websites. Not surprisingly the images are heavy on sex, nudity, and general adult themes. When I first viewed his shots they suggested another Terry Richardson wannabe. But maybe that's kind of the point. Richardson makes expensive coffee table books that dudes jerk off to. His pictures are the product of a bare fantasy—sex that is as removed from gentle copulation as you can get. It’s about separating the body from the brain. Bradley Scott, whether by accident or design, bypasses the bit where he transforms the model into the subject. By photographing sex workers he addresses the fantasy directly. People try and explain away the role sex plays in art, but are we really just holding out to see tits? Bradley thinks so, and he skips all the faux-intellectualism to get there. 

VICE: Tell us about this side of your work.
Bradley Scott: I shoot sex workers. Sometimes I shoot it for myself—or sometimes they pay me to shoot and they’ll use it for their websites and things like that. I usually get referred on from other sex workers or spend the day trolling sex worker websites trying to find girls who look interesting.

Why sex workers?
Because they’re cool and open to doing what I want them to do. They seem to see the artistic side and the human side of sex—it’s not a taboo. Sex is sex and they do it for a living so they can see the other side of it, it’s not just porn.

Also—I’m going to sound like a dick—but I wanted to see tits. I wanted to see naked girls. I wanted to shoot naked girls. The girls at the modelling agencies, they’ll get naked, but for the right photographer. And at that stage I wasn’t that guy. I wasn’t someone who could just say, "cool take your top off” and they would trust me because I’d never had that experience. There’s something about sex workers that’s kind of interesting and made me want to shoot them.

It’s easy to look at this and see a Terry Richardson or Richard Kern runoff. What makes your work different from the sexualised photography trend that’s everywhere at the moment?
A lot of people make that comparison. In some ways I take reference from both of them. I don’t know, I hope I bring something more of myself into it. It’s more intimate than just sexualised fashion pictures. I go in there with the intent to create images that relate to me or of something that’s happened to me, I just capture that. I hope there’s some kind personal thing in there that people can see.

How did you get this job?
I have no idea. I moved to Sydney from Perth and I was just like, fuck it, I’m gonna see if I can work this out. I emailed a couple of sex workers and showed them my earlier stuff, like my fashion stuff and all my other photography, and just told them I wouldn’t charge them and they’d get all the photos. One said yes, I just built it off of that.

Are you different on shoots now?
Maybe. I mean I think I can talk to people a lot easier now, and I can judge how someone’s feeling a lot easier that I’ve done a lot of this work. I can get a sense of what’s cool and what’s not cool and what I will and won't be able to get.

In the past you've interviewed a number of renowned war and documentary photographers for VICE, including Tim Page and Stephen Dupont. How does this side of your work relate to their kind of output?
I could probably make up some bullshit about how sex and war are related and how the battle inside myself regarding women and relationships is that of a war zone but that wouldn't be true. I interviewed those guys because I wanted to show their talent to the readers of VICE. Their work inspires me of course, and i've learned many things from them; they're my friends, but i don't think you can really compare our separate works alongside each other.

Are you the go-to guy for sex worker promo shots?
I wouldn’t say I’m the go-to guy. I get referred on a lot but nah, I’d say I’m good at it but I’m not the best at it. I just do what I do.

Follow Wendy on Twitter: @Wendywends

These pictures originally appeared in the 2014 VICE photo issue.

Ass-Cheek Desert, offices of EGGFLAN Creative, Los Angeles

Labia Coffee Beans, offices of Brått Coffee, Portland, OR

Glass of Piss, Hampton Inn, Lake Havasu City, AZ

Used Tampon, Bellagio, Las Vegas

Used Condoms, Best Western, Wickenburg, AZ

Semen on Blue Paper, Peppermill Resort Spa Casino, Reno, NV

For this year's photography issue, Jamie Lee Curtis Taete installed some bland-looking pictures of gross stuff in corporate settings where they might pass as pleasant abstractions. Read all of the articles Jamie writes for VICE here. 

To both Jews and non-Jews the idea of an anti-Zionist Jew can sound like a contradiction in terms—an abuse of Rabbi Hillel’s most famous ethical aphorism, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me." But for Sam Weinstein, and for around 30 others, me included, tucked together in a small Jewish bloc at Saturday’s Gaza demo in London, standing against Israel is precisely what our background demands.

“I come from a Jewish tradition that has always fought for the underdog,” Sam told me as he unfurled a banner of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network in the sticky heat. “One that has fought for social justice because historically we were the ones getting killed by the state.”

On the 8th of July, Israel began Operation Protective Edge, a military offensive which used the kidnapping and murder of three boys in Kfar Etzion, a settlement in the occupied West Bank, as a pretext for the bombardment and invasion of the Gaza strip. Since then, over 80,000 Gazans have fled their homes and more than 500 have died, the majority of them civilians.

For British Jews and other diaspora communities that oppose this, the added tragedy is that it is done in our name, in the expectation of our full, unflinching support. Before the Second World War, there were many Jews that refused to accept political Zionism as an ideology. But since 1948, when the State of Israel was established, support for it has slowly become almost unanimous.

“The Israeli state identifies Israel with all Jews,” Naomi Winborne Idrissi, a co-founder of Jews for Boycotting Israel Goods said to me as we passed Downing Street. “It aims to speak for all of us. But we say Israel and Zionism does not represent us.” Refusing to be wrapped up in a cause that is blindly and destructively nationalistic is why we were demonstrating in our capacity as Jews—both expressing our solidarity with Palestine and reclaiming ownership of our Jewish identity.

That’s not an easy thing to do. For a long time when I was growing up I felt that Israel did represent me. In 2002, during the Second Intifada, I remember standing with 40,000 people in Trafalgar Square, swept up in a haze of blue and white flags, proud parents and slogans I only half understood. 2002 was also the year I was bar mitzvahed. Every Saturday morning for nearly 12 months I sat in my local synagogue in Essex to hear stale one-sided sermons from the man supposed to be teaching me about Jewish values, ethics and intellectual life. In my early teens I was a member of the Federation of Zionist Youth, one of thousands of emotionally charged and politically naive kids, sent on summer camps and tours across Israel to sample Israeli culture in the most santitised, ideologically curated way.

In Britain, the United Synagogue, the largest Jewish denomination, puts “the centrality of Israel in Jewish life” as one of its defining values. The British Board of Deputies, the primary representative body of British Jews, claims in its constitution that it seeks to advance “Israel’s security, welfare and standing”. Dwelling on these facts is the only way I can make sense of why otherwise decent people, family and friends, show their support for what seems so obviously and monumentally wrong.

“The direction in which Jewish and Israeli people are going in is terrifying,” said Dan Nemenyi, one of the younger demonstrators in the bloc. “The Jewish establishment in Britain remains as right wing as ever, and still holds power over schools, synagogues and the representation of the community. In Israel a solution needs to be found for the situation of the Palestinians. But the response is full military occupation and war whenever it’s needed.”

It’s a depressing state of affairs, as a 2000-strong pro-Israel rally, also held outside the Israeli embassy the following day demonstrated. On Sunday alone more than 100 Palestinians were killed and 500 injured. In Shuja’iyeh, a small neighbourhood in the East of Gaza City, 66 bodies were found by medical authorities, 17 of them children. Horrifying videos have appeared online of civilians fleeing by foot, charred, bloodied bodies lying strewn around them.

Not a single reference to this reality was captured in the recycled platitudes held up by the demonstrators—no trace of irony or shame in proclaiming Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East."

“British Jews have come out because although we do not live in Israel we want the Israelis to know we support them,” one man told me. “If we are not there in body we are there in spirit. Israel is our land. And as long as they continue to do the right thing, they will get our support.”

“I’m out today because this is a time of crisis for Israel,” another man said. “What Israel is going through with rockets coming in from Gaza is absolutely abhorrent. It’s important I come out as a British Jew to defend against this anti-Semitism.”

As the rally continued, a growing number of counter-demonstrators arrived through the crowd to a small area cordoned off by the police. Almost all of them were goaded, booed and harassed as they passed. One pro-Israel demonstrator ripped a Palestinian flag out of a man’s hand before throwing it onto the street to loud cheers. Another was held back by the police as he lurched at a man with two young children holding what looked like an umbrella with Palestinian colours. “I feared for my safety and my children,” the father told me after.

Another demonstrator, Douaa Elterk, was driving through the crowd to join the counter-protest when the car she was in was attacked by pro-Israel demonstrators. “We were assaulted as we passed by holding a Palestinian flag,” she said. “We were hit with sticks and one of our flags was snatched. Water was thrown and we were spat at. Somebody then blocked the road to stop us before the police moved them on. The Israelis are holding banners saying peace not war but are attacking everyone passing by. It’s such hypocrisy.”

As the rally came to a close a number of younger, masked counter-demonstrators turned up to face the large section of Israel supporters that had peeled off from the main area. At one stage the new arrivals broke the police line and kicked the window mirror of a car driving past waving an Israeli flag.

As I left, I received a text from a close family member who spotted me at the rally. “So Philip who were you supporting today?” she asked. Whatever optimism can be taken from a small group of people saying, “Not in our name," for most diaspora communities around the world, Israel should never be publicly condemned.

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