Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley in 'The American Friend.' Courtesy of the IFC Center

Noteven considering his work as a painter, playwright, or photographer, it'schallenging to classify the rich, eclectic filmmaking career of Wim Wenders,which spans over four decades and is in no danger of slowing down. Early on, the glorious West German landscapes in his "road movie" trilogy of features (1974's Alice in the Cities,1975's The Wrong Move, and 1976's Kings of the Road) cemented him asa pillar of the then-emerging New German Cinema movement. In 1984, a dehydrated HarryDean Stanton walked out of the desert to a jangly Ry Cooder guitar score in Paris,Texasan austere, lyrical drama that earned Wenders that year's Palme d'Or at Cannes.Ever see that U2 music video in which Bono hangs out on the shoulder of a giantstatue in Berlin? That would be a reference to the eternal angels invisiblycomforting all of humanity in Wenders's 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire (and its 1993 sequel Faraway, So Close!), though the German auteur directed that video,too.

Inmore recent years, Wenders (with whom VICE

Unless you've in some kind of fugue state, chances are you've heard something by now about the crisis brought on by hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn Middle Eastern countriesSyria in particularstreaming into Europe. A photo of a Syrian toddler who drowned while trying to reach Greece went viral earlier this month as a heartbreaking symbol of a spiraling humanitarian disaster, sparking a lot of goodwill toward migrants, but there has also been a nativist backlash, and nations seem to be constantly reassessing how to respond to the waves of people entering Europe.

Over the weekend, Germany imposed new border controls to slow the flow of migrants into its territory, and Austria, Slovakia, and the Netherlands followed suit Monday, as the New York Times reported.

To those of us lost in the chaos of inscrutable numbersand fast-moving headlines, it's tough to get the perspective needed to understand whatsorts of big moves are needed. In the name of untangling this knotty affair,here's everything you need to know about Europe's unfolding migration crisis.

Exactly how Big IsThis Crisis?

Recent numbers suggest that at least 381,000 migrants have made it into the EU zone since January of this year. Most pass through Greece via Turkey and go on to the Balkans and Hungary; others travel by way of the centralMediterranean, starting in Libya and getting stuck in Italy. But no matter their route, these people are generally trying to move north to Austria,Germany, and Swedenplaces with high standards of living and relativelywelcoming asylum status policies.

Related: Calling Bullshit on the Anti-Refugee Memes Flooding the Internet

Authorities don't believe this migration acceleration isslowing down any time soon. The UN estimates 400,000 migrants will have crossed the Mediterranean by theend of the year, and that another 450,000 could follow in 2016.

Why Are Americans Only Talking About This Now?

Migration to Europe has been on the rise since at least 2012, andthat's just been one element of a growingglobal migration problem. The number of displaced peoples throughout theworld has tripledover the last decade, and within the last few months alone, we've seen a gooddeal of press coverage on the migration of Rohingya Muslims out of Bangladesh and Burma, and the deaths of hundreds of migrants bound for Europe on makeshift boats departing from Libya. But some of the new attention stems from the images andstories coming out of migrant camps and routes in recent weeks.

Especially as winter approaches, there is growing concern about thewellbeing of tens of thousands of people living on meager rations in ricketytents, sometimes on overcrowded and relatively isolated islands, as they await a change in their status orthe opportunity to move to a new nation.

Hungary's Prime Ministerthe far-right Viktor Orbanhas also drawn a deal of attention to the migrant crisis through his racially-tinged rhetoric. Disparaging migrants as a Muslim threat to Europe's "Christian roots," building a 110-mile fence on the Serbian border, threateningto build another on the Croatian border as well, and preparing his armyfor potential police action against migrants has made Orban a polarizing figure, to say the least.

Why Are the CampsGetting So Overcrowded?

The reason so many migrantsare getting stuck in Greece, Hungary, and Italy centers around the EU's 1990 Dublin Rules, which mandate that migrants registerfor asylum in the first European Union country they reach but offer little guidance about who should qualify for asylum andrefugee status in the EU generally. Meanwhile, conditions in Syria and its surrounding nationshave increased the number of people willing to gamble on coming tothese camps and staking out an asylum claim. Orban has called for the sending of $3.4 billion in aid to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan in order to improve conditions in theircampsand stop or at least slow down the flood of refugees fleeing those camps.

Watch: Meet the Volunteers Searching for Bodies in Winnipeg's Red River

Are All the RefugeesSyrians?

An incredible 7.6 million Syrians have been internally displaced, and a further 4.1 million have fledto Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey since the start of the nation's civil warin 2011collectively more than half of the nation's 23 million people. But only about 349,000 of them have sought asylum in Europe since April 2011.

Many of the remainder of the people seeking refuge in Europe are also fleeing violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Ukraine, Yemen, and other countries. However a fair chunk of migrants are fleeing poverty, including those who actually come from within Europein the first six months of 2015, around 45 percent of asylum applications in Germany came from Balkan nations.

Why Hasn't EuropeSolved This Problem Already?

Despite the occasionally overheated rhetoric, migrantsaccount for less than 1 percent of the EU's population. And major figures like Pope Francis have been calling on the EU for months to do the humanething and accept more refugees into its borders.

But nations like Bulgaria,the CzechRepublic, Hungary, Poland,Romania,Slovakia, and Spain have all opposed plans to take in migrants. Theirmain argument seems to be that distributing migrants around the EU andrewriting the Dublin Rules will make it too easy and attractive for migrants tocome to Europe. Orban seems especially convinced (in public, at any rate) that "tens of millions" of migrants are ready to flood his borders.

How Can Any PlanSucceed in That Environment?

Thanks perhaps in part to more attention to the crisis in the mainstream media, countries around the world have started to soften their stances on refugee intake. Australia has agreed to accept more refugees from Syria, and the US said it will do the same next year.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, has been encouraging the EU to take in an additional 160,000 refugees, and there is some support for this idea; Spain is changing itstune, while even the Czech Republic and Polandhave expressed willingness to take more refugees so long as quotas arevoluntary rather than mandatory. Juncker has been selling pro-migrant policies as bringing potential young blood to revitalize aging economies. He's also called for more standards when it comes to granting asylum.

Not everyone is onboard, however. TheUK is among countries that are home to vocal anti-immigrant political movements; Germany'srecent moves may lead Belgium and France to reconsider the EU's open border policysomething that's been in the air since Italy started allowing migrants to move north freelyin 2011.

Is There Any Solution to This Mess?

Taking in, better distributing, and caring for migrants willgo a long way to alleviating the crises. Renewing funding commitments to refugee facilities closer to Syria could make the dangerous trip to Europe less attractiveof course, that wouldn't solve the problems of the refugees who are already on the continent or are on their way there. But the larger issue is the instability and conflict that has driven millions of people from their homes in Syria and elsewhere to undertaken an incredibly arduous, hazardous journey to the relative safety of Europe. Barring the ability to wave a magic wand and achieve worldpeace and prosperity, there are few optionsthat's why Junckerand others want to see systematic changes and candid conversationsabout the way Europe chooses who gets in, how, and where they go from theborder. But as Juncker recently said, in an address quotedrecently in the New York Times:

"As long as there is war in Syria and terror in Libya, therefugee crisis will not simply go away."

Follow Mark Hay on Twitter.

Police making an arrest after stop and searching someone, not drug-testing him randomly in a club queue. Photo by Tom Johnson

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

At first glance, Club Tropicana does not look like the epicenter of Aberdeen's drug scene. The retro music venue attracts a mixed crowd every Friday and Saturday, which dances to Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, overlooked by portraits of Del Boy and David Hasselhoff.

But on a Friday evening in late August this year, six police officers arrived at the club. They came with a sniffer dog, a CCTV van and an "itemizer," which tests hand swabs for traces of illegal drugs. They also returned the following evening, testing around 100 people over the weekend. As it turns out, Club Tropicana is almost certainly not the epicenter of Aberdeen's drugs scene. According to the venue, the police failed to record a single positive reading over the course of the two nights.

Police Scotland is now facing a major backlash over the incident. Everyone from the leader of the Scottish Lib Dems to the former head of Scotland's drug enforcement agency have condemned the action. But what's gone largely unnoticed is the extent to which clubbers across the UK have been facing drug tests for several years. What's rightly now being flagged as a major infringement of civil liberties was quietly introduced without debate as early as 2002. It's an increasingly common tacticjust one of a raft of draconian measures now routinely imposed on clubbers.

In Scotland, the incident at Club Tropicana is being seen as a nadir in relations between the nightlife industry and the police. Donald Macleod, the owner of several clubs in Glasgow, tells me, "Confidence among club owners and publicans is at its lowest level." The situation has been worsening since police forces across the country were merged to create Police Scotland in 2013. Shortly afterwards, new chief constable Sir Stephen House said, "My view is policing doesn't solve problems. We are not a solutions agency; we are a restraint agency."

This view was at least partly responsible for the loss of legendary Glasgow venue the Arches in June last yearcited in an investigation into the closure by clubbing website Resident Advisor. Following a tragic drug death at the Arches, the venue became the focus of intensified police pressure and subsequently lost its late license. A few weeks later, the club went into administration.

Scott Forrest was music program manager at the Arches. "The police put the venue through the ringer," he says. Forrest says the club was fastidious in reporting drug seizures to the policereports which were then used to justify increasingly onerous demands on the venue. "We were following the law to the letter," he says. "What are venues supposed to start doing blood tests on the door?"

One Glasgow club operator tells me what happened at the Arches has led to distrust between the police and venues. "The concern for other operators is what happens if we continue to follow best practice guidelines and report instances of drug confiscations and other drug-related activities?" he says. "Effectively, the police are forcing what they perceive to be a problem underground."

The incident at Club Tropicana has done nothing to help matters. "They are hailing the operation as a success," says Macleod. "A waste of time and resources is closer to the truth."

READ ON THUMP: Has the UK Really Fallen Out of Love with Nightclubs?

Police Scotland is far from the only police force to pursue such a strategy. In the last couple of years there have been reports of police in Yeovil, Swansea, Wokingham, and Bridgwater using itemizers. Club owners in Brighton and London also say they have been targeted. In case there was any doubt that police in Scotland and the rest of the UK share similar views on clubs, Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe gave a speech earlier this year in which he asked: "Do we really need as many licensed premises?"

Police Scotland claims the itemizer is only used in partnership with venues. A statement said: "The use of the itemizer is done ethically, with respect to human rights and with the consent and support of licensees."

Club Tropicana owner Tony Cochrane says this isn't the case: "The club only heard 30 minutes beforehand. It wasn't a choice," he tells me. "They say they had permission in so much as the manager felt obliged towhat could he say? We objected the second night and they still did it." Becky, a press officer at Police Scotland, called me to deny the club was given less than an hour's notice, but was unable to say when the management was informed about the operation.

A London club owner tells me about two incidents of police drug tests at his venues in recent years when he was told he wouldn't be allowed to open if he didn't cooperate. Each time, one person out of 100 tested positive. Neither was found in possession of drugs. "There must have been about ten police officers in attendance on both occasions," he says, describing the operations as "a complete waste of resources as well as an invasion of civil liberties." But it's not just club owners who have raised concerns. Civil rights group Liberty said back in 2002 it was "deeply worried" about the use of itemizer technology. Its worries obviously went unheeded.

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People who visit nightclubs are now subject to stricter scrutiny than people boarding transatlantic flights. ID scanners, sniffer dogs, fingerprinting stations, breathalyzers, body searches, CCTV, and metal detectors are all in use across the UK. In other walks of life, this is only acceptable if you're under arrest or, at the very least, suspected of a crime. Effectively, all clubbers are now classed as criminal suspects. While it would be naive to claim that people don't take drugs at nightclubs, most don't. And while plenty of other public places are also the home of occasional criminal activity, none face the same sanctions.

The Arches is not the only victim of oppressive licensing rules. Fabric escaped the threat of closure at the end of last year, but was slapped with a raft of conditions, including a requirement that it pay for sniffer dogs. The club is currently appealing. Alan Miller, chairman of the Night Time Industries Association, says clubs face both increased costs and a potential loss of custom as they become ever more inhospitable places to visit. "Cumulatively, these measures have an enormous impact," he says. "It's a major problem treating British citizens and tourists as if they are guilty of doing something wrong, indiscriminately."

Even putting aside issues such as civil liberties and the importance of nightclubs to the UK's cultural scene, there's still a huge question mark over the approach being pursued by the police and licensing authorities: What exactly does it achieve?

Matthew Dimmack is director at The Haunt nightclub in Brighton. He recalls being visited by the police with drug testing technology at another club around eight years ago. If drug testing was supposed to tackle substance abuse, it doesn't seem to have had much effect. Drug deaths in England and Wales are now at their highest levels since records began.

"If you come into my club and something happens, I've got a lot of trained people around. If you do drugs at home or in the park, there's not anyone there to help you," says Dimmack. "Stopping people taking drugs in nightclubs isn't going to stop anyone taking drugs."

Follow Mark on Twitter

Black Mass is the riveting true story of James "Whitey" Bulgerthe brother of a state senator and the most infamous violent gangster in the history of South Bostonwho became an FBI informant to take down a Mafia family invading his turf.

In this episode of VICE Talks Film, legendary filmmaker William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) sits down with Black Mass director Scott Cooper to talk about the complexities of the film's chilling true story and Johnny Depp's acting transformation into the ruthless sociopath.

Black Mass hits theaters everywhere on September 19.

A cannabis cookie. Photo via Wikimedia

Read: Finally, a University Is Offering a Class on How to Grow and Sell Weed

A new study that claims to show links between prolonged cannabis usage and prediabetes has been slammed by pro-cannabis campaigners.

The study, conducted by the University of Minnesota on more than 3,000 Americans, reported that regular cannabis users had a 65 percent greater chance of developing poor blood sugar control, while those who have used the drug more than a hundred times in their lifetimes had a 50 percent greater chance. While no biological link between prediabetes and marijuana use has been found, there is a suspicion that the disease is brought on by the munchies.

A spokesperson from the NHS said that the intense hunger generated by bong hits to the brain "can lead users to snack on foods with a high calorie and sugar content, but with little in the way of nutritional value" and that "if maintained on a long-term basis, this type of diet can lead to obesity, which is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes."

Stoners across the world have put a lot of work into debunking and shouting down claims that weed can negatively impact your health over the years. This time round it's no different.

"The interpretation of this awful research is both dangerous and unethical to the point where even the NHS themselves have published an immediate rebuttal. Diabetes' own website refers to the potential benefits of cannabis to those suffering from diabetes and GW Pharmaceuticals are currently doing research on the efficacy of cannabinoids with some great results so far," says John Liebling, head of United Patients Alliancea cannabis advocacy group that launched its UK branch last year.

No study into the negative effects of regular cannabis consumption are ever going to be taken at face value while weed remains illegal, so the red hot defense of it and continued fight for its availability, medicinal or not. What we can agree on, though, is that eating four bags of Haribo and three gallons of Dr. Pepper at 2 AM is not doing anyone any favors.

Journalist and author, Juliet Jacques. Photo by Sarah Shin.

In June 2010, Juliet Jacques began writing for the Guardian, chronicling her experiences as a transgender woman as she got ready to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Her deeply personal column, "My Transgender Journey," lasted three years and was shortlisted for an Orwell Prize.

In the three years that have followed her last blog, Juliet has become a well known journalistic voice, writing across matters of identity, culture, and feminism, interweaving the personal and political.

Now, Juliet has published her first book, Trans: a memoir recounting her life from new university graduate to now as she navigates her changing identity and all that it means to be a trans woman, as well as an aspiring writer, today.

Here, VICE has reprinted an excerpt from the epilogue of Trans, in which Juliet is interviewed by author Sheila Heti about her book, feminism, and writing.

Sheila Heti: Why did you want to end the book with a conversation?
Juliet Jacques: I wanted to cover what happened after my final Gender Identity Clinic appointment in April 2013. And as so much of what has happened since then has had to do with my relationship to the media, I thought the format of this epilogue should be a magazine-style interview. Also, I wanted to explicitly mention a problem I had with the mediatransition being portrayed like a mythical hero's journey. To me it didn't feel like that, rather a bunch of hoops to jump through while working in boring jobs.

After I finished the Guardian series, I felt so burnt out. I scaled back my social life and Internet presence, and my feelings about the transition changed. I became so angry about how long the Real Life Experience took, and how difficult it was. Writing this book, I arrived at a more nostalgic attitude about certain aspects of my life, particularly my pretransitional explorations of gender.

The narrative concludes on a deliberately flat note. People might have expected me to leave the clinic and jump in the air, and a film might have finished by freezing on that moment, but life just went on. What else could have happened, apart from me going back to the office and thinking: what now? It really was that anticlimactic. But while the transition had to close there, the book didn't. I thought this might be a way of showing that life didn't end at that point.

One of the most painful moments in the book is the suicide note you wrote, where you say you had tried to give life some meaning through writing, and that you hoped to leave the world a little better than when you found it. How much of that desireto leave the world a better placeis in your mind when you're writing? Is there a way in which having that thought is helpful, but another way in which it's kind of oppressive?
If you thought like that about everything you did, you'd go insanewhich, I suppose, I did. Sometimes I'll take on a commission thinking, If I do this, it'll buy me a few days to do what I love. Usually, this means short fiction. I worked for the NHS until last summer, and the fundamental principle there was: do no harm. I try to apply that to writing. Not every piece I write is going to contribute to a grand aim, but hopefully, enough of them do.

I wrote in the book about the anxieties of being a trans advocate, but a lot of it has been great. The thing I enjoyed the most came in 2013, where I was asked to speak to a sixthform Feminist and LGBT Society. The invitation came from my old college in Horsham. I had such a happy time there: I told a few people I was 'a cross-dresser' and felt comfortable experimenting a little (although later I met Ryan, whose experience of transitioning there was not positive). So it was wonderful to see how much things were improving, with these teenagers creating spaces for themselves.

If you'd told me in 1998 that one day I'd come back and speak to a society like that, which included trans people, I doubt I'd have even understood what you were describing. I had a beautiful afternoon, talking with them about their cultural references, gender politics, and ambitions. I got back in touch with several teachers. Perhaps they wondered what had happened to me. Because of my name change, they wouldn't have known.

It also felt so good because with the Guardian series, I was aiming at people like the 16- to 18-year-old mepeople interested in language, gender, and politicsand trying to make those things accessible without talking down to them.

Elsewhere, speaking to the Bishkek Feminist Collectiveall under thirty, I thinkabout the situation for trans people in Britain, they told me about how hard it is to get gender recognition or surgery in Kyrgyzstan. One of my favorite moments came when Selbi, translating between English and Russian, asked, "Did you respond to the Julie Burchill scandal?" I laughedthat Burchill piece was so noxious that it stank all the way to central Asia. I didn't think when I started that people in Kyrgyzstan would be invested in these arguments, but they are.

Did you ever feel any resentment about having to write this book? There are many places where you discuss the onus on trans people to convey their experiences and write autobiographically. Were there any points where you thought, Why do I have to do this?
Definitely. Having written my life story once already, I found it incredibly frustrating that if I wanted to be a literary writer and journalist, I had to cannibalize myself a second time before I could do anything else. Initially, I wanted to write a wider history of trans people in Britain, as well as short stories, but all I could get publishers to consider was a personal story. This became more annoying with my awareness that once the book came out, I'd be accused of overshadowing collective politics with a self-centered publication, and reinforcing stereotypes of trans people as individualistic.

Plenty of times I've wanted to write about other things, but trans writing has taken precedencepartly because I felt the need to do it, partly because other people seemed to feel I should use my platform to address our political problems, and partly because editors reach for the first name they associate with certain topics, and with trans topics, that's sometimes me. The way I've tried to handle it is to cover other subjects as much as possible, only returning to trans issues when I feel it's absolutely imperative.

I hope this book fulfills the same aims as my journalism on the subjectproviding a better understanding of trans living, some sort of reference point. Every time I think there's no further need for this sort of writing, the situation changes. I thought after Burchill and Littlejohn, things were calming down, so why do I need to do this? Then the situation changed againthe transphobic radical feminist perspective pushed back into the mainstream and there was a need to create a weightier counter to that.

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Can you talk about your relationship to radical feminism, and to feminism in general? Do you consider yourself a feminist? You wrote about Germaine Greer and a certain line of feminism that you say "hates" trans people.
I discovered transphobic feminism through the Guardian, after seeing one or two post-punk bands allude to Janice Raymond. To me, that was feminism. I hadn't read any theory besides Valerie Solanas or studied feminist politics. I could have done in Manchester and I wish I had now. Instead, I had this modernist/socialist background that was scornful of what it called "identity politics," a position I later saw as prejudiced in itself.

When I read Bornstein, Stone, and others, I thought of them as transgender theorists. I didn't connect them with feminism, even though they were responding to that discourse. I read them alone rather than through any sort of community, so that was how I framed things when I started writing around these issuesseeing trans and queer people on one side and feminism on the other. I knew nothing of third- or fourth-wave feminist efforts to integrate these sides, besides knowing a bit about Judith Butler, who I'd not yet read.

It was only when I joined Twitter that I got a following of people who identified as feminists and learned about transfeminism, cyber-feminism, and intersectionality. I had to give myself a crash course. If I hadn't, the articles probably wouldn't have worked.

Maybe because I spent my twenties feeling so excluded, I find the word "feminist" difficult to apply to myself. And perhaps after working through so much trans terminology, I'm fatigued with labels in general. But feminism has done a lot to shape my writing: A Transgender Journey was an attempt to counter socialist, conservative, and feminist transphobia at the same time.

You read something like The Transsexual Empire now and you really are floored by its depth of hatred. But in 1980, the US National Center for Health Care Technology commissioned Janice Raymond to write a paper about medical care for trans people to help them make evidence-based decisions on the efficacy of treatment. Her paper was very hostile to gender reassignment, and Medicare didn't fund hormones or surgery until May 2014. It resulted in thirty years of people not being able to access those services unless they were wealthy. In the book, I talk about Julie Bindel's piece about rape crisis centers, and about the time I was nearly sexually assaulted in 2012. The Equality Act of 2010 tries to secure certain trans rights, but also talks about conflicting needsthe example it uses are centers for survivors of rape or domestic violence being allowed to exclude trans women. That means we don't have anywhere to go that feels safe, especially given the coalition government's assault on services for LGBT people and women. I don't know what the right answer is, but I do wonder how that discussion might look if trans people hadn't been characterized as walking rapes, and if the people doing that hadn't had the ear of policy makers.

My tactic has been to acknowledge that there's no way around the fundamental problem with a certain brand of feminism refusing to accept our identities, so I try to appeal to an audience not immersed in those arguments, saying, "What's the fairest perspective on this?" It's an effort to make sure that trans perspectives on trans lives reach people in influential positions.

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There's an interesting line in the book where you say, "If you articulate an outsider critique well enough, you stop being one." What's your relationship to being an insider or outsider after being embraced as a voice by people in the trans community, and politicians who invite you to their events and want you as a spokesperson?
I've felt like an outsider from an early agefirst in my family, then at school, and in my home town, then at university, then in every job I've ever had. So a big problem came when I felt that considering myself an outsider wasn't tenable any more. There was this strange mixture of fascination and repulsion in going to places like the House of Commons. I've noticed that there are many ways I feel like an insider in terms of where I'm published, who I've met, and the opportunities I've had. But I sometimes still feel like an outsider within those circles, because my perspective and frame of reference make me feel like I don't fit in.

I think I'm through with those swanky liberal LGBT events nowI'm now far more selective about what I'll go to. But there's a great line in a Lydie Salvayre novel about the narrator's voluntary reclusion meaning that people don't invite her to things. Remaining an outsider while keeping your hand in physical and online communities enough to ensure you're not forgotten, and that you keep up with the discussion enough to remain relevant, is incredibly difficult.

First-person opinion journalism has exploded in the last five years, and there are so many people doing these sorts of pieces now that I can sustain regular slots in mainstream media outlets but I still feel relatively marginal just because I don't write that often, and when I do, it's not on the expected topics. Perhaps it's more important to keep questioning the power dynamics of the industry, and to make sure that what I write is sincere, not a performance, and done for the right reasons.

One of the motivations of your book seems to be to cut down this phrase'trapped in the wrong body'as a dominant way that people who don't know much about trans people think about them. You really demonstrate why it's not apt.
The conclusion that I and people like CN Lester reached at the same time was: what if we're not trapped in the wrong body but trapped in the wrong society? If I'd been allowed to transition in my early teens, then my adolescent and adult life would have been much easier. Kate Bornstein was questioning this phrase twenty years ago, but I still see it in mainstream media as a way to convey gender dysphoria. I understand why it exists as a shorthand, but never felt "trapped" by my body. I said in the Guardian that transitioning was about "re-launching the symbiotic relationship between my body and mind from a starting point that felt right." I stand by that.

There's so much in the book about struggling for money and taking low-paying jobs. There are two factors: one is being a writer, particularly one who writes online a lot, which isn't lucrative; the other is being trans and experiencing discrimination and this affecting your income. I wonder where you are in your relationship to making a living as a writer, especially with your growing audience.
Things haven't changed that much. Writing online is nowhere near as lucrative as some people think. When I was writing for the Guardian, a lot of the criticism seemed to spring from the assumption that every time I published something, it would add another story to my house, and that I was spending any spare money on getting wasted in the Groucho Club, which wasn't the case (with one exception).

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One of the things I think the internet has done is make it less difficult for diverse voices to break in: I think the Guardian took a chance on me because I was cheap. Securing this representation is important, but I wouldn't recommend trying to make a career from blogging. Most people I know who do so for prominent publications have day jobs. There's another factor between my writing and my gendermy mental health. Some of my problems were attendant on my dysphoria, some not, but depression and anxiety were big barriers. You throw that in with my politicsopposed to everything from a radical left positionand it's not a recipe for a happy relationship with capitalism.

Near the end, you say, "It's weird being on an even keel, I sort of miss the chaos." Do you feel the chaos has passed?
The lack of stability that came with transition itself feels like it's resolved, although it has some effects on my employment prospects, since I couldn't focus on a career in my twenties like many people. If I go somewhere now, I don't feel being trans has to be a big issue, and I like it not to be. Getting misgendered or heckled in the street happens rarely; and in situations where I don't have to speak, hardly at all. Some days I feel good about where I am physically, others less so, but that's still not the same as gender dysphoria, with its all-consuming sense that my body and the way I was expected to behave because of it were fundamentally wrong. I feel less weighed down than I used to, but I'll always have a transsexual history. I've learned to be proud of that, though.

The media stuff remains a constant process of victory and defeat, so that still feels chaotic. I've been on the front line for five years and I want to move away from it. Psychologically it's been draining.

Withdrawing from social media, especially Twitter with its bitter arguments, has helped. I think it's terrible for writing. I can't think of anything less healthy for an author than being able to measure their audience down to the last digit, not just in general but for each piece. As someone who's devoted to shining a light on marginal culture, Twitter is a disaster. It was one thing to suspect no one was reading when I wrote for Filmwaves. It's quite another for Twitter to tell me that two people "favorited" my blog on Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovi.

There's such a compelling quality in the book where we have a sense of being with you through your days, so I thought I'd ask in closing: What was your day like yesterday?
What was my day like yesterday? I went back to my therapist for the first time in 18 months, partly to discuss the effect that writing the book had had on me, and what it was like to return to all the memories in it. Then I did a podcast where I talked about my relationship with the media, then went for a drink with friends in Leytonstone.

It seems like it was a nice day.
It was pleasant enough.

Juliet Jacques will be in conversation with novelist Chloe Aridjis about the cruxes of writing and identity and the problems of performance and confessional writing at the London Review Bookshop on September 29. Book tickets here.

In an enormous act of self-sabotage, I have fallen on my sword and illustrated this article with photos exclusively of myself at university. Above is me in fancy dress; so young, so stupid. (All photos via the author)

What are you doing on the internet reading things, you fucking nerd? It's Frosh Week out there. It's carnage. Your mum's taken you for a big shop at IKEA. You've bought a load of face paint and a toga. You've got a bottle of vodka and a box of tins and a big ol' Frosh Fair carrier bag full of condoms, and you're ready to cause havoc.

You are young and you are lithe and you are brilliant. You are smart and you are destined for great things. You are a good two-hour drive from home and, oh god, fuck, you're so alone. Is it too late? Can you go back? "Hello mum, it's me," you want to sob down the phone. "I don't want to do it any more. I don't know how to cook pasta and I'm scared. Some bigger boys want me to do drugs."

Thing is, you're locked in this prison of further education now, so it's probably best you just get acquainted with all the pricks you're going to meet this week.

Christ. Fucking Christ.

The Guy With The Fucking Acoustic Guitar

"Today," he says. "Is going to be the day that they're going to throw it back to you."

He looks down to make sure his fingers are on the right chord, a brief pause.

"Everybody!"

Nobody sings along.

Inexplicably, he goes and does this outside the SU, ostensibly to pick up girls, and doesn't even once get beaten up. University is a different world.

Ban cameras tbh

'Really Into DRESSING UP' Girl

Oh my god, stop dressing up as things, Becky; it doesn't make things more fun now that you slightly look like something.

A Guy Who Has Never Bought Drugs But Who Is Looking For Drugs

Somehow this dude is in your halls kitchen, and for some reason he thinks you're holding. "Alright?" he's saying. "Yeah: got any? Any ganj? Any coke? Any M? Any drugs?" He's talking from behind his hand, looking around wildly. It's cold and he's only wearing a T-shirt. "Hook me up, yeah?"

You'll see him, intermittently, every six weeks or so, walking around the quad looking lost and un-high. "Any drugs, lads?" He still hasn't found any. Has he been to any lectures? Has he slept? Has he spoken to anyone beyond potential amateur drug dealers? He has not.

One day, without anyone noticing, he will slip away into silence, and you will never see him again. No one will ever see him again.

God, I hate myself. This wasn't even funny.

The Literal UniLAD

The day you move into halls you will be greeted by the firm, no-nonsense handshake of an off-the-peg lad $160 polo shirt; Sports Direct XXL jogging bottoms; case of PBR on the go at 12:01 PM; two wallet condoms; stolen bottle of Nando's lemon and herb sauce the only decorative item on the windowsill in his room and you'll think: "This is alright. Lads are alright. They're quite quiet, polite. He keeps doing kick-ups in the kitchen, but otherwise he's OK."

And then, the first night of sleeping there, you'll be woken up by a kitchen full of lads that he's somehow collected in the past seven hoursLawro, Dean, Cabbage, Dean, Deaner, Deano, Dan, Jimmy, Fuckknob, Gordy, Wingerworth, Cliff Randy, Miggsy, The Choadyour new cereal bowls filled with the ash of a thousand roll-ups, Miggsy wearing nothing now but a pair of pants made of duct tape, air shagging your new blender.

Don't worry about The Lad. He'll quit his Sports Psychology degree within six weeks and go back home to get his UEFA badges, and all that will be left, whispered on the wind, will be a single word: banter.

An actual Trainspotting poster in the background, there. A "Choose Life" Trainspotting poster.

Hysterical Food Girl

Hello, new students and old, and welcome to the prison of paranoia I like to call "the dairy triangle." It goes like this: if you put anything from each of the three tips of the dairy triangle into a shared fridgethat's cheese, milk, and butterthen those items will, like cruise liners in the North Atlantic, disappear. This is something you must accept, must offer up to the dairy gods as penance. You will steal milk and you will have milk stolen from you. You will take a portion of the butter when you wake up and decide you need to bake a cake. You're just as bad as everyone.

On VICE Sports: Running Makes People Insane And This Forum Thread Proves It

Apart from Hysterical Food Girl. Hysterical Food Girl has these special star-shaped Post-It notes that she leaves on her eggs and butter to let everyone know they are hers. Hysterical Food Girl dots all her i's with heart shapes in the passive-aggressive note she taped over the sink. "PLEASE NOTE," Hysterical Food Girl is saying, "THE SCRAMBLED EGG RESIDUE IN THE SINK IS FROM MY EGGS BUT I HAVE NOT EATEN SCRAMBLED EGGS THIS WEEK BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN STAYING AT MY INCREDIBLY DULL VEGAN BOYFRIEND'S HOUSE. PLEASE DO NOT STEAL MY MILK AND EGGS!"

She's on the phone to her mum, crying. "My milk and eggs, mum," she's saying. "They keep stealing it." Little mini-fridge in her room. Can't sleep over the sound of it clanking. Slowly, inevitably, twisting further into madness. She's missing lectures now. Her grades are slipping. You steal another egg.

Is that an actual fedora? Jesus fucking Christ I think it is.

Someone Who, In Week One, Has Already Done All Their Assigned Reading And Then Turns To You And Says, 'Have You Done The Assigned Reading?' And You Say 'No' And They Say 'Will You Not Be Taking University Seriously, Then?' And You Say: 'No'

Good thing about bullyingand, you know what, bullying gets a bad rap, sometimes, right?is it creates a strict hierarchical schoolyard structure where everybody knows their place. It's very animal kingdom, very class system: nature finds a way of imposing these hierarchies onto everything we hold dear. And then you go to university and there is no one there to flush nerds' heads down the toilet, so they all get an inflated sense of self-worth.

Someone doing all their required reading and then being proud of it isn't right, according to every universal law that there is. And yet they skulk around, these proud readers, in their Jack Wills hoodies, going resolutely un-beaten up. They are a walking reminder that university is a bubble. Do not make friends with them.

The Kid Who Collects Every Tin From Every Beer He Has Ever DrunkHe Only Started Drinking This Week, And Has Already Gone Through One Box of PBR And Another Of Carlsberg, Assembling The Empty Cans Into One Great Tottering Pyramid, The Kid Getting Aggy Whenever Someone Crushes A Beer Can That He Could Have Used For The PyramidAnd Who Has The Biggest Tantrum You've Ever Seen When A University-Assigned Cleaner Sweeps All The Cans Into A Big Clear Recycling Bag, Running To His Room And Not Coming Out Until He Has Watched All Three Films Of 'The Hobbit' In Consecutive Order

There is a 90 percent chance this guy is called Rory.

WATCH ON MUNCHIES: Consider the Lobster Diver

The Girl Who Just Started A Psychology Course Who Tells You Picking The Label Of Your Beer Is A Sign That You're Sexually Frustrated

Hey, what does this Rorschach card look like to you? *Slowly lifts a solitary middle finger in front of a folded piece of A3*

The Dude Who Really, Really, Really, Really Wants To Lose His Virginity

"Haha, hey," he's saying, in the corner of the SU bar after all your new friends go to the toilet at once, his virginity so firm and in place that you can smell it as he sidles up to you, black short-sleeved shirt still ironed flat from when his mum packed it, going, "Heh, the girls in here, manthey are just letting loose, you know?"

This is the guy who is going to hide a camera in his shampoo bottle in the shared showers. Do not be friends with him, or he'll yell your name out pleadingly when the police march him out of your applied maths lecture.

That guy punching the air is getting married next year. Here I am writing this. Who's doing better? I don't even know anymore.

Girl Who Stays In Her Room So Much You Slowly Suspect She Is Either Dead Or Never Existed In The First Place

You see her on the first day and she does a tight little nod and hellonormally a mature student, this one, mature students of course being adults who didn't quite make it as adults, sinking back into the warm blanket of further education because the real world is full of responsibility and high winds and council taxand then she grabs an extremely large bowl of food and slinks back to her room, never turning her back on you, walking backwards and smiling still.

And then the whispers start: did you meet the mature student yet? Most of you do not even know there was a mature student. Only three of you admit to having seen her. The person in the dorm next door swore the room was empty. "There are no sounds," they say. "There are no sounds coming out of there."

And then, one day, the door is open, the room empty and immaculate, the mature student just a ghost now, lost to the sands. Did you imagine her? Was she ever real? How come you never see her around campus? Are you even real? Look at your hands. Open and close them. Maybe it's time for a nice weekend at home, yeah? A nice roast and a tummy rub from your mum.

The Kid Who Is Throwing Off The Shackles Of His Do-Your-Homework Parents And His You-Have-No-Mates Secondary School And Is Now, Finally, Free, And So Decides To Entirely And Unconvincingly Reinvent Himself, Really Loudly, At You

"Hi guys! Name's Si, but everyone calls me Si-cho, 'cos I'm a psycho! Just joking. Yeah, I always wear this Dappy hat: sort of my thing. Back home in Kingston everyone used to call me 'Dappy hat.' Oh, these bracelets? It's really cool, actually: I did a sort of placement fortnight in Rio. Beach holiday? Haha: no thanks. No, actually, these really appreciative street children weaved them for me as a gift, and presented them to me through the cab window while I was stuck in traffic outside the airport. Anyway, peace out! Hook me up with your dope dealer!"

If they invent time travel I am going back to this pre-pubescent looking motherfucker to tell him to cut his fucking hair. BRO DO U EVEN SHAVE YET.

The Guy Who Ends Up In A Very Bad Situation With Wonga.com After Spending His Entire Student Loan On Just One Big Speaker

"Look at that baby, yeah. Subwoofer. Can you hear the bass coming through that?" Your skull shakes in the skin of your head. "Yeah. Big sound, like. Still got to buy all the other bitsspeakers, tweeters, an actual amp, more than one CD because I've only got them Ministry albums for nowbut yeah, when it's done: pussygeddon, mate."

He's spent his entire loan in one day. He has to eat plain oats until January because he can't afford any other food. He puts that one Duke Dumont song on so loudly your genitals thrum. "Naughty!" he's shouting, indistinctly, arm bobbing slightly out of time. "NAUGHTY!"

READ ON NOISEY: What Do the Libertines Mean in the Age of Thinkpiece Pop?

The Girl Who Is Really Homesick And Never Stops Going On About How Good Fucking Peterborough Or Somewhere Is

On the phone to her mam the first night, sobbing. Dad's halfway up the A1 to fetch her before she's talked down. Three-hour-long Facetime chats in the shared kitchen to her boyfriend back home, where all either of them seems to say is the word "baby" in a child's voice. Home every weekend on an $80 train for a roast. All her back-home mates turn up in full night-out garb and seem petrified by the concept of electric light, and they all sit there hitting Bacardi Breezers until one of them cries, rivulets of fake tan streaming down her face, until they decide to just watch a Disney movie while laughing in her room instead.

This came from a Facebook album that was just titled 'Trash.'

The Two People In DORMS Who Everyone Knows Are Going To Fuck, And Then They Fuck And Then It Gets Weird

Oh, he's got a girlfriend back home, or something, so they can't fuck, but then they do all the pre-fucking stuffthey have playful water fights with each other and spoon under the covers in her room with the door open watching moviesand everyone is like, "Are they going to fuck, or what?" and "This is like watchingand I understand the gravity of what I am about to say herean especially bad episode of Hollyoaks."

One time on a night out she gets with someone else and they have a big argument, and then three days later they make up and fuck, and then there are two ways this goes: either these two end up getting married, distantly and in the future, saying things like, "Our origin story was incredibly dull! We really did settle! I'm so happy with the inevitable mediocrity of my life!" or the fallout is really weird and they stand silently in the kitchen on opposite microwaves, passive-aggressively warming up soup and taking them to their respective rooms to consume in silence and alone. With you in the middle. Just trying to make some toast.

University hoodie. Shoulder bag. Simple string bracelet. Line for a mouth. Wanker.

The Person Who Is Really Phoning It In, To Be Honest; The Person Who Turned Up And Is Like, 'I'll Do My Reading In Reading Week, Probably?' The Person Who Is Like, 'The Grades Only Matter In Year Two And Three, I'll Just Get Pissed And Put On A Stone And Join The Fucking Harry Potter Society For Now' The Person Who Is Like, 'Foam Party On A Monday? Don't Mind If I Do!' The Person Who Was Good At School Too Easy, School Was, If We're Honest, Barely STUDIED And Still Aced All The TestsBut Now Finds The Work Genuinely Difficult, And Instead Of Turning To Meet This New Challenge Head On They Give Up, Score Some Cheap Resin And Work On Their Tumblr Page, Write Really Bad Poems And Short Stories In A Shitty Little Notebook, Wake Up At 2pm, Spend Their Entire Loan ON GROCERIES, And Suddenly It's January And The Year's Half Gone, And You Go Home And Your Friends Are There But It's Different, Somehow; They All Look The Same And Sound The Same And Smell The Same, But It's Not The SameSomething Has Shifted And Tilted Among You All; There Is A Distance There, A Jarring Dissonance. And Then You Realise You Haven't Really Got Any Actual Uni Friends, Have You? Not Friends You'd Consider Friends, Anyway, Not Real Friends; But Then You've Been Quite Cynical About It All, Haven't You? 'Join The RAG Society?' You Scoffed, Didn't You, 'Have Genuine Fun For A Good Cause? Fuck Off!' But What Do You Do Instead? You Don't Even Do Sports. You're Slowly Growing Useless And Big, Your Youth Frittering Away One Wasted Afternoon At A Time. Yeah, You've Watched Every Episode Of 'Parks And Recreation' On Netflix, But Was It Really Worth It? The Best Years Of Your Life Are Ending One Second At A Time Are You Really Having A Kebab For Dinner Again? Your Family Is Worried About You, MateGet Out Of This Funk.

Lol @ you

@joelgolby

More stuff about university:

This Is What It's Like to Be Homeless in University

What the British University You Go to Says About Your Drug Taking

Here's What Happens to You Immediately After You Graduate University

All photos by the author

For most New Yorkers, Coney Island is a place that you only go when you've passed out drunk on the subway. "Bing bong!," says the subway car. "This is the last stop on this train!" Then you wake up all wasted and covered in vomit and your wallet's gone and then you think, Oh, no. I'm in Coney Island."

I wasn't drunk on Sunday, but I ended up at Coney Island anyway. There was some big Warriors event that started at 10 AM and ended at 11 PM, and I was told to go and cover it.

I'm a big Warriors fan and really like vests, so the culture editor at VICE told me to cover this Warriors reunion in Coney Island. He smokes these big black smelly cigars, and as he told me how I was going to spend my Sunday, he waved his flaming tobacco baton around for emphasis. "You are GOING to the Warriors reunion, so get used to it!"

The subway ride to Coney is 80 minutes from my house. When I finally detrained, I walked to the large fenced-in lot and waited in a line. Once inside the big parking lot, I watched a large group of people in vests wait in another line for many, many hours.

This is Jacob from Long Island. He bought his vest online and it is an official prop replica. Pretty dope. The Warriors fans were all pretty nice and an overall enthusiastic group. I own both versions of the DVD and the PS2 game, so I'm no slouch in loving The Warriors. I also love fanatical movie devotion. All the people who showed up were awesome. Standing in lines is like the worst thing in the world to me though. Fuck standing in a line.

This dude got his vest signed by the cast. That's pretty neat. I'm not really much of an autograph guy, but if I were I'd be stoked. I'm just second-hand stoked for this guy.

This is Steeler. I liked his patches. We discussed how G. G. Allin is the true god of rock 'n' roll.

Here's a page from Steeler's sketchbook.

Everyone assumed I was in costume as one of the Turnbull AC's and kept yelling "You skin-headed fuck!" and taking pictures with me.

This is me with James the Giant Painter and his friend, both of whom flew in from Chicago for this. James told me that he'd been a fan of Dorsey Wright, the guy who played Cleon in The Warriors, since Wright was on White Shadow, a TV show about a high school basketball team with black players and a white coach, which was one of the first interracial TV shows. I couldn't find any evidence that Wright was on it, but maybe he was.

I just liked how this guy looked.

One funny thing was that like half the people were dressed as fake gangs and then the other half of the crowd were actual bikers and car-club people in their real vests. While filming The Warriors, the actors had to take their vests off in between shots so people didn't think they were a real gang.

All the stars of The Warriors were hanging out in this big tented area. I couldn't see any of them from outside, and I wasn't about to wait in a two- or three-hour line just so someone could write their name on a DVD. That's crazy. After civilization ends, I'll happily wait in line for water if I'm still alive and there is unradioactive water available.

Here's what everyone paid $25 to do for a long time. I would also stand in line to get God's autograph. I would wait in line to get a ghost's autograph, but like a real ghost. I would wait in line for an autograph if it meant knowing that an afterlife existed.

This lady has one of the best mohawks I've ever seen and a studded fanny pack that goes on the leg like Hellraiser would use.

We fought this guy on roller skates, and people yelled, "You skin-headed fuck!" at me.

Here's a mime warming his wife in the cold September rain as they waited hours in line for some strangers to write their names on a piece of paper or some shit.

One of the greatest joys that can be had as you age is the joy of not showing up to shit. By this point it was already raining and we were right by the water and everyone was underdressed because we were all wearing vests without shirts, so shit got kinda bleak.

There were some decent vests. It was a good vest fest. I am curious, though, why neither the lady or her vest skull are wearing a turban if she's in the Turban Queens. If I were in the Straw Boater Dukes, you know I'd be wearing a straw boater and my vest skull would have one, too.

I also dug this lady's vest.

Tom Scharpling recently brought up a good point on his podcast, the Best Show. In The Warriors, all these adult criminal gang members are desperate to get back home, so why doesn't it ever occur to them to just steal a car? Either carjacking or hot-wiring would have worked. They must have just been really loyal to public transit.

There really wasn't much to do at this Warriors reunion besides take photos of people who were mostly dressed the same and standing around in a rainy parking lot. It seemed odd that they weren't playing the soundtrack to the movie or anything. There was a DJ playing funk and disco nearby, but I don't think he was connected to the event, and there was also a dancehall DJ spinning and MC'ing a carnival ride.

This guy is Jim, and he installs swimming pools in Vernon, New Jersey. He is also a pretty professional cos-player who dresses as Ivan Drago, Lord Humongous, and lots of other stuff that involves being a well-muscled man. We talked about his workout regimen, and he mentioned that, when he's serious, he drinks two gallons of water a day, which he says speeds up your metabolism. As I write this, I am drinking two gallons of water to get less fat.

I heard that they cancelled the costume contest because of the rain, but this guy dressed as Cochise should have won.

This is my friend Carrie. I wish more women dressed like these two. The world should look more like the cartoon Jem.

I walked around trying to find a decent slice of pizza and came across Ryan A.K.A. "Skeleton Boy." I ended up eating at Nathan's. Around this point I was like, "What the fuck am I going to write about? I've been at this thing for hours and nothing has happened."

The rain was starting to clear up around this point, but it was also dark. Here's the fucking Wonder Wheel.

These people were just waiting around while Sick of It All did a sound check for about an hour.

Sick of It All came out in Warriors vests. As soon as they started playing the loudness of the music and the awful food I ate gave me horrible diarrhea, and I had to take a shit in this really public toilet on a bus, and the bus was swaying from how loud the music was. When I wiped my ass, there was blood on the paper towel, and I thought, I think I've had enough of The Warriors reunion. And then I went home.

Follow Nick on Twitter.

Lee Berger's daughter Megan acts as a safety caver on the expedition. Photo by Robert Clark/National Geographic

Dr. Marina Elliott had no idea what kind of adventure lay in store when she decided to answer a Facebook ad that sought people with excellent archaeological excavation skills.

At the time, which was the fall of 2013, the location of the project wasn't even specified, but it did mention that those who answered needed to be "skinny and preferably small."

Elliott was intrigued. The ad had been posted by Lee Bergera paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witswatersrand in South Africa.

Encouraged by her supervisor at Simon Fraser University in BC, Elliott responded and conducted a Skype interview with Berger.

Three weeks later, her plane touched down in Johannesburg.

From 60 qualified international applicants, Berger had assembled a team of six women. In addition to Elliott, a Canadian who had just completed her PhD in biological anthropology, there were four AmericansHannah Morris, Alia Gurto, K. Lindsay Hunter, Becca Peixotto, and one Australian, Elen Feuerriegel.

They were indeed all small, an essential quality for the task ahead, which involved squeezing into a series of underground cavities of the Rising Star Cave including a variety of tight squeezes and one narrow point only 18 cm wide.

What the team didn't yet know was that they were walking (or rather, crawling) into the groundbreaking discovery of Homo naledi, an entirely new species of human relative. It was also a find that would prove to be unusually rich: the single largest deposit of ancient hominin fossils yet uncovered on the entire continent of Africa. The huge discovery is being featured in the October issue of National Geographic.

Marina Elliott in a cave in South Africa. Photo courtesy Marina Elliott

"I think all of us that managed to end up on the project literally spent time stuffing ourselves under the furniture in our houses to see if we could get into an 18-centimetre gap," said Elliott with a laugh.

At 46, she was one of the most experienced cavers on the team, a factor that may have led to Berger's decision that she lead the first crew to descend into the space, located 25 metres below the surface.

It was early November when an above-ground support network of more than 50 scientists, cavers and experts gathered at the site, about 50 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, in a wider world heritage site famously known as "the cradle of humankind" for its large deposits of ancient human fossils.

All that was known prior to the initial descent was what had been gleaned from the reports and photos of cavers Rick Hunter and Steve Tucker, who made the initial discovery.

Berger, already known for his 2008 discovery of hominin Australopithecus sediba in nearby Malapa Cave, suspected the Rising Star cave system might harbour a specimen of another, yet unknown, ancient human relative.

A composite skeleton of H. naledi is surrounded by some of the hundreds of other fossil elements recovered. Photo by Robert Clark/National Geographic; source: Lee Berger, Wits, photographed at Evolutionary Studies Institute

However, essential to the quest to figure it out for certain would be this team, clad in blue jumpsuits and helmets, affectionately referred to as the "underground astronauts."

The cave had never produced ancient fossil material previously and they thought it was likely a salvage operation of one skeleton, said Elliott.

"Really, we all thought that this was just going to be kind of a one-off thing. That we would go, we would excavate this thing and we'd be done. I don't think any of us thought it would be an ongoing project," she added. "But then it just became so much more."

From the beginning, she was briefed on the cave's high-risk environment. If an injury occurred, even a twisted ankle, rescue could become a major problem.

"It was a very, very physical exercise to go from the surface to the excavation chamber. It's very physically demanding. And you're also then adding on the fact that it's pitch black so if you have a technical problem and your light goes out, then you're kind of... in the middle of nothing," said Elliott. "You need both hands, both legs and all your faculties to negotiate that system."

Minimally armed with CO2 monitors, lights, excavation gear, and harnesses, Elliott and team members Morris and Peixotto prepared to enter the cave.

Among the more difficult sections included a squeeze called "Superman's crawl" and another jagged, nearly vertical section they dubbed the "dragon's back."

"It's in an area called 'the chute' which is actually a 12-metre-deep crack in the rock, it's kind of a long fissure, so 18 centimetres is the depth that you need to be able to squeeze through. You've got room on either side of your shoulder but you have rock right at your nose and right at your back," said Elliot. "You can't really see down, because you can't turn your head to look down below you. You just have to kind of feel."

It was this final section she had to negotiate before first emerging into the final space they were seeking: Dinaledi, or the chamber of stars.

"Underground astronauts" Marina Elliott, Becca Peixotto, and Hannah Morris work inside the cave where fossils of H. naledi were discovered. Photo by Garrreth Bird

otto work inside the cave

where fossils of

H. naledi

"I am a bit of a history buff and I love the Age of Discovery writing, and so when I was actually working my way through the system and finally knew that I was about to enter the excavation chamber itself, it's quite a tight hallway you have to slither through, and I remember thinking, as I squeezed past this final section into the final chamber: 'This was what Howard Carter must have felt like when he opened Tutankhamun's tomb.' Because the story of him doing that has these pencil sketches and there's someone in the background saying, 'Carter, what do you see?' and he's peeking through this hole and he says 'Things, I see wondrous things,'" she said.

As she entered the room, Elliott glanced about with her headlamp. All she could see were flashes of bone, everywhere, all over the floor of the chamber.

"I thought, holy crackers, what is this? Wow, this is not what I signed up for. This is going to be a bit crazy. It really was one of those combinations of exhilaration and kind of, oh, maybe a little bit of terror? Like, I don't know man, I don't think you guys knew what you were getting into," she said with a laugh.

They team began uncovering huge amounts of material, 50 to 80 fragments a day, a density of material that archaeologists often don't recover in decades of work, said Elliott.

So far they have amassed more than 1,550 fossils from 15 individuals of the same species which span in age from infants to the elderly.

Though they are certain that Homo naledi walked upright, there was no evidence within the cave of tools or fire implements, and it didn't appear to be a living space.

It's also unknown how the bodieswhich are not accompanied by flora or fauna or show any evidence of being dragged there by animalsended up in the chamber. Berger said they suspect they were intentionally placed there, a behaviour that until now was thought to be the sole domain of humans.

Unusually, Berger and the entire support team not only shared their findings via social media as the excavation went along, they also deliberately decided to release their findings through a peer-reviewed, open-access, non-profit scientific journal called eLife, to make the information as accessible as possible.

"Marina, along with the other underground astronauts are, in my opinion, heroic," said Berger via email. "The guts it took to drop everything and come to South Africa in order to recover fossils in such a dangerous situation is something I shall admire for the rest of my life. I hope their actions and exemplary modelling of what it means to be a modern day explorer inspires a generation of young men and women to themselves become explorers."

Work at the site continues and new fossils are still being excavated, said Elliott, who spoke with VICE from where she is still stationed in South Africa. It will likely take decades before the significance of all the material is fully understood, she added.

Paleoartist John Gurche used fossils from a South African cave to reconstruct the face of Homo naledi. Photo by Mark Thiessen/National Geographic

Follow Julie Chadwick on Twitter.

Alan Lord on the roof of Strangeways Prison during the 1990 riots. All photos courtesy of Alan Lord

"Fuck your system," someone screamed,"fuck your rules!"

It was 1990. HMP Strangeways,Manchester's notoriously brutal jail, had finally come to the boil. Conditionswere awful: three men to a single cell; bucket for a toilet; showers, exercise, and clean clothes all hard to come by; allegedly drunk and abusive guards everready to ignore complaints; violence from both inmates and staff.

On April 1,in the chapel, what should have been the riot to end all riots began. Prisonofficers were relieved of their keys; pews piled up for barricades. Alan Lord,a convicted murderer, scaled the roof and saw the forces of law and orderrunning with their batons between their legs. The prison was theirs and for 25glorious days they held onto it.

It threw the whole system intocrisis. The public enquiry that followedthe Woolf Reportwas meant toensure such a situation never reoccurred. For a while, conditions improved.

For the last three days, StuartHorner has been running around the roof of HMP Strangeways, smashing in windowsand clowning around for the assembled press. The one-man riot has a crude message,daubed on a prison shirt:

"It's not 1990. Tell the Governmentwe've all had enough. Sort the whole system."

Strangeways, it seems, has come fullcircle. We phoned up Alan Lord, the convicted murderer, seasoned rioter, andhealth freak who was integral to the original Strangeways protest, for a chat. He told us about his life back then, what he's up to now, and claimed that Horner is refusing to speak to anyone other that Alan Lord.

VICE: HiAlan, what do you think of Stuart Horner who is currently protesting on the roof of Strangeways?
Alan Lord: At the moment, he's requested to talk to me only. His family got in contact with me on Facebook the day before yesterday. But it's not just as simple as that. I'm an ex-lifer on license and I'd be putting myself in a precarious situation; it could give the authorities the opportunity to haul me back in for inciting has been up and running for a year now and it's going great. The weight-lifting part of it is picking up more and more and more and more. The clientele I've got is fantasticevery evening it's practically full up.

Ever get any attitude?
None whatsoever. I'm upfront about my past with anyone that asks me but I've had no adverse comments or any kind of animosity towards meor even raised eyebrows. The feedback I get from a lot of the clients is: Alan, you've done wrong, nobody's perfect, and also you were a young boy at the time and furthermore you paid your dues to society so good luck to you.

What'syour message for the pissed off prisoners of today?
I know it's hard. I know it'sdifficult. But before taking the extreme path you should take a concertedeffort to put pen to paper and expose the system that way. But if all elsefails, what choice do you have? And if push comes to shove, and it comes downto that, prepare for the consequences. Don't kid yourself it'll be an easy ridebecause it won't.

ThanksAlan!

Alan's book, Life in Strangeways: From Riots to Redemption, MyThirty-Two Years Behind Bars, is available here.

Follow Charlie on Twitter.

The seemingly serene huldra is the first creature you'll meet on your walk. All screens courtesy of Simogo.

In 2013, one iPhone game stood out among everything else as a truly remarkable, entirely singular, uncommonly captivating work of interactive art. It was beautiful, a two-dimensional first-person puzzle adventure that enraptured me from the moment I started itand what a beginning. I headed from my cottage at the edge of the woods to a windmill on the other side. I met a girl there. We talked. She was cold towards me, distant, like she'd never been before. She avoided my gaze. I told her my plans. She warned against following through with them. I left her there. It wasn't long afterwards that I met the huldra. Minutes later, I near enough shit myself on a commuter train between Brighton and London.

It was a jump scare I wasn't expectingbut more fool me, as the only way to really approach Year Walk, made by the small team at Malm-based studio Simogo, is with all bets off. It's not a game that's easily summarized in a sales-pitch sentenceeven describing it as I did above, "a two-dimensional first-person puzzle adventure," while ticking a lot of face-value stylistic boxes, fails to convey its complete nature. It's also a horror game, all the more disturbing for its cuteness, its approachable twee aesthetic torn in two at a number of seat-edge-slipping moments. It's deeply atmospheric, despite its visible limitations, its almost paper-art looks. The soundtracksubtle, creaking, eerie, and enchanting at onceis a vital aspect of the game's hold on its player, likewise its freedom: while there's a set order to the puzzles that must be adhered to, you're free enough to wander the woods, crunching through the New Year's Eve snow under a midnight moon, noting down clues and directions as you go. They will be useful later.

And now, with the game ported to Nintendo's Wii U, you can actually make notes without keeping pen and paper handy, as the GamePad menu has a tab that allows you to scribble down any hints you might find as you attempt to complete your "year walk." Or in other words, the rsgng, an ancient Swedish means of divination, where participants went searching for clues to their future through strange rituals and encounters with supernatural creatures. You'll meet four (well, five, but two come as one) of these beings during your Year Walk playthrough: the huldra is the first, and to satisfy her you must know your lefts and rights, and when to follow them, and have a keen ear for pitch. The final entity is the Church Grim, a goat-headed humanoid who says nothing but stares right into your heart. Even encountering him for a fourth time sends shivers through me.

But mastering the Grim's challenges of GamePad manipulation doesn't present you with the real end of the gameeven after the credits have rolled, there's more to discover, and you're holding one part of how to unlock the truest conclusion in your hands, as you play. There are secrets to Year Walk that only become apparent once morning's dawnedeverything that happened, it can still be changed, and the watchers needn't always win. And to reveal any more is to spoil this game's majestic mystery for the newcomer.

And if that's you, and you're one of the ten million Wii U owners in the world, download this when the first chance arises, as it's an immediate essential among the console's growing indie catalogue. While Year Walk was already a great success on iOS, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, it's this port that represents the definitive experienceand that's the in the opinion of its makers, not some dumb critic like me.

Article continues after the video below

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"It just feels very natural that you always have access to the encyclopedia, map, and such on the GamePad, while playing on the TV," Simogo's Simon Flesser tells mehis is the name you'll see first in the credits, which you should at least reach once given the Wii U port provides plenty of clues to help you overcome its trickier sections. "I love the new controls too. And as you know, a big part of Year Walk's puzzle design was based around having to take noteswith a stylus and a touchscreen always available, we could now integrate that into the experience, which feels great. So I think it's a number of things that just makes it feel as it came home at last."

The map is a great addition to the game, allowing you to immediately find the best route back to any clue you passed without properly processing. The encyclopedia provides information on the act of year walking itself, as well as all of the creatures met along the way, each entry readable in full before you've even encountered them. It's vital that you keep your eyes on both the television screen and the GamePad, as one puzzle demands that you explore both of them. Simogo has brilliantly integrated the GamePad into the Year Walk experience in a way that a lot of much larger developers, including Nintendo themselves, aren't always able to do, and while the new controls don't click immediatelyyou use the triggers to grip and move objects on the screen, having positioned a pointer over what you want to interact withafter a few minutes they feel natural enough to get by with, although nothing will ever be quite as immediate and intuitive as proper touch controls, as used on the iOS original.

New on Motherboard: Introducing a New Series, Abandonware

You think this doll looks creepy now? Wait until you spin it a little.

"There were a number of factors in bringing Year Walk to the Wii U," Flesser tells me, "and one was definitely that we could make the gameplay with the companion pieces feel really natural, because of the two-screen nature of the platform. I'm a big Nintendo fan, too, and when I play I mostly play on Nintendo platforms, so I always wanted to make something for their hardware. Another factor was that I had talked for some time about doing a project together with Rhodri Broadbent, at (Welsh studio) Dakko Dakko, and so, well, this was a good project to collaborate on."

"Early on, Rhod suggested that we'd try motion controls for the pointing, and to be honest I was really skeptical at first, even though I love motion controls," Flesser continues. "As the GamePad doesn't have an infrared pointer, like the Wii Remote, we had to be really creative how to use the gyroscope to control the pointer. It's tricky, because gyroscopes drift, and you can't be sure where the 'center' is. So we went through a number of iterations, and worked very hard on how players would re-center the cursor, until we settled for the current solutionwhich I really love. Holding both the shoulder buttons feels very physical, like you're really grabbing on to objects in the game world."

'Year Walk,' Wii U trailer

Year Walk's not a long gameeven if you get a little lost, a little stuck, a little scared, you'll likely see Simon's name and those of his colleagues inside 80 minutes. Perhaps sooner, as the map doesn't half help get around the small woodland world more effectively than the somewhat blind rambling of the iOS version. That's before you attempt to solve What Comes Next, of course, but not everybody will have the dedication to crack the complex code that gives you the answers only teased prior to the first ending.

But don't allow that short playtime put you off from downloading this unique game, as it is really is an unforgettable offering from developers who regularly burst with creativity. The multi-award-winning, highly innovative text adventure Device 6 and excellently addictive rhythm action game Beat Sneak Bandit: those are Simogo's babies, too; likewise The Sailor's Dream and Bumpy Road. Yet it's Year Walk that's perhaps the studio's finest achievement, immediate of impact and lasting of impression, quite unlike anything else you'll play on a mobile deviceand now, on the Wii U. And after the tie-in E-book Bedtime Stories for Awful Children, the Nintendo port also represents the final time that Simogo will visit this surreal world of archaic traditions and disquieting spirits. Probably.

"We're now done with revisiting our universes for a little while," Flesser says, "and I think it's safe to assume that we won't make a sequel to Year Walk. At least, not any time soon. New adventures!"

Year Walk is released for Wii U via the Nintendo eShop on September 17, and is available now for iOS, Windows, and Mac. Buy it, because it's dead good. Find more information at the Simogo website.

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

As fashion choices, tattoos are fairly permanent. But compared with other works of art, tattoos are ephemeral, doomed to decay as their hosts' skin wrinkles and, when they die, be burned or buried along with them. Tattoos can cost thousands of dollars and mark major life milestones,but unlike paintings, you'll never be able to bequeath them to your descendants. No one showcases old tattoos in their home.

Charles Hamm wants to change that, which is why he startedthe National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art (NAPSA). Thenonprofit organization is devoted to enabling people to preserve their tattoosskin and alland pass them on to their loved ones after they die.

Hamm, a 60-year-oldformer accounting guy from Cleveland, has developed a process by which tattoosand the skin surrounding them can be removed from your corpse and preserved,allowing your friends or relatives to literally keep a piece of you forever. (There's a$115 fee to join NAPSA, and yearly dues are $60; beneficiaries will get a $2,000stipend to defray the costs of preserving the tattoo.) Hamm envisions a futurewhere people might display the tastefully framed tats of their forebears on themantle, much like some people do with urns of cremains. It may sound grisly, but the NAPSA founder believes there's going to be a lot of demand for his group's services. He's fond of the JohnnyDepp quote, "My body is my journal, and my tattoos are my story." If you feltlike that about your body art, why would you want your story to be thrown awayafter your death?

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In advance of NAPSA's official launch today, VICE spoke toHamm about how all of this would work.

VICE: How did you develop this concept?
Charles Hamm: I'mpretty much tattooed from my neck down to my waist, with the exception of acouple little spots here and there. They all have meanings to memy grandsondesigned a couple, and I even had one of my business partners develop one for me.And I'm quite proud of them, they're very big works of artI probably have$10,000 on my back, and it is a piece of art.

I sat around, really thinking about that. Someday I'm goingto pass away and I'm sure I'll be cremated and it'll all vanish into the air. Ijust didn't think that was right. So I got together a bunch of people in theindustry; we talked a lot about it, spent a great deal of time trying to putthis together, and we developed a process andsaid, "Listen I know they're not up and running but I gotta get that tattooIwant my son to know how much his dad loved him." And we were able to retrievethat tattoo. And that's what this is about.

This interview hasbeen edited and condensed for clarity.

To join NAPSA or just check out their website, go to SaveMyInk.com

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

Check out more from Julian Glander at his Twitter, Instagram, and blog.

One of the two scenes anyone remembers from 'Wild Things'

With my 36th birthday fast approaching, I have few qualms in admitting that I don't own property, I've never been married (or divorced), and I haven't birthed a child. While these lack of accomplishments have the potential to deprive some people of sleep, speculating where they could have gone wrong, I'm fine with all of it. However, what truly floods me with regret and despair is the fact that I've made it this far in life without ever having experienced a threesome.

While being the filling in a penis sandwich and/or engaging in the type of spontaneous, steamy FFM threesome you've seen in the Wild Things trilogy has been in the forefront of my fantasy highlight reel for as long as I've been legal, I have yet to have one firsthand. And that's not for lack of trying.

When I'm seeing someone, they are generallyand mindbogglinglynot down for it. If they are, we have a tricky time finding a third (though my last couple attempt was in the days before Tinder). Rarely have I met a guy who shares the same threesome fantasy idealeither me and two guys, who aren't making out with or into each other (we'll get to that) and are completely mindful of my comfort level, or me and a guy in a dominant role, with a hot, younger, subbing third we stumble across during a frosh week rally.

While the vast majority of couples I know don't register to me as potential sexual playmates, occasionally I'll meet a pair who has a free-spirited and open sexual candor that I envy and want to get in on. The guy is always down, the lady, not so much. When one friend asked if I wanted to join her and her boyfriendwho I'd never metsome time, I told her I was game, but mostly because it felt imprudent to say otherwise. When she texted me a few days later, asking if I wanted to meet them at a hotel, I declined. The whole thing felt too professional, in the showing up and getting down to business, sight unseen kind of wayand not in a way that has to potential to turn me on. A similar incident happened a few years earlier, with a fella I was casually sleeping with when I'd swing through LA. I was in town on his birthday, and he had planned to meet me at my hotel. Before arriving, he texted to see if I'd be down with another lady joining usit was his birthday, after all. When I told him it depended on if I was attracted to her, he texted back: "She said the exact same thing." She never showed up. Another time, I was set to meet up with a fresh-faced pair of skater cuties I'd met on Tinder who were in town from Montreal. The night we were meant to meet up for a drink to see if the chemistry was there, they (well, the guy) told me their car broke down in Brantford, Ontario, and they weren't going to make it.

To help resolve my feelings of perturbation and non-fulfillment in my lack of experience, I reached out to several experts on the subject, to see how I could better confront my obstacles.

Guys want bis, girls not so much
The science of threesomes is sparse, at best. A few studies have been conducted over the years: in 2004, ABC News found that 14 percent of adults (and twice as many single men) have had sex in a threesome, while a 2010 Cosmo survey (hey, I said there were few studies) showed that less than ten percent of women had had one.

So apparently, I'm not alone.

The fact that I'm excluding a slice of peoplebi-sexual menfrom my fantasy is not unique among women. Heather Armstrong, an associate researcher at the University of Ottawa, conducted a study looking at attitudes towards bi-sexual partners. What she found wasn't that surprising: women have more negative attitudes about having a bi-sexual male partner than men did about female partners. That's to say, a lot of men are totally game with hooking up with two ladies, while women aren't as open to having a threeway with two guys who are equally into both partners. (The study examined opposite sex relationships, and not same-sex partnerships.)

"The vast majority of the men were interested in participating in a threesome, especially if it was a casual sex relationship...whereas the women were much less interested in having that opportunity," she told VICE. "In general, women tend to want to have threesome more with women than with another guy."

Armstrong suspects that is a result of the widely held stereotype that bi-sexual men are actually gay men who are reluctant to admit it, while there's a greater cultural acceptance of girls and bi-sexuality.

"So if she is bi-sexual, then the idea is she's straight and just fooling around with her girlfriends, so it's not a treat to a male partner," she says.

My reluctance to engage with bi or gay men in a threesome has nothing to do with me feeling threatened. While I identify as 12.8 percent not heterosexual, I'm simply not aroused by the idea of two guys making out. I'd prefer to have the attention focused entirely on me. But where am I going to find two straight men who are okay being naked together and turned on with the idea of sharing a woman?

Make it virtually happen
My smartphone, that's where. 3nder (pronounced thrinder) is an app that's basically Tinder, but with the intention of pairing couples with thirds and vice versa. I had great hope, so I created a profile, customizing my preferences to find a pair of men who were into a devil's threeway. Unfortunately, there were only three sets in my area, all of whom appeared too feyand perhaps didn't understand the settings on the appfor my tastes.

I reached out to the app's creator, Dimo Trifonov. The London-based Bulgarian designer started the app after he and his girlfriend had trouble finding a third for some experimenting. They didn't relate to the clubbing lifestyle or swingers bars and were creeped out by polyamorous dating websites. So he designed 3nder as a way to branch out.

He says the demographic is 75 percent straight men, as well as couples and bi-curious girls who range in age from 18-26. Trifonov suspects that it draws a younger demographic who feel they don't have much to lose, while people with more conservative lifestyles might be nervous about the mandatory Facebook login.

Ironically, despite committing his life to an app that facilitates threesomes for people, Trifonov still hasn't had one. Unlike me, it was never a goal for him.

"We were curious at some point but it wore off," he says. "We keep an open mind but this app is so deep into my life and opened up my mind to experiences, so that's cool too."

Check your comfort levels
Reid Mihalko is a sex and relationship expert based in Oakland, California. While he regularly speaks at colleges and hosts seminars like 'How to be a Gentleman and Still Get Laid' and 'Navigate Successful Threesomes,' he didn't come at his experience through scholarly studies. Basically, he learned how to teach threesomes by having lots and lots of themmore than 150, though he can't place an exact number. When we spoke, he gave off the same open and affable vibes as a seasoned Burning Man attendee. It's also worth noting that in 2004, he founded New York City's Cuddle Party. Mihalko is full of tips and strategies to get things underway in consensual, comfortable circumstances.

His bottom line is that if you want to participate in a threesome, you need to feel emotionally and physically safe. If you're in a relationship, talk openly about what you'd like from the experience with your partner. If you're single, talk about who you'd like to engage withstrangers, friends, a coupleand be clear about how often you've all been tested. Mihalko says it's optimal for threesome virgins to have their first experience with someone who is old hat to such activity.

Once everything has been established and the three-way is close to going down, Mihalko suggests the best time to get things rolling is when it feels most awkward.

"Take a breath and say 'I have an idea,' and then you ask for something you'd like them to do for you," he says, adding that three-way kisses are great. "Instead of something you'd like to do to them, because some people get anxious receiving."

Most three-way newbies refer to porn for the base of their foundation, which MIhalko says is potentially disastrous.

"They don't think it's three people in a shower making out and soaping each other up," he says. "People get nervous of having it go from 0 to 100 in a heartbeat. When you can suggest things that you count as a threesome, it gives people more choice and options initiating and getting the threesome started."

Having dug deeper into threesomes in ways that didn't involve watching porn has helped reassure me that it's probably best I didn't make it happen when I wasn't entirely feeling it. My future game plan is to meet the right fellow, and make it a joint effort. That way, my intentions on having a threesome will feel more like teamwork than a solitary quest. But for now, I will channel the patience of a Buddha and re-watch Larry Clark's Ken Park as fodder for creative visualization.

Follow Elianna Lev on Twitter.

Still via DAILY VICE

Seminal Canadian indie band Arcade Fire were in Toronto this week promoting their new documentary The Reflektor Tapes, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film offers a glimpse into the making of 2013's Reflektor, the group's hugely successful double album, bouncing around from writing and recording sessions in Jamaica to shows in Los Angeles and an impromptu gig in Haiti. The whole thing kinda feels like an acid tripwithout the fun of actually being high. There's little narrative or dialogue, save for a few wisdom bombs like "People have false expectations about what love is" delivered in voice-over. Director Kahlil Joseph previously worked with Kendrick Lamar on m.A.A.d., a 15-minute short that showed at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art.

VICE spent some time with frontman Win Butler, his wife and bandmate Rgine Chassagne, and bassist Tim Kingsbury last weekend, where we asked them about the documentary and, in light of the upcoming federal election, politics.

VICE: What made you want to work with Kahlil Joseph on this project?
Win Butler: I personally think Kahlil is a major director. From a selfish perspective, I think it's really cool that his first feature length is going to be this film 'cause I know that he's gonna do major film work for the next like 30 years. When I was just in LA we saw a piece he did on Kendrick Lamar. I left the film feeling like I knew something about his process and something more intimate than a normal documentary would maybe tell me.

I'm hopeful that the film Kahlil made for us has a similar impact and you kind of get windows into the creative process and the art.

Haiti, obviously, you guys have a really strong connection to it. Can you talk about your philanthropy work there and why that's been so important to you?
Rgine Chassange: My family is from Haiti. I grew up always being told "You're so lucky to be here... Go to school, shut the fuck up, don't complain 'cause you have access to everything." I really had this in mind my whole life. I never thought I would be in a band ever. When I realized that it was going to be a real job and it was going to be successful, I really started to right away want to give back absolutely to Haiti, which is the poorest country in the hemisphere.

Butler: We started touring Funeral and on the course of that tour we went from playing 80-person rooms to, by the end it, selling out like six nights at venues in LA. It started to get kind of crazy. We were coming home to do a hometown show and, as a band, we decided we wanted to give away the money from the hometown show because we could. Once it became real, you're like, "Here's a bag of $10,000, what's actually going to happen with it?" I think that's when we read Mountains Beyond Mountains and started learning about Paul Farmer.

In light of the upcoming election, what local or Canadian issues do you think are important?
Tim Kingsbury: I'm excited to change governments. It seems like the Harper government has kind of constantly been keeping people in the dark more and more. You can see when he gives press conferences, he won't take questions. It's kind of weird

Butler: I actually learned recently that, as an American citizen, I'm not allowed to endorse, as a public figure, a Canadian. If I were like... "I wish the NDP would win the election," that would be completely illegal for me to do.

There have been opinion pieces in the media lately about Harper's legacy and how Canada seems to be skewing more to the right, in terms of its policies, and becoming more American in a sense. What do you make of that?
Butler: Not that American. When I first moved to Montreal, I feel like everyone I knew in a band was on some kind of an arts grant, like every single person in every band that I knew, which was kind of an amazing thing, and that's all completely gone. Systematically, things have kind of chipped away. But in terms of the big picture stuff... Canada is just way more liberal than the States, it's like not even comparable.

This interview has been edited for style and clarity.

Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.

so

Remember the Garbage Pail Kids? Yeah? That's probably because you're getting old. This year, the Cabbage Patch Kids-parody-turned-gross-out trading card series is celebrating three decades of delighting kids and horrifying adults.

The Topps collectionbrainchild of illustrators Art Spiegelman and Mark Newgardenrose to fame thanks to its cartoon depictions of children vomiting, being blown up, falling apart, and being subjected to more or less every other grotesque spectacle its artists could conjure up. It quickly became a massive success and was rolled out worldwide under local names like Snotlings (Italy) and Trashlings (Latin America). At the height of their popularity, the cards were actually banned from most schools in the States because teachers thought they were causing too much of a distraction.

To mark the anniversary, I emailed co-creator Mark Newgarden for a chat about why he first decided to start drawing kids being ravaged by spiders.

Mark Newgarden outside Topps, Brooklyn, 1986. Mark Newgarden 2015

VICE: You worked on Garbage Pail Kids from the start, right? How did the project come about?
Mark Newgarden: To some extent, Garbage Pail Kids grew out of a series called Wacky Packages that had been very successful for Topps in the late 1960s and 1970s. Wacky Packages were stickers, sold with bubble gum, that featured illustrated parodies of familiar consumer products. Crest Toothpaste became Crust Toothpaste, Pepsi Cola became Pupsi Cola, etc. I used to collect them as a kid and plaster them all over my mother's kitchen door.

In 1984 I got a job at Topps through my former teacher at the School of Visual Arts, Len Brown. He was working as the director of the Topps New Products Department and assigned me the task of developing material for a new Wacky Packages seriesthe first one in many years.

During the series' original run a lot of large companies sent "cease and desist" orders because of the parodies, so Topps was always looking for "fresh meat." The Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were taking off in American pop culture at the time, and they seemed like a solid target. I dubbed my parody Garbage Pail Kids and sketched it up. It seemed to work. The concept was subsequently moved up the production pipeline and became a sticker in the 1985 Wacky Packages series.

As our work on Wacky Packages progressed, the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls were rapidly becoming a pretty huge fad, and Topps was always interested in anything that was becoming a pretty huge fad

Original Mark Newgarden sketch for Wacky Packages, 1984. Mark Newgarden 2015

I read somewhere that they were trying to settle a license with the Cabbage Patch Kids people at some point. What happened to that?
From what I understand, the Cabbage Patch Kids people just weren't interested in bubble-gum cards, stickers, or Topps. I think they felt like it was too low-end a product category for their brand. You have to understand that those dolls were originally luxury items, more or less "hand crafted" and sold for fairly outrageous prices at exclusive stores they set up as "hospitals," complete with "medical staff." It was quite an elaborate marketing strategy.

Anyway, Arthur Shorin, the CEO of Topps, decided that if Topps couldn't get Cabbage Patch Kids then they'd do it their way. During one of Arthur's product meetings, the GPK Wacky Package paintingwhich was sitting in a folder on my deskwas requested for review. After the meeting, I got it back and Len Brown told me, "OK, this one's out. But now we have to figure out how to do 44 of these things!"

Related: Watch VICE's film about Mr. Cherry, Japan's Leading World Record Holder

How did you pick the artists and writers that ended up making it?
We got lucky. There was a lot of great talent at Topps at the time. John Pound became the lead artist on the GPK and, in my opinion, the success of the product was largely due to the high quality of his work. With his background as both a cartoonist and a science fiction and fantasy artist, John had the perfect skill sets for the job.

We asked John and two other artists to try out some different concepts of what Garbage Pail Kids might look like. Of the three, John, who'd already painted the GPK Wacky Package, scored a perfect bull's-eye. He submitted a lot of great ideas right off the bat. I think that between John and I, we "wrote" about half of the first series.

Tomas Bunk started out illustrating the card backs and soon became our second lead painter. Tomas was an underground cartoonist from Germany who had connected with Art Spiegelman after arriving in New York. His dense, manic, cartoony approach was a great compliment to John's more iconic work. The third major Garbage Pail Kids artist was James Warhola, another illustrator with a background in fantasy artand, believe it or not, the nephew of Andy Warhol. His renderings had this spooky, moody vibe that fit in nicely with the rest.

Most of the visual gags were created by Art and I, as well as by the artists themselves. John Pound, especially, was a real idea machine. I wrote most of the backs, along with Jay Lynch and others. It was a group effort.

Tomas Bunk and Mark Newgarden, Brooklyn, 1987. Mark Newgarden 2015

I remember reading that you thought you were the only one who was actually excited about the series. How come?
I think, in general, there was a certain ennui and a jaded attitude about the work among the Topps "brain trust." I found it perplexing at first. Today, I understand it a bit better. Part of the reason I was hired, I guess, was that I was young and eager, and maybe a little naive. I actually found doing this kind of thing fun. It wasn't a burden. It wasn't boring. I didn't have decades of history there and I wasn't entrenched in formulas. I liked it. So they took advantage of that and I was given leeway. I was 23 when I started and probably the youngest person in the whole building. Ben Solomon, the original head of the Topps production department, was still there at the time and was probably my elder by a half-century.

Anyway, once the series became a certified hit, everybody there, no matter how tangentially connected, wanted to put their name on it.

Did you expect it to be so popular with kids and annoy so many adults?
Garbage Pail Kids is exactly what children like. I wasn't entirely surprised by the controversy, either. I honestly don't know if Garbage Pail Kids would have ever got off the ground had it been made today. The PC police would probably shut it down pretty quickly.

Mark Newgarden Inside Topps, Brooklyn, 1987. Mark Newgarden 2015

I read that your parents were proud of your involvement in the project, and happy that you'd "found a slot somewhere to express the more perverse aspects of personality." What were you like as a kid?
I was the oldest of six kids. I read a lot, drew a lot, and entertained my younger siblings with disturbing stories and gross pictures. I guess it was the perfect background for the job.

Were there cards that never made it into the series because they took things a bit too far? Where did you draw the line?
We always had an extra painting or two up our sleeves for the final "elimination round" of each series. So if Arthur Shorin objected to an image we would have a slightly less edgy back-up ready to go. We would then resubmit the rejected images next time around, again and again, and eventually wear poor Arthur down. But yeah, there were still a few gags that never saw the light of day. A pickled baby floating in a jar, a kid in a wheelchair jumping off a diving board, a post-nuclear holocaust GPK wall shadow are a few of the ones I can remember. In total, we produced 16 seriesabout 660 imagesand more or less every finished painting was eventually included.

Did you get a lot of hate mail from outraged parents or teachers?
Topps tried hard to shield the creative team from direct contact with the public. We never received any credit for our work on the series. Occasionally a secretary would pass along a particular piece of mail if they thought I might get a kick out of it, but I never saw any death threats. We did see plenty of public hatred for GPK on TV newscasts and in print. Most of it was absurd and amusing, and of course it fueled sales. It was the perfect storm for Topps.

Mark Newgarden in Los Angeles, 1987. Mark Newgarden 2015

A live-action GPK movie was released in 1987. In 2005, you said you were yet to see a worse movie. Did you ever manage to find one?
No. I have no explanation as to why any movie could end up being quite so awful.

Do you think there's still room for children's satire today? Could you give me a few examples of some recent kid stuff that really made you laugh?
I like to think that there's still room for funny stuff for kids, and still I work hard at it. But I have to admit that I see less and less interesting, creative, and genuinely funny work being produced in any medium. The climate is wrong and the odds just seem to be stacked against it. There seems to be no more privately-owned businesses like Topps that peddle humor directly to kids without parents, teachers, librarians, or multi-tiered corporations running interference. I think humorespecially satiregenerally makes gatekeeper-type adults very, very nervous.

Follow Julie Lebaron on Twitter.

Cover art detail from 'Return to Earth,' a game so bad all usable screenshots have been destroyed

Nintendo's Wii was a remarkable console. It broke down barriers, offering a point of re-entry for lapsed gamers who felt the medium had moved on too far for them to feel involved, and a safe space for newcomers to take their first steps. It brought friends and families together, tacky plastic peripherals clashing over those mega-tubs of Quality Street you get at Christmasor just after, for half the price. It didn't care who you were, what your gaming past was, or what you wanted to achieve in waving a remote in front of a TV screen like you were trying to land a pixelated plane being beamed into your living room. The Wii never discriminated. Casual, hardcore, super-fan or fair-weather enthusiast, all players were welcomed.

Yet the Wii was host to some truly appalling video games, some of the worst ever made. There was Ninjabread Man, a game so badly broken and bug-riddled that playing it actually makes its awful pun of a title seem pretty funny. Pimp My Ride, the game, made the TV show it took its license from look worthy of all the Emmys a man could carry. There was Sexy Poker, which you've already worked out the depressing premise of in your head.

And 2010's Doctor Who: Return to Earth, despite all the promise of a great license and the incredible popularity of the BBC's flagship sci-fi series, was one of the Wii's most abhorrent exclusives. Official Nintendo Magazine, a publication you'd think would at least be sympathetic towards even the hottest garbage finding a home on a Nintendo system, awarded it a 19 percent review score. "A profoundly miserable experience," they wrote, chucking in such choice, unlikely-to-make-the-back-of-the-box words as "abysmal," "incoherent," and "contrived."

Sadly for fans of Doctor Whoand of gamingReturn to Earth was far from the first video game bearing the license to come out stinking worse than the dead Face of Boe left to crisp in the final fires of the Time War. Of the titles released since Doctor Who's 2005 revival, when Christopher Eccleston assumed the role of the Ninth Doctor, only 2013's match-three-style Doctor Who: Legacy, released to coincide with the series' 50th anniversary, received anything like a positive reception, and that was mostly because it was a freemium game that didn't immediately try to bleed your bank account dry. Someone did think of the children, for once.

At least all the monsters have been present and correct in relatively recent Who games, though. Back in the 1980s, when the BBC didn't fully own the rights to iconic characters like the Daleks and K-9 (it still doesn't), substitutes had to be used. 1985's Doctor Who and the Mines of Terror, a semi-Metroidvania-style platformer from a time before the original Metroid was even out, saw the Sixth Doctor encounter sort-of-familiar robotic enemies, except these ones were rolling around on caterpillar tracks. Close enough, but the game's production costs crippled its developer, Micro Power, and they effectively folded soon after its release.

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Back in 2012, Supermassive Gamesthe Surrey studio behind this summer's surprise hit Until Dawnteamed up with the BBC for Doctor Who: The Eternity Clock, which was supposed to represent the first game in a series. But while the puzzle-platformer wasn't in the Return to Earth bracket of unplayable brokenness, again the Who license had been squandered on something of a stinker. A wealth of great inspiration saw the game realize some creative momentsa section where River Song has to keep her eyes on several creepy sorts from the Silence as she side-scrolls her way towards a stasis field generator stood out as something different from the game's more basic puzzlesbut they were in vain as The Eternity Clock couldn't squeeze in enough of the show's singular warmth and wit to elevate the generally generic gameplay and overcome its own array of bugs. Said series was quickly canned.

History is littered with further failed Doctor Who franchise tie-inswhich is baffling, looking at what a terrifically profitable commodity it is for the BBC today. How can such an iconic character have been so poorly served by video games? We might have seen an outstanding title in the late 1980s, when licensed video games enjoyed a boom as companies like Ocean began to properly capture the spirit of movies like Batman and RoboCop in multi-format releases. If the TV show had been an all-ages international hit as it is today, back then, studios would have been queuing up to take it on. But it wasn't. It was adrift in the broadcasting doldrums, a fading franchise eventually put on ice in 1989 after Sylvester McCoy's tenure as the Seventh Doctor failed to reverse falling viewing figures. And post-comeback, we're yet to see the definitive Who game materialize, despite a fair few attempts. Which leads to the question: Will we ever?

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The Doctormultiple (re)generations of himwill appear in a video game this year, as the forthcoming LEGO Dimensions features a Doctor Who level pack. But regarding a headlining-capacity release of his own, the horizon appears empty. Unless, that is, you make your own. The Doctor Who Game Maker launches on the BBC website today (September 15), to coincide with the beginning of the TV show's new series on BBC One this Saturday night (September 19). A statement from the corporation promises the suite of drag-and-drop toolsI'm picturing a simplified take on what Super Mario Maker's doing right now, so very wellwill enable the creation of "brilliant games using a range of heroes, monsters, and worlds visited by the Doctor." It's more an educational vehicle than video game proper, part of the BBC's Make It Digital campaign, but the Game Maker will at least place the blame for any shoddy results, shareable online, firmly at the feet of the player who created them.

Beyond that, what would a good Doctor Who game even need, if made today? For one thing, it'd need to find focus within a fiction that permits its central protagonistand, presumably, a companion or someto travel anywhere in space and time. A Doctor Who game can be set in any period of human history past, in the here and now, or in a time so far ahead of where we are now that it can be completely ridiculous and yet somehow make sense because, hell, what do you care what the Earth's really going to be like in 2816? That in itself represents a massive demand on a creative team: limiting themselves to best serve a story, when the possibilities for environmental design are endless. What would the "game over" conditions be, when the Doctor can regenerate, becoming a new person? Can the Doctor actually die? (Yes, he cannot that he ever has, yet, I don't think, but we're now on Doctor 12 of a "maximum" of 13.)

'LEGO Dimensions,' Doctor Who trailer

Could some ambitious team take it on in the way that Rocksteady approached Batman with its Arkham series, and build their own Who universe (am I allowed to write "Whoniverse" here, or will someone come for my VICE card?) separately from what we already know, but retaining the same character names and their established personality traits? Perhaps different Doctors would possess different abilities, meaning that each playthrough could lead to new conclusions based on what's been unlocked between the opening cutscene and end credits? It'd have to be kid friendly, to a degree, but that doesn't mean it needs to lack imagination, novel gameplay or introduce entirely new characters (a brand-new Doctor, even) to fit an innovative mechanicjust look at Nintendo with their track record of producing amazing games playable by parents and children alike. In fact, just look at Nintendo.

Wait, you did that once already. Return to Earth. OK, maybe don't do that again.

There's also the Telltale model to consider, basing a story-driven, point-and-click-and-QTE game on the franchise in the way the Californian studio has The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, and, soon enough, tales from the Marvel Universe. That could work, certainly, and Telltale's record is decent at the momentTales from the Borderlands is scoring well, and Minecraft: Story Mode might prove more than the cash-first car crash of a tie-in that it looked like on its reveal. But it'd be a quick fix, an easy and obvious way out, an overly linear adventure when the scope for a Doctor Who game is immeasurably massive.

The opening moments of 'Doctor Who: The First Adventure'

Such an approach surely wouldn't satisfy those who've been waiting to play the Doctor in a meaningful way ever since 1983's The First Adventure gave a quartet of mini-games ripping off Pac-Man and more a Who makeover and shamelessly called itself the original "official" Doctor Who video game. (And besides, we've already had The Adventure Games, not that you can play them anymore.) Instead, I imagine fans pre-pubescent and post-retirement alike dreaming of a Mass Effect-like experience full of interplanetary exploration, countless aliens to fight and befriend, and just a dash of above-the-shirt romance.

But I don't think we'll ever see it. I don't think the program rights holder, the BBC, would risk its most valuable IP with any studio that wanted to go big and bold with a character so strictly controlled, so meticulously shaped over several hundred episodes, be that BioWare, Telltale, or anyone else. Inevitable interference from New Broadcasting House would undoubtedly compromise any game director's vision for where an interactive Who goes; which might be why what's come out thus far has been so pathetically piss poor or, at best, entirely rudimentary. Too many voices, too little sense: a decent Doctor Who may forever prove the impossible game.

Of course, I could be proven wrong. I'd like to be proven wrong. But until then it's either build your own, make do with LEGO Dimensions, or just shut up and play The Phantom Pain like everyone else.

Get more information on The Doctor Who Game Maker, and the new series of the TV show, at the BBC. LEGO Dimensions is released on September 27.

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Photo by Ben Thomson

My cat Milkshakes is the obese, whinging, hair-shedding love of my life. But for all the tender feelings she stirs in me, I barely register in her world. I'm nothing more than a bag of flesh who feeds her tins of meat. Unless I'm getting changed, in the shower, on the toilet, or having sexthen I'm the single most interesting thing in the world.

She's not only interested in me, though. If anyone takes off their pants near my apartment she knows about it. She spends hours staring through a gap in the balcony that looks into my neighbor's living room, but only when their kids go out and they fool around on the couch.

At first I didn't mind; it was kind of funny. But it has become increasingly unsettling to feel those yellow eyes peering through the dark during my most vulnerable moments. I feel ashamed over raising a pervert. To understand this body obsessed thing that lives with me, I called Richard Gowan, a feline veterinarian from the Cat Clinic to see if he could work out why my cat was such a creep.

VICE: I feel really embarrassed talking to your about this.
Richard Gowan: It's OK, I get asked embarrassing animal things all the time. At least we're on the phone and not face-to-face.

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Photo via Facebook/Patrick Brazeau

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He's admitted to beating up his ex-girlfriend and possessing cocaine so, naturally, disgraced politician Patrick Brazeau has his eye on returning to the Canadian Senate.

On Tuesday, the former Conservative senator pleaded guilty in a Gatineau, Quebec courthouse to simple assault and cocaine possession. Four more charges including sexual assault against his ex-girlfriend, two assaults and uttering a death threat were dropped.

Both Brazeau's defence attorney, Gerard Larocque, and the crown prosecutor called for an absolute discharge, which would leave Brazeau without a criminal record (for now). Larocque reportedly told the judge that his client's chances of returning to the Senate are "excellent" with said discharge. He won't be sentenced until late October.

Speaking to the media, Brazeau, 40, said the "nightmare's over." He was booted from the Tory caucus when the assault charges surfaced in early 2013 and was later suspended from the Senate (along with fellow Conservatives Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin) over disputed expenses.

Brazeau, described the sexual assault charge as "the worst or one of the worst that anybody can have. And I've been living that for two-and-a-half years, and it's over."

Only, it's not quite over. Brazeau still has two trials in his future, for impaired driving and fraud relating to his Senate expenses.

His immediate plan, he said, was to take a vacation.

But even if Brazeau's Senate comeback eludes him, his work experience leaves him with some solid options, namely, boxing, refereeing pro wrestling, and managing a strip club.

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Pablo Picasso. 'Bull.' c. 1958. The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. All photos courtesy of the Modern Museum of Art

In1966, Paris's Petit Palais was preparing a retrospective of the work of PabloPicasso. The exhibition would include paintings from every epoch of his career.But to the curators, it felt incomplete. Since his youth, Picasso had assembledthree-dimensional objects from disparate materials as wood, wire, bronze, andrefuse. But the artist had turned down every offer to show these pieces,and the works were kept in privacy. "Picasso's sculptures mainly kept Picasso company during his long hours in the studio," said MoMA curator Anne Umland.

The artist eventually relented to thePetit Palais curators, allowing them to show a selection of his sculptures, butthe works have not been shown in the 49 yearsuntil now. Yesterday, MoMA openedPicasso Sculpture, the second publicshowing of Picasso's three-dimensional work and the most comprehensivegathering of these works ever. Situated in the museum's 11-room, fourth-floorgallery, these works are displayed by the episodically driven periods duringwhich Picasso created sculptural work, with each room representing a distinctperiod: "Early Years," "Cubist Years," "War Years," and so on.

This is the first time they've all been comprehensively put together, and it will likely be the last of such an exhibition in our lifetime. Anne Umland, MoMA curator

Pablo Picasso. 'Chair.' 1961. Muse national PicassoParis 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

"Unlike Picasso's paintings, which can be mapped as an unbroken thread, Picasso would have these windows of activity, which he would then abruptly end," said Ann Temkin, the museum's chief curator of paintings and sculptures. "And whenever he would return to sculpture his output would be dynamically different from the previous episode. It's hard to walk through the exhibition and believe you are seeing the same artist's work. There's no clear thread the whole way through."

Interestingly, the show does notstart at the beginning, but at the end. On the fourth-floor landing, bathed in sunlight, the first sculptures of Picasso's that I came across werealso his final, and his hand is immediately recognizable. These works ofpainted sheet metal included an origami-style chair; a miniature, lithe horse; a Michelin Man-like creature with outstretched arms as if to give a hug;and two prototypes of monumentally scaled works: Bust of Sylvette, a fixture of the NYU campus, and Marquette for the Richard J. Daley Center,more famously known in its park-sized incarnation as "Chicago Picasso."

In a bold curatorial move, however, MoMAhas opted not to include labels for any of the 141 pieces included in the show."We felt labels might be visually disruptive," explained Temkin. "But if peoplecomplain we can have them up in a day." (Glenn Lowry, the museum's directorsitting adjacent to her, sputtered, "A day?") The risk of mis- ornon-identification is dodged by a small, printed guide obtainable at theinformation kiosk. You can, of course, choose not to consult this. Picassoseems to have named many of his sculptures for organizational purposesalone. Given that these weren't made for the public in mind, why would Picassoeven bother to give names to creations that are so visually distinct? Such wasmy thought when I discovered that the chair was Chair, the little horse LittleHorse, and the Michelin Man? Womanwith Outstretched Arms.

Once he learned the rules, of course, he immediately tried to figure out ways to break them. Umland

Pablo Picasso. 'Glass of Absinthe.' Spring 1914. The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Pablo Picasso. 'Guitar.' 1924. Muse national PicassoParis 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Many of these objects come with intriguing backstories that are easy to miss without an audio guide. Take the six separate pieces all named Glass of Absinthe found in the "Cubist Years" room. The glasses are each topped with sugar cubes that are each dotted in different colors, touching upon the supposed psychedelic properties of the drink. But rather than make his own, Picasso laid his sugar cubes to rest upon real absinthe labels.

"Theabsinthe glasses were created in 1914, the same year that France banned theconsumption of absinthe," explained Umland. "That was also the year WWI brokeout, and Picasso's dealer was a German. His shop closed, and all the absintheglasses except one kept by Picasso were sold off in private deals. We had aheck of time tracking them all down, but here they all are, together for thefirst time since Picasso had them cast." The room also includes two ofPicasso's almost identical sculpted guitars, one made of metal, and one ofcardboard.

"The cardboard sculpture in particular bewildered a lot of people who didn't see it as sculpture," continued Umland. "The truth was, Picasso was making things without actually knowing the rules. He was never trained as a sculptor. Which explains why the wires for strings are hooked on the rest of the body. He didn't know how to solder them on!" Then a laugh: "We actually call this the party room, since it's got music and drink."

Pablo Picasso. 'Flowery Watering Can.' 195152. Muse national PicassoParis 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

After the outset of WWI, Picassostopped making sculpture, instead focusing on his growing fame as a painter. Theprompt for his return was a commission in 1927 to create a memorial for hisfriend the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had died of influenza at the war's end. Ratherthan return to familiar materials, Picasso enlisted the help of a metalsculptor, Julio Gonzlez, who taught the artist how to bend and solder metal.

"Onethinks of Picasso as the quintessential individual genius," observed Umland."But he developed an intense workmanship relationship with other artists, whotaught him how to use materials. Once he learned the rules, of course, heimmediately tried to figure out ways to break them."

The many skeletal wiresculptures, included in the "Monument to Apollinaire" room, resembleGiacometti-like figures within geometric structures. Even from a shortdistance, however, it's hard to see them as more than lines. "Imagine proposinga monument that is basically made out of thin air," said Umland. None of Picasso's proposals were accepted.

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I noticed a large upright assemblagestanding in a secluded space in the gallery. Woman in the Garden is suggestive of its title, a seated figure seems to be pushed by a breeze as she tends to two large flowers. Iwandered around her noticing the dimensional detail of the womanno matter whatangle I stood at, it seemed to be the right one. Here I felt Picasso had trulyachieved a Cubist sculpture, that all perspectives were open game.

It turns out I wasn't theonly one to appreciate the piece. Not long into my viewing, a TV crew walked inand set up in front of the sculpture. A TV newswoman began to speak rapidly ina Brazilian-accented Portuguese while gesturing at the work. I would encountermore TV crews, more cameras, and a horde of journalists, more than a presspreview normally drew out. It dawned on me that this exhibition of Picasso's sculpturewasn't localized to New York City, that it was an international event.

"This is the first time they've allbeen comprehensively put together," confirmed Umland, "and it will likely bethe last of such an exhibition in our lifetime."

Pablo Picasso. 'Woman in the Garden.' Spring 192930. Muse national PicassoParis 2015 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

It took me two loops to really takein everything. After the Apollinaire came a series of playful plaster busts ofwomen's heads that, despite their bloated or mutated appearances, cast a feelingof joy at the female formone of Picasso's favorite subjects.

Past that thelights dimmed, and we were thrust into the WWII years that Picasso lived out inNazi-occupied Paris. As well as a lover, Picasso had a streak for defiance anddissent. One particular piece, Death Mask,a black paper skull that testifies in one bold metaphor to the horror of Nazioccupation. What is amazing is that Picasso had it cast in bronzemetals werestrictly regulated by the Nazis, who plundered the material for their army,even melting preexisting artwork for ammunitionand if Picasso had beencaught, he would have certainly been jailed. The skull is, then, a middlefinger to Hitler.

Toward the end of the show, after anotable ceramic period at his home in Vallauris, Picasso became an increasingproficient "ragpicker," as Temkin described him.

"He made friends in Cannesand Vallauris with all the people who ran junk heaps, scrapyards, anddemolition companies," she explained. "They provided his materials."

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There's acrane with a spigot for a head, there's a little girl jumping rope with awicker basket for a chest. Only the rope touches the ground. ("Picasso dreamedof a floating sculpture," noted Umland. "This is as close as he got.")

Andthen there are the batherssix large wooden figures, Picasso's onlymulti-figurative piece made of disparate pieces of wooden, all slightly tannedand faceted in body. I wandered around them, wishing that I too were at abeach, noticing that one even had a panel hammered in his backside, with anetch for a butt-crack.

"Even at 75," said Temkin, "Picasso was just having funwith wood, hammer, and nails, making sculptures that were bigger than he was."

Picasso's final sculpture was the large abstract face that sits in Chicago. Supposedly he was offered $100,000 dollarsfor the commission. Picasso famously turned it down.

"It's a gift," he said. "Forthe people of Chicago, for everyone."

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Picasso Sculpture is on display at the Museum ofModern Art in New York through February 7, 2016.