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Our modern obsession with teenagers is a well-documented and sometimes cringe-worthy thing. We can't get enough of coming-o- age stories full of words like ripe, blush, and bloom. But the fetishization of youth—especially for young girls—is something that can be hard to honestly represent. This was on the mind of Elize Strydom when she began her Small Town Girls photo project. She spent time in the lives and homes of girls across the world, taking photos of the everyday moments that make up their own teen experiences.

VICE: First up, are you from a small town?
Elize Strydom: Yes, I moved to Sydney about five years ago. I'd grown up in the country and been at a regional university in Lismore, northern NSW [New South Wales]. I got my first job in radio in my hometown and another radio job in another regional town. So I spent my whole life in regional towns.

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Where did this idea come from?
Making friends with girls that grew up in Sydney caused me to think maybe we had quite different lives. They talk about their experiences of catching the train into the city and going to gigs, sneaking into clubs when they were like 15 or 16. I was like, what gigs? They didn't play a part in my teenage years at all. That made me think, Oh maybe things were different for me.

Also I'd turned 28 or 29 and realized I was a teenager ten years ago. It felt like yesterday. I felt like it would be rad to go back and revisit my teenage years through other young women. I didn't really have a name for it, I just lined up a few girls, took a few weeks off work, and asked if I could come stay for a week and follow them around to document their daily life.

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You've expanded it overseas as well, right?
To start with it was just in Australia, then I thought it would be cool to do in the US as well because that was the country I idolized as a teenager. I thought, I wish I could go to summer camp. It was romanticizing whatever I saw on US TV shows and movies.

When you were living with those American girls, did it look like the fantasy you had as a teenager?
It did! But one thing I was surprised about was not every teenage girl went to summer camp. I just thought that was what every single American teen did, that illusion was smashed. But otherwise yes it did. There would be times we'd be driving to Starbucks or the mall and I was like, I'm in a movie.

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Were there similarities between girls who grew up in towns of similar sizes even if they were in very different countries?
Yeah, the importance of family was a major one. They were more isolated and their friends might not live within walking distance. It was just a lot harder to get together and socialize so their siblings became their best friends and they spent a lot of time just kicking around home with them. Especially in America, I noticed family came first.

Why girls instead of teenagers in general?
I just think the feelings and experiences of young women—especially in small towns and isolated places—aren't as widely legitimized. I wanted to shine the spotlight on girls, and also as I said before, I sort of wanted to relive my teenage years.

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We've touched on this glamorized idea of what it is to be a teenager, especially in America. And there's a lot of that in art and pop culture at the moment as well. Do you think we fetishize what it is to be a girl in her teens?
Definitely, and I'm worried at times that I'm adding to that. But what I really strive to do is not to go into it thinking, OK I really want to get a shot her doing this because I want it to look like this. Typically I barely know anything about them before I arrive: They could be really remarkable, or just be doing their thing. I just try go into it with whatever they present is what I try to capture.

Elize's show 'Small Town Girl - Australia, South Africa and the USA' will be showing 14 to 20 May at Gaffa Gallery in Sydney.

Interviewed by Wendy Syfret. Follow her on Twitter.

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'Final Fantasy VII,' obviously.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The life of a nerd is thrilling, from the early years of thinking it matters that people mock you for being weird, through to later on when you realize literally none of that matters and you were a moron for caring what those dickheads thought. Also: The older you get, the more you get to enthuse about role-playing games.

But my journey to RPG nirvana was a bit all over the place. I didn't play Dungeons & Dragons, I tried Space Hulk once and got pissed off with the rules, and I would never give any Japanese games the time of day on my Amiga. It's a genre that could easily have passed me by—I could be like so many VICE readers out there, unable to accept that, actually, Final Fantasy XII is a really good game.

But something happened. I had an epiphany. Well, a slow epiphany, which sort of defeats the entire meaning of "epiphany," but I've used the word so now I'm sticking with it.

In the beginning I had no idea what I was even doing, never mind that these things had an entire genre behind them. I picked up Megatraveller 1 on the Amiga because I liked the look of it. Sci-fi! Stuff like that! Umm, mega! But I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I went back to Speedball 2.

Amiga Power, the greatest gaming publication of all time, went mad for Hired Guns, so my brother and I couldn't wait to get our fat, jam-smeared hands on it. But we were idiots. We didn't know what the hell it was about, or why you could only move a grid-based square at a time, or what the difference was between your characters, or why it was just Dungeon Master (which I also didn't get) but with more science fiction.

I even tried that game I can't remember the name of where, I kid thee not, if you didn't wipe your ass after going for a shit you died. Seriously, it's almost like the RPG genre didn't even want me. Me! Ian! A nerd!

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'Hired Guns'

But much as the nasty genre attempted to keep me at arm's length, and much as my time with the SNES was colored mainly by Super Mario Kart and Mortal Kombat II, I made the leap in 1997. Thanks to a preview in CVG—a massive, gushing article full of the sort of praise that would make all 25 people who still think Gamergate is a thing set off their loudest collusion klaxon—I put £42 in an envelope and waited for some un-remembered import company to send me a copy of Final Fantasy VII.

And waited quite a while, because it seems the postal worker had nabbed the two quid from the envelope but left the 40 notes. A phone call and a check written by mummy later and I had it in my hands. The quest to get it playing in color was a whole other thing—something you post-non-NTSC-capable-TV generation kids will never understand. But the game! Man, the game.

I had no fucking clue. No fucking clue. What were all these numbers? Why did I have to drink shit to not die? Why couldn't I bash the buttons to hit them repeatedly? Why were they all talking such utter gibberish? What the fuck was Cait Sith? Why had I named the main character "Smoothy?" (Clue: Because I was a nerd who thought he knew how to be cool.)

But something about it stuck with me. More epic than anything else I'd played, with moments that I actually gave a shit about. Much as I loved ISS and WWF: The Arcade Game, they didn't make me feel an emotion like that bit with Red XIII's dad did. It had taken 14 years of me being alive, but the genre that I really should have been into all along had bitten, hard. (On topic, check out VICE's two-part guide to the greatest moments of the Final Fantasy series.)

Related: The Mystical Universe of Magic: The Gathering:

So the snowballing period followed—Vandal Hearts with its ludicrous gushing of blood and Fisher Price My First Strategic RPG difficulty; Vagrant Story with its intro that I must have watched 20 times in a row; Suikoden with its "I didn't get into this as much as my mate who got all 108 stars did;" the other Final Fantasies with me actually knowing what in the name of Ultimecia was going on; a loaned copy of Fallout from a friend and the realization that there was a good Mad Max game out there; walking into my housemate's room back at uni and seeing him hopping up a mountain in Morrowind and realizing that yes, I had chosen the right genre (but said housemate was still a prick).

There was the belated appreciation—the Chrono Trigger session that lasted until I got to the last boss and couldn't win, so I never went back to it again. The difficulty spike in Final Fantasy III that just made me completely stop playing it. Other games got played, sure, but this was now the genre—I wanted to get lost in some badly translated bullshit trope-ridden world for 100 hours at a time, critics be damned.

It even matured with me, at least to some extent—as I became a fully-fledged manchild I was introduced to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and Oblivion, all from just two studios. Life was good, even if life involved sitting inside for most of it while living a life of someone else on a screen in a virtual world that wasn't real and no I didn't have a girlfriend.

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The 'Mass Effect' trilogy was one of the most critically acclaimed RPG series of the previous hardware generation.

But even though it seemed so perfect, the dark times soon enough came. Final Fantasy XIII with that fucking Leona Lewis song that I will hear on a loop when I end up in hell. Dragon Age II with whatever its developers had been smoking to make them so lazy as to cut-and-paste three dungeons and fob the results off as an entire game. Two fucking Worlds.

I honestly thought that was it. My period of playing and enjoying RPGs was over; I would return to just playing FIFA and be done with it, never again sinking 100 hours into something or caring about the fretting shrieks of an adolescent girl (who also has The Magic That Can Save the World, or something) while a pervy old man and a talking salamander make awful jokes in the background. The RPG was dead.

But with death comes rebirth—you know, as per the old saying that I just made up—and other people were given chances to make games, and other series I didn't pay attention to previously came to the fore. I was wrong about not sinking 100 hours into something ever again, because Persona 4 Golden made me do that (and get obsessed with its soundtrack), while Dragon Age: Inquisition was so absolutely not shit it almost made me forget about Mass Effect 3's original ending. Final Fantasy XV looks like it might not be shit, too, and Square Enix finally fixed Final Fantasy XIV. We're back into a golden age, sort of. Maybe. Hopefully. Otherwise I'll spend the rest of my gaming life (i.e. "all of my life") playing shitty, tired RPGs.

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Extreme 'Football Manager.'

But the greatest—the absolute best—RPG I've ever played is one I got into when I didn't understand what the hell they were. Some think me counting this as an RPG shows I still don't know what they are, but to them I say: Show me how Football Manager isn't the greatest RPG ever made. I even made a stupid video about it, which you can watch above. If you like.

Nothing has ever grasped me so firmly by the imagination gland, making me stay up 'til way past my bedtime just because I had to see if that Brazilian kid would learn English by the end of the year, or if I could let my aging midfielder leave in the summer only to immediately re-sign him on 35 percent of his original wages, or until I was so furious with a sequence of results from my finely crafted team that I threw my laptop at the wall and broke it.

All those things—and a lot more—have happened during my life with RPGs. I might not have understood that I was actually playing one back in the day, but it seems the love has always been there. It's not all shit haircuts, rampant melodrama and Yewtree-alerting female characters—role-playing games are fucking brilliant.

Follow Ian Dransfield on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on VICE Brazil.

Vale Noturno, or Night Valley, was a gang of eight fire balloon-obsessed teenagers from Capão Redondo—a favela just south of São Paulo. After one of their dads showed them how easy it was to put together a homemade hot air balloon in the early 90s, the group began building them and, like many others, launching them from an alley in Jardim do Colégio.

"It really was a golden age—there were so many balloons in the Brazilian sky back then. Sometimes we wouldn't sleep, we'd just light a campfire and stare at the stars and the balloons," Gilmar Oliveira, a member of the group, recalled.

Launching these makeshift sky lanterns was illegal back then, but the very worst it could get you was two months in jail—and that was only if you were really unlucky. In 1998, the year the gang called it quits, that very law was changed and launching balloons suddenly became an environmental offense punishable with up to three years in jail or a fine, sometimes both. Who knows whether this was why Vale Noturno decided to pack it in, but it's highly unlikely that it did anything to encourage them to keep going.

Luckily for us, photographer Zilton Coelho was around to capture the boys' six-year run with his analog camera. Not only did he manage to document the gang's impressive balloons, but he was also able to provide a unique insight into a teenage hobby that would later become a serious crime.

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All clothes vintage

PHOTOGRAPHY: BELLA HOWARD
STYLING: KYLIE GRIFFITHS

Make-up: Lily Keys using MAC Pro
Hair: Sami Knight using Unite

Born and raised in Colombia, 21-year-old Kali Uchis is a rare kind of artist. Pushing Motown vocals through a modern RnB filter, Uchis' brand of pop blends decades and styles to create something more energizing and feel-good than a breakfast smoothie.

After writing, producing, recording, and releasing her 2013 mixtape Drunken Babble in just 48 hours, Uchis quickly caught the attentions of hip-hop pitch-hitters like Snoop Dogg, A$AP Rocky, Earl Sweatshirt, and Tyler, The Creator. Now based in Los Angeles, Uchis has been evolving her signature sound, something she calls "lowrider soul." Her most recent offering—a mixtape titled Por Vida, released in February—could easily be mistaken for Amy Winehouse doing Spanish pop songs, or a collection of undiscovered Motown b-sides from the mid 1960s.

We caught up with her recently to talk about her roots, her influences, and boys.

Read the full interview on Noisey

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Road damage following the April 25 earthquake. Photo by Krish Dulal via Wikimedia Commons.

A second massive earthquake rocked Nepal on Tuesday, two and a half weeks after a 7.8-magnitude quake resulted in over 8,000 deaths. The new earthquake registered a magnitude of 7.3, according to the United States Geological Survey, with an epicenter 50 miles east of Kathmandu, near Mount Everest's base camp. Tremors were felt as far as Northern India. By Tuesday afternoon, Nepal's National Emergency Operation Center reported 1,117 injuries and 36 deaths. That number has now grown to at least 42, at the time of publication.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/T79UDt4_lUo' width='100%' height='360']

Read More About the Earthquakes:

1. Watch Earthquake in Nepal Dispatches from VICE News
2. Pictures of an Evacuation from Nepal
3. Videos Emerge of Climbers Fleeing Mount Everest Avalanche After Nepal Quake
4. Five Nights in Nepal: A Backpacker's Story of Survival

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

The British supermarket sector appears to be crumbling. You'll remember it was only last month that market-leaders Tesco announced a record-smashing pre-tax annual loss of £6.4 billion [$10 billion]. Well, since then, Sainsbury's are also said to have fallen £72 million [$113 million] in the red, Asda have reportedly registered their worst sales in two decades, and fourth-largest chain Morrisons have announced a 2.9 percent drop in sales. All "big four" supermarkets are apparently in turmoil.

Interestingly, though, it's food sales bearing the brunt of the slouch, with merchandise sales largely unaffected (Sainsbury's clothing section, for example, grew by 12 percent last year), so it's not like we've somehow been put off supermarkets altogether. But this does beg the question: if not from the supermarkets, where the hell are we getting our food?

Austerity can go some way to explaining the current situation. With wages shrinking since the economic downturn, many shoppers have begun to change the way they go about filling their weekly shopping basket. Put off by factors like, you know, supermarket prices increasing by upwards of 8 percent, the average cost-aware and open-minded shopper seems to have gradually shifted allegiances to a mixture of major supermarket convenience outlets, limited-stock discounters Lidl and Aldi, and online retailers.

So, alongside the recession, shopping routines changed too: people were making more frequent trips and buying less product; the weekly "big shop" now spread across a variety of different supermarkets.

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Photo by Hannah Ewens.

Of course, the trouble for the major supermarkets now is that, although disposable incomes and real wages are apparently on the rise, people are generally reluctant to alter these shopping habits. Shopping around has become habit rather than necessity. And instead of injecting that extra cash "we" now have back into the supermarkets, we can spend it elsewhere—like on eating out.

According to a report published by food service consultants Horizons last month, increasing numbers of people are now purchasing restaurant meals and "food-to-go," with the number of food outlets and choice of cuisines hurtling ever upwards—especially in London.

The report found, for instance, that 66 percent of these "to-go" retailers saw an increase in food sales in the last year, with 21 percent indicating a "large" increase. Meanwhile, a second report published last week found that over half of brand owners planned to open more than five outlets in the next year (up on 35 percent the previous year), specifically targeting shopping centers, transport hubs, and suburban retail parks. If you thought you couldn't escape the temptation of an overpriced Starbucks Frappuccino before, things are about to get worse.

Related: Our documentary on Britain's busiest food bank:

"People have been eating out more for years," says Peter Backman, Managing Director of Horizons. "It came a little bit unstuck during the recession, but if you go back 20 or 30 years, you can see it's just been increasing and growing its share of social spend. Since 2013, the trend has started up again." Backman says that with more money floating around, consumers are getting increasingly used to eating out, so are doing so more often. Temptation has also been fueled, as higher-profile places to eat out grow in number, with a heightened emphasis on new, innovative products and good-value meals.

We're still not splashing out on swanky three-course dining experiences, though; the first report also found that 62 percent of consumers spent an average per head of under £12 [$19] this year (compared with 51 percent the year before). So budget meals are still the cash-wary consumer's priority: "People are eating out more often, so volumes are up," explains Backman. "But their increase in eating out tends to be in the cheaper places, so it's not that they're necessarily spending less on a meal, it's that when they go out for an additional meal that they didn't have this time last year, it's in a cheaper place."

Singled out by Horizons in this respect were Pret A Manger and Nando's, both considered as "admired brands" by their peers. Nando's, for its well-executed but simple concept and all-age appeal; Pret, for its freshly prepared food, organic coffee, and pleasant (albeit controversial) staff-customer engagement. Elsewhere, Burrito brands are rolling out the outlets at the moment (the Guardian recently reported that the number of Mexican restaurants in the UK has increased by 71 percent in the last year), with street food, "Italian casual dining," and anything with an American theme also proving popular.

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Snacking is also on the rise, with 48 percent of operators noting that snack sales have increased year-on-year. "Coffee seems to be the driver," says Backman. "People will have a coffee and then a muffin or a wrap to go with it." Model examples of the "food-to-go" concept, he says, are provided by businesses such as Vital Ingredient, Avocado, and Pod, which offer apparently healthy meals and which, often based around offices, cater to both the lunch-time and "all-day grazing" businesses.

In the way an increasing amount of our food budget is being spent on eating out, the UK is slowly starting to catch up with the States. "We've been on a long-term trend," says Backman. "In the States, 50 percent of every food dollar is spent on eating out. In this country, it's only about 30 percent. Although I don't think we'll ever reach the level of the Americans, we are adopting things like brunch, for example."

But will restaurants will be able to endure such levels of expansion in the long run? "Clearly, growth can't continue forever," Backman answers. "However, the population is growing at half a percent a year, so that says that every restaurant should be able to grow at half a percent a year, and then add onto that changing lifestyle issues and the propensity to eat out. There's a lot of this sort of incremental growth around. It's not going to influence the overall market for the foreseeable future. There's still growth there and there's change as well, so it's not 'everybody does well;' there'll always be some sectors and certain types of operations that are doing badly."

It's possible, then, to see these trends move back and forth, and it's likely the supermarkets will boomerang right back into profit—the absurd price cuts and redundancies will end and the admittedly convenient "big weekly shop" will come back in vogue. And it'll be outlets of Nando's—not Morrisons Local—being shuttered.

For now, one thing the supermarkets could avoid is launching their own in-store eateries and "artisanal" coffee shops. "Over the years, supermarkets have not proven very adept at developing restaurants or food-to-go offers," says Backman, understatedly (ever had a meal in Morrisons?) "They've all tried it over the years. My view is that supermarkets can try, but it's not in their DNA to run restaurants. It's all a little bit systematic and lacking in soul."

Follow Huw on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user greentleaf

KTLA reported that an eight-year-old boy was injured after he was "tossed like a rag doll" by an actor dressed as Pluto during a trip to Disneyland, according to the boy's mother. She accompanied her son to the hospital after the intense hug, where he reportedly "spent all afternoon in the emergency room." KTLA has a video of the loving assault, which looks a little rough but not as dangerous as all those gangs and feral cats and measles outbreaks plaguing Disneyland.

Want Some In-Depth Articles About the Happiest Place on Earth?

1. I Auditioned to Be a Disney Princess
2. A Sketchy Florida Sheriff Says Child Molesters Have Been Working at Disney World
3. Goth Day at Disneyland!
4. The Meat Puppets' Curt Kirkwood Talks About His Love for Disney and Old Musicals

In some Australian states, if you're a guy who believes you're being hit on by another guy, you can kill that guy and not face a murder charge.

"Gay panic" is a kind of provocation defense recognized in Queensland and South Australia. What it means is, if someone of the same sex hits on you, the shock of that advance can legally render you temporarily insane. Officially known as the homosexual advancement defense, it harkens back to a time when certain situations could be seen as a slight against a man's honor and therefore provoke him into a killing that he's not 100 percent responsible for. Individuals who successfully employ the tactic can expect their charges to be downgraded from murder to manslaughter.

In July 2008, Jason Pearce and Richard Meerdink bashed Wayne Ruks, leaving him for dead in the grounds of a church in Maryborough, Queensland. During the 2010 trial, Pearce claimed Ruks made a sexual advance toward him, causing him trauma due to childhood sexual abuse. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter, while Meerdink was convicted of the same offense. But the judge's sentencing remarks suggested the pair lacked intent to kill because of alcohol intoxication, so it's unclear whether gay panic defense influenced the jury's verdict.

Father Paul Kelly, the priest at the church, began a campaign for the removal of gay panic defense in late 2011, with an online petition that's currently gained up to 226,000 signatures worldwide.

"There were two separate cases where a person was beaten to death by two other men, both of them happened up in the Maryborough region in Queensland," Father Kelly said. "One case where the homosexual advancement defense is used is more than unfortunate, but to have two in a row is a bit careless and dodgy."

The second case involved 62-year-old hitchhiker Stephen Ward allegedly making a pass at John Peterson, who flew into a rage and bashed him. Later Peterson and his companion Seamus Smith took Ward to an isolated area, leaving him to die. Medical evidence was given at the trial showing Peterson was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, due to violent sexual abuse in his youth. Peterson was convicted of manslaughter and Smith accessory to manslaughter.

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Illustration by Michael Hili.

Last month, Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath announced her government will be introducing amendments to ensure a homosexual advance is no longer considered provocation for murder. A spokesperson from her office told VICE these amendments were originally put forward by former Attorney-General Paul Lucas to remove doubts about how and when a partial defense involving a sexual advance can be used. These changes were recommended by an expert committee in early 2012, but dropped by the incoming Liberal government a few months later.

Mark Thomas, a barrister on the management committee of the LGBTI Law Service Inc, was a member of the expert committee. He explained the suggested amendment outlines that provocation defense would not apply to an unwanted sexual advance or minor touching. This would apply in circumstances of exceptional character, such as an individual suffering PTSD due to violent sexual abuse experienced as a child.

"The fact that provocation can operate as a defense to murder in the context of a non-violent sexual advance is a wholly unacceptable proposition," Thomas said, adding that gay panic defense, "seems to suggest that homosexuals are in some way less entitled to the protection of the law than others."

Tasmania abolished provocation defense in 2003 and subsequently so did Victoria and Western Australia. Amendments were made to the defense in the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, which exclude non-violent sexual advances.

In May last year, the state government of New South Wales passed a bill amending the law of provocation, which had the support of all parliamentary parties. The bill removed non-violent sexual advances from provocation defense, effectively quashing the use of gay panic defense.

"The crimes act is an artifact of the early 20th century and a century later community attitudes have changed and it simply wasn't appropriate to maintain a defense like this," said Justin Koonin, co-convenor of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby.

Related: VICE traveled to Russia to investigate the effects of the country's state-sanctioned homophobia:

The 1997 case, poorly dubbed Green versus the Queen, is often said to have established gay panic as a partial defense in common law. In May 1994, Donald Gillies made a sexual advance toward his friend Malcolm Green in the NSW town of Mudgee. Green responded by repeatedly punching Gillies until he was unrecognizable and then stabbing him 35 times. Initially sentenced to murder, Green's High Court appeal reduced his charge to manslaughter.

But Koonin explained this was not the first case of its kind in NSW, as the defense was used 11 times between 1990 and 2004, with other cases having occurred before the 90s.

One case bringing renewed attention to the gay panic defense is the murder trial of Michael Lindsay. In 2013, Michael Lindsay claimed he was provoked into killing Andrew Negre, as he'd repeatedly come on to him. The jury found him guilty of murder, but last Wednesday the High Court of Australia revoked the charge and ordered a retrial. They found a miscarriage of justice had occurred. In South Australia gay panic defense can still be argued, but the original trial judge suggested to the jury that it no longer should be.

According to Ian Purcell, spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Health Alliance of South Australia, there would be no grounds for a retrial if the gay panic defense wasn't still in operation. But the guilty verdict of the original trial shows a change in the general public's attitude.

"It's interesting that in this day and age a jury was not influenced by the gay panic defense," Purcell said, contrasting it with a 1992 case he campaigned against, where two young men were acquitted from almost bashing a middle-aged gay man to death with an iron bar. "It seems there was a level of homophobia still in the general community then that made the panic defense work and that's how those two thugs got off."

At the beginning of the latest session of the South Australian parliament it was announced that the South Australian Law Reform Institute would be undertaking a review of legislation that discriminates against the LGBTI community. They've asked for submissions from the community that will create a list of priority matters to be seen to.

Purcell believes the latest High Court decision may push gay panic defense to the top of this list of proposed reforms. "This case might put more pressure on the government, since it's an attack on this state's legislature that the guy has to be retried," he said.

Follow Paul on Twitter.

Sometimes I feel like I only know people from Oregon. That's alright, since people from Oregon seem to be far more agreeable those from any place I've ever been to on the East Coast. Portland sounds like a strange oasis of hip stasis, where you can be a career waiter and live comfortably with plenty of free time. Wherever there is free time, there are good bands—and And And And are the sultans of the scene.

We are premiering the group's new music video for their song "Losing Team," off their recent LP. It's part two of their epic GoPro- and iPhone-shot saga, following "A Real Case of the Blues." This time, the gang is real sick and have visions of grotesque surgeries, Ghostbusters, interdimensional portals, and IFOs (identified flying objects).

Listen to And And And on Bandcamp.

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Martin Gore has been making music for the greater part of 35 years. His band, Depeche Mode, released their first record in 1981, and the new wave craze catapulted them into the mainstream for the rest of the decade and beyond. Despite being one of the highest-selling artists of all time, Depeche Mode has managed to keep on experimenting and innovating long after their peers dried up, and they're still making music today.

Gore is clearly one of those uninhibited workhorses whose career inspires artist biopics—his sheer output makes you wonder if the guy's ever taken a break. In between Depeche Mode band stuff, Gore decided to record and release his first-ever solo album, MG, which is made up entirely of lurking, cinematic instrumentals. He's been releasing snippets of the record as 15-second visualizer video clips on Facebook, and the album is finally out now on Mute, the same label that championed Depeche Mode in their infancy.

It's a textural, complicated album, and one that sounds way more grown up and multifaceted than any chart-destroying song Depeche Mode dropped in the midst of the 1980s electro-craze. I gave Martin a call the other day to chat with him about his new album, his old band, and how talking about synths in interviews all the time gets "very boring."

VICE: What's up with these little 15-second previews you've been doing on Facebook?
Martin Gore: We thought about ways of trying to promote this record and we didn't want to do anything that was obvious or that I'd done in the past. It didn't really warrant the kind of events we've done in the past for band releases. At one point, the record company were talking about me going over to London and Paris and Berlin and doing listening parties and stuff, and it didn't really work for this project. Getting these little snippets together and then having the films made was a much cooler way of doing some self-promotion.

And a good way to satiate everyone's dwindling attention spans.
Or maybe everybody's just downloading the 15 seconds and they won't bother with the album.

You could just release 200 15-second long albums! Could you tell me a bit about how this project came together?
I had a few instrumentals leftover after I finished the Delta Machine project. We have two band members writing now, so we had so many songs written that there were too many even for the deluxe edition. We didn't want the album or the deluxe edition to be too long. I was left with stranded instrumentals. I started thinking that it would be a good idea to continue writing instrumentals when I got back from the tour and put out a full album. I thought it was exciting—it's something I've never done before and it was completely unexpected. I want to do things that are unexpected, to keep people on their toes.

People get bored by gear talk, but I'm curious—did your gear setup on this album differ from the usual?
The majority of the sounds were made with Eurorack modular systems. Apart from that I did use some vintage synths and other modular synths. My studio now is basically one big modular mothership.

I bet it's pretty cool. With this instrumental stuff I feel a cinematic influence. Was this your mindset at all? Are they any specific film influences on this album?
I definitely wanted the album to be atmospheric and have a cinematic quality to it. I think that's one of the reasons why I kept the tracks quite short, since I imagine them being short scenes from a film. I don't know if there was any actual film or composer that I was trying to emulate necessarily, but I like a lot of film music. I really like Michael Nyman even though he's nothing like what I've done and I love the classics like John Carpenter and Vangelis's Blade Runner stuff.

Do you find it hard to divorce yourself from all the past Depeche Mode stuff, or do you find yourself now free to do things you were unable to do before?
I like the idea of doing this full instrumental album, for example, because I see it as a piece of art, really. Over the years I've written many, many instrumentals for Depeche Mode, but they've always been used as interludes on albums or extra tracks or singles, and they've been scattered all over the place. It was quite nice to work on a complete 55-minute instrumental piece of music. You can kind of join them together and they work as a whole.

Yeah, you can take that old kernel that you used for interludes and expand upon it.
It's only been a very small part of the band's output over the years, but I think there is a small percentage of fans who appreciate those instrumentals.

Do you think you'll stay with that concept for the next thing or will you continue to try to surprise us?
The next thing I have to start thinking about is, I suppose, a Depeche Mode album. I mean, I'm already writing songs, I've actually started going into the studio and writing songs now, not writing these instrumentals. I've started on that path. Assuming we finish another album, and it comes out, and we do another tour and finish that, it would be nice to do something different. People keep asking when Counterfeit 3 is coming out. It'd be nice for it to come out when people least expect it.

You can't surprise people too many times in a row.
[Laughs]

Do you treat your studio time like a full-time job, or is it more sporadic?
I really never feel like I have to go every day, but I do, and I enjoy going every day. I think it just so happens that I keep the same hours because of the time I get up and have breakfast and all that. I get over there by mid-day and usually work until six or seven. I don't feel like it would be more creative for me to be in there until midnight, you know?

Yeah, you wrap up and save whatever's mid-way for tomorrow.
Right, I think you could easily get burned out. It's quite nice. Like today I knew what I was doing yesterday when I finished, so I'm gonna go in there today and finish it and I'm excited. If I had worked until midnight last night, I'd be thinking, "Oh god, I've got to go finish that today."

It's good to stay excited. Thanks, Martin.

[body_image width='2000' height='1335' path='images/content-images/2015/04/17/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/04/17/' filename='kids-you-should-go-see-art-with-leo-fitzpatrick-928-body-image-1429278929.jpg' id='47143']Leo Fitzpatrick. All photos by Emil Nordin.

This article originally appeared on VICE Sweden.

Twenty years ago, Leo Fitzpatrick played Telly—New York's scariest teenage Casanova—in Larry Clark's Kids. Since then he's snatched up some pretty coveted acting gigs in things like Bully and The Wire—both of which are cult classics in their own right.

But acting isn't Leo's main priority these days; Thanks to his (and fellow artist Nate Lowman's) gallery projects Home Alone and Home Alone 2, he's managed to carve out a name for himself in the art world—both as a gallerist and as an artist. Home Alone's concept is pretty simple: To draw a clear line between art and money by purposely never selling any of the works on display.

I recently met up with Leo at one of his shows in Copenhagen to chat about art, doing things for the right reasons, and being recognized as "that guy" from Kids.

VICE: What's with owning a gallery that doesn't actually sell anything?
Leo Fitzpatrick: I think art has gotten far too serious. It revolves around money way too much. You see a lot of work that looks very similar because that's the sort of work that sells. And once you start selling artwork you stop experimenting as much, because you know what will sell. You stop challenging yourself.

So Home Alone is about forcing artists to experiment?
The whole point was to get rid of the money aspect and just focus on the art again. These days we are so aware of the artist's popularity that we often forget to take in the art.

How did you make it all work financially?
You just lose money. I mean, in New York, we lost $20,000 in one year. Luckily, I was in a position where I needed a tax write-off, so that's how I could justify it. But when I was no longer in that position we had to close the gallery and think of a new way to go about it.

I really hope that young folks who want to open galleries don't compare themselves to big, "real" galleries. If you have access to a pizza shop, do it in a fucking pizza shop. You know, like, where do young people like to hang out? Bars. Do an art show in your local bar—you don't have to have a "gallery" to show art.

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Have you managed to build a reputation around that? I mean, are people approaching you to talk about their new art spaces?
Yeah! It's funny. Because of Instagram, you can talk to people all over the world. There was this guy from London who wrote to me saying, "Oh man, I really wish you'd do a Home Alone in London!" And I said, "Well, Home Alone is just an idea. YOU can open a Home Alone in London." You know, we can have Home Alones all over the world. I don't own Home Alone—it's an idea. A really simple idea. You just have to act on it and that's what is difficult.

The other day I was walking down the street in New York, and this young fellow asked me: "You're Leo Fitzpatrick, right?" And I nodded, thinking he was going to talk to me about movies but instead he said, "I really like your gallery!" To me, that was a great moment because it meant that what I do is working. That kids liked our gallery—and that's who we're doing it for. We aren't doing it for rich people wearing suits. We are doing it for the people who can only afford a can of beer but don't have a place to drink it. Come to our gallery—you can drink it here!

When I was young there were galleries in New York where you'd just go and hang out. Whether or not you bought art or cared about the art, it didn't matter. That was where you hung out—at art galleries. And I don't think that exists so much anymore in New York. Which is a shame because musicians, artists, and skateboarders—they need a place to hang out and talk. And why not do that at an art gallery as opposed to a bar?

So where did you hang out when you were younger?
There was a gallery called American Fine Arts and they showed really weird people. The director was this guy named Colin de Land. He was kind of an artist himself. There was great energy around that gallery. People wanted to hang out there, and it wasn't just artists—it was everybody.

So do you ever buy art?
Yeah, but I'm very cheap. I have a small art collection. When I was 17, I bought my first painting from this guy, Chris Johanson. It cost $300 and it took me like three months to pay him. That was 20 years ago, and that painting is still on my wall. It was the one thing I ever did right with money. I just bought it with my gut. Sneakers and music go out of fashion after a while. So yeah, I buy art, but I only buy art I like.

Related: An interview with Harmony Korine:

Are you sick of hearing about Kids?
No. As long as people are cool about it, I don't mind. Sometimes when people get drunk and pester me, that's a little annoying. But if people are like, "Hey, I like that movie!" I don't mind. It's not something I'm ashamed of or that I'm overly proud of. It's something I did in high school. It's weird that people still care about it 20 years later. To me, that's what's weird. That it still has a life. Because, to me, it feels very old.

But you do see why it's iconic?
No. I just feel like maybe nobody had made a film like that before, with actual teenagers. Everything that Larry Clark does, he seeks the approval of the teenager. He doesn't care about what the adults think. His main concern is what's authentic to teenagers.

That's similar to what you're doing with art.
I guess so. At the moment we are selling his prints for $100. So it's funny that when I was 16, he took a chance on me and put me in a movie when I'd never acted before. It was through Larry that I was introduced to art. It's funny that we're still working together—25 years later. But now, I'm helping him do a project. His print show started in my gallery.

At the beginning, we hadn't told anyone it was happening. Except for a few skaters, because we knew that the skaters would all tell each other. But we didn't want some rich person coming in, buying all the photos. He only wanted the kids to own the art. Larry is such a fucking teenager at heart that sometimes I feel like the adult. But it's really admirable. It's really weird to hear people think that he's sketchy or something, because all he wants is to be a teenager. How many older artists are making stuff that teenagers will pay attention to? Most 70-year-olds are retired. He's still going to skateparks, meeting new kids to get ideas. He makes me feel old.

Follow Casia on Twitter.

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Gary Hall on a recent trip to Uluru. All images via Facebook.

Gary Hall says he would die for Alice Springs. In fact, he loves it so much he founded Australia's newest paramilitary group, the Alice Springs Volunteer Force (AVF) in July last year. The Irish-born insurance broker, who is in his mid 40s and has been a resident of the central Australian capital since 2008, says the AVF will combat the "unacceptable" crime rate in the town and the inability of the police to do anything about it.

"What happens if a guy steals a few things in town? They put him in jail then give him bail and put him back on the streets," Hall told VICE. "So then he goes to court, and the judge says, 'Well this is your first offense, so we're going to give you three months suspended sentence and a $200 fine.' The guy leaves court laughing his head off."

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A recent attack on Hall's SUV

To combat this issue, Hall posted a recruitment notice last week to a closed Alice Springs Facebook community group, inviting those with a military background and "firearms experience" to join. The group has previously nominated those "who break into houses or steal cars" as targets, but a quick read of the replies suggests an overt racial agenda at play. One reply read "A good idea would be to declare open season on them [Aboriginal people]... Naturally with a bag limit, possibly a bounty on matching pairs would be an incentive." While Hall hasn't directly admitted to being motivated by prejudice, it's this kind of sentiment that has locals nervous.

So far the tendency has been to treat the organization as a racist redneck lynch mob or something of a novelty. Hall rejects both characterizations and says the organization is only looking to recruit those who show iron discipline.

"We're not a bunch of redneck Klu Klux Klannies," he says. "This is an organized group, the definition of vigilante. A paramilitary is a military organization. So it helps to have someone who has had military training. Someone with discipline who can follow orders."

According to Hall, the model for the AVF has so far been the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a loyalist paramilitary group that operated in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There the UVF waged a violent 30-year campaign that ended up with the group listed as a terrorist organization by the governments of Ireland, the UK, and the US.

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Hall, either before or after giving a two-finger salute.

While Hall says he has connections with both loyalist and Republican factions from the days when he lived in Ireland and sold insurance to high-ranking members, he refused to go into detail when we asked for his history. A loyalist named Gary Hall was jailed for attempted murder in 1993, only to be released under a general amnesty in 1998. We asked whether this was him but he stated he would "not comment on my past in Northern Ireland."

Despite Ireland's ceasefire, some members of the UVF have dispensed vigilante justice to those they believe to be criminals in that past, and the group reportedly remains involved in violent crime.

Still, the the AVF wants to import some of these methods the outback. "Someone will go to his front door and warn them, 'Don't do this again,'" Hall says. "If they continue doing it, then we may arrange for him to be kneecapped."

While the Northern Territory police have said they are monitoring the AVF's activities, traditionally those on the receiving end of Irish-style street justice are threatened with death or forced exile if they talk. This makes it unclear how the police will respond if the organization starts acting on its threats.

In terms of numbers, Hall says the group started out with less than ten when it was first founded but have added at least five more since, bringing the number of active members to "just under 20." The aim now is have around 100 active members and Gary says going public has only helped with recruitment. "Until crime is reduced to acceptable levels here, and that is until it is accepted by the people of Alice Springs, we will continue," he says. "That's the message."

Follow Royce on Twitter.

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Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gonnerman

By now you've probably heard something about how Rikers Island, the massive jail complex in New York City, is a hellhole. But the wider world might never have paid much attention to the place were it not for a handful of journalists determined to thrust its horrors in front of our faces. Along with a massive New York Times investigative series, the story that probably had the greatest impact—forcing Mayor Bill de Blasio to name-check its protagonist in a recent policy initiative—was Jennifer Gonnerman's "Before the Law" for the New Yorker, a sprawling investigation into the plight of then-16-year-old Kalief Browder. The teenager spent three years rotting away in Rikers without even getting a trial before prosecutors dropped the weak case against him—he was accused of stealing a backpack—and let him go.

Gonnerman's fantastic story is the first magazine piece ever to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and in addition to elevating the author to new heights career-wise, it seems to be making a difference in the real world, too. I called up Gonnerman to figure out what makes some crime journalism so important that the powers that be can't get away with ignoring it.

VICE: Why do you think your Rikers Island story struck such a chord? Was it partly a question of the climate in which you did your reporting—the national conversation about police killings of black men and the Black Lives Matter movement?
Jennifer Gonnerman: The piece came out in early October, which preceded some of the largest protests, but I think many factors came into play. Partly it was timeliness—the New York Times has been pounding away at Rikers Island all year. So that woke people up to some of the injustices going on there. Last August, the US Attorney had released a devastating report about the conditions in the adolescent jails on Rikers. So that also fed interest.

Often when people talk about the backlog and the court system, they talk about delays in case processing. There may be no more dull phrase than that.

But I also think a story about a teenage kid who spends three years waiting for a trial that never happens—just the facts of the story themselves are pretty stunning, I think. It's pretty surprising that that sort of thing still goes on in this day and age. Especially, you know, Rikers Island is so close to the media capital, right—just between Queens and the Bronx. So for those kinds of injustices to be going on right in New York City was in some ways surprising to readers.

So the problems at Rikers were already a major story, but your piece offered this incredibly gut-wrenching, personal window into that world, and kind of crystallized what people were already vaguely aware of, and made it harder to ignore?
I think some of the most difficult facts that come out of media and newspapers are most easily digested as a single narrative about a single person, and that worked to the story's advantage. And also, the story really looks at the massive dysfunction in two different systems—both the city's jail system, Rikers Island, and also the court system, particularly in the Bronx. So it was a chance to look at the interplay between two highly dysfunctional bureaucracies in a way that is very difficult for newspapers to pull off just because they don't have the space.

What's your sense of how different, if at all, Rikers Island is from when your subject, Browder, left there in 2013? There's been all this media attention, but how much has changed?
I don't know for certain because I haven't done on-the-ground reporting on this in the last few months, but Mayor de Blasio has focused a lot of attention on Rikers, which is to his credit since it had been terribly ignored by prior administrations. They've got plenty of smart people working on it, but whether that has actually had a trickle effect where peoples' day-to-day existences on the Island are any different, I'm not convinced that's happened yet. And it's obviously an incredibly difficult thing to pull off.

Do you think reforms—like the new rule that possession of small amounts of marijuana results in a summons and not arrest—will actually reduce the impact of the criminal justice system on people of color? Or will they just clog the courts with more dubious cases, as some police reformers have alleged?
Several years back when the stop-and-frisk trial was happening in federal court in downtown Manhattan, I covered it and wrote about it, and focused on a police officer in the Bronx who testified against the NYPD. And he always told me, "You know, the biggest problem is actually not stop-and-frisk, it's summonses." It's the way the kind of unofficial NYPD quota system, at that time, was forcing him and his colleagues to hand out a certain number of summonses. And that was, in his view, the larger injustice, and I thought it was only a matter of time until the public came around to seeing things, perhaps, that same way. And so now we're starting to focus more city attention on that.

The mayor released a statement to you, mentioning Browder, when he announced changes in how the city's court system operates (in hopes of speeding it up). Is it fair to say it's a direct result of your reporting? What's the relationship like between journalism and reality here?
Did Kalief Browder's story make that happen? I think that at any given time, the folks in City Hall have a long list of criminal justice reforms they are supposed to be working on, want to work on, problems they need to fix, and the story in the New Yorker certainly helped push court reform to the top of their concerns and priorities.

I think the impact of taking so many young men and imprisoning them has ripple effects for families, parents, children, entire communities.

Often when people talk about the backlog and the court system, they talk about delays in case processing. There may be no more dull phrase than that. I think for people who actually genuinely wanted to work on that issue, this story gave them a way to mobilize other folks and focus their attention on it in a way they might not have before. If it was about, "Hey, we need to work on case processing delays," it's hard to get people excited about that, compared with telling them the story of a young man who sat around for three years waiting for his case to go through the system and losing three years of his adolescence.

Some of the people you spoke to in that follow-up piece were skeptical of how significant these reforms will prove to be. Is this new policy proportional to the problem?
It's too early to say if it will have any lasting change. There certainly are some very smart, determined folks that are dedicated to these issues, but these issues are many years in the making—both Rikers and the court system—and very difficult to resolve. So whether they're going to be able to actually make lasting changes, I have no idea. Part of the challenge is you have all these different players in the court system who are essentially at odds with each other: the prosecutors, public defenders—that's the definition of the way the adversarial process works. And yet to make this work you have to get everybody on the same page to move cases through the system faster, and that's the real challenge.

Looking back at the last eight months, it's obviously been a busy stretch for journalism centered around prisons, jails, police brutality, and cop protests. How do you think a moment like this happens?
I think it's the beginning of a sustained dialogue. Even Hillary Clinton had that long policy speech about the problems of mass incarceration. But I think a huge factor is all these cell-phone videos that you're seeing. It's no longer one police officer's word against a civilian's word. The Eric Garner video, for example. Cell phone videos have completely changed the tenor around these conversations, and given credibility to people who might in the past not even have been heard by the mainstream media, even if they've been saying the same thing for years.

Related: Watch our former prison correspondent Bert Burykill try to navigate urine tests and other legal snags after his release.

Does the gendered nature of the problem—so many of the characters or victims are men, and specifically young men of color—somehow shape how you approach a story, or dictate the direction that one goes with a story like this?
I've been covering the criminal justice system for many years and actually wrote a book about a woman who was in prison for 16 years. So I feel like I've tried to cover the criminal justice system from many different angles and focus on many different kinds of peoples' experiences. But men obviously are disproportionately represented behind bars—that's a fact. I think the impact of taking so many young men and imprisoning them has ripple effects for families, parents, children, entire communities.

And so that's another way I've tried over the years to cover the criminal justice system, to focus not only on the single person who's locked up but also on many unintended consequences of our policies.

Finally, is having an impact your endgame, or if not, what is your chief goal when writing a story?
I personally want to write a piece that people are going to read, first and foremost. I mean, if I were a journalist who spends too much time worrying about what the final outcome might be—I don't really think it's our job to be lobbying for specific policy changes. More the point, I think, is to just try to do the best job possible to report a story and get a full understanding of the problems going on and then relay them to a reader in a way they can understand. And then whatever happens from then, if somebody reads it and wants to make a change, that's sort of the politicians' or policymakers' job. I think any journalist who gets too much caught up in that, it doesn't really make for great journalism.

But first and foremost I'm just hoping to write a story that people are actually going to read to the end.

Follow Matt Taylor on Twitter.

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Photo by Carlos Delgado via Wikipedia Commons

Lenny Kravitz probably leads a pretty nice life, but for the last few days, it's been nicer. Earlier this week, Kravitz took up residence in his friend Ian Schrager's empty Edition Hotel in Manhattan before the hotel's official opening. He stayed in the $8,000-a-night penthouse, according to Page Six, and has the hotel's entire 300-person staff at his disposal. They are "on point to tend to his every request," a source told Page Six. Whenever the man wanted a Milky Way, a veritable army leaped to supply one. Unfortunately, the hotel is opening today and Kravitz has to move out. Back to the daily grind of a millionaire actor-slash-guitar shredder.

Want Some In-Depth Stories About Music?

1. Why Can't I Stop Laughing at This Lenny Kravitz Parody Video?
2. Remembering the Rat, the Famously Violent Boston Punk Club That's Now a Luxury Hotel Suite
3. Rediscovering San Francisco's Punk Scene in a Box of Old Negatives
4. Watch a Documentary About Indonesia's Punk Scene

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Lejac Residential School in Fraser Lake, BC, circa 1920s. Photo via press release

Whatever unimaginable horrors could happen to a child, Leslie Pierre says happened to her.

Pierre, 34, was a participant in a recent study that revealed children of Indian residential school survivors, and victims of childhood sexual abuse, were significantly more likely to be sexually assaulted themselves.

The Cedar Project examined drug use in young indigenous women and girls (age 14-30) over a seven-year period in British Columbia.

The study showed if an indigenous girl was the victim of childhood abuse or had at least one parent who attended residential school, they were ten times more likely to be sexually assaulted later in life. The indigenous participants were all found to also be drug users at some point in their lifetime.

Pierre, who's from the Sekani Nation, is not surprised by the project's findings.

"The (sexual assault) rates are probably a lot higher," says Pierre of the Cedar Project's findings. She's now an outreach worker with Providing Alternatives, Counselling & Education (PACE) Society, an organization located in downtown east-side Vancouver that offers services to the city's sex worker community.

"I only had one parent that went to residential school."

Pierre said her father's experience in the residential school system was horrific.

The University of British Columbia School of Population and Public Health and the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences spearheaded the project, following a group of 259 young indigenous women.

Growing up wasn't easy for Pierre, as she says she witnessed and experienced various forms of abuse.

She started using drugs at age 13, and later worked in the sex trade for 13 years.

"I got so many things against me: I'm trans, I'm aboriginal, I'm a former sex-trade worker, I was an addict," says Pierre.

Today, she helps many indigenous women and girls who were just like her, sharing a similar family history.

Mary Teegee is from the Takla Lake First Nation and the executive director of Family Services for Sekani Family Carrier Family Services in Prince George, BC. She says she would like to see these women's stories count for something.

"We understand that this is an impact of residential school but what are we going to do about it?" asks Teegee.

"One of the recommendations we have provided is to provide a holistic, culturally appropriate, one-stop-shop for those victims of sexual abuse."

British Columbia indigenous leaders such as Teegee are hoping to run a pilot project in northern BC and Prince George to help young indigenous women and girls.

"That would be the child advocacy model, where if a child has been sexually abused they go there, they tell their story once and the services are wrapped around that child and family to ensure that it never happens again," says Teegee.

The Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre based in Calgary already operates under such model.

The advocacy centre brings together police agencies, child and family services and health counsellors to help children, youth and families.

Individualized and integrated case plans are created for each child.

"There's got to be an integrated approach, an indigenous child advocacy centre where all these issues can be dealt with in one place," says Kukpi7 (Chief) Wayne Christian, Splatsin Secwepemc Nation.

Such a centre would include traditional practices that have been used for thousands of year to keep the people healthy, explains Christian.

Right now, an indigenous woman has to explain what happened to her eight to 10 times—working on issues individually through a variety of services.

"There's got to be a way that we can look at [the issues] for the child and family to deal with, so they're not lifelong sentences," says Christian.

"It's people that do not deal with those trauma-based issues have a cycle of violence, a cycle of addiction, a cycle of poverty."

Pierre wonders why there isn't an integrated trauma centre on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, given the high number of indigenous women and girls and after all the years of intergenerational trauma.

"It would be neat to make an all nations centre, where everybody can go for help and there will be all kinds of help within one location," says Pierre, who admits she still has problems finding services herself.

Luckily PACE hired Pierre and provided an opportunity to her, something she says she's extremely grateful for.

She says it isn't easy to land a job when you have a bunch of strikes against you and personal pain.

Pierre hopes to see something change to help those indigenous women and girls with their pain, addictions, and someday begin their healing journey.

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