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Illustration by Stephen Maurice Graham

It's easy to forget the great games that have emerged in 2014. The games that millions of players from across the spectrum have participated in. Because, frustratingly, GamerGate has managed to tarnish much of what was previously seen as a pastime for pleasure. The widely documented abuse began sometime in August, and the repercussions of those first shots fired are yet to be fully realized.

If you're looking for a snapshot summary of what GamerGate's been, and what it might mean, you're in the wrong place. I've already tried that, twice— once with perhaps the wrong steel-toe-capped boot forward, but the best intentions; and secondly in a more olive-branch manner, only to be accused of "bargaining" (oh please, strangers on the internet). This isn't that piece.

I don't think anyone can successfully condense GamerGate in a balanced way, as none of us can help leaning toward a side of the dividing line that's going to cause unrest on the other—or simply alienating moderately interested readers with terminology that most won't have the time or inclination to translate. The fact is that very few people actually care, actively, about GamerGate. Try talking about it with friends at the bar, or with a loved one. Unless they are fairly game savvy, they won't give a shit.

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Anita Sarkeesian talks about GamerGate on 
 The Colbert Report

Even after the New York Times wrote about it, even after Colbert devoted a segment to it (above), even after the BBC had Zoe Quinn in tears, after everything else: The specifics of GamerGate remain of only limited interest to the kind of person who just wants to play FIFA and Call of Duty after a few Friday night beers. These blockbuster games aren't about to be usurped commercially by more cerebral creations from the indie sector—whatever the coverage they receive from critics whose job it is to highlight progress in their specialist field.

"Pro"-side writer Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart columnist whose writing on GamerGate has been acutely antagonistic, is writing a book on the subject. Good luck to him, I say: It'll be the only publication out next year that'll be both outdated and issued too soon to appreciate the complete picture, as that'll remain imprecise until all games come to a grinding halt, which they won't. Games are worth too much—economically, socially, emotionally, culturally, cathartically, you-name-it-ally.

I see some relevance in the more measured side of the "controversy," which concerns itself with ethics, with what consumers want versus what they're told they should have. I think it's an aspect of proceedings blown way out of proportion, because the gaming press can successfully self-regulate; but I do see how gamers of a particular persuasion might feel "bullied," almost, by a literate, connected, and friendly media that is interested in promoting a brand of game that they're not only unfamiliar with, but afraid of.

There's fear behind a lot of GamerGate rhetoric—fear that the rise of a more varied array of gaming options will in some way marginalize the traditional shooters and sports simulations. But to deny these smaller, more niche productions space to exist beside the big boys is to promote inequality and everything that comes with it, from attitudes on feminism to political persuasions. Nobody that GamerGate has been seen to attack wants to steal away the big-budget blow-up-everything affairs—not even Feminist Frequency's Anita Sarkeesian, who has repeatedly stated that games she identifies sexist shortcomings in can be enjoyed despite these factors—but everyone needs to be OK with a growing field of alternatives.

But we're on well-muddied ground here. Whatever side you want to consider yourself a part of, there's limited point in us persisting with the usual arguments. Public-facing "Social Justice Warriors" of the games press get time off at Christmas just as much as those who'd rather hide behind Twitter pseudonyms to publish their agendas. Christmas is a time for forgiving (if not forgetting, in this case), so perhaps we can all take a day or two to really assess our attitude toward games, GamerGate, and what we want this great passion of ours to be going forward. Because whether you're "Pro" or "Anti" in all of this, there's a unifying quality apparent: You love games.

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PlayStation Access offers eight reasons to love Dragon Age: Inquisition—all of which seem lost on "serious" gamers, according to Breitbart's Yiannopoulos

Except Yiannopoulos, actually. He's previously tweeted that gamers are " beta-male bollock-scratchers and 12-year-olds," "overweight, awkward and lazy," and, by his own admission, didn't even play games to any great extent until September of this year. His "review" of Dragon Age: Inquisition for Breitbart is laughable, with talk of "serious" and "ordinary" gamers—seemingly the same thing here—actually belittling the audience he's so eager to court. He's a limpet on the hull of a ship he can't steer, with ambitions of evolving into some kind of colossal squid and dragging the whole vessel under to serve his opportunism.

But perhaps Yiannopoulos will come to love games as a consequence of writing his GamerGate book. Perhaps, too, he'll appreciate that when the "gamers are dead" instance of "journalist collusion" occurred in late August, the sentiment was not one of confrontation, but of acceptance that a new norm has manifested. There isn't one type of "gamer," and all notions of there being such a stereotype should be dashed at this point.

Gamers don't all spend their days in basements. They're not all spotty dorks, goofballs or geeks. They can be good at sports. They can have wildly attractive partners and make big money that they spend on lavish homes. They can also be poor, struggling, and desperate. They are everyone—and, as such, cannot be defined by a term as restrictive as "gamer." Nobody is a "musicer" or a "filmer"—you like punk and I like jazz, but we both contribute to something bigger.

There isn't one type of "gamer," and all notions of there being such a stereotype should be dashed at this point.

The entry for "gamers are dead" on the evidently "Pro"-maintained GamerGate Wiki is a gift that keeps on giving, as is much of the site: "GamerGate is a consumer revolt aimed at addressing the collusion, corruption and censorship within gaming journalism, [and] the harassment of women is neither the point of the movement nor even tangentially related to achieving this goal."

Yes, we've heard the sales pitch. Say it again to the women frightened enough by the abuse they received over social media to quit the industry entirely. The harassment was the point—and the debate regarding ethics and the like came well after the puncture wounds had been delivered.

Nobody who's been singled out for sustained abuse as a direct result of GamerGate—to the extent where they've left their homes, feared for families and loved ones, or lost essential income—will forgive their tormenters easily. They're still bleeding. Speaking to Giant Spacekat studio co-founder Brianna Wu recently, I asked if there could be a silver lining to GamerGate, that by receiving abuse (Wu has been one of the most persistently targeted women across this "consumer revolt") she's actually benefitted, as her elevated profile will direct more attention the way of her team's work.

"At a terribly high price," is her response, "for myself and all the other women targeted. It's undeniable that diversity in games is something that more people understand is more important than ever before. For myself, personally, it's no exaggeration to say that I'm one of the best-known women working in games today, as a result of being targeted. And, you know, I'm sure that'll eventually result in opportunities for my studio. So I think it came at a very high price, but I think that the people against diversity showed how they really are. And I think in doing that they made a really fantastic argument for diversity in games."

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Giant Spacekat's debut game, Revolution 60

Even at its most hateful, then, GamerGate hasn't been without some sort of positives to pull from the wreckage of its worst instances of misogyny—which, it must be stressed, comes from only a very small percentage of those identifying themselves as GG supporters. And abuse has been dished out and received by players on both sides—so while the stories of Wu, Quinn, and Sarkeesian have made headlines, we shouldn't forget that you can be a complete dipshit with access to a Twitter account and consider yourself an advocate for diversity in gaming. Besides, it's perfectly acceptable to enjoy many types of games: Wu might work in the indie sector, but at the time of our conversation she's put 80 hours into Far Cry 4, a wholly mainstream, triple-A title featuring dudes with guns and a good few bare breasts.

All that said, it's also important to remember that, of the celebrities on the "Anti" side who've criticized GamerGate's sexist slant, actress (and renowned gaming culture aficionado) Felicia Day was "doxxed" whereas the equally, if not more vocal, Chris Kluwe—a the football punter turned writer—did not. It's definitely not about misogyny, then. Except when it clearly is.

Some of the very journalists highlighted as "SJW"s to avoid—including VICE Vs Video Games contributors Keza MacDonald and Leigh Alexander—have, in a quite perverse fashion, "benefitted" from the experience. Many will bear lasting scars, but I know of writers whose highlighted role among the tweeters and trolls resulted in, as Wu so eloquently implies, more work. Which is something to be thankful for after months of turbulence.

So what the hell: merry Christmas, GamerGate. Grab a cup of nog and cozy up by the fireside. You know, we're not all so different. Sure, some of you need shutting down if games are ever to attain the artistic status enjoyed by music and movies, but games are young, and growing all the time.

Right here, we're generation zero for games—the first group of shared-interest individuals united by so much and divided by so little. We're adapting to live with gaming's expansion, ever-changing tastes, and polar-opposite perspectives, like nobody before us. This isn't Sega versus Nintendo—it's so much more multifaceted than that.

But I think we've all learned something from GamerGate—whether, in the case of those cashing in, that's to monetize the misery of others; or to accept that whatever any of us do or say, games will continue to diversify; or that "gamers," as a catchall collective noun, deserves to stay dead.

Cheers!

Follow Mike Diver on Twitter.

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All photos by the author

On Saturday night in Brooklyn, solemn quiet hung over the area surrounding Myrtle Avenue and Tompkins Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a few hours earlier Ismaaiyl Brinsley "assassinated" NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos while they were eating lunch in their squad car before taking his own life. Officers working overtime to protect the crime scene or show their support off-the-clock packed nearby delis, soft-spokenly placing orders before returning to their partners with sandwiches and hot drinks.

At around 10 PM, visibly distraught NYPD employees and relatives gathered in silence at Woodhull Memorial Hospital to salute their fallen comrades, as the bodies of Officers Lui and Ramos were carried away. After the emotional ceremony, officers patted each other on the back, embraced, and stood quietly around the hospital where their colleagues were pronounced dead.

The somber evening took a combative turn when Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch spoke to the press moments after the bodies of Liu and Ramos were carried out of the hospital. He placed blame for the " execution" on Mayor Bill de Blasio and the protesters who have been holding demonstrations for police accountability across the city.

"There's blood on many hands tonight. That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor," Lynch told reporters after the ceremony. "Those that incited violence on the street under the guise of protests that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did every day."

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Patrolmen's Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch

Earlier in the day, an inflammatory statement initially attributed to the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, which later denied issuing the memo, read, "The mayor's hands are literally dripping with our blood because of his words, actions and policies and we have, for the first time in a number of years, become a 'wartime' police department. We will act accordingly."

Before de Blasio's remarks, WPIX11 recorded a video showing officers turn their back to the mayor as he arrived. Lynch later confirmed the disapproving statement from officers with a nod to reporters inquiring about the incident.

Lynch and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association have quickly developed a fraught relationship with de Blasio, whose support for court-issued NYPD reforms and remarks sympathetic to racially-charged policing have been deemed betrayal. After de Blasio told ABC's This Week he spoke with his biracial son Dante about acting carefully around police, the PBA urged officers to notify de Blasio and another politician sympathetic to demonstrators, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, that they are not welcome to attend their funerals, should they die in the line of duty.

De Blasio spokesperson Marti Adams said of Lynch's most recent tirade, "It's unfortunate that in a time of great tragedy, some would resort to irresponsible, overheated rhetoric that angers and divides people," adding that "Mayor de Blasio understands this is the time when we must come together to support the families and friends of those brave officers New York City lost tonight, and the entire NYPD community."

At a press conference before the bodies were carried away, de Blasio issued a teary-eyed remembrance of Liu and Ramos, honoring the men and women of the NYPD.

"When a police officer is murdered, it tears at the foundation of our society," the mayor said. "It is an attack on all of us. It's an attack on everything we hold dear. We depend on our police to protect us against forces of criminality and evil. They are a foundation of our society, and when they are attacked, it is an attack on the very concept of decency."

The family of Missouri teenager Michael Brown—whose death did not result in an indictment for the police officer who shot him, causing widespread protests—also issued a statement condemning the "senseless" killing. "We reject any kind of violence directed toward members of law enforcement," it read. "It cannot be tolerated. We must work together to bring peace to our communities. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the officers' families during this incredibly difficult time."

At a press conference with the Reverend Al Sharpton Sunday morning, Eric Garner's mother Gwen Carr expressed her condolences for the NYPD's loss, and bemoaned violence in the name of justice for her son. "I'm standing here in sorrow about losing those police officers...we stand with the families," said Carr, "We are going in peace, and anybody who's standing with us, we don't want you to use Eric Garner's name for violence." Garner was killed by a lethal police chokehold on Staten Island this summer.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams on Sunday urged police reform protesters to hold-off on demonstrations "out of respect and decency" until Liu and Ramos are laid to rest. He called on New Yorkers to join him at the intersection where Liu and Ramos were attacked for a candlelight vigil in the evening, but also pushed back on the police unions' attacks on the mayor.

"Blood is on the hands of one individual—a sick man who did a sick act," Adams said.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. stressed that the killings were a "hate crime," which Congress has defined as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation."

Echoing Lynch, the head of the New Jersey PBA, Patrick Colligan, said in a statement that the shooting is "nothing less than an act of domestic terrorism spurred on by so much recent hatred aimed at officers everywhere."

Though Brinsley was initially tied by some reports to the Black Guerrilla Family—a Baltimore gang whose plan to target "white officers" and "send a message" was detailed by the FBI in a Friday memo—federal law enforcement agents have told the Baltimore Sun that Brinsley has no known ties to the group. Earlier this month, a Black Guerrilla Family threat to harm the NYPD was deemed "not credible."

The motive behind Brinsley's shooting of his ex-girlfriend earlier Saturday has largely been ignored, even though that event appears to have set off his anti-cop rampage. Her blood may be on Brisley's clothing in photographs he posted to Instagram with the caption, "Never Had a Hot Gun On Your Waist and Blood on Your Shoe...Nigga You Ain't Been Through What I Been Through You Not Like Me And I'm Not Like You." According to NBC, "Brinsley's mother and sister told the NYPD that he was a violent person and that they were afraid of him."

The New York Times reported Sunday that Brinsley may have experienced mental illness. According to the Times, during an August 2011 plea hearing in Cobb County, Georgia, Brinsley was asked, "Have you ever been a patient in a mental institution or under the care of a psychiatrist or psychologist?" to which he responded yes. NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce, citing the suspect's family, said Sunday that he attempted to hang himself about a year ago. The Times report also touches on his record of brushes with the law, which includes charges for serious offenses like making terroristic threats and weapons violations.

The paper added that the Baltimore County Police Department learned of Brinsley's threatening Instagram posts at about 1:30 PM Saturday, and then telephoned the NYPD's 70th precinct to notify the department of his whereabouts at around 2:00. Almost exactly at the time of the killing 45 to 50 minutes later, the Baltimore cops faxed a warning memo to the NYPD's real-time crime center.

On Sunday, flags at New York City administrative offices were being flown at half-staff.

Follow Kristen Gwynne on Twitter.

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Illustration of Erik Davis by Craig "Questions" Scott

Erik Davis is an author, scholar and connoisseur of the weird. He's spent over 20 years exploring fringe movements, occult covens, and liminal cyberspaces, finding some time in between to become one of the world's leading authorities on West Coast counterculture and write about everything from California's alternative spiritual groups to Burning Man.

I recently spoke to him over Skype about psychedelics, conspiracy theories, and "haunted technology."

VICE: The phrase "follow your weird" has been associated with you. What do you mean by that?
Erik Davis: It's what I did instead of getting a normal job. I followed weirdness and wrote about it. The exploration of the unusual became a way of being. Most of the interesting people I've met did the same thing; characters like Terrence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson—those guys were very good at following their weird.

I was struck by the phrase one of you mentors used: "PhDs don't impress me; people who have confronted the void impress me." What impact did that kind of thinking have on your life?
When I heard that, something shifted inside. I realized that thinking, talking, and reading fall short of encounters that go beyond ordinary thought. It's important to keep portals open to those experiences.

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Davis talking in DMT: The Spirit Molecule

Are you talking about taking psychedelics?
There are many portals. I have a lot of respect for psychedelics and the way they challenge, shatter and call forth new perspectives, but sometimes we can overemphasize the extreme experiences at the expense of looking for less stressful ways of keeping the mind open. Meditation, yoga, and sexuality are all ways of pushing the limits of experience without shattering your perception.

Can you explain your concept of "techgnosis"?
Techgnosis describes the way in which technology is haunted by spiritual dreams, fears, and hopes. We think that technology is a work of science, but if you look at how we use it, these supposedly rational devices are overwhelmed by the "irrational" parts of ourselves.

Give me an example of a haunted piece of technology.
The way we experience the power of computers very much recalls the old magicians who dreamt of devices that could give you all the information in the world—the ability to see into the past and to communicate over great distances.

So is the act of downloading similar to a magical ritual like the ones performed by renaissance magicians?
Renaissance magicians believed that by doing certain operations using codes, rituals, and esoteric symbols, they could communicate with angelic forces, and these forces could give them information. A similar pattern of belief is operating in how we use technology today.

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Photo by Flickr user Charles Kremenak

You seem to have a more positive take on online life compared to those who say we're creating more and more degrees of separation between ourselves and "true reality," whatever that is.
No, actually [I don't]. The techgnosis idea recognizes the positive aspects and simultaneously acknowledges that online spaces are fraught with diabolical possibilities. The unnerving fact is that surveillance and manipulation is conceivable on a level never imagined before.

Also, for me, the spaces created by technology are infested with the spirit of the trickster, who is an archetype you find in many different cultures. The trickster appears as an inventive hero but also screws stuff up. He presides over liminal spaces where nothing is clear.

Let's take Facebook—how does the trickster manifest there?
A lot of people think that Facebook is a groovy free service that allows them to communicate with their friends and family. They never expected Facebook to start manipulating their news feeds in order to see the effect on their emotions.

OK, I get you. You're aware of the Tulpa phenomenon—sentient beings imagined into existence, who then post messages online. What's your take on this fusion of occultism and modern technology?
It seems now that these old techniques are being pulled out of their occult context and employed in the spirit of pure experiment. It's like Jackass occultism. The "Three Kings Ritual" thread on Creepypasta is another example.

Do you see this kind of online occult activity as an extension of the counterculture that began in the 50s and 60s?
Any alternative exploratory group that isn't Republican has some relationship to the counterculture. The kids taking the bungee jump into ayahuasca space are clearly an extension of the old hippie movement. But I also think there are subcultures that are totally far out and new—tulpamancers and furries, for example.

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A chalk drawing of Slenderman. Photo by Flickr user Dangaard via

One thing that strikes me as very fresh is Slenderman—the first monster to emerge purely out of the internet.
Slenderman is significant because it has a real force. Think about it—what's the difference between a fiction and a god? A god is a fiction that everyone believes in. Sometimes fictions can take on a similar kind of reality. Take Sherlock Holmes: In some senses he has more "reality" than your average detective in a crime novel. Reddit and Creepypasta have become venues for a self-aware experiment with that part of human consciousness—the way fictional characters can take on a life of their own.

That brings me to conspiracy theories. There seems to be a sliding scale of conspiracy theories, with David Icke and his lizard people at one end, and Russell Brand and his watered-down Illuminati at the other. What do you think that trend is all about?
It's important to recognize that the term "conspiracy theory" is a derogatory term used against people who are sometimes pointing out very real, very harmful conspiracies. Power, in essence, takes the form of conspiracy. So even if you're not a crazy left-winger, but a reasonable left-winger, there's a lot of truth to seeing our current condition as the result of conspiracy.

But even if a given shadowy group exists, that doesn't mean they have their hand on the lever any more than any of the other groups out there with their own crazy agendas. I see many manipulative groups: corporations, intelligence agencies, the super-rich, pranksters, and transhumanist technologists. All these groups are making a move on the future, so if you go hunting for conspiracy you're going to find it all over the place.

You've written about your early drug use being an initiatory experience. Would you recommend that teenagers take LSD?
It's definitely not the kind of thing that I would blanketly recommend. There are a lot of people who should never do LSD. I can't judge who they are, and you might not even know yourself. But, at the same time, you can't know where it might be appropriate.

But due to technological changes, like the Oculus Rift, and the explosion in ayahuasca use, I think we'll live in a much more psychedelic world in years to come.

When you say "psychedelic world", do you mean a world where people take more psychedelics or a world where the general consciousness is more open?
A little of both. If you mix the alternative reality games of the Creepypasta world, the sound and light machines of rave culture and our increasing knowledge of the way the nervous system creates reality, then you won't need to be taking any compounds in order to trip balls.

The revised edition of Erik's book Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information will be out in March of 2015. For more from Erik, listen to his podcast Expanding Mind, or read any of his many articles on www.techgnosis.com.

More stuff about this kind of stuff:

Meet the 'Tulpamancers': The Internet's Newest Subculture Is Incredibly Weird

A Chaos Magician

Whoa, Dude, Are We Inside a Computer Right Now?

MATTE magazine is a photography journal I started in 2010 as a way to shed light on good new photography. Each issue is devoted to the work of one artist, and the magazine is printed in full color with no ads and sold for the cost of production. MATTE is collected by the libraries of MoMA, ICP, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art . As photo editor of VICE, I'm excited to share my discoveries with a wider audience.

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James Gentile is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose father, Lou, is the foremost expert on player piano maintenance in New England. As part of his profession, Lou is also called upon to dispose of old pianos that have been abandoned or are decayed beyond repair. He does this by pushing them off the back of his truck at the local dump in Scituate, Massachusetts. For the past two years, James has been documenting this process—which Lou jokingly calls "shit-canning pianos"—by shooting action sequences, collecting Lou's cellphone videos, and recording the ephemera around the dead pianos and his dad's repair shop.

Issue 26 of MATTE features James's story, alongside a documentary short video produced by Cameron Cuchulainn and edited by Annelise Jeske.

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James Gentile is a Brooklyn-based photographer. See new work on his website.

Purchase physical copies of issue 26 of MATTE magazine featuring photos by James Gentile on mattemagazine.org.

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Malls have been symbols of a certain kind of surreal suburban America for so long that they seem like permanent features of the landscape. But the truth is they're dying out, and it's not hard to imagine that in a couple generations malls will be just another IRL institution killed by the internet.

Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen ushered in the era of the mall in 1956 with the opening of the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. His idea was to enclose all the places we like to shop into one convenient building at the heart of town, with a confusing layout intended to distract shoppers from their original goals and get them to hang out and socialize with each other. Thanks to changes in the depreciation tax enacted by Congress in 1954, investing in massive shopping centers became potentially more lucrative than playing the stock market, and between 1950 and 2005, more than 1,500 malls opened up in the US.

American malls have hit hard times in the past decade, however. This is likely due to the rise of the online shopping and the fact that teenagers are spending more time in virtual spaces, where they can sext and play video games, and less time loitering around food courts. A new mall hasn't been built in the US since 2006 and only 1,000 malls are still standing today. Many of these old symbols of commercialism are being converted into bowling alleys and storage facilities, others are just left to rot in disarray. It's gotten so bad, there's even a website dedicated to writing the obituaries of malls.

But is the age of the shopping mall really over? I wanted to find out. So I went to Oaks Mall in Gainesville, Florida. Oaks Mall was built in 1978, and in 1984, the Ocala Star Banner called it the "major retail center for North Central Florida," estimating it had brought in more than $50 million in sales and was employing more than 800 Floridians. Today, the lines aren't as long as they were back then, the parking lots aren't as full, and the shops aren't as bountiful. Recently the mall has seen the closing of major stores that have been struggling nationwide, like Abercrombie & Fitch, Cold Water Creek, and Ann Taylor.

To figure who still shops at American malls and why, I approached some customers at Oak Mills and asked them a few questions.

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I found University of Florida dining hall cook Timmie Perry sifting through a mass of mini fuchsia shirts and sequined skirts with his wife, Takoma Ross, at Sears. The recently married couple was shopping for a dress for their daughter's second birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's—which, yes, also still exists.

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I caught "40-something" Sabrina Jones and her camera-shy teenage daughter on their way out of the mall. "I haven't been to the mall in a long time," she told me. "I only come to Sears to buy Craftsman.

"I love Craftsman," she added. "You know what I love about Craftsman? They let me return my Craftsman rake three times."

She said "Craftsman" about five more times before I was able to ask her why she didn't just order from the tool company online. "Shipping," she said.

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"When we come to the mall, we come to get something to eat," Marchieta Lyons, 18, told me. Lyons and her sister regularly ride the bus for at least 20 minutes for the sole purpose of getting either a Cinnabon cinnamon roll or a pretzel. "They have a cinnamon pretzel with caramel," she said. "The pretzels here are so good."

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"We're just here to charge our phones," said Caleb Smith, 19, as he people-watched next to Marchieta's little sister at a charging station in the food court. The Ohio native said he's been "everywhere," but prefers Gainesville because of "the people"—like the Lyons sisters, who he became fast friends with.

"I was in the Army," Caleb told me, "but I didn't make it through basic [training]." So now he just hangs out at the mall, chatting up girls like Marchieta and then taking the bus back home.

I met Delray Beach native Jessica Torres as she rode a large, rechargeable rhinoceros named Roxx around her kiosk, Carter's Zooland. "He's super metal," she said as she straddled the toy. Torres's main job is to attract kids to take the electric animals, like the pink mouse or blue cat, out for a spin around the mall. Lack of business, however, means she spends most of her shift riding them herself.

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And then I met James Williams, a former community college basketball player and Palatka, Florida, native, who was resting on a couch. "I was looking for shoes... But then I got tired of walking around," he said.

He told me never comes to the mall. But if he has to, it's for Jordan 1s or Foamposites. "House of Hoops is the best thing to happen to this mall," he said.

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This is Justin "J-Money" Harris, who runs one of those annoying kiosks in the center of the mall. He peddles weird little electrical massagers. He's got a kiosk in nearly every mall in Florida

I asked him why he was swooping into the malls of suburbia just as they seemed to be taking their last breath. He admitted things were slow, but "[besides shopping,] there's no other activity for people."

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Since he doesn't get much business, he often passes the time testing out his "palm massagers" on himself.

Ironically, if Gruen were around to see the fading American shopping centers like Oaks Mall, he would be happy that they have started to fall out of fashion. The socialist architect saw the rapid proliferation of malls and their massive size as fundamentally divergent to his lofty dreams of saving urban civilization. Gruen's original concept of the mall involved setting land aside for community functions and facilitating social interaction. Instead, the mall became an embodiment of the sprawl and our unending desire to consume. Towards the end of his life, Gruen described them as "gigantic shopping machines" and "land-wasting seas of parking."

Compared to the horror stories I've heard about other malls across the county, Oaks Mall doesn't seem like it has it the worst. There were a few people actually roaming around and browsing stores. However, considering all the employees I met complained of not having customers and the only thing that got the younger customers excited about the mall was its Cinnabons, it's safe to say that Oak Mills is on a slow and quiet decline. Someday in the not-too-distant future, it will become another of the country's numerous "ghostboxes" that are too expensive to tear down but not lucrative enough to actually use. For now, though, it's here in case anyone wants to buy a rake or a palm massager.

Relations between the US and North Korea have hit a low point recently thanks to the Seth Rogen/James Franco comedy The Interview. The FBI says that the DPRK regime was involved in a cyberattack against Sony Pictures, which produced the Kim Jong-un–mocking movie, while North Korea has accused the US government of having a hand in the film's creation. But the "Hermit Kingdom" hasn't always been so openly hostile to American culture, as our HBO show found out firsthand in 2013, when it followed Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters as they played an exhibition game against a North Korean basketball team.

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The entrance to La Zagaleta, a gated community for Europe's super-rich outside Marbella. Photos by Henry Wilkins

The security guard had a handlebar mustache and a large gun strapped to his hip.

"I'm looking for the director of communications," I said. "He's supposed to be meeting me here."

"Su amigo?" he asked.

"No, no."

I could see this wasn't going to work. Using the translator on my phone, I tried again. This time the man exited the security cabin and started walking away briskly, beckoning for me to follow him through the steel gates.

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The La Zagaleta estate. Photo courtesy of La Zagaleta Ltd.

I was at the entrance to La Zagaleta, a vast gated community for Europe's super-rich outside Marbella, Spain. Originally owned by the man who marketed the first contraceptive pills, in the last 20 years it's been developed into a magnet for anyone able to shell out the millions it takes to buy a property there.

Centred around two golf courses, Rod Stewart, hedge fund managers, and Moscow's former mayor are among its residents, and there are rumors that Vladimir Putin also owns property on the estate. But any notoriety associated with today's residents is overshadowed by the legacy of the estate's previous owner, arguably the wealthiest and most notorious arms dealer in history: Adnan Khashoggi.

Khashoggi, born in Mecca, made his fortune by brokering arms deals between Western and Middle Eastern governments. In the early 1980s he was worth around $4 billion.

Khashoggi helped set the trend for a certain kind of lavish lifestyle aped by so many sheiks, oil barons, and oligarchs today. He hosted some of the most extravagant parties in European history and owned one of the first custom-built super yachts, which was later owned by both the Sultan of Brunei and Donald Trump. He also kept several private jets and properties around the world, as well as wielding massive political clout in the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

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The clubhouse, which used to be Khashoggi's hunting lodge

The rolling acres at La Zagaleta used to be Khashoggi's private hunting ground, back when it was called La Baraka, meaning "luck." Khashoggi would often turn up there in a helicopter to shoot the local fauna and throw enormous, extravagant parties.

Central to all this was his hunting lodge—now the clubhouse. It has long since been renovated, but a couple of summers ago someone told me that the basement had been left to gather dust, completely untouched since the Spanish courts seized the estate from Khashoggi after he ran into financial troubles in the late 1980s.

In our correspondence, the estate's director of communications, Sebastian*, implied that this basement no longer existed, but after some gentle coaxing conceded that it was still there. Like King Tut's tomb, somewhere in these hills outside Marbella was a relic to a modern pharaoh waiting to be discovered.

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Adnan Khashoggi in the 1980s. Photo by Roland Godefroy via Wikipedia

When I finally met Sebastian on a sunny day in southern Spain, he looked flustered and slightly embarrassed about his tardiness. I knew from our email exchanges that, while keen on free publicity for La Zagaleta, he was anxious about the estate's history getting out to the public. He'd come up with a strictly regulated itinerary.

"Later, you will meet the company president," he said, "But first, we will go on a tour of the helipad, the equestrian center, a house for sale, and finally the clubhouse."

Bundling into the back of a four-by-four with Nadine*, another agent from the company, we drove to the helipad. The pair explained that although no helicopter had landed at the site for years, the residents liked to know it was there, just "in case any of them suddenly suffer a heart attack."

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Nadine and Sebastian at the helipad

I asked about the demographics of the estate. "We have all kinds of people here. Most are English-speaking, either from the UK or Ireland. We also have a lot of German and Dutch, some Russians, some Chinese with European business connections, and a few Spanish and Middle Eastern clients," said Sebastian.

"You also have some high-profile political figures here, right?"

"Ah, you're talking about Putin. We would neither confirm nor deny it, but we can definitely deny that one," was Sebastian's mystifying reply.

We bundled back into the car.

"Our clients like their privacy, you see. They like the fact that we don't let journalists in here."

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After ticking off all the other boxes on our schedule, we arrived at the clubhouse. "We're trying to lose the image of this being a hunting lodge," said Sebastian as we entered the building, past two massive elephant tusks and into a room full of hunting trophies.

When I reminded him of my request to see the basement, Sebastian grew nervous again. He said they didn't know how to access the basement and that Nadine would have to ask the cleaner. I told them I didn't mind waiting and they agreed to show me around.

I followed the pair down the winding staircase, its marble steps flanked by mosaics made from hundreds of tiny mirrors. Greeting us at the bottom of the staircase was a huge gilded gold eagle on a white pedestal.

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An Economist report estimates that Khashoggi required around $250,000 a day to maintain his lifestyle. His friends included movie stars, world leaders, and European kings, and it was in this basement where those elements of his lifestyle converged. This was where his legendary parties took place, and it has remained more or less untouched since he left.

I wanted to know more about Khashoggi's visits to the area, but figured that Sebastian might not be the best person to ask. Instead, I got in touch with Ronald Kessler—an investigative journalist and the author of a Khashoggi biography, The Richest Man in the World, who hung out with the arms dealer at his estate in the 80s.

Kessler described the surreal circus of excess that took place on Adnan's 50th birthday in July of 1985. After being served a selection of canapés by topless women, his guests entered the main hall of the Spanish stucco ranch house (now the clubhouse). They walked under an archway made of crossed swords, held aloft by 50 costumed pages.

Later, these same pages—now carrying hundreds of silver balloons adorned with the modest words "The World's Greatest"—danced guests from room to room. The party was attended by Europe's richest aristocrats, as well as businessmen, politicians, movie stars, and former CIA agents. Shirley Bassey belted out "Happy Birthday Dear Adnan" to anyone within earshot.

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Khashoggi's private bar

Walking through the basement—this relic of Khashoggi's excessive lifestyle—it was easy to picture the salacious parties Kessler described. Off the hall was the main room. Everything was covered in purple velvet, with gold touches. The dance floor was surrounded by plush sofas with a disco ball hanging overhead and a stage where performers or guests could dance.

Several small hexagonal rooms with floor-to-ceiling mirrors also led off the hall. Khashoggi has spoken about hiring prostitutes to attend his parties, and considering each one of these rooms was about the size of a storage cupboard – and since storage cupboards generally don't come equipped with floor-to-ceiling mirrors—I found it hard to imagine what they could have been used for other than to grab some privacy from the party.

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Further down the hall was a bar covered in a thick coating of dust. A door at the far end led to a recreation area with a terracotta tile floor and a huge wine rack. The centerpiece of the room was a single bowling alley with a retro computer for keeping score. In the corner stood a vintage arcade game. There was another stage in the clubhouse rec room. On it sat a solitary stuffed leopard with a weirdly happy grin on its face. In the 80s, Khashoggi kept 20 Arabian stallions and 200 African animals on the estate. I wondered if this was one of them.

Past all that was a heavy, padded door opening to a darkened room. There was a light at the far end that illuminated the silhouette of a person.

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Khashoggi's private firing range

Sebastian switched the lights on and I found myself standing in Khashoggi's private firing range. I suppose I should have been less surprised that an international arms dealer would have one of these his basement, but with the target still hanging at the end of the corridor it felt eerie, like it had only recently been used. I tried another similarly padded door leading off the shooting range, but was told it's always kept locked.

"That's where we keep the skeletons," Nadine joked.

In his heyday, Khashoggi was implicated—but never convicted—in a good number of scandals. The most high-profile of these was the Iran-Contra affair, a large blot on the Reagan administration. Despite an embargo, officials in the US government had been smuggling arms to Iran, with Khashoggi greasing the wheels. It later came to light that the money was going toward funding the Contras, an anti-communist rebel group in Nicaragua, support for whom had been banned by Congress.

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Some of Khashoggi's hunting trophies on the outside wall of the lodge

Although he has dodged several criminal convictions, Khashoggi is still being chased by aggrieved creditors from all around the world for millions in alleged unpaid debts. A financial services company called Broadridge and a team of lawyers sued for an unpaid debt of $21 million in 2011, and are still trying—against all odds—to have the US judgment against him enforced in his native Saudi Arabia.

Other debts include those owed to the architects, banks and contractors from a failed $400 million office and shopping complex in Salt Lake City that his company, Triad, was involved in. The National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia also claims Khashoggi owes them about $22 million, plus interest.

Due to his lavish partying and a number of dodgy investments, by the late 1980s Khashoggi's enormous fortune was in decline, and one property after another was sold or seized. Stories spread of how staff and yacht-crew salaries and bills for property maintenance and his daughter's helicopter lessons went unpaid month after month.

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Enrique Pérez Flores, president of La Zagaleta

My escorts were getting increasingly anxious at all the pictures I was taking. They rushed me through the rest of the basement and we made our way back, past the figures of exotic beasts with glassy eyes and out into the bright sunlight. Soon after, I was taken to meet La Zagaleta's president, Enrique Pérez Flores, and we got into conversation about Khashoggi's financial downfall.

"In Khashoggi's time, the process for getting loans from banks was different," he said. "At that time, you could get a lot of money based just on your image."

This "image"—a carefully constructed façade—is what the now 79-year-old Khashoggi was trading on most recently, his reputation allowing him to work as a consultant.

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The main room, where many of the parties were held

In recent years, with Broadridge and their ilk still on his trail, Khashoggi has claimed to be broke. In 2011, he was implicated in a money laundering case, alleged to have laundered around $300 million with the help of Indian businessman Hasan Ali Khan, but the charges were never proved.

Faced with the remains of the pharaonic image Khashoggi tried so hard to create, I never got a sense that anything I saw in the rooms of La Baraka was meant to stand the test of time. Everything felt somehow tacky and temporary. The basement was no King Tut's tomb. Instead, like the haunts of so many wealthy people—and like Khashoggi's own life—it felt like more like a bubble: iridescent, but hollow and ready to pop with at lightest of touches.

*Names have been changed

See more of Henry Wilkins's work on his website.

I have mixed feelings about Christmas decorations. Often, I like them. Rarely do I find them inspiring.

I live in Malibu, California. The average version of a decorated yard in my neighborhood looks more or less like an outdoor restaurant courtyard at a four-star hotel. The decorating style is consistent because many of the residents hire the same company to wrap their trees and shrubbery for them. They all look somewhat like this:

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So intimidated was I that for many years I never decorated my yard. It seemed too daunting, too expensive. And then, in 2008, the veil was lifted. A Christmas miracle occurred. A new role model appeared before me, and as luck or serendipity would have it, it was the same role model I used to turn to for creative and lifestyle advice as a teenager.

I speak now of the first time I noticed that Bob Dylan had wedged a small, decidedly uneven, single strand of Christmas lights into the hedge in front of his estate.

It's possible that they were there before 2008. I'm embarrassed to say that before then I wasn't really paying attention. But it also makes sense that this was the very beginning, since he released his one and (so far) only Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, in 2009.

Here is the earliest known photo I took of Mr. Dylan's holiday oeuvre.

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I was immediately taken by his distinctive approach to decorating. Much the way he forged his own path in music, he exhibited an independence of significantly different than the other homes in the area.

If a professional decorating staff was enlisted, their work was subtle to the point of being invisible, deeply disguised by a faux-naïve approach that recalls Matisse or Chagall. The string of lights seems to say, "We have been casually tossed into this hedge by someone in a hurry." But of course, this is no randomly displayed, haphazardly arranged, string of colored bulbs. What we have here is the work of Bob Dylan: prolific poet and songwriter, painter, filmmaker, paterfamilias to a whole generation of creative offspring, gate welder, patron of Christmas, born-again Christian and born-again Jew, seer, genius.

So I returned the following year, in 2009, to once again stare at the ever more erratically shaped curvilinear lines.

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Having grown up in a world where nothing Bob Dylan has ever done is considered too small to merit serious consideration and scrutiny, this was the year I began to wonder if these lights contained a deeper meaning. Using Christmas lights as a medium, was there something beneath the surface that Mr. Dylan was trying to tell us?

I decided to embark on a multi-year quest. My goal: to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about this legendary artist. Thus did I return, season after season, much like the holidays themselves, as I sought to uncover the subtext behind these deceptively simple annual statements.

The serious student of Mr. Dylan will not be surprised to learn that careful examination did indeed reveal many hidden layers. What first appeared random was, in fact, the complete opposite.

This became clear for the first time in 2010, as I noticed that the angle and pitch of the lights seemed more extreme. At first I thought, Perhaps he's making a cosmic statement by recreating the Big Dipper . But later that night, after a bit of googling, it occurred to me what he had really done. The lights spoke to something of great concern to both the country and the world. They mirrored the monthly underemployment levels in the US throughout the year.

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When Christmas of 2011 arrived, I was ready and eager to uncover any hidden message Mr. Dylan might have to share. But oddly enough, 2011 brought a light display both truncated and minimal. The questions before me now were these: Were there fewer bulbs this year because they had burned out? Or were the ones remaining being used to convey a message in another way entirely?

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This was the year that I realized I needed to abandon all previous paradigms and formulas, as Dylan himself has always done, and view what was before me with fresh eyes. By enlisting the help of someone more musically knowledgeable than myself, I was able to interpret the light arrangement musically.

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The result was a Christmas carol of a very different sort—a highly sophisticated atonal composition that starts out light and playful but ends in a darker mood, clearly influenced by modern composer George Crumb and his revolutionary Christmas themed piece " A Little Suite for Christmas."

Here it is, performed in its entirety:

2012 was a year that began on a very auspicious note. It was, of course, the year that was supposed to mark the end of the world, as predicted by the end of the Mayan calendar.

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Facing his own mortality, Mr. Dylan was predictably in a somber mood as he created a self-portrait in lights that told a complex personal story. This year's lights tell the tale of a legendary artist, his triumphs and his tragedies, in the context of both international and national events, with a nod to the vast impersonal universe that surrounds us.

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2013, though full of ups and downs, was nevertheless a very good year for Mr. Dylan, as he clearly illustrated with the surprising addition of a second string of lights.

Which brings us to 2014, the final year of my study. It is a year in which we see a more painterly, almost abstract expressionist vision, still full of characteristic touches of personal symbolism. While the second string of horizontal lights, added last year, is still visible this year, the vertical lines are emphasized.

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What does the prominent "7" shape in this year's lights imply? Is it a symbolic wishbone? Will Bob start a new band this year called Wishbone Seven? I only ask these questions. I no longer answer them.

Instead, 2014 marks a new beginning. It is the first year that I have hung my own Christmas lights, both as a nod to the season and an homage to my mentor.

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Though I painstakingly tried to incorporate his teachings, I still have much to learn. Nevertheless, season's greetings to one and all.

Merrill Markoe is an Emmy-winning comedy writer and New York Times best-selling author. Her latest book, Cool, Calm and Contentious, is available now on Amazon. Follow her on Twitter.

Officially founded in 1999, Nunavut is the youngest territory in Canada. It's only been two generations since Canada's stewardship of the land forced the Inuit people from their semi-nomadic way of life into a modern, sedentary one. But while the introduction of modern conveniences seem to have made life more comfortable, the history of Canada in the arctic is mired in tragedy, and the traumatic effects of residential schools and forced relocations are still being felt.

Today, Nunavut is in a state of social crisis: Crime rates are four times the national average and the rates of suicide are more than ten times higher than the rest of Canada.

If you ask people here what the driving force of the problem is, a lot of them will say: alcohol. Even though alcohol is completely illegal in some parts of the territory, it's been reported that 95 percent of police calls are alcohol-related.

In this new VICE documentary, we visited Nunavut to discuss whether or not alcohol prohibition is helping or hurting the territory.

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The New Era estate might have won their battle, but thousands of other families across London are facing a grim future in "poverty exile". Photo by Philip Kleinfeld

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

Last week, the government published their quarterly homelessness data for July-September 2014. It wasn't pretty.

At the end of September, 60,940 British households were living in temporary accommodation—usually a grim, out-of-the-way hostel or B&B—after being declared homeless. This is an increase of 6 percent in a year. Dig deeper into the numbers and you realize there's a new trend establishing itself in post-Olympic London: poverty exile.

All local officials have a legal obligation to house their homeless somewhere, but in the perfect shitstorm created by the government's housing benefit cap, soaring rents, stagnating wages and widespread turbo-gentrification, increasingly, London councils are sending homeless families to other areas; often distant suburbs on the other side of the metropolis.

It is a London problem. Of the 15,260 households placed in temporary accommodation outside their home borough, 14,220 (93 percent) came from London boroughs. That's 14,220 London families exiled to unfamiliar, often unsuitable temporary accommodation miles from their jobs, schools and doctors. 14,220 London families shunted beyond their local communities, friends, families and support networks—nannies, shoulders to cry on, friendly faces, sources of comfort, assistance and joy. Prime Minister David Cameron's government has spent four years stretching out the holes in the welfare safety net, and now, to make matters worse for the capital's poorest, the social safety net is disintegrating beneath them, too.

It's easy to drown in the stats, but these are the critical ones regarding poverty exile: 14,220 homeless households placed outside their London borough is an increase of 29 percent on the same point in 2013. Go back another two years, to 2011, and you're looking at an increase of 123 percent.

"No council should be sending tenants en masse to a different part of the country," a government spokesman said when the figures came out last week, clarifying that this should be a rare exception to policy, not the policy. But the last resort has become a quick-fix in boroughs like Westminster, a flagship Conservative stronghold that has actually blamed Cameron's welfare reforms for their homelessness crisis. (To get a sense of how well Westminster Council care for their most vulnerable families, last year they were ordered to pay £100,000 (over $156,000) in compensation to 40 families left languishing in B&Bs for over six weeks—against government regulations.)

On a Wednesday morning earlier this autumn, I joined a West London anti-poverty charity called Zacchaeus 2000, who have been helping advise Westminster residents affected by the miserable zeitgeist cocktail of homelessness, poverty, debt, benefits caps and bureaucracy. A plaque bearing the legend CHURCH ARMY on a grand old Victorian building alerted me that I was in the right place; there, down in a damp basement room, a range of local charities and volunteer groups had gathered for one of their twice-weekly group advice surgeries. These are the field hospitals in Britain's ongoing war on its poor.

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Zacchaeus 2000's London HQ. Image by the author

Inside, it really felt like a scene from the Victorian era, as if modern Britain and the welfare state were just an interregnum before we returned to type: stackable grey tables and chairs, a well-trodden grey carpet and brick walls painted white. Damp, the lingering smell of cleaning fluid and tea cup stains that probably carbon date back to the 1980s. It was a grim day outside and the "clients" wore winter coats and grave expressions: a sad, soft-spoken succession of 30-odd adults furrowing their brows, and a few desperately bored kids kicking their chair legs. There were moms carrying infants and busy-looking charity workers. Someone searched in vain for an Arabic translator.

Zacchaeus 2000's Joanne Phillips and her junior colleague sat down at one of the tables marked "Z2K" in the corner and were immediately approached by familiar people with familiar problems. A middle-aged woman in a headscarf stopped by with a quick question. She'd been placed by Westminster in a B&B in East Ham and was wondering if she could get out yet. After she left, Joanne turned to me: "Last week, that same lady brought in a whole jar full of bugs she had collected—to show us what the temporary accommodation is like. Her son has bites all over his arm from them."

The air was stale with exhaustion. Trying to understand your options is exasperating, especially when it's accompanied by this much bureaucracy—even more so when a translator is needed; a lot of clients do not speak English as their first language. One of the first, Sara, was a woman in her late thirties, shunted to temporary accommodation first in Mile End and then in Kensington and Chelsea. It took about 15 minutes of sifting through caches of papers on Westminster Council and National Health Service (NHS) letterheads, comparing case notes and addresses, rifling through bags, checking deadlines and databases, just to ascertain Sara's status with the various withered arms of the British state.

In red block capitals, the phrase "YOUR RENT—YOUR RESPONSIBILITY" stood out—stamped on one of the warning letters from the council. She was divorced and struggling. But the local government won't help her because she's been declared "intentionally homeless"—because she said no to an offer of a flat at some point. It wasn't clear why.

Joanne slowly and seriously asked the translator to explain the gravity of the situation. "Can you tell her that no council in the country will house her now?" There was a delay. The translator took her glasses off to explain the bad news in Arabic and Sara grasped her face and protested—more in desperation than anger.

"But what about her ear illness?" asked the translator. Perhaps this loophole could help her claim? "It would've had to have been tackled in July—it's too late now." Her case was referred on to another Z2K advisor.

The next client, Maria, exemplified the pain of poverty exile. She had three children, was pregnant with a fourth and had been placed in temporary accommodation in Haringey by Westminster, since being evicted in 2013. One of her children had acquired asthma since they arrived in their current hostel—it's a common complaint borne of the often damp, cramped and unsuitable temporary accommodation, along with stress and other mental health risks. In addition to the physical challenges of pregnancy, Maria had severe back pain—it was a disc problem.

The individual problems are complex and numerous, but the over-arching one is simple: the family has been sent to Haringey in northeast London, and everything they know is in Westminster in inner-west London. Maria was determined the children would not face any more disruption, and so has kept them in the same school—they need a tiny modicum of stability in their lives. But it takes three buses to get Maria and her young children from the hostel to the school, from Haringey to Westminster, and back again. It's a daily commute of one and a half to two hours, each way, every day. Up to four hours on six buses, five days a week.

Last week, that same lady brought in a whole jar full of bugs she had collected—to show us what the temporary accommodation is like. Her son has bites all over his arm from them.

"It's not even worth going home after I drop off the kids," she said. By the time she would get back to the hostel, it would be almost time to return and collect them. So what do you do all day? "I stay in Westfield. All day, during the day." She can't afford to buy anything but at least the shopping center is warm. It's so cold in the hostel her daughter has been sleeping in her school uniform.

Maria has a job, too, as a salesperson in a rug shop on Edgware Road. She likes it, and likes her boss, and she knows she's fortunate to have been given maternity leave. The one time she smiles is when she says her boss has promised to make her full-time after she's had the baby.

"I don't want to stay at home." Until then, there is just exhaustion and daytime clock-watching in Westfield. Getting the little one in the pushchair on the bus is impossible sometimes, she says, and her back is in so much pain, and the kids are getting sick in the B&B—and she's so, so tired. "We need support from your [doctor] if we're going to prove your accommodation is unsuitable," says Joanne. Maria leaves us for the hospital. "Every day, another appointment," she says as she leaves.

Westminster's own guidelines now decree that it is acceptable to place homeless families in temporary accommodation anywhere up to two hours travel away from the borough. "The emphasis is different now," Joanne explained. "If you can't afford the accommodation [in Westminster], you've got to move." The old received wisdom—that for children's (and adults) wellbeing, health, their social and educational development, as much stability as possible is key—has been buried in the dust of the affordable housing crisis. "What they say to people now is, 'You'll just have to move school.'"

Some clients were more angry than tragic. Harry was evicted because his landlord didn't want tenants on affordable housing benefits and he can afford to do without them—fewer and fewer London landlords will take subsidized renters now. He couldn't believe how unfair it was—the landlord gets the same money every month, but now he's homeless. Joanne did a lot of nodding. More often than not, she ended up delivering the government's bad news to people who whispered about their physical and mental health problems, about deaths, divorces and breakdowns, the extraordinary upsets to their previously stable status quo. "It's a big country," Joanne explained to one 50-something mother of two fighting eviction after years in Westminster, "and if you can't afford the rent any more, you might have to look elsewhere, somewhere cheaper."

The next client, Mike, was white, in his late sixties, and wearing a stained blue puffer jacket. He'd been living in public housing with his wife, daughter and mother, until his mother passed away—she'd been there 50 years. The council are saying they're under-occupying and are trying to turf him, his wife and daughter out. To make matters worse, there are other bills coming in after his mom's death that he just can't afford, and he doesn't think he should have to pay anyway. The pension people had overpaid his mom's rent, and want the money back. "All debts stop at the point of your death," explained Joanne. "They can't charge for it after her death." Mike looked reassured. "I don't want something for nothing," he objected, to no one in particular. There was a lot of emotion in the room.

In a small space with at least ten advice sessions going on simultaneously, I caught snippets of exasperation and sadness everywhere. At one point, in a gap between clients, a Z2K adviser at another table, a middle-aged man with a big frame pressed into a blue shirt, announced with a mixture of anger and weariness: "This country has got nasty. I don't know what's happening, I really don't."

Follow Dan Hancox on Twitter.

Rocco drinking tampon tea in Anatomy of Hell

This post originally appeared on VICE UK

"TIFU [Today I Fucked Up] by letting my boyfriend finger me" is a deeply scarring Reddit story that was flying around Twitter a few months ago, putting everyone off their lunch and vaginas in the process. I won't go into the full details because I don't want to be personally responsible for you sicking up all over yourself, but it revolves around a menstrual cup and "rotted uterine filth." This story reminded me of the worst film I ever paid to see.

You know the girl in art class who put her tampon in a teacup and spouted some bullshit about womanhood and repressed femininity and how this tampon in a teacup was a piece of art that summarized all of that in a clever nod to austere Victorian ideals, or whatever? That girl grew up to be French film director Catherine Breillat. In her film Anatomy of Hell, she literally puts an actual bloody tampon in an actual cup of water. And then makes an Italian porn star called Rocco drink it. Let me explain what's happening here.

The film (it is French, obviously) opens with a dude-on-dude blowjob in a car park. This is meant to inform us that we are now outside a gay club. Inside this gay club is a woman (Amira Casar) in a white T-shirt looking bitchy as all hell, like she should really call it a night and just go home for a weak herbal tea. Instead, she and her PMS walk straight through the middle of the dance floor and deliberately bump into all the guys who are just there for a nice night out and maybe a blowjob in a parking lot. She shoulders one guy (Rocco Siffredi) so hard that he follows her into the bathroom.

She's in there to slit her wrists in a tiled wipe-clean room, and he finds her bleeding all over her skirt when he comes in to get his dick sucked. By her. Because that's what all gay guys want: to get sucked off by a woman in the toilets. He asks her why she slit her wrists in the surprisingly deserted nightclub toilet. She replies, bleeding, but not all that profusely: "Because I am a woman."

This is the first time while watching Anatomy of Hell that you think, Why am I watching Anatomy of Hell?' If your answer is, "Because I work in a DVD shop and watch literally every movie that comes through these doors," then we are very similar breeds of idiot.

After they get her wrist sewn up at the chemist and she blows him under a street lamp as a thank you present she says she will pay him good money to come over for the next four nights and just watch her when she is "unwatchable," i.e. having her period all over the bed. Her reasoning here is that because he's such a massive gay—and therefore won't be busy trying to fuck her, like all other men—he'll be able to drop truth bombs impartially.

She's essentially paying him to sit up in an uncomfortable chair all night while she sleeps and occasionally stares him out while flashing her pubes to camera. Fun party. No one ever mentions an actual cash amount, but the Italian porn star gets his dick out a lot.

If you're wondering where all this is going, then—SPOILER ALERT—when the four nights are over the woman leaves town and the man has some emotions on a cliff, suggesting this period party actually meant something to them both.

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The trailer for Anatomy of Hell

There's a feeling you get when you're watching a movie like Alien or Aliens on a shitty screen in your room—one where you can see every eight-bit pixel—that makes you think, I wish I'd seen this at the cinema months ago instead of on this shitty screen. That feeling comes from the fact that you want to catch every bit of everything that happens.

I did not have this feeling while watching Anatomy of Hell. There is a shot where the camera is so far up this lady's junk that it must have been gaffered to her thighs. As she birthed a stone dildo and it flopped out onto the bedsheets I did not think, Boy, I wish this was in HD. I also did not have this feeling when the guy's hard dick pulled out and a wave of period blood gushed over the woman's lower butt area. Gushed. All I thought was, Put a towel down. Put a dark-colored towel down nowwwwww.

Anatomy of Hell has one thing going for it. It is exactly 77 minutes long. Like a 250-page novel, I would say this is optimal, bladder-wise. But every one of these 77 minutes is about how men are afraid of, and therefore hate, women. They're scared that when they have sex with them they will be sucked up inside their vaginas like that Bilquis scene in American Gods. But are they really? I wasn't scared of vaginas until I saw this film. Now I am. It makes having one awkward because I have to see it all the time and be in its general vicinity as I go about my daily life. I'm afraid I might sit on something at a weird angle and swallow a Swiss yoga ball.

I'm also now very specifically afraid that one particular scene from Anatomy of Hell will play out in its entirety in my real life: that some man I have invited into my bed will tiptoe to the bathroom cabinet, find a red lipstick that I'm really into and costs upwards of $20, tiptoe back to the bed with it, and sit beside me. I'm afraid that he will then take the lamp from beside the bed, pull it over and down toward my naked ass. I'm afraid that he will then take this lipstick I like and draw up and around my anus. I'm afraid that he will lift my leg up like I'm livestock that he's checking for worms, and that he will continue the lipstick line from my anus in a loop, up and around my vagina and pubes. I am afraid he will return the lipstick to the bathroom cabinet and next time I actually need it it'll be run out.

Before this movie, my vagina was just a thing I pissed out of and the equipment I brought to the sex table. I didn't really think about it. It's not all that interesting; it was just a vagina. It still is.

But just as a man with long gray haired dressed in denim will always make me think of Bob from Twin Peaks and subsequently send my stomach flipping, so will women talking about periods at me like it's NBD; so will gross stories on Reddit; and so will the sight of men sent out for tampons, suicidal in the Boots aisle, trying to decide between light and heavy flow.

Anatomy of Hell made me this way.

Follow Hayley Campbell on Twitter.

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Illustration by Tom Scotcher

This post originally appeared in VICE UK

33⅓ is a series of books dedicated to the most incredible musical albums ever made—one book per album, one author per book. Over the coming months, we'll be running excerpts from their in-depth essays. This week, Tennessee-based music writer Kirk Walker Graves introduces Kanye West's 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Here's Chapter One:

Lurking somewhere amid the tabloid covers and reality show cameos, in the icy silence between tweets, the periods of relative calm preceding fresh bouts of histrionics, lost within the noxious cultural static that clings to his very name, there has always been—in spite of his best efforts to distract us—the music. And in the first decade of the twenty-­first century, Kanye West created the best—the most consistently ambitious and thrilling—pop music of any American artist, hip-­hop or otherwise, during the period. From "Through the Wire"—the first single off his 2004 debut LP The College Dropout, and the cockiest anthem of survivor gratitude this side of disco—to "Lost in the World", the penultimate track on 2010's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF), more mystic dare than pop song—he has staked his claim as the digital era's first pop visionary, a multivalent talent with an intuitive genius for collage. Best known initially as Jay Z's wunderkind producer at the turn of the millennium, champion of the sample-­driven "chipmunk soul" beats heard in "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" and "Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)", West's music now illuminates the pop skyline with a gauche radiance all its own.

For sheer scale and visionary brio, MBDTF is his masterpiece, the work that contains the fullest possible expression of his aesthetic vision. The album opens with a foreboding nursery rhyme chanted in a bad English brogue by rapper Nicki Minaj, and it ends with a relentlessly unanswerable question—"Who will survive in America?"—posed by late bluesologist Gil Scott-Heron, via a sample of his "Comment No. 1." Between those end stops lie 68 minutes and 38 seconds of closed—circuit narcissism, a buffet of sonic delights that blends rococo opulence ("So Appalled") with pornographic anxiety ("Hell of a Life"), suicidal ideation ("POWER") with feelings of omnipotence ("POWER"), redemptive humility ("All of the Lights") with go-­for-broke ambition ("Monster"). The album unites disparate samples in a spirit of bold experimentation, incorporating prog rock as an enjambment here, transmogrifying a sixties radio pop melody into a hook there. Each song crackles with the intensity of a manic episode, employing every color in the sonic palette to paint a pop fantasia that is sui generis. MBDTF is such a testament to the power of first-­rate American maximalism that one almost need look to literature—to twentieth century behemoths like The Recognitions and Women and Men—for an apt analogue. Simply put, the album has few peers in the way it stormed out of the gates and into the pop music canon.

That said, the 33 ⅓series is devoted to landmark pop albums of the past few decades. Why write a book on an album less than four years old? How much perspective on the music is possible? In human terms, the average four-­year-old has few tangible achievements outside toilet proficiency and a functional understanding of Velcro. And as music is such a vital force, a phenomenon as synonymous with life as respiration, shouldn't we apply developmental benchmarks to our judgment of its value? No sane person would presume to evaluate the legacy of a four-­year-old. For most of the music we come to cherish, our love anneals in the crucible of elapsed time. The passing years trace the grooves in the culture the music has made, put our first impressions on trial in the courts of evolved taste and popular opinion. We hear, say, "Hey Ya" in an antiseptic department store lobby and receive deliverance across a lost decade, borne back to the moment of polymorphously perverse joy we felt upon hearing it for the first time. A truly great record is a miracle of double endurance, thriving in the besieged sanctum of the heart—beating back the new music , the competition for our ardor—while simultaneously persisting through time in the byzantine officialdom of critical acclaim. We reflect on where and when a particular record became more than a record, looking for the point at which the music's charm collided with our own tender susceptibility. We find meaning, prophecy, validation, and mystery in those points of connection. Time then bequeaths the music to posterity, cultivating the growth of an intergenerational democracy, a world where tomorrow's grandparents can share their grandchildren's burgeoning enthusiasm for London Calling, Pet Sounds, The Chronic , and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.

The question, therefore, remains: Why write a whole book about such a young album? MBDTF is a concentrated dose of Kanye West, who, in his way, is a concentrated dose of the still-­young digital era. Ours is a period of unprecedented and instantaneous access to books, films, fashions, and ideas. The vast majority of the world's recorded music is searchable and streaming, just a few clicks or swipes away. The arc of West's career reflects this digital ubiquity as no artist before him, the artistry of his samples a kind of transhistorical pop consciousness. And as the pop music canon continues to self-­codify, new technologies have made it easier than ever to document and endlessly share our mandarin obsessions and revelations. Blogs and now apps have become clearing-­houses for the kind of serendipity that dorm rooms and college radio stations used to provide. Kanye embodies our era's insatiable appetite to aggregate—to incorporate everything all at once—and MBDTF is the operatic sound of that insatiability set to music. To promote the album in the late summer of 2010, he even gave impromptu performances of new tracks at the headquarters of both Facebook and Twitter, where, at the latter, he opened his now infamous account.

There are many other compelling reasons to devote an entire volume to MBDTF. Few compete with the album's greatest theme, however, which is the saga of its creator's pathological need for greatness. More than a panegyric to excess or a celebration of his narcissism, MBDTF is a spiritual anatomy of Kanye West. Listen hard and you find that the fundamental conflict is between a child-­emperor and his irrational fear of oblivion. "My-Beautiful-Dark-Twisted-Fantasy"—say it aloud. It could be the title of an essay penned by a vengeful third grader. The album is a portrait of genius held hostage on all sides by ambition, frustration, and insecurity, an allegory about art as the only valid response to emotional crisis and the only authentic mode of redemption. If those descriptions sound a bit too highfalutin for a discussion about a pop star, that is because West is no ordinary pop star. In truth, it is unclear what he is, exactly, or what he might become. On MBDTF he often seems to bear more kinship to visual artists like Matthew Barney and Sigmar Polke than Lil Wayne or Prince.

From its swollen roster of diverse collaborators, to its polysemic tapestry of inspired samples and breathtaking hooks, to its creator's covetous wish to inherit the King of Pop's mantle, to the in-­studio awareness during production of the stakes for West's career, to its yawping desire to sound like nothing else before or since, MBDTF is a monument to its own pursuit of perfection. For critics and fans across demographics, listening to the album once in its entirety was enough to ratify its status as an instant classic—more exploding quasar than landmark—but a classic nonetheless.

Follow Kirk Walker Graves on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Tiocfaidh ár lá 1916

On December 20, Ismaaiyl Brinsley fatally shot two New York police officers after shooting his ex-girlfriend outside Baltimore. The motive for the former seems clear. Brinsley referenced Eric Garner in an Instagram post, and said it might be his last one because he was "putting wings on pigs today." This was before he ambushed NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu as they sat in their patrol car.

Stretch radicalism as far as it goes, and maybe you'll find a few people who would support cold blooded assassination of cops, but not many. They were random, uniformed targets who might have on the best end of the spectrum for their job, the worst, or—maybe most likely—somewhere in the muddy middle.

But never mind the pointlessness of the murder. A great deal of the right seems to have been waiting for this tragedy. (A third cop—himself a former NYPD office—was killed early Sunday morning in Tarpon Springs, Florida.)

To a certain type of pundit or rabble-rouser, these deaths are confirmation that the darkest parts of police reform protests—the looting, one incident last week where what appeared to be 50-100 protesters chanted, "What do we want? Dead cops!" and a few other occasions where the sentiments were similarly homicidal—are its true face.

Now it's apparently time to score some political points. It's time to waffle and take back the progress towards bipartisan police reform that conservatives have been making ever since Rand Paul has shown that it's okay to notice that police are militarized, there are a lot of people in prison right now, and things like mandatory minimums are to blame for that excess.

According to police and their allies—including law enforcement unions—protesters at large, ones who chanted nasty things, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and the Reverend Al Sharpton have blood on their hands. Even President Obama is suspect for offering political platitudes about "dialogue." (And pundits can join in with thinly-sourced accounts of poor people cheering the assassination of the NYPD officers.)

Obviously, police unions exist to defend cops at all costs, so their outrage over this real tragedy makes sense. But the conservative indignation is bizarre. Police enforce laws, many of which target consensual activities, mostly related to buying and selling sex, drugs, or any kind of good or service without the proper regulatory permission. Conservatives and anyone lazily pro-cop seems to have confused wanting reform and accountability within an institution to "making war" on it, or hating it and all its members. They also don't seem to know the meaning of the small government values they profess to hold.

Police should mourn the three officers killed last weekend, but they cannot use this awfulness to shield themselves from the national conversation that finally really got going in August. They cannot be allowed to evade this, or to act as if there is some kind of "war on cops."

Last year, 27 cops were killed with intent—a record low. Meanwhile, 2013 also hit what seems to be a 20 year high—though it's hard to tell, due to lax record keeping—for felony suspects killed by police, at 461.

If you marched and chanted something about killing cops, maybe the fact that a 13-year-old lost his dad the week before Christmas should give you a pang of guilt and a realization that cops are humans, too, no matter how bad our criminal justice system is.

Still, no matter what came out of anyone's mouth during these last few months, the person to blame for a homicide is the person who commits it. Public servants tasked with legal, lethal force should have the the highest standards of behavior, and the most critical eyes pointed at them. They are supposed to be tough enough to take that, even when tragedy strikes.

Now onto this week's bad cops:

-On Friday, the NYPD suspended an officer who was captured on video punching a 16-year-old while he was restrained and cuffed by other officers.

-Little Bou Bou Phonesavanh is recovering from being burned by a flash-bang grenade during a drug raid on his parents' (temporary) residence in Georgia. However, Alecia and Bounkham Phonesavanh now have $1 million in medical bills to pay for fixing their little boy, who they were told in the minutes after the raid had only lost a tooth. Turns out he needed to be placed in a medically-induced coma because flesh on his face and chest had burned off. Thanks to Georgia's sovereign immunity law, the county can't pay the family's epic hospital bills, nor can the cops. The drug task force that performed the raid was abolished four months later, but they sure weren't held accountable for nearly killing a toddler. All this to find Bounkham Phonesavanh's nephew—who wasn't even in the home at the time. The family could still file a civil lawsuit against the police force and the county, however, and a federal investigation is ongoing.

-Police in Pocono Township, Pennsylvania spent two years of their time investigating several massage parlors for prostitution. The feds, including the Department of Homeless Security (DHS), are also involved, because some of the workers may be undocumented. Two years undercover for multiple victimless crimes—what a valuable use of resources.

-No doubt the bad press, and the Institute for Justice lawsuit, inspired Philadelphia's decision to drop its civil asset forfeiture proceedings against a couple's home because their son sold $40 worth of heroin. The Philly PD took a staggering $64 million in revenue over the course of a decade, which has provoked plenty of armed headlines with good reason.

-John P. Walters, former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, is not jumping on the Let's End the Drug War bandwagon, nor joining the Gee, there are some racial elements to the war on drugs party. No, Walters is quite certain we just didn't drug war hard enough.

-A San Francisco sheriff's deputy was arrested on multiple charges on Friday, which include battery and perjury. On November 3, Michael R. Lewelling allegedly grabbed and choked a man who had been sleeping in a emergency room waiting area after he tried to walk away from the officer. In his official report, Lewelling wrote that the man had hit him with his cane, but video footage contradicted that claim. Lewelling now faces four felonies and a misdemeanor.

-Police in my home state of Pennsylvania took $160,000 of legally purchased wine from a couple who collected it, and now plan to dump it because liquor laws there are archaic. The motivation for the search? A complaint, and undercover police asking the man to sell four or five bottles of wine to him. So police in 2014 have the time to stage undercover alcohol buys, presumably to the strains of the latest Count Basie single.

-Austin, Texas Police Officer Andrew Petrowski retired on December 12 when he realized that some of his remarks to a reporter would be publicized. These remarks were about the damn ladies these days, who totally say things like, "We want equal pay, and we want this." His response was, "You want to go fight in combat and sit in a foxhole? You go right ahead, but a man can't hit you in public here? Bullshit. You act like a whore, you get treated like one." Props to Petrowski's boss, Chief Art Acevedo, who actually said, "Somebody [who] has that mentality has no business being a cop."

-On Tuesday, a Salem, Virginia Police Officer and former member of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) taskforce pled guilty to soliciting sexual favors from drug suspects. Kevin C. Moore was arrested in October on the charge that he traded oral sex and sexual intercourse on three occasions for a lesser sentence for suspects.

-Our Good Cop of the Week is a Kansas City police officer who didn't even want to be identified for being a good guy. On Tuesday, the officer was spotted sitting and petting two dogs by the side of the road by a woman driving by. Her photo made the thing into a gooey Facebook pass-on, but it's one with legs. The officer saw the loose dogs, got off his motorcycle, and sat and petted them as he waited for the Humane Society. For all the stories of untrained and skittish cops shooting someone's pet, it's great to see a cop who likes dogs, and wil go out of his way to reunite them with their owners—which they eventually were!

Follow Lucy Steigerwald on Twitter.

I'm not a father, at least not to my knowledge. But I'm home for the holidays, I love my dad, and I want the best for him. So when I received this new track by electronic duo Cologne, I played it for him. He really liked it. "Slippin'" has a smooth trip-hop feel, with vocals that will evoke imagery of an attractive woman drinking a cocktail, or Joaquin Phoenix during his crazy phase. Your dad will love it. At the end of the day, if I can musically please just one dad, I'll have done my job.

Cologne are two guys from NYC named Danny and Billy. Danny is a fashion photographer and Billy is a ship captain. "Slippin'" is a bonus track from their new record, Vanilla Abstract, and has the IDM vibe but doesn't pander and never gets too weird. Even if you're awkward, if you drink enough, you'll certainly be able to dance to it.

Buy Vanilla Abstract on Bandcamp.

Oscar winning director Kathryn Bigelow's latest film Last Days is an animated short on the illegal ivory trade. The international industry, which reportedly finances terrorist organizations such as al-Shabab and the Lord's Resistance Army, threatens to bring elephants to extinction within the next ten years. VICE spoke with Bigelow and collaborator Scott Z. Burns about the urgency of the crisis. Last Days is available online and can be watched below.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

From Sloane Rangers to yuppies, normcore heads to health goths, the British media love a story about a new subculture. If more than five or six people are doing something in a certain way anywhere near each other, and someone doing a journalism internship gets wind of it, you can bet your house on a deluge of "Who Are They?" and "How to Get the Look" and "How Rihanna's Embraced London's Craziest New Youth Cult" pieces coming your way.

The latest in a long line of just-about-real tribes was last week identified by the Evening Standard's Richard Godwin as "the cutester." The definition of the cutester is simple enough; a young, London-dwelling "creative" type who, instead of pursuing a destructive lifestyle of drugs and dive bars, exists in a universe of "street food festivals, speakeasies, ping-pong cafes, new branches of the Breakfast Club, and the cutester rite of passage: Secret Cinema." The cutester wears sweaters with cartoon characters on them. The cutester has emoji tattoos and a "well-kempt beard." You probably know a few cutesters. If you don't, the cutester is, simply put, a harmless, infantile dickhead.

While it's easy to groan at the coinage of these web-friendly media stereotypes, it's also sadly indisputable that these people exist. In fact, I'm pretty sure they exist by the thousand, and you will definitely see them at any of the places mentioned above. I don't think they're as easy to spot and define as the article would have you believe, partly due to lack of a real, defining "look" (apart from the dire beanie 'n' beard steez, but even soccer players are on board with that these days)—but they are, definitely, tragically, unequivocally A Thing.

In his article, Godwin goes on to note how the cutester is making a departure from the more addled, scruffy and risk-prone existences of London's previous generation of "hipsters," suggesting that there's a new breed of safer, more careful, and childish young person filling up the usual eastern and southern enclaves of the capital. "The hipster is more concerned with attitude and authenticity. The cutester is friendly and open and aware that fun usually comes at the expense of cool," the article reads. "The cutester is part of the generation that takes fewer drugs, drinks less booze, and has less sex than its parents—but does dress up more often," says Godwin.

[body_image width='640' height='596' path='images/content-images/2014/12/22/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2014/12/22/' filename='cutesters-and-london-body-image-1419260598.png' id='13434']

A screengrab of the Evening Standard's story introducing "the cutester"

The change is interesting and very much real, I think. But for me, the question isn't, What is a cutester?—that has, more or less, already been answered. The question for me is: Where the fuck did the cutester come from? How did one of the world's most oppressive and unforgiving cities give birth to something so infantile and inane?

The whole concept of the cutester is an odd thing to consider for someone whose tolerance of London Mayor Boris Johnson's urban car boot sale depends on the existence of the Barbican rather than Broadway Market, the Westway rather than Whole Foods, Corsica Studios rather than Champagne & Fromage. While I do find the whole thing a bit depressing—to me, London should basically always be the way it was in the video for "It's A London Thing" by Scott Garcia—I don't think it's necessarily true that the cutesters themselves are terrible people. I just think they're customers of a London that is selling itself in a different, and perhaps erroneous, way.

It would be easy to pin the cutester on the usual suspects—to lay into BuzzFeed, the Cereal Cafe, Secret Cinema, "free hugs," and Boris Johnson's breakfast burritos for siring this epidemic of the infantile. But London wasn't always like this. I personally had a very different image of the city growing up. To me, it was a city of knife amnesties, Irish fighting pubs, cruising saunas, City boy hooligans, Crystal Palace players with Streets of Rage haircuts, debutantes with blocked noses and clubs like Caesars in Streatham. The closest thing there was to a mayor was probably crime boss Terry Adams, and a "secret cinema" was a place you went to jerk off in public without getting your head kicked in, not dress up like a character from Back to the Future in public without getting your head kicked in.

But somewhere along the line, that changed, and undoubtedly it took a concerted effort for that to happen. It's hard to place the blame anywhere in particular. If there was any grand social project drawn up, it's one that has never been made public— there was no great speech made, it just kind of started to happen and never really stopped, in that ceaseless way that money has where it needs to keep creating more room for itself.

However, if I were forced to pinpoint the origins of the great shift that has led to the cutesters becoming as defining an image of London as the street gang Peel Dem Crew once were, I wouldn't choose the moment where Boris was elected, or when the first Krispy Kreme landed here, but the point when London decided to re-market itself as the knot of villages it ceased to be with the advent of trains in the 19th century. When London devolved into some weird former version of itself but with fewer dead infant chimney sweeps and more ads; a hybrid of the shopping center atBluewater, Disney World, and a quaint town that never actually existed. When London became a poorly-travelled American's impression of itself.

Before that, the dream of London had been of a utopian, utilitarian megalopolis. It was a dream that the city and its guiding hands believed in enough to try and fail to realize over and over again. But for metropolises to become megalopolises they need to grow and that means selling the myth of a place to more people. If all of those who wish to live in a city precisely because it is a city are already there, then it's time to expand the net and attract those who are perhaps less willing to tolerate the challenges and rites of urban life. To rethink and rebrand. To repackage London as one massive exploded province, to tout the green spaces of Hackney rather than its true and eternal aroma of burnt kebab meat and cooling gas fumes. London's guiding hands drive a housing market to a booming point. Real estate agents have more privately rented bedrooms to fill. Cutester, meet deskspace. The country came to the city and nothing was ever the same again—we were suddenly awash with workwear, technology renamed itself "tech" and decided it would rather look like Hello Kitty than The Matrix , pubs on the Seven Sisters road started charging $10 for a Scotch egg.

We might not know exactly what happened, but the change affected the reasons people came here in the first place, and was perhaps inspired by the wants of its latest batch of residents. Previously, people had sought out London for its grit. That was the basis of its myth. London might have been hard and nasty, livened up by the occasional IRA bomb scare, but with that came the South Bank warehouse parties, pirate radio, and so much more.

People who were interested in that kind of thing moved here, and those who weren't, didn't. Most who were born here either lived in that world, or the parallel one of Tatler, Tramp, Princess Diana's ladies-in-waiting, and an incredible detachment from the real world. And while those two lifestyles bear little in common at surface level, they were united by one thing: they were London. They were moody, in your face and defined by fashion, sex, drugs, and music.

The cutesters aren't defined by such things. They seem to have little interest in the old London. They're defined less by the pieces they're wearing on their bodies than the ones they share on social media; they're in the bar on Sundays laughing at the straight crowd, surrounding themselves instead with a replica version of the familial weekend outings of their endlessly idolized childhoods.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/qzBba_tSB4I' width='640' height='360']

The trailer for The Long Good Friday. Nothing much cutester about it

To understand the enormity and speed of that change, you only have to look at how much the things we aspire to have changed. In 1980's Long Good Friday, one of the great London films, Bob Hoskins' yuppie gangster Harold Shand is building a city in the sky. He wants to take the money that will come from filling the old Docklands with modernist apartments, Bang & Olufsen stereos and Valentino suits, and he isn't going to be stopped. He might have been a gangster, but he was very much trading off the dream of the time. It might have been elitist, but it was about being part of the city, albeit on a higher floor than the scum. It was an urban, futurist existence people were aspiring to: Ballard's High Rise reimagined by Donald Trump, the court of Versailles on the Isle of Dogs. Whatever it was, it was a long, long way from the cutester.

This image of aspirational urban living stretched right from the earliest, most radical dreams of Brutalism, through the downturn years, to when modern living became the domain of the rich and former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher transformed the word "estate" from a term of desire into a term of deprivation, right up until the early 2000s, when the Dome and the Docklands Development were very much part of a thoroughly modern, New Labour-led lifestyle that was personified in the video for Daniel Bedingfield's "Gotta Get Thru This," a cultural artifact I'm quite sure will be seen as definitive when we come to study the turn-of-the-Millennium aesthetic.

But I think what happened after this was that the industries that had kept London afloat—the City, the markets, the pubs, the family businesses—became caught up in scandal and failure, and suddenly the jobs to have weren't defined by a choice between banker or real estate agent, but barista or social media developer. And with that, the demographic of London changed. Being a butcher or a banker requires being a certain type. You have to be able to cope with a little blood and gore; you're supposed to be a haggler, a hustler—a bastard, perhaps.

But working in a coffee shop, or writing tweets for some company, is the domain of another kind of person. Not a bad person, necessarily—and surely no worse than the bankers, at least—but perhaps the kind of person who wouldn't have come to London once upon a time. This is where the shift came from. When slightly twee, sensitive types from the 'shires and the home counties became the market to attract, rather than your Harold Shands.

That's all the cutester is: someone just trying to live a nice life in a nasty city.

Cutesters aren't so much interested in bars or pirate radio. They're a gentler, more parochial sort, and the culture has shifted to adapt to them. They want to recreate the world they come from and, smelling the money, developers and entrepreneurs, are willing to crush the old London for that.

This is why all bars must look like something out of The Wind in the Willows to prosper now, why they serve beer that has to taste nice, even though most of us know that beer isn't supposed to taste nice—why they have signs that have to emphasize how lovely and yummy and scrummy everything in there is. Because they want to attract the type of people who have money to spend beyond the weekly $100 set aside for the drug dealer and the off-licenses. They have free time, disposable income and an obsession with finding new places and posting about them on social media.

This is also why movie theaters have to present some kind of experience, rather than just a dark room and some stale popcorn. This is why banks have to seem "friendly," why Hackney needs a bunch of farmers trucking in every weekend to rip people off, why Brixton needs a champagne and expensive cheese shop and, yes, why Brick Lane needs a Cereal Cafe.

That's all the cutester is: someone just trying to live a nice life in a nasty city. And you can't begrudge them for that, even though it feels like everything else is being cast aside because they, the ones with money, are leading the way. When you take the natural harshness away from London, it becomes home to people who probably wouldn't have much fancied the Joiners anyway. Or people who would rather Zadig & Voltaire or whatever the fuck Madame JoJo's is going to become than any dead estate pub.

Cities have to change, and London's ability to do that has kept it interesting where so many have stagnated. But at the end of the day, London is a city, not a village. And trying to replicate a cute, country lifestyle here is only driving things backward.

Follow Clive Martin on Twitter.