Photos by the author

It has come to my attention that a new phrase has entered the Hollywood lexicon: “Let’s TED talk this out.” A derivative of, “Let’s hug it out”, which was popularised by a bro-centric TV show produced by Mark Wahlberg. I find it repulsive, not because it makes absolutely no sense (TED stands for the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference) but because it’s a sure sign of the beginning of the end. Bastardising TED talks as parody is the societal equivalent of “why we can’t have nice things”.

TED lectures are meant to illuminate the public on new inventions, relevant dangers of the future and cool iPhone apps. Making a Christopher Guest attempt at peeling it apart is pointless, and you shouldn’t do it, unless, like the improv-based show Prompter, the focus is on wild-card fun rather than the conscious "skewering" of the TED format; all others need not apply.

I realised this when I attended the LA Fringe Festival’s Death by PowerPoint, a 60-minute play depicting four “TED-talk-like lectures”, in the hopes that somehow in the mix of theatrical farce I would find a gem that skewered it in a way that felt justified. What I got was a round of pessimism not much darker than Happy Hour on NPR, only NPR’s afternoon chats still felt slightly edgier.

I didn’t want anyone to die, but I desperately wanted the play to make good on its promise. Titling your show Death by PowerPoint is indeed a flashy way to get butts in seats, but anything that doesn’t resemble an intellectual bloodbath is sure to pale by comparison. As if in answer to my silent plea to see someone die, an 18-year-old tech hand stood onstage and recited an announcement that seemed to pain him with every word: “If any audience member should keel over from the power of the presentations – don’t be alarmed.” We all chuckled awkwardly, feeling for the kid. Is anything more poetic than a theatre nerd who can’t handle performing in the theatre?

The show began, and four young and enthusiastic actors sashayed across the stage. Each step they took was aggressively coached to the tiniest detail. Immediately, I recognised a handful of archetypes I was to assume fit well within the TED world: the obsessive overachiever, the aggro-brainy dude, the unassuming perky blonde who would somehow “prove us all wrong”, the slacker wunderkind who makes it all seem effortless. Not a single black Steve Jobs turtleneck among them. I guess that’s too on the nose. 

Much like the obvious differences in their characters, each performer utilised the TED talk format to suit their individual arcs. The overachiever strung terrifying statistics that popped up with every slide. She wanted you to get depressed, and she did a damn good job trying. The aggro-dude spliced incoherent platitudes like “SUPERHEROES ARE AWESOME” in with gratuitously adorable photos of pugs, a tactic meant to grab the attention of the ADD generation. The unassuming blonde chose a more storytelling-like format, using anecdotes about her mom to pull at the heartstrings. The wunderkind veered off script completely, becoming one of those TED talkers who’s more Steve Jobs than Wozniak, giving the audience the intellectual finger. 

An example of a pretty good TED talk

For a moment, I felt as if this play was going to take on a narrative. That it wouldn't be so much about the TED talks as it is the lifestyles of both the presenters and the attendees. Would it comment on the hypocrisy of the world’s top earners being the few to actually afford the pricey ticket to one of these conferences when the message is consistently about equality and innovation? Sadly, no. Would it use the characters that present these topics as a jumping off point into glass ceilings (there are two female presenters onstage) or perhaps to talk about what the next steps may be for the problems they pose? Also, no. 

Instead we just got a glimpse: a peek at devastation; a glimmer of genocides; a brief glance at how an actual TED talk may look, feel and taste. And that's when it really fell apart.

In all honesty, the messages presented were fine – just fine. When the aggro-dude said, “The poor used to starve to death – now they just die of diabetes," the audience gave a nod of understanding. When the unassuming blonde said her free will has been compromised by the fact that Gas Station store layouts are organised by chocolate temptation – the morsels of actual insight were a welcome change in an otherwise dry series of depressing presentations. 

There was no “death” by PowerPoint. No overwhelming “a-ha” where it’s revealed that we’ve been watching these lectures in a futuristic dystopia where the losers are executed. Instead, the show climaxed when the floppy-haired wunderkind seemingly went “off-book” into a daydream about his first time having sex. The detail given to this first carnal temptation, and the break from the frenetic rhythm of presentation after presentation was nice – touching even.

Then he flipped it all by claiming he made up the entire tale to fuel his point that the truth doesn’t matter when you describe it with enough forced confidence. Later, when he lost to the overachiever girl, he took out a mask and tried to suffocate himself while wielding a gun. Sadly, his character survived. 

This particular play danced on the topic "boldness of opinion" without ever making a clear argument. It laid out the harshness of the real statistics used by many TED talk-like presentations in the real world, and fused it with the fiction of a theatrical play but never made a decision on which direction it wanted to go in. Some parts would have operated fine as actual TED talks, and perhaps this is a love letter the playwright is creating for that form. It would have done well as a wacky sci-fi farce, positing a future where people who don’t give convincing public lectures are executed “Hunger Games”-style.

But since it meandered so aimlessly, much like a PowerPoint flips from fact to exciting image to video to fact; it’s lost. 

“Let’s TED talk this out” is an incredibly gross thing to say, but it’s proof that the format has infiltrated the social lexicon. “Normies”, “civilians”, whatever you want to call the non-#blessed, crave the prestige that comes with these lectures, and they may wrongly believe a farce is as close as they’re going to get.

Follow Julia Prescott on Twitter.

Remember the NSFW Life Ball poster that drove Austria mad? Looks like the photograph of a woman with breasts AND penis got so high up some people's grill that the Freedom Party (FPÖ) (i.e. Austria's far-right assholes) took it upon themselves to show us "what a real woman looks like".

Enter the poster above. Put together by the Youth division of the FPÖ (Ring Freiheitlicher Jugend), this naked, blonde and blue-eyed female is the bigots' response to transgender reality TV personalities, Conchita Wurst, gender-sensitive pronouns and other recent attempts at making Austria a slightly better place.

"Don't forget," proclaims the Aryan beauty, demurely covering her real breasts and non-existent penis with the RFJ flag: "Real women a) have no beard or penis, b) don’t need a quota to be successful, c) need no gender-sensitive language.“

I got in touch with Werner Wassicek, regional chairman of the RFJ, to ask him what the fuck.



VICE: What exactly is a "real woman" and what separates her from "fake women"?
Werner Wassicek: A real woman doesn’t need a beard or a penis. She doesn’t need quota regulations or gender debates. A real, strong woman distinguishes herself through skill, strength and confidence.

Are real women allowed to look different to the woman in your poster?

Of course they are. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough space on the pamphlet to fit all the different types of women.

You say that women have no beard and no penis. What exactly is the problem if she happens to have one of those things?

It becomes a problem when those features are the only reasons a woman is pushed into the spotlight. Would Conchita Wurst have won if she appeared on stage as Tom Neuwirth?

What’s the message behind your poster? Do women have to get naked in order to prove that they are "real"?
No, the message is directed against gender madness and against letting absurd developments get more attention than they deserve. It is indeed a side blow against those who preach tolerance but remain intolerant when it comes to normality and freedom of speech.

Is Conchita Wurst’s victory at the ESC and the depiction of a transgender model on the Life Ball poster worrying to you?

It’s not only about the ESC or the Life Ball poster. It’s also about being open- or narrow-minded and about being tolerant or intolerant. But these are absurd developments and we wanted to show that with this campaign.

You say are against gender debates and positive discrimination, because they don’t lead to equality. But are these things also harmful to some groups?


I don’t know a single woman who is treated equally just because of gender debates or positive discrimination. I’m not talking about hypocritical equal treatment but about the fact that men still earn more than women and women are put off with low paid maternity leave. These are the problems of our times, none of which are resolved by gender debates or quota regulations. Would you want to have surgery performed on you by a woman not cause of her skill but because of quota regulations? I don’t.

The "Team" section of your website lists seven men and one woman. What’s behind this arrangement? Aren’t there more women who want to join the RFJ?

We don’t have to fulfil a quota. What matters is individual performance and motivation.

Were there any women involved in the making of this campaign?

Yes, two men and two women were involved in the planning and editing of the campaign. It would be pretty insane to build a campaign about women but not involve any women.

What is it exactly that you are trying to protect the youth from? Are you afraid that beards and penises are contagious?

It’s not about a fictitious contagion. It’s about showing our youth that there is another way to look at the world. You don’t have to approve of everything the media presents us with. You can swim against the current and there is no need to embrace every new development.

Some of your posters write: "Don’t let yourself get genderised – aimed at today’s women and girls." What exactly is „genderisation“ and what does it lead to?

It’s a play on words. Sometimes you have to read between the lines.

All photos via the author and Tatyana Kondratenko.

My introduction to dumpster diving came shortly after I moved to Denmark from Toronto. I'd always been intrigued by the idea but had never gotten around to trying it out, so when my thoroughly Danish pals – Anders and Rasmus – asked me if I'd like to dig through the local grocery store's trash with them late one night, I figured, why the hell not?

The amount of stuff we found blew me away: fresh vegetables, pastries, whole loaves of bread, cookies... These weren’t festering, larvae-encrusted, rotting piles of half-composted food, either. For the most part, the produce was totally fine. The stuff looked like it was tossed because it had a few bruises, or, if it was a bunch of food packaged together, because one grape in the whole box had some mold on it. All freshly baked goods are required to be thrown out every night, regardless of the state they're in, so the bread was especially fresh. (I probably shouldn't have been so surprised; according to the United Nations Environment Programme, about 1.3 billion tonnes of food – or about a third of the world's production – is wasted every year.)

As the months went by, a few classmates and I began to develop a system for efficient bin dining while slowly growing immune to the sickly-sweet stench that seems to settle over all garbage. If you’d like to try it yourself, here’s the ethos we developed:

1. Wait about 20 to 30 minutes after the last grocery store in the mall by our dorm closed.
2. Put on clothes we don't mind getting putrid, strange liquids on (for me, old black jeans and a sweater).
3. Grab a couple of bags (at least one just for bread and pastries) and flashlights.
4. Get free food.

Our only rule was "throw everything we didn't want back in." If we left it out like a bunch of raccoons, whoever had to clean up the mess in the morning would get pissed off and lock the wheelie bins for a week or two. For me, a poor student in a notoriously expensive country, discovering dumpster diving was like hitting a treasure trove, and over the semester I gradually began including more and more wheelie-bin-rescued food into my diet.

Although I ate my fair share of "rubbish" during that year, it was always treated as supplemental nutrition, never my primary diet. Since then, I've always wondered if I could have lived off of only found foods, and so last May I decided to give it a shot. 

For two weeks I held myself to three rules:

1. I could only eat food I picked out of the bin.
2. Spices/condiments/oil do not count as food.
3. Alcohol does not count as food.

I also decided to document everything I found and to tally up the total value of my foraged delicacies.

Here's what I was able to salvage:

4th of May

-2 cauliflowers
-2 bouquets of flowers
-3 boxes of strawberries
-2 boxes of green grapes
-box of mushrooms
-1 live rosemary plant
-3 bananas
-8 oranges
-8 red peppers
-4 yellow peppers
-7 chocolate muffins
-7 croissants
-2 pop tarts
-5 lemon rolls
-2 pain au chocolat

Total: 355.50DKK (€47)

May 6

-3 leeks
-1 broccoli
-1 box of mushrooms
-3 red peppers
-18 buns
-1 chocolate muffin
-2 loaves of bread

Total: 179.50DKK (€24)

8th of May

-1 box of salad
-2 aubergines
-2 courgettes
-5kg bag of potatoes
-2 heads of lettuce
-9 oranges
-1 grapefruit
-5 and a half loaves of bread
-3 buns

Total: 298.50 DKK (€40)

11th of May

-4 boxes of grapes
-half a box of strawberries (found a whole box, but half were mush)
-3 small bags of mini carrots
-1 box of cherry tomatoes
-1 pack of vine tomatoes
-1 broccoli
-1 celery
-1 lemon

Total: 175DKK (€23)

14th of May

-5 platters of assorted cheese (goat, brie, Emmental, blue, and cheddar)
-1 tub of “salat” cheese (think shitty feta)
-6 limes
-1 cucumber
-1 avocado
-2 aubergines
-3 loaves of bread
-15 buns
-2 cinnamon rolls
-3 poptarts
-4 lemon rolls
-10 croissants
-9 muffins

Total: 573.50DKK (€77)

17th of May

-3 1kg bags of potatoes
-7 vine tomatoes
-2 1kg bags of carrots
-2 ears of corn
-27 buns
-9 muffins
-3 pain au chocolat
-5 croissants
-2 loaves of bread
-3 honeydew melons
-6 peppers
-1 mango
-2 mini heads of lettuce
-1 rake
-1 plant (Princess Ariane Red)

Total: 504DKK (€67)

GRAND TOTAL: 2086 DKK (€279)

That comes out to just over a month's worth of rent at my dorm.

To be honest, though, I did slip up. Over the two weeks of a supposedly dumpster-devoted diet, I ate two pieces of a chocolate bar, then I scarfed down a chocolate ball, and I went to town on a falafel ball (all given to me by friends). I also found myself getting cravings for rice and eggs about five days in, but I quenched the former by making cauliflower “rice” and the latter went away after I ate eggplant, which tastes and feels oddly protein-y if you cook it right.

But by the end of the experiment, I think I was actually healthier than before I started. The diet was mostly vegan, and junk food was hard to come by. Knowing how to cook also helped because I managed to whip up stuff that looked and tasted pretty decent:

Even though my most hardcore bin diving phase has run its course, a big chunk of what I eat is still coming out of the garbage. I haven't had to pay for bread in months, and it's working wonders for my wallet. Trust me, give it a try. Stake out your local grocery store after hours and take a peek into what they throw away. You may encounter a bunch of decaying waste – surrounded by ravenous rats with beady little eyes – but more often than not, you'll probably be able to find something for lunch the next day.

Follow Jackie Hong on Twitter.

One night shelter is hardly enough to serve an entire city’s homeless population. Unfortunately, that’s currently all Manchester has to offer  – and that severe lack of beds has left the city’s small network of homeless charities facing an incredibly difficult challenge.

It’s been a year since Narrowgate – the city’s only homeless shelter – was temporarily forced to close after Salford City Centre found that the facility could no longer accept housing benefit, its main source of income. A private donation has kept the shelter open since, but only for four nights a week.

Graham Ridge, a support worker at the charity Barnabus, is visited by four or five people every day who are either homeless, or in danger of losing their home and in need of advice. “I’ve been doing this for seven years and there’s been a decline in the number of spaces available,” he says. “We’re over-stretched. It’s a battle for every service user.”

The number of people made homeless because they were evicted by their private landlord is at its highest in ten years, according to government statistics released at the end of last month. Around 13,650 households were accepted as homeless by their councils at the end of the last financial year, a 14 percent increase on the previous year. On top of that, the number of homeless households living in temporary accommodation in England rose to 58,590 in 2013/14, the highest it's been for five years. 

Responding to the figures, Campbell Robb – chief executive of Shelter – said they were “just the tip of the iceberg”.

Some 2,225 families were accepted as homeless last year in Greater Manchester, according to figures from Shelter. A further 2,438 were living in temporary accommodation, 429 were intentionally homeless and another 2,332 people were found to be homeless without priority need.

Liam – who I meet at a breakfast drop-in on Bloom Street in Manchester city centre – is one of the many who makes up those statistics. Run by volunteers and staff from Barnabus, around 40 people come to get a cup of tea and something to eat at the drop-in every weekday morning. Liam has been on the streets for five months and tells me he struggles to get enough to eat when this place isn’t open.

“On weekdays it’s OK – this place is open, so you only need to get enough money for a B&B; you don’t need to worry about food,” he says. “But obviously this place can’t be open 24/7, so the weekends are more difficult.”

Given the transient nature of the homeless population, statistics on this issue sometimes only give a rough indication of the size of the problem. The most recent council figures show there are 24 rough sleepers in Manchester, double the rate of the previous year. This number is based on council officials and other individuals going out on a night in November and doing a head count of the people they could find sleeping rough.

Ashley, 27, who has been homeless since he was 16, explains that the figures can be misleading, as the majority of rough sleepers don’t want to be found. “I’m sleeping anywhere that’s warm and dry at the moment,” he says. “I’m a good person and I’m from Manchester, so I know people and I’ve got friends here, but they never see me out. I don’t want them to see me out. So I go to the places where I cannot be found.”

Matt has been homeless for two years and sleeps at the Shudehill bus station most evenings. "There’s a hell of lot more people sleeping rough these days," he says.

John Leech, Liberal Democrat MP for Manchester Withington, says the figures on rough-sleeping have been underestimated for years.

“A rough sleeper is someone who is sleeping on the street, whereas someone who is homeless has no accommodation that they have a legal right to occupy, but they do have a roof over their head – for example, a B&B or hostel,” he explains. “It’s highly likely these figures are underestimated and have been for years, given the difficulty in accurately counting the number of people living on the streets and the failure to check derelict or empty buildings.”

I’m told the same thing at every charity I visit: the number of people coming through their doors is increasing, and it’s proving difficult to give them appropriate support.

Dave Smith, founder and director of the Boaz Trust

The Boaz Trust, a Christian organisation that has helped destitute asylum seekers and refugees in Greater Manchester for the past decade, relies on volunteers giving up their spare rooms so their service users can have somewhere to sleep.

“We’re always overstretched,” explains director and founder Dave Smith. “We’ve got 50 people on our waiting list at the moment.”

Downstairs from Boaz in their Oldham Road office is Mustard Tree, an homeless charity with a client list numbering over 19,000 people. They have recently expanded to employ 16 staff, and Graham Hudson – the charity’s Creative Programmes Director, who overcame a life of gang violence and drug addiction before getting involved in the charity – tells me he’s surprised to find himself working in a “growth industry”.

The Booth Centre is an organisation that offers meals, advice and training to around 170 people each week. Visitors at the centre are evenly split between rough-sleepers, people in temporary accommodation and those who have recently been housed but are struggling to cope with the demands of a normal lifestyle.

Amanda Croome is the chief executive of the centre, which is just round the corner from Strangeways prison. The building has a kitchen, computer rooms, a garden and a performance space where theatre groups from the Royal Exchange come to put on workshops. She says the economic downturn and cuts to services have led to a surge in the number of people using the facility.

“The services that we now have in this city don’t really meet the needs of the people we see,” she says.

Unsurprisingly, the lack of night shelters in the city has also had an impact. As Amanda explains, previously the police would be able drop rough sleepers off at the 80-bed shelter run by the Salvation Army. The closure of this facility in 2011 meant this option was no longer available.

Amanda Croome

Amanda worries that the proposed Universal Credit benefits reform – which will see people receive their housing benefit directly, rather than it being given to their landlords – will increase homelessness in the city.

“With universal credit it’s a great idea that work should pay more than benefits, but giving drug and alcohol users their housing benefit rather than giving it straight to their landlord is madness,” she argues. “The first thing they’ll do when they get that money is try to score. It will be a good system for a whole section of people, but for a group that are largely ignored, it could be catastrophic.”

The lack of housing supply in the city is also a concern; over 85,000 people were on the waiting list for council housing in Greater Manchester last year, according to figures from Shelter.

Graham Ridge struggles to find accommodation for the people who come to him for advice.

“Very often people come in asking for accommodation over the weekend, and there’s just nowhere to put them. We can sometimes find them a place in a B&B, but those spaces are rare,” he says. “In the past week I’ve done three referrals to a supported accommodation provider, but even if they accept the people there’s no guarantee that they’ll get in. They’ll most likely be put on a waiting list.”

Joan Campbell, right, says she's the happiest she's ever been since going to the Booth Centre.

Involved in the founding of the Booth Centre in 1995, Amanda has a calm sense of authority and is well liked by staff and service users; walking around the centre I meet three people who say they would “do anything for her”. Joan Campbell, who’s in her fifties, spent a year living in hostels while waiting for a flat to become available after becoming homeless 18 months ago. “Over the years I’ve had more support here than I've ever had in my entire life,” she says. “All my friends are here.”

As I get ready to leave the centre, a tall man with a cut on his chin walks in and asks if there’s anything to eat. “Hi Kevin,” says Amanda, before telling him that lunch won’t be ready for another 40 minutes, but that he’s welcome to have some soup. I ask her if it’s normal for people to walk in off the street like that. She says it is and admits it can be hard to keep track of those who use the centre. “It’s normally when people have hit really hard times that they come back,” she explains. “I haven’t seen Kevin for 15 years.”

For Manchester’s long-term homeless, the lack of housing, cuts to services and an absence of more than one night shelter in the city have created a dire and unmanageable situation. And the longer this persists, the harder it will be for those being let down by the system to get back on their feet.

Ashley, who doesn’t like his friends seeing him sleeping rough, tells me he was top of his class and set to go to college before he found himself living on the streets.


“You know when you were a kid and you would get all your Lego bricks, and build something really big, only for a friend to come over and kick it all down?” he says. “That’s how I feel. How many more times do I have to start again to get back to that point?”

@JSandlerClarke / @CBethell_photo

More stories about homelessness in the UK:

Activists Poured Concrete All Over Some 'Anti-Homeless' Spikes This Morning

I Am One of Britain's Hidden Homeless

Sneaking Into Brighton’s New Homeless Shipping Container Ghetto

Although Michael Jackson’s body shut down from a suspicious drug overdose five years and a week ago, worldwide interest in the misunderstood – and by all accounts, creepy – pop superstar’s legacy is still alive and thriving, as exemplified by the interest in last week’s interview about urban exploring Neverland Ranch. We got a number of requests to release the rest of the photos taken by our crack team of photographers, and we were like Sure, why not? So here they are. Keep a look out for the blue robot. You can't make it out, but the inscription on the robot reads, "HI KIDS! MY NAME IS ZORD. I WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND. I HAVE A SPECIAL SURPRISE PICKED JUST FOR YOU. THANK YOU AND BE GOOD!"

I guess we'll never know what Zord's "special surprise" was.

Follow Jules Suzdaltsev on Twitter.

Return to The VICE Guide to Europe 2014 homepage

(All photos by Glauco Canalis unless otherwise stated)

While all the tourists make their bored pilgrimages to Rome and Florence, here in Milan we have the best food, the coolest fashion, the most attractive people and we all like going to bed early, so you don’t even have to pretend you still like clubbing. If you do like clubbing, then it’s about time you took a break – come to Milan, but read our guide first.

Jump to sections by using the index below:

– WHERE TO PARTY
– WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?
– POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?
   Squats | Protests | Meet the Immigrants
– WHERE TO EAT
– WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?
– WHERE TO DRINK
– WHERE TO STAY
– LGBT MILAN
– WHERE TO HANG OUT WHEN YOU'RE SOBER
– HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP
– HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST
– PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID
– TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES
– A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF QUESTIONABLE LOCAL MUSIC
– VICE CITY MAP

WHERE TO PARTY

The Milanese aren’t the wildest party animals on the planet. We’re not even the wildest party animals in Italy. To be honest, there are Bedouins with a better understanding of rave than us – most people here would be much happier just getting an early night and staying pretty.

Don't expect to find anywhere that really breaks the 5AM barrier, there are still a few clubs doing their best to keep people out past bedtime. The Dude club, in Lambrate, is the spiritual and actual home of the city's techno scene, and does its best to keep up with London and Berlin.

Back in the day, the tiny Rocket venue, in Navigli, only had a bar licence, which meant you legally weren’t allowed to dance. A run of parties later and they finally got around to getting their groove permit and nowadays the lights stay on until dawn. One night here you’ll see the city’s good-looking indie kids pulling shapes to Hoosiers songs, and the next night somebody might actually fulfil your holiday fantasies and put some Italo on. Whatever’s going on, dancing has gone from prohibited to pretty much mandatory.

Another of the city’s best party venues is Tunnel Club in the north-east of the city, which is in a railway arch close to Milan’s Central Station. The brick walls and exposed steel pipes add to the underground vibe, while the DJ roster draws from the top tier of European techno DJs and they also throw in the odd live gig by people like Wild Beasts and St Vincent. Basically, this is a much better use for a railway tunnel than just letting the Mafia store their dead bodies here.

So some bad news. We used to have this great label called Buka who became a sort of clubnight and hosted amazing parties at weird locations playing nutty underground electronica. Then it closed down. We live in hope of it being resurrected – it doesn’t seem completely unlikely, so it’s worth checking for signs of life when you’re here.

Obviously, it goes without saying that you should avoid all the trashy overpriced clubs in the city centre unless you’re a professional footballer or are keen to have sex with one (an admirable and achievable goal).

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WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?

The good news about drugs in Italy is that things are chilling out a bit. Since 2006, we’d had one of the harshest anti-drug laws in Europe, known as the "Legge Fini-Giovanardi" after Gianfranco Fini and Carlo Giovanardi, the two right-wing assholes who supported it. Thankfully, that law was recently thrown out by the Constitutional Court. Nevertheless, this is hardly a tolerant city.

Unlike hard drugs, which are still under Mafia control across the country, the weed in Milan is often grown here in Italy. Hashish is slightly more expensive than grass, unlike the old days when it used to be much more popular with locals.

In a city with a fashion industry as big as Milan’s, you won’t be too surprised to learn that there’s enough cocaine around to keep our men limp and women tense forever. Outside of fashion parties it's prevalent at raves, in the suburbs, restaurants and anywhere urine is collected – after all, wastewater investigations in 2011 suggested that the city consumes 330 kilograms of cocaine every year.

MDMA, speed and ketamine aren’t unheard of, but this isn’t exactly Berlin or Amsterdam, most of us think the "straight through crew" are just people who cut the queue in the bakery. Soz.

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POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

SQUATS

Milan is the city where Berlusconi was hit in the face with a miniature metal souvenir of the Duomo cathedral, so we’re no strangers to weird political moments. During the 1970s, a decade-long period of turmoil known as the Years of Lead saw terrorism from both left and right-wing groups, and the city is still politically divided. The left is in the majority, but the right is muscling in. Political parties from both sides have their headquarters in the city, but they tend to only make public appearances during major events.

The city is also host to a multitude of different ideological groups, each with their own space. Starting from the South, in Conchetta Street you'll find Cox18 – a left-wing squat founded in 1976. They offer beer at affordable prices, Balkan-beat concerts and a decent outdoor area primarily designed to annoy their neighbours. If you like books and beards, you've come to the right place.

A few miles away there's Vittoria, a squat where you can talk about feminism while drinking wine from plastic cups. Further north is Macao, the Milanese artists' squat. It’s a former slaughterhouse that is now used for art installations and performances and is a good place for a quiet drink. They don’t bang on about politics too much at Macao, though the management are undoubtedly leftists.

The North of the city is equally divided between left and right-wing groups. Here you'll find the Presidio (the right), the T28 (the left), the Leoncavallo (the middle-class left) and the Torchiera (the reggae left). The Presidio is the local office of Forza Nuova, a national far-right party. The counter is covered with flags bearing the Celtic cross, and every Thursday they put on a skinhead gig. The T28 is a squat not far away from Loreto Square. It's leftist, looks like it might fall apart at any moment and there's always some more wine to go around. The Leoncavallo is a historic Milanese left-wing squat that hosts political meetings on Mondays and then for the rest of the week is a buttrock goa, dub and electro psy venue. Further north, there's the Torchiera, a former farmstead next to a cemetery and a Roma camp where you can listen to reggae and drum 'n' bass and drink sangria.

You get the gist.

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POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

PROTESTS

In Milan, there are at least a couple of protests a month. There are times though, where you have one a week or even more. Apart from public transport strikes, this mainly happens when summer approaches, between April, May and June, when all the left-wing students prefer trotting down the streets to staying in class, and right-wing students follow just to avoid being forgotten.

Then summer comes, and protests go on holiday. Throughout the year there are many historical anniversaries, mainly linked to WWII and the Italian Resistance movement – Milan received a gold medal from the State for its role in fighting in the Resistance, and is the city where the corpse of Mussolini was hung upside down for public viewing. Fascists have their own rallies too, and anti-fascists always show up for a counter protest.

Some demos can be quite rough, especially when the police get fighty. The main problem with the rallies are the streets, which are constantly getting closed down. So be careful, and if you’re hoping to do some shopping, do avoid the demonstrations' paths.

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POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

MEET THE IMMIGRANTS

In 2013, there were 20 immigrants for every 100 residents of the city of Milan. The biggest immigrant communities are from Asia, Eastern Europe and North Africa, and as anywhere else, each group tends to congregate in certain areas of the city: The Chinese and Filipinos live right outside the centre, from Monumentale Cemetery to Arena. The Slavs share the central area of Porta Venezia with the Eritreans, who reached Milan in the 1970s and are now a well-established community with their own restaurants, bars and shops. In Padua Street, immigration has no boundaries: Peruvians work as delivery boys, and Ecuadorians drink Heinekens in the park. The Moroccans run butcher shops, and the Egyptians – the second biggest immigrant group in the city of Milan – pizza restaurants. The Pakistanis have their convenience stores where they sell beers for a few Euros.

The weird thing about Milan is that these communities live right next to the headquarters of the right-wing parties who have been fighting immigration for years. This guy here, who seems to be a fan of Anders Breivik, has his office right next to a Roma market, while Berlusconi's headquarters are a couple of metres from Padua Street.

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WHERE TO EAT

Erba Brusca
Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, 286, 20142
“They got that homegrown shit!” would be an inappropriate but not inaccurate thing to shout when eating in this beautiful and traditional Milanese restaurant, where all the vegetables come from the owners' garden. It’s worth the long drive for the taster menu of six courses for €40. If you feel bucolic but don’t want to make the journey out to Erba Brusca, try Un Posto a Milano instead, which is a real farmstead but right in the city centre.
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Osteria Alla Grande
Via delle Forze Armate, 405
Every website designer on the planet could learn something from whoever decided that the best way to advertise a traditional Milanese trattoria is with a picture of the proprietor nude, holding a statue of an eagle in front of his junk. (Seriously, check it out.) They serve all the best local dishes, with a strict policy against burgers and other fast food.
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Trattoria Sabbioneda da Romolo
Via Alessandro Tadino, 32, 20124
If you’ve always dreamed of having an Italian grandmother – an oddly specific dream – this place flogs simple, traditional dishes cooked just the way our grandmothers make them. To complete the experience, the waiters are rude and the chef, Romolo, is terrifying. You’ll probably need to make a reservation, as it’s wildly popular – we fucking love it when waiters are rude to us.
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Luini
Via Santa Radegonda, 16, 20121
The pizza places in the city centre are tourist traps selling pale imitations of our most famous food. Avoid them at all costs. If you do want to taste real Italian pizza, grab a slice from Spontini or get a true Naples style pizza from Tegamino. To really eat like the Milanese do, go to Luini's for the panzerotti. They look like Cornish pasties but they’re actually miniature calzone and they’re amazing. Luini’s doesn’t have anywhere to sit, so do as the locals do and take them to eat in the nearby square and watch all the fashion people stride by, daydreaming about eating pizza.
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Valà
Daniele Crespi 14 (angolo Cesare da Sesto) 20123
Two very cool young women from Palermo and Modena run this place close to Porta Genova, where they serve a different menu every day. Whatever they’re flogging when you visit will include dishes from Sicily, vegan food and the famous crescentine from Modena – a delicious filled-bread thing. If you’ve got a taste for vegan food, there’s an upmarket option at Ghea, in Porta Genova, or the much cheaper Alhambra restaurant in Porta Venezia. Basically, it's Italy; you're not going to starve any time soon.
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WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?

Milanese Cutlet
Because we love trapping baby animals in crates till they're dead then covering them in toast, breaded veal cutlets on the bone are wildly popular here. If you want to show off your local knowledge to impress absolutely no one, try asking for an "Elephant Ear", a bizarre local colloquialism based on the fact that from the right angle, if you squint a bit, they might look vaguely similar.

Milanese Risotto
Look, I know risotto isn’t exactly a “weird local food”, but we’re Italian; everyone stole our food, so we don’t have too many surprises left. Anyway we make this better than anyone else, so screw you.

Casouela
I know a dish made from pork leftovers and savoy cabbage sounds like it would be shit, and we’re willing to grant you that it looks like medical waste, but it’s honestly pretty great.

Pizza
Think you know pizza? Yeah, fine, you probably do know pizza, but we invented it. My favourite varieties are Naples style, the soft and doughy original, the thin and crispy Roman style and the panzerotti we told you about earlier, which is like a mini-calzone. But there are loads more. In fact, pretty much the only type of pizza you can’t get here is that one with the little cheeseburgers baked into the crust. Boy, are we mad about that one.

Negroni Sbagliato
To drink like a local, order a Negroni Sbagliato as an aperitif. A twist on the classic Italian cocktail, this was invented in Milan’s Bar Basso and is basically a Negroni with prosecco wine instead of gin. Another common drink is the spritz, made with prosecco wine, alcoholic bitters and sparking mineral water; although this one comes from Venice, so it’s not as traditionally Milanese. Either way, we’re doing our best to reclaim prosecco from hen parties and first dates.

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WHERE TO DRINK

Most of the best places to drink in Milan are in the Porta Ticinese-Porta Genova-Navigli area near the river Darsena – known for having almost as much cocaine in it as the water in London. Still not worth drinking, though.

Instead, start your night on Vigevano Street. Here you’ll find the Peppuccio bar, which despite its shitty interior is right at the heart of many of Milan’s social scenes. Also on Vigevano, you’ll find Cape Town where all the Milanese hipsters hang out, pondering whether their lifestyle of indolent and infantile dandyism is compatible with the red-blooded Italian alpha archetype that has been closeting gays and ruining female lives for generations. There’s also a great juice bar called La Susina nearby, although a) it’s only open during the day and b) this is a guide to going out drinking, so fuck juice bars.

Away from Navigli, the preppy Porta Venezia area is worth checking out, if only because it’s the best place to hang with people who’ve come from all over the world to make Milan their home. Our big Eritrean community is around here and if you came from Eritrea, you’d be pretty chuffed to be in Italy too, which is what makes the One Love Cafè such a nice place to get pissed. Also good is Bar Picchio in Melzo Street – they haven’t changed or cleaned anything since the 1950s but the cocktails are dirt-cheap.

You should check out the Isola district, which as the name suggests is an isolated area away from the town centre. Ten years ago it was empty, but these days it's blossoming with unusual bars done out in radical-chic. We recommend the Frida, the Blu and the Deus Ex Machina.

There are only two good bars in Ortica, but they’re both well worth visiting. The unusual Santeria is a bar, a restaurant, a shop and a workspace where many Milanese people meet for an aperitif, or a brunch. The second place is the Balera dell'Ortica, which has been a spot for scenesters since the war ended and everyone started making babies.

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WHERE TO STAY

Our taxis are overpriced and our public transport is like taking a short trip around hell, so you’ll want to stay somewhere pretty central to avoid commuting. Top of our list would be the Ostello Bello (from €35 per night for a dorm bed). It's right in the centre of town and the young owners have done a good job. They put on gigs that even the locals turn up to, so this is also a good place to a) nod your head to some songs you’ve never heard before and b) make some fashionable new Milanese friends.

Alternatively, get a taste of what life would be like if you’d taken up the habit by staying at Monastery Hostel (dorm beds from €26 per night), which is located in one wing of a Franciscan convent. It’s completely independent of the Church, so you should be alright to stay here even if you’re an unmarried couple, or gay, or Jewish, or trans, or coveting an ox or one of the many other things the Vatican hates.

The Bio City Hotel (rooms from €60 per night) in the Central Station area is decent. It’s out of the bustle of the city and as the name suggests it makes a big effort to be lovely to the environment. This way you can tell yourself you’re offsetting all those toxic emissions you created travelling here just by sleeping in a place with zero-emission heating.

If you hate nature, or if you’re just keen to stay right in the heart of the liveliest part of the city, try the BB Hotel Navigli (rooms from €63 per night). It has smart, modern rooms but most importantly if you pinned a map of Milan to a dartboard, this would be the bull's-eye.

Also, obviously AirBnB exists here.

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LGBT MILAN

It might surprise you to learn that a city which has been dominated by the Catholic Church for the last 2,000 years doesn’t have the most thriving gay scene. Still, there are a handful of places worth checking out. On Fridays, head to Q21 on Padova Street, while on Saturdays you should choose Glitter Club instead. Later in the night, head to VERBOTEN at Queens Club, which has a no photos and no mobile phones policy, so who knows what goes on in there.

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WHERE TO HANG OUT WHEN YOU'RE SOBER

San Bernardino alle Ossa
Not exactly a bunch of laughs, but if you’re feeling a bit metal we recommend a tour of this small chapel in the Santo Stefano square which was built over a cemetery and is decorated with real bones and skulls. There’s a giant cross made of skulls. A giant fucking cross made of skulls.

Milanese Trattorias
These are chilled out spots to eat, because restaurants aren't enough for us. It's worth noting that there's no such thing as a "healthy Italian diet". This is especially true in northern cuisine, where even the greenest dish is usually cooked in lard. Still, they’re great places to hang out because everyone’s in a good mood when they’re full of lard.

Bagatti Valsecchi House
If you want to get an idea of what your trip in Milan would have been like in the 1500s, come here to check out an incredible range of art and antiques from the 15th and 16th centuries. To complete the effect, smash your iPhone up, snap your credit cards and then dose yourself with tuberculosis.

Frip
If you want to pass yourself off as a local, there are two things you should do: 1) Never ever walk around barefoot when you’re drunk or too tired for high heels (Italians would never be so crass) and 2) pay a visit to Frip. It's in the Ticinese area and it's where you can make sure you’re at the bleeding edge of contemporary Milanese fashion. We can’t make you good-looking, but we’ll do our very best to make you stop dressing like a 14-year-old with a PlayStation addiction and a Pringles habit.
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HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP

Italian pickpockets have elevated their vocation to an art, and Milan is their museum. Keep a close eye on your pockets and bags, particularly in busy train stations. These thieving bastards come in all shapes and sizes, including teenagers and children. Opportunistic theft is quite common, so even the apparently refined clientele in a bar and club could relieve you of your wallet or phone if you make it easy for them.

Embarrassingly for us, one very real problem for women in our city is sexual harassment on public transport. It ranges from dickheads trying to surreptitiously touch your tits "by accident", through to more explicit and obscene types of abuse. It really doesn’t matter whether you’re dressed like a nun or a stripper, it just happens. In general, try to keep your distance from the groups of men who will be making loud comments about you – and there will be many – and stay close to staff like bus drivers, who can be guardian angels. I’m really sorry about these guys, they’re the fucking worst.

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HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST

There aren’t as many tourists in Milan as there are in Rome or Florence – I guess because of the slightly austere vibe of the place. Those tourists we do get fall into two categories. The first are hard to hate, even though they get in the way of all our shit – slow-moving families who herd around the Duomo Square and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where they pirouette on the balls of the mosaic bull on the floor for good luck.

But the second, the second kind wind us all up. They’re the fashion-obsessed droves who come to Milan to steam up the windows of high-end shops with their breath. So, if you come, don’t spend your time staring at high-end shops they had in the airport you left from. Go and find something else – especially if you’re into fashion.

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PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID

Corso Como
This street starts from the train station of Porta Garibaldi and ends in the chic neighbourhood of Brera. The nightclubs here are stuffed with 40-year-old douchebags on a constant, charmless search for “figa” (the Italian equivalent of “pussy”).

Preppy Men
The worst people in Milan are the preppy men who hang around on Corso Como. These are the guys who study Economics at Bocconi University with the hope of becoming tomorrow’s Berlusconi and the only thing they love as much as themselves is chatting up tourists, so be on your guard.

Certain Types of Fashionable People
Fashion designers and fashion design students share an ironclad belief that being a Milanese fashion designer gives them the right to makeover anybody.

Duomo on Saturdays, Especially on Carnival
Duomo Square, Corso Vittorio Emanuele and Torino Street have the highest concentration of bland clothing shops in the entire world. They're also where all of Milan’s bored teenagers congregate on a Saturday afternoon. During Carnival they come armed with shaving foam – which obviously, is great fun for them, but totally humiliating for anyone who gets foamed.

Eataly
Eataly is well known as the place to buy the most expensive Italian food. Do you know where else you can find good Italian food in Italy? ANY SUPERMARKET, most of which don’t have price tags designed to give Russians hard-ons.

The Number 90 Bus Line After 11PM
Not long ago, the number 90 bus used to be the only one running after 1AM. It connects all the shittiest areas in Milan, and if you’re riding it late in the evening your chances of meeting some unpleasant drunk cunt are close to certain.

Any Bar with a Slot Machine
Slot machines are currently turning a vast number of people into addicts all across Italy. Do your best to avoid this tragic diorama of ruined people handing their last Euros over to the state.

Taxis
To ride in a Milanese taxi is to submit yourself to a half-hour lecture about how all the alternatives (like Uber) suck while you sit stationary behind a bus watching the meter tick over and over until it finally bankrupts you.

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TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES

Tipping:
You don’t really need to tip in Italy. Obviously most workers won’t refuse a tip, but let us be clear: Italians don’t tip. At least, not for simple things like taxi rides, a coffee or a pizza. Our grandmothers do tip sometimes, on particular occasions – birthdays or golden anniversary lunches that bring the whole family together – or if they were given an outstanding service.

Rather than tipping, in certain cases Italians allow the restaurant to keep the change when paying cash (e.g. leaving a €50 banknote on a €48.50 bill).

Handy phrases:
Ciao – Hello
Bella – Gorgeous 
Grazie – Thanks 
Baciami – Kiss me 
Ciao, Balotelli – Hello, Italy's second best footballer 
Grazie, Berlusconi – Thank you, man who isn't Italy's Prime Minister any more
Coglione – Idiot
Pezzo di merda – Piece of shit
Che cazzo vuoi? – What the fuck do you want?

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A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF QUESTIONABLE LOCAL MUSIC

Here's a little primer of the kind of stuff you'll be hearing while you sway about in our bars. It's not all as fabulous as our shoes.

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VICE CITY MAP

Well, there you go. Have a lovely time and don't drop litter please.

Ciao,

– VICE Italy 

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Return to The VICE Guide to Europe 2014 homepage

The interpreters who worked alongside American and NATO forces in Afghanistan are among our bravest and most loyal allies. They played an essential role in sourcing intelligence and educating Western troops about the local culture. Now they’re being abandoned.

In part two, VICE News correspondent Ben Anderson interviews the Taliban's official spokesman, who tells him that the Taliban considers Afghan interpreters who worked for the United States to be traitors who should be punished with death. But these interpreters aren't threatened only by the Taliban – members of their communities suspect them of being spies and of being paid highly for their services, and are targeting them accordingly. Despite living under constant danger after loyal service to US forces, these interpreters have been unable to obtain visas necessary for them to leave the country.

Download the full eBook from Ben Anderson's The Interpreters on PDF Download (Free), Google Play (Free), Kindle, and Kobo

All photos courtesy Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)

When David Lee steps before several dozen guests to introduce his once-in-a-lifetime take on North Korean cuisine, he sounds almost sorry. After all, as the executive chef of Barn Joo, a (South) “Korean-inspired gastropub” in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, Lee admits he makes “pretty Americanised” versions of his own national dishes, and his attempt at North Korean fare will inevitably have to take some liberties, too. Born in South Korea, Lee couldn’t visit his estranged countrymen to the North if he tried, let alone taste what they’ve been eating lately.

But tonight, somewhat unbelievably, everybody in Barn Joo’s private dining room can. Joo Yang, a 23-year-old defector and the evening’s guest of honour, has brought along some smuggled ingredients from her home country’s black market. She’s here courtesy of Liberty in North Korea, the nonprofit for which this dinner is supposed to raise a bunch of cash. With a team spread across Asia and the United States, LiNK is committed in part to challenging perceptions of the country – typically coloured by nuclear rhetoric and Kim family nonsense – and drawing attention to the 25 million human beings still tethered to its soil.

Tonight’s menu is probably their most creative project yet. LinK’s Sarah Lee (no relation to the chef) speculates that this may well be “the first meal of its kind in North America”, which is probably true by token of the authentic dishes alone. Take into account those that are a more hepcat, Manhattan-gentrified take on a cuisine largely still locked within what is still the world’s most notorious police state, and this might be the first meal of its anywhere.

Joo Yang reassures Chef Lee that his food reminds her of home – a compliment he receives like a badge of honour – but he is correct that one of Manhattan’s hippest South Korean restaurants is an incongruent place to try the food of their frequently famished kin. “SoulCycle” buzzes by my ears more than once, and one sheepish diner at my table only grazes on the assorted platters, explaining she is technically in the middle of a juice cleanse. A modelesque, Slavic-looking waitress offers me a glass of “our North Korean drink”, a dose of Pyongyang-made soju cut by the type of ginger beer not likely found much outside of artisanal stores in Brooklyn.

At a cafe the next day, Joo Yang tells me a bit about what mixology is like in North Korea proper. While she spent the last few years of her teens alone in North Hamgyong province after her parents and two younger siblings successfully defected in 2008, she subsisted partially off of the illegal alcohol trade, procuring the strictly contraband machinery needed to produce homebrew soju and making an acorn moonshine in her otherwise empty home. Eventually, after the secret police claimed the house on suspicion of her family’s true whereabouts, she moved her operation to the warehouse where she spent her final year in the country.

“You don’t sell your alcohol direct to the consumer, but to a middleman,” she says. “That person buys from different producers, so if you make alcohol you start to become known locally... You kind of develop your own little brand name, like, ‘Oh, the soju Joo Yang makes is good; it tastes good.’”

As I’m downing the last fizz of the delicious cocktail at the North Korean gala, out come the “defected” foods of the night. Their presence is a logistical marvel as much as moral quandary; why should we be making edible curios of actual food lifted from a country that hasn’t had enough to eat in two decades? Joo Yang assures me these ingredients are among the nation’s most common, however, and that the 27,000 refugees now living in South Korea have created a large market for authentic northern flavours – “the taste of it, the feel of it” – no matter how much more nutritious and robust their South Korean counterparts might be. The plates before us, then, are perhaps just one drop of gochujang in a sea of kimchi – especially as the genuinely North Korean items are limited to the single-bite hors d'oeuvres.

And every one of them does, in fact, contain distinct cultural information. To circumvent the upper-class cost of pork in North Korea, there is injokogi, an oil-sapped compression of soybeans that creates a flattened protein substitute quite similar in taste and texture to tempeh (North Koreans like to add hot pepper paste to re-moisten and spice). Served in triangular swatches, the artificial meat follows a comparably chili-burned bean and corn compound with an almost tofu mouthfeel. The diners around me share smiling analogies to different vegan restaurants around town, though the innovations we’re eating came not from a multi-billion dollar industry built around moral convictions and dietary guilt, but instead sheer, starving necessity.

Joo Yang explains to me the onset of the Arduous March’s famine aspect in 1994, and the revolutionary shift in perspective it engendered among the nation’s Millennials. Born a healthy, even chubby child just a few years prior, she says it was quickly apparent that a lean life laid ahead. Her family hastened to the countryside, where they could at least forage the mountains for roots and other digestible miscellany. Relatives soon followed, until there were 13 of them living in a single home. It was in these cramped quarters that she, like her peers across the country, began to develop an epochal disbelief for the widely espoused Kim regime dogma of nationwide support – strangely resistant to revision, even once the crucial government rations ceased altogether in the mid 90s. Joo Yang tells me that those closest to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il were in fact hit the hardest.

“Those people got preferential treatment and extra rations for so long that, when all of a sudden everything stopped, they were the least prepared to survive,” she says. “It was especially difficult for those in the cities.” Throughout the remainder of the decade, it was common for people to die in the streets or their sleep. In just four years, an estimated quarter million to 3.5 million Koreans died, out of a population of just 22 million – a famine body count unprecedented in the 20th century for a literate, urbanised society. Much of Joo Yang’s mother’s side didn’t make it.

A major theme of the night is corn, a crucial rice substitute North Koreans developed for its cost and nutrition efficiency. It’s central to the last of the smuggled samples – the remarkable corn ddeok ball, a resourceful rendition of rice cake lacking any rice at all – and the first of the more interpretive mains, a summer corn soup. The segue is almost comical: anchored by organic jumbo crabmeat from the Union Square farmers’ market down the street, and buoyant up top with parsley confetti and an olive oil Rorschach, it’s more reminiscent of Martha’s Vineyard chowder than any survivalist broth. Less apocryphal than anachronistic was the delicious mullet, which was once an abundant treasure in Pyongyang’s increasingly lonely Taedong River; Kim Il-sung was lamenting its loss of diversity, thanks to industrialisation, as early as 1964.

Moreover, ours were stuffed to the gills with beef, a gravely forbidden delicacy in modern North Korea. Joo Yang tells me that, because of their agricultural utility, killing a cow is an act punishable by public execution. She once knew someone who was slaughtering cattle and selling the meat for proportional reward, and when the authorities noticed that person went into hiding inside the Yang household. The amateur butcher attempted to defect shortly thereafter, but Joo Yang isn’t sure what happened to her.

It wasn’t impossible to use cows to get food more indirectly, however. When I ask Joo Yang how her family survived during those harshest years, she smiles, remembering a story she’s never shared before. She was just eight years old when she stayed to watch over the house with her grandmother while her parents and two younger siblings left to try and earn some money for food.

“Basically, my mother and father put a bunch of tools and things for sale on a government cow… and they just wandered away with it, trying to make some money. They started at our house and walked in a giant circle out of town, by foot, which lasted 15 days. That was one of my most difficult memories – I don’t really have that many memories of being really, really hungry, but that time in particular…”

Fifteen days later her family returned, successful – they were able to bring back a lot of white rice, especially rare during the famine. Their homecoming happened to coincide with Seollal, the Korean New Year, which traditionally calls for the enjoyment of sweet ddeok, a celebratory rice cake.

“But everyone in the neighbourhood was starving,” she says. “So my father took all the rice, made it into ddeok and shared it with the entire neighbourhood – especially the elders,” who had been suffering the most. Joo Yang, in revisiting the moment, struggles to admit that as a desperate child, she had a hard time accepting her father’s decision. But their neighbours all hailed him a great man, and her family felt a new appreciation among the community. She could better understand it a little bit later in life.

For dessert, coincidentally, we are served sweet ddeok as well. In chef Lee’s hands, of course, it takes a more decadent form: a dense, mapled hockey puck of pancakey sugardough, flecked with black and white sesame and a pine nut pendant. They come so abundant in their saucers that, compensating for the diet-conscious demurs around my table, I swallow three or four to minimise the waste – a task their deliciousness abets.

Waiting that fortnight for her parents to return, at age eight, was the nadir of Joo Yang’s life. She was alone with her grandmother, who was blind, so she had to handle a lot herself. All they had to eat were soybeans, which quickly made Joo Yang sick; she vomited regularly for days on end, but continued to force them down in absence of an alternative. Gradually her own vision blurred, yellowed, faded in and out. At one point, she got so disoriented that she stumbled over her grandmother’s face, as she had been sleeping on the floor. On the very worst night of those 15, Joo Yang says she learned what it feels like to die – and, barely, come back again.

After we’ve all finished eating, she rises from her table to give a little speech. She touches briefly on many of the things she’ll elaborate in our subsequent conversation, and on how listening to pirate foreign radio as a child helped her to fathom the outside world. She mentions what it was like living alone for three years after her family defected, and all the lies she told and things she sold to get by. She talks a bit about finally escaping across the Tumen River herself at age 20, only to be imprisoned by Chinese patrolmen, and ultimately liberated by a bribe from a South Korean nonprofit.

She says all of these things with a tentative but promising grasp of English, sometimes speaking instead through an interpreter. As she concludes, Joo Yang urges us to support the North Korean public in any way we can, emphasising her deep faith in their potential as a people. Perhaps well convinced by all that she has just shared – perhaps for shame of the sweet flavours still settled on our lips – everyone seems to know what she means.

Joo Yang now lives in Seoul, where she is preparing to enter college, appears on a popular variety program about defectors called Now On My Way to Meet You and interns for Liberty in North Korea.

Follow Jakob Dorof on Twitter.

More on North Korea:

Inside One of North Korea's Secretive Slave Restaurants

North Korea Has a Friend in Dennis Rodman and VICE

North Korea Is About to Freak Out
 

These guys consoled each other the only way they know how.

Last night, the biggest game of the biggest sporting tournament on the planet was played in Brazil. Contested between the hosts and Germany in Belo Horizonte, the World Cup semi-final will inevitably cast a bigger shadow than anything that preceded it and the final itself, and it did not go as coach Luiz Felipe Scolari – or anyone – had planned. Had Brazil won, this morning we'd probably be lauding a team that had built up an unstoppable momentum on their way to a sixth World Cup victory. Instead, this latest incarnation of the Seleção ended up battered by their opponents, mocked by their fans and eviscerated by their journalists.

The German performance was one of brilliant cruelty; four goals in six hallucinogenic first-half minutes saw them double the tally England had managed in their entire tournament. But while England's presence at this World Cup now seems a distant and ridiculous memory, what happened to the Brazilians will be etched into the psyche of the nation for decades. Before last night, this was a nation still haunted by a World Cup final lost to Uruguay on home turf in 1950. Now, a new generation of Brazilians have their own ghosts to exorcise.

Aside from the absent Thiago SIlva and Neymar, the only Brazilian players to come out of the game with even a slither of credit were the stranded goalkeeper, Julio Cesar, the scorer Oscar and the centre-half Dante. The latter deserves a sympathy pass only because his partner was so totally inept. After this summer's £50 million move to Paris St German, David Luiz is the most expensive defender of all time, and last night he cost his national side dear, putting in a performance that will deservedly be held up for decades as a disasterclass of decapitated anti-defence.

Anyway, as the Brazilian squad and their management wept and weighed up the relative merits of different hideouts, we asked photographer Mattias Maxx to go out onto the streets of Rio to capture the mood of the city. There'd been reports of violence earlier in the day, of gunfire, robbery and brawling at the official FIFA fan park on Copacabana beach, but in the end the social discontent that has rumbled away throughout this tournament did not rear its head.

This morning, many Brazilians will wake up still feeling angry at FIFA for robbing their country blind. But last night, as the planet waited for the country to catch fire, the locals were mostly just sad and drunk in the rain. Welcome to our world, Brazil; so long, jogo bonito.

Click through for more photographs.

A fan tries to evade the downpour outside a fast food shop

A Brazil fan tries to flee the scene outside the Copacabana Palace hotel

A Brazil fan dances in the rain

Reports indicate that the police had a surprisingly quiet night

Pissed off fans piss against a World Cup hoarding

Brazil fans staring into space

Brazil fans console each other

Smug German fans lord it in Rio

There were a lot of empty bottles as Germans toasted their success and Brazilians drowned their sorrows 

Some Germans thrusting their victory in the face of a Brazilian, who didn't seem too impressed

Argentines were happy, too. They celebrated the German's success, or rather, Brazil's failure, with pizza

This guy was pretty confused as to how his heroes failed so badly

Workers clearing rubbish off Copacabana beach

Brazilian left-back Marcelo in an "All or Nothing" adidas advert

A Brazilian fan stranded in the rain

Guns were reportedly fired as a gang apparently carried out a "mass robbery" on a bar at a fanpark

Zhang Dali with one of his sculptures. All exhibit photos by Petra Szabo

“I stopped spray-painting the Beijing streets in 2006,” says Zhang Dali, China’s best-known graffiti artist. “Graffiti is the fashion in China these days and has lost its meaning as protest.”

Zhang is answering my questions from Italy, where he sometimes lives and first discovered graffiti. His opening in a Chelsea, Manhattan, gallery in the early days of summer was just too hectic for all the heady stuff I needed to ask him. Not only was the space filled with gallery hoppers, art students, and a few serious collectors doing some shopping, but a crew of legit taggers had shown up as well. In book bags and street wear, they roamed the space looking for the artist while slurping up free wine. The internet has broadened the street into a global neighbourhood, and graffiti artists from one city can know the work of a fellow spray-painter in a different country – even an authoritarian one. That’s quite different from even my own youth; as a teenager, my friends and I wanted our tags on every bus and train just to spread our names locally, around New York. One enthusiast I knew bought a cheap copy machine and stole post-office stickers to be able to reproduce his tag at a digital rate.

These days, local graffiti heads are aware of the explosive work Zhang Dali bombed Beijing with a few years back. Citywide recognition is nothing compared with the power of intercontinental street art. As a result, I was jostled around the crowded gallery between Zhang Dali’s 3-D printed doves, cyanotypes and sculptures of anonymous workmen hanging upside down.

“Collectors and fans enjoy my work because they can interact with it on an intellectual level, but also because it is seen as being positioned at the intersection of hip and political,” Zhang tells me.

The kids in camouflage wearing bags clinking with spray cans were eager to see the master’s work. Of course, Zhang Dali’s art doesn’t come cheap; that night the most you could spend was $30,000 (£17,500) on a sculpted workman, while a cast dove went for an ‘introductory’ $1500 (£875). Meanwhile, vandalism is still a crime in New York; spray paint is illegal for those under age 18 to possess, as per laws regarding the defacement of property. In Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s day, the NYPD was tasked with purging the city of "vandals," and there is still an anti-graffiti task squad roaming around. (Maybe Banksy’s visit to New York last year will have some kind of lasting impact, but I’m not holding my breath.) In any case, the crew of taggers in Chelsea that day were not your typical admirers of fine art. In fact, I felt compelled to ask the gallerist, an old friend named Eli Klein who has been featured on the Bravo reality show "Gallery Girls,” whether he had hired these kids to drive up the ‘authenticity’ factor. (He had not.)

The exhibition will remain in the US until the 30th of August, and eventually move on to China – which is where Zhang Dali could run into some trouble. Instead of kids with a generous enthusiasm for international street art, Communist Party stooges might be the ones snooping around his openings. Zhang has had many problems with the authorities before; after all, this new piece is called "The Square" in honor of a seismic historical event that the Chinese internet still doesn’t acknowledge even happened.

Zhang Dali fled China in July of 1989, after participating in the Tiananmen Square protests that ultimately resulted in massacre. In his own words, “I thought that there was no hope in China, and I lost any confidence. The biggest pain was to be forced to give up the place where I lived. No one likes to do that. At that time many artists and intellectuals felt the same and couldn’t help but leave the country, there was nothing else we could do. In 1992, China took the road of more reforms and more opening to the external world. In 1995, I returned to Beijing to live there.”

But after leaving China in the midst of its most renowned totalitarian outrage (and waiting it out in the West), he was not too pleased with what he saw upon returning home. The Communist Party had become a shell corporation with slogans blaring and international bank accounts brimming; meanwhile, developers who suddenly saw the value in Beijing real estate were haphazardly tearing down the old to make money building the new. The Forbidden City was open for business, a desecration of a public monument beloved by the people (and an ideological opposite of the huge Square where doves don’t fly but tanks can roam). Even though Zhang Dali had been trained in the Central Academy of Art and Design, he became a street artist. As he puts it, “I wanted my art to enter into the public space. There were great changes going on in China in those years. They were demolishing the old Beijing, and I was angry about the destruction of old buildings and neighborhoods. Taking my art to the streets was a way to express my opposition.”

A reprint of Zhang's graffiti from Beijing. Photo via Flickr user Alexander

In New York, during the bad old 80s, there was plenty of discussion about graffiti, as it had just become a fad and the streets and subways were covered in the stuff. The old guard despised it, but the art community embraced it with open arms. Hollywood used graffiti as a visual image of decay and crime. But judging by the prices Keith Haring’s and Basquiat’s work now fetch, as well as the international success of artists like Banksy and Zhang Dali, I’d argue that the issue is pretty much settled in the West – at least when it comes to the art world.

China is not so simple. Because of the limited public forum for discussion, the authorities play a major role in every debate. Zhang Dali had three tags he worked with. One was simply an outline of his bald head, representing himself as well as an abstract person. With it he bombed the buildings about to get torn down in the old Forbidden City. He also used "AK-47" as a tag to express violence and "18K" to symbolize wealth. Zhang saw the people of the city being assaulted by new money and callous power brokers, and called their attention to it. Most of these tags were put on walls that were about to be bulldozed, which did not mollify the Beijing police in the least. The political implications of the images and their interaction with the cityscape meant that the cops came looking for Zhang Dali many times. There were more than 2,000 of his pictures up in Beijing and it was speculated that this was the mark of a "punk" or "gang member" before Zhang revealed his identity. Early in his career he was considered a criminal for doing contemporary art; now he was classified as one for pointing out the crimes of others. Vandalism was another accusation thrown at Zhang Dali by the Beijing authorities, despite the fleeting nature of the work. In fact, as the artist puts it, “I used these three tags to spray on walls to be demolished, to express the situation of Beijing at that time. I knew they were ephemeral, they were not going to last... The bulldozers would come and destroy any trace of it. Of course I would like to keep them, but this out of my power, nothing is lasting, life or art.”

New York City taggers see it the other way around. A few days ago, a 42-year-old graffiti artist named Jason Wulf, whose tag “DG” can be seen throughout the city, was found electrocuted in the subway system. The quest for immortality can be deadly, while embracing the temporal nature of life is not just an expression of some obsure Eastern philosophy but of an artistic point of view, like Tibetan mandalas drawn in sand only to be swept away. The ephemeral interests Zhang. The artist’s "A Second History" was completed in 2010; this later work used the ideologically retouched photographs of Chairman Mao that once covered every wall in China. The collection symbolised his step from the street into the studio.

But artists need to eat, too. Before he died, Wulf sold canvasses that looked like his street work. In his own street art days, Zhang Dali sold beautifully rendered photographs of his tags to those who were willing to pay for the pleasure of holding on to them. Now Zhang has many collectors – most of them in the West. The political nature of his recent material continues to stir up controversy: Tiananmen Square was an architectural intruder forced onto the city, a giant, erasing blot that mimicked the parade grounds of Moscow. And no doves fly over its expanse, which is partly why Zhang Dali crafted them – to highlight their absence. In the West, doves represent peace, as Picasso used them in his famous work. But in Zhang’s art, which is now produced with a cutting edge 3-D printer instead of primitive spray-paint, “the doves are the souls of the people sacrificed and they also are the holy light brimming there”.

The holy light that Zhang Dali sees in Tiananmen Square is also expressed in the cyanotypes depicting the birds. The sculptures represent the earthy and human element that life depends on. I asked Zhang about calligraphy, the traditional Chinese writing form that he studied when at the Academy. While some of his older works contain elements of ink calligraphy, the process did not inform his style of graffiti. The elite nature of it – calligraphy was the art of both the ancient emperors and Mao Zedong – made it unsuitable in essence to his outsider approach. Having grown up under Mao, social realism and Communist Party ideology are inescapable influences on Zhang, and he acknowledges it. Of course, he would rather be known as an artist who happens to be Chinese than a Chinese artist, but with the awfully heavy weight of the opening of China to the West to contend with, his roots cannot be ignored.

In a sense, the New York graffiti enthusiasts who love Zhang Dali from afar understand all this – they get a kick out of seeing and even meeting the first tagger of Beijing. But some of the newer work also seemed to confound them, as Zhang feels that the street art was just one period in his career. A 54-year-old dreadlocked man who came to see the exhibition insisted there’s no moving beyond the cult of the spray can, apparently unsatisfied with Zhang’s progression. A tag was left up on the bathroom wall of the gallery, where it will have to be scrubbed off – arguably an act of aggression. Then again, street artists usually feel they enshrine their subjects by painting on them. So perhaps the anonymous fan who left his mark at the show was just doing what Zhang Dali himself once did. The first and best Beijing tagger got tagged himself. I’m confident he didn’t mind.

Daniel Genis is the author of the novel Narcotica, as well as many translations from the Russian. He began his career with a rather classical education, and finished it off with a decade in prison. These days he is concentrating on reconciling the subtleties of the Brooklyn scene with the requirements of parole.

Nintendo needed this. A rough start to 2014 has seen gaming’s greying giant post terrific losses and weather unrelenting criticism directed at its Wii U. Its financial year forecast for the console dropped from nine million units to just 2.8 million. A year after its late 2012 launch, the machine wasn’t close to breaking even. But now there’s hope. Now, the Wii U has its Mario Kart.

Mario Kart 8 (developed and published by Nintendo) is absolute videogame purity: easy to pick up even if you’ve never played a previous title; a ball to play from the simplest starting grid to the toughest track; and a total blast when enjoyed alongside others in local multiplayer modes.

Naturally, this being the 21st century, you can compete online and upload highlights of your fastest laps to YouTube, selecting angles and action points using an array of easy editing controls. But it is in the company of Actual Human Beings where the smiles really register, where the laughs bubble and froth before flowing freely. This sensation you’re all feeling, I know you don’t get it with every game. It’s known as fun. And Mario Kart 8 trades exclusively in it.

By now you know the drill, surely. But if not: Mario Kart pits a slew of famous (okay, some not-so-famous) Super Mario franchise characters against one another in kart races, with adjustable difficulties open from the outset and more complicated circuits requiring an absolute mastery of the game’s elementary controls to satisfyingly conquer.

And those inputs really are immediate, if not completely intuitive: one button to go and one to stop; one to jump and drift, and another to use a power-up, weapon or whatever perk you’ve most recently acquired. You’ll need to steer, too, which you can do using the analogue stick or with the GamePad’s motion controls.

With over 20 years having passed since Super Mario Kart introduced this series onto the Super Nintendo, Mario Kart 8 exhibits its share of evolved gameplay elements. Foremost amongst these are the newly introduced anti-gravity sections, where kart wheels flip horizontal to float atop the surface like Doc Brown’s retrofitted DeLorean. This lends the title a delicious F-Zero GX-style dizziness. Fans of Captain Falcon, please form an orderly queue.

Also debuting are new offensive weapons. The boomerang can be tossed three times to strike opposition drivers ahead of you, while the Piranha Plant sits atop your racer and munches through both obstacles and fellow competitors. The blue spiny shell returns, too – it shoots through the field until striking whoever is pulling clear in first. Those in the lead can protect themselves by picking up the Super Horn – its shockwave works much like the barge power-up in Bizarre Creations’ (barely) more realistic 2010 racer Blur, deflecting projectiles and unbalancing nearby racers.

The rest is tried and tested, and loved: mushrooms give you speed boosts, bananas make your vehicle slip and slide, lightning shrinks the field and slows everyone down and coins are collected across each course to incrementally increase the player’s overall speed. Every driver looks and sounds perfect, with karts modifiable using a variety of bodies, wheels and gliders. There’s innovation, sure, but not to the divisive level previously showcased in the GameCube’s Double Dash!!. Accessibility is paramount.

So is it familiarity that lends Mario Kart 8 its fantastic appeal? Partially, yes: many gamers will have great memories of Mario Karts past, be they of drunken four-player sessions on the N64 version, everyone cramped around a 14” CRT screen, or of the more recent Mario Kart 7, hunched over a 3DS on a train journey or long car ride. These games are in our blood, ingrained into the fabric of Nintendo’s history – there’s been a Mario Kart for pretty much every Nintendo system since the SNES.

But Mario Kart 8 can stand tall on its own terms, its forebears forgotten, as an example of truly expert engineering. Gorgeous visuals, impressively detailed environments, enveloping sound and exquisite gameplay: it all adds up to an essential experience for anyone with the slightest interest in having a laugh with a controller of some kind in hand. The most fun you can have in the company of a few friends while keeping your pants on? Could be, could be.

What Mario Kart 8 is not, however, is the final puzzle piece that completes the argument for the Wii U being a must-have piece of living room machinery. The system still needs a few more so-called killer apps for it to even begin to build towards the amazing popularity its predecessor, the Wii, enjoyed.

A new Metroid title could be on the cards – Metroid Prime developer Retro Studios has been making some positive noises on the matter. But that’s still a little on the niche side, the kind of game that’ll click with an old-school Nintendo crowd, but perhaps not those with a more casual interest.

An all-new direction for the Zelda series? Now we’re talking. And what about some of that sweet third-party support, of the kind that launch-day exclusive ZombiU seemed to portend? That’ll do nicely. Not that Nintendo is too worried right now. With something like $10bn in the bank, it’ll take a few more years of "failure" for it to start sweating.

Quick detour from a console triumph to recent iOS highlights, what with this being holiday season and everything. Monument Valley (ustwo, also on Android) is a beautiful, becalming puzzler inspired by the art of M.C. Escher – a vital soother for stressful airport situations. Kiwanuka (CMA Megacorp) is a hyper-coloured Lemmings-like affair that’s “dubstep powered” – but don’t worry, as it’s not all guts-loosening wumps, and is actually pretty hypnotic. And Leo’s Fortune (1337 & Senri LLC) is a side-scrolling platformer that looks so good on one’s iPad that you want to climb into it and roll in the grass. All are out now, and represent better away-break purchases than that impulse-buy Dan Brown you usually end up with.

@MikeDiver

All media courtesy of Kurt Braunohler

When I heard that comedian Kurt Braunohler was doing a cross-country jet ski trip for charity, I was not surprised. Kurt Braunohler is the closest thing we have to a real-life Willy Wonka, a whimsical eccentric who uses his resources to better the day of the average citizen in the most ridiculous way possible. Jet-skiing from Chicago to St. Louis might not suit the average guy, but was exactly something he would do – and he did it to raise enough money to donate 500 goats and 1,000 chickens to families in Africa. After he was done traversing down the Mississippi River by jet ski, I caught up with Kurt in LA to get a recap of the adventure.

VICE: How did the idea to journey down the Mississippi come to you? 
Kurt Braunohler: Last year I did that thing where I raised money on a Kickstarter to write a joke in the sky. And I wanted to do something bigger, and the whole impetus of that idea was like, 'What’s a stupid moment to insert into stranger’s lives that could make the world a little bit of a better place?' So this idea was kind of like, what’s bigger than that – and can also make the world better in a real way? At first, I wanted to jet-ski from LA to New York, and then people were like, “No, that’s impossible.” Apparently I don’t really understand geography. Then, we decided that we could do it from Chicago to New Orleans. So we’re doing it to send 500 goats and 1,000 chickens to Africa.

Are you a jet-ski aficionado? Had you ridden jet skis before?
I had ridden jet skis before. But I hadn’t touched a jet ski in probably ten years.

Until you decided to cross the country with them.
Exactly.

So what was the most insane moment on what was, presumably, a very insane adventure?
An hour and a half into the trip, the chase boat ran out of gas. When a boat runs out of gas, it doesn’t just stop, it starts to drift into danger. There were, like, ten or 15 people on that boat who were just in an industrial canal with barges that come by and with no way to control the boat. That was pretty insane. Then we ended up having to crash-land at an abandoned grain silo. It looked like a nightmare factory. We got stuck at this abandoned grain silo for hours, because we were on private property that was zoned by the army core of engineers, who then showed up and were very mad that we were there. That was probably the most insane moment.

Wow. Did that moment make you go, like, Uh, I should stop?
That was the first day! I was like, Oh, shit. This is a bad idea. We’re not going to be able to pull this off.

So how did it level off after that? What brought you around? Was it a matter of getting your sea legs, so to speak?
It was. The next day was a pure shit show as well. We did a show at noon in Saint Louis.

Oh, I was there for that!
Yeah! We did that show in Saint Louis, and then, after that, the production was so disorganised. The production van and the other car we had just left, and we had seats for 23 people. And both of those vehicles were driving just two people. Me and Jon Daly and the director and Scotty and the camera crew were just left at a bar. There was no way for us to get anywhere because it started pouring with rain and no cabs could come get us. So we sat at the bar for three hours. We’re on such a tight time schedule, and like, just sitting around for three hours doing nothing is insane, because we had to shoot this entire episode from 7 AM until 1 PM, and then get on the road and go 100 miles from 1 PM until 7 PM. So that was insane. I was still just incredibly frustrated, but then once we got on the Mississippi, after we launched – launching was fucking disgusting; it was filled with used condoms and cigarette butts – once we got 25 or 30 miles south of Saint Louis, that’s when it just became very… That’s when I realised this was a good idea. It’s like, the Mississippi! It’s a mile wide, there’s no buildings anywhere because it floods so often and it was just wilderness. I felt like I was in the artery of America, and I felt amazing then. It took a whole two days. That was the end of the second day, and then I was like, “OK, we did a good thing.”

The Mississippi... It’s a historically important thing. I think everyone thinks of, like, Huckleberry Finn. What is it actually like to be in it?
What’s fascinating about it is that no one goes on it. It’s too dangerous. It’s a really dangerous river to go on. No one takes a luxury boat out on the Mississippi River, because it’s a 9- or 10-knot current, which is very dangerous. Very strong everywhere. As you’re going through them, they’ll pull the ski left or right, which is insane. And there’s a lot of commercial traffic, so you just have giant barges that are pushing… It’ll be like four or five barges tied together with one tow pushing it at the end, so that means that the person who’s driving the tow and is pushing these barges cannot see the three football fields to the front of the boat. They make a lot of wake. So it was totally dangerous, but in a way that I truly enjoyed. It felt very desolate and beautiful and dangerous all at the same time.

What can 500 goats and 1,000 chickens do for families? What is the impact of that?
It’s actually a pretty amazing impact. What happens is we’ll provide… These are African-raised goats and chickens, so we’re not actually sending any animals over to Africa. They’re raised in Africa. Each family will get one goat and two chickens, which means that creates a mini-economy for that family. So not only do they have a renewable resource for food – meaning milk, cheese, butter and yogurt – but also, they have eggs that they can sell or eat. You have this completely renewable resource for the family, and that means money for the family, and it means food. There’s a level of stability there. It’s like giving them a small loan.

And it’s sustainable.
Right. These animals aren’t going over to be murdered. They’re there to be providers for the family.

That’s phenomenal. What was your favourite moment of the entire trip, from coming up with the idea until arriving in New Orleans? 
There were so many cool moments. I would say a moment that was truly organic was when we pulled into this kind of weird biker bar in Evansville, Illinois. The daughter of the woman who owned the bar just happened to walk up to us and tell us that she was graduating high school the next day, and Scotty – my writing partner, who also plays Little Minnow on the show – was like, “We should give her a ride to her high school graduation on the jet ski.” We asked her, and she was super psyched about it. So we worked it out at the bar that night and then showed up in the morning, and she was there in her cap and gown, and I drove her to her high school graduation on the jet ski. That was awesome! It was so very real and a cool, stupid thing to do.

One last question: What did you learn the most about America via your journey? 
The thing I learned is that there’s zero, zero clean water in America. There is no waterway that is clean. It’s all disgusting. We’ve ruined it all. What else? Oh, you know what was amazing? Coming through the bayou in between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. We had to cross the Gulf of Mexico, and then we came in, and that was just gorgeous. Also, a crazy amount of weird houses on really tall stilts. I don’t really know what they are, but like, 50-foot tall stilts, seemingly in the middle of the ocean. Things like that reminded us that there are still these unknown places in America that are confusing and wonderful.

It sounds like you went on a confusing and wonderful journey to find them.
I did!

Follow Josh Androsky on Twitter.

Illustration by Cei Willis

Why can't those layabouts get a proper work ethic? You know who I mean – yeah, the bloody Danes. So lazy. Sitting around, watching Borgen and eating bacon butties. They need to learn some lessons from those hard-working Greeks. And what about those Dutch? Why do they insist on skiving off, practising penalties in the park, when the Portuguese are still slaving away at their desks?

Clichés are funny things, aren't they? It's amazing how often they turn out to be the exact opposite of the truth. We're brought up on the idea that Southern Europeans are work-shy – only lifting a finger to make beer and more comfortable hammocks for their endless siestas, it's no wonder their countries are all broke! If only they could learn from those diligent northern Europeans with their protestant work ethic, and so on.

It's total nonsense. The European citizens who tie themselves to their desks for the longest each week are from countries which are neither mostly protestant nor northern European: Greeks and Austrians. Those who cop off earliest, on the other hand, are from Denmark and Lithuania.

In fact, the three Nordic countries in the EU – Sweden, Denmark and Finland – are all towards the bottom of the table and Norwegians work the fewest hours on earth. So, what are the Scandinavian governments doing about their layabout populations? How are they going to whip their workforce into shape to make sure they can keep competing in the global economy?

Gothenburg, the second biggest city in Sweden, has been debating this recently, and they have a plan: cut the working day to six hours. Yes, that's right, despite already showing up for some of the fewest hours in Europe, these Swedes plan to spend even less time in their offices.

Scandinavian countries have something else in common too. They are also among the richest in the world. Of course, in Norway, this is partly because they have loads of oil. But Denmark and Sweden don't, they're just richer than us because they run their economy better than we do. It's not just them. People from the Netherlands, Ireland, Luxembourg, Belgium and Germany are all, on average, also richer than people in Britain despite working fewer hours than we do.

In fact, after Austria and Greece, we clock in with the third highest number of hours in the EU (I'm British), and British men work longer than any. So are our politicians following Sweden's lead and trying to prise us away from our jobs? Earlier this month, Michael Heseltine – the man behind the UK government's review of its economic policy – announced that the problem with the British economy is that we “don't get up early enough”. In other words, to fix our economic problems, we should try to be more like Greece.

When almost everyone else in Europe is having a lie in, or has time to – well, to be honest, I have no idea what people do with week day free time, because I barely have time to do the washing up, but whatever it is people do – whilst they are doing that, we're wilting in screenglare. Yet we're only the 10th richest country in the EU, per person.

We're working ourselves to death and not even doing it well. We're like the kid at school who revises really hard for every test, but still gets a “C”. We're James Milner – endlessly pacing up and down the wing no matter where the ball is. Add in the fact that we are the most unequal country in Europe – and so most of the money we do make in the country doesn't come to most of us – and it's time to start asking questions.

Questions like “Is working long hours really the route to success?” and “Why am I slaving away so someone else can get rich?” and “why the fuck are we all stuck indoors on the only sunny day of the year while the rest of Western Europe is out having fun and still getting paid more than us?”

In a sense, none of this should be surprising. The longer someone works, the less productive they are per hour. It's better having offices full of chirpy people working hard then going home on time than tired staff wired on coffee sneaking back to an irate Facebook argument every time the boss isn't looking then drowning their stress in booze in the few moments they do have off work.

But it's about more than that too. In 1891, Oscar Wilde called for us all to work less. In a beautiful piece, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he wrote “man is made for something better than disrupting dirt”. In a thrillingly titled essay called Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren John Maynard Keynes, the grandaddy of macro-economics, argued that we, in the future, ought to work only fifteen hours a week. As he put it “we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

Both were making a simple point. Back in the early 20th century, people in countries like Britain had enough stuff already, if only it was shared out more fairly. As machines got more and more efficient, it would take less time to make that stuff. So, once we'd made it, why not just clock off for the day, and go sit in a park? Or read your kids a bedtime story? Or, well, I really don't want to know how you'd spend your time, but I imagine you'd enjoy it more than you do at work.

There are other good reasons for everyone to work fewer hours. At the moment, some of us toil away every moment of the day, whilst lots of others want more hours. Surely it'd be much more sensible to redistribute a bit? As the New Economics Foundation pointed out in their report on this a few years ago, the average number of hours worked a week in the UK, when you count unemployed people, is 21. Why don't we stick with that average, but just share it out better?
Working fewer hours a week would mean we could spend more time looking after each other, and if men worked less, maybe we couldn't get away with depending so much on the women in our lives to care for those we love. It would mean we could contribute more to our communities – or actually build communities rather than just rushing past our neighbours while rushing to and from the station. It would mean we'd get fewer stress headaches – British workers are the most stressed in the world. Ultimately, like the Swedes, it would likely make us more productive.

There is a problem with all of this. With our massive inequality, lots of people in Britain live on very low pay. Cutting their hours would make them poorer. So first, we'd need to redistribute some cash from the mega-rich – but I'm sure they'd cope. After all, the richest people in Britain have seen their wealth double since 2009.

Which only leaves us one thing to decide. In the 20th century, trade unions got together and they organised and they liberated a day for us all: Saturday. The question for our generation, then, is this: which day do we want to free for our grandchildren? I vote for Monday.

@Adam Ramsay

“Bikelife” is a very American phenomenon. Brought to the internet’s attention via the documentary 12 O’Clock in Baltimore, it basically involves young men in places like Harlem and Philadelphia ragging quad bikes and dirt scramblers through their neighbourhoods at speeds that tend to fill hospital waiting rooms and jail cells. While they're doing this, they're usually pulling wheelies that make gravity look like a prick. ASAP TyY and Meek Mill are into it – as is Chief Keef, though he’s not very good.

Much like Seinfeld, techno and tobacco, however, Bikelife is a Yank export that is now resonating over in the UK. While the quads and dirt bikes in the US YouTube clips aren’t readily available over here, resourceful teens have made do instead by locking down their CBTs, buying up 50cc mopeds and heading to back roads and industrial estates to make their own videos.

I wanted to get a better sense of the UK’s Bikelife culture, so I got in touch with Ash, founder of UK Raise It Up – a Facebook group that organises meets and ride-outs. He invited me to join him at a caff just off London's North Circular, before tagging along with a bunch of mopeds on a ride-out to an industrial estate.

The meeting place was Ace Cafe, a biker institution near Stonebridge Park tube station in London. It was kind of surreal, the patrons were a weird mix of TV – Sons of Anarchy on the outside, Hairy Bikers on the inside.

Mark Wilsmore

Mark Wilsmore, the owner of Ace, told us that while his business has long been a sanctuary for petrolheads and "proper" bikers, he's also grateful that he can offer the Bikelife kids somewhere to hang out and make noise without being hassled.

"Previous generations, such as the Teddy Boys and ton-up kids, were no different to today's kids – it's just that today they simply wear different clothes and roll on different wheels,” he said. I was surprised by how magnaminous he was; I'd assumed most old school bikers would assume all 'ped riders were Clearasil-loving fairy boys.

The problem, as Mark sees it, is that the government has an "us vs them” mentality when it comes to young people. And when that tension boils over, it's rarely the government who are going to come out on the losing side. 

Barry Cheese

With the moped boys yet to arrive, Mark introduced us to Ace Cafe stalwart, Barry Cheese – a former Lib Dem Councillor for Brondesbury Park, Brent, who had to retire in February after suffering a severe heart attack. 

Leaning against his deafeningly loud Honda Cub 90 moped (imagine a two-wheeled Vauxhall Nova with its muffler removed), he told me that he'd spent his youth outside the cafe, trying to break the 100mph mark down the North Circular in the days before it had a speed limit. After becoming councillor, he noticed the importance of providing sports programmes for young people, citing an immediate drop in antisocial behaviour, vandalism and petty crime in his borough. He said the Ace was offering the Bikelife crew something like that today.

Before long, a couple of the UK Raise It Up lot arrived. They weren't quite as rowdy as the Twelve O'Clock Boyz but this isn't Baltimore, it's Brent, a place where "working a package" is something people do with their wives in the carpark of the local IKEA rather than with guns on drug corners.

I'd always figured that riding a moped was just a convenient stop-gap between being legally able to lose your virginity and being legally allowed to drive a car. Turns out I had it all wrong; everyone I spoke to was devoted to their bike. Connor, for example (above centre), has spent £3,000 (€3,800) suping up his moped with bespoke handlebars, a chrome exhaust and a wheelie bar.

As more of the Bikelife boys began to turn up, it transpired that it didn't really matter what you were riding, so long as you did most of it on one wheel.

For whatever reason, the police seem to love it when large numbers of moped owners congregate in public spaces. And sure enough, a couple of officers quickly arrived to check out the meet, hung about for 15 minutes to make their presence felt, then headed off again, leaving the riders to it. 

While the police had been chatting to Connor and his mates, Ash arrived with the rest of the UK Raise It Up crew. He told me UK Raise It Up had come about by accident; a one-off ride-out turned into a series of ride-outs, then meets, and now a community boasting a thousand Likes and hundreds of riders.

Ash

Most of the others gravitated towards him, waiting for the heads up to ride out – and some, it seemed, just to be close to the king. It was clear that Ash was one of the more talented riders, pulling near-12 o'clock wheelies and doing the kind of technical stuff to his bike I'd imagine a lot of his mates are forced to pay for. 

What I’d seen so far couldn’t have been further from America's Bikelife videos; unsurprisingly, it was far more Channel 5 than HBO. But that shouldn't diminish the community that's sprung up around it – a club of lost boys who realise that pulling wheelies with their mates far beats hanging around and doing fuck all on a grim Sunday afternoon.

This guy seemed gutted he couldn’t join in. That's the problem with bringing a car to a moped party, mate.

That said, screwface was the default look for the whole crew by this point.

I hadn't noticed the flowers decaying in a heap opposite the cafe until the riders moved off the pavement. It was a sobering moment amid all the bravado, and later that night Ed Morrow – Campaigns Officer for Brake, the road safety charity – reminded me how much danger the Bikelife kids were putting themselves in. “Roads are not a playground, and treating them as such could easily lead to tragedy," he told me. "It’s no coincidence that road crashes are killing young males more than any other group. Motorsports have their place, but it is not on public roads.” 

Watching some of the riders narrowly avoid scraping the backs of the helmets along the ground as they wheelied past, I could understand Ed's concerns. But when the money for Barry Cheese's sports programmes is running out, wages are stagnating and youth unemployment is rife, Bikelife at least offers some sort of outlet for creative expression.

Or it's just some guys fucking about on mopeds. Either way, watching the bikes was cooler than staring at a JSA queue.

As the clouds rolled, they gathered at the roundabout to wait for a few more riders. All set, they took off, hoping to make it to the industrial estate before it started pissing it down.

Ash led the charge, his L-plate pack following closely behind.

The Sports Direct generation might not look as chic as the guys from Quadrophenia but at least they'll never be in thrall to Sting.

And there's a certain charm and a romance to it that I think would be lost if the UK scene was a direct replica of what's going on in the States. 

Watching them ride off, I understood the importance of places like Ace and the kind of communities that people like Ash have helped to create. Anywhere else in London, these guys would be labelled a public nuisance and hooked off the road with some moped-specific ASBO.

That's understandable, of course; they're fucking loud, and I can't imagine anyone would be too keen on 20 guys regularly tearing up the road outside their house. But it means more to these guys than just that. I remember getting a moped at 16 and feeling a sense of opportunity that I'd never really felt before. I could go to parties without the assistance of my parents and their Nissan Primera; I could turn up to dates with a confidence I hadn't had before, until realising my entire head smelled like helmet and my fringe was stuck to my face.

But as that year passed and I got my full license, a car and a job to pay for that car, the fun of being able to go anywhere and do anything was replaced by a feeling of creeping responsibility and a pressure to keep moving forward. Bikelife is the antithesis of that feeling. Or, as Ash put it: “Bikelife is a way of life that we know like no other. Eat, sleep, ride. Even if you take the bike off the rider, you can never take the Bikelife spirit away.”

@Bainosaurus

More stuff about this kind of stuff:

The Illegal Dirt Bike Gangs of Baltimore

Meeting the Female Street Racers of Palestine

The city has become a battlefield. As modern militaries are forced to adapt to a landscape that often gives the upper hand to insurgents, proper training becomes more essential than ever.

VICE News correspondent Alex Miller travels to Israel, home to one of the largest and most advanced urban warfare training centres in the world, to embed with a unit practicing effective urban combat tactics before employing them in the streets.

A chart illustrating how many copies of Paula sold during its first week, compared to some more flops. (Click to enlarge)

Robin Thicke’s latest album only shifted 530 copies in its first week of UK sales. Take a look at the chart above and you’ll see that those numbers put Paula considerably below Future Past, the debut solo album from Blue member and sometimes TV ice dancer Duncan James. Considering 2013's “Blurred Lines” – Thicke's ode to making women feel really uncomfortable – is the UK’s most downloaded song of all time, it’s fair to say things have slightly deteriorated since last year.

But where did it all go wrong? How did he go from retiring songwriter to disgraced idol of the men's rights community, naming albums after the woman who divorced him in the hope it'll win her back? Was it because his breakthrough single was basically "no doesn't always mean no" set to a Pharrell beat, or the fact he then defended it as "a feminist movement within itself"? Perhaps it was the time he was pictured groping a fan while still married to Paula Patton? Or maybe it's just because his new album isn't very good?

Whatever the reason, everything seems to have gone to shit incredibly quickly since he used balloons to tell the world how big his dick is. And there's only one thing that's really changed about Thicke since then: he got properly famous. I wondered whether this fame had a direct role to play in his downfall, so I called Nadine Field – a chartered psychologist who specialises in fame and celebrity – to find out.

(Photo via)

VICE: Hi Nadine. So let’s talk about Robin Thicke. He was 16 when he got his first record deal, which is obviously pretty young. What kind of effect would that have on the brain?

Dr Nadine Field: A huge effect, of course. You’re getting validation at a very tender age, and validation at any age gives you the sense that you’re bigger than you are. It inflates your personality. At that early stage of development we’re all searching for ourselves and creating a certain image of ourselves for the world. If you get validation, you think, ‘Gosh, I’m bigger than I thought.’ Obviously that’s wrong. This validation very young will inflate the ego to some extent because you’re not in a position to evaluate it.

Would that have an effect on your sexuality?
If that validation comes early, you’re at the early stages of thinking about your sexuality. ‘Do I like women? What do I think about women? How do I view them?’ The "Blurred Lines" video says a lot about him – the filter wasn’t there. The video tells me that he never got the balance right between his appreciation of femininity and a sense of demeaning women. That’s where he needs to find his middle ground.

That was his first proper taste of mainstream attention. What happens to the average person’s brain when they experience fame as an adult?
Psychologically you think you’ve made it. You’re experiencing this huge rush. You’re surrounded by all these temptations and you’re probably going to submit to everything and sleep with as many women as you want. That filter might not be there yet. You might not have got to the point where you evaluate, come to a standstill and ask yourself if your choices are what you really want to do.

(Screen grab via)

How does fame affect your ego in the long term?
That’s going to cause the celebrity to have a dilemma. Everyone has two senses of self – a personal self and a public self. With validation it’s harder to evaluate, to see the private side behind the public side.

What happens if you struggle with that?
Your public and your personal sides can start to merge, which is a big problem. Believing your own propaganda precedes your downfall. They’re only as good as the person in their life who can tell them they’re being ridiculous. All celebrities need someone in their life to keep the private self in check. You need anchoring. 

Have you dealt with celebrities who struggle with this balance?
Most of the celebrities I’ve worked with are vulnerable people who think that a certain part of themselves is fraudulent. They’re concerned that people believe in the public self they’ve projected for themselves. They worry, ‘People think I’m someone, but actually I’m someone else.’


And that can undermine the validation you get and make you insecure.

Exactly. If you buy into the public persona, you’re not actually taking account of who you are. 

Okay. If there are underlying traits of misogyny or arrogance in your psyche already, would these be affected by fame?
Yes. If you’ve got men or women throwing themselves at you, it’s the human condition to want to give in. The inflated ego as a result of the fame makes you believe in this public self and makes you believe you’re invincible – but no, you’re not. We all have good and bad aspects of who we are, and fame will only play on these. 

(Photo via)

How exactly?
If they buy into the public life, a male artist can be inclined to think they can do whatever they want. There's a whole history of male celebrities who have been abusive to their female partners because they can. The whole issue with our Yewtree investigations – we’re seeing now the repercussions of fame on male sexuality. Thankfully, it’s meaning that everyone is seeing that they can’t actually do what they want.

Yeah, there’s a photo of Thicke groping a fan while he was still married (a "source close to him" said he "did it as a joke"). 
He’s a celebrity who, unfortunately, has bought into his public persona, and his self is his public. He believes he is invincible – at this point, anyway. He thinks he can do whatever he likes.

After all this backlash, what could he be feeling now? He’d been working on his career for over half his life, then it all blows up in his face.
I should hope he’s looking for another agent! Psychologically, he might finally have to grapple with the two senses of self. If not now, then soon down the line – if he survives, that is, and I think he’s a survivor. He’s going to have to really weigh these two identities up, the public and private. The private person might be very vulnerable. On the other hand, is Robin Thicke having trouble sleeping at night over it all? I don’t know if he is. It’s hard to tell. His inflated sense of self could still make him believe he’s now on the ride – that he’s really going somewhere.

Did you see that his new album is named after the wife who left him?
No. But oh gosh, how interesting. Many male celebrities – Johnny Cash and Elvis, for example – take on too much of that public self and think they can do anything. But then they find out they can’t and it all crumbles.

What happens to the brain when your fame is suddenly taken away?
I’ve worked with a lot of people whose fame has been taken away, and they dissolve. They’ve got too much invested in that public self. Psychologically, they go through hubris – “I thought I could be somebody, but I’ve been picked up and dropped back down.”

@hannahrosewens

More Robin Thicke:

Robin Thicke's New Album Isn't Really About His Wife – It's About His Dick

Calling Bullshit On Robin Thicke's Misogynist Apologists

Not long after a so-called ceasefire ended in eastern Ukraine on Monday night, the Ukrainian military sent a column of artillery into Sloviansk and officially began its offensive. The Russian and Ukrainian governments, along with representatives from the OSCE, called for a new effort to establish another ceasefire, setting a deadline of Saturday for the resumption of talks. For now, however, the war continues.

VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky travelled around the outskirts of the city and visited several checkpoints where soldiers were preparing for what's to come.

I love this world but it freaks me out every day. More and more, I experience the sense that nothing is real – like it's all a dream. That’s when I’m drawn to take pictures. It can happen any time, whether I'm in the countryside or in the city – whenever I feel I’m not in a place, or faced with a scene that I can imagine to exist in reality. I shoot so others can see how I look at them.

Everyone in this life is batshit crazy, which I find endearing; I like to look for people's quirks, and the quirk can often simply be someone's face – they can actually look insane. But then there are the times, when someone is so beautiful it makes me feel crazy and confused – like, how can this person actually exist on planet Earth?

See more of Sam's work here and here