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Turkey Releases Two VICE News Journalists from Prison as One Remains in Detention

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Turkey Releases Two VICE News Journalists from Prison as One Remains in Detention

James Deen Is Pissed Off About Racism in the Porn Industry

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James Deen Is Pissed Off About Racism in the Porn Industry

Argentina’s Rural Stores Are a Fraying Link to the Past

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El 91 Butcher Shop. All photos by Guillermo Srode-Khart.

Argentina is usually seen through the lens of Buenos Aires—their sophisticated and cosmopolitan capital city. But when Argentinian photographer Guillermo Srode-Khart spent the past few years traveling the country, he found himself captivated by the more rural areas. Visiting countless small businesses, he observed how they weave a thread into the country's past. Local stores doubled as museums, post offices, workshops, butchers, bakeries, and bars. Many had been in the same families for generations, and served as the heart of individual histories.

In this series, he attempted to capture the past as it disappears to younger generations breaking with tradition and seeking life in the city. VICE caught up with Guillermo as he headed to the US to promote his new book, Stories.

Leili Bike Shop

VICE: What drew you the countryside in the first place?
Guillermo Srode-Khart: I've had a connection with the countryside since my childhood. My grandfather was involved in the wood business in Argentina, but I didn't take it seriously until I was in my early 20s and I'd moved to the US. I realized I was really interested in my country and I wanted to explore it. Slowly, these places symbolized the inner nerve of my identity.

Many of these places serve several practical roles—post office, store, meeting place—but what do they mean to the cultures they service?
These places are very complex. The owner of a store called Cuatro Esquinas [Four Corners] explained to me he knew everybody's names, problems, and would take care of everyone. It's also vital for people to socialize—these towns are very isolated. People go to the establishments to get together and talk about news, life, whatever.

Cuatro Esquinas also considers itself a museum. Given the long history of the place, the customers asked the owner to make it memorable and started giving him things, like a wild boar taxidermy head and so on. It's a museum made by the people.

Cuatro Esquinas

As you mentioned, many of these places are very isolated. How were you received when you arrived in each town?
Usually they were very welcoming because they didn't receive a lot of visitors or attention and the business wasn't going well. To have a "gringo" from the city come and ask about their lives and what they do, which is a vital part of their identity, really honored them.

So business is generally not going well for these stores?
These guys are trying to keep their businesses running, but it's difficult. Most of the time once the owner dies, the younger generations don't want to continue with the business because they can see the hardship of the job, and are just not interested in learning a trade or running a shop like that. For example, the woodworker told me his son is studying IT and when he visits he asks how he can live a life that makes him sick without economic reward. Still the carpenter—with a lot of sadness—understands these are different times and his son has a different life.

Colonna Wood Shop

Are they proud of their trades?
Yes, absolutely. I think there is no disconnection between their trade and their sense of being.

What effect do you think this project has had on you?
Because of this work I recently moved to a small town. I love the countryside. I miss it and I always want to come back. I was renting a house in Buenos Aires and I gave that up and rented a house in a small town six hours from the city. I felt I had to be closer to this world because I was so nurtured by it.

Interviewed by Laura Rodriguez Castro, follow her on Twitter.

Britain Is a Weird Place: Dismaland Is a Smug, Clichéd Monument to Banksy's Dated Agenda

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All photos by Jackson Drowley

Let's face it; Dismaland is a bad pun. It is, at best, a tweet sent after being disappointed by Space Mountain, a Facebook status bashed out after paying $10 for a soggy hot dog while your infant child screams in horror at weird human Goofy. But ham-fisted puns and visual metaphors have been Banksy's MO ever since he first stenciled a rat onto a flyover. Policemen making out (yay for gay rights)! A man with a bandanna throwing a bouquet of flowers instead of a Molotov (yay for peace)! A robotic arm reaching out of an ATM and attacking a little girl (money is bad)!

But Dismaland is more than a stencil, of course. Half art show, half funfair, it's geared as a kind of Festival of Britain in reverse, a celebration of national decay set up in a long-abandoned part of Weston-super-Mare. It features a decrepit, burnt-out fairytale castle, a riot-van fountain with a slide coming out of it, and a game in which you attempt to knock an anvil off a plinth with a ping-pong ball. In a time of growing political disquiet, when old social divisions are being cleft open without finesse by the first fully Tory government since 1997, it's not hard to see why demand for tickets and media interest is peaking around Dismaland. But in 2015, is Banksy able to state anything beyond the obvious?

You only realize how scattershot Banksy's targets are when you write them down. Walt Disney and the horse-meat scandal. Selfies and the police. Fat cats and bad TV. It's a weird list, a mixture of things your dad would hate jumbled up with the grievances of an anarchist.

Talking of bad TV, there used to be a program on TV called Holiday Showdown. In it, two families would experience each others' typical vacations to see how the other half lived. In 2006, they aired an episode in which Family A, who'd routinely jet to places like Thailand, was forced to endure a numbing stay in Weston-super-Mare—and Family B was treated with absolute derision by all involved for their liking of the English southwest. Almost ten years later, the attitude toward Britain's seaside towns hasn't changed. They're seen as a passé relic of a pre-EasyJet era, the crumbled ashes left in the wake of a particularly violent Ryanair take off. Once, though, they were the only option for most people, and one that brought bright-eyed excitement rather than the I-suppose-so sighs they elicit today.

Weston-super-Mare doesn't have the immediate sense of youthfulness that somewhere like Brighton does. On the contrary, the roads near the entrance to Dismaland were lined with coaches holding dozens and dozens of white-hairs. After disembarking they were, of course, walking in the opposite direction, away from the massive dystopian art prank.

There were two lines for entry, one for ticket-holders, the other for non-ticket-holders. The former was long, but the latter was vast, with people sitting on deck chairs awaiting the opportunity to hear, see, and soak up Cardinal Banksy's gospel.

On the way in there's a fake, cartoonish stop-and-search where aggressive security guards give you a metal detector frisk-down "for no reason." Being involved in any kind of am-dram performance is likely to earn a smile—you'd have to have a heart of stone to tut at someone trying to make you laugh. This was no Guantánamo Bay simulator; I wasn't about to be waterboarded with a gallon of flat Fanta. I was asked to place my bag on the floor and pick it back up, before being wished a "miserable day."

Then the park opens up, and one thing is markedly visible: lines. Lines stretching far and wide. But there were no barriers, no marks on the floor. The people were lining themselves up into contorting snake shapes across the place. I get it: British people love to wait in line! But having just come from an almost hour-long one, I decided to look around a bit, as the prospect of more waiting in line made me want to crumple to the floor.

I went on the merry-go-round, in the middle of which was a figure in a HazMat suit surrounded by boxes of horse lasagna. The staff in purple hi-vis jackets are all uniformly disinterested—a nice joke that went over some people's heads, including one woman who was visibly annoyed when the Ferris wheel operator shrugged at her question of, "How many times does it go round?"

That said, it was still pretty hard to get away from how basic it was. The horses on the merry-go-round were to be turned into lasagna. Get it? Banksy, I have been getting it since 2013.

There were bits about Dismaland that I quite liked. The exhibition, for example, was good, especially Jimmy Cauty's post-riot model village, complete with these miniature policemen stranded in the middle of the sea atop a van. But other things, like the cinema, felt jaded and weird rather than incisive. Here were reams of families, grandparents, and small children sitting on deck chairs, watching a video of a woman's face aging while gloomy, droning Philip Glass–type music played. Sure, that may be the point of the place: to jar the senses, to take the concept of people relaxing in the sun and juxtapose it with arresting video art. But without the complicity of the viewers the art looked silly, two things staring at each other in confusion and misapprehension, like your grandma watching Boiler Room.

The park's soundtrack of Hawaiian steel guitar music was intermittently interrupted by a small child doling out messages like, "If you behaved nicely, the communists wouldn't exist." It felt hackneyed and was lost on me, and was the sort of gag a smug sixth former would make while bullies kicked him around the common room floor and rubbed apple cores in his face.

The biggest anti-climax of the day was the contents of the dilapidated castle. The biggest line in the park was reserved for this, snaking, sometimes through other lines, with the lines splicing, people having even less of an idea of what they were waiting for, just standing behind one another on instinct.

Inside, there was a green screen against which people had their photo taken, before being ushered into a room that was pitch black save for the flashing lights of the exhibit's "cameras." They illuminated an overturned princess's carriage, flanked by paparazzi, Cinderella flumped out of the window with two cartoon birds doing her dress up. That was it. Was it meant to be Lady Di? I don't know. I guess. I'm not entirely sure I care.

For more than 20 years, Banksy has been busy anonymously building his cult of personality—but it's that shroud of mystery that has allowed him to be taken and bastardized. Today, Banksy is the anti-capitalist brickwork scribbler, but he's also the parody Twitter account spaffing out positive messages. He's a theorist in a loose sense, but only in a meme-ified form. It's poster art, computer wallpaper art, art to scoff and smirk at. We are constantly told that this invisible graffiti artist is a genius, but what evidence have we got for that besides someone's wall being crowbarred out and sold for a million dollars every few months? The whole thing screams, "We are intelligent. You—while not not intelligent—could probably do with reading a few more books. You don't have enough angst, so here's some hidden in a chocolate cake so you don't have to think about it too much." It's not quite poking fun at the philistines and peons trying to enjoy a day out in the sun by the beach, more putting a smug hand on their shoulder and telling them, "Sure, you could ride the waltzer, but how about opening your eyes for once?"

There's also something insidious about the idea of making a place purposefully shitty and unfulfilling, so that when people come away feeling shitty and unfulfilled they can say it's part of the experience.

Dismaland feels like a missed opportunity for Banksy and his cohorts. For the last two decades, young people have been getting more and more marginalized as time creeps toward a total annihilation of everything they hold dear—fun, fairness, freedom, prospects; anything resembling a positive future. Yet the man who could be their biggest artistic representative is content hammering the kind of tropes you'd see Nigel Havers incredulously bleating on about during an episode of Grumpy Old Men. Lines; being conned by untrustworthy fairground workers; overzealous security checks; celebrity culture; all the drab complaints that prop up the self-righteously glum "Keep Calm" lifestyle. When the Very British Problems Twitter feed already has its own TV show, do we really need Dismaland?

What Banksy has created here is a crusty monument to his own dated beefs, which—at a time when British youth have far bigger things to worry about than selfies and ITV2—manifests more as a parade of delusions than cutting social commentary. His paint-by-numbers anti-capitalist, anti-establishment schtick has become as woefully archaic as the seaside setting of his tawdry monument to humanity's ills.

I rode the Ferris wheel and looked out onto the beach of Weston-super-Mare. The tide was slowly washing in, like spilled water creeping toward the edge of a table. I saw a line of children sitting on donkeys plodding across the wet beach. It was time to leave Dismaland and find a donkey of my own.

Everyone on the beach was laughing and running around. A little girl was repeatedly picking up clumps of sand and throwing them angrily into pools of water. If you want your dose of pointless British nihilism then you had to look no further than this scene.

I approached the donkey vendor and requested a ride. Only for children, he told me, with a weight limit of 100 pounds.

It appeared I didn't fit in anywhere in Weston-super-Mare, neither in its pretentious un-fun fairs nor on the backs of its heroic donkeys. I wandered on.

Follow Joe on Twitter. See more of Jack's work on Tumblr.

How to Sublet Your Apartment with a Refugee and Crowdsource the Rent

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Bakary with Jonas and Mareike. Photo by Jean-Paul Pastor Guzmán

Germany is taking in more refugees than anyone else in Europe right now, with the annual number of those applying for asylum in the country soon expected to hit 800,000. There has been some ugliness from far-right groups in response to the influx, but an encouraging number of German citizens and groups are taking it upon themselves to make new arrivals feel welcome. Among them are the young couple behind an Airbnb-style website launched in January 2015 that matches refugees with hosts willing to give them a free room for at least three months.

The site, Refugees Welcome, came about after 28-year-old Mareike Geiling left Berlin to spend a semester teaching in Cairo and decided to donate her vacant room to a Malian refugee named Bakary by crowdsourcing his portion of the rent. After a couple of Skype discussions with her boyfriend, Jonas Kakoschke, and with a social-worker friend, Golde Ebding, the trio threw together a Wordpress site to help others do the same. Two months later, Refugees Welcome was live and taking applications from both refugees and potential hosts. Almost immediately, Geiling says, "it exploded." She and Kakoschke now work full-time on the initiative, which is currently active in Germany and Austria, but is set to expand into several other countries soon. I caught up with Mareike to find out more.

VICE: Why did you feel compelled to start the site?
Mareike Geiling: We don't like how refugees are treated in Germany. No one leaves his country without a reason, and [the government is] putting them into mass accommodation, where 100 people have to share one bathroom, outside of the city center, where there are no Germans living or people that speak German. You are put together in one room with many people, not from the same country, [whom] you maybe don't understand. You have to stay there for a lot of months; you get depressed.

We saw some documentaries on TV and read a lot about it so at one point we said, "OK, we are concerned about it and we want to change something." The concept we provide is so easy. Someone is looking for a room, and someone is offering a room, and we bring these two parties together. It's not something complicated. At one point we thought, Why didn't someone do something like this before? We believe in the concept of living together, because [the refugees] get many profits out of it. You learn German better, you can build up a network, you can be proud of the community, people who live in Germany can help you to settle down, and we only provide one person per room so everyone has their privacy.

What are the benefits for hosts?
Of course, living together also enriches [the hosts]. The hosts learn a lot about the reasons why people came. We have heard a lot from the people hosting refugees that they don't see refugees any more as an anonymous mass of people. It's someone that you know the background of, you know the stories he's telling. It's interesting to see how the world is for someone who is not German—you see the world from another point of view.

How did things work out with Bakary?
Bakary is now a close friend of ours. We've had a lot of flatmates living in our rooms when we are not there and I've also lived in many, many shared flats, and with Bakary it was one of the best living experiences I've had. Not because he was a refugee, but just because we like each other, and it was very easy. Before [staying in the flat] he was homeless, so of course it was a lot better for him to live with us. Sometimes we partied together, or when we had friends at home we would just sit together, and he took us to the mosque when he was going there.

Related: Watch our documentary series about the migrant crisis, 'Europe or Die'

You currently operate in Germany and Austria, are there plans to expand?
Just this week we've had someone from the UK here [finding out] about how to establish it there. Since the beginning we have received a lot of mail from all over Europe, but also from the US and Australia, from people who want to build up the initiative in their country. There are already teams in some countries. We are pretty sure that it will go online in the Netherlands in the next month and also Portugal. Greece is very far along in the process and France as well, but people also wrote to us from Sweden, Norway, the Czech Republic, Spain, Switzerland... It's a lot of work right now but we never did it proactively, we just react to the messages we get. But of course we would like to support them so let's see if it will work out.

Do you provide training to hosts?
It's not training, but when they register they get in contact with one of us from the team, and they usually have a lot of questions and we on the team usually have a lot of questions. Then afterward, we are still in contact with these people and we try to meet them. And we often use buddies who register at the website. The buddy is someone you can [turn to] as a refugee when you have questions or doubts, so you're not alone.

Golde Ebding, Mareike Geiling, and Jonas Kakoschke. Photo by Jean-Paul Pastor Guzmán

What advice would you give people who want to set up a social initiative like this?
We tried to reach out to some people and told them the idea and they said, "Oh, that will never work out and there will be huge problems." And we said, "OK, I don't give a fuck, we'll just do that," and found out, "OK, it's working." But we say know your target group really well; you should be in close contact with them and really ask them what they need. Then just use the internet as a tool, and it's about trial and error. If it's not working out it's not a problem—we didn't put in hundreds of thousands of Euros. If it didn't work out like we thought then it's a political statement, which is also good.

How big do you think it could grow?
The issue of accommodation for refugees is not a German question, and it's not a European question—it's a worldwide question. This explains why we get emails from the US and Australia. I would be happy if it were still working in one or two years. If it could exist in like five other countries, that would be amazing. I couldn't tell you how cool I would find that.

London's Biggest Drag Queens Weigh In on the State of Drag in 2015

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"I'm going on holiday and I'm happy to say there's no drag in the bag," says East London DJ and drag queen John Sizzle, who is finally giving himself a week off. We're sitting in The Glory, a gay pub in east London co-run by John and fellow performer Jonny Woo. It's lunchtime, and the bar is empty. I was here last Friday night, though, and the room was wall to wall with gays. At a time when London's drag pubs are rapidly closing, The Glory is a success story. But then, that's to be expected—John and Jonny are hard working queens; they might do drag for fun, but they've also built decade-long careers out of it.

These careers are documented in a new film about their lives called Dressed As a Girl. The "frockumentary"—directed by Colin Rothbart—follows six London drag queens: Jonny and John, along with Holestar, Pia, Amber, and the controversial (he once spat a milkshake on Nick Grimshaw) Scottee. With a reality TV aesthetic and episodic structure, it ploughs through personal stories of John's HIV diagnosis, Holestar's clinical depression, and Jonny's alcoholism, through to their individual "coming out" moments and Amber's gender transition. It does leave you with the feeling that all drag queens' lives are plagued with negative drama, but despite that, it's still a brilliantly camp and amusing documentary, which captures a critical moment in London's drag history on camera.

When the group decided to start filming in the mid-to-late 2000s, what they couldn't foresee was that drag was on the brink of exploding. In many ways, what was once a fringe art form has now permeated the mainstream. Last week, Channel 4 aired Muslim Drag Queens—a documentary about gay Asian drag performers in the UK; almost every big, commercial festival in the UK over the last few years has had some kind of drag troop on the line up, including Glastonbury, Bestival, and LoveBox; and some of London's most popular nights are now themed around drag—from Sink the Pink to Savage. At these nights, it's evident that a lot of young men are trying their hand at drag and—judging by their walk in heels—probably for the first time.

One of the most poignant moments of Dressed as a Girl, for me, sums this up. It's when London-based drag act, performance artist, and writer Scottee turns to the camera, and says, wistfully, "The scene's fucked up at the moment. Everyone's got this feeling that there's only one golden ticket." He's talking about how the rising popularity of drag in recent years has brought with it an ever-increasing number of drag queens vying for the limelight. It's almost like London's drag circuit has become an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race: one big competition. Not everyone will get the attention they crave and—depending on their act—the attention they deserve. Nor will they all get paid for it.

READ: A Day With London's Female Drag Queens

"You've got to a point now with kids, where you think, Where's drag going?" says Holestar—who self-describes as a "tranny with a fanny" and who has joined us in The Glory. I ask how the landscape of the scene has changed over the six-year period in which they filmed Dressed As a Girl. "The look is very polished and American now" she continues, "It's about looking and behaving in a certain way—a pageant. Think Drag Race. I'm kind of over it. It's very generic: everything looks the same."

John Sizzle agrees: "It's very pop video now, isn't it?" He says, speaking of a younger generation of queens. "They've all grown up with, like, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, so they like to act a particular type of flashy, sexy, teenage girl. That's their whole schtick, so you don't get much variation. Whereas our generation was kind of more disturbing, a bit more of a mixed bag. It was more personality-led than look-led. A lot of people that we know, the look would be deliberately DIY and more post-modern."

Still from 'Dressed As a Girl'

In Dressed As a Girl you get a sense of this. The guys and girls are often looking a little ropey, never too choreographed. Dry humping each other on stage. Falling off the stage and getting carted off in an ambulance. That kind of thing. Amber puts on a striptease party to fund her top surgery. Jonny Woo sits on people's faces at his Gay Bingo night. And everyone gets naked, a lot. "A sense of humor would be appreciated now," says John, "and self deprecation—young queens need to realize it's OK to laugh at yourself... because drag is ridiculous."

Holestar picks up: "Some people are taking it very seriously, and thinking they can make a career out of it. You can't have longevity just being a face, you need some sort of talent behind it. It's like, the only person who's made a career out of that in the club world is Amanda Lepore." She exhales: "Personally, rather than someone who looked beautiful and gorgeous and elegant but just useless, I'd like to see someone who looks like shit on stage but can perform. I'd rather see blood and tears and passion and sweat."


Jonny Woo in 'Dressed As a Girl'

It seems that, like most art forms, the aesthetic trends within drag go through phases. In the 1960s, South London boozer Royal Vauxhall Tavern hosted fairly masculine drag queens who would dance along the bar. That was about parody over passing. Then there have been more avant–garde phases, with organized pageants like Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World attracting artists like Derek Jarman, Grayson Perry, and Leigh Bowery as entrants in the 70s and early 80s, before, in the mid-80s, came the iconic and high fashion drag nights like Kinky Gerlinky, which was held at Blitz in Covent Garden, and later in the West End. In the 90s and onwards, there was a trashy Soho moment, which centered around drag parties like Trannyshack UK at Madame JoJo's, or Fruit Machine at Heaven.

London's history of drag is obviously too long, potted and contested to truly recount here. But there can be no doubt that, when it came to the Noughties, Jonny Woo was instrumental in bringing drag performances to major London arts venues like the Royal Opera House. Woo can also be credited with helping to set up The NYC Downlow stage at Glastonbury, as well as starting up London's long-running Gay Bingo (which is exactly what it sounds like)—all of which we see footage of in Dressed As a Girl.

"It's all swings and roundabouts," reflects Holestar. "If you look at the history of drag, especially British drag—and also with the gay scene—things ebb and flow. Drag is having a moment right now, then it will go out again, then we will reclaim it. Similarly, if you look at the gay scene over the last 30 years, everyone was in Earl's Court—there's no one in Earl's Court now—then everyone moved to Soho, then Islington, then Vauxhall. It's always moved about and it always will. I've lost a lot of work because of certain venues being closed, but we're moving on, The Glory's now here, we've now got Bloc Bar in Camden. I'm getting work there."

"It's like in pop music," John adds. "It might be indie for five years and then later it'll be all electronic. And what I've noticed is it's slowly moving again from this glamor drag, like RuPaul-style hyper-femininity, to people doing creatures now, there's people doing trees and sexy lobsters! So I think that—within a saturated scene—there's always individuals morphing and changing and moving things on. With Facebook and camera phones, everyone can create an image and the people able to cut through that will be more transgressive. The people who really want to show off will find a way."


Related: Watch JD Sampson go in search of America's last lesbian bars


According to Holestar, this is the whole point of Dressed As a Girl: to show people what drag can be about and inspire young people that if they really do want a platform to show off then there are still avenues. "When we decided to make the film six years ago, we wanted to access young queer people who are dealing with whatever they're dealing with, and are not sure who they are, and feel forced into wearing tight pants, and going to the gym, and taking lots of drugs, and just saying to them, 'You don't have to do that, there is an alternative. You can be whatever you want to be.'"

Now, it seems that the movement of drag into a more mainstream space doesn't have to make it any less subversive a practice, so long as you're creative and find new ways to push boundaries. Equally, the proliferation of young boys and girls trying out drag doesn't necessarily mean you can't make a career out of it. "I think there's loads of work now that drag crosses over into the mainstream more," says John. "But you need to do something more than just stand there and simper and lip-sync; you need to be able to DJ; you need to be able to stand your ground; you need to be able to entertain people."

Follow Amelia Abraham on Twitter.

Dressed As a Girl is premiering this Sunday September 6 in Soho in London. Get tickets here. Check out other screenings around the UK here. DRESSED AS A GIRL is being released through Peccadillo Pictures and the DVD is released in December.

The Idiot, the Pisser, and the Nazi: Tattoo Artists on Their Most Memorable Customers

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All photos by author.

Tattoo artists earn their living by permanently marking people's bodies with artistic ideas often born out of beer-fueled benders. Given the amount of people who are destined to spend the rest of the lives moping about with lower-back tribal tats, I'm not entirely sure how these guys sleep at night. But, hey, we've all got bills to pay.

I guess things were simpler back when body modification was mostly a hobby of Russian criminals and American sideshow performers but these days body art lovers are just as varied as the images they cover themselves with.

To get some insight into the minds of those willing to plaster their bodies with non-specific Chinese lettering, I asked some of Vienna's tattoo artists to recount their favorite workplace anecdotes. Here are their stories, in their own words.

There may very well be a tattoo in there.

The Satisfied Customer

"It's pretty normal for first-time customers to bring a few friends along for support. Recently, I had a young woman show up for her appointment with three of her girlfriends. When I asked her what she wanted, the gang started giggling excitedly and she got all red in the face. She explained that she had a birthmark in her bikini area, around which she wanted to draw some petals so it would look like a daisy. A fairly straightforward task.

She took off her shorts, then very reluctantly drew down her underwear. I still couldn't see it. It turned out that it was very, very deep in her bikini region—strictly speaking, right next to her labia. I made it clear that I wouldn't be able to do it unless she actually took her underwear off completely, lay down and spread her legs. Her friends started cracking up, but she didn't seem to mind.

While tattooing her, I looked up to see her eyes were closed and she was biting her lip. But not in the same way that other customers usually do. It quickly became apparent that the machine was giving her some sort of sexual pleasure and because of its vibration, she was on the verge of having an orgasm. I have no idea if she came or not, but her girlfriends sure found the whole thing incredibly funny."

The Pisser

"There's a huge difference between tattooing people who already have a lot of tattoos and tattooing those who don't have any. Usually, people who have tried it before know what sort of pain to expect. Not too long ago, I had a customer who was fairly covered in work, come by and ask me to tattoo his hands. After a brief chat about the design, I began to tattoo his knuckles. Even though it's a rather tender area, it's usually quite bearable because it rarely takes more than 20 minutes to finish a piece like that.

As I was about to start on the third finger, I noticed him twitching slightly. I politely told him to stay still but when I looked up, I realized that his entire body was cramping. All of a sudden, things escalated. His eyes rolled back into his head and he proceeded to piss himself and fall out of the chair. I was just about to call an ambulance when, out of nowhere, he sat back up as if nothing had happened. He simply tied a shirt around his waist to cover the urine. Honestly, I really didn't want to finish the tattoo but he convinced me to by promising to see a doctor immediately after. He survived the rest of the piece but I doubt he ever went to the hospital."

The Idiots

"Quite a large part of my job is refusing customer requests. Once, this 20-year-old guy came in and wanted to have the word "whore" spelled out in huge letters on his forearm. I'm not sure what kind of answer I was expecting, but when I asked him why on earth he wanted that, he just said, 'Because it's my favorite word.' I said no, and told him to think about what his mother would say.

Unfortunately, we sometimes get asked to tattoo Nazi symbols. Since these idiots understand that it's a sensitive issue, they always try to build up to it gradually by asking general questions about scripts and portraits before finally asking explicitly for an SS-skull, runes, or in the worst cases: a huge Hitler portrait. Naturally, I tell them that I won't do it and that they shouldn't bother coming back. The scariest part about it is that these guys are more often than not just young insignificant-looking types and not the boneheads you'd expect."


Related: Watch our film on legendary NY tattoo artist, Thom deVita

Also check out, 'The Sacred Art of the Japanese Tattoo'


The Lovebirds

"Couple tattoos are always in high demand and I often reject them. One time I agreed but only because it happened to be an acquaintance of mine. He convinced me by saying that he had found true love and that they both wanted to get tattooed to prove it to the world. It was to going be something truly "special." Given that he was 40, I figured that he was old enough to decide for himself and said OK.

That same night, I woke up and instinctively checked my texts—like I always do. He had sent me a photo. The first thing I saw was a photograph of a huge cock, followed by that of a vagina. It turned out that he wanted to have a realistic depiction of his girlfriend's vagina on his thigh and that she wanted his penis tattooed on her abdomen—both tats needed to be life-size.

His girlfriend showed up for the first appointment and, sure enough, she got a huge dick on her stomach. That was it for her, so she headed home. Then, it was his turn. Seeing as he's about 6.5 and his thigh is massive, he requested I make the vagina slightly larger than life-size. It ended up being about the size of an A4 page. While I was tattooing him, he received an text containing a new photo of the same vagina—but, this time, with something white on it. When I asked whether or not it was semen, he very indignantly replied: 'No, do you think we're perverts?' I never did find out what that white stuff was, but as the icing on the cake, he finished the tattoo with a script that read,'Ain't no pussy like my girl's pussy.' Charming.

I bumped into him on the street a few weeks later. When I asked how their tattoos were healing up, he told me that they were no longer together. It probably bothers them to have each other's genitalia on their bodies, but it can't be that bad given that neither of them has ever asked me for a cover-up."

The Mistake

"Once, an acquaintance of mine, who happens to be in a biker gang, came to me to get some work done. He'd always told me that he wanted to have his wife's name tattooed on his body but never mentioned what her name was. We downed a few glasses of whiskey to settle the nerves and I showed him some pre-sketches. He was thrilled and wanted it done on his wrist so that everybody could see it. We drank some more and I did it.

The next morning, I was pretty shocked to see him and a bunch of his biker mates at my front door. At first, they wanted to beat the shit out of me, but I luckily managed to ask what was going on. It transpired that in his whiskey stupor, he'd mixed up the name of his wife with that of his girlfriend which, not entirely surprisingly, his wife was more than a little angry about. As a peace offering, I told them I'd cover it up—but only if his friends stayed as witnesses."


The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Woman Defacing Campaign Signs Was Arrested by a Conservative Candidate Dressed in Camouflage

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Ryan Leef, seen here neither in camo nor executing vigilante justice. Photo via RyanLeef.Conservative.ca

A Yukon woman claims she was out defacing the campaign signs of her local Conservative party candidate, when—like a total ninja or creepy Rambo—he stepped out of the trees in camouflage and placed her under "citizen's arrest."

Whitehorse playwright Carrie Boles said she went for a late night bike ride along the highway last week and noticed signs promoting Conservative Ryan Leef. The former MMA fighter (zero wins, two losses) and corrections officer was first elected to office in 2011.

For shits and giggles, she told the Yukon News, "I decided I would cut out Leef's name from the signs before putting them back."

Just as she was gearing up to mutilate sign number four, Boles said she heard a "rumble in the bushes" behind her. Seeing as she was on the side of the road late at night, Boles assumed the noise was an animal, a moose maybe, or at worst a bear.

"Just then two men came into focus—one balding and dressed all in black, the other in camouflage," she recalled.

Within seconds, she said her left arm was being twisted behind her back and she was forced to the ground, as the men chanted, "Citizen's arrest, citizen's arrest, you are being placed under citizen's arrest!"

The vigilantes then cuffed her and called RCMP, she said.

"After spending a few minutes listening to the ridiculous banter over the phone," she recognized the voice of one of her captors as Leef. (She believes the other man was his campaign manager.)

"I was like, 'what are you doing sir, out here at 11 o'clock at night in the pouring rain, protecting your campaign signs?'" Boles later told CBC. A pretty fair question.

The cops let Boles off with a warning.

Leef's office did not respond to request for comment from VICE, however, when reached by the Yukon News, confirmed the events described by Boles were true.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.


Canada’s Prime Minister Refuses To Take Additional Refugees After Backlash Over Drowned Syrian Boy

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Canada’s Prime Minister Refuses To Take Additional Refugees After Backlash Over Drowned Syrian Boy

Why Are Murder Rates Spiking in Some American Cities?

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NYPD Commissioner William Bratton at a Wednesday press conference in Manhattan. Photo by the author

At a Wednesday afternoon press conference, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton thanked three officers for saving the city from a "slew of problems." The day before, at around 3:30 PM, Andrew Vlasaty, Erik Skoglund, and Adam Riddick used a GPS-tracking app to apprehend car thief who was on a multi-state crime spree that included murdering a pawn shop clerk and raping a 15-year-old girl.

The capture of 21-year-old Kendrick Gregory was a perfect parable for the commissioner's message: Violent crime may a growing problem in major cities across America right now, but not New York. As the New York Times reported Tuesday, murder rates have risen sharply in cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore this year. But Bratton and several other members of the NYPD's top brass used the Wednesday press conference to crow to a roomful of reporters about how the city just experienced its safest summer in the past 25 years.

According to the Times, Milwaukee had 59 murders in 2014 and has had 104 so far in 2015 —a 76 percent increase, and it's not even fall yet. (Places not even mentioned in the article have seen rising homicide rates, too, like Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, although other cities, like San Diego have seen fewer murders.) Some experts told the paper that officers were being passive in an era of national scrutiny towards them, and that young men were more likely than ever to use violence to resolve minor disputes.

But David Kennedy of the Center of Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York says that anyone who claims to know what's going on here is "not being honest," and that the idea of violence spiking because cops are afraid of indictment is demonstrably false.

"With regards to the places where there are big changes, like Milwaukee and Baltimore, we have no idea at this point whether this represents the beginning of a trend," he told me. "And in St. Louis, there's an alleged 'Ferguson effect.' But if you look at what's happening there, the crime numbers were actually going up before [Michael Brown was shot] and have gone down since."

Kennedy also said that pointing to a safe summer is a red herring and that it's impossible to extrapolate anything meaningful from a few months of data. To date, New York has seen an increase in homicides of 9 percent this year, according to the Times. When asked if he was worried by the statistics in other metropolises at his Wednesday press conference, Bratton scoffed and referred again to the trio of officers who apprehended the out-of-state criminal.

"I do not expect that all," he said. "A lot of thats has to do with the resources we have, resources that are being expanded this year with 1,300 new cops, significant overtime, the technology we're acquiring, as well as the skill sets you get to see. Today you were just exposed to the creativity of three of our young officers, so, no I'm quite comfortable we're not gonna see anything like—unfortunately—many of our colleagues are experiencing in other major cities around the country."

If Bratton citing a small data set to pat his department on the back is arguably misleading, his comments Tuesday on MSNBC's Morning Joe were just plain weird. On the talk show, he drew controversy for referencing the work of former US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wrote a report for the US Department of Labor in 1965 called "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action." Bratton called the paper "prescient" and talked about "the disintegrations of family, the disintegration of values" in the black community.

(An assemblyman in Brooklyn and a spokeswoman for Communities United for Police Reform both told POLITICO New York they thought the comment was "racist.")

At the press conference, a reporter asked Bratton to clarify his comments, and the commissioner thanked him for the opportunity.

"There is no denying in the African-American community that there are strong cultural, strong religious, strong community, values," he explained. "But that over time, and this is what the Moynihan report spoke to, there is no community that has been so stressed over time as the African-American community: 250 years of slavery, 150 years of Jim Crow, coming out of Jim Crow, the segregation that spawned the civil rights movement. And at the time that report was written, it was a call to action, to assist a community that has been impacted like no other community in our history."

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

This Rapper Made an Entire Mixtape About 'Dragon Ball Z,' So We Quizzed Him About the Anime

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This Rapper Made an Entire Mixtape About 'Dragon Ball Z,' So We Quizzed Him About the Anime

VICE Vs Video Games: Admitting My Addiction to ‘Age of Empires III’ Saved Me from Depression

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A screenshot from 'Age of Empires III'

Computer games: they're a drug like any other. Whether you want to get your blood flowing or escape from your troubles, disappearing off into a fictional world where you play God is delicious. When you're confused, upset, lonely, angry, or just plain bored, nothing beats the blues like killing things.

This is the story of how my self-righteous gamer guilt transformed into a humbling lesson on being human.

As a teenager I used to love computer games: Zelda, Mario, RollerCoaster Tycoon, and the Age of Empires series. But when I became an adult I gave them up. I went traveling, had sex, and met lots of inspiring people who made me feel amazing and cool.

Then one day I found myself in a foreign country, with no job and no money, and I went crawling back to where I felt comfortable: real-time strategy games, and Age of Empires III.

It's 3PM, I'm unemployed, and my girlfriend is going out to do food shopping. The door slams. I scurry across to my laptop, and immediately send thousands of men to their deaths. During this process I am unaware of time and space; I have conquered mortality because I am no longer aware that I exist. The door slams again. I rapidly minimize the window and pull up Gmail to make it look like I've been job hunting. Guilt washes through me like a river of ice.

The fact that I didn't want her to judge me was a reflection of how I was judging myself. I felt like a pathetic teenager who was running away from his problems by hiding in a fictional world. I castigated myself for playing the game and grew more depressed. This, of course, led to more Age of Empires.

Things got worse. I'd be reading a book about social activism in Brazil and imagining hordes of Spahi cutting down peasants in their fields. I'd be falling asleep and suddenly realize that if I allied with the local Cherokee in Texas I might be able to protect my railroad from the British.

New on Motherboard: The World's First Water-Cooled Laptop Looks Like a Bad Idea, But Here We Are

Nothing demands such crisp attention as this semi-historically accurate, civilization-building computer game. Everything matters, from where you build your market to how many Janissaries you train before your first attack. Once you click start, the absorption is deeper than orgasm.

The first step to overcoming addiction is admitting you have a problem. For me, the revelation was double. First, that I was obsessed with playing Age of Empires III. Second, that I hated myself for having this obsession. What was hurting me was not playing the computer game, but the pressure I put on myself not to play the computer game.

I began to study my habits and investigate my addiction.

Article continues after the video below


Related: Watch VICE's new film, 'Gone: The Story of Paul Alexander'


First discovery: Age of Empires is both a stimulant and a depressant

In the morning I played to pump myself up. I focused my mind on a simple and captivating task: raising an army of grenadiers and destroying the French. This made me feel like I'd achieved something, even if I wasted the rest of the day.

At night, fighting despondency, I nursed my laptop on my knees and watched my field guns blow away the computer's Spanish infantry along with my bone-aching loneliness.

Second discovery: It is a silent, versatile, and continually accessible drug

It's hard to shoot heroin in a library. But the Age of Empires junkie can play anywhere, any time. All you do is get out your needle (laptop), cook up some shit (train hussars), and wash your mind in numbing escapism (slaughter longbowmen).

Third discovery: During gameplay, everyone listens to you and everyone trusts you

Click settler, click house: settler builds house. Click musketeer, click settler: musketeer kills settler. The power is clear and absolute, and if you mess up and your colony gets destroyed, you can press replay and none of your population conscientiously objects.

Oh, and Janissaries don't get jealous when you click on other Janissaries.

New on Munchies: Apparently Cornish Pasties Aren't Actually from Cornwall

My first two discoveries highlighted how easy it was for me to maintain my addiction, while the third was the key to my recovery. I was feeling powerless and I wanted to feel powerful. I was living in a new country, with no friends, a fractured relationship, and no job to distract me from all of that, provide me with money, or offer me a social role to play.

Drugs and alcohol were no good to me because they only made my gloomy situation heart-achingly clearer. I needed something that forced holistic concentration; I needed escapism that made me forget about lunch and the fact I had no new messages.

Another screenshot from 'Age of Empires III'

Age of Empires III was my cocoon against pain and confusion. But my realization that I was trying to play God helped me accept my futile humanity. I can be quite an arrogant person; I look down on friends who spend all night watching Orange Is the New Black because it seems such an utter waste of time. I believe there is always something you can be doing to improve yourself: reading, writing, playing music or sports—whatever. At first I didn't want to admit I had an addiction to computer games because I saw it as an inability to deal with the nasty, messy, tiring real world that surrounds us. Then I realized that I am not a god. I get downtrodden and I get hopeless, and in those moments I need some help.

The only things that defeat my imperial colony are my real-life friends. I never miss a meeting with a mate to play Age of Empires. When I'm motivated, surrounded by fun people, and frolicking through the smooth of summer, my Janissaries stay in their box. When I move to a new country with no job or social stimulation to support me, I hide away and wage war.

My experience with Age of Empires III was humanizing. I now have empathy for everyone who spends a sobbing weekend with an HBO boxset, or plays Gem Crusher instead of reading the news.

Life can be shit, but it's better to wallow and massacre a bunch of computerized images, than pretend everything is okay for a while and then spontaneously throw yourself in front of a train.

Follow VICE Gaming on Twitter.

Canada Denies Report Its Warplanes May Have Killed Up to 27 Civilians in Iraq

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Canada Denies Report Its Warplanes May Have Killed Up to 27 Civilians in Iraq

Here's What We Learned About DJing from 'We Are Your Friends,' Zac Efron's Stupid EDM Movie

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

DJs Complaining is a Twitter feed and website that chronicles instances of DJs complaining—about airlines not having the particular brand of orange juice that they like, about hotels not having plugs next to the bed, and generally about spending all their time being flown around the world to make people happy.

We asked the people who run the Twitter account to review the new Zac Efron EDM movie We Are Your Friends for us.

DJing has come a long way over the years. There was a time when to be a DJ meant investing a large chunk of your hard-earned wages in records, spending years accumulating an extensive and valuable collection that you'd occasionally cram into the back of a VW Camper along with a half a ton of audio gear and drive to your local social club where you'd play Motown and Decca 45s for seven hours until someone glassed you or head-butted the amp, all for half a crown and a pint of Mild if you were lucky.

Gone are the days of breaking your bank and your back on vinyl, though; in 2015 you don't need much to be a DJ. As Zac Efron succinctly puts it in new EDM rites-of-passage flick We Are Your Friends, "all you need is a laptop, some talent, and one track." And while we're not quite sure if Zac has completely grasped the concept of DJing there (more on that later), it is hard to argue with him that we've entered a new age. Ever since Skrillex put an LFO on a square wave back in 2010 the EDM scene hasn't looked back, and with its meteoric rise have come meteoric rewards for the scene's stars. While DJing used to be the burden of the socially impeded freak, it is now a role occupied by people who look like models, wear suits for no reason, and hang out with David Blaine. With Hollywood now getting its sweaty lizard claws into the world of dance music and offering up its hottest teen star (27-year-old star, whatever) to play a DJ in the making, there is no doubt that the world of electronic music has finally cemented its place in mainstream US culture.

As Brits, this Spring Break version of dance music is an alien world. Private jets and Vegas residencies are a far cry from Dance Energy, Doncaster Warehouse, and Pat Sharp in a student union. Of course we're well aware that everybody's had a pop at this film, not least the critics. This being VICE and us being DJs Complaining, you're probably expecting us to do the same and make some sarcastic jokes about all the inaccuracies in the stupid, turgid, coming-of-age-by-numbers script. But shut up your sniggering. We've had enough of occupying the moral high ground and living in a hovel that smells of cigarettes and soup. We want some of that Vegas money.

We went looking for tips—and here is what we learned.

Looking and Sounding Like a DJ Is More Important Than Actually DJing

You live this lifestyle 24-7, right? You love "sick" beats, and even when you're not "spinning" "drops" and "crushing it in the club," it's important that everyone knows you're a cool DJ guy. For this reason (and probably also because the company that makes them is sponsoring your stupid film), it's very, very important that you wear inappropriately big, ostentatious headphones everywhere you go. Even if you're not listening to music; even if they're squeezed silently around your neck and it means that you can't look down; even when you're out in the 80-degree midday heat, running off your unspoken dark past and thinking about your estranged parents and dead friend; even if they are so hot that you might as well be jogging in a fucking balaclava, you will wear them, you sweaty little bastard.

djING to a Half-Empty Club On a Thursday Night Will Get You a Million-Dollar House

In our experience, the weeknight slot has never been the most profitable. Seventy-five bucks in cash and four free drinks (as long as they're not spirits) is usually about the best you can hope for. You'd have to play an awful lot of these nights to save enough money to even think about laying down a deposit on a bedsit in Chigwell, but it seems things are different in the States. Enter James Reed, an aging and jaded DJ who, over the course of the film, becomes something of a role model to Efron. Together they turn every Thursday night into a spiritual voyage that involves them DJing to a smattering of disinterested models who just happen to live in luxurious bungalows in the Hollywood Hills, each replete with its own swimming pool, state of the art home studio, minimal furnishings, and beautiful girlfriend.

A Girl Will Always Ask You to Play Beyonce

Ha ha! So true! Women, you see, don't really understand music. They're just there to be blank-eyed underboob machines, soullessly wiggling in front of Zac as he pounds the cue button on his CDJs and, as he puts it, "locks on" to these simple creatures' 120BPM heart rates and "brings them up" to the "ideal" 128BPM.

Of course, their inferior intellects won't be able to fully grasp the intricacies of this clever piece of manipulation, but that's besides the point; two minutes ago they were requesting "Drunk in Love" and now they find themselves gratuitously winding their bikini-covered rumps in slow motion to a genre of music they can't even name. Bless.

Taking Drugs Is Mostly Fun But Occasionally One of Your Friends Will Die

It's always the funny-looking innocent one who is impossible to dislike who ends up paying the ultimate price for a heavy night out. If you're that guy—especially if your nickname is "Marmot" or "Gopher" or something—do not touch any drugs. One bad pill and BAM! Before you know it your friends are crying in the montage of your arbitrarily Jewish funeral. No, leave all that drug business to your crew of sex-pest mates—the hyperactive one, the Johnny Depp one, and Freddie Prinze Jr. They're made of tougher stuff than you, and are too important to the story development to die.


Watch Big Night Out: Ibiza, our film about the legendary party island:


Getting Spiked, On the Other Hand, Will Lead to a Great Time

By most people's standards getting spiked with PCP by a man you've just met, who is twice your age, and whose limo you have been wooed into with the promise of a "fun party," would be a highly traumatic experience. But not in the Los Angeles of We Are Your Friends! No, rather than spending the rest of the evening locked in the toilet whispering reassuring words to himself in a desperate attempt to reattach his id, Zac finds himself cascading into some kind of euphoric iPod commercial, where neon colors, terrible music, and attractive dancing women merge into one rapturous, carefree, super-fun drugs experience. And the next morning any fears that Zac may have been disturbingly manipulated are put to rest when he wakes up alone and fully clothed in his new friend's beautiful home. Time to start leaving those drinks unattended, people.

Everyone With Creative Drive Has Some Sort of Horrible Trauma in Their Past That They Can't Be Bothered to Explain

If you are a young, aspiring DJ, this will cause you to seek a father figure to replace your mysteriously estranged Papa. Don't worry, the audience are too bored to care what actually happened, so the occasional vague hint followed by a pained look into the middle distance will suffice. Once you find an ersatz dad (usually after he has spiked you with PCP in a limo) it will be rapidly apparent that he has his own demons to wrestle with. These will lead to troubling behavior on his part, such as drinking whisky, eating birthday cake without a plate, and having a little nap during the day. Eventually he will go entirely to seed and have a breakdown. You can tell this has happened because he will have left crumpled clothes all over his furniture. Look out for your surrogate father's mental health by checking his clothing storage arrangements. If you can catch it at the sock stage there is a very good chance of full recovery. Unfortunately the producers of WAYF failed to illustrate the horrible reality of end-stage catastrophic mental breakdown: egg all down his front. If this happens to your mentor, it's probably game over.

All You Need Is OnE tRACK

By definition you need at least two tracks to DJ, and even then it would be a pretty short and disappointing set. It soon becomes apparent that the makers of WAYF are not quite sure what DJing is, and how it differs from actually making music of your own. But they don't care about such trivialities, and nor do the festival-goers, who don't seem to mind at all when Zac decides not to DJ at his big make-or-break gig, instead bravely plumping to perform some kind of bizarre Ross Geller live version of the "one track" that he has spent the last few weeks slaving over. And it turns out the crowd love it. They love the Eurotrance melodies, elaborate multi-sectioned arrangement, and interspersed emotional field recordings from Zac's life that have absolutely no relevance to them whatsoever. They love it so much that they probably won't mind the 53 minutes of silence that will inevitably follow him playing the one and only tune he has ever made. We, however, remained unconvinced. When a film is based around the creation of one piece of music, the aforementioned big finale when you finally get to hear it is


always going to be a let down. Zac's one big tune really takes the biscuit; a pallid pitter patter of beige milk drying overlaid with some helicopter noises. But then what did we expect? We saw Zac in his room earlier, copy-pasting an audio file called "techno" over and over again, before very slowly twisting a knob on his nanokontrol, flicking through some VST presets, and taking off his headphones looking disappointed. We were hardly expecting him to have secretly turned out "Strings of Life."

So, these are the new rules that we intend to live our lives by in order to pursue success. Relentlessly hectoring those more established than ourselves, spending more time posing in big headphones and hoovering up chisel than doing anything productive and marginalizing women into roles of objectified window dressing. That should set us apart from the rest of the UK dance scene.

See you in Vegas, losers.

Follow DJs Complaining on Twitter.

A New Kind of Opera Connects Audiences to Africa

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A New Kind of Opera Connects Audiences to Africa

Baltimore Is Bracing for the Freddie Gray Trials After a Deadly Summer

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Photo via Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, a local circuit court judge denied motions to drop the charges against the six officers indicted in the April death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, and declined to recuse State Attorney Marilyn Mosby from trying the case.

Defense attorneys argue Mosby acted inappropriately when she dramatically announced criminal charges on May 1, but Judge Barry Williams dismissed that argument. He also ruled that each officer should be tried separately.

Next week, another hearing is scheduled to determine whether the trials—set for mid-October—will take place in Baltimore or in another jurisdiction.

The court proceedings come at a fraught time for Charm City. Nationally, the Black Lives Matter movement continues to flex its muscles. Activists held their first national conference in July, have been successfully pressuring presidential candidates to speak more directly about criminal justice reform, and just last week, the Democratic National Convention passed a unanimous resolution in support of the movement.

Locally, Baltimore activists have also continued to organize themselves since the Freddie Gray protests ended in the spring.

Amidst all this, the city has seen sharp increases in homicides over the past several months; 215 had been killed by the end of August, up from 138 at the same time in 2014. Forty-five people were murdered in July alone, the bloodiest month the city has seen since August 1972. Concerns about violence and unrest threaten to derail political momentum around criminal justice reform.

In the days leading up to Wednesday's hearing, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) cancelled officer leave in order to ensure that as many police officers as possible would be present throughout the day. Some police showed up in uniform, and others dressed in plainclothes to work undercover. Activist Kwame Rose was arrested in the morning, and one officer suffered minor injuries while assisting with the arrest, but by and large the demonstrations were relatively calm. Baltimore native DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, both prominent figures within the national Black Lives Matter movement, attended the demonstration as well.

Speaking at an afternoon press conference, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said demonstrators were "peaceful and respectful and an example of democracy in action."

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore City Police Officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, says he expects the community protests to remain fairly calm in September, but that "the real shit is going to hit the fan" when the court issues its final verdicts for the officers. Charges range from second-degree assault—a misdemeanor—to the rather unusual charge of second-degree depraved heart murder. Moskos does not expect that the cops will be found guilty.

Though the community response is likely to escalate following the October trials, activists say they plan to ramp up protests relatively soon. Duane "Shorty" Davis, an activist with Baltimore BLOC, a local grassroots organization, told the Baltimore Sun that they're encouraging people to engage in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience over the next two weeks, particularly in the wealthier and whiter parts of town. "We're not just going to go in the black community and wave our hands. We're going to the white communities," he told the paper.

City politics also remain chaotic. Mosby, who has been cleared to continue working on the Freddie Gray case, will be campaigning and fundraising for her own re-election at the same time. Her husband, Councilman Nick J. Mosby, has also announced that he is "seriously considering" a run for mayor. And in July, Rawlings-Blake fired the city's police commissioner, Anthony Batts—citing the rising city violence. "We need a change. This was not an easy decision, but it is one that is in the best interest of the people of Baltimore," she said at the time. The interim police commissioner, Kevin Davis, has been significantly reorganizing the police department over the past two months.

Dayvon Love, the co-founder of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, an organization that advocates for the interests of black people in Baltimore, tells VICE that he anticipates "a plethora of politicians and organizations" will try and use the Freddie Gray trials as a way to advance their own personal careers. "So that sucks," he says. In the meantime, his group will continue to push for reforms to the police union contract, which they were doing well before Gray's death. Specifically they have been focusing on changing the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights, (LEOBR), which they see as a significant barrier to transparency and accountability. Other groups, including the NAACP and the ACLU of Maryland, have rallied for similar changes.

The police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, strongly opposes changes to LEOBR and worked hard to fight proposed reforms this past legislative season.

In the face of all the political maneuvering, the city's activists will be waiting on the verdicts to determine whether justice has been served in a case being watched closely by reformers around the country.

Follow Rachel Cohen on Twitter.

I Went to School in Virtual Reality

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I Went to School in Virtual Reality

The VICE Guide to Right Now: A Texas State Student Replaced Her Car with a Toy Barbie Jeep After Getting a DUI

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Photo via Tara Monroe

Read: What's the Safest Way to Get Home When You're Sloshed?

While driving home from a Waka Flocka concert, Tara Monroe, a 20-year-old Texas State student, was pulled over and asked by the police to take a breathalyzer test. Monroe refused and, as a result, she lost her driver's license. Her dad confiscated her car, leaving her with a bike to ride around campus with. She was less than thrilled.

"Riding a bike around campus sucks," Monroe explained to MySanAntonio.com. "Like really sucks."

In an effort to avoid the terrible suckiness of a bicycle, Monroe went where many resourceful and desperate people go: Craigslist. There, she found a children's pink Barbie Jeep, owned by a young girl named Charlene. Monroe forked over $60, christened the chariot "Charlene" after the original owner, and sped off in her new ride, legs dangling over the sides.

Well, not exactly "sped." The 12-volt battery powered kiddie car can only go up to five miles-per-hour, but that's enough to ferry Monroe around the Texas State campus. And the Barbie-style mobility has benefitted Tara Monroe in other ways, too. She's got a whole bunch of fans.

"This is the best way I could've gotten my 15 minutes of fame," Monroe said. "Basically, it was the best decision I've made in college yet."

Monroe is only a junior, so who knows what kind of other legal trouble she can spin into internet fame during her next few years at Texas State.

Protester Arrested for Wearing ‘Aylan Should Be Here’ T-Shirt at Stephen Harper Event

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Alan Kurdi, left, and his brother Galib Kurdi. Photo courtesy Tima Kurdi/The Canadian Press, via AP

Sean Devlin says he is facing charges for resisting arrest and obstruction of justice because he wore a T-shirt to a campaign stop with the prime minister, protesting the Conservatives' lack of action on resettling Syrian refugees.

Devlin, known for his role in the Shit Harper Did website, showed up to an event in Surrey, British Columbia on Thursday morning, where Stephen Harper was supposed to address the media firestorm that grew around the death of Alan Kurdi.(Note: Turkish authorities first named Alan as Aylan.)

Under his blazer, he was wearing a T-shirt reading "Aylan should be here."

During his arrest, Devlin says that shirt got ripped. "Which I thought was rather symbolic," he says.

Kurdi, just three years old, drowned when the boat he was travelling in capsized off the coast of Turkey. His mother and five-year-old brother lost their lives as well.

A photo of Kurdi's body was splashed across headlines worldwide on Thursday, as a symbolic representation of the growing refugee crisis facing the world. Kurdi's aunt tried to bring her family to British Columbia, where she had relocated, but abandoned those plans after Canada's immigration system denied a refugee application from Alan's uncle.

"I went then there this morning. I presented no identification, and I walked right into the event," Devlin told VICE. "When I went inside the event, a photographer said they needed more young faces behind Harper, so they actually invited me to stand in the backdrop behind his podium."

Devlin spoke to VICE from inside an RCMP holding cell in Surrey. He was only able to tell part of the story before RCMP officers arrived and told him to hang up the call.

"I don't really understand what's happening right now," Devlin said of his circumstances. He says he's facing charges of resisting arrest and obstruction of the peace.

It's not the first time that Devlin has done this. He got onstage with the prime minister in 2014, and pulled out a sign reading "Climate Justice Now."

This time, however, he could be facing a trial.

"I was forcibly removed using pain compliance by three members of his security detail. They arrested me and said I was being arrested for resisting arrest and obstruction of the peace," Devlin said. "I'm still being held, but they've given me my phone back."

Devlin says one officer grabbed him by the throat and applied pressure behind one ear, which he calls "pain compliance."

Because Devlin was wearing a blazer, he expects that the staffers couldn't see his shirt, with the message scrawled on it.

"Once I was at that backdrop, someone in his security detail noticed that I was wearing a T-shirt under my blazer that said 'Aylan should be here.'"

"They asked me to leave the stage. I said I'd been invited there, and I didn't want to lose my place, at which point they just used physical force to remove me from the stage," Devlin said.

"There were three of them, they grabbed—" Devlin began, before being interrupted by an RCMP officer.

"Hang up the phone, dude," the officer could be heard saying.

VICE called Devlin back after he was released, roughly a half hour later. "They've taken me to a bus stop," he said.

Devlin says he's not currently facing charges, but that the RCMP stressed that they could still prosecute him anytime within the next six months.

He says he was forcibly removed from the stage, placed in handcuffs, and then taken out a back exit.

"They kept me in the parking lot, in the back, until they could get a car there. They said they didn't want people to see me," Devlin says.

He says one of the strange moments during his arrest came when one officer asked: "if I was from Iran," he says.

Devlin is Filipino-Canadian, and was born in Ottawa. The Philippines he notes, are "pretty far from Iran."

He says the motivation for his protest came from seeing the photo of Kurdi's body lying on that beach.

"Knowing that that family could be here right now if this government hadn't reduced the number of refugees being allowed into this country" is what pushed him, Devlin says.

Devlin also organizes activism around migrant issues, having recently launched a website aimed at documenting refugee and migrant stories.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

Don’t Call it a Technical Recession, I’ve Been There for Years

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Algoma Steel mill in Sault Ste. Marie. Photos via Flickr user Adam Kahtava

Prepare yourselves for hearing and seeing the word recession about a trillion times until Election Day. The NDP and the Liberals are frothing at the mouth to be able to hang the faltering economy on the head of Stephen Harper. The PM and the Conservative party, conversely, are going to use every semantic trick in their Necronomicon of political skullduggery to maintain their reputation as steady economic stewards.

But if you're like me and grew up in the '90s in one of Ontario's many struggling manufacturing centers, the whole debate seems disingenuous. As I remember them, the '90s were filled with abrupt layoffs, mass migration, and downtowns that resembled the toothless smile of a lifelong drunk. For many Canadians, a recessionary economy is all they've ever known. A recovery, whatever that even means, never showed up. The debate over "Is it a recession? Who caused it?" obscures the true picture of an economy that over the past 25 years has mercilessly and unceremoniously made millions of Canadians unnecessary. Youth unemployment rates in Ontario are almost 17 percent. In London, Oshawa, and Windsor it's 20 percent. Twenty percent! Those are terrifying, Southeastern Europe numbers, the kinds of numbers that make fascism happen.

During the Great Recession of 2008, when the news talking heads were at the peak of their "Is Christmas even going to happen?" levels of hysteria, I remember thinking: Is this it? Is this what everyone was freaking out over? Mass layoffs. Foreclosed homes? Uh, listen: I'm from Sault Ste. Marie. We just call that Monday.

Sault Ste. Marie is a one-industry town of 75,000. (A slippery number; it would be more honest if the sign on the way into town said: "Population ... It's Complicated") It is a rugged, sometimes violent place, blue collar in its culture, surrounded by beauty and filled with complicated, stubborn-to-a-fault people. It's like Season 2 of The Wire mixed with all the seasons of Trailer Park Boys.

Sault Ste. Marie is nestled in between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. It's 700 kilometres away from Toronto, but that distance would be more accurately measured in decades. When you get there it feels less like you travelled through Ontario and more like you travelled back through time to a distinctly unglamorous part of 1997. When the local Blockbusters (RIP) folded, a local man purchased the business and maintained them as video rental stores, which are thriving to this day. I repeat: Sault Ste. Marie still has profitable video rental stores. The Sault feels like an outpost, a distant colony on the edge of an empire, a place where the niceties of life have been sheared off.

The main employer is the steel mill, which used to be known as Algoma Steel but is now known as Essar Algoma Steel. In the 1980s, the plant, a squat slab of industrial grey that stretches for kilometres throughout the city's west end with a bleak and brutal appearance that betrays the still in use post-war technology, had 12,000 employees. During this time, the town boomed. My aunts and uncles describe a downtown where souped-up hot-rod cars drag raced down the main strip as moneyed young high school dropout men chased pretty girls like it was the nostalgic parts of a Springsteen song.

By 1993, globalization's downward pressures had reduced a workforce of 12,000 at the plant to 3,000. Rapidly lowering steel costs throughout the world necessitated brutal, austere cuts. Unemployment reached 20 percent as hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands disappeared from the local economy.

Downtown Sault Ste. Marie

Growing up, and to this day, my downtown Sault Ste. Marie was less the start of "Jungleland" and much more "Atlantic City." Shuttered storefronts clump throughout the former amateur speedway. If you didn't know better, you'd assume newsprint's main purpose was covering up the windows of recently failed businesses. New businesses struggle like crops planted in sand. The busiest the downtown gets is the lineup at the Pita Pit after last call.

I remember one time my father and I were driving past Algoma. As we passed the plant, he pointed to a bright flame steadfastly burning at the peak of the plant. He said, "See that flame there, that flame is burning off all the poisons from the plant. If you ever see see that flame has gone out, you better get the hell out of town." My father often confused sporadic, troubling statements with good parenting. Nonetheless, his warning illustrated the life and death relationship Sault Ste. Marie has with it's steel mill. If that flame goes out my hometown perishes.

This is not an uncommon story in Canada and certainly not in Ontario. In the past decade, 500,000 manufacturing jobs were lost—300,000 in Ontario alone—and 20,000 factories closed. These are massive numbers, especially when you consider the ripple effects. According to Dimitri Anastakis, a professor of history at Trent University and writer of Autonomous State: The Struggle for a Canadian Auto Industry from OPEC to Free Trade, every job on an assembly line is responsible for four more jobs in the local economy. Throughout Ontario, from Oshawa to London, you can see the traumatic effects of these layoffs. Once proud towns with a stable middle class are now broken, streets are barren as the hollow-eyed unemployed wander outside of boarded up windows.

The scariest part is these jobs are not being replaced. Not truly. When I interviewed him, Anastakis emphasized how special these jobs truly were, "People think these are dumb jobs but they aren't. Car factories are the highest of hi-tech, requiring a highly trained workforce." These are complex jobs that pump millions of dollars into a community all the while providing a strong identity and pride for citizens. There are not enough Walmart greeting jobs in the world to begin to recoup the loss a place like St. Thomas is going through. In Sault Ste. Marie a jobless rate that reached 20 percent was halved but with call-centre jobs whose wages are a quarter of what the steel plant offered. Replacing steel plant jobs with a call center jobs is like getting losing your dog and replacing it by just taking your hamster for more walks.

The solution was supposed to be a new knowledge economy. Manufacturing jobs may be gone but we'll replace them with ideas and education and knowledge. We won't need factories because Canada will be an idea factory. Millennials were the first generation sold on this new plan, going through a university focused education system, one that taught us that going to university was the key to everything.

The result? Hundreds of thousands of young Canadians saddled with huge debts and useless degrees. Thirty-somethings who previously would be settling down, maybe even owning a house, are living with roommates and haggling with student loan offices. And the knowledge economy? Never showed up. It turns out there is no replacing a manufacturing base. That a highly educated workforce doesn't just magically create new industries or economies. And while wealth continued to exist and grow in Ontario, it goes to more and more of a privileged elite while the rest of us fight over jobs serving those who go to work with a starched collar. A knowledge economy just mean you can start a conversation with the average dishwasher about art history.

That's why the squawking over whether or not we are in a recession is repulsive to me. Sault Ste. Marie fell apart in the '90s, which was supposed to be a boom time in Canada. When you come from a manufacturing centre the disparity between our leaders' abstract musing and the truth on the ground is stark. We know that terms like "recession" and "growth" just hide the fact that we rely on a market that will callously leave anybody behind. No matter how faithful a community is to a factory, how many tax breaks they offer, it doesn't stop a companies from finding a sexy thing down south and ripping a town's heart out. (Though, has anybody from Oshawa tried standing outside GM's headquarters with "In Your Eyes" blaring from a boombox?)

Capitalism, at least the cruel, freewheeling style all Canadian parties swear fealty to, isn't in crisis. It, as anybody who has been abruptly laid off can tell you, is the crisis.

Follow Jordan Foisy on Twitter.

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