Illustration by Cei Willis

Injecting heroin isn’t for everyone. Some people panic whenever there's talk of vaccines, and can't contemplate giving blood without passing out from terror. If you're got such a phobia you're obviously unlikely to develop an intravenous drug addiction, however, a fear of needles isn't always enough to steer people away from this kind of harmful behavior.

Besides those admittedly rare anomalies, there are plenty of heroin addicts who inject but, strangely, have never held a syringe themselves. There are a number of reasons why that might be, but the main one is that injecting drugs is a lot harder than you might think, and needles don't come with instruction manuals.

Like me, most who do inject started out with veins that were both healthy and visible. However, after a substantial amount of time spent polluting your bloodstream, they tend to become considerably more difficult to detect and tap into.

After a few years of injecting drugs, I hit a wall; all of my previous injecting sites packed in pretty much simultaneously. There were still spots I’d never used—some because they were out of reach and others because common sense had previously told me to avoid them—so I persevered for a while. But as I saw no other short-term alternative, I set out to find a person who could “get” (inject) me. 

I ended up using a selection of different people, all intravenous drug users themselves, to inject my drugs for me. Most of the time these were people I didn't associate with—or even know very well—as my involvement in the British drug scene is limited to a regular exchange with my usual supplier. After a few months of relying on these people to deliver me a daily supply, the veins in my arms became less visible. People began refusing to waste their time, wanting instead to go in my neck or groin—areas I hadn’t injected before—where you could see or feel the vein. I didn’t want to start injecting there, but the problem with addiction is that, at times, you can really feel like there’s no other option.   

I always found it strange how I’d unconsciously agree upon the terms of whoever was injecting me. How I had so little say on the outcome, even though it was my body and my drugs. And this is undoubtedly the same for others in similar situations; I’ve seen injectors get air in a pin, the recipient hoping it’s not going to kill them when it’s injected. I’ve seen people wipe the end of the pin with their fingers, or push the gear into somebody’s skin instead of their vein (two big no-nos). But you’re not in a position to complain because of the worry that you’ll have to find somebody else who will undertake the whole ordeal, possibly losing your hit in the process.

The etiquette of asking someone to inject you also includes offering to share your drugs, or supplying the funds for them to buy their own—making the whole thing more of a challenge financially, as well as creating a kind of informal black market for addicts looking for assistance. The average “price” for injecting someone is usually a ten bag, or half of what you have yourself if it’s less than that. This price applies to each individual hit, which often encourages users to take more in one go than they would otherwise.

Photo courtesy of the author

I spoke to Jane (all interviewees asked me to change their names), who—despite a fear of needles—has spent ten years being injected with heroin. She began taking drugs intravenously with an ex-boyfriend; she told me that while she recovered from the breakup of their relationship emotionally, she was still coping with the realization that there was a much stronger physical attachment that needed satisfying: the desire to inject drugs.

“I was lucky that I knew someone I trusted, who helped me,” she said. “I’d rather have them do it than anyone else, but it’s not possible to pin somebody down 24/7. Besides the trust issues, I've had to spend twice as much money when I've asked other people to help me, because they need something in return.”

Unsurprisingly, this relationship can have as much of an impact on your wallet as it can your body. Jane—who’s currently holding down two part-time jobs—is finding it financially crippling to fund not just her own addiction, but also that of whoever injects her. I asked why she goes to these lengths to have her drugs injected, rather than switching to another method of ingestion—like smoking, for example.

“I think I just like to punish myself,” she said. “While I'm injecting, my short-term situation gets a little better and the long-term health implications get much worse. This situation’s a nightmare and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but I have no desire to start smoking it. The only way I see my situation improving is if I learn to do it myself.”

Joy, another user I spoke to, was left without anyone to inject her when her partner was sentenced to 12 months in prison. “After digesting the news, I was struck by the realization that I had drugs with no way of taking them,” she said. “After many failed attempts, it hit me how little [information about injecting] I’d actually taken in over the years.”

Photo courtesy of the author

This is a situation those who can’t inject could end up finding themselves in, with some forced to wander the streets in search of an addict living rough who might be swayed by an offer of a ten bag. As Joy explained, “I couldn’t think of anyone who could do it for me, so I decided to go to a church that provides breakfast for the homeless.

“I had a shit night trying to ‘get’ myself, which was made harder by the fact my circulatory system had been hammered by this point. The following day was horrible; I’d been throwing up all night and wondered whether you could get so sick that you couldn't go out, and if eventually I would just fall down and die.”

Injecting other people with illicit substances is clearly not an ethical thing to do. Although the person who knows how to administer drugs intravenously might be without money or the drugs themselves, a huge power imbalance is created by the fact that the recipient physically needs them there to feed their addiction.

I’d always condemned anyone who injected others, but after experiencing heroin withdrawal myself I began to at least understand their reasoning. Due to the increased levels of anxiety and the onset of desperation and panic as the drugs leave your system, the prospect of breaking the law or going against your personal values becomes a more viable option.

Bundles of heroin. Photo via

I spoke to Nick, who is currently facilitating the supply of another person’s drugs, to get his perspective on the situation.

When I asked how the relationship came about, he said: “I live in a house with three other people who inject drugs, so as a household we get a lot of people asking us to score for them, inject their drugs, or just have a smoke. I declined the first time [the person I inject] asked, and one of the other people I live with did it for her as a one-off, but she came back the following day.”

I asked what changed his mind. “If I’m honest, I didn’t have anything and couldn’t afford to turn down the drugs,” he replied. “At first, the continuous stream of heroin was enough to keep me doing it, but she started expecting me to give her a few [hits] throughout the day.”

I wondered whether he’d grown used to injecting the woman—if it wasn’t something that bothered him by this point. “It’s tricky, because I’m still doing it, but it makes me feel like shit,” he said. “I’ve wanted to say no, but when it comes to it, I can’t. When I'm not feeling good myself, I've found it impossible to turn down a bag; everything else seems to go out of the window.

“The idea that I’m being bought is hard to accept," he continued. “To be honest, I’m sick of the whole thing—I don’t want to put holes in myself, never mind someone else.”

Photo courtesy of the author

Currently, I can inject myself, so I haven’t recently been forced to find anyone to help me. That, of course, can’t be said for everyone, with some stuck in a cycle of obtaining twice the amount of money, buying twice the amount of drugs, and tracking down someone every day to inject them.

So what can be done to reduce the potential harm? One resolution would be to introduce supervised injecting sites throughout the UK, like the facilities in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. But considering drugs services here seem to be hung up on treating heroin addiction with methadone—subsequently leaving many addicts with a whole new addiction—that doesn’t seem like a particularly likely outcome. 

A related issue that also needs addressing is being addicted to the injecting itself. I’ve known people, for instance, who’ve given up heroin but continue to inject water into their veins. And when I asked Joy whether she’d ever considered smoking instead of injecting, she said, “I’ve never smoked it, and I don't think I could stop ‘digging.’ It’s such a big part of my addiction that I wonder if I’m punishing myself through some unusual form of self harm, which I'm sure would be minimized if I could do it myself.”

For long-term injecting drug users, the process of actually preparing the drugs becomes an intense, integral part of their lives. This can be linked to a release of dopamine in the brain when they handle the paraphernalia – a phenomenon known as “stimulus conditioning.” However, that’s something that can only really be treated with time and therapy.

For me, the way forward is through specialist counseling, like cognitive behavioral therapy, and abstinence-based recovery. It’s not having the drugs—or having them and not knowing how to inject them—that’s at the root of this specific issue. So learning to live without drugs should be the quickest route to recovery, instead of substituting one highly addictive drug for another, as is the case with methadone treatment.

Unfortunately, that’s obviously a lot easier said than done.

Below are a number of services that can help heroin addicts in the UK and the US seek treatment:

samhsa.gov / recovery.org / lifeline.org.uk / drugscope.org.uk 

All photos by Roger Perry

Roger Perry's long out-of-print The Writing on the Wall—–a collection of photos charting London's early graffiti scene—is being republished this week. Here, George Stewart-Lockhart, an art historian and publisher who wrote the extensive new foreword for the re-release, takes us through a few of his most striking images.

London’s graffiti culture hasn’t always revolved around big bouncy graphics and Shoreditch street art tours. Forty years ago, in the wake of the 1968 Paris riots, London was engulfed by a wave of politically charged and poetic statements, scrawled on the corrugated iron fencing and dilapidated buildings of Notting Hill by members of the disillusioned post-war generation.

Their style was unlike the one beginning to take off in New York at the time. Where Manhattan’s trains were sprayed with the kind of wildstyle you’re now likely to see in shoe shop window displays, the focus of London’s graffiti writers was the message; style wasn’t important. They were more Blake than Basquiat.

The culprits weren't “artists” in the sense they are now, but poets, playwrights, political revolutionaries, and the saxophonist from Madness (who I’ll get to in a bit).

Those familiar with the burgeoning graffiti scene of the time (not that there was really much of a “scene," per-se) would be acquainted with the work of the Wise Brothers. Dave and Stuart Wise were better known as part of King Mob, a mutation of Guy Debord's Situationist International, and were responsible for a number of the period's most iconic pieces of graffiti.

One work of theirs sticks out in my mind: a lengthy tirade against the banality of commuter life, written alongside the Hammersmith and City line—between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park stations—in the shadow of the Westway. It was a collective effort by Dave Wise, Chris Gray, Don Smith, and Madeline Neenan, and actually precedes the May 1968 riots, having been painted in January of that year.

The tradition of tagging tracksides is well established now, but this would have been one of the very first—certainly in London, at least. Take the train along this line now and the walls are cluttered with layer upon layer of tags and throw-ups (a slightly more complex tag), some of which don't last more than a few weeks before either being painted over or buffed. I get excited when I spot a single rogue “Tox04” that may have survived the last ten years, high up and inaccessible on a railway bridge. But this was prime trackside that stood untouched for a decade. In modern terms, that's pretty extraordinary.

In a bizarre synchronicity, Banksy would work from a studio directly behind this piece around 30 years later. Mind you, graffiti culture has continually been drawn to this small section under the Westway, so perhaps it’s not so bizarre. When legendary graffiti writer Futura 2000 came over to London in 1981 to hang out with the Clash, for example, he painted a wall under this innocuous stretch of dual carriageway, bringing modern graffiti as we know it to the UK.

Another key player in the scene at the time (again, there wasn't really a “scene," so to speak) was Heathcote Williams, who’s now best known for his epic polemical poems, such as “Autogeddon” and “Whale Nation." But back before Harold Pinter was praising his work, he ran a large squat in Notting Hill inside an old bingo hall, known as the “Meat Roxy," which was part of the Albion Free State—his utopian vision of a Britain without government or rule.

The squatters frequently held gigs there, with Gong collaborators Here & Now playing regularly. The photo above is an interior shot of the Meat Roxy, showing a tag left by the “101ers," a short-lived pub rock band fronted by Joe Strummer before he joined what would soon become the Clash.

When Heathcote wasn't at the helm the Albion Free State, working at his “Ruff Tuff Creem Puff Estate Agency for Squatters” with writer and comedian Tony Allen, he would be adorning the walls of North Kensington with his own brand of humorous graffiti.

The Heathcote piece in the above photograph was painted on the eve of Princess Anne’s 1973 wedding to Mark Phillips. It references the Princess’s trip to Kenya in 1971, where she was accompanied by Valerie Singleton, presenter of children's television show Blue Peter. The simplicity and absurdity of the humor speaks for itself.

It would be wrong to think that all graffiti at the time was antagonistic or poetic in its execution. Much like today, there were also a number of prolific taggers—none more so than a writer by the name of “Kix," who worked mainly around his native Kentish Town (some of his graffiti from the early 70s survives there to this day).

Despite probably never having come across his work, you'll almost certainly be familiar with the output from his day job. When he wasn’t tagging West London, Lee “Kix” Thompson was playing saxophone as a founding member of Madness, alongside—amongst others—keyboardist Mike Barson, known for his tag “Mr B."

The image above stands out amongst the rest of Roger Perry's photos, in that it isn't anonymous. The majority of the works illustrated in The Writing on the Wall express some kind of group sentiment; whether it's a plea for social housing or an affinity for the IRA, the graffiti usually let the combined voices of a certain section of society be heard.

These phrases can occasionally seem mundane to the modern viewer, but for them to have been committed to such a surface in the first place means they must have meant the world to whoever wrote them. A good example of this is the “Clapton Is God” image below. This was a sentiment felt and subsequently expressed by the vast majority of a certain generation. It became ubiquitous on the walls of London in the 1970s, with no fixed perpetrator. It was open-source graffiti.

Roger Perry's example was actually “faked," in so much that it was needed for a book on Eric Clapton, but with a deadline looming they couldn't find a suitable example anywhere. Determined, Perry headed out with graphic designer Pearce Marchbank and found a corrugated iron fence in North London. Perry was on lookout while Marchbank painted the proclamation on the wall.

While the majority of the assertions that “Clapton Is God” were unsolicited (save for the above example, obviously), the 70s saw graffiti being adopted by advertising agencies for the purpose of guerrilla marketing. Nowadays, this is common practice, but back then it was still somewhat of a novelty, particularly when the Rolling Stones decided to utilize the medium for the promotion of their 1974 album It's Only Rock 'n' Roll. The less said about this, the better, as it marks a serious hijacking of what should be a powerful and independent way of expressing oneself, not a means to sell records.

The graffiti in Roger Perry's photos is so far removed from that in Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's seminal Subway Art that you can't really compare them. What went on in London at the time was a cultural bubble. It wasn't taking influence from the US, and, in turn, didn't have any influence on it.

The London graffiti scene that we know today really owes more to what went on in New York, but that doesn't make these works any less important. They are a uniquely English take on graffiti; charged with subversive humor and heartfelt poetic sentiment that is all but absent from the majority of work today. That isn't intended as a knock to either party, but merely a statement of the facts. People's priorities have changed, with use of color and form taking more prominence than the message conveyed within those forms.

These images, along with over 120 others, are included in Roger Perry's The Writing on the Wall, which is being republished exclusively through a Kickstarter campaign, running until October 16. It includes an introduction by the late George Melly, a new text by Bill Drummond and an extensive foreword by George Stewart-Lockhart.

Find more details at rogerperrybook.com.

The Syrian city of Aleppo, under constant bombardment by air and threatened by both Syrian regime forces and Islamic State militants on the ground, is now one of the most dangerous places in the world. In addition to fighting the enemies at the gates, Aleppo's rebels have to contend with adversaries within the city, including armed gangs of criminals and pro-Islamic State infiltrators.

While the US government is now ramping up military aid to the ostensibly secular Free Syrian Army, Aleppo's Islamic Front rebels are holding their ground with homemade munitions. Considered too Islamist for support from the West, and too moderate for jihadist fundraisers, the Islamic Front is preparing for the final battle. VICE News followed Islamic Front fighters defending the rebel-held half of the city against overwhelming odds from both the might of the Syrian regime and the resurgent Islamic State.

Doug Ford waving hiiiii as he walks into last night's debate. Photo via Don Peat on Twitter.

After days of speculation surrounding Doug Ford’s bid for mayor of Toronto—is the brother of notorious crack-smoking clown Rob Ford serious? Does he think he can actually win? Is he just doing this to save face for the family dynasty?—his apperance at last night's debate against fellow candidates John Tory and Olivia Chow at a packed high school auditorium was met with more than the usual amount of enthusiasm.

Before the debate even began, loud chants of “We Want Doug!” prevented Chow from being able to have an audible conversation with reporters. But we did get a bit of information from her.

From the get-go, it seemed as if Chow was clinging to her main talking point against Tory’s transit plan: His proposed SmartTrack rail system would have to make a 90-degree turn at one point, which would presumably necessitate the bulldozing of a bunch of homes, a community center, and a childcare facility. Later in the night, Tory calmly explained that he would simply have the rail go underground in that particular section, popping Chow's bubble quite swiftly, though he didn't explain where that tunnel money would come from.

Transit plan bickering aside (Chow and Ford both showed up with signs that had their transit plans drawn onto them, neither candidate went into great detail about what either of them meant) the debate was marked by frequent interruptions from a crowd that seemingly couldn't stay seated and quiet.

About 20 minutes into the debate, a woman named Iola Fortino, who had previously accosted Toronto City Councilor Kristyn Wong-Tam by calling her a “fucking fag,” stood up and yelled, “He [Ford] goes to his family cottage during the pride parade. That's why we love him!” This unpleasant disturbance led to the moderator reminding the crowd that security and police officers were present, which didn’t seem to resolve the issue, until the police came to chat with Fortino and wound up ejecting her from the event.

If you’re keeping score at home, this makes at least two major election events where Ford Nation supporters caused a homophobic disturbance. And, according to Jonathan Goldsbie, Fortino was also involved in a nasty bit of homophobia at a recent Ford Fest.

After the loud homophobe left, the debate was restored to a somewhat normal pace as the dream team of Tory, Chow, and Ford answered questions about welfare, their transit plans, and garbage collection.

The Fords got credit for privatizing garbage, which was undoubtedly a good thing in the wake of David Miller’s pungent garbage strike from the summer of ‘09. (Though Tory needled Ford by saying that it was too bad he, as “co-mayor,” ran out of gas after that.)

Ford also clung to his brother's old adage: subways, subways, subways; which got a crowd reaction that reminded me of moments when Stone Cold Steve Austin would crack a couple of brewskis open and pour them all over his face.

Seriously. People in York love them some Ford.

Chow responded by striking a Helen Lovejoy-esque chord over and over again: Think of the children! She spoke of the importance to keep kids fed in school, because, in her words, when kids have food “they won't be able to be so hungry."

Chow’s transit plan involves building above-ground rail, rather than the underground systems favored by Ford and Tory, in Scarborough—a project she says will be quicker to complete. Chow also wants to electrify the Go Train rail and connect it to the TTC, and she wants to get more buses on the road as soon as possible. She also railed against Tory’s transit plan, arguing that it would shoot taxes up into oblivion.

Tory’s scheme to build SmartTrack trains on existing Go Train rail, which will link up with the TTC subway, sounds good on paper—but as Chow and others have pointed out, large swaths of his plan involve running rail in areas where rail simply cannot be run, unless he plans on demolishing a bunch of buildings. If he keeps the wrecking ball at home, he’ll have to dig tunnels, which Tory frequently handwaves away with a we’re just gonna get ‘er done mentality. Construction cost be damned.

While the discussion of these competing transit plans is not ideal for a time-limited debate setting, with an assortment of crazy people yelling and screaming in the audience, the conversation about Toronto’s future as it pertains to welfare, transit, and waste collection was at least somewhat productive. That is, until the question of the Pride Parade came up.

All candidates were asked if they would pledge to attend Pride. Chow, of course, took her moment to remind the crowd she always goes to Pride, and Tory offered his support as well. When it came around to Doug, however, he was quick to mention that he attended once and proclaimed that he had once donated $3,500 to the parade. If this figure sounds dubious, well, that’s because it is.

Doug was referencing a donation of rainbow stickers in 2010, some of which had Rob Ford campaign messaging on them, which he had valued at $5,000 at the time (now it's apparently slipped $1,500 in value; I guess the sticker market just isn’t what it used to be). Now, let’s remember that Doug is a multimillionaire who owns a label company, so $3,500 to $5,000 in stickers really isn’t much of a goodwill gesture. I spoke with someone at Pride Toronto this morning who confirmed that Doug's donation was through printing, not cash, and that the stickers were donated years ago. It is important to remember that the Fords have never supported Pride, and are in favor of cutting its funding (as is Tory). So it's unsurprising that Ford was unwilling to say, “Yes, I’ll go to the damn parade.” Many of his supporters aren't down with Pride—some, like Fortino, seem to hate the very idea of homosexuality—but it would be political suicide for him to denounce the parade. So instead he danced around the issue, pledging his lukewarm support while not denouncing his most bigoted fans.   

Ford also attacked Tory at numerous points in the night for being an elite who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter, and whose executive job at Rogers was handed to him because of nepotism—a bizarre claim for Ford, the son of a wealthy businessman and politician, to make. But inside Ford Nation, presumably such things make perfect sense. 

While none of Toronto’s mayoral candidates seemed all that impressive, it was alarming to see all the extremely vocal support Ford attracted. Before the end of the night, a man stood up to yell, “Go home Olivia! Back to China!” in a very sad show of racism and disrespect. Unless you love the Fords (by the way, news broke today that Rob’s sister told the cops she smoked crack with the now former mayor after his taxpayer-funded driver dropped a drunk Rob at her house) your choices are Tory or Chow, and neither are great options. But another four years of the Fords’ bullshit is really just unacceptable.

Follow Patrick McGuire on Twitter.

A crime scene in Dobsonville, a township in Soweto, outside of Johannesburg. All photos by the author

The Devil is probably not launching an all-out assault on the people of South Africa, but if you pick up the tabloids, talk to the locals, or ask the police, they’ll all tell you: Satanic crime is a growing problem.

On the early morning of February 19, a man was walking though a long, dusty pit in Dobsonville, a township in Soweto, outside Johannesburg, when he found the bodies of two teenage girls. He spotted Chwayita Rathazayo, 16, and Thandeka Moganetsi, 15, in a field of high grass, broken pottery, and assorted pieces of trash. According to news reports, the girls were in their school uniforms, lying just a few feet from each other, with cuts and open wounds on their backs, necks, and arms, just out of view from the row of stout brick houses that border the field. Next to the girls were three black candles and two unused razor blades.

The field’s narrow footpath ditches keep residents, who fear attacks, at a distance. But that morning, as news of the bodies spread, the victims’ classmates slowly arrived at the scene. “They were crying and were saying they know exactly who did this, and they knew that this was going to happen,” Malungelo Booi, a television reporter who covered the scene, later told me. “They were told that they were going to be next.”

A week after the teenagers’ murder, the South African Police Service, the national police force, announced that occult-related crimes were on the rise: Between December 2013 and February 2014, 78 such crimes had been reported in Gauteng, South Africa’s most populous province. Formal cases were opened for 48 of those reports. By February 26, four of those cases had been closed, with court convictions ranging from 15 years to life. Not all of these voodooesque crimes were in the name of Satan: They span a broad spectrum of screwed-up rituals done in the name of crazy-ass religious practices. The official police statement mentions theft of body parts several times, but that’s oddly run-of-the-mill in South Africa, where witchcraft accusations and fake traditional healers still make headlines every week.

Pastor Mamorwa Gololo

As soon as the announcement was made, religious groups descended to combat the threat. South Africa is currently engaged in a “spiritual war,” according to Pastor Mamorwa Gololo, a confident, middle-aged South African woman with a piercing gaze. Gololo has a church in Soweto where she preaches the teachings of the deliverance ministry—in short, she performs exorcisms. When I met with her, she described how she had helped save a Nigerian man from Satan last December. She even recited the special prayer she used to extract the evil from him.

This isn’t the first time that South Africans have been faced with an apparent outbreak of Satanism. Reports of satanic cults and brainwashed teenagers began appearing in the 1980s, which coincided with the slow dismantling of Apartheid. As criticism of the Apartheid system grew, articles on social unrest in South Africa’s white enclaves were a fixture of the news cycle, but the upheaval had little to do with larger social change. “The alleged rise of Satanism in the 1980s was being blamed for increasing divorce rates, feminism, kids using drugs, and kids not wanting to go to the army,” Nicky Falkof, a lecturer in media studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told me with a laugh.

Falkof had spoken to three other reporters on the week that we met, since she’s one of the only PhDs in South Africa who has written academically on the subject. Her focus was on how the media perpetuated these fringe beliefs of a sudden, calamitous emergence of devil-worshipping teenagers, creating what is commonly seen as a moral—or, in this case, satanic—panic. “And at some point it just stopped, and the Satanists just vanished, and no one talked about them anymore,” she said. “I had a really strong sense that there was something important about that happening as a consequence of the kind of consistent weirdness of the end of Apartheid among white people.”

This time, however, the crime increase is occurring almost entirely in the black communities—the underserved townships and informal settlements that, despite the radiant promise of 1994, remain painfully impoverished. A black kid growing up in South Africa’s townships today is surrounded by endemic joblessness (more than a quarter of the community is unemployed), pathetic housing conditions (about 13 percent live in corrugated metal shacks), and little to no chance of escape.

Nicky Falkof, a lecturer in media studies

The day after the bodies were found, police arrested two black 16-year-old boys, schoolmates to the murdered girls. That same day police dug up animal bones, an ax, and a dagger from the yard of a nearby house. This was reportedly part of an older, ongoing investigation, but it happens to have also involved accusations of satanic practice.

The next day, the Daily Sun newspaper ran its cover with a picture of an ax in an evidence bag and an all-caps headline: “HOUSE OF SATAN BUST!”

I met with Reverend Gift Moerane, who helps coordinate church business and personnel in Gauteng, at his office in Johannesburg. Three days after the girls were found dead, Moerane and other local pastors, including Gololo, and a former education minister visited Dobsonville to hold a prayer session at the high school.

Moerane has played a big role in building a partnership with the Department of Education to allow religious groups greater access to schools, despite South Africa’s secular government. “Sharing the word of God helped us to be better people,” he said, carefully framing his preference for an Apartheid-era policy. “But now, because the secularization of the state has forced religion to be removed from education, it has opened a gap, a vacuum. And because nature does not allow a vacuum, something has come in to close that vacuum.”

Moerane sees this as a literal case of Satan coming in to snatch up South Africa’s children, but he conceded that these things don’t happen in, well, a vacuum. “The people who propagate this practice, they promise all kinds of things,” Moerane told me. “If you join this movement you get everything that you want. You don’t even have to work; you don’t have to go to school.” Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—they’re all included.

Kobus Jonker, an expert witness

The religious side believe it’s the Devil, and the secular side thinks it’s economic disparity, but both happen to agree that these crimes are done out of desperation. “You listen to the testimony of the young people doing this, and they talk a lot about wanting to get power and about powerlessness,” said Falkof, referring to other recent court cases tied to the occult. “Satanism gives us a way to discuss these murders without having to ask what it is in this country that is raising a generation of kids that is capable of such extreme acts of violence.”

In the eyes of the law it’s essentially the same: A quickie exorcism is unlikely to alter any charges against the boys for alleged murders. “If they said, ‘The devil inside me said I must do this and this and this,’ most of the time it’s nonsense,” Kobus Jonker, who serves as an expert witness in occult-related criminal trials, told me. Jonker is the original head of South Africa’s Occult Related Crimes Unit, which was founded in 1992, during the last satanic panic. He’s also probably the most despised man in the country’s pagan and occult circles, having written the police guide on identifying harmful religious practices and occult items, which is frequently criticized as outdated, biased, or downright inaccurate.

“I don’t care if you’re a Wiccan or a pagan or an Antichrist or a vampire. I don’t care. We’re there for crime that’s been committed,” Jonker told me. He said that he doesn’t have nightmares as he turned past an illustration from his first satanic crime case—a picture of a naked dead woman with the words “Jesus” and “Christ” carved into the bottom of her feet and a “666” sign carved into her arm.

As a police consultant he’s more than a little aware of the reported increase, and he even gets calls from concerned parents—especially in the past few months, he added. “I think some of the children are bored,” he said. “They’re on their own. They don’t feel they have a place in society. Then they read this and say, Oh, this can get me in a position where I can actually dominate people.”

The two Dobsonville boys are still awaiting trial after a series of postponements for psychiatric evaluations. Innocent or guilty, the case is unlikely to hinge on whether the Devil had anything to do with it. Likewise, it probably won’t hinge on whether the boys were lost to the desperation of economic helplessness. The case will be a criminal one, and South Africa will continue to battle its demons.

Illustrations by Eric Hanson

The following article is an extract from the book Bowie, a collection of essays by British philosopher Simon Critchley. The book—published by OR books and available here—starts with Critchley's first encounter with the Thin White Duke and charts the lifelong love affair that followed.

Let me begin with a rather embarrassing confession: no person has given me greater pleasure throughout my life than David Bowie. Of course, maybe this says a lot about the quality of my life. Don’t get me wrong. There have been nice moments, some even involving other people. But in terms of constant, sustained joy over the decades, nothing comes close to the pleasure Bowie has given me.

It all began, as it did for many other ordinary English boys and girls, with Bowie’s performance of “Starman” on BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops on the July 6, 1972, which was viewed by more than a quarter of the British population. My jaw dropped as I watched this orange-haired creature in a catsuit limp-wristedly put his arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulder. It wasn’t so much the quality of the song that struck me; it was the shock of Bowie’s look. It was overwhelming. He seemed so sexual, so knowing, so sly and so strange. At once cocky and vulnerable. His face seemed full of sly understanding—a door to a world of unknown pleasures.

Some days later, my mother Sheila bought a copy of “Starman," just because she liked the song and Bowie’s hair (she’d been a hairdresser in Liverpool before coming south, and used to insist dogmatically that Bowie was wearing a wig from the late 1980s onward). I remember the slightly menacing black-and-white portrait photo of Bowie on the cover, shot from below, and the orange RCA Victor label on the seven-inch single.

For some reason, when I was alone with our tiny mono record player in what we called the dining room (though we didn’t eat there—why would we? There was no TV), I immediately flipped the single over to listen to the B-side. I remember very clearly the physical reaction I felt listening to “Suffragette City." The sheer bodily excitement of that noise was almost too much to bear. I guess it sounded like... sex. Not that I knew what sex was. I was a virgin. I’d never even kissed anyone and had never wanted to. As Mick Ronson’s guitar collided with my internal organs, I felt something strong and strange in my body that I’d never experienced before. Where was suffragette city? How did I get there?

I was twelve years old. My life had begun.

There is a view that some people call “narrative identity." This is the idea that one’s life is a kind of story, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Usually there is some early defining traumatic experience and a crisis or crises in the middle (sex, drugs, any form of addiction will serve) from which one miraculously recovers. Such life stories usually culminate in redemption before ending with peace on Earth and goodwill to all men. The unity of one’s life consists in the coherence of the story one can tell about oneself. People do this all the time. It’s the lie that stands behind the idea of the memoir. Such is the raison d’être of a big chunk of what remains of the publishing industry, which is fed by the ghastly gutter world of creative writing courses. Against this and with Simone Weil, I believe in decreative writing that moves through spirals of ever-ascending negations before reaching... nothing.

I also think that identity is a very fragile affair. It is at best a sequence of episodic blips rather than some grand narrative unity. As David Hume established long ago, our inner life is made up of disconnected bundles of perceptions that lie around like so much dirty laundry in the rooms of our memory. This is perhaps the reason why Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, where text is seemingly randomly spliced with scissors—and which Bowie famously borrowed from William Burroughs—gets so much closer to reality than any version of naturalism.

The episodes that give my life some structure are surprisingly often provided by David Bowie’s words and music. He ties my life together like no one else I know. Sure, there are other memories and other stories that one might tell, and in my case this is complicated by the amnesia that followed a serious industrial accident when I was 18 years old. I forgot a lot after my hand got stuck in a machine. But Bowie has been my sound track. My constant, clandestine companion. In good times and bad. Mine and his.

What’s striking is that I don’t think I am alone in this view. There is a world of people for whom Bowie was the being who permitted a powerful emotional connection and freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open and more exciting. Looking back, Bowie has become a kind of touchstone for that past, its glories and its glorious failures, but also for some kind of constancy in the present and for the possibility of a future, even the demand for a better future.

I don’t mean this to sound hubristic. Look, I’ve never met the guy—Bowie, I mean—and I doubt I ever will (and, to be honest, I don’t really want to. I’d be terrified. What would I say? Thank you for the music? That’s so ABBA). But I feel an extraordinary intimacy with Bowie, although I know this is a total fantasy. I also know that this is a shared fantasy, common to huge numbers of loyal fans for whom Bowie is not some rock star or a series of flat media clichés about bisexuality and bars in Berlin. He is someone who has made life a little less ordinary for an awfully long time.

Simon Critchley's book Bowie is available now from OR Books.

Solar Anus (2006) at the Hayward Gallery, in London. Photo by Regis Hertrich

It’s not easy to comprehend why someone would want to penetrate his scalp with a metal hook, infuse his scrotum with saline solution, and invite a live audience to watch. But Ron Athey’s not a simple guy.

Over the last 20 years the experimental body artist has been dubbed a masochist and a sensationalist for his extreme practice—a kind of queer performance art that deals with themes of trauma, ritual, and resistance through the mutilation of the body. Always challenging, always underground, his work has been heavily influenced by his upbringing in a Pentecostal household and by living the past 28 years of his life as HIV positive.

Pleading in the Blood, a new book on Ron’s life and work, features contributions from the likes of Anthony Hegarty, Bruce LaBruce, and Lydia Lunch. When he invited me to his north London studio to chat about it, I wondered if I was about to walk into a torture chamber. Instead, I found a neat apartment with an enviable bookshelf of queer literature and a guy whose field of knowledge seemed to match.

Talking to Ron assured me that he doesn’t create work for his audience, and that he certainly doesn’t torture himself for the press. He’s working through his own experience—the experience of outliving your friends in an epidemic, and not quite understanding why you’re alive.

Martyrs & Saints (photo by Elyse Regehr) and Premature Ejaculation, 1981, with Rozz Williams (photo courtesy of the artist)

VICE: Your work often involves some kind of self-mutilation. Can you explain the kind of stuff you do?
Ron Athey: Well, there was an earlier work called St. Sebastian, which I still redo, where I make arrows out of very long medical needles and insert the metal into the head, which causes a lot of bleeding. So really it’s a sort of bloodletting performance. Some longer performances from the 90s, like the Torture Trilogy, included scarification, flesh hooks, branding, anal penetration, surgical staplers—an entire palette of things, some of which I still use. I guess I always play either with flesh or with fluid or blood in my work.

I'm very squeamish and would probably faint if I saw that in the flesh. Do you find your audience transfixed or horrified?
I think it’s harder to watch a video because you lose the context and the rhythm of the piece. It’s not relentless blood and gore, but people have really different boundaries around the body, yes, so I’ve had a number of fainters at shows—people who didn’t think they were particularly squeamish. There are things that some people maybe didn’t bargain for in close proximity if it’s an intimate performance [laughs].

Do you enjoy those reactions?
I don’t really notice them. I think it surprises me, because I’m not one of those people. I’d like to be an emergency room doctor.

St. Sebastian,1999. Video still via YouTube

You’ve been described as a "masochist" by the media. How do you feel about that?
I worked for LA Weekly and Village Voice for a long time, so I’m not un-savvy—I do understand how the long table works: exploitative headlines, or being assigned to write a headline that’s an attention-grabber, even though sometimes it makes you cringe or you wouldn’t have used it. So even serious journalists—you know, people I respect—they’ll talk about the physical action [in the work], but I think over time you can begin to see the other layers. 

But are you trying to play with the boundaries of shock or horror a little bit? It feels like your work might be to do with looking—like you’re challenging people not to look away.
For me it was activism to be who I am, and to represent it in a performance it has to be upped to a hyper-reality. So in a way it’s really honest and, in another way, it’s really manipulative. In the beginning, a lot of the symbols were didactic around HIV iconography; later, they sometimes don’t mean anything, or a successful performance is just one where I have some kind of transformation. For example, in the Self Obliteration series with the blonde wig and the glass, they don’t mean anything, and the needles hidden underneath the wig are a kind of masquerade to do with my turning 50.

Self Obliteration I & II in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2011. Photo by Miha Fras

Your parents were quite devout Pentecostals—how did you move away from that into what was essentially a queer performance environment? Did you speak to them again after you left home?
Not those ones, no. I just waited for them to die, one at a time. My first boyfriend, Ros, had a rock band called Christian Death. That was kind of my entry into that scene—taking acid, reading Patti Smith… Imagine being a teenager in a pre-internet era, locked in a house in suburbia; you have a very small idea of the history of the world. I needed to read backwards through Jean Genet and Charles Baudelaire, and Patti Smith points the way over and over again in different songs.

How did the AIDS epidemic shape your work back in the 1980s?
I always refer back to AIDS because I had a cloud of death over me from 1985, until I trusted that the drug cocktail was working. I’m an outwardly very expressive person, and with the intense conditions of the time—real scenes, real activism, real death, real loss—I effortlessly made all of that into work because of the way the pressure was. I wasn’t performing therapy or catharsis with my work, but I was just completely observing and trying things out while I had a fire under my ass because there was this black cloud over my head.

My work always has a philosophical question, a thesis. I think that came about after surviving an apocalypse with everyone dying rapidly and everyone being sick and choosing whom you need to visit at the hospital as priority. This was a time to live through. We’re definitely in a different era now. You have to adapt somehow to that change, stop having a tantrum that everyone died and it was so bleak. It was really bleak for a time, but a whole other generation has come through.

In 1994 a newspaper claimed that audience members had been put at risk of contact with HIV-infected blood at one of your performances, and although it wasn’t your blood there was a media outcry. What happened?
It was a really enthusiastic audience somewhere small, so the performance sold out a month ahead of time and everyone had waited for it and everything went fine. And then it was this front-page story that blood was spilling and people were running around knocking over chairs. It was very carefully written, attributing everything to a quote from a different audience person so it wasn’t actually libelous. It was a front-page news story and went on the wire to, like, 200 newspapers, the Weekly World News, and even chat shows. I have to admit it was something bigger than me, bigger than my performance art.

I was essentially blacklisted in the US, and nobody had the money or a way of showing my work without the specter of a scandal over his or her head. I didn’t do anything but works in progress in LA, because I lived there, or at European festivals, and tried to ignore the political bullshit. Now, so much time has gone that I can see that it's something that probably bent me in a different direction. It was almost like a world event happened to me [laughs].

What direction did it bend you in? 
That was a particularly prolific period for me. I just started taking myself a bit more seriously. I could handle the word "artist" after my name without cringing. I didn’t really relate to anyone else’s work so much, except for writers, and kind of scolded myself. I’m not naive, but I don’t come from the academy either, and I do a lot of innocent visiting lectureship stuff, but I don’t teach anywhere. I couldn’t imagine going to a staff meeting.

Incorruptible Flesh: Messianic Remains. Photo by Maneul Vason.

Is it tough to make a living as a performance artist? You don’t really produce any tangible work as such.
There’s a structural problem with performance art, not having anything for sale. Okay, so there’s ephemera, but that’s not considered high art—you’ll never sell ephemera for anything significant. Although, you can go to the other extreme, like Marina Abramović, where you make amazing work to then go the lowbrow celebrity route. But you have to get paid from somewhere. It’s like there's Marina and Tin Sehgal, and then there’s no more money left. 

It must be nice to archive everything in Pleading in the Blood then. Are most of the contributors friends?
They were all people I asked. Friends on different levels, yeah. Lydia Lunch has been one of my mentors since the late 80s. It’s always been part of her practice to kick everyone’s ass to make them work. She’s like the motivator saying, “Start a fucking band or do spoken word instead of daydreaming about it.” She knew I’d done performance and worked with bands in the early 80s, and when I was waffling about kicking it back up she was instrumental.

It was an honor to get quotes from Genesis P-Orridge, because their work’s been so important to me; Throbbing Gristle, COUM Transmissions, etc. It was a smaller scene and a different time then, so it was easier to infiltrate everyone. There was a small 400-person punk club called Club Lingerie in LA. It was where Diamanda Galás performed on her first tour. It was like everyone wanted to see who this bitch was with the screaming voice [laughs]. She topped the room in a sequin opera gown.

What are you working on at the moment? What’s your most recent work?
Further ahead projects work more with ecstatic voice, glossolalia, and operatic theater. I’m kind of leaning back in a theatrical direction. So Messianic Remains—which is what I just showed in Hackney Wick—has some nods to Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising and addresses the ritual circle as performance space. It starts out interactive, so people touch me as I’m suspended in a state of trauma, and then the second part is a text from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and it’s about Divine’s funeral—a drag queen's funeral. I have a phobia of being the last suburban goth chick [laughs]. I’m always wrestling with that.

Ron Athey will be presenting his new performance Incorruptible Flesh: Messianic Remains in the UK this autumn. The first-ever monograph on Athey's work, Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Performances of Ron Athey, edited by Dominic Johnson, is published for Intellect Live by Intellect and Live Art Development Agency. It's available here.

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter.

Video preview of Easternsports courtesy of the artists and ICA Philadelphia

Last Friday night in Philadelphia, a holy trinity of hot young contemporary artists unleashed Easternsports, a four-channel video of elaborate proportions, onto the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art. The dream team is spearheaded by Alex Da Corte, a 2010 graduate of the Yale School of Art whose career could be described as “blowin’ up,” as the kids say, and Jayson Musson, an interdisciplinary artist famous on YouYube as satirical art critic, Hennessy Youngman. To complete the trifecta, Dev Hynes, popularly known as recording artist Blood Orange, composed an original score for the video in real time while watching it projected in Da Corte’s studio in Philly. If the contemporary art world were a game of fantasy football, this is the team I would pick.

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports (video still) courtesy of the artists and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Joe Sheften Gallery, and Salon 94

Easternsports is Da Corte’s fifth time showing work at the ICA. It’s by far his biggest presentation in the space to date, although it hosted a two-man show consisting of Da Corte and Andy Warhol in 2011. De Corte frequently presents his work alongside that of other artists, and his list of recent collaborators includes wunderkinds Sean Patrick Fitzgerald and Sascha Braunig, fashion brand Eckhaus Latta, and Red Hook, Brooklyn-based collective the Still House Group. It was one such group presentation that brought Hynes and Da Corte together.

Dev Hynes, New York, September 2014. Photo by Matthew Leifheit

“I went to a group show that included his work in London at White Cube gallery,” Hynes told me. “In true fashion I took a lot of Instagram pictures, because the room with his work was so good! We have mutual friends who tagged him in the posts, and they connected us.”

Hynes had has explored various media in the past, but this is his first involvement with an installation in a museum. The collaboration with Da Corte and Musson seemed like a natural progression, as he recently scored Gia Coppola’s first film, Palo Alto. His approach to scoring the installation was intuitive.

“I went to Philly, and in a couple days just plotted it out," he said. "I would watch the whole video, then try and get a mood from it. He [Da Corte] uses a lot of color, which is good for me, because I use a lot of color, to help with sounds and stuff [Hynes is synesthetic]. I would take one instrument, and do a live whole pass as the video played. I’d then do it again, and try to find specific moments to accent. The first couple videos set the tone, and characters reoccur. So I would find sounds that I thought were best for the characters, and use them all the way through. There are recalls to earlier melodies.”

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports (video still) courtesy of the artists and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Joe Sheften Gallery, and Salon 94

If anyone is surprised to see Hynes, who is best known as a musician, working with artists on a museum piece, they may misunderstand his practice. “I think some people don’t know that Blood Orange isn’t like, a band. To play this album live, I used a band," he said. "So I think people are a little confused. It’s really just me, doing whatever I do next. I’ve only played 17 shows on my most recent album; I don’t really care about touring. I don’t like traveling all the time, and I don’t like to play stuff over and over again. It doesn’t make me feel good, and that in turn is not a nice thing to put out into the world.”

Alex Da Corte in Philadelphia, August 2014. Photo by Matthew Leifheit

Da Corte is another artist who isn’t interested in producing anything he doesn’t fully believe in. Although offers for shows and “co-branded” collaborations arise frequently, Alex is reticent of working on anything he didn’t come up with on his own. This careful economy of output is surprising, considering much of his work is made up of the mass-produced plastic crap you’d buy at a dollar store. On a recent afternoon in his Philadelphia warehouse studio, he told me how this ambitious project began and why he dedicated months to making this baroque four-channel video installation a reality.

VICE: How do you and Jayson know each other?
Alex Da Corte: We’re really old pals, Jayson and I. We went to undergrad together, and we’ve always talked about working together or doing a show together. But it never really fit, maybe because at the time we were both making objects. We are both pretty critical of each other’s work, like old friends are. But recently the curators at ICA, Kate Kraczon and Amy Sadao, thought it would be interesting if they put us together.

They wanted to highlight parts of our work that aren’t normally viewed. When he was an undergrad, Jayson was mostly making text work, and now he’s making paintings and things, which he shows at Salon 94. They were really interested in his use of language, and him as a critic, the way they seem him criticizing on Instagram or Twitter. He’s really active on those platforms, and the curators recognized that part of his work as being really powerful. Similarly, they knew I made videos, but had never really shown them.

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports (video still) courtesy of the artists and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Joe Sheften Gallery, and Salon 94

How long have you been making videos?
Well, I studied film and animation in undergrad—and made several videos in the early aughts—but I have been making videos more frequently for the past five years. I think about film and video all the time. But I tend to make objects, and if the videos happen, they just end up on my Vimeo. They have been kind of outside of my world of making.

ICA wanted to focus on the parts of our practice that are lesser known, and that was something that finally made us excited about what we might do. If the show was just an object with an object, like one of Jayson’s sweater painting with one of my sculptures, that wouldn’t seem married the same way. This becomes much more intimate.

Alex Da Corte's studio, August 2014. Photo by Matthew Leifheit

Were the videos made entirely by you, or did Jayson and Dev have a hand in their production as well? Their aesthetic is clearly yours; they look a lot like your work.
The title Easternsports was taken from a poem Jayson wrote in the early 2000s, where he was talking about fantasy and accessing and fetishizing what is outside our grasp. He likened the ways in which we adopt other cultures and schools of thought to sport. Jayson and I are both interested in allegory, and myths, the worlds that we create in second life, or travel via video games, and how these runs close to, or are a reflection of the past in some ways. There’s all of this mirroring happening. So the ideas very much came from both Jayson and I. Because the prompt was video with language, it made sense for me to generate the images, and then for Jayson to respond to that and construct a dialogue or a script that could run over the top of it. There are subtitles in the videos, because the narration is spoken in French.

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports (video still) courtesy of the artists and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Joe Sheften Gallery, and Salon 94

Why French?
Francophilia is one of the sports we were thinking about—and how that particular lifestyle choice is performed. How does it broaden or elevate one's philosophical stance, or not when performed in a country that is largely English-speaking?

Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson: Easternsports (video still) courtesy of the artists and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Joe Sheften Gallery, and Salon 94

There’s also something really stylish about having French narration and subtitles.
Yes its funny and romantic, but also "cool" and exotic. Its completely absurd to think that the French are all wearing black-and-white striped T-shirts and quoting Bauldrillard all day long while smoking cigarettes, but... what if?

That sounds funny.
Yeah they’re funny. I think they’re funny. Jayson is really funny.

Easternsports will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia through December 28.

Matthew Leifheit is the photo editor of VICE. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo Courtesy of Karim Jabbari, the artist.

Karim Jabbari is a 36-year-old street calligraphy artist with a small goatee, faint moustache, and short black hair. In the summer of 2015, he plans to host the third street calligraphy festival where Tunisian artists struggling with post-revolution unemployment and poverty can come together to find renewed hope through their talent.

It all started in April 2013 when the prison warden learned about Jabbari’s work from a mutual childhood friend. That month, while Jabbari was living in Montreal, the warden called him to come back to his hometown Kasserine, an impoverished city in west Tunisia located next to the Algerian border. The prison is situated in the heart of the town, behind a 260-yard wall that was destroyed from rioting on the final day of the revolution and rebuilt just two weeks later. With the region historically neglected by the government, the warden wanted Jabbari to organize an event that empowered youth and helped disassociate the prison from police corruption. 

“I wanted to design the longest calligraphy wall in the country,” said Jabbari. “I knew that since I was from Kasserine, the project could have a deeper impact.”

After Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, dreams of a better future gradually faded for many living within the country.  Faced with rising unemployment, drug smuggling, and threats of terrorism affecting Kasserine, Jabbari returned home in July 2013 to host “Toward the Light,” the city’s first street calligraphy festival.

Inspired by the work of Abou El Kacem Chebbi—a classical Tunisian poet from the 1920s—Jabbari selected a verse from his writings to guide the direction of his project.

“You have to struggle on the path of life because life doesn’t wait for those who are asleep,” recited Jabbari in a small café in downtown Kasserine. “I wanted these kids to realize that they couldn’t rely on our government to help them.  They needed to take action for themselves.”

When Jabbari began his project, many young Tunisians quickly discounted him as a stranger who couldn’t possibly fix the community’s issues with his work. That didn’t deter him. He answered that while he didn’t only grow up amongst the poverty of Kasserine, his father had also served two of his 13 years in prison behind that very wall. 

Jabbari’s father’s affiliation with Ennahda—an Islamic political party outlawed under former dictator Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali—led to his unlawful arrest, torture, and a sentence for his political opposition. Because of his father, “Toward the Light” represented more than a practice of community empowerment. It also provided Jabbari with an opportunity to attribute new meaning to the wall, which had reflected a harrowing time in his family’s past.

“I was anxious during the days my father watched me paint,” Jabbari told me, while we drove down the streets where he grew up.

“Watching my son paint the wall helped disguise the memories of repression it inflicted,” Abdullah told me, after welcoming me into his house.

As Jabbari’s story about his father spread, his critics joined him. With the wall as the main focus, Jabbari also organized spoken word and calligraphy workshops to attract the youth in the city. Within days, “Toward the Light” pulled young artists to the wall while dragging others away from smuggling and violence.

“When I first walked past the wall and saw the sound system turned on, I grabbed the microphone and started rapping,” said Hamse Ichawi, a 19 year-old-local MC.

Jabbari had been looking for Ichawi ever since the warden raved about the talented young rapper. Once they met, Ichawi became one of 15 teenagers to help Jabbari paint the wall every day. Ichawi told me that all the sleepless nights working on “Toward the Light” were worth it; they didn’t only offer his peers an activity to occupy their time but also attributed meaning to their lives. By attracting the community to a place that was often avoided, the wall became an icon of the city.

“Everyone working on the wall became a family,” said Ichawi.

“Together, we made this city come alive,” added Jabbari.

On August 25 2013, the wall was completed, but the community celebration was bittersweet. Driven by their passion and a desire to bring a sense of continuity to the youth, Jabbari set out to organize another festival that December and to make it an annual celebration.

With the wall as the backdrop, young calligraphist’s styled the streets while community rappers staged opening performances for renowned MC’s. Humbled by their involvement, and grateful to have built strong relationships with the youth of his hometown, Jabbari vowed to nurture the talents of a generation that had always been neglected.

“Anybody can break a wall down,” said Jabari. “It’s transforming it that’s a challenge.”

Follow Mat Nashed on Twitter.

British Prime Minister David Cameron addressing delegates at the UN Climate Change Summit in New York. Photo via Flickr user Number 10

As more than 120 world leaders came together in New York City for the largest climate summit in history on Tuesday, most fell short of the sort of “bold pledges” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon called for even as they expressed vague support for the cause. While the summit was never expected to produce actual treaties or binding agreements, global elites now have just 15 months to get their acts together ahead of next year’s follow-up in Paris. If they don’t, climate change experts generally seem to agree that we’re all supremely screwed.

The summit opened with a poem from Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands—a chain of atolls (ring-shaped reefs) which may be soon be swallowed up by the sea. If carbon emissions are not curbed, scientists predict that temperatures could rise up to 9.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the next century, causing polar ice caps to melt and ocean levels to rise, potentially swallowing up atolls like the Marshall Islands. Jetnil-Kijiner laid bare the stakes, and while world leaders concurred about the gravity of the situation, few used their speeches to respond with new, tangible action plans.  

"We are the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change and the last generation that can do anything about it," President Barack Obama said in a statement that exceeded the allocated four minutes but still seemed awfully brief for such a massive problem. Referencing China, he added, "As the two largest economies and emitters in the world, we have a special responsibility to lead. That’s what big nations have to do." Besides promising a sort of knowledge-sharing initiative to bounce climate change solutions back and forth with developing countries, Obama made no new commitments, but vowed to outline an agenda in the first part of next year—conveniently after mid-term elections take place in November.

Some officials did make concrete promises. The United Kingdom announced it would cut subsidies for fossil fuels, Peru said it will better regulate deforestation, and Germany that it will not support any new coal plants. The representatives of Congo and Uganda promised to restore 30 million hectares of damaged forests by 2020, Japan and France expressed desire to become low-carbon role models, and Georgia said it will become a “hydropower giant.” Northern Europe emboldened its already progressive stance towards climate change with several Scandinavian countries claiming that they will become entirely fossil fuel-free by mid-century. The European Union in general, already quite successful at cutting carbon, promised to reduce emissions by 80 to 95 percent within the same timeframe. Additionally, more than 30 countries set a 2030 deadline to completely eliminate deforestation—a goal the UN says will have the same effect as taking every car in the world off the road.

But these kinds of actionable pledges were in large part absent from the world’s three biggest polluters: the US, China, and India. Other pivotal carbon players such as Russia, Australia, Canada and UAE didn’t even bother to send high-level delegations. Most glaringly, the heads of state from China and India—the world’s two most populous countries—were too cool for the party.

Of that group, Beijing made the most sweeping shift, with its emissary promising for the first time to work to mitigate the effects of climate change. Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli said that China would reduce its carbon emissions by 45 percent from 2005 levels.

“They're starting to realize that they cannot grow first and clean up later,” EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard told VICE at the Summit. “Their thinking has moved over the last five years.”

Prakash Javadekar, India's minister of environment, forests and climate change, said his country would cut emissions by up to a quarter over 2005 levels by 2020. Encouraging as this might seem, it’s the same figure that India proclaimed at the RIO+20 climate conference in 2009. While he also announced a plan to create 100 “smart cities,” Javadekar provided no real details.

Nowadays, climate skepticism has mercifully been driven (mostly) to the fringes of discussions of global warming, but collective action on the issue may not happen until the US shoulders responsibility and announces an actual strategy.

“Where’s the US plan?" Jeffrey Sachs, economist and special advisor to Ban Ki-Moon on sustainable development, wondered in an interview at the summit. “It doesn’t exist. With all the speeches President Obama may give about the commitment, where is the US pathway to deep de-carbonization by 2050? It doesn’t exist—they’ve never written it down.”

Without the US, other powers like China and India—who both happen to be among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations—will be reluctant to act. That’s a sentiment they’ve expressed ever since the fiasco at the last major summit in Copenhagen in 2009. According to Sachs, everyone wants to fix the problem, but no one wants to do more than others. This means fundamentally changing the world’s energy systems, moving to a near-zero carbon economy in the next few decades, and outlawing the attitude of impunity that still prevails among multinational corporations.

And time is almost up.

“We all have to decide we’re going bold together—and we’re not there by any means,” Sachs told VICE. “Paris is really our last chance to get this right." Still, he held on to at least a hint of optimism. “I think there’s a good chance for an agreement next year,” he said, “But whether that is a real agreement or a photo op—that remains to be seen.”

So there's still no international framework to save the planet from climate change apocalypse. Since the Copenhagen shitshow, the world has only become hotter and seen more extreme weather. This sense of urgency was obvious on the streets of NYC Sunday, when more than 310,000 people gathered (on the opposite side of Manhattan) to demand aggressive moves from political leaders in what has been deemed the largest protest in decades.

As it often goes in politics, actions speak a lot louder than words; judging by the speeches alone, the world’s key policymakers still have commitment issues. Indian and Chinese prime ministers Xi Jiping and Narendra Modi were MIA, and while President Obama made his speech, it was overshadowed in media coverage by the beginning of American air raids on Syria the same morning.

Overall, the rhetorical hijinks were stronger than at Copenhagen five years ago: French Prime Minister François Hollande compared climate risks to war, while Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—in fitting anticapitalist fashion—quipped that “ you cannot eat money.” In the opening remarks, actor Leonardo Dicaprio—who was recently appointed UN Messenger of Peace—said that if leaders didn’t act now, they’d be vilified by history and urged them to do something right away: "I pretend for a living, but you do not,” he said.

Even as the tone was more grave than ever, the ultimate obstacle for the international coalition will be to reach and enforce a collective agreement.

“Countries will do something,” Scott Barrett, a Columbia professor specializing in resource economics and climate change, told VICE. “They have an incentive to do something. But they don't have a strong enough incentive to do what it will take to stabilize concentrations. Countries have been making pledges on climate for 25 years. What’s new?”

When asked whether global policymakers are taking the climate threat seriously enough, Hedegaard, the EU climate commissioner, was cautious.

“I believe that today, they are taking [the] planet extremely seriously. The challenge is, will they also do that tomorrow and next week?” she asked, while questioning whether such commitments will last until Paris next year. “Everybody can say nice things on such a sunny day in New York, but the real test will be what will be the contributions from all of the countries next year?”

Kim Wall and Beenish Ahmed reported this story with support from the UN Foundation. Follow Kim and Beenish on Twitter.

Asian carp—a slimy, ugly, and often gargantuan species of fish—have taken over many waterways in the United States. First introduced in the US in the 1960s to control weeds and parasites at aquatic farms in Arkansas, the bottom feeders eventually escaped and made their way through the Mississippi River system, eating almost everything in their path and severely damaging ecosystems across the Midwest. Today, government officials are concerned that the fish will invade the Great Lakes, destroy more ecosystems, wreak havoc on the region's multibillion dollar fishing industry, and spread to almost every major waterway in the Northeast.

VICE News traveled across Illinois to see how people are dealing with the Asian carp invasion, visiting the Redneck Fishing Tournament—where the sole mission is to catch as many carp as possible—touring a processing plant trying to monetize the fish, and then heading to Chicago, where we learned that Asian carp are a symptom of a much larger issue.

Meet Bruce Gilden. In case you're clueless, he's one of our favorite Magnum photographers who won a Guggenheim Fellowship this past year and is known to be one of the badassest badasses in the business. He also shot a feature for our September magazine that you can check out here. When we asked him to film a new photo critique show, he agreed on the terms that the show wouldn't suck and, if it did, we'd let him sock us in the face.

We would like to officially present Take it or Leave it with Bruce Gilden, VICE's first photo critique show where Bruce tells up-and-coming photographers if their work is transcendent, total crap, or somewhere in-between. 

Placenta capsules. Photo courtesy of Lisa Kestler of Hill Country Placentas. (All other photos by author, unless otherwise stated.)

Sara Petit-McClure had just given birth to a pink-cheeked baby girl in Austin, Texas, when her husband asked the nurses if they could have some alone time with their new daughter. When they left, he went to the medical wastebin, grabbed the blue plastic sheet, and upended its contents into an ice chest that he had brought along. Then he sealed it and strolled out of the hospital, secretly carrying Petit-McClure’s placenta inside.

Like a growing number of women, Petit-McClure wanted to have her placenta dehydrated and encapsulated. Placenta consumption is rumored to improve milk production, balance hormones, support vaginal healing, and ward of postpartum depression. But when Petit-McClure asked her hospital if she could take her placenta home, they told her she had two options: She could get a court order for it, which would cost $250, or she could arrange to have it sent to a morgue (a loophole in the health code allows hospitals to release placentas to funeral directors), which would cost only slightly less.

“It made no sense to us,” Petit-McClure remembers thinking. So she spoke with friends who had given birth in the same hospital to see if there were any other options. “They said that they stole it with the help of their doula.” That’s when Petit-McClure decided to steal hers, too.

A raw placenta pre-encapsulation from Feel Good Placenta. (Click photo for un-obscured image)

Placenta encapsulation is nothing new. Celebrities like January Jones and Natasha Hamilton thrust the practice into the public eye when they encapsulated theirs post-pregnancy, and we wrote about the process last year. Valerie Rosas, an encapsulator in Los Angeles, has performed almost 200 placenta encapsulations already this year—and she’s even had to turn away clients because the demand is so high. Rosas treats each placenta like a work of art, photographing them and imprinting them onto watercolor paper, and twisting the umbilical cord into a keepsake ornament. From her home near Venice Beach, she transforms placentas into capsules, tinctures, salves, smoothies, or even meatballs. She recently got a request to turn a placenta into a haircare product and another to create a teddy bear from the skin of the organ.

But if placenta encapsulation is becoming a trend, it’s also highlighted the tug-of-war between women and hospitals fighting over who gets to keep the organ. There are very few states with clear-cut laws on which parts of your body you lawfully own, meaning that hospitals can decide on a case-by-case basis what you’re allowed to take home (from your tonsils in a jar to the remnants of your appendix after surgery.) When it comes to placentas, some states have come up with decisive policies—in Indiana, for example, placentas are legally considered “medical waste,” along with catheters, tubes of blood, and “grossly spoiled disposables,” so it’s illegal for women to take them home postpartum. In Oregon and Hawaii, women are legally guaranteed the right to take home their placentas, thanks to recent legislation. But everywhere else, it’s a legal gray area.

That’s why in states like Texas, where Petit-McClure gave birth, hospitals have a reputation for being hostile toward women who ask to take home their placentas. “As crunchy as Austin is, all of their hospitals require court orders,” says Carrie Ahr, a placenta encapsulator in central Texas. “Dallas is really bad.”

It’s not just that hospitals make it difficult for women—lacking statewide regulations, Ahr said that hospitals can arbitrarily change their policies or outright refuse to let women have their placentas. She recalls clients who have been told that taking home their placentas is illegal in Texas (it isn’t), and recently one of her clients gave birth at a Scott & White Hospital in Texas only to discover that they had changed their policy and now required that the mother present a court order to have it, even though they had previously told her that she didn't need one.

“The day she birthed her son, she was in the courthouse trying to get a court order for her placenta,” Ahr recalled. “It’s so difficult and expensive to do that, and I felt so bad that I hadn’t been privy to the change.”

Placenta capsules. Photo courtesy of Brenda Ojala of Placenta Works

Lisa Kestler, who has encapsulated over 400 placentas, says this experience isn’t uncommon. “We’ve even had placentas at the hospitals where the funeral director goes to pick up the placenta and the placenta is ‘accidentally’ thrown away,” she told me. And “some Baylor Hospitals won’t even release to moms with a court order.”

If it isn't legally defined, then why are hospitals so reluctant to give women their placentas? Ahr thinks the issue ought to be as simple as releasing the hospital of its legal responsibility, which they should be able to do with a signed waiver. “Then they couldn’t be held liable. Like, ‘Please don’t sue us if you take your placenta home and choose to eat it.’”

Liability is certainly part of the issue, but it's not the whole story, according to Dr. Mark Kristal, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Buffalo. Dr. Kristal is recognized as the foremost expert on placentophagia (consuming one’s own placenta) and he points out that hospitals don’t want to be accountable for the effects of placenta encapsulation, especially since there aren't any scientific studies on the effects of placenta encapsulation. (There was a survey from 2013 that suggested that most women who consumed their placentas had positive experiences, but the population of this survey was likely self-selecting.)

Despite the benefits that women report from their placentas, we don’t know very much about the organ itself. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has called the placenta “the least understood human organ and arguably one of the more important, not only for the health of a woman and her fetus during pregnancy but also for the lifelong health of both.”

Valerie Rosas wears an "I Heart Placenta" apron as she prepares a placenta for dehydration (Click photo for un-obscured image)

What we do know about placentas is that they’re incredibly valuable—not just for new mothers, but for biomedical research. Dr. Kristal pointed out, with slight hesitancy, that research hospitals could have a financial motive to keeping women’s placentas given that “a lot of bigger hospitals have—or, at least, had—contracts with pharmaceutical and cosmetic houses to sell the placentas.” The hospitals I spoke with denied this allegation, but it's perhaps worth noting that Baylor Hospitals—which is notorious for refusing to let moms take home their placentas—is also part of a national study to evaluate the efficacy of using cells derived from human placenta to treat Crohn’s disease. (Baylor would not return my calls for comment.) Placentas have been proposed as a viable alternative to stem cells in biomedical research, and a hospital in the UK came under fire several years ago when it was discovered that they were selling discarded placentas to a biomedical company.

Given the ambiguity of placenta policies, some women—like Anne Swanson—have taken their experiences to court in an attempt to coax legal change. Swanson, who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, had planned a homebirth when she was pregnant in 2007. But when her baby took a turn, she had to transfer to Sunrise Medical Center for a C-section. Swanson was forthright about her intention to keep her placenta: “I reiterated my request several times to different nurses and to the surgeon once he entered the operating room. I again asked for the placenta as my daughter’s cord was cut and as her placenta was removed from my body. My husband and I reminded my postpartum nurse frequently that we wanted it and asked when it would be returned to us.” She had also brought along signed legal documents, which released the hospital of any liability.

Placenta artwork. Photo courtesy of Brenda Ojala of Placenta Works

But the nurses gave her wishy-washy answers. “I was constantly told that it wasn’t a standard request and that they, the nurses, would pass my request along.” Eventually, a hospital risk management lawyer arrived to tell Swanson she couldn’t have it, as her placenta would be considered "medical waste." (There is no law in Nevada that necessitates this.)

Swanson left sans placenta, but told the hospital that she would be seeking an injunction and asked that they freeze her placenta, to preserve it, until she could reclaim it. It took three months of court battles for Swanson to finally have her placenta released to her—but when she went to collect it, Sunrise Medical Center informed her that the placenta had been "cross-contaminated with another patient’s medical waste” before it had been frozen, rendering it useless to her.

There’s a silver lining, though: Because of the growing popularity of placenta encapsulation, there’s increasing pressure on states and hospitals to revise their policies. Although Sunrise Medical Center insisted that Swanson’s case was an “isolated” incident at the time, they revised their hospital-wide policy about a year later, and now allow moms to take home their placentas without a court order. Other states are adopting similar laws, too. Until 2010, many New York hospitals would only release placentas to funeral directors, a policy that has since been revised. Other hospitals and birthing centers, like this one in Dayton, Ohio, require mothers to wait 72 hours before they can take home their placenta—a timeframe that’s largely arbitrary, but still allows access to persistent moms.

Placenta capsules. Photo courtesy of Brenda Ojala of Placenta Works

Other encapsulators say that, as the practice becomes more widespread, more hospitals are aware of women's interest in keeping their placentas and are easier to negotiate with. Brenda Ojala, a veteran placenta encapsulator in North Carolina, told me she’s never lost a placenta in the seven years that she’s been in this line of work, though she does bring hospital liability release forms to each birth. Rosas told me she’s never had a problem picking up a placenta in Los Angeles, either. But they both say that taking home your placenta should be your right—not something left to the discretion of an individual nurse or doctor.

Kestler, who encapsulates in central Texas, went so far as to call this a "civil rights issue." She believes the final word should come from statewide laws, like the ones in Oregon and Hawaii, that secure a woman's right to go home with her placenta. “If you can take your tonsils home," she suggested, "why not your placenta?”

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

All photos by the author 

Japan is one of the world’s foremost recyclers. In 2010, 77 percent of the country’s plastic waste was recycled, and recent reports put the figure for total amount of wastage sent to landfills at a relatively low 16 percent (the comparable US figure is close to a shameful 70 percent).

However, the level of packaging wastage throughout Japan is in complete contrast to the country’s recycling efforts. I don’t want to give anyone a lesson in how to sustain a green economy—I take 20-minute showers, after all—but when I visited Japan it struck me almost instantly that the culture has a serious packaging fetish. Walking through the supermarkets, my eyes were drawn to fruit that you’d expect to be naked and out in the open, but were instead hibernating inside three layers of plastic and cocooned in foam netting.

Individual bananas were enveloped in whole sheets of cellophane before being sold, the condensation building up inside the packaging. I stood, holding my sweaty banana, wondering what was wrong with the natural, biodegradable skin around it. Every corner shop stocked these abominations.

Restaurants were no different; instead of plastic chopsticks that could be washed after use, you were provided with an endless supply of disposable wooden ones. I’m not suggesting this is the sole reason why Japan is destroying Siberia’s forests, but it could well be one of them. Reusable cloth napkins were nonexistent as well, replaced with paper napkins, aprons, and bibs. Obviously this happens in the UK and other Western nations, but I’m talking haute cuisine establishments here, not White Castle.

Is this packaging issue about obsessive presentation, a Japanese tradition? If so, has it now become a problem, and how can it be solved? To get a more authoritative viewpoint on the subject, I spoke to Roy Larke, an expert on retailing, consumer behavior, and marketing who was previously based at Rikkyo University in Tokyo.

VICE: Do you perceive this over-packaging issue as a problem for the environment?
Roy Larke: Clearly it is a problem, doubly so given the high propensity to consume packaged products in Japan and the high population. The only proviso would be that Japan is currently pretty good at cleaning up, so at least you don't see too much litter compared to some cities around the world.

Why do you think this is happening? Does it have anything to do with hygiene?
It is partially hygiene and regulations relating to it. Lush cosmetics had issues with packaging when they arrived in Japan, as most of their products overseas are open for people to touch and smell. Equally, the bags that cornflakes are placed in inside the box are much higher quality than those expected or acceptable outside of Japan. I don't know of any research or surveys that have checked on customers' worries over hygiene, but it's likely that some would indeed be put off if this wrapping didn't take place.

The biggest factors are actually tradition, inertia, and what the Japanese would generally consider to be ingrained customer expectations. It wouldn't do to be the only company that sold chocolates that weren't wrapped individually, for example. Equally for confectionery, cookies and so on. It's convenience: the Japanese like to keep a supply [of sweets] on them, so individual wrapping is preferred by many. (There was a Nikkei survey last year that found the majority of women kept a few chocolates in their bags at all times to help them when they wanted to relax.)

There’s also the fact that wrapping, excessive or otherwise, is seen as an additional touch of luxury. Hence the automatic multiple layers of wrapping and carrier bags at department stores—which also help to convey the brand—or the placing of each piece of bread from a bakery into its own plastic bag, complete with individual twist tie at some chains. The wrapping of fruit in supermarkets is, I think, a bit rarer, and is often used mostly for "higher end" items.

Does it seem like consumers in Japan are generally aware of the issue?
That’s difficult to answer. Very generally speaking, I'd say no. However, if you asked a typical Japanese consumer, my guess is that they'd profess outrage at the amount of packaging, but be unwilling to change their behavior. Arguably, choosing to consume less packaging is very difficult in Japan.

So it wouldn't be a simple problem to solve?
Yes and no. Primarily, it's hard to say that it is a problem. Like whaling, from Western and global eyes, it certainly is, but from Japanese eyes—both corporate and consumer—it's probably less of a problem because it's a part of life.

The initiatives that currently exist, that I know of, are things like Coca Cola's water scheme and IKEA's efforts to promote less packaging, and quite a few others, including some from Japanese brands. These seem to work extremely well—partly, I suspect, because they remain in the minority and so stand out in marketing terms. A tiny handful of supermarkets now promote reusable shopping bags—I know of one that expects customers to pay for shopping bags—but most veer away from this, or at best ask for donations if consumers want a bag.

There are quite a few government initiatives moving towards change, including the requirement to properly recycle all electrical goods, for example, and these will grow.

But—trying not to be in any way "anti–Japanese tradition"—the volume of waste must clearly be an issue. As is common historically in Japan, solving this issue may well take place once the issue reaches close to crisis point, and then, yes, it will be solved—just as with the power crisis post March of 2011, when people switched to using less power.

Japan demonstrates incredible single-mindedness and political docility when it comes to solving such problems that are demonstrably for the public good. When the landfills are finally overflowing, things will certainly change and change extremely quickly.