[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='william-strobeck-wants-to-bring-back-the-golden-era-of-skate-videos-103-body-image-1426633992.jpg' id='37181']

All photos courtesy of William Strobeck

The 90s were arguably the purest time period for skateboard videos. The campy, day-glo, skit-filled vert videos of the 80s had given way to raw street skating spliced with irreverent behavior and scored with edgy hip-hop. By the mid 90s consumer video cameras had shrunk to palm-sized and become somewhat affordable, leading to an explosion of amateur footage. Suddenly it seemed as if every kid in every town across America was filming his scene and his crew's antics. The videos reflected just how small and insular skateboarding was at the time.

But just as skateboarding grew and progressed at the turn of the century, so did the way in which it was documented. VX cameras were replaced with the highest possible definition, and filmers were using dollies and jibs and all sorts of Hollywood gadgets and gizmos to unnecessarily dress up an art form that is naturally beautiful. Picture Kate Moss caked in makeup, if you will. We were, and still are, in the era of the big-budget skate video, where production crews outnumber skaters and spots are referred to as "sets."

In this climate William Strobeck, who released his first full-length video, "cherry," for Supreme last year, is a breath of fresh air. Best known for his documentation of the Love Park skate scene from 1997 to 2003 and his work with Alien Workshop, he began filming "cherry" in 2012, at the height of the Michael Bay-esque skate video explosion. Strobeck's 40-minute opus served as a counterweight to all that and put the spotlight back where it belonged, on the skaters and their colorful personalities. The result was the most authentic and fun video of 2014 and the closest anyone has come to capturing the purity of mid-90s Eastern Exposure-era skate videos.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of "cherry" so we decided to sit Strobeck down to discuss the video and the death of personality in skateboarding.

[body_image width='1200' height='868' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='william-strobeck-wants-to-bring-back-the-golden-era-of-skate-videos-103-body-image-1426634075.jpg' id='37183']

VICE: With last year's "cherry" video for Supreme you helped usher in a newer look of shants and high-socks. What exactly do you call that look?
William Strobek: Ha! Are you referring to the style that Dylan [Rieder] or Sean [Pablo] run? I don't know what it's called and why people even care. When I showed up and those guys were rocking that shit I felt like, Damn, these guys look like rad... and they're good at skating.

What's the most blocks in advance to actually ollieing that you've seen Sean or Sage [Elsesser] crouch down?
Ha. I had seen someone write that somewhere. Do you see something weird? Because I seriously don't even notice it. Of all the times filming these kids skating I never thought anything they've done was weird. I actually like their style a lot and the way that it all looks. They're just doing their own thing.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='william-strobeck-wants-to-bring-back-the-golden-era-of-skate-videos-103-body-image-1426634218.jpg' id='37185']

I just like busting their balls about it, but in general it looks like that crew of Fucking Awesome kids are having a lot of fun. And it seems like you're having fun filming them—or at least that's how it comes across in the footage.
Dude, it's totally fun and I hope that's how it comes across. Sure there are times that it has been frustrating to get things going, but whatever, that's how it is. It's like the World Industries days but in a modern way. They pretty much do what they want. Seems like they're not catering to what people want them to do, which I think is dope. I've seen how other crews film throughout the years and it'll be like, "Lets meet up at 11 AM and go to the spot and go to work." Whereas for me I was just out in a hotel in LA for a month to film "the red devil" and I'd wake up and text them and might not hear back for a couple hours or we might not even skate that day. But nowadays I like that. I like to have time in the morning and not be rushed or have a day off here and there. I guess it's been that way since I left Philly. In Philly there were so many people I was filming that I didn't have time to do anything else. If Pappalardo wasn't filming then [Josh] Kalis was. If Josh wasn't then Stevie [Williams] was or Kerry [Getz] was. There was no down time. And you can tell back then in the footage that there was a lot more going down. The vibe now looks a little more relaxed to me.

I like to be around to document the delinquency of it all, like when kids act fucking crazy.

Which way do you prefer to operate?
I guess I prefer it to be way more mellow. I think the best way to get footage out of anybody is literally to not push them to do anything at all and to hang out and just be an observer. They'll know when they want to do something. Like these Supreme kids definitely pick a lot of the things they want to do. If somebody doesn't want to skate you'll never hear me be like, "Dude, what the fuck? Somebody is paying you! You got to!" Fuck that. They'll skate when they skate. I think hanging out and being around is a part of it all and I like to capture that part of it as much as the skating.

"cherry" was Supreme's first video aside from The Love Supreme by Thomas Campbell back in 1995. How did you end up getting the gig?
Well, I'd pitched to some of the dudes who work there about doing a video a few times prior to "cherry" but nothing had panned out. Also I had known about the Thomas thing and I always loved the film and think it still holds that time perfectly. But on the other end I had heard that the skaters involved in it actually wanted a real skate video and not a film with a little skating in it. Also everyone had wondered why Supreme had never done a video before. So then a friend of mine who I had known growing up, Kyle Demers, started working there and asked me if I wanted to do a commercial for them with [Jason] Dill and Tyshawn [Jones]. I worked on that and when it came out they really liked it so Kyle came and asked me what I thought about working on a full-length video. I was super down. It was going to be my first full-length and Supreme's first actual skate video. If I was gonna put my all into a video it'd be this one. That said we banged it out in a year and a half. I guess one of the craziest things about the video is that I literally used everything I filmed in that time span. There's hardly anything left over. It was originally supposed to be short like a Tim & Henry's Pack of Lies. That was the goal, but as time went on and new people came aboard it ended up being 40-minutes. I like the length a lot actually and feel it's just enough without being too much.

You're 36. What's it like cruising with a crew of teenagers on the regular?
It's exactly what you think it'd be. There's so much personality in those kids in particular. They seem excited to be doing all this, also just excited to skate and still be fucking goofballs. That's what's fun to be around, I'm pretty jaded in general so the randomness and energy of these kids is refreshing and can actually be better than going out with somebody who's on a schedule who is like, "Meet me here, I'm going to try the trick for an hour and then I have to get home and meet my wife and kid." Another reason is I like to be around to document the delinquency of it all, like when kids act fucking crazy. That shit is exciting to be around, I don't care what age you are that shit's funny.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='william-strobeck-wants-to-bring-back-the-golden-era-of-skate-videos-103-body-image-1426634149.jpg' id='37184']

You know, being around this crew gives me the same vibe of what it was like growing up with the crew I did. Same shit, really—I'm just older. I obviously know my age but I don't feel old or anything. I mean who really wants to be their age when they get older anyway, you know? I just look at it like my job for Supreme is to document what these kids are about, in my own style. I personally feel like it's time for skateboarding to pay attention to a new crew of people and I think these kids have the perfect personality to get that attention.

Speaking of colorful characters, you filmed Anthony Pappalardo and Brian Wenning extensively. They've changed so much since you shot them earlier in their careers. One is as skinny as a rail and the other as big as a house now; they form the number 10 when they stand next to each other. What are your thoughts on what came of them?
Yeah, those were heavy years filming with them and it's weird to think that I don't see either of them as much anymore. I mean I still talk to Anthony now and then and he's still my boy, but I haven't really heard from Wenning for a long time. I guess it's just a case of somebody getting a lot of attention when they're really young. Those kids in particular were just some real young East Coast skate rats. All they thought and did was skate.

When I got the job filming for Alien Workshop I got a list of the guys like AVE, Dill, Freddy [Gall], Dyrdek, and I was a fan of everyone so I was intimated to call certain people at first. That's what made me call Wenning and Pappalardo, because they were unknown. I called them and they were like, "We're heading to the city tomorrow at 9 AM." I took the Greyhound up from Philly and met them at the Seaport and that was it. I hung out with them non-stop. Then they got real big because they were so good. They landed all these crazy deals and got a lot of money and things started to get a little weird. Those guys were best friends, then it seemed like they were getting a little competitive, and then suddenly they were not homies to the point where they were like, "I will not skate with that dude. I don't want to be around that dude." It just got weird.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='william-strobeck-wants-to-bring-back-the-golden-era-of-skate-videos-103-body-image-1426634447.jpg' id='37186']

Those two both have intense personalities, and you said before, "Personality is part of the trick." I've always felt that way. My favorite guys in history: Grosso, Cardiel, Rowley, etc, all had intense personalities. But it seems like the skateboarding industry is trying to skirt personalities to the side and make the act of skating the focus. Yet they wonder why pro models and endorsed goods have a hard time selling when there's no relatable personality to latch on to.
I think the higher uppers close shit off for the business. I'm not trying to be on some Fionna Apple-shit but it's a very political business. At times it seems like things are fixed. Like, "We want so and so to sponsor this contest, but their guy has to win so we can get the sponsor's money." Also it seems like the plain guy skater is promoted more these days because there are way more plain Jane skaters out there than not and that's good for business. So there is a chance of them getting sponsored and being a part of the industry and that brings in cash. Basically skateboarding has its ups and downs but I just feel like a lot of the soul is gone nowadays, or I guess when I was younger I wasn't aware of this back side as much as I am now and in general just didn't know any better. I really don't want to know about the back end of skateboarding or any business in general.

[body_image width='1200' height='883' path='images/content-images/2015/03/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/17/' filename='william-strobeck-wants-to-bring-back-the-golden-era-of-skate-videos-103-body-image-1426634529.jpg' id='37187']

Final question: It seems like so much skate footage is either super polished or disposable dog shit. Which direction do you think skate videos will go in the future?
All I can say is, I think there are so many more kids skating and filming these days. Also a lot more videos are being made and seen. I guess I see people wanting to find their own niche, like for example someone like Palace filming with the VHS and then Ty Evans going next level with his own thing. Seems like now so much has been done already, how do you find an original way to do it? A lot of kids are just straight up copying what other people are doing in videos or copying how videos are being made, thinking that's the way they have to do it to get anywhere. I hope that stops and that kids everywhere just go out skating and goof around and try something new and just post it online. I think companies will see that type of rebellion against what they're putting out and hopefully we'll have a return to the purity of what I got into skateboarding for in the first place.

Follow @WilliamStrobeck on Instagram

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko

[body_image width='1200' height='799' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='is-egypts-proposed-45-billion-pre-fab-mega-city-realistic-or-completely-insane-293-body-image-1426639669.jpg' id='37197']

A delegation looks at a scale model of the new Egyptian capital displayed at the congress hall in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on March 14, 2015. Photo via KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images.

Last Friday in the coastal Sinai resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, during a development and foreign investment conference entitled "Egypt the Future," Egyptian Minister of Housing Mostafa Madbouly unveiled the details of a plan to build a new national capital between the current seat of Cairo and the Suez Canal. A $45 billion project to be led by the Emirati real estate investment firm Capital City Partners (headed by the man behind the Burj Khalifa), the as-of-yet unnamed and supposedly smart and sustainable metropolis aims to house Egypt's governmental and diplomatic buildings, as well as 5 million residents, on 270 square miles of land. All of this, said Madbouly, will go up within five to seven years, ideally (although some officials estimate that 12 years may be more realistic).

The main stated impetus behind the project is a desire to take the pressure of population growth off of the already overcrowded Cairo. A megacity of 18 to 20 million people set to double in size within the next 40 years, officials want to siphon traffic and pollution into a better organized and more easily maintained environment, giving the ancient lynchpin of the nation space to breathe. Many also see the new city as an element in a larger bid to boost the nation's stalled economy, foundering since the 2011 Arab Spring, using construction jobs and new shops and government gigs to ease unemployment and fuel the goal of achieving 6 percent growth in the next five years.

Yet there's clearly an element of zealous spectacle at work in the new city, which in addition to 663 health centers, 1,250 churches and mosques, and 1.1 million homes split across more than 20 districts, claims it will boast a green space twice the size of Central Park and an amusement park four times the size of Disneyland, not to mention an airport equal to London's Heathrow. Many suspect that this city is as much an honest bid to resolve economic and urban planning woes as it is a monument to the vision of renewal promoted by coup leader-turned-president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who aims to ameliorate years of economic, political, and social crisis. Madbouly seemed to confirm as much when he explained of the city, as quoted in The Guardian:

"Egypt has more wonders than any other country in the world, and provides more works that defy description. This is why it is necessary for us as Egyptians to enrich this picture—and to add to it something that our grandchildren will be able to say enhances Egypt's characteristics."

Given the history of purpose-built cities, raised up from nothing to suit the ideological or practical ends of a state, there's plenty of cause to be skeptical about Egypt's new project.

Up until a couple of centuries ago, creating administrative centers from scratch was commonplace for new countries or regimes. (They were especially popular in the utopian-imperialist land grabs of 19th century North America.) Eager to either find the best spot from which to defend and control, establish a neutral zone between cultures and factions, or distance themselves from old elites and create new symbols and icons, leaders often built up magnificent yet originally small and contained administrative centers. That's how Cairo got its start, built in 969 AD by the invading Fatimids as al-Qahira, which roughly translates to The Victorious. Some of these planned cities, like St. Petersburg (circa 1703), Washington, D.C. (circa 1800), or Ottawa (circa 1857), by virtue of the money lavished into their contained and well-populated nuclei, naturally and organically evolved into more formidable mega cities and commercial hubs.

Yet today purpose-built capitals and communities have developed a bad reputation, thanks to a slew of pop-up cities, often built at great expense and for poor reasons, that now sit half-empty, half-finished, or entirely soulless after exceptionally long construction periods. China's Caofeidian, a city built for one million, attracted just a few thousand, while the unfinished Emirati smart city of Masdar, a moderate community of 50,000, has only attracted a few hundred residents. Sejong City and Songdo in South Korea remain half-completed and desolate after over a decade of work each.

Egypt actually has a particularly bad reputation for unlivable and desolate developments. In Egypt's Desert Dreams: Development or Disaster?, ironically released the week of Madbouly's speech, urban planner David Sims outlines the history of at least 22 attempts in the modern nation to lure Egyptians out of the cities and into purpose-built suburbs. In every case, Sims explains, a lack of jobs, transit, or amenities for largely poor and coerced residents led to the rapid abandonment of the settlements, which now have less than a million collective residents.

"Governments think they can just move people to new areas," Simick Arese, an Oxford University urban anthropologist, recently told The Guardian summarizing the failure of modern pop-up cities. "But actually people go where they want to go."

Yet there are success stories. Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan, which took the reins of power in 1997 as a more central, less earthquake-prone, and less ethnically homogenous site than the old seat of Almaty, seems to be developing a stable and satisfied population. Brazil's Brasília and Nigeria's Abuja (inaugurated in 1960 and 1991, respectively), although not universally beloved and much smaller than Rio de Janeiro or Lagos, respectively, still have loyal supporters who see them as legitimate, livable, and pleasant towns. And smaller settlements like Adelaide in Australia or Milton Keynes in the UK now feel just like everyday (if starkly gridded) cities.

Although every city has its own story (Naypyidaw's connection to a cruel military junta obsessed with astrology and repression or Brasília's beloved and inventive architecture) contributing to their success or failure, there are a few common lessons to be drawn from them as a whole.

"The most important thing anyone designing a new city has to bear in mind is not striking architecture or smart technologies," P.D. Smith, author of 2012's acclaimed City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, told VICE, "but the people who are going to live there."

"The new city needs to reflect what we are and what we want in our lives if it is to be successful ... Will the new Cairo have great parks and squares? Places where people and communities can express themselves? That's fundamental. Otherwise all you've got is a collection of buildings."

On paper, it looks like the new Egyptian megacity is drawing on the best lessons from purpose-built cities of the past. Focusing on mixed-use structures and envisioned as a trade hub hooking into concurrent expansions of the Suez Canal industrial zone, Madbouly and company believe the city will create 1.5 million new jobs, providing the right economic incentives to draw people out of Cairo naturally. They've also obviously gone overboard with entertainment venues and public greenways. And with plans to build the city right on the eastern edge of Cairo, connecting it with rail and roads, the new settlement should not be isolated like old Egyptian desert towns.

Whether these jobs materialize and how well people like the public spaces is hard to predict. Smith suspects that the political climate may limit the form and potential of parks, for instance:

"The chances of a new Tahrir Square being created [as a place for self-expression] in this new Egyptian capital are looking slim," he says. "That's tragic and doesn't augur well."

Yet that's a wait-and-see concern. Right now the more pressing question is whether Egypt can even pull off such a massive project in such a short amount of time. After all, Brasília and Islamabad, which took more than half a decade to inaugurate and continued construction for ages, even now consist of only 2.8 and 1.8 million people, respectively. Many suspect that Madbouly's five-to-seven-year timeline is unfeasible, setting Egypt up for a shoddy ghost town.

However the project isn't impossible.

"[It] sounds manageable [in terms of size and population density]," says Smith. "The timescale sounds ambitious to me! [But] mind you, China manages to build infrastructure and cities at an astonishing rate. Even so, Masdar City is a much smaller project and it's taken, what, ten years?"

Madbouly claims that, all doubts aside, the government has raised the money to built the first 40 square miles of the city, featuring key government offices, diplomatic missions, housing centers, universities, technology and innovation parks, and over 6,000 miles of roads—the military has already begun a road from Cairo to the construction site. Officials also say that the project will not cost them a cent, supposedly because they're scoring billions in support from Gulf countries (explaining why at least one development will be named after a crown prince of Abu Dhabi).

"We are committed for the first phase," Madbouly recently told The Guardian. "We have already a very clear plan [sic]."

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680464.jpg' id='37318']

This article was originally published on VICE UK

We're good at extremes in Ireland, applying the same logic to our property market as to how much we drink on St Patrick's Day. Indulge now, worry about the ruinous consequences later.

The theme of this year's St Patrick's Day parade in Dublin fit that remit: "Celebrate Now". Which, aside from its government-endorsed blandness, had a vaguely apocalyptic ring to it. Celebrate now, because by morning you'll be hungover. Celebrate Now, because tomorrow the streets will be spattered with vomit and blood and you'll still have to go to work.

But it's Paddy's Night now, rather than Paddy's Day, and the streets are oddly silent. A grey mist hangs over them and there are sirens in the distance. It's only at Harcourt Street that the first harbinger of a messy night appears: a girl dances out of a club into the path of an oncoming Luas (Dublin's slow-moving purple tram system) and it grinds to a halt until she moves on. She's wearing the first of many thousands of green velour stovepipe hats I'll see tonight. The signature Paddy's Day hat, sewn from shiny flammable-looking fabric often with a fake red beard attached.

The hat is troubling me, raising questions of national identity that cannot be drowned out by drinking. Is it made here, or China, or Bangladesh? Do jet-lagged tourists line up and purchase them, or are they passed out with the headphones on the flight over? Is it sweaty and uncomfortable to wear? And does nobody, Irish or otherwise, realise that by putting on the hat they instantly transform into an absolute gobshite in the eyes of any onlooker?

[body_image width='1200' height='1807' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680525.jpg' id='37321']

The author and her new French friend

Nearer Stephen's Green shopping centre there's another omen: a man wearing the Irish flag as a cloak. He is pissing through the park gate into a shrubbery. I meet Sarah, the photographer, at Bruxelles, a bar where we chat to a pleasant Bavarian couple – "It's amazing, such culture!" the man tells me in the kind of English that doge speaks – and a French guy who's deemed this the perfect night to go out wearing explicitly tight cycling shorts.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680493.jpg' id='37319']

At the end of the street we run into an assembly of Gardai (Irish police), who are happy to smile and pose for photos with tourists. They list pickpocketing and being drunk and disorderly as the day's most common offences. "At least taxi drivers get paid more if they work today," one quips. "We just get paid the same as usual."

Night closes in. Our landmarks have been lit a bilious green shade in honour of the occasion. Dame Lane, the back street full of bars that we head to next, is greener still: its denizens have lit up en masse and the smell of weed almost overwhelms that of kebabs and stale beer.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680923.jpg' id='37340']

I speak to two brothers from Kingston, Ontario. They're all white teeth and healthy tans, taller and better looking than us, the potato people. "In Ontario they celebrate St Patrick's Day, but nowhere near on this level," one tells me. He is interrupted by a horde of cackling teenage girls, sitting on bins left out by restaurants nearby and drinking WKD blue. One of their number appears to have passed out.

We turn onto Dame Street, orbiting closer to Temple Bar, the city's biggest tourist trap. But first we must cross the piss lake forming outside Rick's Burgers, a fabled late-night spot for hungry drunks. People will pee on the streets behind Rick's on any standard night, but tonight such is the volume of human urine that it has seeped out onto the footpath, bursting its banks.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680640.jpg' id='37329']

We stand for a while in front of the piss lake, reluctantly taking in its smell. Around us, things are beginning to get weirder. We're passed by more fake auburn beards, tangled and coarse like ungroomed pubic hair. Apparently a man kicked in the toilet door at Abrakebabra and a couple were found having sex in the cubicle next door. A very loud, very drunk lady with fake eyelashes hanging off her face tries to start on Sarah, but she manages to talk her down.

Our feet finally on Temple Bar's cobblestones, we meet a man from Brazil wearing a tutu and novelty glasses. "My father was a leprechaun and my mother was a fairy," he tells us. "I'm sort of inter-species."

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680839.jpg' id='37338']

The crowd is changing, becoming more outlandish and urgent. That same green hat appears over and over, toppling from groggy heads, obscuring the faces of wearers who KO in the street or maul each other against walls. It seems to inspire its wearers to mimic the worst historical caricatures of Irish people: deranged, engaging in animalistic behaviour.

Surprisingly it's not just tourists who are enjoying Irish ethnic kitsch. Before tonight it had never occurred to me that actual Irish people listen to Dropkick Murphys, but we encounter a trio of fans from Balbriggan who have come straight from their Vicar Street show. I ask where they're off to next, whether they'd consider a trip to the infamous Copper Face Jacks, a club beloved of off-duty Gardai and nurses. "I would rather shit in my hands and clap than go to Coppers," one replies.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426680755.jpg' id='37336']

"The skanger kids were running wild earlier," another guy tells me ("skanger" is a pejorative word for working-class Dubliners). "They were carrying eggs in their pockets and throwing them. I asked who the targets were and they told me 'the posh people'."

These kids keep coming up in conversation, mentioned with a kind of fear by many I speak to. It's possibly the loss of innocence that disturbs people, that Paddy's Day is intended to appeal to children in a simpler way with its parade and its funfair. Evidently the minute they're old enough, Irish children evade their parents' clutches in favour of Smirnoff Ice, bummed cigarettes and eggs as projectile weapons.

[body_image width='1200' height='1806' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426681001.jpg' id='37341']

Smoke from falafel shops spirals into the night sky, leading us down a street of takeaway shops. A father and son wearing matching face paint, from Yorkshire with Irish blood, sing " Grace" by the Dubliners about the 1916 martyr Joseph Plunkett. "They'll take me out at dawn and I will die..."

Glass crunches underfoot, and this place begins to feel like the end of the earth. There are trenches of cans and empty chip boxes stacked in the street, groups of tourists sitting on the footpath among them. Their costumes speak of competitive self-humiliation: men in spandex and tinsel wigs, women in heels and " sexy Leprechaun" ensembles. A kind of Irish drag that's more Ibiza than Emerald Isle.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426681021.jpg' id='37343']

Some are lost, beer goggle zombies following the green light. They lead us towards Temple Bar Square, where the streets are so packed we can't move, and are drawn into a slow collective mosh.

In hell green beams of light criss-cross the sky. In hell they chant "Seven Nation Army" like it never went away. In hell everyone has a vuvuzela.

The absurdity of this night becomes clear: the emptiness of surrounding streets, the pressure-cooker chaos of Temple Bar. The abundantly clear fact that nobody hear is actually Irish, that they – and the Irish themselves, for that matter – must know fuck-all about Irish culture apart from drink.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426681124.jpg' id='37344']

What is the point of all this? No one even looks like they're having fun: they look like this is an exercise in masochism via cirrhosis of the liver. As though they are drinking only to want not to drink again in the morning. To prove to themselves that they are capable of living up to an inflated ideal of Irishry.

And we Irish didn't even invent it: before 1961, the 17th of March was a genuine saint's day, meaning that drink was not commercially available except for, curiously, at a dog show in central south Dublin. The first parades were in Boston and New York: it was emigration that turned St Patrick's Day into Paddy's Day, then later "Patty's Day"; Irish-Americans who dyed pints and rivers in Chicago the colour of chlorophyll.

And it was a certain postcolonial instinct which drove us to embrace all this back here in Ireland, seeing the national caricature of alcoholic mayhem reflected back and deciding to capitalise on it through tourism. Trivialise us, make potato jokes, take irreverent selfies at the Famine memorial. We'll charge you €7.45 for a pint in revenge: you can drink our culture at an inflated cost.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426681167.jpg' id='37345']

In this sense, St Patrick's Day is a collective illusion, one as flimsy as a synthetic red beard attached to a hat. All we're doing is clawing at the facsimile of Irishness, but it helps us to make peace with all the absurd things we cannot change. With being Angela Merkel's bitch. With a national leader who mugs in pictures with Hulk Hogan. With no longer being able to leave the Catholic church by writing a letter (in 2010 the Canon Law was changed). At least we can still take a saint's day and turn it into a worldwide piss-up.

Though the chaos never lasts long. Not long after midnight, everywhere but the middle of Temple Bar empties out. Tomorrow is a working day: the tourists will leave, the Dubliners will return and the bank holiday will be over.

[body_image width='1200' height='797' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='st-patricks-day-piss-up-in-dublin-174-body-image-1426681201.jpg' id='37346']

I say my goodbyes and walk home through the mist that still hangs over Dublin, out into the suburbs. On the way I keep stepping on little clumps of red fabric beard that were once attached to hats, beer-soaked and abandoned on the footpath.

They'll hang around only a few more hours, until the street cleaners come collecting empty bottles and cans, and the rest of the discarded Irish drag.

@RoisinTheMirror / sarahfuckingmeyler.tumblr.com

More stories from Ireland:

We Went Out in Dublin While People Celebrated the Legal Ecstasy Loophole

Hey Americans, Please Stop Pretending to Be Irish

Ireland Is Locking Up Trafficked Cannabis Slaves

Intrepid intern–turned–actual VICE staffer River Donaghey is releasing an album with his band Pocket Hercules next week, so we told him we'd premiere the record if we could get a celebrity to review it. We asked Aaron Carter, of "Aaron's Party" and "That's How I Beat Shaq" fame, to give the record a listen and report back. Unfortunately, Aaron hated it, and sent us a track-by-track review tearing the album apart. Sorry River.

I understand this dark, kinda emo pop-rock music. I hired a tour manager last year named Brent Wingen. He was a super chill dude. He always wore the same black jeans and took me to random SXSW concerts while we were in Texas on my tour, so I got to see and hear this genre of music.

I liked the Dum Dum Girls but everything else kinda scared me a bit. I still fucking enjoyed SXSW and surprisingly lots of people there recognized me and took pictures with me. It was dope. What I'm saying is that this kind of music isn't foreign to me, because I started off doing 90s grunge/garage music when I was six in a band called Dead End. We sucked.

At least Pocket Hercules is better than that. Yes, I compared you to a six-year-old and his band who played for coffee houses and had a 70-year-old keyboardist who is probably dead now. Yeah, I said it.

1. Reverse Manifest Destiny

First track is pretty good but extremely forgettable. I couldn't sing you a line right now to save my fucking life. I'm kinda confused where this album is headed.

2. Party

OK. What the fuck guys, 52 seconds long? What are you trying to do to people? I guess being tortured for 50 seconds isn't as bad as three minutes or more, so thank you for sparing me from using my energy to change the track. Right when I wanted to change it, it changed itself.

3. Divers

No comment.

4. A Million Statues

No comment.

5. Drowning Friends

No comment.

6. Christopher Jesus

No comment.

7. I'm Uptight

No comment.

8. Little Pieces

I skipped a few. Now onto "Little Pieces." Anyway, what the fuck is this song trying to do? Get people to crash in their cars with that squealing guitar lick? Damn-near crashed my car. And a terrible place to fade out the end.

9. Power

The majority of the album has a decent mix on it. Time signatures on this song are mediocre at best, pretty repetitious arrangements, and a weak-ass guitar solo before the second verse. Sorry. I don't think I can understand a single word in this song. I tried! I'm actually listening. I hear nothing; I understand nothing. You should just say you did this song in the German language, 'cause it's definitely not English.

10. Well-Adjusted

Starting off pretty weird. I can barely hear the ride cymbal in there and when I do it sounds like a creepy Santa Claus about to come through my chimney. This song is super trippy. If you're trying to appeal to druggies then I'm sure this song will take them on a weird trip. Don't do DMT and listen to this song, you might not come out of it. But maybe a spiritual awakening is needed, because the song leaves me feeling depressed and un-adjusted. Abrupt ending, too, thank god.

11. Center of the Room

Did you guys tune your instruments before you recorded? Clearly no one is a poet. There is no reason or rhyme to this song. I think you guys just took songs from the 90s and revamped them.

All in all, this is pretty much grunge-pop meets Dirty Beaches. It is super depressing, but what do I know? I do fucking pop music. If I was feeling depressed or some shit I might just throw this on and escape.

Aaron Carter actually wrote this. You can follow him on Twitter. Also, catch his live show at the El Rey Theatre in LA on Friday, March 27. You can buy tickets here.

Follow Pocket Hercules on Twitter and Facebook. Their self-titled album is out March 24 on Seagreen Records.

Pre-order the record here, and go to their release show March 25 at Brooklyn's Shea Stadium.

Portrait by Michael Marcelle

A punk like Larry Clark never really grows up, but now he's 72, and his work is starting to show signs of his secret maturity. Clark's recent film Marfa Girl, which was released on his website in 2012 before being acquired for theatrical distribution last year, is a coming-of-age story about Adam, a Mexican-American teen who lives in the desolate border town of Marfa, Texas. The movie has the sex-and-drugs brutality of Clark's early classics Kids and Bully, but it also addresses subjects like spirituality, belonging, and parenthood with a tenderness foreign to that work. In anticipation of the film's (re)release, I had dinner with Clark near his Tribeca home to discuss the shift Marfa Girl represents and his plans for a sequel.

VICE: What led to the acquisition of Marfa Girl after its online-only release?
Larry Clark: My idea was to put Marfa Girl online and cut out all the producers and distributors—the crooks, I call them. I put it on my website, and it was online about a year. It did OK, but I guess there's something hard about convincing people to charge their credit card $5.99 on someone's website. It was an experiment, and I'm glad I did it. But I don't plan on having any more major releases online—probably just short projects that I've done for fun. Anyway, people approached my producer, Adam Sherman, about a theatrical release, so we're doing it now. And since the movie's release, I've gone back to Texas and shot Marfa Girl 2, so sometime soon we'll be able to do double features of the movies.

You've kept active since Marfa Girl's release and sold thousands of your archival photographs. What else have you been up to?
I'm just back from Paris, where I made a film in French called The Smell of Us, which is about teen skaters who hustle on the side. I spent a year in Paris, and it was interesting for me to make a film in a different language with an all-French cast and crew. I don't speak any French, but it was OK, since the language and the emotion of the film are close to English, I think. I've had the idea of making a French movie for a long time, and after I met Mathieu [Landis, the screenwriter] in Paris in 2010, we developed the project together for over a year. It was originally somewhat autobiographical for him, but halfway through shooting I threw out the script and changed it. So I guess it's not really his story anymore. We have a book coming out that's going to include stills from the film as well as the screenplay. So if you read French, you can read the script and see how the movie itself is totally different.

What attracted you to making a movie set in Marfa? In your film it's depicted as a place of total desolation, but the town also has a reputation for being a hub for young artists.
When I first went, I was visiting my friend Christopher Wool, the great American painter, and I was just fascinated by the town. There's nothing there. There are no jobs—all the kids' ambition is to get the hell out of Marfa. It truly is in the middle of nowhere, and even though they're 70 miles from the border, there are hundreds of border patrolmen who have nothing to do except fuck with the locals, and they're stopping the Hispanics who were born and raised there. So there's a real racist aspect to the town. While I was there, I kept a notebook where I kind of wrote a script, and day by day I was just making the film up while I was shooting it, just flying by the seat of my pants. I had some basic ideas so that I could schedule the actors and the crew by the day, but I kept adding ideas as I went along. I kept making the bad guy worse and worse... like that scene where he sexually abuses Adam—I told the actors about it 20 minutes before we shot it. They just sort of had to go along with it. I lost a couple of crew members over that.

That part of the movie was really unexpected for me. What made you put that in there?
There was this cop in Oklahoma who busted a friend of mine when I was a kid, and he said that he'd let him go if the kid let the cop blow him. So the cop blew the kid and let him go! I just wanted to make Tom as disturbed as I could, so I thought about every crazy person I've ever known and every crazy thing that had ever happened and put it all in this one character, so that was fun for me to make happen. It was a lifetime of stories that I was able to draw upon and put in these characters.

Your work has always focused on certain subjects, most noticeably adolescence and young people. Why is it that you've never had a protagonist who's an adult, even one in his or her 20s?
The way I see it, The Smell of Us is a story about all ages, but it's still told through the perspective of youth. It's just what I've always done. It's like a bottomless pit for me. It's my own territory. No one else seems to be doing it as well as me.

What's different about French teenagers compared with Americans?
They're a bunch of mama's boys, so they're weaker in that way. I like them a lot, but there's a certain toughness here that's not there.

Do you feel any differently now about young people than you did when you started making art about them?
Yeah, I'm sure I do. I think I have much more insight, of course. I think that the consequences are a lot more apparent to me now. Whatever one does in one's life, there are certainly going to be consequences. I see them more as an old guy. I kind of know what's going to happen—I can tell what's going to happen to people, and it's very disconcerting. That's part of the reason I always wanted to go back [to Marfa] and make a second movie, and even a third one. It's the same characters, same story. I just felt like there were so many unanswered questions at the end of the film. So it was interesting to go back and pick up the loose threads and see what could happen next.

Marfa Girl comes out in New York and Los Angeles on March 27.

As the bitter winter comes to a satisfying end, Canada's Misteur Valaire reminds us of the good things our country has to offer. Watch as these electro-jazz tastemakers talk about their musical inspiration, picking up girls, and jamming in elementary school before taking the stage at Canada's newest skatepark, Dew Underground.

[body_image width='1024' height='685' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='quebecs-police-ethics-system-heavily-favours-cops-over-complainants-263-body-image-1426693850.jpg' id='37489']

Banner at a Montreal rally against police brutality. It reads "Who protects us from the police?" Photo via Flickr user Gary Lauzon

In the early hours of November 15, 2013, Dominique Jacobs and her then partner, Shane, awoke to four police officers banging on the door of their South Shore home. As Shane opened the door for the police, an officer barged past him without providing a warrant. He proceeded to look around the kitchen and living room with a flashlight.

Her son Terell, and stepson, Nathan Picard, had been brought home by the police. According Jacobs' official complaint letter to Quebec's Police Ethics Commissioner, the officer asked her for Terell's ID. When handing it to the officer, Jacobs asked him what Terell had done. The officer allegedly responded by saying, "Calm the fuck down." Later, as she was outside, handing the officer a pen and paper in order for him to write down his badge number, she says he told her to "Shut the fuck up, OK?"

The officer informed her that Terell and Nathan were under arrest for jaywalking. She had a hard time believing it was that trivial because the officers were behaving so aggressively. "I thought they had robbed a bank. It was that bad," she said.

The complaint letter alleges that the two youths, both of whom are black, had been crossing a street in Brossard, a suburb of Montreal, when police cruisers pulled up next to them, telling them nothing else other than to put their hands up. As Nathan, 19, asked what they had done wrong, he received a punch to the back of the head and was thrown to the ground. Terell, 17, was threatened with pepper spray should he fail to shut up. They were then placed in a cruiser and driven to their home in Brossard.

After entering the house, the officers began to mock Shane as he was outside asking the police to let Nathan out of the car. "They were just laughing at Shane," asking him "who he [thought he was]," says Jacobs.

Following the episode, Jacobs filed her complaint, claiming that the police had abused their authority, been disrespectful and impolite, and carried out an illegal entry and search of their home.

In late February of this year, they received a response telling them their file was now permanently closed because there was not enough evidence to verify their claims. A letter from the Commissioner's office to the family stated that the police officer had provided a different, and "exculpatory" version of the events of that November night. As a result, "[The Commissioner is] not in a position to demonstrate by preponderance the complainant's allegations."

In the eyes of the Commissioner, it was the police officers' word against theirs.

The experience shared by Jacobs and her sons points to what is seen by many as the systematic inability of the Police Ethics System to hold police officers accountable for their actions, especially concerning issues of racial profiling, which is recognized under the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms as a violation of the right to equal protection from discrimination and harassment.

Created in 1990 as part of the Quebec Police Act, the Police Ethics System is an independent body separated into two parts: the office of the Commissioner, which receives and examines complaints; and the Police Ethics Committee, which is a specialized tribunal enforcing the code of ethics of Quebec cops, and is designed to ensure "the protection of citizens in their relations with police officers."

The Commissioner receives the complaints and after examining the evidence, decides if it should go to investigation, which, if the officer is considered guilty, could see the officer placed in front of the Ethics Committee.

"The system was created to enforce professional conduct...the whole notion is about legislative as well as public oversight of police conduct and practices" says Fo Niemi, head of the Center for Research-Action on Race Relations.

But the Police Ethics System is not living up to its responsibilities. The main problem, says Niemi, is the way it was set up; "It doesn't have enough resources, doesn't have enough impartiality, it doesn't have the power to fully carry out its mandate."

What renders the Commissioner particularly toothless in investigating violations of police ethics is Section 192 of the Police Act. This section exists in order to protect officers from self-incrimination, yet it effectively allows the police to not cooperate or speak with the Commissioner during his investigation.

The Police Ethics System deals with civil matters, not criminal, and therefore the idea of self-incrimination is not relevant, reads a report by the Commission des Droits de la Personne et Droits de la Jeunesse, whose mission is to promote and uphold the principles of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms.

"Without the officers being interviewed during the investigation, and questioned by the investigator, the Commissioner can only rely on documentary evidence and other police or civilian witnesses, if any, to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to cite and bring the officers before the committee" says Niemi.

This means that the Commissioner's fact finding process and final analysis is weakened as it makes it all the more difficult for him to gather enough evidence, rendering the issue one of credibility and not necessarily one of proof.

Louise Letarte, a spokeswoman for the Commissioner's office, says Section 192 doesn't give the police an unfair advantage, "It doesn't give them the right to not work with the inquiry. If the Commissioner doesn't get a version of the event from the police, it doesn't work in their favour...but effectively it's an obstacle that we have to work with."

The Commissioner rarely, if ever, allows for a claim of racial profiling to proceed to investigation, and even less likely is it for a claim to result in a reprimand of a police officer. In the period between the spring of 2011 and the spring of 2014, the Commissioner received 358 complaints of racial profiling, of which only six percent resulted in the citation of an officer.

According to the CRARR, several cases that have a racial profiling component to them see the racial aspect thrown out by the Commissioner while other aspects are retained.

Cases of racial profiling are notoriously difficult to prove because the burden of proof rests upon the intent—whether or not the officer intentionally targeted someone based on their race.

"I agree [that this is problematic], but it's not because we don't make efforts," says Letarte. Nevertheless she agrees that racial profiling should be a higher priority for the Ethics System, "It's a shame, I am disappointed in the decisions of the committee" she says.

There may be a more cynical reason as to why racial profiling does not receive more attention from the Ethics System than it currently does. Niemi says that civil litigation or cases of racial profiling take time and are extremely costly and therefore preferably avoided. "I suspect there is pressure from police community and the Ministry of Public Security not to rock the boat on this issue."

Furthermore, Quebec's police forces are reluctant to share statistics on the number of minorities that are arrested or targeted.

"[The police] don't release data on race of victims because they say they don't have the power to do so, which is hogwash. The reason why they don't want to release the data is because there is an overrepresentation of black individuals in police stops and arrests," he says. A 2009 internal report by the Montreal police department confirmed that almost 40 percent of black youths in certain neighbourhoods of Montreal were stopped and asked for ID. The corresponding statistic for whites was six percent.

CRARR has been asking the Commissioner to adopt policies and release information on how he deals with racial profiling. Its pleas have been met with silence.

VICE's attempts at speaking to the police about the Police Ethics System were unsuccessful, with this reporter being referred to the Commissioner for comment.

There is a strong sentiment that police officers have very little to fear from being investigated because the majority of cases brought before the Commissioner are thrown out. In the years between 2008 and 2014, an average of 57 percent of complaints were closed, meaning they did not even reach the stage of conciliation, a way of resolving the complaint that sees victims meeting with the offending police officers.

Conciliation however, usually doesn't provide much sense of justice, as the officers are paid for their time, are not obliged to speak, and do not suffer any professional consequences. Furthermore, anything mentioned during conciliation cannot be used elsewhere.

Neither are citations, or reprimands of cops very frequent. Between 2008 and 2014, the Commissioner received a total of 11,698 complaints, of which 349, or 2.9 percent, resulted in a citation for the officer or officers targeted by the complaint.

In Montreal, the most diverse city in Quebec, where around a third of the province's complaints are consistently filed, only 2.9 percent of the 4,479 complaints against the Montreal police, or SPVM, ended in a citation for a police officer in the years 2010–2013.

According to Alex Popovic of Coalition Contre la Répression et les Abus Policiers, the lack of accountability for racial profiling and ethical infractions by police officers is only leading to an increase in the amount of cases, "The message from Ethics Commissioner to the wrongdoer is too weak and is being interpreted as an invitation to reproduce and continue this problematic behaviour," he says.

In Montreal, the total number of complaints filed against the SPVM fluctuates, however, the number of police officers cited for ethical violations has decreased steadily from 56 in 2010 to one in 2013.

"The system is designed to enhance professionalism, but if an officer does not recognize he has been unprofessional, what can you do?" says Niemi.

Adding to the weakness of the Police Ethics System is the perceived lack of impartiality. Investigators working for the Commissioner are all former police officers. Although they cannot investigate a unit to which they previously belonged, it is hard for people like Jennifer (she withheld her last name), a member of Coalition Opposé à la Brutalité Policière, to accept that they approach a case without bias.

"I don't think [the Police Ethics System] is the solution. Cops are getting judged by police officers all the fuckin' time and getting nothing done with it... It's fuckin' ridiculous and there are the numbers to prove it."

Despite a 2011 report by the Commission des Droits de la Personne et Droits de la Jeunesse recommending that the Police Ethics System be revised and amended, very little has been either reviewed or changed since its inception in 1990.

Dominique Jacobs believes a revision or a fundamental change to the process needs to be carried out in order to address a dynamic of impunity that has left her and her family feeling unsafe.

"I think they're setting a very bad example, especially for the youth. It's hard to convince your young black child that he can trust the police. And I did that. He was convinced. Do you think he trusts them now? Not at all. We're supposed to be able to rely on them. They're not the ones supposed to be making us feel like we're in danger."

Today, there are more people in the world who play the online multiplayer battle game League of Legends than there are people who live in France. We wanted to see how humanity got to this point, so VICE host Matt Shea flew to South Korea, a country where competitive gaming—also known as eSports—can either make you rich and famous or land you in rehab.

In Part Three, we head to London to meet KSI, a millionaire gamer who became rich and famous by vlogging his FIFA matches. At a VIP gaming party we have our first encounter with the One Direction of Europe's eSports scene: Team FNATIC. We follow them to Gamescom, the biggest gaming event in the world, to see them take on Team Alliance for Europe's top title.

Follow Rhys, Matt, and Grant on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426674739.jpg' id='37244']

The author after boarding the 453 bus for the first time that day

Photos by Justinas Vosylius

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

There are plenty of iconic things about London. The big clock tower in Westminster, the gaudy wall of adverts in Piccadilly Circus, the Queen's house, the phone boxes that nobody actually uses unless they're posing for a photo or taking a piss. However, none of these symbols represent the city as well as the one with wheels: the highly practical, often delayed, red double-decker.

There are currently 8,765 of the things carting people around the capital, from front doors to desks; from house parties back home. Millions of us ride the bus every month, and while the majority of these journeys are pretty uneventful, you do get a few glimpses of humanity sitting on their ugly patterned seats: post-nightclub PDA, rowdy school kids, furious young men walking straight through glass doors.

The top deck is also one of the best ways to see the city. Unlike the tube, you aren't teleported underground; you're witness to every step of your journey, elevated enough from the street that you can see the kind of things you wouldn't otherwise. Those weird spiky things on top of bus stops, say, or that guy who walks around Hoxton in a Speedo and flip-flops as soon as the sun comes out.

I recently rode around on one from early morning on a Friday to first daylight on a Saturday, hoping to learn more about the city and its people.

Of all the routes I could have taken, the 453 seemed like one of the most representative of London as a whole. Starting in the moneyed streets of Marylebone, it heads south through Soho and past Parliament, into the blossoming luxury development hamlet of Elephant and Castle; down the Old Kent Road, one of the most multicultural areas in the city; past New Cross's chicken shops, art students and porn cinema; and finally into Deptford Bridge, home to a college, a $1.5 billion development hoping to turn the area into the "Shoreditch of the south," and a market where you can sometimes buy your stolen bike back from whoever nicked it.

Importantly, it also turns into a night bus come midnight. This was vital, as I was going to be on it past midnight.

[body_image width='1200' height='1800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426675106.jpg' id='37245']

I board the 453 at Piccadilly Circus as it heads south towards Deptford Bridge. Passengers throw their heads into their laps as soon as they sit down, beating the rush hour, but still sitting on a very loud bus while they could be hitting the snooze button.

Each leg of this trip takes just shy of an hour. Nobody's actually ridden it for the entire length, except Abdul, who's been hustling his CVs from Florence Road in New Cross up to the boutique hotels of Marylebone.

Abdul's story is the same as many passengers' throughout the day; post-recession, there are jobs available, but the vast majority are posted in the City, or central or South West London. If Abdul's CV is accepted anywhere, this bus journey is going to become painfully familiar—the first stretch of a long commute to a job that probably won't pay very well, or provide any real sense of professional satisfaction. Still, it's something to do with the days.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426676011.jpg' id='37251']

For anyone not desperately trying to keep their eyes shut, reading material consists exclusively of crumpled copies of the Metro. Until one man boards, that is, and takes out a book called The Servant: a Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership, which looks a lot like a self-help manual for aspiring Patrick Batemans.

The shoutiest passengers speak German, French, Mandarin, and Japanese, with the only words I recognize being "Elephant and Castle." This is where most of them get off, leaving the bus half full as we continue down the Old Kent Road.

The loudest languages here switch to English, Arabic, Swahili, and Yoruba—that last one unsurprising considering the large Nigerian population in the area, particularly down towards New Cross, where everything from ex-industrial buildings to former bingo halls have been converted into Pentecostal churches with names like "Mount Zion, the Dwelling Place of God."

[body_image width='1200' height='1520' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426676490.jpg' id='37256']

From Marylebone to Elephant and Castle, the colors have all been shimmering silvers and the blue of the sky bouncing off them. Tall, anonymous buildings reflecting the city rather than adding anything particularly recognizable to the landscape.

Past Elephant's huge roundabout—the one everyone used to say Aphex Twin lived in—the roofs become lower and browns start to dominate the pallet, a reminder that whoever makes Monopoly very much needs to update their board: in 2015, a two-bed flat along the Old Kent Road will set you back at least $440,000.

Gentrification is a constant along the journey, from the vanillafication of Soho to the demolition of swathes of public housing in Elephant and Castle to make way for "a better class of people," according to something the former regeneration "guru" at Southwark council actually said out loud.

So it's refreshing, heading down the Old Kent Road and through New Cross, to see that the area looks much the same as it has for years. What used to be a Stella and sticky-floors boozer might now be serving stone-baked pizzas, and there's someone making artisanal Mexican cheese under a railway arch near the Aldi, but at least these are independent ventures, allowing the area to retain some of its character rather than sand-washing it with foreign capital and multinational sandwich chains.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426675375.jpg' id='37248']

End of the line for the first time is Deptford Bridge, where I see a pub landlord scrubbing his windows and a building offering "friendship, help and advice," which is nice. The bus driver fancies a break, so the photographer, Justinas, and I alight and catch the next one heading north.

Driving into town the bus is more crowded. Babies wail and tourists staying in hostels south of the river start to wander on board. Looking out the window, there seems to be more community and camaraderie down south: old men play draughts while their friends have their hair cut, while in town people keep their heads down, charging from Itsu back to the office. Going north, passengers tend to travel alone; going south, they band together in teams, perhaps a symptom of the fact so few people can afford to live in Zone 1—housemates and friends local to one another heading home from their trips to waxwork museums, or the M&M's souvenir store, or any of the other inexplicably expensive stuff you can only do in central London.

For around two hours now I've been constantly surrounded but incredibly lonely. Anyone who's lived in a large city will understand the notion that it's probably easier to feel alone in the most densely populated place in the country than any remote Lake District hideaway. I get my first neighbor at Malt Street, but fumbling in her bag she makes it clear she doesn't want to chat. A double seat frees up and she quickly moves across.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426676069.jpg' id='37252']

We pick up plenty of tourists between Westminster and Oxford Circus, all of them staring wide-eyed at the monuments I've already soaked up twice this morning. Up in Marylebone, two American men gossip about the Kardashian sisters and their exact proportions (Khloe is apparently eight inches taller than Kim, in case you were wondering).

The remainder of the morning rolls on much like this—a hum and a lull as the bus fluctuates between moments of chatter and calm.

Turns out early afternoon is the best time to take the bus. It's warm on a spring day—probably helped by the lack of opening windows on the 453—and tranquil before the school kids jump aboard and the commuters crush themselves in.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426676171.jpg' id='37253']

Later, crumpled morning Metros turn to crumpled Standards, and as it darkens outside passengers open up a little more. One girl, Leilah, tells me to stay off the top deck in the early hours. She recalls being afraid of the gangs of boys she used to see rushing up the stairs of the N38, before hearing strange noises from above.

It's 7 PM by the time the first pre-drinker arrives. A man in a spiky leather jacket boards somewhere near New Cross and necks a can of Skol, nattering on the phone all the way to Elephant and Castle. Soon after, a gaggle of teenagers who've clearly been getting on it for a while come and sit near me.

"By the time I'm 20, I'll be working in a Michelin star restaurant," says one. "You gotta work harder—that's like playing for Chelsea, blud," replies another.

Later, I get chatting to a Romanian catering worker as we amble through W1. "If they put me in work tonight I will hang myself—too much, too much," he says.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426684208.jpg' id='37374']

Just then, a Megabus starting its ten-hour journey to Amsterdam overtakes: a depressing reminder that, in that same amount of time, all I've done is cross over a big brown river a bunch of times.

Sirens start shrieking not long after 8 PM, and they don't really stop, regardless of where in the city we are. Out the window a cyclist has been knocked off his bike opposite New Cross Station, looking dazed on the pavement as passers-by help him out of his helmet. As we swing back around via Deptford Bridge, I'm glad to see he's back on his feet.

King's College student Craig tells me he's spotted people pissing into water bottles on their trips back home. His friend Ellie adds that she once took the night bus to St. George's Hospital in Tooting after cracking her head open, making me feel the scar. Not that long ago passengers were edging away from me, but now they all seem keen to tell me their stories (which may or may not have anything to do with all the booze they're drinking).

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426676307.jpg' id='37254']

Katie (center-left)

A girl called Katie moves next to me. She reckons she once saw a couple consummating their 3 AM pull on the back seat. Based on what I've seen, I'm inclined to believe her. I observe only two types of late-night romance: couples fiercely screaming into each other's faces, or sucking each other's mouths for the best part of the journey, apparently oblivious to everything around them.

For the first time—but not the last—a pack of mopeds swarm the bus, weaving around it and overtaking, dancing with the double decker like it's the fat old uncle at a family wedding. As a rider with L plates revs at a traffic light, his engine splutters and stalls, causing most of the bus to erupt in laughter and patronizing pointing.

[body_image width='1200' height='1800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426684145.jpg' id='37372']

Naomi

New Zealanders Naomi and Jamie are heading to a party in an old church, but aren't quite sure exactly where they're going.

"My friend Paolo organizes these things," Naomi says, suggesting I come. "You're on the night bus, something bad is going to happen to you," warns Jamie.

I wonder whether I should tell him he's being paranoid, but before I get the chance the pair are up, following a man with dreadlocks who they assume is going to the same spot as them.

"Find some Italians," they yell, confusingly, hopping down the stairs. "They party the hardest on the night bus."

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426684261.jpg' id='37375']

Until now, I wasn't aware that any nationality had a monopoly on getting drunk on buses, but at 2 AM I finally meet my Italians, and I see what Naomi and Jamie were talking about. On journey number 12, a group of them harmonize surprisingly well to "We Will Rock You."

(A quick word on post-night out snacks here: please eat them in the street, not near other humans. At one point an elderly man climbs on, carrying a tuna pizza. He gets off after a few stops, but the smell lingers for an hour.)

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426684371.jpg' id='37377']

Sometime after 3 AM I'm joined by maybe the least subtle drug dealer in the history of people trying to sell drugs without getting caught. He's visibly swaying and brandishing fistfuls of very conspicuous, very green ziplock bags. He doesn't share my fascination for buses; he's just "too fucked to drive." Somewhere around the Toys R Us on Old Kent Road he starts muttering about how he's been a "bad friend" to his customers, presumably because he's using quite a slow bus to drop off their drugs.

It's nearing 4 AM and I fully comprehend what Burial meant when he said he was making music for the night bus mafia. The 14 bodies surrounding me are bitterly sobering up. Everything's come full circle: heads are in laps and eye contact is averted. It won't shock you that everything starts looking a little desolate around this point. For the final two hours until the sun comes up, the bus crawls along in dreary silence. The central streets that would be filled with screaming protesters in just a few hours are deathly silent.

[body_image width='1200' height='800' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='one-day-on-the-453-bus-674-body-image-1426684433.jpg' id='37380']

Everyone I spoke to after my journey was quick to tell me their own mythical night bus story. The 24 from central to Haringey is apparently full of coke fiends; the 51 from Camden to Kilburn is supposedly the best route to take if you want to make friends and/or get laid; and the N253 is 100 percent definitely the bus you should board if you're hoping to see someone freebase crack cocaine in public.

And of course all of that happens. If London's streets are its arteries, then buses are its red blood cells, oxygenating the city route by route. They play host to millions, all of whom have their own lives and a varying propensity to make out with complete strangers. Also, my Oyster was only checked once by a ticket inspector in the entire time I spent aboard, so it's no surprise so many people bunk the fare.

Riding the 453 for about 20 hours straight, I saw the city and its people gradually shift around me. Right in line with everything the world already thinks about the British, my fellow passengers seemed staunchly opposed to interacting with anyone until they'd given their liver a bashing, coming to life from behind their papers before dropping into them once more.

The city never really sleeps, but it does suffer a muted, bleary-eyed comedown as the sun rises and the first of the day's workers start clocking in.

[body_image width='700' height='379' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='pregnant-in-prison-178-body-image-1426684111.png' id='37370']

Screenshot via

This post originally appeared on VICE UK.

Pregnancy can be an anxious experience for all women: fears of miscarrying, birth defects, difficult labor, and how you'll cope are natural when you're carrying a child. If you're pregnant in prison, however, natural anxieties can become terrifying. What happens if you can't get proper healthcare? What happens if you're not let out of your cell when your waters break? What happens if you miscarry and no one knows what to do?

Being pregnant in prison comes with myriad fears—most distressing of all is the question of whether you will be able to keep your baby. While female prisoners in the UK are legally allowed to keep their babies for the first 18 months in a secure Mother and Baby Unit, the vast majority of children are separated from their mothers. In turn, many women go into labor knowing that their baby will be lifted from their arms within hours, that they will return to prison later alone, swollen, and lactating.

According to the NSPCC's latest report, an average of 100 babies are born in prisons in England and Wales each year. Yet antenatal care in prisons remains substandard. Not only is there no universal standard for what prisons have to provide for pregnant women, there is no legal requirement to offer antenatal classes. You might be bearing a child but you're a prisoner at all times. Evidence has shown, too, that women inside are more likely to experience birth defects or have stillborn babies than those on the outside.

Maddie Logan*, 30, from Bristol, has experienced the ills of this prison system first-hand. For the entirety of her pregnancy, she was told she would not be able to keep her child. "I suffered from depression for the whole nine months because I was told I wouldn't be allowed to keep my baby," she tells me.

Two weeks overdue, Maddie's labor was defined by fear. "For 14 days I'd been sitting in the prison, overdue, before they finally transported me to hospital in a van to induce me," she says. "In labor, nothing was working. First, they gave me tablets, but that didn't work. Then they broke my water, but that didn't work either. Eventually then they put me on a higher-dose drip."

It was only when the prison officer came in and told Maddie that she could keep her baby that "it came out straight away." Within 30 minutes, Ruby Logan* came into the world, within touching distance of two prison guards.

"It was horrible having two people I barely knew with me at all times. Especially in such a tiny room that only had enough space for a small hospital bed with two chairs at the end," Maddie recalls. "Imagine waking up to deal with a crying baby in the night and, right at the end of your bed, you see two men officers watching you. You would have thought they'd at least stand outside the door. It's not like you can escape. The small windows didn't even open."

Maddie's entire pregnancy was plagued by uncertainty. "I thought I'd have to hand her out to a family member and not see her for over two and a half years, until I'd finished my sentence," she explains. "I was scared about all sorts of other things, too. When I'd press my buzzer and nobody would come, I'd get paranoid that the same thing would happen when I needed to go into labor.

"I was also frightened that I'd miscarry or that they wouldn't call my family in time for the birth. Ah god," she exhales, deeply. "All the worries got me down. It's not like being pregnant on the outside. It's a lot more pressure. If you get scared, you can't just go see a doctor, you have to wait."

Maddie is adamant that she received no special treatment as a mother-to-be in prison. "They weren't nicer to me because I was pregnant. I'd have my regular scans inside the prison, but they don't keep an extra eye on you. I had no antenatal classes. There were no special mattresses. If I cried and got upset, all they'd do was get an officer to come and sit with me and that was it. I won't put them all down, but most don't really care. They're just there to do their job."

Many women go into labor knowing that their baby will be lifted from their arms within hours, that they will return to prison later alone, swollen and lactating.

Arrested for attempting to smuggle drugs and a phone into prison for a friend, Maddie was initially told she'd get five years. But this was dropped to three and a half years when the judge found out she was pregnant. "I was two weeks pregnant when I got caught smuggling. They nicked me straightaway and I was put on remand and sentenced after a few weeks," she explains. A former heroin addict, Maddie was smuggling drugs in to pay off debts. "It's a long story, but I was bullied into taking it in for someone because I owed a lot of money, and then the debt would've been wiped off."

During her sentence, Maddie was moved from Holloway in London to Bronzefield and then back to Eastwood Park where there was a Mother and Baby Unit. "It was a lot better than prison," she says. "You could go outside and walk around the grounds with your baby. It's obviously fenced off but there's a big garden. You've got to be in your room at certain times but you have keys to your own door. It's not like you get locked in with your baby."

Without Ruby, Maddie says she wouldn't have been able to cope. "I just wish they hadn't waited till the last moment to tell me that I'd be allowed to keep her. I understand they've got to do checks—if I'd been in prison for violence before, I wouldn't have been able to go to the unit—but I hadn't."

Maddie and Ruby were finally released from the Mother and Baby Unit in 2010 when Ruby was six and a half months old. "Ruby is five now and is doing really well," says Maddie. "She's absolutely lovely. She doesn't remember anything from the prison, but I suppose I'll have to tell her when she's older."

Maddie is not alone in her experience. The latest figures show that two babies are born in prison every week. Despite this, the physical and psychological needs of pregnant women continue to be neglected. From the chief inspector and head governor to the wing officers, prison is an institution designed by men, for men.

Moreover, lots of women only find out they are pregnant after their preliminary health check-up. In turn, they are forced to deal with this news on their first night behind bars. Mothers-to-be are housed in standard prison accommodation, sleeping on wafer-thin plastic mattresses with threadbare blankets. Forced to eat whatever custodial cuisine is thrown at them—in spite of inexplicable cravings—like everyone else they must navigate the punitive, rigid routine of prison. If they have morning sickness and skip breakfast, a mid-morning round of dry toast isn't really an option.

As well as inadequate food and nutrition, evidence has shown that persistent institutional failures lead to substandard antenatal care and a lack of emotional support. In a recent study of 1,082 mothers in prison estates in England, almost two thirds reported that they were depressed and that 56 percent were lonely.

Miscarriage is another devastating issue, albeit one that gets little coverage. Public Health England does not record statistics on miscarriages across the prison estate. In spite of this, miscarriage is thought to be widespread, with chilling stories of women being forced to clean up their own blood. Miscarrying is a traumatic, painful, and heartbreaking experience in the comfort of your home or a hospital room. But in a cold concrete cell, alone, it is a living nightmare.

Clive Chatterton, one of the country's most experienced prison governors, has also experienced the failings of the prison system first-hand—from the other side of the bars. Chatterton, 62, started working as a screw at the infamous Strangeways Prison in the 70s, before going on to work at 13 different prisons and serving as the chief governor at three of them. He retired in 2012.

Let's face it, prison is not the greatest place for anyone to be, and one would say that it's less conducive to someone if they're pregnant. Especially when you remember that most women are sent to prison for non-violent, low-level offending. – Clive Chatterton

In the 37 years he worked in our prison system, Chatterton says he was most haunted by his time as governor of Styal, a woman's prison. In his letter to former justice secretary, Ken Clarke, he writes: "I have never come across such a concentration of damaged, fragile and complex-needs individuals."

"Styal was a real eye-opener," he tells me. "We housed 460 women and sometimes over 40 women might be pregnant at any one time. They'd all be at different stages of their pregnancy. Pregnant women would often apply for our on-site Mother and Baby Unit but, if they were refused a place, their babies would often go into care. Staff used to say watching this separation after 18 months together was one of the most traumatic experiences they'd ever seen."

Chatterton also tells me that many women chose not to apply for places in Mother and Baby Units. Instead, they would leave the child with relatives. "Distance was another thing which put women off applying. If Styal was full, they'd be applying for a place which could be 100 miles away from their family."

Perhaps fittingly, Styal is an old Victorian orphanage. Unlike other institutions of its kind, its recent inspections have been positive. "The rooms are brightly colored like you'd have at a kids' nursery, but not too much because obviously the mom is in there as well," says Chatterton. "There's a crèche and nannies who would take the babies for walks outside of the prison and daily visits were allowed."

While Chatterton might be positive about the Mother and Baby Unit, he remains insistent that prison is not the right environment for a mother-to-be. "Let's face it, prison is not the greatest place for anyone to be, and one would say that it's less conducive to someone if they're pregnant. Especially when you remember that most women are sent to prison for non-violent, low-level offending."

As the women's prison population continues to grow—increasing by over a third in the last decade—more and more infants are being separated from their mothers. Even though there are eight Mother and Baby Units in the UK, with a joint capacity of 73 mothers and their babies in total, rejection rates are sky high. According to a recent report by the NSPCC, "Places are under-utilized and frequently lie empty across the women's estate." In 2013, there were only 38 mothers resident in MBU's—just over half the capacity.

Why are these units so under-used? Rigid risk assessment and security criteria mean applications are frequently rejected. On top of this, many women choose not to apply in the first place. This might be because they have been told their application will be refused, or, perhaps they believe that prison is the wrong place for a baby. They may also not want to move far away from family or their older children.

Whatever the reason, the prison system continues to disrupt maternal relationships irreparably. Even in situations when the mother is reunited with their baby on release, they will have missed important stages in their child's development. The infant will now be attached to another caregiver and the mother might feel like a stranger.

It goes without saying that, when you imprison a pregnant woman, you're also imprisoning her—entirely innocent—baby. And, behind bars, this baby is denied the safe, stimulating environment it deserves. Unsurprisingly, the long-term affects on their physical, social, and emotional development can be significant.

Pregnant women should not be sent to prison in the first place. It's not the right environment for a child to be growing. – Alex Hewson, Prison Reform Trust

The same can be said for the children who are left behind when a woman is locked up. After all, two thirds of female prisoners have children under 16, while a third have a child under five. In due course, 17,000 children are separated from their mothers each year because of imprisonment, and it's estimated that 3000 of them are under the age of two. Out of these children, only five per cent are able to remain in their own home.

In spite of this, the children of prisoners continue to be an invisible group, apparently unworthy of our attention. Universal health and early years services will not necessarily know that a baby has a parent in prison, either. But as life goes on, children of prisoners suffer—they are twice as likely to have mental health problems as their peers.

As a highly vulnerable, troubled demographic plagued by domestic violence, mental health problems, and addiction, it's clear that female offenders need help—not the rigid torment of punishment. Not only have half of women in prison experienced domestic violence, 53 percent have been victims of childhood abuse, and over a third have experienced sexual abuse. Moreover, of the 3,959 women who are currently in prison in Britain, over eight in ten are inside for non-violent crimes, and are far less likely than male prisoners to have any previous convictions.

As a result, Alex Hewson from the Prison Reform Trust argues that, "Pregnant women should not be sent to prison in the first place. It's not the right environment for a child to be growing."

In the words of Dostoevsky, "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals."

* Maddie and Ruby's names have been changed

Follow Maya on Twitter.

[body_image width='2000' height='1500' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='i-rode-along-with-the-san-francisco-police-departments-only-mental-health-liaison-318-body-image-1426690981.jpg' id='37440']

San Francisco Police Psychiatric Liaison Sergeant Kelly Kruger. Photo by the author

As I'm standing with three cops in the kitchen of Julian's cramped San Francisco apartment, one of the officers knocks on his bedroom door. In youth custody for most of his life and now in his 30s, Julian (whose name has been changed) has a rap sheet several pages long consisting of various violent offenses committed after his release. He's paranoid, delusional, and often violent, San Francisco Police Psychiatric Liaison Sergeant Kelly Kruger explains.

We show up after his roommate calls in complaining that Julian tried to light something on fire, causing an electrical problem.

Julian opens the door. He's a big man—standing more than six feet tall and weighing about 240 pounds—wearing gray sweatpants and T-shirt with a towel draped over one shoulder. Seeing Sergeant Kruger and two armed cops, he sizes up the situation pretty quickly and follows their instructions. " I don't need to go to the hospital," he pleads, well aware that's exactly what is about to happen.

The cops search Julian and find $700 in cash and a knife. The short glimpse of his bedroom I got revealed a dresser full of cleaning products and a messy single bed. They take him outside and stuff him into the marked squad car, a black and white police cruiser. He's on his way to San Francisco General Hospital, the city's only public hospital with emergency psychiatric care, to be placed on a what's known as a 5150 hold (fifty-one-fifty)—the police radio code for a mental illness–related detention. In general, a patient has to be a danger to themselves or others to get that status. If either condition is met in California, cops and designated county clinicians can detain patients for up to 72 hours against their will.

Earlier that day, Kruger explains as we're driving to Julian's place in an unmarked car that he's a known entity around town. She suspects it will be necessary to detain him. "In large part it's because of his past and my knowledge of his case file," she says. "He also doesn't recognize his paranoid delusions and that's why he can get dangerous."

San Francisco has developed something of a reputation for being a seven-mile-by-seven-mile treatment center for the mentally ill. It is not entirely undeserved. Kruger is expected to review the 250–300 monthly incident reports from the population of citizens suffering from a variety of mental illnesses. In part that's because of San Francisco's population of roughly 7,000 homeless adults and children, many of whom suffer from mental health problems. Initially that justified a corps of officers to handle the related calls for service. "It started at 18 people," Kruger says. "Two of the country's first officers with PhDs worked in the unit."

But for the last 15 years, San Francisco cops have had just one officer on the mental health beat, leaving Kruger to conduct an uphill battle on the fringe of America's dire healthcare system.

One reason the SFPD only has Kruger on the job is that it strives to train at least a quarter of its officers with the crisis intervention techniques necessary to diffuse situations involving the mentally ill. The idea is that there should theoretically be at least one officer in every police district, on every shift, available to handle mental illness concerns that require law enforcement's attention. "Police officers by nature find niches," SFPD Chief Greg Suhr told KQED last year when the public news organization did a major story on how police treat the mentally ill. "I don't want cops to find a niche and be expert on what they do and don 't do. I want them to do it all."

The SFPD began training officers in crisis intervention in 2001, and graduated its first class of 30 in May of that year, according to department documents. By the end of 2006, at least 544 officers had completed the training, but the KQED report suggested only about 18 percent of the city's police has received the training as of last fall.

One reason police are trained to handle encounters with the mentally ill is that government funding for institutionalized treatment was cut in the 1970s across the country. Deinstutionalization, as it's called, was a response to overcrowding and patient abuse , but the problems that appeared its wake—chronic homelessness and crime—worsened as the feds further cut funding for institutionalized treatment throughout the 1980s. Now the public health concern has been handed off in large part to agents of law enforcement.

"Crisis intervention has become quite a land mine," Kruger says. We're on our way to the Emergency Psych Ward, riding the green Taurus assigned to her for the day. It's 80 degrees out and the air conditioning doesn't work.

Born and raised in California, Kruger, now 50, says that after years working as a psychiatric technician at a state hospital in the world-famous wine-growing region of Napa, what ultimately nudged her into becoming a cop was a patient's obsession with her. "I had a gentleman who raped and shot a female park ranger get fixated on me," she recalls. "He told me that he wanted to make me his wife. So after that I felt like I was one of the blonde girls in a scary movie, walking out to my car late at night and then something bad happens. The hospital couldn't provide protection, so I told the chief of police in Eureka how I didn't feel safe, and he gave me a permit for a concealed weapon. I'm thinking that was probably the transition from doing mental health care to being police—because I wanted to protect myself."

She ended up buying a Smith and Wesson .357 caliber revolver, although she hasn't killed anyone in the line of duty.

Kruger earned her badge in 2001, and has been the psychiatric liaison since 2005. "There are a lot of layers," she says about each case she handles, describing one with a quarreling, possibly alcoholic parent who "puts his head in the sand" when dealing with his son. The adult son is experiencing psychiatric symptoms but doesn't know or understand that he is. But the state's standards for a law enforcement intervention require patients to be in imminent danger of hurting themselves or someone else—or unable to provide for basic personal needs like food and shelter. The adult son didn't meet any of the criteria, and Kruger wasn't able to act.

"We had a guy with a substance abuse issue that had gangrene and was going to lose a limb," she says to illustrate her point. "There were maggots climbing around an open wound. He had this corner that he had made up, and people would give him money. 'I'm not moving,' he said, and he was fine crapping and urinating on himself." But because the man wasn't dangerous to himself or others and explained how he planned to feed himself, Kruger's options were limited.

One thing Kruger can do is navigate the complex bureaucracy and treatment options that are available once a 5150 call is made to the SFPD. That's why we're driving to the hospital, so she can oversee and monitor Julian. While on duty, she also helps other officers handle mental illness–related calls. "It's helpful to have me navigate the system," she says. "If I can't go, I just monitor the situation, and make sure the ball doesn't get dropped."

When we arrive at the hospital, Julian has already been escorted into the Psychiatric Emergency Services section. On the ground floor, and close to the building's southern entrance, a sally port is the only way to get in or out of the psych emergency unit. When I try to walk in with Kruger, the clinician refuses me. I don't get a glimpse of anything more than a white desk, and can't spy Julian from my vantage point.

Kruger emerges a few moments later. I ask what they're going to do by way of treatment, and she replies that the clinicians will likely replenish his medicine supply. They'll also conduct a psychiatric evaluation.

With Julian handled—relatively speaking—Kruger moves onto her next case for the day. A man named Greg called earlier explaining that he planned to shoot a video of his entire experience being treated at the hospital for an unknown medical condition. For privacy reasons, it's against the hospital's regulations to allow any patient to record their entire visit. "There's not a chance he's getting in here," says one of the nurses. "He's got a plan, and he monopolizes a lot of my time."

After a brief confrontation with Kruger backed up by two Sheriff's Department deputies, Greg expresses frustration, and leaves a brown paper bag—containing what he says are urine samples for the doctors—on the ground. One of the deputies throws it in the trash after he leaves. "I'm concerned with his health," Kruger says, "but he's not allowed to videotape inside the hospital."

In 2012, of the 6,293 patients admitted to San Francisco's Psychiatric Emergency Services unit, 5,144 were involuntary, according to San Francisco Department of Public Health communications director Rachael Kagan. Of those 6,293 admissions, about a third had no address. The cops are involved in about half—many of which are the result of 9-1-1 calls—although the city's Mobile Crisis Team and other organizations have an impact as well, according to a Department of Public Health study conducted on psychiatric emergency response in 2006.

"The SFPD plays an influential role in San Francisco 's mental health system," the study concludes. According to SFPD records, Kruger processes—whether by handling the case herself or reviewing it—about 3,800 5150 service calls a year. Many of the calls she receives are related to substance abuse, often booze and drugs. Suicide threats are also common, as are threats of violence.

When I ask Kruger how she copes with her job, she says she just wants to help people suffering from mental illness who are often caught up in a system poorly designed to treat them.

"That's what I love about San Francisco, that people have the right to be who they are and not be judged," Kruger says. "The hard part of that—and I don't mean to be dramatic, but it does rip my heart out—is when you see somebody in need of treatment and you're unable to help them."

Follow Max Cherney on Twitter.

[body_image width='640' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='artist-tom-sachs-brings-the-noise-and-a-space-program-to-sxsw-482-body-image-1426693043.jpg' id='37478']

Installation view, 'Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective 1999–2015,' the Contemporary Austin-Jones Center, Austin, 2015. Courtesy Tom Sachs

It's a sunny 70 degrees in Austin on the first Saturday afternoon of South by Southwest, the kind of weather that announces spring has arrived in central Texas. Tom Sachs's hotel room–turned–makeshift studio is located just south of downtown, and bands playing along the city's seminal strip of South Congress can be heard throughout the boutique hotel's quaint grounds. Inside, Sachs carries on a somewhat manic conversation on his iPhone as he balances a cup of tea. Ceramic pieces in various states of completion are strewn about his hotel's patio, with many baking in the hot March sun.

Sachs has developed a reputation as an artist who appropriates pop culture, reconstructs these pop totems though DIY means, and then offers a newly contextualized identity for the piece. Even as early as the 1990s, Sachs has been toying with giving commercial objects a deviant twist, like he has in HG (Hermès Hand Grenade), a fabricated hand grenade covered in Hermès logos, or the Tiffany Glock (Model 19), a fake Glock Pistol painted Tiffany's blue. More recently his style has considerably evolved to encompass video, sculpture, and sound, such his deliriously ambitious DIY NASA sculpture project titled A Space Program (which he shared with us in a 2012 video for Motherboard). Yet the same pervasive need to subvert our culture's iconography persists. And for an artist so smitten with the duality of consumer culture, SXSW is the perfect environment of branding hell and rampant materialism for him to run amok.

Turning his attention back to the interview at hand, Sachs quickly wraps up his call and gestures to open a bottle of beer on the patio table before settling in to discuss his SXSW film debut of A Space Program (his documentary of his exhibition of the same name) and Boomboxes, his many-faceted solo show ongoing at the Contemporary, which features Sachs's playful, functional boombox sculptures from 1999–2015 along with collaborative DJ sets from artists like Young Guru and J Rocc alongside contributed playlists by Frank Ocean and Kanye West.

VICE: The last time you were in Austin, you were kicking off the Boombox Retrospective at the Contemporary. How did that show come to be?

So I flew to Austin and instantly fell in love. I'd heard [about the city], but I instantly got it... I've also just been experiencing the music and the vibe and the energy of the city. When Louis said, "Do you want to do a show?" I immediately said yes, because I'd do anything for Louis. But when he said the show was in Austin, it presented a double whammy.

What about Austin made an exhibition focusing on your boombox sculptures seem like the right fit?

Could you talk about your film, A Space Program? It debuts tomorrow night at the Paramount as a SXSW feature film.

[body_image width='792' height='612' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='tom-sachs-brings-the-noise-283-body-image-1426689860.jpeg' id='37429']

[body_image width='792' height='531' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='tom-sachs-brings-the-noise-283-body-image-1426689880.jpeg' id='37430']

Stills from 'A Space Program' (2015), by Tom Sachs

You have the exhibition up downtown, your film debuting, DJ sets planned on your functional boombox sculptures, and the pirate radio station playing curated playlists from the exhibition. It feels like you're coming at SXSW from all angles.

The boomboxes are pieces that have carried me through my adolescence, and I knew that music was one of the many things that just defined Austin. It seemed right to have all that happen now. I don't know if the SXSW scene has embraced the show, I can't tell, but to me, it seems right. But it's also important to know that if you're in town, you can hear the playlists that correspond to the boombox works on 94.3 FM.

[body_image width='768' height='472' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='artist-tom-sachs-brings-the-noise-and-a-space-program-to-sxsw-482-body-image-1426693716.jpg' id='37486']

[body_image width='640' height='640' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='artist-tom-sachs-brings-the-noise-and-a-space-program-to-sxsw-482-body-image-1426693778.jpg' id='37488']

Above: Installation view of 'Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective 1999–2015,' The Contemporary Austin-Jones Center, Austin, 2015. Courtesy Tom Sachs. Below: The artist at 'Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective 1999–2015' via lorareynoldsgallery on Instagram

There are some big-name contributors on the playlist roster, like Frank Ocean and Kanye West. What was the process like getting them involved, and why did you want to collaborate on the playlists?
We all make playlists, right? So I reached out to my friends and asked them all to contribute. I have a relationship with Kanye and Frank, and they were psyched. This is their talent, [to create music]. You just can't argue about Kanye's musical ability.

So what you hear on the pirate radio station, and what you hear in the gallery since they're the same, are sounds from my community. And now my community, our cultural communities, are much larger than they used to be. I don't see those guys that much, but I'm glad they got the chance to participate.

We've seen the boomboxes, we've got the film debut, and you hinted at The Tea Ceremony, but what's next?

To cut through ice of that depth is a pretty daunting task for a spaceship or probe coming from earth with our level of resources, but that's our problem. That life could exist there, that's the exciting thing.

A Space Program opened at the Paramount earlier this week. An additional screening at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar location will occur on Thursday, March 19. Electronic artists such as Young Guru, J. Rocc, and IAMNOBODI will be performing at the Jones Center, using the functional boomboxes in his ongoing Boombox Retrospective at the Contemporary, starting at noon on March 18 ad running through March 20. In addition, Tom Sachs's exhibition Nuggets will be on display at Austin's Lora Reynolds Gallery through April 25.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='silent-hill-2-was-the-game-that-made-me-hate-myself-826-body-image-1426667797.jpg' id='37203']

This article contains plot spoilers for Silent Hill 2, in case that wasn't already obvious.

Silent Hill used to be an idyllic New England tourist trap. Now it's Hell. If you find yourself there, walking its fogbound streets, you've probably done something terrible. It's a place where sinners are lured and judged by the ancient, unholy evil that lurks there, and your journey through it is shaped by your own anxiety, fear, and guilt.

This dark presence roots around in the dingiest corners of your subconscious and brings the worst bits to life. What you see, others won't, because it's a personalized nightmare created just for you. It's a supremely fucked-up town, and home to one of the best, most emotionally charged stories ever told in a video game.

Silent Hill 2 was released in 2001 for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, and is by far the highlight of the series. It's a survival horror game, but it's no Resident Evil. While Capcom's famous series is all B-movie zombies and cheap jump scares, this game is defined by its genuinely unsettling atmosphere, its bleak, psychological story, and its David Lynch-inspired marriage of the mundane and the horrifying.

You are James Sunderland, a widower who receives a letter from someone claiming to be his dead wife, Mary. "I'm alone there now," it reads. "In our special place, waiting for you." This "special place" is, in fact, Silent Hill, and James drives there alone. He knows it can't be his wife, but he goes anyway. Something is drawing him there.

You arrive and find the town choked by a dense, swirling fog. It's completely abandoned, but there are traces of life everywhere. A car sits in a gas station with its engine still running. Signs hang in windows advertising sales and upcoming events in the community. But then it gets weirder. Roads suddenly end, with gaping chasms where the streets used to be. Bizarre, cryptic messages are scrawled on the walls. "There was a HOLE here," one reads, written in what looks like blood. "It's gone now."

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='silent-hill-2-was-the-game-that-made-me-hate-myself-826-body-image-1426667824.png' id='37204']

Occasionally you'll hear the distant wail of an air raid siren. This heralds a shift to the "Otherworld"—a disturbing alternate reality that has become a hallmark of the series. The fog is replaced by a stifling blackness. The jarring, industrial sound of grinding and pounding machinery fills the air. The walls are rusted and metallic.

As if that wasn't bad enough, throughout the game Sunderland is confronted by a series of disturbing monsters. Writhing sacks of flesh staggering around on twitchy legs; hospital nurses with grotesque tumors obscuring their faces; contorted spider-things made up of the plastic arms and legs of shop mannequins. It's the strangest, creepiest selection of enemies I've ever seen wriggle out of a video game artist's imagination.

He also has a stalker, named Pyramid Head by fans, but who remains nameless in the game. This creature, whose head is a large, crimson metal triangle (hence the name), seems to be shadowing Sunderland, and sometimes it tries to kill him. It's omnipresent, impossible to kill, and utterly terrifying. I'll never forget the first time I saw it, standing perfectly still, just staring at me. That moment said everything I needed to know. I was no threat to this thing, and it had taken a special interest in me.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='silent-hill-2-was-the-game-that-made-me-hate-myself-826-body-image-1426667855.jpg' id='37205']

The search for Mary—or whoever sent the letter—takes Sunderland to a hospital, an apartment block, a bowling alley, and an old Civil War prison. I learned about the town's troubled history from documents and newspaper clippings. I met a handful of other characters, including a flirtatious, enigmatic woman called Maria who looks eerily like my dead wife. As the story unravelled, slowly, and I discovered more about James and his marriage, I started to feel uneasy. Something wasn't right.

Sunderland finally arrives at his and Mary's "special place"—a hotel perched on the edge of a gloomy lake. The same one they were guests at when they visited Silent Hill before she died. I fought my way through yet more disturbing creatures, and find their old room. I enter, and it's here that Silent Hill 2 hit me square in the gut with an almighty emotional sucker punch that left me reeling.

A distorted VHS tape plays on a television, and James sits down and watches it, dumbstruck. It shows him by his dying wife's hospital bed, smothering her with a pillow. All this time, you've been in control of a murderer. I looked at the letter in my inventory, and it was blank. There was never any letter; Sunderland was lured to the town, by the town, to face judgement. He's another sinner who's arrived for his court date in Hell.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='silent-hill-2-was-the-game-that-made-me-hate-myself-826-body-image-1426667890.png' id='37206']

It's a cheap trick, but an effective one. I was made to sympathize with Sunderland, thinking it was the tragic story of a bereaved husband chasing the ghost of his dearly departed wife. I thought he was the victim, being hounded by malevolent monsters. But it's all in his head, and those demented creatures are his own sick creation. He's the very definition of an unreliable narrator, and he fooled me. Big time.

Team Silent, inspired by, among other things, the paintings of Francis Bacon, designed these monsters to reflect Sunderland's mental anguish. Those fleshy things represent hospital patients squirming in agony. The mannequins are a manifestation of his frustration. The nurses... Well, isn't it obvious?

Creepier still, each creature was designed to be subtly sexually suggestive, with slender feminine legs and plunging necklines. A lot of dark shit has been bubbling away in this guy's head, and now it's boiling over into the world around him. Video game enemies have come a long way from anthropomorphized mushrooms.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='silent-hill-2-was-the-game-that-made-me-hate-myself-826-body-image-1426667950.png' id='37209']

And what about his pyramid-headed predator? Nobody knows for sure except Team Silent, but a popular theory is that it's a kind of otherworldly executioner, and signifies Sunderland's unfulfilled desire to be punished for killing Mary. Or maybe it's just a dude with a pyramid on his head. It doesn't really matter, because its constant, looming presence makes it a powerful, unnerving nemesis. It's a shame Konami had to milk the character dry, including a bewildering appearance in a cutesy Game Boy kart racer.

This is all pretty deep, morbid stuff, but that's what makes Silent Hill 2 so special, and so much more than just another survival horror. Absolutely everything, from the monsters to the town itself, is designed to support the plot. Everything is so nuanced and considered, it's devastating that the series has taken such a nosedive in recent years.

Fourteen years since it was first released, few video game writers have come close to the intelligence and artistry of its storytelling. And now that Team Silent is no more—the development group was disbanded by Konami in 2004—it's unlikely that I'll ever experience that magic in quite the same way ever again. The Western developers who have since taken over the series make decent play-it-safe horror games that have none of the provocative, subversive spirit of the originals. They aren't terrible, but they aren't Silent Hill either.

[body_image width='1280' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='silent-hill-2-was-the-game-that-made-me-hate-myself-826-body-image-1426667971.png' id='37211']

Silent Hill 2 is a game that lingered in my thoughts long after I'd finished it, and snuck uninvited into my daydreams. When the curtain was pulled back and Sunderland was exposed, I was tortured by conflicting emotions. Did he do a terrible thing? Absolutely. Is he a monster? Probably. But I still need to keep him alive until the end. I need to protect him from these demons. It's a game that burrowed under my skin, made me think, and made me feel. The controls are clunky and the voice acting is abysmal, but that's all part of its idiosyncratic charm. There'll never be another game like this.

There is hope for the series, though. The next game, Silent Hills, is being helmed by Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, a developer who has made a career out of subverting expectations and messing with our heads. I can't think of anyone better. It's being co-created with film director Guillermo del Toro, and will probably be released sometime next year. It might just be the game that brings the series back from the brink.

Follow Andy on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699594.jpg' id='37525']

All photos by the author

I love it when people die. Specifically when an ornery old bastard whose family hated him dies, because they own the best shit, and I want to get my hands on it.

I realized this when I was living in Cologne, Germany and noticed the inordinate amount of flea markets in the city. Flea markets are a big hoopla in Germany and not to be laughed off or dismissed as mere distractions. In any hamlet or village, you'll find that Germans are very serious about their weekly flohmarkts, which are markedly different from the ones you might find in North America. At the Brooklyn flea in NYC or Junction Flea in Toronto, you're more likely to find original jewelry designers or indie fashion labels than you are unique antiques or vintage bric-a-brac. Sure, you can find typewriters but they'll charge you $500 for an ugly 1979 Corona with no platen or spools and missing keys. At the German flea markets, there are virtually no hipster-entrepreneurs trying to sell you peacock earrings, and the typewriters only cost €12. All the vendors are greasy, old curmudgeons with snaggleteeth who smell like Eau de Czech Republic. It is the smell of paydirt, my friends. Their foulness informs me that I have come to the right place.

I got to know one such vendor from Düsseldorf named Winnie who, like almost all flea market vendors, worked dually as an estate liquidator. When an old fucker croaks, the surviving family will hire estate liquidators to remove all belongings and furnishing from his home in order to sell the property. Winnie noted that happy families will keep all the good shit like Davenports, credenzas, love letters, and sentimental photo albums, but unhappy families will just want to get rid of the entire lot. And included in Winnie's fee is the right to do what he wishes with the belongings. Once he's sold all the big items on eBay like refrigerators and Chesterfields, he sells the smaller stuff, like china tea sets and old radios at the flea market.

[body_image width='960' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699629.jpg' id='37526']

What that means for sickos like me is that I get to buy the weird shit that these people kept secret in their hidden drawers for years. Shut-ins, hoarders, agoraphobics, sex offenders, and Nazis are a rare and special find, and without fail, my brain gets off when I do discover them.

There was the postcard dated January 30, 1933, the day the Nazi party came into power. It depicted the propaganda march that was held under the Brandenburg Gate, and featured a stamp with both Hitler and Hindenburg in profile. The caption was the first line from Germany's national anthem, "Deutschland Deutschland über alles," which is no longer sung upon pain of criminal prosecution.

[body_image width='960' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699647.jpg' id='37527']

Then there was the postcard from the 1938 Third Reich Party Conference in Nuremberg, signed "Heil Hitler" on the back, and came with a sheet of perforated stamps featuring Adolf in profile. The caption read, "He who wants to save the people must think heroically." When put into context, that is a pretty serious mindfuck.

[body_image width='1200' height='1600' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699703.jpg' id='37529']

When I moved to Berlin, my favourite flea market was held at Rathaus Schöneberg, where I bought several wallet-size photographs from someone's personal family album. One featured a Nazi propaganda parade. In it, you can clearly see swastika flags hanging from the buildings and bunting, and all spectators are giving the Hitler salute as the soldiers parade through the village. Another photograph clearly features low-level officers seig heiling in line, shovels by their sides. What they were digging with those shovels, one need not imagine.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699683.jpg' id='37528']

Another photograph showed a family of children waving hello from a window, the swastika flag clearly visible beside them. The photograph was dated March 1933, only two months after the party came to power, so you can see just how quickly Nazi propaganda took hold of the city. Buying these items from Rathaus Schöneberg struck me as rather ironic, as this is where John F. Kennedy gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.

[body_image width='1600' height='1200' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699718.jpg' id='37530']

There were endless hardcover first-edition copies of Mein Kampf strewn about the vendor's tables. There was the SS typewriter that was manufactured with a special key featuring the SS symbol. There were Third Reich medals of honour, and I once even found an entire Wehrmacht uniform in pristine condition for sale.

To sell or purchase Nazi memorabilia in Germany is not illegal, however the display of the swastika is, so most of these items were buried at the bottom of the boxes, forcing me to dig. Otherwise, the swastika was covered with a small sticker.

The vendors at the flea markets at Rathaus Schöneberg, Boxhagener Platz, and Ferhberlinner Platz in Berlin all began to recognize me after a while: that weird Canadian who bought the Nazi stuff. They couldn't understand my fascination; after all, they were used to seeing this shit. Most Germans have parents or grandparents who fought in the war or supported the Nazi party. So in any German household, it would be easy to find this stuff buried in a drawer.

[body_image width='960' height='720' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699746.jpg' id='37531']

Everything in the 1930s had to carry a Nazi stamp: from birth certificates to driver's licenses to teaching permits. They all bore the eagle gripping the swastika. What they don't understand is that, for Canadians, this is not something we ever see. When we learn about World War II and the Holocaust in school, it is always something that happened on the other side of the planet a million years ago. We never see swastikas or Hitler stamps. So when a Canadian gets the chance to stand in the place where books were burned, where war was declared, and to hold a relic from the most infamous incident the modern world has ever seen, it grips us very viscerally. For me, these items are dark, disturbing, mysterious, haunting, and powerful. Which, at its worst, is also how I view sex.

For balance, and for my own sanity, I have also bought many photographs and love letters from those who survived Nazi atrocities. At a Brussel's flea market, I bought a dirty and terribly yellowed letter written during the occupation of Belgium. As I read it, I translated it from the original French in my head:

"My dear little cousin. We still haven't heard news from you. You must know we are worried. We have done nothing but think of you since the invasion of Belgium. I hope you're not longer in Brussels. You are no doubt a refugee in Ypres. If you could come to Saumur, we could mutually comfort each other...Belgian refugee trains arrive daily and more than once we have had tears in our eyes to see them.... Oh, how victory will be beautiful; Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, England, and France are fighting for peace and annihilating Germany... We hope this day arrives quickly, we pray with fervor that the Good Lord will not remain insensible."

Why would such an historical and personal letter be for sale at a flea market for only €1, let alone dumped without care at the bottom of the box, soaked with rain water and doused in dirt? Winnie's words are the only explanation: when the recipient of this letter died, he was probably not on good terms with his family, and they had no desire to keep anything of his that remained. Who was this person? How did he survive the war? Who did he love? Why was he hated in death?

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/03/18/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/03/18/' filename='collecting-nazi-junk-at-german-flea-markets-made-me-a-better-person-273-body-image-1426699781.jpg' id='37532']

There's no way to know. So I have framed all of these family photographs and letters, and I hang them on the wall of my bedroom. These people took such great care to fashion these letters and keep these memories, so I figure somebody ought to remember them. I may be the last person on earth to appreciate these lost moments in time. So yes, I don't know who they are, and I never will, but that can't stop me from collecting their stories.

As for my clusterfuck of Nazi items, I keep those tucked away in a drawer where I hope they will remain, until an estate liquidator smelling of mud and BO comes into my room and wonders what kind of person I was.

Follow Christine Estima on Twitter.