VICE CA

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Screengrab from The Islamic State. Photo by Medyan Dairieh

This post originally appeared in VICE Benelux

Last month, three Swedish teenagers tried to make their way to Syria to allegedly join the Islamic State. Their plan was to fly from the town of Umeå—where they are from—to Stockholm and from there to Istanbul, where they were going to jump on a bus to Syria. But that plan failed when the 16-year-old girl and the two 17-year-old boys were spotted by volunteers of anti-terror organization SATA and brought home to their—I'm guessing—outraged parents.

It's a little worrying to me, as a Swedish citizen, that the kids weren't caught by police or airport security forces but a nonprofit organization, which at the time of writing has 90 likes on Facebook. On the other hand, what SATA lacks in online support, it seems to make up for in enthusiasm. Their aim is to change the minds of young people who are on the verge of joining extremist organizations through workshops and talks. Another of SATA's methods—apparently proven successful—is to send volunteers to airports. There, they pretend to be on their way abroad, while actually being on the lookout for suspected radicalized teens.

"We are 60–70 people who are actively working with interfering and stopping radicalized youths from affiliating with militant organizations," chairman of SATA, Mohamed Artan, told newspaper Dagens Nyheter. "[Our volunteers] spotted the three youths [in Umeå] and suspected that something was wrong. They chatted with them and figured that they were going to Turkey and eventually to Syria."

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Umeå Airport. Photo by Mikael Lindmark

News about the three teenagers is currently spreading across Sweden. The reports are coming a couple of days after an announcement from the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO) that 100 Swedish citizens are confirmed to have left the country to fight for the Islamic State.

On Saturday, SÄPO chief Anders Thornberg told Swedish Radio radio that 150 unconfirmed cases of emigrated Swedes are believed to be fighting for the Islamic State—on top of the already verified 100. SÄPO estimates that there are "as many as 250–300" Swedes who have joined the organization. This means that, per capita, Sweden is among the top five European countries with citizens teaming up with Islamist groups.

With the increasing number of reports related to Swedes fighting for the Islamic State, there's a growing concern that the Swedish government is making dangerous moves in their attempt to control the situation. Sweden's Minister of Justice, Morgan Johansson, is currently trying to enforce a law that will make it criminal to participate in organizations that are listed by the UN as terror organizations. The law, which is planned to come into force in the beginning of next year, is currently being criticized for potentially stigmatizing Muslims.

Whether the law will be executed is still yet to be seen. In the meantime, let's hope Sweden's security services pick up on SATA's methods to prevent kids from leaving peace for war. Because I'm not so sure that 70 volunteers are able to keep up with the rising estimate of unknown cases of Swedes looking to join Islamist groups abroad.

Follow Caisa Ederyd on Twitter.

Ever wondered where the bulk of Australia's weed comes from? The answer is grow houses—family homes that are bought or leased by a syndicate, with each group running a number of properties simultaneously. A grow house is rarely lived in. Instead the bedrooms are converted into hydroponic nurseries watched by a rotating roster of weedsitters.

Grow houses generally pop up in nondescript suburbs with only the aroma and unkept yards to give them away. Sometimes snitches notice those red flags and alert the drug squad, which is what happened to one weed house in Rowville, about 45 minutes east of Melbourne.

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_{The house. A few neighbors found this very exciting.}

I parked down the block but could smell it as soon as I got out of the car. There were a dozen police officers pulling big, bushy plants out of a house and spreading them over a driveway. "We didn't know if anyone was home," explains Sergeant Phil Goodburn. "We got here at about noon. The garage was locked, and there were shoes at the front door, so we weren't sure." He describes how they gained access in the way you'd expect—by surrounding the house and kicking the door in. Then, when they found no one home, they called the power company. "We don't touch anything until the place is electrically safe. A lot of these places aren't done by a qualified electrician, so they can be quite dangerous, especially with the amount of water around."

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The power company found an electrical bypass, meaning the house was pulling juice for free. This ran dozens of high-intensity-discharge hydroponic lights wired to supermarket timers, delivering light to around 100 plants 14 hours a day. The plants were in plastic pots filled with coconut fiber. The police first removed all the electrical equipment and then the plants, one room at a time.

"This is our first dealing with this particular syndicate," says Goodburn. "We don't see a lot of this stuff out in the eastern suburbs, although it seems to be becoming more prevalent now. We had one a few months ago—360 kg in a factory with a monthly turnover of about $60,000. Each plant is valued at about $1,000 and this house here has over 100 kg, so that's about $100,000 worth. Because of the electrical bypass we don't know how long it's been running for. Perhaps another one or two crops apart from this one."

I wasn't allowed in the house without a search warrant, but I had free rein of the yard as the police carried out the plants. An onsite botanist officially declared them cannabis. Next they were weighed, tallied, and laid over the drive with yellow number cards to indicate the room they'd come from. Photos were then taken so court officials could personally count the plants. Last up, a final picture was snapped of the drug squad posing with their haul.

As you can see, a few of the guys were clearly mid-Movember, which worked great with the guns slung around their legs. They joked about beer o'clock and complained about the heat. Then I talked gardening with a woman who was arranging marijuana across the paving. "Tomato plants smell wonderful," she said. "But these give me a headache."

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_{They asked me to take a few shots of the group}

"I can't tell you how we found this place," said Sergeant Goodburn, "but the number-one thing is that people ring up Crime Stoppers and give information. We're hoping to make an arrest out of this. We've got a person in mind. We just need to catch up with them, although we presume they already know the crop has been raided." He explains that after everything is weighed, photographed, and bagged, the botanist writes up a certificate that's presented to the court. Assuming a suspect is arrested, his or her defense lawyer can then dispute the certificate, before a magistrate issues an order to destroy the evidence—which in this case is the 100 plants. Victoria Police have a designated drugs incinerator located in Werribee, a suburb that's also home to Melbourne's wastewater treatment facility. "They don't care about the smoke out there," says one of the Movembers. "It stinks enough already."

There's a month between seizure and the incinerator, with raids happening all the time. This raid was the second that day, with another scheduled for later in the afternoon. My final question for Goodburn is whether or not he gets a thrill from busting drug houses. "A thrill?" He asks. "No, it's hard work. All we do is investigate drugs but this is the hard bit. Ice is more prevalent and there's a lot of ice out there at the moment. This is a lower priority, but when it comes up, we have to do it."

Follow Julian Morgans on Twitter.

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Look, breast implants are expensive. A decent pair of silicone will run you between $5,000 and $10,000, and not every flat-chested girl's got that kind of money. I've heard of women injecting everything from olive oil to Vaseline into their tatas as a sort of "DIY boob job." For what it's worth, those methods are not recommended. The woman who injected Vaseline into her boobs eventually died from it.

But this video, of a woman injecting her dog's pee into her rack, has really got me stumped. (Disclaimer: This video actually shows a woman injecting urine into her breasts, so click at your own risk. It's probably the closest thing to "breaking the internet" that I've ever seen.)

If this video is real, then I'm entirely at a loss as to what would compel a person to inject dog urine into her body. The leading theory on Reddit is that the woman in question was hoping for a "P cup"—not that it seems to be working. The poor woman's breasts don't look any bigger by the end of video, and she appears to be in a great deal of pain. She also wrote in the description of the video that her "right boob were very swollen and i had a hard time breathing and feels like my airway were blocked.. and its still swollen after 8 hours or now that the video has been uploaded."

But back to the question. Why would anyone do this? Some theories:

This is some form of urine therapy
There's a belief—a disputed one, but a belief nonetheless—that urine has some kind of medicinal power to heal the human body. It's been alleged to relieve allergies, soothe stings and bites, and even treat cancer. Of course, most evidence to support urine therapy involves human urine, so it's unclear where the dog fits into the equation.

She's a camgirl
People will do some fucked-up shit on camera when it's for money. This would explain why she's filming this highly disturbing procedure, as well as why she's injecting herself in the first place.

She has an injecting-dog-urine-into-her-breasts fetish
There's something for everyone, right?

She's can't afford breast implants
As noted earlier, that shit's expensive. And the woman in this video is wearing a pink Abercrombie polo shirt, which is a good indication that she isn't rolling in dough. There's also a lot of scar tissue surrounding her breasts, so maybe she's injected dog piss many times before, or maybe she's injected other things into her breasts in order to make them appear bigger.

She's attempting hormone therapy
There's some speculation online that the woman in the video may be transgender. If that's the case, she could be (a) trying to make her breasts bigger, or (b) trying to use urine as a type of hormone therapy. The urine of pregnant mares has been used as a somewhat controversial hormone therapy, since it's so high in estrogen. The thing is, she's using pee from a dog, and that dog appears to be male. It also doesn't explain why she drank the pee afterward.

It's some sort of elaborate prank
...which wouldn't explain why someone would want to make other people think she had injected dog urine into her breast. Maybe she was trying to get more Instagram followers?

There simply is no explanation
The only thing worse than watching the entire length of this video is doing so and not knowing why. Why! Why! But there are some questions for which there just aren't answers: Is there life on other planets? Who is John Galt? What happened to Amelia Earhart? Why is this woman injecting dog pee into her breasts? We'll never know, and that's probably OK.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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A noose at the True Crime Museum in Hastings

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

When I was a kid I found a human tooth. There was a gap in a row of houses, and in that gap was an overgrown garden. My parents banned me from going there, warning me about used needles in the uncut grass. I didn't listen.

One day I went to the garden with a few friends and we decided to dig a hole. We scooped away handfuls of dark soil until we reached the roots of the ivy and the bushes. As I pulled away a handful of dirt I saw something white and square. "It's a tooth," I told those gathered around.

A serial killer called John Christie once lived in the house that occupied the gap. He killed eight people and hid the bodies beneath his floorboards and in his garden. He propped up his fence with their bones. After the bodies were discovered, Christie was hung, his house was knocked down and, later, the garden was planted.

I kept the tooth in a drawer near my bed until I was a teenager. I don't know exactly when it disappeared, but I'm assuming around the time I started paying income tax—that point in your life when you realize you no longer need an XS Chelsea strip, or your year 6 maths textbooks, or a stranger's tooth cluttering up your room. And actually, in retrospect, I'm not even sure what I had was a tooth; it may well have been a small stone that looked vaguely tooth-like. However, I do vividly remember believing that I had a piece of the Christie story sitting in the palm of my hand,

I didn't know it then, but I'd just become (or maybe not, depending on the whole pebble theory) a "murderabilia" collector.

Murderabilia collectors are exactly what they sound like: people who search for objects associated with murder or violent crime. The hobby is predominantly an American phenomenon, but the UK has its own small, dedicated community collecting British pieces.

A display at the True Crime Museum in Hastings

The first time I heard about this community was in a book about infamous serial killer lovebirds Fred and Rose West. In 1987, the couple killed their 16-year-old daughter Heather and buried her dismembered corpse under the patio stones of their house on Cromwell Street.

After the Wests were caught in 1994, that house stood empty for a while before being demolished. In that interim period someone dug up a patio stone and took it home with them. It's rumoured they built a barbecue with the stone acting as its foundation.

For a while, this story informed my idea of what collectors were like—strange, wheezy creeps sneaking into gardens and struggling to lift masonry into the back of their people carriers. They were all men, they all had combovers and they were all just one traumatic life event away from becoming murderers themselves. The truth is they're not like that at all.

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Steven F Scouller

Steven F Scouller is a British true crime writer and murderabilia collector. From a young age he's had an interest in horror films like Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs—all movies that have their basis in real-life cases. Steven's intrigue eventually led him to investigate the reality behind the films, and this influence can be seen in the sort of things he collects today.

For instance, Ted Levine's Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs is based partly on the American murderer and body snatcher, Ed Gein. A farmer from Plainfield, Wisconsin, Gein dug up freshly-buried bodies and made trophies out of their skin and bones. He crafted lampshades and masks out of human faces, a belt out of nipples, bowls out of skulls and a corset out of a female torso. Steven owns the razor that Gein used to make his human Etsy catalog.

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A drawing by American cannibal and killer Ottis Toole

It's a gruesome object—something it's hard to imagine any rational person paying actual money for. However, Steven's purchase had nothing to do with a fascination with brutality, but rather an interest in pieces that could offer new clues into famous cases.

He also has an identity card owned by Fred West, for example. Masking tape is wound around the top of the card, concealing a substance that resembles dry blood. If it is blood, the card might offer new evidence into the Cromwell Street murders.

Then there's the artwork created by an American cannibal and killer called Ottis Toole. Six murders have been attributed to Toole, though he claimed to have killed many more. Toole drew depictions of the murders that he wasn't convicted for, and Steven believes that the pictures could help to solve a homicide.

Joel Griggs, curator of the True Crime Museum in Hastings

Joel Griggs is a father first and a murderabilia collector second. He runs the True Crime Museum in Hastings and, when I visit, he tells that he wants to make it a family attraction. "My daughter loves it, and she's 11," he says.

Pieces of murderabilia sit disguised among Halloween props. A plastic face hangs from a meat hook next to an info board about Ed Gein. A flashing UV light uncovers bloody handprints on a mock-up of a sitting room wall. A noose hangs in a coldly-lit room.

When I ask for a photograph Joel poses beside a large glass jar that once contained acid used by the killer John George Haigh to decompose the bodies of his victims.

Joel admits two things: that the kids who come will probably be a bit weird, and that the ephemera he displays mustn't be too extreme. He says his museum falls on same scale as the London Dungeon or the Horrible Histories books, and argues there's nothing wrong with exhibiting pieces of murderabilia.

"I'm often asked, 'Does this glorify crime?' And I say, 'No, it doesn't glorify crime, it doesn't condone crime; it looks at it as part of society, part of human nature,'" he tells me. "Does it sensationalize it? Probably, yes, it does, but then so does a newspaper, so does a magazine."

Joel's own interest was sparked at the age of eight, when he witnessed a bank robbery. One of the robbers was a man called John Childs, who later became one of the UK's most prolific contract killers. He killed six people and cut up the bodies into tiny pieces in his bath, before burning them on his fireplace. Eventually he was caught and given life for the murders.

Childs lived in a council block in Poplar, four doors down from Joel's great uncle, a man who worked for the council's civic amenity department. So it was his colleagues who cleared Child's flat and took the bath to the Poplar refuse depot, where it was planted in a garden of remembrance. When the depot closed down, Joel's great uncle took the bath to his allotment in Walthamstow, where he used it as a water trough. Now, the bath is in Joel's dad's garden, and soon it may be in the museum.

Joel says that you never know who's going to be interested in murderabilia. "I thought it would be mainly blokes, but far from it," he says. "You get very, very genteel women who look like they wouldn't say boo to a goose."

A Halloween display at the True Crime Museum in Hastings

That said, there are visitors who have darker reasons for seeking out the museum. Joel tells me that the noose I saw earlier was used to execute two people at Lincoln prison.

"We had a birthday party here recently and there were a few people enjoying themselves, and they wanted to be photographed with exhibits. One of the partygoers put the noose around her neck," says Joel. "I thought to myself, 'I don't think I could do that.' I don't think you can disrespect a noose."

Joel has also been approached by people who want to use his items for S&M, saying they have more appeal specifically because they've been used to kill.

So how did Joel get hold of these items? The methods used by murderabilia collectors vary. Some will befriend the families of killers, or actually write to the killers themselves so they send on personal items. These items could be anything from letters and artwork to chocolate bar wrappers or toenails.

Steven says that female collectors often have an advantage when writing letters to male serial killers, and male collectors will even pose as women to lure the killer into a relationship.

Understandably, most collectors won't talk to the press about where they get their items from. If prison authorities discover that convicted killers are sending items onto a collector, the correspondence will be stopped, so it's not in the interest of the collectors to talk.

Joel, however, is surprisingly willing to say where he sources his items; he writes to museums and asks if they have anything of interest, and says he has police and forensics contacts who sell to him.

The internet has opened up trade on a global level, with websites like murderauction.com allowing collectors from America, Australia and the UK to bid against each other for pieces. At the time of writing, some artwork by satanist and serial killer Richard Ramirez is going for just under £1,000.

In fact, a portion of your income may have even gone towards murderabilia in the past, as an (admittedly very small) amount of taxpayer money has been used to acquire stuff associated with murder for a variety of reasons. The Welsh government, for example, bought the house where a man called Mark Bridger is believed to have killed five-year-old April Jones two years ago just so that they could knock it down. Then there's the London Met's Crime Museum, which has housed the property of criminals since around 1874. That one, however, is currently off limits to the public.

When you think about it, the collecting of objects that are associated with the murder and the suffering of people happens in museums all over the world; the difference between a sword used in battle and a modern murder weapon is only a few hundred years.

While it's easier to assume that collectors are strange or dangerous, it's not always the case. As Ed Gein once said: "Every man has to have a hobby."

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Photo by Craig Atkinson, Preston Bus Station, Pie and Blow Dry

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

If you really sat down and tried, you could turn a lot of pages in the space of 30 days. While we've spent over a decade providing you with about 120 of those pages every month, it turns out there are many more magazines in the world other than VICE. This new series, Ink Spots, is a helpful guide on which of those zines, pamphlets and publications you should be reading when you're not staring at ours.

Café Royal books is an independent label run out of North West England by artist/ photographer/ father/ publisher/ one-man-miracle Craig Atkinson. Running since 2005, mostly they put out books of B&W photography by British social documentary photographers, but there's no hard and fast rule. The main criteria is simply that the work demonstrates some kind of "change"—a theme Craig explained to us when we caught up with him this week.

VICE: Hi Craig. How did Café Royal come about? What was the "lightbulb moment"?
Craig Atkinson: I used to paint big abstracts and I suppose the "lightbulb moment" was deciding to stop painting. I returned to drawing and wanted a way of exhibiting the drawings that didn't rely on the gallery system. Books and zines, at the time, were my way to disseminate my work affordably and quickly. I didn't want to self publish under my own name, so Café Royal was started.

You put out an edition every Thursday. Why one book a week?
Because I don't have time to do more!

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A Café Royal book. Cover shot by Hugh Hood.

Is that pressurising? It sounds like kinda a lot of work.
The team is excellent, we work really well together. Very tight routine and excellent admin department. In reality though, it's just me, in a small room. It is pressure but not really stress, not often anyway, because it's so enjoyable. I teach full time and have two young children, so all together it gets tight—there are no breaks!

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Photo by Tony Bock, from Social Britain

What has been the hardest thing about running Café Royal?
It's only recently that I've considered how it's grown. I never had the intention of it becoming a 'business', or something I could potentially do full time. I see it as a way for me to promote great work by getting it seen and in collections and to make the books I'd like to collect. There's nothing hard really except for timing but that becomes a system that, if kept to, doesn't cause many problems. It's great fun, if it wasn't I'd stop.

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Photo by Tony Bock, from Social Britain

You're a photographer? How does that influence your curatorial practice as a publisher?
As my work has moved further into photography so has what I publish. The books initially were just an outlet where as now the books and my work meet in the middle, they kind of inform each other. So in terms of curatorial practice in relation to my own work, the two are tied.

The majority of what I publish now examines social change in the UK in some way; aspects of which my work does too. Roughly one fifth of what I publish is my own work. My interests are brutalist architecture and estates, public places and street photography specific to a location.

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Photo by Craig Atkinson

You print works in a limited run. What do people most often wish they could get their hands on?
The titles that have sold the fastest are by John Claridge, Jim Mortram and Brian David Stevens... So perhaps they are the ones. Once they're out of print they stay out of print. A second edition is sometimes (but rarely) produced, and really only at the request of the photographer. We have to agree there's a reason for it rather than just to sell more. For example, if something sells out in a day it limits the audience. It creates a buzz but long term it doesn't reach it's potential I don't think, so on occasion I might make another edition. No more after that though.

Having said all that, I think some of the slow burners are the ones that when they've gone people will appreciate. John Darwell, Arthur Tress, Tony Bock, Geoff Howard, for example. Loads of shops stock them now but out of print ones... I guess eBay might have a copy.

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Photo by Geoff Howard, Holy Ireland

Why do you focus on change as the overriding theme in the work you publish?
When I started to use a camera more, it was very much as a tourist. Then I found out that a place in Beijing that I'd shot for a book had been demolished. It was a place of cultural significance, gone, to make way for the Olympics. So the book became a record of something that no longer existed and that really simple thing affected the way I saw photography and the way I wanted to engage with it. The term "change" is very broad. History shows change. Without showing a history what we have is just surface. I think it's good to remind people, to suggest, to pause, reflect etc.

Which Café Royal editions would you recommend?
I only publish work that I love so to single out a few books is too difficult. Impossible. It's all of them. Steve McCoy's Housing Estates book stands out to me but that's because, coincidentally, the housing estate is the one I grew up on. John Darwell's topographical work and John Stoddart's Liverpool work... I could give reasons for every book.

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Photo by Brian David Stevens, from Notting Hill Sound Systems

What's coming up and what's the future of Café Royal more generally?
Recently I started Notesnotes.caferoyalbooks.com. The aim is to create a resource or reference of UK social documentary photography, and it will also provide contextual information for the books. Next year I'm working with John Stoddart, Ken Grant, Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows, John Darwell, Patrick Ward, Steve Clarke, Steve McCoy.

The future? Time will tell. I'll stop when I no longer enjoy it but right now I enjoy it more than ever. I still see the books as very small things, but slowly, somehow, I think they're making a difference.

Follow Café Royal on Twitter and buy some of their books through their website.

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter

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Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Conflict Kitchen in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is an art project, a cultural experience and a political statement—and it's a take-away. The food and signage change every so often to highlight a country that the US is in conflict with. In the past these have included Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba.

Recently, Conflict Kitchen has focused on Palestine. This earned it the ire of people who assumed they that they were unabashedly anti-Israel and one sided. The Times of Israel accused it of "serving up humus without mentioning Hamas". They even got a death threat—which was deemed serious enough that the restaurant was closed for a week. Local supporters plastered the front of the building with notes of support.

Dawn Weleski and Jon Rubin are the co-directors of Conflict Kitchen. "We realized there was no Venezuelan cuisine, no Afghan or Persian cuisine [in Pittsburgh], and we realized we were naming all the countries that the US was in conflict with," said Weleski. "Food is something we are all creative with and make on a daily basis. We also all have to eat. It's a way to create an atmosphere of security to some extent, a way for people to feel safe, and a way for people to engage with one another and then something that can eventually lead to a space to share personal opinions, or perhaps sensitive things like political topics."

It wasn't until this discussion focused on Palestine and Palestinians that it drew contempt and threats of violence. As Conflict Kitchen's Co-Director Jon Rubin Explained, "I think Palestine is just as important as Cuba in terms of a conversation that we [in the US] should be having. For certain members of the Jewish community it's a conversation that they are not always interested in having. I'm Jewish myself and I understand the sensitivities and difficulties around conversations about Palestine and Israel but we have no problem being critical of our own democracy, we think that is one of our rights—one of our responsibilities—to be thoughtful and engaged."

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Coexistence Kitchen (Photo via Hillel Jewish University Centre of Pittsburgh)

While some threatened violence, others chose to disagree in a more agreeable fashion. Two student groups from nearby universities—Tartans4Israel from Carnegie Melon University and Panthers For Israel from The University of Pittsburgh (both named after their university's mascots)—started a rival eatery called Coexistence Kitchen. Last thursday it could be found which is to be found less than a block away from Conflict Kitchen, giving out kosher, halal Middle Eastern food. It was so popular that when I turned up, it was already all out. I spoke to Josh Robertson, a Junior at the University of Pittsburgh and Member of Panthers for Israel. He told me, "The idea [behind the Coexistence Kitchen] being that when we went to Conflict Kitchen we just kind of noticed that the discussion seemed very one sided."

Elayna Tell, who is also a member of Panthers for Israel expanded, "We wanted to show in a conflict it's not just black and white, there is so much grey area, and those are the places where you are going to bring people together... There is another aspect to that conversation that isn't being brought to the table. It seems like [Conflict Kitchen] was trying to perpetuate the conflict instead of bridging the gaps to solve it."

That's been a common criticism of Conflict Kitchen recently, and one that Rubin disagreed with. He said, "We have a very small Palestinian community in our city and in our country, and some people aren't interested in a Palestinian perspective without a pro Israeli perspective. It's unfortunate, and to me it goes counter to not only what we would hope would be the best of American culture, but what I think is the best of Jewish culture. I say that as someone who is Jewish—who grew up in a culture with incredible empathy and engagement with very difficult topics. That this one has to be off the table, or has to presented in one light, or one scenario, is troubling. "

Josh Robertson was worked to set up Coexistence Kitchen and he told me he wasn't rejecting the Palestinian perspective, but trying to highlight the Israeli side of things. "For me personally, because the conflict isn't directly between Palestine and the US, it was just to showcase the conflict from both sides."

Conflict Kitchen has also been accused of not discussing violence within Palestine, but again, the people behind the project don't recognize that. Ruben said, "We've discussed Hamas several times... Violence is one thing and Hamas is another. There is sometimes a relationship between the two, but are we leaving parts of the conversation out?... What happens in the United States is unfortunately many see most Palestinians as terrorists, it's a knee jerk response some Americans have—they point right to Hamas."

Members of the two different kitchen projects seem not to be talking. "To my knowledge things have never been that open with them [Conflict Kitchen]," Josh Robertson of Coexistence Kitchen said. "I can only say that based on what I've heard from people who've tried to get in touch with them. I've not gotten in touch with them based on what I've heard and I decided not to try and interject myself upon that situation. I think it's a touchy subject and I'd prefer to stay away from it."

Elayna Tell said the same thing. "We don't necessarily have to do it with them, we would like to—that would have ultimately been the best goal—but if we don't have that option, we're not just going to just stand around and not do something," she said. "Everyone needs to be heard, especially on campus where there are so many voices."

Jon Rubin at least seemed a bit more willing to break bread with the Coexistence Kitchen. "To be honest I think its great what they're doing. It's better they do something than complain about what we're doing. We are completely open to discourse. What we find counterproductive is bullying, attempts at silencing us, inflammatory rhetoric that actually shuts down discussion."

Follow Richard Potter on Twitter

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Jules Mattsson

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

When Metropolitan Police spotted some cress, apparently the ISIS of garnish, on the back of journalist and comedian Mark Thomas's bike at a guerrilla gardening rally in Parliament Square, they deemed it subversive enough to file a report.

They filed another when Thomas organized a plastic Barbie car race outside London's Saudi embassy. These and 62 more disturbing records about the Channel 4 presenter's movements, actions, writing, and broadcasts were logged in the Met National Domestic Extremism Unit's database.

Using the Data Protection Act, Thomas and five other journalists got their hands on their records only to discover the police not only consider them "domestic extremists," but have spied on them for years. The idea of the UK being a police state sounds less and less like a conspiracy theorist's fantasy and ever more like a real thing with the paperwork to prove it.

The level of detail the police kept on Thomas is both scary and impressive. "One entry notes my presence at an anti-war demo, describing what I am wearing and what sort of bike I am riding," Thomas wrote in an NUJ blog post about his files.

"You've broken no law, you have no criminal record. Why is this stuff being recorded? Who has got access to it? Who is being provided with it?" Thomas asked his colleagues at a National Union of Journalists (NUJ) meeting about state surveillance at The Guardian on the 16th of October.

To find out, he and the other journalists—all members of the NUJ who work full-time or freelance for The Times, The Guardian, and others—launched a legal claim last week backed by the union. They want their files put before a judge to determine if the secret surveillance is illegal. If the ruling finds it so, they hope it will lead to a wholesale change of police practices and get their records struck.

In addition to those grabs featuring several colleagues being targeted, this is me being followed around a tube stn pic.twitter.com/UutzdYXcgo
— Jules Mattsson (@julesmattsson) November 23, 2014

Jules Mattsson, a young reporter who started at The Times in 2013, is one of them. "Keeping secret files on journalists isn't something you would expect in Britain. It's deeply disturbing," he said as he worked the paper's news desk in Southwark overlooking London Bridge.

"For all we know, there could be hundreds of others on there," he warned. For a story he wrote the 11th of November, Mattsson filed a freedom of information request for mentions of journalists in the Met's anti-extremist database. There were more than 2,000 hits.

"It's clear that it's not just the six of us [who are being watched]," said Mattsson, whose own three-page file took six months to dig up. "The theme running through it is that the police think I'm a bit of a pain in the ass," he said. The file even contained a Power Point slide with "an incredibly embarrassing picture."

Police are shown slides like his during pre-protest briefings to help them pick out troublemakers in the crowd, Mattsson said. He once had a police Forward Intelligence Team, which records and photographs protests, monitor him while he worked on a story from a McDonalds. Another time, a team member followed him into a washroom.

Of course, what the police don't know, they can always make up. One entry on Thomas lists him as a VIP for the state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia. Police also placed him at an anarchist rally put on by the Class War group, when he was actually performing a live show for 500 people hours away in Warrington.

The journalists in question worry that people will believe whatever the police have written about them, since it was created by an elite police unit. "I very much doubt that the police reading this file, or any other third-party they disclose it to, will be viewing it with scepticism" said Mattsson.

The National Domestic Extremism Unit (NDEU) was created in 2011, through the amalgamation of three older organisations, including the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit. The NDEU's mandate is to "reduce the criminal threat from domestic extremism across the UK" through "tactical advice to the police service" and the passing of information to industry and the government.

Who exactly is included in the database is a mystery—information is slow to trickle out. FoI requests are supposed to be responded to in 40 days, but one of the claimants waited three years for his file. But to Mattsson's knowledge, journalists are lumped in with Green Party peer Jenny Jones, a Green Party councilor, peaceful activists and not so peaceful activists. One thing they all share in common is that they're considered a threat to the public and the state.

And it's not just the police using these files. Mattsson discovered a note in his file that shows his information had been sent on to a third-party when he was trying to get media accreditation to cover an event.

"What it comes down to is the criminalisation of journalism in the eyes of the police," said Dominic Ponsford, editor of the media industry paper the Press Gazette. This has an attendant chilling effect on whistleblowers and other sources, he continued, "because people obviously aren't going to speak to [journalists] if they're under surveillance, certainly not anyone who has something really interesting to say."

The Press Gazette launched their "Save Our Sources" campaign in September, after the paper revealed that the Met has secretly hacked journalists' phones. Using the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) the police had targeted the Mail on Sunday and The Sun to get at their sources.

"If law enforcement are able to secretly grab the phone records of journalists and news organisations," said Ponsford, "then no confidential source is safe and pretty much all investigative journalism is in peril." Who would call up a journalist to get a story out if a snooping cop might be tapping the phone and listening in?

The NUJ's case falls on the heels of another launched in September by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism at the European Court of Human Rights. It charges that the UK's surveillance of journalist's communications under RIPA breaches international law. It's such a worrying issue even MPs are taking a stand. Members from all three major political parties united in the House of Commons on the 14th of October to demand the government "take urgent steps to legislate" protection of journalists and their sources.

Britain's most senior police officer, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, played down concerns about the domestic extremist database when he appeared on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on the 23rd of November.

"Some journalists are worried that their names appear on a certain database," he said. Missing the point entirely, he went on to say "from what I see, we've probably shot ourselves in the foot a bit with some of the information we've put into the public domain." But he conceded that "unless they're a criminal" journalists' records should be destroyed.

Thomas has already fought back in his own wry way. After challenging himself to take a photo of a police officer each day for 100 days, he then compiled the photos to create a calendar called "Arsey Cops," selling it at live shows.

Before Christmas, Home Secretary Theresa May is supposed to unveil a new code of conduct under RIPA. But it may still allow police decide internally whether to secretly spy on journalists. If it does, journalists are going to kick up a stink about it. "If this isn't tackled appropriately, we'll continue calling for new legislation," said Ponsford.

So far, Mattsson, Thomas, and the other journalists haven't heard from the UK's Home Secretary or Commissioner Hogan-Howe about what will become of their files and those of other journalists in the database. For the time being, it seems that the journalists are being treated much like suspected criminals.

Follow Graham Lanktree on Twitter

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Contemplation and a thorough interrogation of what it is to actually remember something have generally been lost amidst this year's onslaught of First World War memorializing. Tate Modern looks set to inject some much needed philosophy into proceedings with its exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography, which brings together photographers who have looked back at war from seconds after a shot was fired, to 100 years after a war has ended.

The photographs will be grouped based on how far after the conflict they were taken. In doing this, time becomes the focus of the show, while also becoming unstuck. The roll call of featured photographers includes Don McCullin, Roger Fenton, Shomei Tomatsu, Simon Norfolk, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Kikuji Kawada, and many more. To find out more about the intention of the show, I went to Tate Modern to talk to the gallery's photography curator, Simon Baker.

VICE: What was the origin of the show? Was it the anniversary of the First World War?
Simon Baker: It wasn't actually. That's a good coincidence but we didn't set about to make a show for the anniversary. It seemed a very good time to do it. The origin of the show is discovering this equivalence between Slaughterhouse-Five [Kurt Vonnegut's novel] and the difficulty of looking backwards.

We started off with a question: why is that between 15 and 25 years after the Second World War, there is so much amazing photography about it? As we tried to answer that question we realized that now there is quite a lot of amazing photography about the First World War.

We then started to piece together these perspectives and think about what would happen if you put a bunch of things that have the same remove—but don't share the same subject or conflict—next to each other.

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Don McCullin,Shell Shocked US Marine, Vietnam, Hue 1968, printed 2013
© Don McCullin

Don McCullin's famous photograph of a shell-shocked U.S. marine is part of this show. How do these kind of works break away from traditional war photography?
We really wanted the show to depart from photojournalism. People understand war journalism and this show is about something quite different. It's about alternatives to that. It's about thinking about war in the longterm and how it affects people. It's also about artists and photographers as people who think about the subject over a long period of time and really take on that question of how we remember things and how we reflect on them.

There's a great film about Don in which he talks about how this image couldn't be made now. For him, it's acquired more importance as time has gone on because when he took it, it was just one of a number of in-the-moment pictures. Now, this is the kind of image you just can't make because the American or British army would not allow an image of someone completely traumatized to come out.

Do you feel like the distinction between a journalist and an art-photographer gets made too much? McCullin, for example, is hard to categorize...
Don's in the show three times. He's there in the beginning, with the shell-shocked marine. Then, 16 years later, there's his first foreign assignment, which is when he went to Berlin in the 1960s. It looks like the war is still going on, even though it's 16 years after it ended. At the end of the show, one of the last works is by him. It's his photograph of the Somme, which he made in 2000 and is very poetic and very tied up with memory. You can kind of tell the whole show just by Don's work because it's three different ways to think about conflict.

Also, the Berlin series is important because it insists that conflicts don't end when peace is declared. They carry on affecting people for long periods of time. A lot of the works in the show are about both the landscape and the inhabitants of places where something has happened where they are still being affected, whether that's radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the division of the city, or the total destruction of the landscape, these are the long affects that this show really engages with.

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Simon Norfolk,Bullet-scarred apartment building and shops in the Karte Char district of Kabul. This area saw fighting between Hikmetyar and Rabbani and then between Rabbani and the Hazaras 2003. © Simon Norfolk

I know you've done this around the World War I anniversary but British troops are also pulling out of Afghanistan. Is that something you had in mind?
Some of the first pictures in the show are Roger Fenton's pictures of the Crimea in the 1850s and then suddenly the Crimea is back in the news. There's a series of work at the end of the show by Stephen Shore about Ukraine and now there's fighting in Ukraine. These things are going round in circles. And in fact, Simon Norfolk's work about Afghanistan was made during the early part of the war in 2001 and what he actually found were traces of previous conflicts. Even in one body of work, you've got that circularity.

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Chloe Dewe Mathew, Vebranden-Molen, West-Vlaanderen 2013; Soldat Ahmed ben Mohammed el Yadjizy, Soldat Ali ben Ahmed ben Frej ben Khelil, Soldat Hassen ben Ali ben Guerra el Amolani, Soldat Mohammed Ould Mohammed ben Ahmed; (the title refers to four soldiers that were killed at the site photographed) 17:00 / 15.12.1914

There are a lot of photos that are abstract and you can look at them without knowing they're connected to war, like Chloe Dewe Mathews' haunting photos of sites where First World War deserters were shot at dawn—though they are of empty pieces of landscape, you project the whole scene onto them...
It's really noticeable as time goes on because there are less obvious things to photograph. Kikuji Kawada, who made The Map (1965), one of the most famous Japanese photo books of the 20^th century, went to Hiroshima with a documentary photographer, Ken Domon, and while Domon was looking around for things to photograph Kawada noticed these stains on the ceiling of the cellar of the hypocentre, which was where the bomb landed. He started having nightmares about these stains spreading and then he photographed them extensively.

As the years go on, photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki become a lot more graphic, a lot angrier, tougher and more determined. In Shomei Tomatsu's 11:02 Nagasaki,you have the famous pictures of keloid scarring, melted bottles, bone fused into a helmet and the watch that stopped at 11:02, when the bomb hit. The affects of the radiation were so long lasting that you could be a documentary photographer and go to Nagasaki in 1970 and still find people struggling to live on a daily basis, with problems relating to the bombings.

This is something that's key to the show. You have the notion of a conflict and you have the notion of it ending. And then you have these things that continue to echo. Most people think of photography as being about the moment but actually photographers are commonly engaged in much more research-based and longer-term practices that become a whole book rather than a five-page spread in a magazine.

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Toshio Fukada,The Mushroom Cloud - Less than twenty minutes after the explosion (1) 1945; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Tokyo, Japan)

You talked about the anger that builds in the work on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A lot of people think of anger in relation to war, how much anger is there in this show?
We're not proposing that there's no judgement to be made about the events but we're stepping back and presenting the artists' points of view. So where an artist has a particularly strident view about something, we are presenting that in terms that are appropriate.

We started with Kurt Vonnegut andSlaughterhouse-Five, which is an angry book but also a very funny book in which the anger is displaced in very interesting ways. Vonnegut's inability to write the book is the most important thing about it. It took him 24 years to write it and he says that he must have written 5000 pages and thrown them all away. The introduction is really interesting because it's all about him trying to travel back and remember—but he can't really—and I think that the anger, such as there is in Vonnegut, is a self-excoriating sense of self-consciousness.

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Luc Delahaye,US Bombing on Taliban Positions 2001
C-print; 238.6 x 112.2 cm. Courtesy Luc Delahaye & Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles

What do you think of the memorialising of the First World War this year?
I think, as with anything like this, it tells us a lot about the current state of cultural memory and how cultural memory operates. There have been a lot of memorials that are to do with these stories of individuals, through genealogy and learning about what happened to individuals and this psycho-biographical sense of what happened to one person who was standing for something bigger. This kind of memorialising, which is to do with the internet and the fast-flow of information and how people now research things, is not so much about the actual process of remembering, but more about giving us a lot of detail and information.

We thought that photography works in quite a different way, in that it's quite open and it deals with things in an emotional way and in a reflective way. We wanted to think about the mechanics of memory: how do we remember? Vonnegut says people aren't supposed to look back. The first thing you read when you come into the show is his line, "People aren't supposed to look back." He says that if you look you become frozen "like a pillar of salt" but actually his book is a masterpiece, it's completely not a frozen narrative; it's super-innovative and Avant-garde.

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Ursula Schulz-Dornburg,Kurchatov - Architecture of a Nucleur Test SiteKazakhstan. Opytnoe Pole. 2012. courtesy of the artist's studio. © Ursula Schultz-Domburg

And I think that experimental, artistic approach is present in your show because it looks at conflict in such a different way
We're trying to show different kinds of images about the same kinds of places. A lot of the earlier First World War photos are about battlefield tourism, which is an unusual way to look at it. We're thinking about the Second World War primarily in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Berlin. There are very few dead bodies in the show. There are very few soldiers in the show. There are a lot of images that deal with the affect on civilian populations and on places.

Is that because we've seen a lot of dead bodies?
I think it's also because we're interested in showing artists and photographers who have a longer term, reflective practice. We could have done a photojournalism show, which would also have been interesting, with all of the same conflicts told through pictures of action. But that is not what we're interested in. We're interested in what it means to look backwards and whether it's possible and how photographs can do it.

Thanks Simon.

Conflict, Time, Photography runs from 26 November 2014—15 March 2015 at Tate Modern

Follow Oscar Rickett on Twitter

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Gogo Philip earrings, Adidas jumper

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX DE MORA
ART DIRECTION AND STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Photographer's assistant: Theo Cottle
Stylist's assistant: Thomas Ramshaw and Mali Hood
Set and props: Marisha Greene
Hair: Sami Knight using Tigi Bedhead
Makeup: Crystabel Riley at Stella Creative Artists using MAC cosmetics
Nails: Cherrie Snow from WAH
Words: Grace Medford

Historically, female R&B artists do not necessarily come to the fore fully formed. For every Rihanna, there's a Shontelle, an Alexis Jordan or a Kristinia DeBarge. A lack of creative control, an uncertainty about direction or poor management and label decisions often results in a ropey first album with barely a hit to propel them into the second, if they even make it that far.

Tinashe's foundation is more solid, forward-thinking and assured—it's evident that she's both the face and brains of her operation. In fact, with Tinashe, we're probably looking at the most multi-faceted star to launch into the mainstream arena this year. She started as a child model, a member of a girl band and had a recurring role in the TV show Two and a Half Men. Her music career began with three mixtapes, which she wrote, performed, produced and engineered. This year, she steamrollered into the Billboard Top 40 with her bumping debut single "2 On" and earned a Top 20 album with her first studio release, Aquarius—a slick, innovative R&B record. She also found time to donate a track, "The Leap," to the newly released soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One, curated by Lorde. It's worth pointing out that Tinashe only turned 21 this year.

She'd just finished having her nails decked out in a Union Jack flag pattern when Noisey speak to her about teenage rebellion, first drunken experiences and being a woman in a male-dominated industry.

Keep on scrolling for the rest of the shoot, and go here to read the full interview.

Gogo Philip earrings, Fila jacket

Gogo Philip earrings and ring, Nordic Poetry scarf, Adidas top, Ellesse shorts, Kickers shoes

Gogo Philip earrings and ring, Bill†Mar top and trousers

Gogo Philip ring, top from Black Heart Vintage, Edwin jeans

England shirt from JD Sports

Gogo Philip earrings, top from Vintage Style Me

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Photo by Dana Boulos (not of the author)

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Dating apps were invented so people could idly pass time scrolling through the faces of strangers they might want to have sex with. But there are plenty of other uses for these apps that aren't being exploited. For example, making someone believe you actually like them, getting them to buy you stuff, then disappearing forever.

We thought we'd trial that potential usage by asking three writers—a straight girl on Luxy, a gay guy on Grindr, and a straight guy on Tinder—to use their respective app to blag as much free stuff as they could, armed only with a 3G phone and a concerning lack of guilt.

I like champagne, expensive cheese, and silk sheets. Unfortunately, I picked the wrong career path. I mostly subsist on frozen pizzas and can't afford so much as an overnight in a Southampton Travelodge.

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So thank fuck for Luxy. Billed as a kind of "Tinder minus the poor people," it offers to "income verify" its members to ensure that only the highest caliber young ballers British society has to offer are able to bang each other. According to the app, its "successful and attractive" members include CEOs, pro athletes, doctors, lawyers, investors, and celebrities. To break into this exclusive dating pool, I just had to sign up and convince my dates that I was one of them.

The initial signs were promising. In the space of a couple of days and a few flirty messages, I had been promised flights across the world, opera tickets, and stays in swanky hotels.

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But I wanted to see how much I could score in the space of one evening—in exchange for nothing more than my own dazzling conversation. I used Friday night and the following morning to set up dates for Saturday night. I told all three Luxy guys to meet me in Sloane Square, Chelsea, to maximize the monetary value of my potential score, and arrived dressed in my most demure jewelry and an ugly pair of kitten heels.

My first date was with a guy we'll call Piers.* We had arranged to meet at the Botanist, a swanky cocktail bar in the corner of the square, at 5 PM. Piers was 20 minutes late, but I lacked the gall to be too outraged, considering I was about to catfish him.

Piers didn't apologize for his tardiness. I grabbed a menu, eager to get some free booze. But he closed it for me with a smile that seemed to say, "Darling, there's no need for that tonight. Piersy will look after you."

He went off and brought back something called a Lavender Bloom—his "usual," and the most expensive. It tasted like mothballs and potpourri. No matter, I thought. I had got my first drink and things were well on the way. All I had to do was talk to him. He did something in corporate law, which sounded very boring. All that listening paid off, though, because he offered to take me to Paris the following weekend.

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I kept my story as close to my own as possible, to avoid slipping up over lies. I was Hannah Ramazanov, half German, half Russian, but brought up in London. Born in Battersea, I'd inherited a media company and spent my days swanning around Harrods and investing in property. OK, so maybe it wasn't that close to home. I guess I got carried away at some point.

"You look really familiar," he said. I didn't know him from anywhere. I don't move in circles where men expose their chest rugs and have names like Piers, so I hoped that he was just mistaking me for another bleached-blond Chelsea girl. "Let me think about it while I get us another drink," he said.

This time, he came back with a Botanist champagne cocktail. This one was equally unpleasant, but hey-ho, it was booze, so down my throat it went. He'd also ordered some oysters, which I can only assume was his idea of a suave move. Mollusk in hand, he told me many people believe they're an aphrodisiac. Obviously, along with the rest of the Western world, I already knew this. Piers was becoming a little tiring.

But I didn't have to stick with him for long. Five oysters deep, he had a lightbulb moment. "I know where you're from. You look like this girl in an article I read the other day." I laughed the shrill nasal squawk of a rich, older woman. "Impossible," I snorted, waving him away. He got out his phone to try to show me. I said something about powdering my nose and just walked out of the restaurant.

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Unlike Piers, my second date, Henri, was on time to meet me at the station. He told me he didn't want to go for a drink around Sloane Square as it was too pretentious. We got to a bar and he immediately opened up a tab with his credit card.

Two more champagne cocktails down, and we were getting on swimmingly. He talked to me about how he worked at a well-known music corporation. After the incident with Piers, I did feel slightly nervous. It was a little too close to home. When he started bringing up record labels and music journalism, I thought the game was up once more. But we nattered about Metallica and J-pop until I managed to change the subject.

Because Henri was less boorish, I was being asked a lot of questions between sips of champagne. And questions meant answers. Where did I live? Which media company did I own? Where did I own property? He pushed for details, and while I tried to remain elusive, I was losing track of my convoluted lies. This must be what it's like to work in PR, I thought.

My vague answers just seemed to spur him on. He showed me the app from his side of the game. "Look, all these girls, they're gold diggers," he smirked, before inviting me to see Lady Gaga with his VIP tickets. By the time Henri adamantly told me that he was going to buy me dinner, I began to suspect that he was testing me. I wasn't going to find out either way, because I had dinner plans elsewhere.

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After making my excuses, I met date number three at 8 PM at a restaurant called Colbert in Chelsea. On entering, the maître d' asked whose name the table was booked under. I was pretty pissed at this point and had to check Luxy for the name. "Tarquin," I told her. She said there were two Tarquins eating at 8 PM and offered me two surnames. I had no idea. Luckily, a man was already waving me over excitedly. "I hope you don't mind," he said, "but I took the liberty of ordering some champagne."

By this point I was the kind of ravenous you only get when you're wasted in your kitchen at 4 AM. There was a bucket of fancy bread on the table. I dunked it in butter and shoved it in my mouth like I was at a pie-eating contest. Tarquin seemed to take pleasure in this. "I like a girl with an appetite," he chuckled appreciatively. "Sorry," I said. "I haven't had a bite since brunch."

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When the waiter came over, Tarquin asked me if I would like to pick the booze. I chose red wine and let my date pick one of the priciest. I wanted something I couldn't afford for the meal. I was initially going to go for halibut, but didn't want to look trashy. So I ordered the second-most expensive fish dish and two sides of fries in case it was those tiny portions you get in fancy restaurants.

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We chatted about his numerous trips to the Proms, Chopin, hunting, and our mutual interest: gourmet dining. There were no sexual undertones whatsoever. It was like going for dinner with your wealthy, Tory uncle. I had a ridiculously priced ice cream and conveniently excused myself to use the ladies' room while he got the bill.

Walking back to the station, Tarquin made plans for the following week. "I'll book dinner at the Savoy first thing," he said. After a pause and very unsubtle side-eye, he quietly added: "And a stay, perhaps? The timeless suites, I think, would be particularly suitable."

That was my cue to leave. But I could have blagged on. Henri was demanding I meet afterwards for champagne and more. Piers was under the illusion our date didn't go horribly and already wanted me to meet him in the bar at Claridge's the following day. Another guy that had canceled that morning was incessantly messaging me and then somehow managed to find me on Facebook.

That was the problem with these Luxy men. They saw something they liked and didn't want to wait. After each of them bought me something, I felt like I had entered into a financial contract. Nice things for me, a sleepover for them. It was like Pretty Woman ,only I wasn't prepared to hang around long enough with any of these guys to find out if there was a happy ending, just long enough to eat and drink my way through half a month's rent.

*Names have been changed.

Michel Ferrari and his son, Jérôme. All pictures courtesy of Michel Ferrari and Éditions L'Archipel

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

On March 25, 1990, a group of gangsters rushed behind the vault doors of the UBS central bank in Geneva, Switzerland, neutralizing the internal security of the building with a disconcerting ease.

After spending an hour and 45 minutes in the main vault, they fled with 220 kilos of banknotes from Italy and Northern Africa, worth the current equivalent of $44 million. The police never found the loot and all suspected robbers were acquitted, except Michel Ferrari—the brains of the operation—who ended up behind the bars of Geneva's Champ-Dollon prison.

Since a 1963 attack on the Glasgow-London mail train in 1963—during which British gangsters stole $4 million in transit to the Bank of England—about a dozen robberies have been dubbed "heist of the century" by the media. If all these robberies involved the theft of an astronomical amount of money, each of them, too, had its own particularities.

The Antwerp Diamond heist, for example, saw Italian crooks entering a bank dressed in shields made of polystyrene to neutralize the infrared heat detectors of the building's entrance. The break-in of the Société Générale in Nice, France, saw Albert Spaggiari and his men dig a 26-foot-long tunnel that enabled them to walk through sewers and get an access to the bank.

The heist imagined by Michel Ferrari was equally imaginative and required months of rehearsals to be implemented without any fuck-ups. "I planned the heist of the century without knowing it will be the heist of the century," Ferrari told me. "My goal wasn't to revolutionize robberies. I was just looking for a quick way to earn a lot of money—everyone daydreams about that from time to time."

The vaults of the Central Bank of the UBS photographed by the Swiss police after the heist. Ferrari's accomplices had left the equivalent of 3 million Swiss francs behind them.

In the early 1980s, shortly after the birth of his son Jerôme, Michel Ferrari quit his job as a designer in the construction industry to devote himself to another hobby of his—passing colossal amounts of money over the Swiss border for French tax evaders.

Ferrari eventually became a tennis professor at the New Sporting, a leisure center in the middle of the Geneva countryside owned by businessman André Guelfi. It was there he became friendly with seasoned golfers, diplomats, bankers, Swiss sportsmen from the Servette Football Club and French actors such as Jean-Paul Belmondo.

It was in this mundane Genevan context, "where the Mercedes was the car of the poor," that Ferrari was able to buy a Porsche Turbo 3.6 in 1993. Still, despite his love for fast cars and his name, the first time Ferrari moved money from France to Switzerland it was with a small Japanese car.

Corsican gangsters Alexandre Chevrière and Jacques Pattachini walk along Michel Ferrari, eight days before the hold-up.

Following the election of French socialist president François Mitterand in 1981, many French millionaires hastened to transfer their money to Switzerland. Most of them thought that a left-wing government would enforce collectivization and were fearing the "Russian tanks on the Place de la Concorde," announced by former Minister of the Interior Michel Poniatowski.

Thanks to his wife, Marie-Christine, who was an executive secretary at the UBS central bank, Ferrari met Georges, a wealthy entrepreneur from Nice, who introduced him to his first clients. Between two squash games, Ferrari would drive from France to Switzerland with thousand of dollars hidden in supermarket paper bags, keeping a substantial percentage for himself with each passing. Within eight years, he passed kilograms of gold bars, wads of cash, bottles of Calvados brandy, as well as tapes containing incriminating information on French clients' accounts.

Then, in 1989, exchange controls between France and Switzerland started to slowly disappear and Ferrari's income dropped drastically. He decided to come up with a robbery plan.

"It took me several months of reflection," he says. "One of my friends, Laurent Chudzinski, worked at the Central Fund of foreign currencies at the central UBS branch, where he basically had to count notes all day long. He was so frustrated that he started to tell me secrets about the bank, things about the antiquated security system, the fact that the codes had not changed for years, that kind of thing." Over the next few months, after many sketches and meticulous planning, the project begun to take form. Along with Chudzinski, he recruited Sebastian Hoyos, a Brazilian communist activist who worked at UBS as a watchman.

Some stuff seized by the police after the robbery

In September 2014, UBS in Paris was accused of allegedly helping wealthy clients avoid tax, after paying multiple fines for illegal solicitation of customers in France. When I asked Ferrari if there was a political motive behind his crime, his answer was mixed. "I still had selfish motives," he says. "I wanted to be an annuitant and never work again. But I was actually happy to teach UBS a lesson."

According to Ferrari, the bank had an obligation to repay several Jew customers after World War II, but it appeared they never did—mostly because they preferred to serve themselves in dormant accounts belonging to persons who died during the conflicts rather than seeking their legitimate heirs. "I should have taken everything," Ferrari says. "No one on this planet can give me a lesson on morality. Even the judge who was in charge of my case has been convicted of corruption."

Ferrari also claims that he saw many French right-wing politicians in Geneva for tax reasons. Yet, despite my insistence, he refused to disclose their identities because he feared "potential consequences."

Around September 1989, an entrepreneur named George visited Geneva for a couple days, in order to bring money from Italy which belonged to some Corsican friends of his. Seeing it as a good business opportunity, Ferrari offered to the Pattachini brothers and Alexander Chevrière to join him for the robbery, allowing them to recruit some men of their choice. Little did he know that he was dealing with Corsican criminals, known for being part of the powerful Gang de la Brise de Mer. "Nobody knew them at the time," Ferrari explained. "To me, this gang was nothing more than a group of chicken thieves."

After some time, Chudzinski managed to get a hold of the security codes and keys to the main vault. Ferrari planned the robbery right before Easter, because he knew the vault was set to be moved to the basement, which was more protected. He then decided to lay charges on Chudzinski's manager, who was in possession of all the bank's codes. He asked the Corsicans to kidnap him and put him through a violent interrogation, in order to ensure his colleagues remained safe. The Corsican gangsters never obliged. Which makes sense now, considering that their plan was to keep all the money for themselves, without giving a dime to Ferrari.

A facial composite of Michel Ferrari, which was published in several Swiss newspapers after the robbery.

Today, Swiss investigators have speculated that the money was used to fund the run of Richard Casanova—the alleged leader of the Corsican gang—who Ferrari briefly met the day before the robbery in order to ensure its smooth running.

The robbery took place without any problems. At 7:45 AM, four Corsicans landed at the bank and took the money. They left at 9:20A M. Meanwhile, Ferrari spent the morning at the New Sporting, waiting for his colleagues who were supposed to call him around 10 AM. His friend Ernest Späth had loaned him his fancy apartment located on the Quai du Rhone, about a mile from the bank, in order for the Corsicans to hide the tickets for a while.

Three weeks later, after finding that his colleagues had never gone there, Ferrari decided to trail them, along with his brother-in-law Yves, Ernest and his friend Patrick. They were armed with a .44 magnum, a .45 ACP, and a Sig-Sauer P228. But their trip to Bastia led to nothing.

On May 29, Ferrari was finally arrested by the police, denounced by his friend Georges—presumably driven by the three million Swiss francs reward that awaited him. He had to serve a sentence of eight years in prison. Unlike his accomplices, he took all of his actions upon himself.

After 24 years of silence, Michel Ferrari published the book J'ai réussi le Casse du siècle (I Organised the Heist of the Century), thanks to the biographer Joëlle Peltier, who, in Ferrari's words, "wrote a beautiful story out of the shapeless manuscript I developed in jail. It took several years for me to get it published. First, I had to wait for my accomplices to be acquitted. But there were also many publishers who feared the Corsicans."

Today, Ferrari manages two nail shops in the centre of Geneva. In the past, he's also worked in two nightclubs and a video store which that "didn't survive the advent of illegal downloading."

The Corsican gangsters involved in the case have never broken the omerta—they were all pronounced not guilty. Chevrière was shot nine times in 2004, as he was coming out of a trial he had won. He succumbed to his injuries only five years later. In 2008, Richard Casanova was assasinated in a garage near Porto-Vecchio.

Since then, the New Sporting was bought by Ernest Späth, who was jailed for a month for lending his apartment to Ferrari. Right now, there's a good chance he's sailing on the tranquil shores of Lake Geneva with his wife, Dona Bertarelli. According to Forbes, his wife's family possess the 92nd-largest fortune in the world. Meanwhile, Michel Ferrari still clings to the hope of collecting the fortune he coveted for years. He's thinking of adapting his book to the big screen, "preferably by Thomas Langmann or Luc Besson."

Michel Ferrari's book J'ai réussi le Casse du siècle is available in Frenchhere.

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Eva Sutton

Angry protests flared up across the country last night as a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson cop Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown in August. Rage was the expected—and maybe appropriate—response to the killing of a black teenager, but the resulting photos of burning cars didn't do justice to the emotions the Ferguson community has been feeling for these past few months.

That's one of the reasons Freida L. Wheaton, founder of the Alliance of Black Art Galleries in St. Louis, conceived of Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Artists Respond, a multi-site, multi-disciplinary exhibition that invited more than 100 artists from around the world to weigh in on the tragedy and the accompanying issues of civil rights, community safety, police violence, trauma, and healing. Wheaton wanted to give voice to all sorts of responses—angry ones but also sad ones, reverent ones, and hopeful ones.

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Najee Dorsey

The exhibition, which was organized by the Alliance of Black Art Galleries, included professional artists as well as Ferguson residents like Howard Barry, an Iraq war veteran with PTSD who was so traumatized by seeing police in combat gear in his neighborhood that he began drawing what he saw every day in the newspaper—on his actual newspapers.

In many ways, the visceral nature of Barry's work could stand as a metaphor for every kind of protest, from the creation of activist art to the violence in the streets last night: an unstoppable response to an unthinkable (yet all too common) tragedy.

To find out more, I talked Wheaton to talk about art, justice, and the community response to the show.

VICE: How did this show come together?
Freida L. Whetaon: At the time that Michael Brown was killed, I was out of town on a Southern trip, engaged in a personal-historical visit to some of the monuments and museums and places that were very prominent 50 years ago during the Civil Rights era. After two days of watching the news and being engaged in that respect, I went out to the Ferguson area to be a part of the protests, to witness what was going on—and also to just be there, because this was in my backyard, and I don't need to watch it on TV.

Then I started thinking about how the Alliance of Black Art Galleries could be effective in the movement that was clearly taking place on a national level. How could we document what was going on in Ferguson? How could we respond to Michael Brown's killing in the fashion that was done, for example, in the 60s, when a lot of artists started doing protest art?

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Howard Barry

So we came up with a broad call that would make it easy for any artist to participate: no fee, no deep requirements. All you had to be was an artist, and make some work reflective of the issues: police brutality, civil rights, voting, First Amendment rights, things of that nature. At the end, we had 14 galleries showing nearly 150 works.

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Ronald C Herd III

As you put the show together, were you imagining a particular audience?
The way I look at it, our audience is everybody. That's the reason I wanted to have multiple venues located in the city of St. Louis as well as in the county. Because we felt it was important for everybody to see the work. Particularly those people who were out in the streets—and those people who were afraid to go out in the streets. We wanted to have messaging for everybody. Also I hoped that it would encourage people to go to neighborhoods and venues that they probably would not otherwise go to, in order to see the full exhibition. So people from the city of St. Louis, who probably would never have gone to the Ferguson Public Library, had to go there if they wanted to see the two artists who were actually from Ferguson.

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Linda Lighton

People in the art world are often dismissive of "activist art." What do you see as the relationship between art and politics?
I think it is a very important for art to reflect what is happening today, or at any point in time to be reflective of what's happening in society. Some people are hesitant to be associated with art that has a social bent, but throughout history art has played that role. Hopefully it will stand the test of time and be used 20, 30 years in the future to reflect back to 2014 Missouri history. This art will be a part of this history.

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Howard Barry

Has the show been prompting the conversations you hoped it would? Has it been having an effect?
The reception of the general audiences has been great. During the opening weekend, we had to hire a bus to be able to take people to all the downtown venues! All of the openings were very full and well attended. At the Ferguson Public Library, over 600 students have come to see the show with their high school classes. White-owned galleries have been very positively responsive.

The Philip Slein Gallery in particular, a very successful and impressive gallery in the St. Louis area, the state, the region, has asked me to curate essentially a show of African American artists for the gallery. This is a first. And I see a lot of interest now in expanding the momentum for black artists, for the black art galleries, for black people, and we're here to do that.

I have a great vagina. Really, I do. I've never had a problem with yeast infections, never had a pap smear come back abnormal, never had to deal with menstrual cramps. I have the kind of vagina that deserves to be pampered, so when I heard about "vaginal steaming," I thought to myself: Vagina, you deserve a spa day.

Vaginal steaming, sometimes called V-steaming by those too squeamish to say the word "vagina," is remarkably similar to making tea. You put a bunch of special herbs in hot water, then—and this is where the tea similarities end—hover over it, allowing the steam to "deep clean" your vagina and uterus. This is said to dislodge any "buildup," and can allegedly relieve hormonal imbalances, menstrual discomfort, and digestive issues.

There's a spa near me that offers V-steaming, but they charge $50 for a 30-minute session, which seems like a lot of money to pay to literally sit on a pot of hot water. So instead, I looked up "DIY V-steaming" online and found these instructions from the YinOva Center in New York:

Pour eight cups of water (preferably purified water) into a medium-sized pot,

Place a handful of fresh herbs (about a quarter cup) into the water.

Bring water to a soft boil (with the lid on) for five minutes.

Turn off the heat and steep for another five minutes with the lid on.

Pour four cups (half of the pot) of water into a bowl you've place in your toilet. (PS put a bowl in your toilet.)

Wave your hand eight to ten inches over the herbal water to make sure it's not too hot.

Remove your underwear and sit on the seat above the steaming water.

Drape a large blanket or sheet around your waist and down to the floor to make sure no steam escapes.

Keep yourself warm by wearing something on your feet (socks, slippers) and neck. You do not want any cold to get into your body while you are trying to warm it.

You should feel a warm, rolling heat for about ten to 12 minutes.

When the steam dies down, dump the water into the toilet. Starting with step four, begin the second dosage with the other half of the herbal water. If it has cooled too much you'll need to reheat it, but test again before sitting over the steam.

If you get your V-steam done at a spa, they'll seat you in chair with a little hole in the middle, which allows the steam to rise into your hoo-ha. Since I do not own a chair with a hole in the middle, I was pleased to find that the YinOva Center recommended steaming on your toilet. This would be so easy!

Vaginal steam baths come from an ancient Korean tradition called chai-yok, which uses mugwort and wormwood to cleanse the vagina. Both herbs are associated with detoxification, uterine health, and improving hormonal balance. I had never heard of either mugwort or wormwood and thought they sounded like ingredients for some kind of Wiccan magic. When I asked an employee at Whole Foods if they carried the herbs, he looked at me as if I'd asked him if they stocked crack cocaine. So I ended up ordering both on Amazon, and when they arrived, I was surprised to find that the mugwort looked and smelled exactly like sawdust. Like, just chopped up tree bark and dirt. I also found this somewhat disconcerting messaging printed on the package for wormwood:

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Look, I just want to steam my vadge, but if I come out with psychic superpowers, so be it.

Before I set a pot of water to boil, I wanted to consult a gynecologist to make sure I was doing this right, so I called up Dr. Alyssa Dweck, an OB/GYN in New York and coauthor of V Is for Vagina. Dr. Dweck kind of balked when I told her what I wanted to do, but she ultimately gave me her blessing.

"Steam will bring extra blood flow to the genital area, and that helps with healing and muscle relaxation in general," she said. It also helps with stress relief—I mean, you're just sitting there on a warm pot for half an hour—which could be why V-steaming has been credited for improving fertility and menstrual cramps alike.

Dweck warned me to monitor the temperature of the steam, "because you could get a pretty bad burn in this area, and that would be awful" and to avoid using essential oils, which would be too concentrated for this sensitive area of the body.

With Dweck's advice in mind, I set a pot of water on the stove and threw in a handful of the herbs. Some women say that while they're V-steaming, they can taste the herbs on their tongue after a few minutes. I seriously hoped that didn't happen to me, because the smell of the herbs—kind of like mulch?—was fairly horrendous. It didn't look great either:

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The witch's brew

When the water was boiled and the herbs were fully steeped, I poured my "tea" into a big mixing bowl and set it in my toilet. It was dark—like, really dark—and seeing it there in my toilet, with flecks of herbs floating around on the top, gave me that same panicky feeling as when you take too much vitamin B and your pee turns neon yellow. You know there's nothing to actually worry about, but seeing those colors in your toilet bowl is simply unnerving.

I eased myself onto my seat, and at first, it felt nice, like stepping into a sauna. But within a few seconds, I realized that the steam was still scorching hot . I threw in a few ice cubes to temper the steam and sat back down. As instructed, I was wearing a pair of thick socks and kept a blanket on my lap to isolate the warmth. It was uncomfortably warm for a few moments, but I relaxed into it pretty quickly, as if I were easing into a hot bubble bath. I flicked my iPad on to enjoy a little mindless internet browsing and tried to ignore the fact that I could feel my vagina sweating.

I sat like that for 25 minutes, and it was honestly very relaxing. A woman needs to spend quality time with her vagina every now and again, and this was an entirely agreeable way to do so.

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When I eventually arose, I peered into the mixing bowl to see if I had "dislodged" anything into the water below. It was difficult to tell, because the herbs and hot water looked just as disgusting as before. But I felt great: clean, relaxed, at ease. Was I more relaxed than, say, after taking a hot bath? Hard to say. Had I gained psychic powers? It didn't seem like it (still waiting to see, though). Did I feel cleansed from whatever was building up inside my reproductive organs? Again, I'm not sure. The steam certainly felt nice, but as for restoring my vaginal health, that might just be a bunch of hot air.

Follow Arielle Pardes on Twitter.

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"In the Pursuit of Happiness (When the Shit Hits the Fan)," 2014, by Dan Tague (detail)

As reports of the October shooting in a Washington State high school ricocheted through the news, New Orleans's Jonathan Ferrara Gallery opened a powerfully resonant and undeniably timely group exhibition called Guns in the Hands of Artists. Organized in conjunction with the New Orleans-based citywide contemporary art biennial Prospect 3, the show features work from over 30 artists who used decommissioned handguns and rifles taken from the streets of New Orleans via the New Orleans Police Department's gun buyback program as their inspiration.

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"One Hot Month," 2014, by Generic Art Solutions

The works in the exhibition, by both local and national artists, are presented through a wide variety of mediums, including photography, prints, sculpture, and video. The pieces confront the place of guns in American culture, and often reference real instances of gun violence. Generic Art Solutions's One Hot Month, for example, is a silkscreened collection of 27 photographs of victims of gun violence in New Orleans in August 2002 layered underneath eerie photograms of handguns.

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"Kurt Cobong," 2014 by Skylar Fein

Based on a similar show mounted in 1996 during a time when New Orleans had the infamous honor of being the murder capital of the United States, the exhibition's overwhelming quantity of gun-related art renders the issues of gun violence inescapable and unavoidable. It also brings those issues into a visceral realm, impossible not to feel, as evidenced by R. Luke DuBois's Take a Bullet for This City, which is programmed to fire a blank every time a shooting is reported in New Orleans.

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"Take a Bullet for This City," 2014, by R. Luke DuBois

The first iteration of Guns in the Hands of Artists appeared at Jonathan Ferrara's former gallery, Positive Space the Gallery, in the Lower Garden District. The show was the brainchild of artist Brian Borrello, who contributed two gun sculptures to the current exhibition. As Ferrara remembers, "The context of that show was the murder rate was escalating in the mid 1990s in New Orleans. Brian chose to put this exhibition on to take the discussion about guns and gun violence in our society into the realm of art, using art as a means for dialogue and an access point."

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"Target: Audience," 2014, by Generic Art Solutions

A striking and newsworthy concept, the exhibition was featured in the New York Times, Time, and Good Morning America, which Ferrara almost missed because back then he was "waiting tables until 4 o'clock in the morning." While the exhibition garnered significant media attention, Ferrara remembers, "from an exhibition perspective, it was heavy on guns and kind of light on art."

Eighteen years later, as a much more experienced gallery owner, Ferrara decided to revisit Guns in the Hands of Artists. "The idea had been welling up inside me and every time something would happen, I would think, You need to do something. What do you do? What do individuals do in this situation? Having done this exhibition almost 20 years ago, I thought, That's what I can do. I remembered how it worked the last time and felt compelled to revisit it."

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"Carry On, Drugs, Gun & Teddy Bear," 2014, by Luis Cruz Azaceta

This time around Ferrara decided to involve government entities in the organization of the show. He reached out to everyone from the City Council to the Mayor's Office to the NOPD. While an active member of the New Orleans community, the grueling red tape–filled process to acquire the guns for the exhibition took about two years. Ferrara explains, "I leaned on my political connections to intercede on my behalf with the NOPD. It still took me probably six to eight months to just get to the point where we could get into the evidence room to meet with the police department and select the guns."

In January 2013, Ferrara, along with Brian Borrello, finally entered the NOPD's evidence room in order to select the guns for the project. "You walk in there," recalls Ferrara, "and there's a huge impound room that smells like reefer, full of impounded weed. Then there's a thousand bicycles and finally, you go into the gun room and there's just guns everywhere. They said, 'Choose them.' We ended up getting 186 guns: 160 handguns and 26 sawed-off shotguns."

Continuing to wait for a letter of approval from now-former Chief Ronal Serpas of the NOPD and eventually, finding himself maneuvering through the bureaucracy of the city of New Orleans to release the guns, Ferrara finally received the chosen weapons in early 2014—only to find that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) got involved and blow-torched the guns before handing them over. He gave the artists the option of either working with the ATF-demolished guns or taking a gun bought by Ferrara as long as it was on the decommissioned list, and Ferrara says many of the artists took on the challenge of working with the torched guns.

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"Sleeping on Reason," 2014, by William Villalongo

Artists in the exhibit range from nationally recognized figures such as Mel Chin and Deborah Luster to younger emerging New Orleans locals; Ferrara felt it was important to reflect the national scope of gun violence. Asked about his process in finding the artists, Ferrara responds, "This is not a New Orleans issue so why should it only be New Orleans art. It's a national issue that affects every region of the country. I tried to work with artists from that perspective."

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"Arthur," 2014, by Mel Chin

Not only does Guns in the Hands of Artists feature artists of varying genders, races, and ethnicities, but Ferrara also commissioned artists who specifically did not typically work with guns in their artistic practice—like Nicholas Varney, a jewelry designer known for working with Hillary Clinton and Liza Minnelli, who created a 18-karat gold and diamond-encrusted bullet. "I wanted to challenge artists to use guns as raw materials for their art in a way that was not already part of their oeuvre or aesthetic," says Ferrara. "I wanted to challenge people who were painters or sculptors to take these foreign materials and incorporate them into their practice to make a statement about guns and gun violence."

"Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun (Last Judgment) After: Hans Memling's 'The Last Judgment' Triptych (c. late 1460's), Bambi's mother from Disney's 'Bambi' (1942)," 2014, by Adam Mysock

"The Last Six, Under Six, Murdered by a Gun in the Sixth," 2014, by Adam Mysock

An artist himself, Ferrara also constructed a sculpture titled Excaliber No More for the exhibition, imbedding a shotgun in stone. "Until I did my piece, I didn't feel completely at ease with the exhibition," he says.

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"Excalibur No More," 2014 by Jonathan Ferrara

Though it took a lengthy odyssey to receive the guns from the NOPD and the city, Ferrara acquired a Mossberg shotgun for his sculpture with unbelievable and almost terrifying ease. Since the private sale of guns is legal in Louisiana, he simply purchased a gun found online for $300 cash right in his gallery. As he remembers, "It took me about two seconds to get the gun and 15 minutes to have a conversation about the Second Amendment. No restrictions, no record, I could walk out the door and do whatever I wanted."

Before placing the shotgun in stone with help from the employees at Mediterranean Tile, Ferrara felt he had to shoot the gun he purchased. "It's a total rush," says Ferrara. "It would be artistic heresy and a falsehood to buy the gun and the rock and just insert it. I felt I had to have a physical relationship with the power of the gun and then suppress it."

"War of Freedom," 2014, by Michel De Broin

In addition to the exhibition, which is open until January 25, Guns in the Hands of Artists also features an essential educational component, motivated by a question from NOPD Weapons Control Officer Earl Johnson, who asked Ferrara, "So you're doing this exhibition in a white gallery on Julia Street, how is this going to affect kids in the hood?" Attempting to answer that question, the gallery is partnering with Central City's Youth Empowerment Project (YEP), an organization working with juveniles from age 7 to 24 who have been through the juvenile justice system, to organize both a monthly series of panels livestreamed from the gallery on gun violence and a youth-focused studio series.

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"Marigny Warning," 2014m by John Barnes

Planning both a book and a documentary about the exhibition, Ferrara foresees Guns in the Hands of Artists as a traveling exhibition. As Ferrara states, "The next stage is for it to travel. What better place to have this conversation emanate from than New Orleans, which has always been a leader in murders. Why can't we take the lead in opening a dialogue about guns and gun violence?"

Reflecting on the success of the exhibition so far, Ferrara reveals, "Watching it over the last month, we've had a lot of viewers that are not art people. The art people love it and the non-art people love it. There's a visual and/or conceptual beauty to the works. The interesting part is once you hook the viewer into the aesthetic, they open their mind in a different way that they wouldn't have been able to before. Art is the access point to potentially changing the conversation."

Guns in the Hands of Artists will be on view at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery in New Orleans through January 25th, 2015.

Emily Colucci is a New York–based writer and the co-founder of Filthy Dreams, a blog that analyzes culture through a queer lens. Follow her on Twitter.

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Cigarillos like the ones Michael Brown reportedly stole from the store. Photo via Flickr user Marcus Walker

Thee following is closely adapted from the testimony Dorian Johnson gave to the Ferguson grand jury, which last night declined to indict officer Darren Wilson.

It started just like any other morning for Dorian Johnson. His plans were to ask his daughter what she wanted to eat for breakfast and then go get high. On the way to Ferguson Market, though, he ran into an acquaintance he quite liked. Michael Brown, who was only 18 to Johnson's 22, was something like a younger brother to him. Although they'd only met about three months before, Johnson thought the kid was the kind of guy he could trust around his family. He was quiet and kept to himself, and he also liked to smoke.

The two agreed to smoke weed together, and Brown joined the quest to procure cigarillos, presumably to roll a blunt. They shot the shit for a while about girls and clothes, although Brown also asked his older companion for advice on living a comfortable life. Johnson, who was wearing pajama pants and holding cash in his shoes, had escaped a life of gang violence to rent his own apartment with a live-in girlfriend.

"Basically our conversation was on future, future emphasis," he told the grand jury.

When they got to the store, Brown unceremoniously walked to the counter and grabbed a box of 69-cent cigarillos—Johnson estimates the box was worth about $30 or $40. When the clerk didn't react, the 18-year-old grabbed a few loose ones too. The proprietor tried to block Brown from walking out the door but was easily brushed away by the 6'4" giant.

Johnson was shocked. After all, his friend always dressed well, so it was weird that he didn't have money. And since he had literally just asked for advice on building a decent life, it seemed out of character for him to rob a local store. "I'm going to call the police," the robbery victim apparently said as the two headed back to the apartment complex.

It was about a four- or five-minute walk home, and Johnson tried to process what had just happened. He panicked when a car headed toward them, but breathed a sigh of relief when it drove past the store for the neighboring McDonald's on West Florissant.

They hadn't decided whose house to go smoke at when Darren Wilson approached them in his police cruiser. "Get the fuck out of the street," he yelled at the pair, who for whatever reason had eschewed the sidewalk. Johnson explained they were "a minute" away from their destination and the cop drove off. But within a second, rubber was burning on the pavement, and Johnson had to jump out of the way to avoid getting hit by the rapidly reversing cop car. "What did you say?" the officer asked Brown, although he allegedly had said nothing.

Brown and Johnson were standing right next to the officer's driver's side door. When Darren Wilson tried to get out it smacked them and closed right back— boom boom!

So Wilson grabbed Brown with his left hand through the window. "He had a real good grip on him," Johnson recalled. In order to break free of the hand on his throat, Brown leveraged one hand on top of the cruiser and another near its side window. The cop and the kid were cussing at each other and engaged in a "tug of war," as Johnson explained to the grand jury.

Johnson was paralyzed with fear by the time Brown handed him the cigarillos. "That's where I'm like, this doesn't happen every day, something is out of order here." By that time, three cars were waiting behind the traffic-blocking cruiser.

When he heard the words, "I'll shoot," Johnson assumed the cop meant a Taser. When he saw the barrel of a gun, he could barely breathe. "He was going to say, 'I'll shoot,' again," Johnson explained. "He didn't finish the sentence. The gun went off."

After Brown was hit, the officer released his grip. Johnson stopped and ducked behind the first of the cars blocked in by the cruiser. "Can you please take me home? I stay in the same complex," he pleaded to the driver, who responded by driving up on the sidewalk and away from the scene.

Meanwhile, Brown made it past the third car with the officer in pursuit. Another shot was fired, which caused his body to jerk and then stop running. He turned around weakly, his hand half in the air as he coped with his wounds. "I don't have a gun," Johnson remembers his friend saying. "And before he can say the second sentence or before he can even get it out, that's when several more shots came."

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On Tuesday, November 25, m ore than 200 Syrian refugees began staging a hunger strike in front of the Greek parliament. It evolved out of a six-day-long sit-in the refugees embarked on to demand the right to live and work in Greece or leave the country legally. Activists have told me that nine people have been hospitalized, six people have collapsed, and others are starting to show symptoms of hypothermia.

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"We will stay. We will not eat. We will not drink. We will not do anything until the Greek government or the European Union responds," says Jalel, a Syrian who has been in Greece for three months. Since the protest began last week, temperatures have dropped and the winds blowing through Syntagma Square have gone from bracing to freezing. On the sixth day, the group decided to commence a hunger strike even as one woman was taken to the hospital for symptoms of hypothermia.

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The number of Syrian refugees entering Europe through Greece continues to grow, according to the Wall Street Journal. Police statistics show that some 29,000 refugees from Syria have entered Greece in the first ten months of this year, versus about 8,500 for the whole of 2013. According to Eurostat, 165,000 Syrians have sought refuge in Europe since the start of the war nearly four years ago. In the earlier days of the Syrian civil war, those seeking refuge in Europe would mostly come in through the land border Greece shares with Turkey.

Since then, Greece, along with FRONTEX, the EU's border protection agency, has beefed up security and built a fence along its 128-mile border with Turkey. Now many migrants, mostly Syrian refugees, travel instead to the eastern Aegean islands, some of which are only a few miles from the Turkish shore. Smuggling rings put desperate migrants on inflatable dinghies and send them across to Greece. The added danger of crossing the border this way has resulted in several deaths and disappearances, most recently late last week when four people—including a little girl—went missing off the island of Lesbos.

According to refugees, part of the problem is the lack of a legal way to leave Greece and go elsewhere in Europe. One told me he tried to leave Greece via FYR Macedonia and said he was not only detained for 30 days but was also beaten by police, exacerbating gunshot wounds from when he was shot back in Syria. Others who have been caught in Macedonia have told me similar stories of prolonged detention and abuse by authorities there.

Many the Syrian refugees who have made it to Europe are highly educated former members of the middle class who sold most of their possessions to pay for their escape. They say they hope to use their skills to find work when they get to a country that has job opportunities for them. Obada is a doctor from the ISIS-controlled city of Raqqa. He and his family escaped to Turkey and he hopes to make it to either Italy or the UK where he has family. "Many of us here are doctors, pharmacists, engineers, and we need help from the European Union to resettle in a place where there's opportunities for us," he says.

Sami, a 20-year-old from Damascus, left Syria with his mother, who is now in Switzerland. He has tried five times so far to travel to Switzerland and reunite with her only to be turned back at the airport. He has made some friends in Greece and says he likes Athens very much, but understands why it is not possible to stay here. "Greece cannot help us. We know this, but this is why we need to be allowed to move on from here," he says.

Moyad, from Homs, has been in Greece for six months and has also tried numerous times to leave. "They don't want us here, but at the same time they are blocking us from going somewhere else," he says.

Some of the refugees have more urgent situations. Khaleel, a 17-year-old who recently lost his hair, wants to seek medical care for cancer after being told by a doctor back home that he has symptoms but was unable to get tested there. He will attempt for the tenth time in three months to leave Greece this week to see a doctor in Paris.

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Despite repeated threats of eviction, the Greek police have refrained from forcing the Syrian refugees to leave Syntagma Square. Over the last week, many individual Greeks and some community groups have left clothes, blankets, and food donations. They say that until they are able to escape the bureaucratic trap they are in, they plan to continue sitting on cardboard boxes and resting in sleeping bags on the marble floor of Syntagma Square, because it's all many of them have left.

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Stephanie Street as Asha Waghekar and Anjana Vasan as Manju Waghekar in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Photo by Richard Hubert Smith

If you live in poverty, you're not in a strong position to negotiate when selling your labor, your body, or your life story. So it is for the children of the slums of Mumbai who have helped solidify the reputations of big-name film directors. In 1986, Mira Nair scoured the city's streets for talent, offering boys 20 rupees (32 cents) a day to participate in a "drama workshop," which was really a kind of audition. In 2009 Shafiq Syed, the boy she chose for her lead, told the Times of India that other children were afraid this was a "game to exploit children." He was paid 15,000 rupees ($242) for two months of shooting. While the resulting film, Salaam Bombay, went on to be nominated for an Oscar and made more than $2 million in the USA, Syed wandered the streets looking for acting work. He eventually returned to Bangalore, where he barely gets by as a rickshaw driver.

Years later, British director Danny Boyle would follow in Nair's footsteps, searching the streets of Mumbai for the cast of Slumdog Millionaire. In the aftermath of the 2008 film's stunning success—by 2009, the film had made more than $140 million—a few people noticed how little the children got paid. Rubina Ali, who played Latika, was originally paid about 48,000 rupees ($785) to be in the film.

When Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker writer Katherine Boo showed up in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi with a reporter's notebook and a couple of translators, her intentions were different from those of Nair and Boyle. While the two film directors used the children in Salaam Bombay and Slumdog Millionaire to lend authenticity to their artistic visions, Boo was attempting to document slum life from scratch. Boo's book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, chronicles the lives of families living in a squalid migrant settlement and became an immense success. It was a New York Times best seller and a National Book Award winner. The people whom Boo wrote about couldn't expect their lives to be changed by the book, just accurately documented. And they were satisfied with the result.

But this month, their stories were taken to a new platform without their involvement. Playwright and scriptwriter David Hare, who wrote the screenplay for The Hours, adapted Boo's book into a play, which premiered at the National Theatre in London on November 10. The film was directed by Rufus Norris and has a cast of more than 30 actors and an elaborate set made by Katrina Lindsay that features heaps of scrap and garbage.

Projects that dive into the stories of India's urban poor can be successful if they attempt to force audiences to see the people represented as complex human beings rather than pitiful or exotic stereotypes. Boo succeeded in this realm. Hare tries but fails with the play. All the elements that an educated foreigner might associate with India are present in both the book and the play—corruption, poverty, oppressed women, religious tension. But Boo's book shows what it's like to attempt to really grapple with and overcome these obstacles. She makes it possible for the reader to imagine herself living and struggling in Annawadi.

A scene from Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Photo by Richard Hubert Smith

Many storylines and nuances in Boo's book are cut from the play, but Asha is a prominent character in both. In the book, she has dreams of being the first female slumlord in Mumbai. She does what she can to take advantage of the system, working against the odds. While her ambitions don't exactly make her a sympathetic character, you have to admit that not many people could do what she's done with the hand she's been dealt. She escaped from the extreme poverty of a rural village to become the most influential woman in her Mumabi ghetto, pulling weight with police officers and politicians. Still, she has to make compromises: "Her mind moved more quickly than other people's. The politicians had eventually recognized this dexterity and came to depend on it. Even so, it had not been enough," writes Boo. In order to really tip the scales in her favor, she occasionally has to sleep with someone. Asha's story is a complex one about, among other things, what causes and sustains corruption and why someone might think participating in a corrupt system is the only way to get a better life for oneself and one's family.

The play, on the other hand, doesn't really encourage complex thinking about these issues. We see the stage version of Asha asking for bribes, and we see her turning tricks. But we don't see the extent of her ambition, or the hard work and shrewdness that's allowed her to get as far as she has.

Hare must have felt both blessed and daunted when he was commissioned to adapt Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The material he had to work with was extraordinarily rich and exhaustive, but this made it more difficult to do it justice. Like Asha, other characters and elements of the storyline are flattened in the play. And this matters, because those are stories of real people who are still fighting it out every day in Mumbai's streets—that is, if they haven't already perished in the struggle. (Many of the people Boo observed died during the course of her reporting.) Occasionally a funny moment will come out of the sad situation, as in real life. But watching the staged version, I was disturbed when an audience full of posh theatergoers laughed while actors, trying with varying degrees of success to hide their British accents, did a mock version of the events that led to a real suicide in a real slum not all that long ago.

Unlike Boo's book, the play isn't a work of journalism bent on exposing the complex issues that lie behind the struggle in Annawadi. It is it another instance of the lives of real people getting turned into lucrative one-dimensional entertainment, while they get little to nothing in return. I can't help wondering what the people of Annawadi would think if they could see Hare's version of their story with their own eyes. But they will likely never be able to afford the $55 tickets.

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