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Jiovanni in 'Approaching the Elephant' (2015), by Amanda Rose Wilder. Courtesy of Kingdom County Productions

Amanda Rose Wilder's new documentary Approaching the Elephant follows a year at the Teddy McArdle Free School in suburban New Jersey, an alternative elementary school organized around the principles of self-regulation. Named for a child prodigy from a J.D. Salinger story, Teddy McArdle consists of about a dozen students, several teachers, and no mandatory classes. At first glance, the school day seems to be improvised from moment to moment, with the adults relying on suggestion and a loose parliamentary style of rule-making to channel the students' energies around one project or another for the day, or not. The school seems to operate in a limbo between class and recess.

At the center of this activity is the school's founder Alex Khost, an endlessly energetic and patient man in his early 30s who hated school as a child and is determined to create something better as an adult. Much of the drama revolves around two of his pupils: Jiovanni, a sensitive and creative 11-year-old boy who often becomes a disruptive and destructive presence, and Lucy, an outspoken and critical seven-year-old, who swings back and forth between being attracted to Jio and being bullied by him. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Lucy tells Alex, "I don't like the things he does, but it's boring when he's not here," more or less framing everyone's relationship with Jiovanni. Can Alex's radical vision for a new kind of school deal with a bright, charismatic kid who won't cooperate?

A disciple of the Maysles Brothers and their Direct Cinema revolution of the 1960s, Rose Wilder found a perfect subject in the Teddy McArdle Free School for her fast-moving, observational style, which arrives free of commentary or context in a timeless black-and-white presentation. This stylistic choice feels important, because it helps release the film from the realm of current events and moves it closer to a timeless study of childhood, capturing something raw and elemental about how children are that isn't specific to any decade. No matter your opinions on education or your personal experience of childhood, you'll find it hard to experience Approaching the Elephant without feeling affected.

Trailer of 'Approaching the Elephant' (2015) by Amanda Rose Wilder. Courtesy of Kingdom County Productions

VICE: How did you come across the Teddy McArdle Free School and why did you decide to make a film there?

One of things I was most impressed by was how the school charges its students with running an active democracy in order to get anything done. The idea that students and teachers are equal and have the same degree of power in the school sounds simple and appealing on the surface. Over the course of the film, you begin to appreciate how heavy this responsibility is, and it's incredible to watch children work to deal with it. It's very different from the traditional American public-school experience, which is not very democratic at all, or only in highly mediated and controlled situations.

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Lucy in 'Approaching the Elephant' (2015), by Amanda Rose Wilder. Courtesy of Kingdom County Productions

The way the students and teachers resolve their problems with Jiovanni, the most disruptive kid in the school, was really surprising. Having to collectively decide whether or not to expel a disruptive classmate is not a situation that most elementary schools place their students in. By the time we arrive at this scene, you have to be impressed at how proactive the Teddy McArdle kids need to be in order to maintain a school that functions at all.

At screenings of the film, Alex is sometimes asked what he would have done differently. While many things could have been done differently, it's hard to really do something for the first time again, you know what I mean? Everyone has a first time, and it's always imperfect. I like that about the film, that it shows imperfections and shows people not always acting the best. Not every documentary has to be about a perfect hero. Alex does behave heroically at times, but he's human and he has flaws, we all do.

What's your hope for the film? What do you hope people see and take away from it? Can it contribute to a larger conversation about education or politics or life?

Approaching the Elephant plays in Brooklyn February 20 through 26 as part of the Screen Forward series at the Made In NY Media Center.

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All photos by the author

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday the Irish government locked up five watercharge protesters for breaking a court order that banned them from protesting. This, predictably, created a protest in itself. It also came shortly after another eight protesters were arrested, leading to accusations of political policing.

Damien O'Neill and Paul Moore were sentenced to 56 days, while Michael Batty, Derek Byrne, and Bernie Hughes will remain in prison for 28 days. Two other protesters, Richard "Richie" Larkin and Mark Egan, were let off because of a lack of sufficient evidence against them.

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Members of the "Dublin Says No" anti-austerity group were found guilty of contempt of court after being told not to go within 20 meters of where water meters were being installed. A protest to "Free the Five" was held outside Ireland's revolutionary landmark, the General Post Office (GPO) on O'Connell Street, a building that still bears bullet holes from the 1916 uprising that eventually led to Irish independence from Britain.

After a flurry of anger in the Criminal Court of Justice, supporters of the protesters met at the GPO and marched to Mountjoy Prison, where the five protesters are being held. I headed out in the drizzle equipped with not much more than a camera phone (as you can probably tell from the photos) to talk to the supporters.

Jailing the protesters has highlighted the widening schism in Ireland between those who support immediate action against austerity and those who want to wait until the elections in 2016 to vent their frustrations.

I spoke to Richie Larkin outside the GPO, who pointed at the building and said we needed a "new republic."

"These protests began over the third levy for water," he told me. "The government have sold us out down the Liffey. The bankers are the ones who go into the court and walk out, yet we get locked up. We should have a new free republic. It shouldn't be politically based; we should have people in power who listen to the people."

But Richie's talk of a new republic didn't resonate with everyone. Half way up O'Connell street I met "John," who asked me why I was bothering with all "that protest nonsense." He didn't want his photo taken and wouldn't let me record him, but said the country would descend into chaos if we let "those shower of eejits run the gaff."

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John and Richie's bitterly divided opinions are emblematic of Ireland right now. Those who supported the broader protest movement—pensioners, civil servants, and the tax-burdened middle class—are pulling back from what they perceive as the hardcore activists in the capital.

The Right to Water Campaign (R2W), an umbrella group that's trying to provide cohesion for the wider anti-water charge, is struggling to keep up with the splits in the movement. R2W, headed by unions and a smattering of political parties and community groups, will not be backing a follow up protest led by the Socialist Party and Communities Against Water Charges tomorrow. It shows a cooling of relations between the "hard left" parties, the communities, and the more conservative unions.

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Tomorrow's protest will be indicative of what is ahead for the Irish left and whether the spate of arrests—and now imprisonment—of protesters has damaged the movement's reputation. Claims of intimidation against Irish Water could scare off the fragile middle class support and isolate what has been a national movement.

Paul Murphy from the Socialist Party said that while he understands groups' hesitation to support wider protests outside of water charges, the issues are all interlinked.

"I understand people don't want to get involved in campaigns about political policing and imprisonment when, for them, the issue might be solely water chargers. But it is time people took a stand against what's going on in this country—it's all connected," he said.

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Mark Egan

I spoke to Mark Egan, one of the men released outside the GPO, who insisted that the protests have remained peaceful and that he hasn't intimidated Irish Water workers trying to install meters.

"There was no evidence against us—it was hearsay. The Irish state is rotten to the core, throwing Bernie Hughes, an expectant grandmother, in prison. Dragging her from her family and banging her up in Mountjoy is just awful," he said. "We have no malice against the Irish Water workers; we want them to have jobs, but fixing the broken pipes, not carrying out this campaign against poor people."

Whatever happens tomorrow will represent an important junction for the protest movement in Ireland. Demonstrations that started against the water charges have morphed into something much broader. Support for what was once a unified challenge against the commodification of water has grown into a different animal, one that could make an uncomfortable bedfellow in conservative Ireland.

Follow Norma Costello on Twitter.

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Photo via Wikipedia

On Thursday night, Twitter was possibly the funniest it had ever been.

That was when the comedy world went into mourning following the shocking news that Harris Wittels, an executive producer and writer for NBC's Parks and Recreation, had died in his home of an apparent drug overdose. Those who knew and loved him and his work immediately started honoring his memory by retweeting and sharing their favorite jokes of his. Within a few hours, my entire feed was filled with Wittels's masterpieces and the churning knot of sadness in my stomach transformed into cathartic belly laughs.

[tweet text="Wheat Thins? Call me when they're Wheat THICKS! Gimme that wheat!" byline="— Harris Wittels (@twittels)" user_id="twittels" tweet_id="101388495590920193" tweet_visual_time="August 10, 2011"]

Wittels was a wunderkind who had the drive, the talent, and the career that so many—myself included—only dream of. He started out in the LA stand-up scene and made his name with acerbic one-liners like "Looking for a girl who hates to laugh" or brilliantly groan-worthy puns like "I hate smoking sections. Unless we're talking about The Mask with Jim Carrey, in which case the 'smoking' section is my favorite part!"

Wittels cut his teeth as a writer on The Sarah Silverman Program before landing his staff writer and executive story editor position at Parks and Recreation. Wittels, along with his friend and colleague Chelsea Peretti, stealthily snuck in the all the far-too-hip-for-a-network-sitcom jokes that made P&R beloved among comedy nerds.

[tweet text="Almost starting to feel bad for Cosby. Did NO one wanna fuck this guy?" byline="— Harris Wittels (@twittels)" user_id="twittels" tweet_id="534898422973607936" tweet_visual_time="November 19, 2014"]

But Wittels was more than just a brilliant sitcom writer. He invented the term humblebrag, which captures the barely-disguised narcissism of most of what winds up on social media. Then there were his appearances on podcasts, particularly those on the Earwolf network—and it's when I think about the podcasts that his absence really hits.

[tweet text="There should be a German word for when you don't like someone, but then you hear them open up on a podcast and you gain empathy for them." byline="— Harris Wittels (@twittels)" user_id="twittels" tweet_id="532737942155182080" tweet_visual_time="November 13, 2014"]

I've mourned celebrity deaths before. I loved Phillip Seymour Hoffman as an actor and was gutted when the world lost him, but he was not someone who had been mumbling jokes into my ears as I drove to work in the morning, or folded laundry, or jogged around my neighborhood. The intimacy of the podcasting medium is still a relatively new phenomenon, and as odd it sounds, it really feels like you know the person speaking to you through your earbuds, week after week. Wittels was one of these people. I felt I had a full grasp on who he was as a person every time he appeared on Comedy Bang Bang to essentially read tweet drafts in an awful-on-purpose recurring stand-up feature called "Wittels's Phone/Foam Corner." When he dragged Scott Aukerman to Phish shows in an effort to convince Scott to like the band (which never happened), I was taken back to high school, where my own brilliant and hilarious druggie best friend would blast Phish in his room and I would moan about how godawful it sounded.

[tweet text="If you aren't cutting my oatmeal with STEEL, then what the fuck are we doing here??" byline="— Harris Wittels (@twittels)" user_id="twittels" tweet_id="435805684299358208" tweet_visual_time="February 18, 2014"]

Can you be friends with someone you've never had a conversation with? That's the one-sided relationship I had with Wittels. I liked that he wasn't afraid to wear his personality or taste on his sleeve, and that he was confident enough to take shit from people who didn't share his loves. He was young—only 30!—he seemed to know himself, and I can't imagine not having his voice in my ear.

Wittels unquestionably had decades of side-splitting work still in him. His death marks an incalculable loss for comedy, and he will be missed by more people than he could've ever imagined.

Creak. Slam. Cry.

Wittels is survived by his fucking hilarious jokes.

Follow Justin Caffier on Twitter.

The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. Today: Muslim rebels in the Philippines make a goodwill gesture to preserve the peace process, thousands protest against power cuts in Ghana's capital Accra, Poland's air pollution is some of the worst in the EU, and former captives of Nigerian militant group Boko Haram reunite with their families.

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All images from video by Sam Gordon

I became aware of my own mortality in June of last year, just after I'd turned 27. I started working as an artist's model around ten years before that, but it wasn't until the belated realization of my eventual death that I recognized a connection between mortality and modeling.

Though it's a matter of fact that having your portrait painted captures you, the subject, at a particular and transient moment, I never thought of it that way. I didn't think about it being a past record in a distant future because modeling, for me, is a way of spending time in the present. Like being on a train, modeling is a way for me to stay still and yet be doing something. Going somewhere. Thinking about things. Getting transformed into art.

I first started sitting for a sculpture class in the North End of Halifax, an amateur session on Gottingen Street that averaged three students a week. Like most teenagers, I had body image issues, and I thought that getting naked for strangers would help solve those issues. It did, I think, in so much as I still have a body, and still have issues, but don't worry about either anymore. Later, I did it to make a little bit of extra money, but that never worked out. A male artist in his seventies posted an ad in Craigslist looking for female nude models, and, unfortunately, this did not make my alarm bells go off. I applied, got booked for a session, and felt deeply uncomfortable as soon as I arrived at his studio. The man smelled of antiseptic lotion and worked in a small room in his apartment where the West End becomes the suburbs. He showed me his portfolio of distorted women in highly sexualized positions, drawn from compromising angles. He asked me to take my clothes off—he stayed in the room watching me undress—and then he asked me to open my legs wider. When I didn't, he strode over to the table on which I was sitting and moved them himself. I never went back.

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I started modeling for Rosy Lamb, an artist friend of mine, when I was 24, which, with four years' hindsight, I can see was an age of becoming. (I'm sure 27 is an age of becoming too—as every age is—but 24 felt particularly cusp-like.) Now, I only model for Rosy. Not to get over body issues, and not for the money, but because I enjoy the process of working with her.

The first time I posed for Rosy, she asked me to get onto a table topped with a mattress and find a comfortable position. I lay on my stomach and crossed my arms underneath my head. "Perfect," she said. "That's perfect, just like that." She got a permanent marker and drew circles to mark the feet of the table as well as her easel, so that the perspective would remain constant. She also used masking tape to mark my elbows, head, hips and feet, as well as the edge of the pillow I held. Any time I took a break, or when I returned for the following session, it was important to find just the same pose again.

It was such a comfortable position, and such a comfortable situation, that I often fell asleep as she painted me. When I was awake, we'd talk about our favorite New Yorker articles, movies we'd seen lately, and our experiences making art—the similarities and differences between writing and painting. When she was working on my face we didn't talk, and I would watch her face at work.

While she paints, her face gets so worked up with concentration that it almost looks as if she is laboring to build something physical. A house, not just a painting. She's constantly looking at me—in a way that feels like she's looking through me, like I am object, subject, background and foreground, but already just a painting—and putting the paintbrush at various angles to compare the lines of my body to the straight line of the brush.

I like watching the colors she picks up and wondering to which part of me they correspond, but it's almost impossible to guess. What I've learned is that human skin, flesh, is made up of every color, really. Orange, green, purple, yellow: Rosy makes every color fit. Sometimes she'll take a make-shift rectangular frame she's cut from paper and look at me through that, because it helps her see me as a final painting. I tell her that I have a similar trick with writing: I imagine that I'm watching a film of my book, and then I just write about what's happening in the film.

We both felt that in that first session, Rosy had captured an immediate likeness—I recognized not only my physicality but my mood, my sense of self. It had just been a few hours, and the painting wasn't finished, but I told Rosy that she'd "captured my soul." But as she continued to work on it over the next weeks and months, she would get frustrated, and worry that she was making it worse. Sometimes she would finish the session by putting the painting facing the radiator on the wall so that I couldn't see it. Not knowing anything about painting, or what she needed from me, I tried to tell her not to worry: "the soul is still there."

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That it took me until I turned 27 to recognize my own mortality is ironic, really, considering that I was diagnosed with a never-before-seen combination of two strains of leukemia when I was 15. One of the strains was called "Natural Killer." Doctors told my parents that I was not expected to survive, and yet, here I am. I had such faith in the medical profession: I didn't let myself worry about dying. In the end the doctors and researchers proved that my trust was well placed, and perhaps that's why I came to feel I was immortal: I trusted that lightning wouldn't strike twice.

Two events converged that June that made me realize that I was not everlasting.

1: My grandfather died. His death was expected; he was old, had been weary for years, and my granny often said how he would beg for death to relieve himself of the constant pain of living. But when his death actually came, I was stunned. I knew it was coming, I just never believed it would arrive.

2: The day after my granddad died, I was diagnosed with pre-cancer of the cervix. (Pre-cancer is such a strange term. The notion of pre-anything is odd, really, because it's a hypothesis, or a promise, rather than a state in itself. I remember walking through the quad in my small liberal arts college and hearing one guy say to his friend: "What does pre-law even mean? Why do you tell people that? I could just as easily say that I'm pre-banging your mom.")

I was alone in my rented apartment in Paris when I got the medical results saying that the cells in my cervix had reached a pre-cancerous state. It instantly became hard to breathe—I remember gulping air. Having recently experienced shockingly bad service in several French medical centers, and it being too early in the morning to call anyone back home in Toronto, I Googled "cancer care help-line." My screen was blurry through tears so I clicked the first one I saw. It just happened to be in Ireland.

The woman who answered was so kind and patient that it made me cry even harder. I explained my situation through sobs, and she listened intently. After a minute, she said, in her lovely lilting accent, "Let me just get this straight. Are you Irish?" "No," I wailed. "And do you live in Ireland?" she said, still the pinnacle of kindness. "No!" "Right, well, I'm not sure what it's like in France," she said, "but this is what I would tell you if you lived in Ireland..."

Of all the people I spoke with before and after the procedure to remove the lesions, she was the most helpful. We even corresponded via email for a few days afterwards. The condition is a fairly common one; they removed the lesions successfully, and though I'll have to monitor it, there's no reason to believe further treatment will be necessary. But the most difficult thing to wrap my mind around was the fact that I had been wrong: lightning is indiscriminate. Lightning will strike however many times it likes.

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I returned to Rosy's studio once or twice a week over the course of a spring and summer as she worked on that first painting. I went to Switzerland and got a tan, which meant that she had to darken the color of my skin; I got my heart broken and then fell in love, which probably changed nothing about the painting for most people, but when I look at it, I know. Rosy requested that I wear little or no make-up but that I keep my nails painted the color they had been the first day: she loved the pale oceanic blue and thought it worked well with the overall colors and feeling of painting. The name of the nail polish was "Sea Change," and the name of that painting is just Harriet.

Rosy started Harriet when she was three months pregnant, and finished just before she gave birth. It was a vulnerable period for her. She was wondering how her life and work would change as she became a mother, and how she would be able to preserve the space she needed to keep working. She spoke honestly and frankly about the difficulties and joys of living as an artist. I was naked, but she was exposed too.

Over the past three years, I've sometimes sat for her twice a week and sometimes once a month, and many months can pass where I don't pose at all. Rosy has made—or is in the process of making—at least ten paintings of me, plus a sculpture and a bas-relief. Sometimes the paintings get abandoned and painted over with a new person, and sometimes I'm the one to cover up a painting of someone else. That contributes to this feeling of present-tense, of transience, but also to the power of layering. If a painting takes weeks or months, there is a palimpsest of moments beneath the final picture. It's not like a photograph, which documents le moment décisif, but a history of the time spent making it.

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In Man with a Blue Scarf, a book about his experience posing for Lucien Freud, Martin Gayford muses: "What, then, is a portrait painter painting? An individual who persists through time, or merely the way a ceaselessly mutating human organism appears in a particular time and place? It is a good question."

My friend Hanna modeled for Rosy for several years, before she moved back to Sweden, where she is from. Something about Hanna's softness and gentle beauty makes her look as if she's come straight out of a Vermeer painting: she has a classical, tender look about her. There's a particular painting of her that's always been one of my favorites: she's laying on her side, breasts and belly facing us, with a gray cloth—what always reminded me of a void, rather than a blanket—over her hips and legs. Her eyes are downcast and she looks mournful, nearly wounded, and yet simultaneously deeply at peace. I asked Hanna what she was feeling while it was being painted, and she laughed: "That painting took months, I was thinking so many things!" This was before I started modeling myself—before I knew about that layering effect.

While part of what I love about Rosy's paintings is the fact that I know and recognize many of her subjects, I also know that her work goes beyond familiar appreciation. After all, in portraits by any great artist, we care more about the work of the painter—brushstrokes, perspective, colors—than who the subject is, or how they may or may not resemble themselves. I don't care who the subjects are in Lucien Freud's paintings, for example, any more than I care about who was picnicking in Dejeuner sur l'herbe. That's not what interests me. And I definitely wouldn't ask any of the models, were I ever to meet them, what they were thinking about while the picture was being painted.

There's a famous quote often attributed to Rembrandt that "all portraits are self-portraits." While the paintings of me exist within Rosy's entire body of work, and in the future they will be considered as "Rosy Lambs" and not as "Harriet Alida Lyes," during the times that Rosy paints me it feels very much like an exchange. They couldn't exist without both of us there: they capture and incorporate us both.

Harriet sold a few years ago to a man I don't know and will likely never meet. I only occasionally wonder what he sees in it; because I have such a clear idea of what it means to me, his angle of interest in it doesn't matter.

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Shortly after my realization last June, I told Rosy of my fears while we were having our lunch break between sessions. "Oh, of course," she said, immediately understanding. "That's the greatest fear. But isn't it just so amazing to be alive in this moment?"

I like modeling because it gives me the space to exist purely, or as purely as I can, in that present-tense feeling. I become intensely aware of myself while at the same time completely forgetting myself. I can forget about my mortality. But what I think I'll be grateful for in the future—in ten years, in 30 years—is the record it shows of me right now. I never thought of modeling as a way of becoming immortal, but as the paintings of me accumulate, I'm starting to see them as a timeline for both Rosy and me. While they won't make either of us live forever, they do immortalize something tangible.

In Harriet I see a girl in the middle of a conversation, unaware of her nakedness, unaware of what will happen to her in life, and OK with that.

Follow Harriet Alida Lye on Twitter, and see more work by Sam Gordon and Rosy Lamb.

Ari Aster's new short film, Munchausen, is a Pixar-inspired silent short about a clingy mother (played by Bonnie Bedelia, John McClaine's wife in Die Hard) who goes to a bunch of extreme lengths to keep her son from going off to college. The film was an official selection at Fantastic Fest and we're excited to share it here today.

Aster's last major work—the controversial, 30-minute film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons—was called a "thrilling piece of cinematic mastery" by Indiewire, and Munchausen continues his streak. Give it a watch.

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Photo courtesy of Ivan Demianets

One year ago, Dasha Oratovska and Sasha Zakhovaieva fled from Kyiv's Independence Square as riot police launched an assault on anti-government protesters, firing flares and rubber bullets into the crowd. Sasha lost consciousness and was dragged by a friend to a makeshift hospital in the nearby Trade Unions building. The building soon caught fire, forcing doctors and wounded protesters to evacuate. As the Euromaidan Revolution reached its bloody crescendo, Dasha found Sasha sitting, dazed, on St. Sophia Square, a short distance from Independence Square.

Six months later, Dasha left Ukraine, likely permanently. Sasha remains in Kyiv but has begun formulating contingency plans should the violence in the country's east creep west.

They are not alone. Ukrainians are fleeing the country in record numbers: since February 2014, 600,000 Ukrainians have sought asylum or other forms of legal stay in neighboring countries, and thousands more have moved to the U.S. and the European Union. Others have fled illegally: Poland reported a 100 percent increase in the number of detentions of illegal Ukrainian immigrants last year.

But the emigrants are not only asylum seekers. They are the Western-leaning intelligentsia, the professional classes with relatives abroad, and the students of the Maidan who first organized protests against former President Viktor Yanukovych's kleptocratic and violent government in November 2013.

Since the overthrow of Yanukovych last year, a Russian-backed secessionist movement has claimed the lives of 5,400 people and injured 13,000. The recent ceasefire has done little to quell the violence. Inflation is skyrocketing, hitting 25 percent in December. The hryvnia, Ukraine's national currency, has lost two-thirds of its value against the dollar over the past year. This devaluation has crushed Ukrainians' purchasing power, particularly for western goods, and severely limited their mobility: the average monthly Ukrainian salary was $384 in January 2014. By December 2014, it was down to just $261.

There is little reason to stay; the brain drain from Ukraine is accelerating.

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Photo courtesy of Dasha Oratovska

Compassionate, diminutive, and curly-haired, Dasha got her undergraduate degree at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine's most prestigious university. Trained as a social worker, she was an active volunteer while living in Ukraine, working regularly with drug addicts and patients at a psychiatric hospital in Kyiv before leaving for the Netherlands last summer. Dasha says she and other recent émigrés are conflicted about whether or not to return. "Many will not go back," she predicts. Spending months protesting for an unfulfilled vision was taxing: "I can't say that I want to return home soon. As I was standing on the Maidan last winter, I realized how difficult it would be for me to stay in Kyiv."

Certain youthful exigencies also beckoned her abroad. The prospect of a Western European lifestyle and education were alluring, and, before moving—in fact, while in the barricades—she fell in love with a Dutchman. "Here in Utrecht," she says, "I feel as though I can develop more as a person than in Kyiv." Still, she cannot ignore the tragedy of the ongoing conflict. Her cousin is training to serve with the army in eastern Ukraine, and another relative runs support to and from the warzone.

Like Dasha, for Ivan Demianets, the war in eastern Ukraine is inescapable, despite the ten time zones that separate him from it. Three months after Yanukovych's fall from power, Ivan moved to the US to pursue a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Southern California. He was active on the Maidan, working with diaspora populations to fundraise for chai, soup, and bread, which became lifeblood of the revolution. After violence erupted last winter, he and his best friend Andrii Dvoiak started organizing hospitals in churches surrounding the Maidan to treat injured protesters, and arranged for 300 badly wounded demonstrators to receive treatment abroad. While at USC, he has been coordinating with Andrii and others to fundraise for the war effort, and worrying about his relatives who remain in the conflict zone.

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Photo courtesy of Andrii Dvoiak

Leaving was difficult. He left behind his family, girlfriend, and an NGO that he helped build. Still, moving to the U.S. was logical, and perhaps inevitable. Ukraine's educational system is in shambles. Plagued by uneven teaching and corruption, students often pay for grades, rendering degrees meaningless. Given the opportunity to get a doctorate from a prestigious Western university, immigration was a kind of imperative. If after the revolution, it seemed like a good idea to get an education abroad and return after a few years, Ivan is now deeply ambivalent about going back to Ukraine. In the present crisis, Ivan now sees two paths for Ukrainians: "You either fight or you leave."

Emily Channell-Justice, a graduate researcher at City University of New York, is writing her dissertation on the youth of the Maidan. She says the fallout from the revolution was a reality check for many young Ukrainians. "The Maidan allowed a lot of people to see an idealistic version of change," Channell-Justice told VICE. "But they also saw what implementation of that change would actually mean. They understood that implementation was going to prevent actual radical change, because it's too hard to implement things that would actually make things different in Ukraine."

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Photo courtesy of Olga Vynogradova

Change, Olga acknowledges, will take time. Olga, who studies at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, defies the Ukrainian female aesthetic, wearing her hair short and dressing more like someone from Bushwick than Kyiv. A new political system, she says, "isn't going to come out of thin air," though many of her countrymen inside and outside of the government seem loathe to accept this. "Many in Ukraine either don't understand this or don't want to," she bemoans. Perhaps for this reason, Olga says that she knows "a great number of people who have left and don't plan to return."

Some of the "Maidantsy," as the protesters were known, have taken up the mantra of reform, if not the mantra of implementation. Activist Hanna Hopko and journalist Mustafa Nayyem are now prominent parliamentarians campaigning for change. But despite receiving praise and awards from Washington and Brussels, the reforms they have championed have stalled. Ukraine is arguably more corrupt today than it was under Yanukovych. As one former racketeer told me, "At least in the old days, you knew who the boss was." Corruption has become decentralized, and, as a consequence, more difficult to track down.

In many ways, revolution was the easy part. The failure of reform in Ukraine over the past two and a half decades has proven that revolutionary fervor does not bring honest government or prosperity. The Maidan, like the 2004 Orange Revolution before it, was fueled by emotionality, not always rationality. If Ukraine is to reform, it will come not from a change in leadership, but from a change in the attitudes of the everyman: the babushka shuffling paper in a bloated bureaucracy, the traffic cop extracting bribes along the road from Kyiv to Cherkassy, and the university rector rubber-stamping diplomas.

Sasha, who narrowly escaped injury on the Maidan last February, is a part of that effort. Speaking flawless English, and committed to Ukraine's European future, she is the archetypal student of the Maidan. She now works with the Ministry of Health to improve the country's "universal" health care system. (In truth, the government has only $149 per capita per year to spend on health care, so coverage is far from universal and corruption is rampant.)

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Photo courtesy of Oleksandra Zakhovaieva

Despite her involvement in reform, Sasha has abandoned activism. The past year has been so discombobulating that she doesn't know what she or Ukraine stands for anymore. "During the Maidan, everything was clear. We fought for our civil rights, the ability to be considered human, and for the right to vote." Now, Sasha says, everything is much more opaque. She will support volunteers and the families of those fighting in the east, but refuses to "blindly support any party" or movement.

A similar confusion pervades the population. Like Sasha, most students of the Maidan who remain in Ukraine are deeply disillusioned. They have little faith in the new and fragile government. A recent poll shows that President Petro Poroshenko's popularity has fallen below 50 percent for the first time since winning the election in May. As the economy and reform efforts falter, analysts are now questioning how long the government can survive. With 2004 and 2014 in its wake, the paradigm of regime change in Ukraine has become revolution. But if radical change again comes to Kyiv, students likely won't be leading the crusade.

Follow Isaac Webb on Twitter.

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Boys Next Door first photo session after Rowland joined. Nick's bedroom, Caulfield, 1978. All images courtesy of the artist and M.33.

Photographer Peter Milne grew up taking photos of his mates in the 70s. But when you're friends with people like Rowland S. Howard, Nick Cave, and Gina Riley, even the most casual shooter can find himself as an unofficial documentarian. Ahead of his show Juvenilia at Melbourne's Strange Neighbour gallery we thought we'd call him up to talk about the 70s and Melbourne's music history.

VICE: A lot of the people you shot like Rowland S. Howard and Nick Cave are pretty iconic now. When you were shooting them, did you have that sense of what they'd become?
Peter Milne: Short answer yes, but it's a bit more complicated. I went to school with Rowland—we went to a hippy school, one of these experimental schools that were very much part of the 70s. So you walked away with a fantastic education in socializing but not necessarily how to read or write. But the advantage of it is that I'm still friends with the people that I met there. And all the other stuff is easy enough to pick up. I was there with Rowland and Gina Riley, do you know her?

She's one of my heroes.
I was there with them and various people who were creative and interesting and fabulous in their own way. There was a sense of coming together, and Melbourne was doing that thing it does periodically and produces extraordinary bursts of creative energy. It was often, at least on a world level, pretty forgotten; a quiet, tucked-away town. But it's always produced a hugely disproportionate amount of talent.

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Rowland S. Howard, Gina Riley, Simon McLean. TATROC gig, Greville Street, 1976

I feel like your generation has really become a benchmark for people my own age, it's a hard act to follow.
Your generation is also producing its great talents. History has shown that at certain times, for whatever reasons, there is a happy collision of influences. So to finally get to your question: Yes there was a real sense in the late 70s and early 80s of particularly interesting things happening.

As someone who wasn't born yet, I think of 70s Melbourne as a very exciting place, but as you said it was it was a bit of a backwater. Was the lack of external stuff going on an element to all this productivity?
I think it was—in some ways positively and in some ways negatively. You argue New York and London were much bigger and more interesting places producing an explosion of music and other art at that time. But the 70s was a time of great freedom and also a lot of violence. People go on about how society is getting so violent—it's absolute bullshit. I used to catch the train from Hawthorn into the city and was beaten up maybe six times.

There must be some change that's been positive?
One subject I never get asked about in relation to the 1970s and 80s is the sexism that still prevailed. There were many very talented and strong young women who were centrally involved in the creative dynamics of the era. But it's striking to look back and consider how little of that was acknowledged. And of course how little is subsequently reflected in the historical record. This includes major co-songwriting credits that are still missing and all sorts of other uncredited contributions.

You've had quite a lot of involvement with the music industry, what's your relationship with it like now?
There's something wrong with the music industry. The corruption's been there for at least 100 years. It's not a generous industry, it's an industry where you will get cheated every single time. I don't find that in comedy. Hanging out with comedians is an uplifting experience. The comedians I like are those who speak the truth and can be funny while making a useful statement or questioning what it is to live a human life.

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Anita Lane at a party in the mid 1980s

What's music about then?
If comedy is about truth, then music is often about putting on a mask and being mysterious. That to me is less interesting.

Would you want to be in your 20s now?
There's always more than one answer. Every age has challenges and great joys. I don't want to go back, when you're young you have no power. You have no perspective and you don't realize that none of the bullshit matters. You don't realize everybody's faking.

If you're young and sensitive and creative you worry far too much what people think and that everyone else knows what's going on and you don't. When you're my age you're fat and bald and covered in wrinkles but at the very least you have the power of knowing that a lot of that bullshit really is bullshit and if you want to do what you want to do, absolutely no one can stop you.

Curators Helen Frajman of M.33 and Linsey Gosper present Juvenilia at Strange Neighbour gallery from February 27 to March 28. The show will be open Wednesday to Saturday from 12 to 6PM.

Words by Wendy Syfret. Follow her on Twitter.

[body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619512.jpg' id='29704'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619526.jpg' id='29705'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619539.jpg' id='29706'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619547.jpg' id='29707'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619554.jpg' id='29708'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619562.jpg' id='29709'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619568.jpg' id='29710'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619574.jpg' id='29711'][body_image width='680' height='952' path='images/content-images/2015/02/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/22/' filename='executioner-and-friend-butts-are-funny-699-body-image-1424619591.jpg' id='29713']

Check out the animated version of this comic and see more of JimmyGiegerich's work on his website and blog.

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Photos courtesy of Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman served as a Marine infantry and special forces officer in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2011, at the height of the War on Terror. In Afghanistan, he also worked as a combat advisor to an Afghan battalion tasked with capturing senior figures in the Taliban. Ackerman has parlayed his experiences into a remarkable debut novel, Green on Blue, which chronicles the short path of a young Afghan boy from powerless orphan to "important man." The book takes its title from the expression for military fratricide as applied to the war in Afghanistan, when a member of the Afghan Army (in a green uniform) attacks a US soldier (in a blue one). Set in a murky world of ever-shifting allegiances in the rural, mountainous region of Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, Ackerman's novel attempts to explain why these attacks occur.

I talked to Elliot to learn more about the inspiration for Green on Blue, his time in Afghanistan, and what he's working on now near the Turkish-Syrian border.

VICE: What motivated you to write Green on Blue?
Ackerman: When I was in Afghanistan, I spent all of my time as an advisor to Afghan soldiers. I fought alongside these soldiers, but after I left, I knew they weren't guys I could keep up with on Facebook or call and get a beer with. I frankly knew I was never going to see them again. I had this real desire to render their world and show the war as they saw it. The war in Afghanistan is presented heavily through the American experience, and Afghans are made nearly invisible or treated as props. So my goal was to write a novel completely from their perspective.

There's this thread of characterization when we talk about Afghanistan, that people are deceitful, embezzling money out of the country. Those things are true, but what I wanted to do was peel back the outer layers to trace why these things are happening. What is the morality from an Afghan perspective on why someone would embezzle money? Why would an Afghan soldier feel that he needed to commit a green on blue attack? I wanted to take this most deceitful action, a green on blue attack, and trace it back to its inception, so that by the time it occurs you may not agree with it, but you do understand.

How did the idea to write fiction about your experience in Afghanistan develop? Did you feel any apprehension about adopting the voice of an Afghan boy, rather than writing in your own voice?
I started writing six months after I came home. I wanted to try to put this dynamic I'd seen into a story, and I started groping around for what the best way to put it into a story was. I decided that it shouldn't be from an American perspective, because Americans are transient. At first, I thought I would have Aziz tell his story like Marlow [in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness]. Early drafts had him telling his story to an American after an opening scene in which he walks into his firebase announcing that [the American] Mr. Jack is dead. But as I went through iterations of the novel, I wondered why I felt the need to have Aziz tell the story to an American. I realized that I was scared to go whole hog and make Aziz's voice my voice; I felt I needed an American to let me do that. I got rid of that element, and decided the book would have to ride on the strength of the story and how I told it.

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How did you develop the character of Mr. Jack? Can you tell me about creating that character as an ex-American in Afghanistan yourself?
One could criticize me by saying I created this American caricature who seems like a cardboard cutout. But I wanted to treat him how Afghans and Iraqis are treated in all other books about the war: as a caricature. If I am trying to be sincerely representing Aziz's viewpoint, Aziz sees Mr. Jack as the Other, and someone who wields great power. The idea that Aziz would honestly feel any empathy for Mr. Jack is not true. There are many Afghans I formed close relationships with, but I know a 19-year-old Afghan boy from a rural area like Aziz couldn't have felt further from me. I felt I had to keep that gulf.

It struck me how non-existent a presence the Afghan government was in Aziz's life, or any of the characters' lives—I don't think Hamid Karzai's name is mentioned once. How does this reflect what you were trying to convey about the nature of the war?
The story is set in a very remote part of Afghanistan, where the government has always had a difficult time establishing a presence. The war is very much a local war, valley-to-valley and village-to-village. My ambition was to try and render the dynamics of the wider conflict in miniature, with one village, one commander, and one militia, to lay out a reoccurring dynamic I saw.

What qualities that you developed in the military were helpful in writing a book?
I loathe giving you this answer: discipline. But being humbled is also something that you get used to in the military and while writing a book. In the military, people don't have to follow your orders—they'll let you know pretty quick if they don't like what you're doing, and as a writer, you have to open up drafts of your writing with tracked changes marked up all over it. I spend my days now [writing] completely alone, so a lot of it is very different, but what is similar is the idea that you are trying to make your ego subservient and humble yourself to some greater good. In the military that is the good of the people around you, and with writing it's that you have to consciously humble yourself and your ego to create good art.

Tell me about your work in Turkey now and reporting on the Syrian Civil War.
I am actually finishing a novel right now set on the Turkish-Syrian border, and have been doing reporting along the way. The working title is Dark at the Crossing, and it's a love story about a Syrian couple who are stranded on the Turkish side of the border. It's about the two of them and an Iraqi-American who wants to cross the border to fight with the Free Syrian Army, and is set during the rise of groups like the Islamic State. My research is immersive; I go to the place I'll be writing about and surround myself with the people who inform the narrative. What often comes out of that also is journalism and narrative non-fiction.

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If Green on Blue were to be put on the syllabus of a literature class at West Point, what lessons do you hope it would teach this generation of soldiers?
I would hope they would take away a more nuanced understanding of the conflicts they are involved in. One thing I learned early on as a Marine is that war is not the realm of black and white. It is gray; there are no good guys or bad guys, and there are no victory parades today. You are often engaging in a practice that is an entity of its own, a war that exists as its own thing that needs to be fed. That's the nature of conflict today, including in Syria. I would hope they would take away the fact that they will probably be fighting against people just like them in many ways. Towards the end of a war, there are feelings of curiosity and even sympathy for someone you've fought against—you look around and everyone else has been defined by that same experience of that same war. In many respects you have more in common with them than the people at home.

Follow Elizabeth Nicholas on Twitter.

Baltimore is a dying city. Long past midnight and in any kind of weather, you'll find kids chugging 40s on dilapidated stoops. For two years, I taught those kids, kids who held oranges in their hands and asked, "How do we eat these?"

After a falling out with my principal at the close of 2013, I decided to quit teaching to pursue writing full-time. It would have been a fine plan except I had rent to pay and little savings. Uninterested in another career, I decided to call a toll-free number in the back of my local paper promising " quick cash for healthy adults between the ages of 18-30."

After a series of screening questions— How many alcoholic drinks have you had in the past month? Do you smoke? Have you ever or recently heard voices?—the young man on the other line deemed me eligible for the study. He explained that I would help researchers develop a drug for malaria, a word he used so flippantly you'd think we were discussing the common cold.

"Yes, you'd be infected with malaria," he said. "You might feel ill for a few weeks, so you need to have an open schedule."

While I declined to participate in the malaria study, I realized that I lived in the Silicon Valley of medicine. Baltimore is home to Johns Hopkins University, with the National Institutes of Health and National Institute on Drug Abuse nearby in Bethesda; there are plenty of well-paying research studies available for young, healthy women. Every morning, I scoured ClinicalTrials.gov and took part in so many initial screenings I quickly learned how easy it was to manipulate the system. For a study on caffeine addiction, I was eliminated due to my ADD diagnosis, a fact I would later omit in future screenings. I always lied about how often I drank and did drugs. It never ceased to amaze me how simple it was to con some of the smartest, most capable people in the country. After years of failure as a teacher, it felt good to finally do something well, even if my work flourished on lies.

Besides infecting myself with a deadly disease, I was open to everything. After signing a stack of legal documents I pretended to read, I suffered through whatever the study called for: my skin burnt with capsaicin, my hand submerged in ice water, my shoulder stabbed with a probe until I broke from the pressure.

My longest running study was an experiment designed to test an anxious person's reaction to pain in contrast to a healthy participant. As the anxious patient, each week I drove to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda to be electrocuted by a 20-something intern. The process was often tedious; to ensure proper adhesion of the electrodes to various parts of my body, I endured 45 minutes of said intern meticulously exfoliating my skin until it was raw.

After my skin was properly primed for electrocution, the intern would wheel an old desktop in front of the chair where I was strapped. The procedure was simple: a series of questions would flash before me (Is the sky blue, y/n?) and while I answered them I sat at risk for electrocution.

The electrodes measured my heart rate, sweat excretion, and the number of times I blinked. Though the questions were a distraction, they weren't enough to divert my awareness of the electric buzzer underneath my nails, a whole new level of pain.

During four intervals of eight-minute sessions, I was always acutely aware of the poorly obscured camera affixed to a far corner on the ceiling. My pride silenced my desire to cry out in pain.

Post electrocution, the cheery intern would remove the constellation of electrodes from my body, then instruct me to fill out a survey on my current levels of anxiety. I'd rush through the form, circling random numbers to rate my anxiety because I always found it difficult to assign a concrete measurement to a feeling.

Once I completed the survey on my levels of anxiety, my medical study liaison, an older woman named Marilla, would walk me to her office so we could debrief. Marilla always greeted me with two Hershey's chocolate nuggets. In those moments, I played the role of a small and desperate child, my eyes bright at the sight of chocolate in her outstretched palm. As the candy dissolved in my mouth, Marilla asked me questions, many of which weren't related to the study.

How's your writing going? Have you told your parents that you quit your job as a teacher? You look a little tired—are you feeling depressed?

At each debrief, I wanted to tell Marilla this would be my final task for the study, my final debrief, my final day as a lab rat. But the words never came. Every time, something inside of me refused to break. At 24 years old, I had become fluent and comfortable in the languages of humiliation, shame, and pain. Despite everything, I refused to quit.

My first glimpse of reality occurred after an MRI, when a lab technician showed me a scan of my brain, which looked like an elaborate series of Rorschach blots. At first, the technician politely indulged my questions about the functions of my brain, answering in short and scientific terms that I pretended to understand. But my desire for reaffirmation was, at that point, insatiable. I had to take it one step further; I asked the technician if he noticed anything different about my brain, anything strange, unusual, or unique. Despite his agitation and attempts to brush off my questions, I continued to probe for the answer I wanted. Eventually, the technician threw up his hands and hissed, "A brain is a brain. What do you want me to say? Your brain looks like everyone else's. It's just a brain."

At home that night, I watched the complimentary DVD of my brain scan, embarrassed and a bit sick. What did I expect to see in the grainy images on my computer screen? Would I have been satisfied with a brain tumor, if it meant I could be special?

I'm special and important was my mantra. I chanted it while a nurse struggled to find my vein. I chanted it from the cold interior of the MRI machine. For a study on the influence of alcohol on sexual arousal, I clung desperately to my delusion while a lab assistant in ill-fitting khakis sat me behind a thin partition and instructed me to think of past erotic experiences for ten timed minutes. Now, a year later, I don't have to try hard to recall the sound of the lab assistant's breathing, the slow march of the timer, or the long silence which followed after the timer was up.

Why did I stop my career as a lab rat?

At one of our final debriefs, Marilla asked me to sign a packet of documents. At the top of each page, in bold print, was "Participant 96645." My participant number was never hidden. I had seen it many times before. This time, the print seemed larger.

Our whole lives can be ascribed to numbers. To the federal government, I'm a student loan. To my former employers at Baltimore City Public Schools, I am no more than my students' test scores. I'm not unaccustomed to my identity stripped down to numbers. Why this moment moved me to never participate in a study again, I attribute to a new respect for my body. For years I focused solely on my mind, strengthening it with education. I spent a great deal of money on mental health professionals and the medication they prescribed.

My final sit down with Marilla showed how once again I had forsaken my body for my mind, this time at a much higher cost. To satiate my desire to be loved, I put my body through senseless pain. My participant number was the ultimate evidence.

I degraded my body and myself for what at the end of the day amounted to a number. I can never take those experiments back.

I signed each document and handed the packet back to Marilla. Everything was different. Her voice sounded distant. Marilla mentioned something about returning to the NIH for free therapy. I said I'd consider it but I think we both knew that was a lie. We said our goodbyes, wished each other well. I know I'll never see Marilla again.

In the past year I've extracted myself from Baltimore's ruin. In my new home of Los Angeles, I have the blueprint of a full life. There are days when my past is barely recognizable. But I've exposed myself emotionally and physically to so many strangers in white coats that any real intimacy I experience now feels cheap. There are strangers who know every secret of my body and mind. Doctors with spouses and children I'll never meet know my deepest fears. An anonymous grad student possesses knowledge of my disastrous childhood. How do I forge genuine connections now when for so long I faked intimacy?

Evidence of my pain and humiliation will be preserved for anyone with the proper credentials for decades. Sometimes I imagine the medical conferences where my secrets will be presented for public consumption. Does anyone in the audience attempt to imagine Participant 96645?

I made around $3,000 dollars as a lab rat. None of the money is left.

Follow Gillian Walters on Twitter.

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Screenshot via Youtube.

Somali terrorist group Al-Shabaab is calling on jihadis in the West to target North America's largest shopping center, the West Edmonton Mall.

The call to arms comes towards the end of a 76-minute video posted on YouTube that shows a masked man boasting about the group's 2013 machine gun and grenade attack on the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, which left 67 dead and 175 wounded. The massacre's perpetrators said it was retaliation for Kenyan and Western intervention in Somalia.

Welcome to our live coverage of the 87th Academy Awards. Guiding you through often bewildering, always frustrating proceedings today will be three hosts: Pauly Shore, whose reputation precedes him; comedianne [sic] and avid VICE contributor Megan Koester; and serious movie guy Alex J. Mann. LA editorial staffers Jamie Lee Curtis Taete, Arielle Pardes, and Mike Pearl are on the couch too.

The most recent posts are at the top, and will refresh every few seconds—no scrolling necessary. Enjoy!

[body_image width='1000' height='667' path='images/content-images/2015/02/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/02/17/' filename='is-jukely-the-netflix-for-live-music-549-body-image-1424204666.jpg' id='28312']Photo by Pete Tong, courtesy of Jukely

It was a frigid night, and I was trying to become a more adventurous person. My efforts were fueled by a new concert subscription program called Jukely Unlimited—which, to put it in Jukely co-founder Bora Celik's own words, is "kind of like Netflix for concerts." Celik launched the company two years ago as a music and concert recommendation site. This past October, Jukely was upgraded to a service which allows users to pay a monthly fee for a subscription that lets them go to as many shows offered on the site as they'd like. Jukely recently launched in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is planning on an eventual 450 city-wide launch. Individual passes cost $25, while "unlimited plus" passes—for a user and a plus-one—are $45. Depending on how many shows you end up going to, that fee can go from a pretty reasonable price to an insanely good deal. Theoretically, you could go to a show every night.

If that sounds too good to be true, here's the catch: While Jukely compares itself to Netflix, the latter asks for far less commitment and is, for obvious reasons, way more convenient. Jukely runs on a first-come-first-serve basis, offering a limited number of passes to a handful of concerts each day. That means even with a subscription, you could miss out on the shows you want to see.

But Celik says Jukely isn't about the shows you already want to see, it's a place to try out something new. "Say you love Tom Cruise, and Tom Cruise has a new movie. You know it's not going to be on Netflix but you buy a ticket to see it," he says when we meet at the Jukely office in Manhattan. "In a similar way, if you really love Franz Ferdinand, you would immediately want to buy a ticket." In other words, Jukely is like the New Releases section of Netflix: "You're hoping to be delighted."

But taking the risk on Netflix is different. Say you randomly pick a movie you've never heard of. If you hate it, you waste maybe 30 minutes of your life and move on. But if you end up at a concert you don't enjoy, you've wasted time and money and energy getting there. You can't leave and just pick another concert, either—you can only go to one show a night. Then there's the selection. While I have my fair share of adventurous, pick-a-random-movie nights on Netflix, I mostly keep my subscription because I know it'll give me things I actually seek out to watch, too.

Nevertheless, I decided to try out Jukely Unlimited for myself. I went on the website to check the listings for shows that weekend, hoping to find something that would drag me out of my winter hibernation. I was disappointed that whenever I saw an artist I like on the site—be it Interpol or Angel Olsen—I was always met with a SOLD OUT sign. If Jukely is Netflix, almost every night would be a pick-a-random-movie night.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Celik says the platform is for people who are adventurous and looking to discover new music. Bands like Interpol are secondary to the app—just a nice surprise for the lucky member who happens to snag one of very few tickets available. "The idea is to introduce new fans, and Jukely members will be people who normally wouldn't be buying your tickets," he says.

I landed on a band called Neighbors, a group I had never listened to before but, from what I could tell by a quick 30-second listen, had a promising indie pop sound. I decided to go see them at Glasslands that Sunday night. The process for RSVPing was dead easy: With two clicks, I was done. I just had to show up the next day.

At the venue, there was no hassle at all. My name was on the guest list and despite the temperature dipping into the lower 20s, the space was bustling with a packed crowd. (How many of us are here because of Jukely? I wondered.) The band was pretty good—several decibels above the bedroom pop sound I had expected but hovering somewhere closer to orchestral twee, complete with a Michael Cera-esque frontman. Would I buy a ticket to see Neighbors the next time? Probably not, but that's part of the risk and excitement of Jukely.

The service seems tailored for solo concert outings, unless you're one half of a couple that does everything together. Even though I had room for a plus-one on my pass, I couldn't find anyone to go with me on such last minute notice.

Jukely may work more in favor of the artist (of low to mid-level fame) than the consumer. They partner with artists, promoters, and venues for ticket allocations, and work to expose new talent. I want to be optimistic about Jukely's mission, because I want to support emerging artists. I've seen a handful of my own friends' shows listed there, and I would love for Jukely users to walk in on their gig and become lifelong fans. But is Jukely expecting us to be more adventurous than we are? Maybe I fall just outside the target demographic—most of the users are ages 18–24. At 18, when I was going to shows all the time, often alone, I would have loved Jukely Unlimited.

I came home around 1:30 in the morning after the Neighbors show, my life neither better nor worse for it. Any other night I would have jumped right in bed and watched something on Netflix. Instead, I was back on Jukely's site, scrolling through to see if there were any new listings posted.

Follow Kristen Yoonsoo Kim on Twitter and find out more about Jukely Unlimited on the Jukely website.

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Rio's Relaxation Spa in Kentish Town, North London

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The young Turkish guy stands up, his hard-on pointing straight out like a divining rod. His mates all cheer as though his erection is worthy of some kind of award. It's 1 AM in the main jacuzzi at Rio's Relaxation Spa, Kentish Town. Couples night runs from 7 PM until 12 AM, but it looks like the swinging is still in full swing, given that right now there are three couples having sex in the water, with eight—maybe nine—blokes enjoying the bubbles and pretending not to watch.

Rio's, a ten-minute walk from Camden High Street, is the punchline to plenty of jokes about dodgy drunken activities ("Ended up in Rio's, did you?"), but it's probably more talked-about than visited. With its iconic, slightly tacky exterior, its photographs of palm trees and sparkling seas at odds with the grimy urban location, there's a widely held belief that the "relaxation" on offer isn't limited to the saunas, steams rooms and plunge pools—that the massages all end very happily indeed.

What actually happens when you visit Rio's is this: you go to the small reception window, where you pay an entrance fee ($32 for single guys, $12–$15 for single women and $32–$42 for couples, depending on the time of day) and are given a towel and a locker key. Then, after a quick frisk by the security guard, you pass through a heavy door. Having stripped nude in the extremely basic changing rooms, you walk into the club via the TV room. Here, the aesthetic you see on the shopfront is developed even further: there's dark mahogany panelling, dusty cheese plants and terrible 60s-style soft-focus "erotic" artwork on the magnolia walls.

You'll get your first glimpse of nudity here as people without clothes recline on white plastic loungers watching football or movies—Snow White with Anne Hathaway, King Arthur with Ray Winstone. There's a strange disconnect at first between the kids' blockbusters on the HD TV and the copious amount of bush and genitalia casually displayed about the place. But as you enter a wide oblong corridor with two jacuzzis and copious steam rooms and saunas under dim blue lighting, you realize that the tension between the oddly familial, friendly atmosphere and the promise of sex that hovers over everything is what makes Rio's special.

The late night crowd here is diverse. There are Afro-Caribbean, Turkish, Russian, Greek, Japanese and Indian revelers, either with white bath towels wrapped around their waists, or—more frequently—nothing at all. Rio's is predominantly straight, but it has a strong gay following, too.

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Some naked men in a sauna that isn't Rio's (Photo by Dr Hanz via)

Let's talk more about nudity. The club has a fully naturist policy on most nights. When you arrive you will be faced with a smorgasbord of cocks (soft and hard), vaginas and asses—some more attractive than others. For the first few minutes this can be disconcerting, as though you have suddenly dropped into a Through the Looking-Glass world where, for some reason, everyone's decided to strip off and pretend it's all cool. After a short while, though, you become accustomed to it, in the same way you quickly get used to the low lighting. Still, a hefty guy's hairy balls swinging by your face as he hauls ass out of the plunge pool is enough put a damper on any hopeful fantasies you may have had before you arrived.

The main room contains a large jacuzzi that could probably hold 20, maybe more, and a swimming pool. The high, whitewashed wooden ceiling gives it a clubhouse feel. There is something oddly relaxing about kicking back, enjoying the bubbles and observing—a kind of advanced-level people watching. There's a social vibe here and most punters know not to overstep the mark. But one mountainous bloke, his stomach skin flabby and tent-like, distended by his huge pot belly—his man-boobs heavy orbs sliding away from one another—moves to sit next to a cute Greek couple who've just arrived. The big man keeps glancing furtively at the girl. She seems to notice, and looks annoyed. A persistent twitch in his shoulder suggests he's wanking discretely beneath the water. The chlorine is eye-stingingly strong—just as well.

"There was this rich Russian bloke who came here regularly with his girlfriend. No telling how many blokes would go through her in the steam room."

Swinging—or wife-swapping—went mainstream in Britain in the 1970s, so given the free love feel of Rio's, I'm surprised to learn that it only came into being in 1989. Trevor, the owner, saw how popular spas were in Europe and set about opening his own in formerly down-at-heel Kentish Town, which at the time was best known as a good place to go if you wanted to buy a gun in a pub. Things were better at the club in the old days, according to Jim, a Geordie I get chatting to in the pool.

"You should have been here 20 years ago—a lot more action then," he promises. "You still see some sights, though. There was this Russian bloke who came here regularly for a while with his girlfriend. He was 70 and rich; she was 25 and hot as hell. He'd go downstairs for a massage for 90 minutes, and she'd have some fun while he was gone. No telling how many blokes would go through her in the steam room. She was clever—she'd time it just right so her fella never found out."

There's definitely a lot of fun to be had here, if you arrive at the right time and know where to look. To the back of the swimming pool, a dark corridor illuminated by low red lights leads out to the garden. Along the way are three or four private rooms, each with a bed and a paper towel dispenser on the wall. Stern signs warn you not to enter uninvited if they are closed, but sometimes it's not necessary to try and inveigle your way in. During the evening, solo men and women often sit in them with the doors open, staring invitingly at passersby.

"It's important you arrive early. With a girl. It doesn't matter if she's ugly. It's just important you bring her so you can fuck other girls."

According to a Vladimir Putin lookalike in a Speedo, to maximize your chances for adult fun you need to come in a mixed couple.

"It's important you arrive early. With a girl. It doesn't matter if she's ugly. It's not so important. It's just important you bring her so you can fuck other girls," he advises, romantically.

Vlad comes here every other week. He gets lucky most visits, but it's definitely hit and miss.

"Sometimes sex, yes—sometimes no. You take your chances. Better you arrive with a pretty girl."

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A couple of people in a sauna that isn't Rio's, and also doesn't have anything to do with swinging (Photo by Artur Potosi via)

If all of this sounds a little seedy, then that's not the whole picture. I hear one couple discussing the invitation they're received to a fondue party. Another guy is drying his girlfriend's hair by the mirrors outside the changing rooms. Rios, it seems, has a tender side, too.

"I met my wife here 20 years ago," the elderly Geordie confides. "She has one of the greatest talents a woman can possess."

"What's that?"

"She has no gag reflex in her throat."

"It's a great quality to have."

"Sure is. We get on very well. We have an understanding. I love seeing her go down on other guys. There used to be this Moroccan fella who'd come here every week. Ugly as sin he was, but with a huge cock. It was great, watching her make that thing disappear."

It's a level of candor you wouldn't encounter elsewhere, but I'm glad he's comfortable enough to share.

"Where's she now?" I ask.

"She's gone home," he says.

By 3 AM, the pickings are slim—just a few couples who don't seem particularly inclined to put out and a legion of thirsty blokes.

For a long-time swinger like him, you'd think Rio's must be paradise, a celestial oasis in the grey streets of North London, with its saucy-toga-party vibe and its smiling, topless Brazilian and Polish barmaids. But, by 3 AM, the pickings are slim—just a few couples who don't seem particularly inclined to put out and a legion of thirsty blokes, including the cuddly wanker from earlier. Even Vlad appears to have struck out. When I see my new Geordie mate sitting with his chin in his hand, staring disconsolately at the floor, I wonder how happy the swinging lifestyle has really made him. I also wonder whether or not his wife left alone tonight.

As I'm in the changing rooms getting ready to leave at 4 AM, a group of five young lads bound in, post-club, excited to be here and ready for action.

"How many birds in there, mate?" asks one.

I don't have the heart to tell him that they're far too late.

"Loads. You'll have a great time."

Communal sex in highly-chlorinated public baths may not be to everyone's taste. But in this age of creeping gentrification and prudery in our once-great capital, where even Boris Johnson is reduced to singing protest songs against big businesses swapping the sleaze of Soho for boutique fro-yo shops, Rio's quirky charm is something to be celebrated.

Follow John Lucas on Twitter.

[tweet text="There is only one true King. #unitetheseven pic.twitter.com/RDFG8jbuI6" byline="— ZackSnyder (@ZackSnyder)" user_id="ZackSnyder" tweet_id="568650209581858817" tweet_visual_time="February 20, 2015"]

Last week's big news in the comic world was centered around a photo tweeted by director Zack Snyder of Aquaman's new getup. Jason Momoa (Khal Drogo of Game of Thrones fame) is attached to the role of the king of the sea in the upcoming Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice film. The new character design, featuring scale tattoos and scaled armor, feels like a proper update. But to get some perspective on the history of Aquaman's outfits, I turned to Dan Raspler, who has edited many standout comic runs including Batman: The Killing Joke, Superman: Birthright, Kingdom Come (for which he won an Eisner Award), and many more.

I'll let him take it from here:

I haven't worked in comics in years, and I haven't done something like this for public consumption in quite a while. I hope all the people who loved me then, love me still. And I hope those who didn't have mellowed as much as I have.

1962

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This, to me, is the best Aquaman costume of them all. The orange and green help him stand out from the constant blue background of his undersea kingdom. The essential black trunks root his outfit firmly in the realm of super-heroes. It also includes the iconic "A" belt buckle and the Captain American–style scales on his tunic. I'll add that there is something essentially open about the crew neck. Turtlenecks are cool for hep cats, but superheroes have nothing to hide.

1986

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This one was a really gorgeous, but ultimately impractical re-design (by the late Neal Pozner, I believe). Unfortunately, no two artists could draw Aquaman the same way. The exquisite color scheme and asymmetrical wave-action details on this one just made Aquaman vanish into the ocean depths. It's no accident that familiar comic book elements—like Aquaman and the sea, or Flash and his Rogues' Gallery—were originally designed to be instantly distinguished with the old unreliable newsprint technology.

1994

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The long hair and beard made for a nice change in this one... And that seems to be something most artists and fans often agree upon. It ties him in to Aquaman's classical roots (images of Poseidon/Neptune spring to mind). It was at this time that the decision was made to turn friendly ol' Aquaman into more of an angry character, righting wrongs perpetrated on the sea, etc... Peter David had recently finished the Chronicles of Atlantis and the long-term plan (I believe) was to retro-fit various conflicting continuities into a more coherent path with this series.

1998

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To me, this new costume always hearkened back to Namor's black/sleeveless outfit... Though, I felt the seashell headband was a nice crown-like element for the Sea King. Either way, this one was a dignified and well-designed new costume. Which brings us to the chopped-off hand. I guess it taps into Captain Ahab, maybe? As for the unfortunate choice to stick a harpoon on his arm (a weapon which, above all other weapons in human history, symbolically represented the depredation and exploitation of the ocean), I believe the idea was for him to "own it" on behalf of all whales (or something). A hero losing his hand has various literary antecedents, so I understood that. And giving his new fake hand new powers (electricity, a grappling hook, etc...) is perfectly in line with traditions in comics. But the harpoon as harpoon always bugged me.

2003

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Full disclosure: I commissioned this particular series and edited it for several months. I think Rick Veitch came up with the "telekinetic water hand" idea, which felt like a respectful update to the harpoon. Obviously, Aquaman still had the long hair and beard at this stage, but I'm not 100 percent sure about his costume. It might have been that asymmetrical outfit with the straps and harness, or it might have been a return to the classic orange and green. I forget.

2011

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This one's written by my old pal Tony Bedard, but I can't say I've ever seen this costume before. The color and haircut makes him look kind of like Aqualad from Young Justice... I don't think men over the age of 40 should cut their hair like that because it makes them look sort of fascistic. In fact, the whole get-up makes him look pretty villainous. Frankly, I think comics fans these days want their heroes to look a little villainous. That's why S.H.I.E.L.D. in the movies wear black-on-black and Hawkeye is never caught dead with even a splash of purple. It's sad to me, but I'm not the market.

2013

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Written by another old friend, Geoff Johns. I haven't read this one, but the costume looks like he's back to basics, including that regal trident. Except he is missing his essential black trunks! And they've given him that military/fascistic high-collar. Me, I like my heroes looking more open and super-heroic. Once you remove the black trunks (or the red trunks on the new Superman), super-characters are in danger of looking like you're supposed to take them seriously. When, of course, we all know deep down that all super-heroes are glorious kid stuff, and we love them because they make us nostalgic for an age where we adored them all unabashedly. Now, I think, we second-guess ourselves, in hopes that non-comics fans will pick us earlier when choosing sides for kickball.

Don't get me wrong, though... Jason Momoa's new costume is pretty elaborate and cool. I love that Aquaman doesn't look like someone you should mess with. But, once again, he's wearing black-on-black and sort of looks like a villain. Or maybe that's just the photo? I hope there's a little green on the costume somewhere. I know it's hard to translate the clean, primary colors of classic super-costumes to film. But I just wish they picked colors other than black.

Still, how great is it that Khal Drogo will be king of the sea instead of just horses? Super awesome.

As told to Giaco Furino. Follow Giaco on Twitter.