ISIS parades captured Iraqi Army vehicles in its Syrian capital of Raqqa

Six months ago, as it swept into the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah in Iraq, ISIS was looking a lot less triumphant in Syria. Faced with a coordinated attack by a coalition of Syrian rebel groups, it was fighting for its survival on that front. Since then, ISIS has rampaged even further into Iraq. This is going to enable them to turn their attention back to Syria, but this time armed with a load of new pillaged weapons, making them a scarier prospect for their enemies.

According to Michael Knights, a fellow at the Washington Institute and specialist on ISF and the insurgency, roughly a quarter of the Iraqi Security Force's (ISF) combat units collapsed within the first few days of fighting. ISIS has captured hundreds of US supplied upgraded Humvees, pickup trucks, tanks and armored vehicles, artillery pieces and even reportedly a number of helicopters, not to mention huge stocks of ammunition and artillery shells. From the sheer quantity of captured equipment, Knights notes "ISIS has probably three sets of captured M16 rifles and body armour for every one of its fighters."

An ISIS convoy with captured Humvees enters Bayji 

Although much of the captured hardware was in poor quality, and it is still unclear whether ISIS has the capability to use it, pictures of captured US supplied Humvees roaring down the streets of northern Iraq flying the group's distinctive black banner were obviously a bit of a propaganda coup. In a jab at their hated American enemies, ISIS's huge and vocal online fan base advertised the group's capture of US-supplied vehicles by mocking Michelle Obama's role in the #bringbackourgirls Twitter campaign, launching the hashtag #bringbackourhumvee.

Charles Lister, a fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, told me that, "ISIS's newly acquire fleets of Humvees, transport vehicles and other APCs should prove valuable for the group, at least in the medium term. Of course, as time goes by, ISIS will need to maintain and repair the vehicles, which may raise some issues. But in terms of live capacity and coordination, ISIS can certainly make use of such an expanded vehicle fleet – and potentially even exploit the more sophisticated radio equipment installed in Humvees.”

An ISIS social media image shows its fighters with a captured Humvee

While everyone’s been gawping at ISIS’s Iraqi rampage, the knock on effects in Syria may be equally significant. A few hours after controlling Mosul, ISIS overran several places on the border between Syria and Iraq. At two of them, Rabiyah, they bulldozed the earth mound dividing the two countries and started transferring captured vehicles and equipment to Syria. ISIS even released a slick video entitled "The Breaking of Borders" featuring ISIS' firebrand spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani and top military commander Omar al-Shishani symbolically driving a bulldozer over the Iraq-Syria border and proclaiming the “end of Sykes-Picot” – an agreement made by the UK and France in 1916 about their spheres of influence in the region.

An ISIS bulldozer drives over the barrier separating Iraq and Syria

The vehicles and equipment seized in Iraq are already playing a role in the Syrian battlefield. Several days ago, the al-Nusra faction in the border town of Abu Kamal pledged allegiance to ISIS, which then moved in with its superior firepower and seized control of the town. ISIS' victory in Abu Kamal led to a complete collapse of the rebels across the province. As groups recognised the new reality, they either pledged allegiance to the new Islamic State, or quit the fight and ran away.

Within a week, ISIS has gained control of another entire province – Dayr az-Zawr – with the exception of the remaining rebels and the besieged Syrian army in the provincial capital. After taking Dayr az-Zawr, according to Charles Lister, "ISIS will seek to consolidate as many of its recent gains in Iraq and possible and to further bolster its control of territory and resources in northern and eastern Syria, so as to present itself as much as possible, as a cohesive ‘state’. Only then will ISIS be in a position to attempt to push back further into western Syria – Idlib, western Aleppo, Latakia, and Hama. This will almost certainly be attempted, the question is simply when it will come."

ISIS propaganda video "The end of Sykes-Picot"

The ISIS proto state is at its most established in Raqqa city – the group's main Syrian stronghold. This has earned the town the moniker of "Syria's Kandahar" – Kandahar being the birthplace of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The presence of ISIS there is all-pervasive. "They hold an iron grip over all life's aspects,” a local told me. “Wherever you walk on any of the city's streets you'd encounter at least two ISIS fighters walking, driving, sitting or passing by... ISIS fighters have a strong presence in the city. They control everything. They run most of the former regime service departments, from granaries and bakers, power and transformation stations, water pump stations... They formed an 'Islamic court', 'Muslim's services office', an 'Islamic' traffic police department and other posts."

Raqqa is also likely to be the operations in Syria. As my Raqqa contact told me, "The organisation depends on a rotation system where a fighter might be sent to several provinces in a relatively short time. Also Raqqa is the safe haven for wounded fighters where many come from different ‘Wilayas’ [ISIS' term for its zones of combat] to settle temporarily in new recovery HQs."

ISIS now operates with complete freedom on both sides of the old Syria-Iraq border, and can transfer its forces between theatres at will. The future for the new jihadist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East has never looked brighter. 

@MemlikPasha

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(Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

In many ways, London is the worst city in the world: it’s expensive, cruel, bitter and twee. But in many ways it’s also the best: a cultural powerhouse where people know how to stay up really fucking late, invent new forms of dance music on a minute-by-minute basis and, over the last 20 years, have finally understood how to make nice food. We’re big on gays, low on racists and love to drink; but we’re also big on oligarchs, low on social mobility and love to drink at infantilising corporate street festivals. Anyway, this is your guide to the decent bits (and a few shitty ones).

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?
   Racists and Lack Thereof | Protests
– WHERE TO EAT
– WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?
– WHERE TO DRINK
– WHERE TO STAY
– LGBT LONDON
– WHERE TO HANG OUT AND WHO TO SPEND TIME WITH 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

(Photo by Will Coutts)

WHERE TO PARTY

Bussey Building, Peckham
133 Rye Lane, SE15 4ST
The Bussey is a bar, venue and gallery space spread across four floors, but it’s best known as a club with one of the broadest musical remits in the city. It’s usually less than £5 (€6) to get in, everyone's beautiful and the smoking area alone is bigger than most other clubs. If you're lucky, your stay here will coincide with Soul Train, a disco and good-vibes house night that the Bussey hosts twice a month and is basically like being trapped at a wedding party in a car park on drugs, even if you're not on any drugs. A nearby alternative is Canavan’s, a karaoke pool bar with a recently upgraded soundsystem and loads of old Irish blokes who don't know what feminism is. It hosts Rhythm Section – the first night you should come to if you're visiting London – once or twice a month.
LINK

Dance Tunnel, Dalston
95 Kingsland High Street, E8 2PB
Of all the basement clubs in Dalston, and there are plenty, Dance Tunnel is probably the best, thanks to its jet-engine soundsystem. Located beneath Voodoo Ray’s pizza place (don't eat there, the pizza is more expensive than war), this is where you’ll hear some of the world's best new house, techno and other types of dance music that don't have names yet at nights like Trouble Vision, Principals and FWD>>.
LINK

Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle
4/5 Elephant Road, SE17 1LB
Tucked away behind a knackered shopping centre on the Elephant & Castle roundabout, Corsica Studios mostly deals in house and nosebleed techno. But depending on the night you’re at, you could also hear grime, disco or the kind of guitar music that The Wire would write about without a gun held to their head. Their booking policy means the dancefloor always feels like a dancefloor, not just a space for DJs to play to a series of well-dressed mothers' meetings, and the shit plumbing keeps yuppies away. There’s also a 24-hour bagel shop – Bagel King – just down the road, which is a fucking godsend at 5AM on a Sunday morning when you realise the only thing you've eaten since Friday lunchtime is chewing gum.
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Oval Space, Bethnal Green
29 - 32 The Oval, E2 9DT
This is basically just a big empty rectangular room, but whichever promoter is tasked with filling it usually does a pretty great job. Music-wise, you’re best off just checking the listings because the events are always changing. But if you prefer having absolutely no idea what you’re going to be turning up to, I’d say just go along anyway because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be disappointed. Pro tip: don’t bother instagramming a photo of the sunset over that big old gasometer next door – it’s already the most photographed thing in London bar Big Ben and all the terrible graffiti along Brick Lane.
LINK

(Photo by Jake Lewis)

Boiler Room
A few years ago the idea of watching someone DJ online was fucking ridiculous, but Boiler Room changed all that. Basically, if you’re into pretty girls in oversized rap tees, handsome men with undercuts and the best DJs in the world, you should definitely check out what they have coming up.
LINK

Plan B, Brixton
418 Brixton Road, SW9 7AY
Good for garage, dancehall and bashment, as well as hands-down the best house bookings in South London. Has nothing to do with the rapper or the morning-after pill.
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Birthdays, Dalston
33 - 35 Stoke Newington Road, N16 8BJ
Not that many people stick around to watch bands in 2014, but Birthdays book the right ones. The DJs and MCs they bring in aren't bollocks either and, along with Dance Tunnel, they've got the best soundsystem in East London. There’s a bar/restaurant upstairs with a revolving kitchen. So, if you get tired of jumping around in the basement, you can head up there and inhale poutine, or fried chicken, or whatever it is they have in that month.
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Fabric, Farringdon
77A Charterhouse Street, EC1M 6HJ
This is a bit of a love-hate one, because it's basically a super club but without the euphoria. However, considering it’s normally the first club pilgrimage anyone makes to London, and because they have a soundsystem capable of rupturing your internal organs, it's worth a visit. Entry is pricey, drinks are extortionate and stairs are overcrowded with gurning Italians. BUT the line-ups can't be fucked with and it’s without doubt the best place in the capital to spot 35-year-old marketing managers chewing their top lips to shreds as the sun rises and DJ Hype wraps up his three-thousandth two-hour set in the main room.
LINK

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(Photo by Bruno Bayley)

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?

The UK has the highest levels of cocaine, ketamine and opiate use in Europe, and we’ve all taken an oath to try to smoke more weed and take more MDMA so it's a full house next year. In London, the news that we snort so much gak that trace amounts of it can now be found in the water supply was greeted more with civic pride than shock.

British people have always liked getting fucked off their faces, but as London has become more and more of a gentrified pop-up pleasure palace, cocaine use has gone mental. Most people from the city get it delivered, but sometimes people do walk around pubs and clubs trying to push the stuff. In places like Camden and Brixton people walk up and down the street offering their gear around, and they’ll happily tell anyone who wants to listen that the bag of white powder in their fist is definitely whatever the buyer wants it to be. No one who’s lived in London for more than 45 minutes talks to these people.

Lots of people take ket here as well, but fuck knows why. It doesn't take a genius to realise that falling into a K-hole outside the Peckham Burger King isn't much fun, plus if you do too much of it, your bladder explodes. There’s little meth beyond gay slamming parties and no one seems to take speed any more. Mephedrone had a period of ascendancy back when that chemical factory in China burned down and no one could get any MDMA, but since the Mandy returned, everyone – bar some in the gay scene and the occasional student – forgot that mephedrone ever existed. Hallucinogens aren't all that prevalent, essentially because London is like a massive cold prison yard, i.e. not really the best place to kiss the sky.

Like everywhere else, a lot of people smoke weed here. The majority of dealers stick with the most coma-inducing skunk they can find, but – very generally speaking – the Ladbroke Grove area is the home of Thai stick and Jamaican bush weed, and in South London there's tons of hash. There are also plenty of shops that sell weed under the counter, but I’m obviously not going to disclose their locations on the internet because I'm not a narc.

Of course, no matter how much we get high, it’s all still very much illegal. And even though bouncers at clubs are generally more likely to bin or pocket your stash than turn you over to the police, the cops have the right to stop and search you, and it’s not unheard of for people to end up with criminal records for possession. 

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(Photo by Jake Lewis)

POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

RACISTS AND LACK THEREOF

London is an astoundingly successful monument to cultural integration. At the recent European elections it was widely noted that UKIP’s manifesto preaching the dangers of mass immigration was least successful here in the capital, where mass immigration is most prevalent. Still, you get idiots everywhere, and since the murder of soldier Lee Rigby by a mentalist screaming about jihad in 2013, the anti-Muslim far right have been trying to make inroads in London. So far, all this has led to is a quasi-religious turf war between some dickhead ex-EDL members calling themselves Britain First and some other dickheads from the entourage of Anjem Choudary, a radical Muslim cleric. You can watch our film about it here, actually.

Generally, far-right and nationalist parties like the BNP and the EDL are given short shrift in London; while there is some anti-EU feeling in the country at the moment, this is a multicultural city and it likes it like that. Occasionally the right-wingers will decide to march somewhere and, without fail, anti-fascist protesters will turn up in at least equal numbers to stop them in their tracks. Usually, these guys end up getting arrested – in September last year, for example, 286 anti-fascist protesters were arrested in Whitechapel as they tried to stop the EDL marching through Tower Hamlets. Many interpreted this as an attempt by the Met to dissuade people from taking their grievances to the streets.

(Photo by Henry Langston)

People from different cultural backgrounds can get along fine, but that doesn’t mean everyone's equal. Displays of overt racism are mostly confined to lone ranters on public transport and the terraces of certain football clubs, but the police are way, way more likely to hassle you if you’re black. In fact, there’s an unspoken bias that pervades the whole of English society to make sure that, decades after mass immigration started – and despite the rise of pop-feminist blogs – pretty much everything is still run by (and for) white people with penises and middle-class accents. The only place where this is not the case is Tower Hamlets, where controversial Mayor Luftur Rahman has carved out an enclave in which it’s much easier to get a decent council position if you’re Bangladeshi.

Somewhat ironically, thanks to all this immigration a bunch of Polish neo-Nazis have settled in the capital. They’re called Zjednoczeni Emigranci Londyn, (that's Emigrants United London, for those of you who've never seen letters put together in that order before) and they hang around Tottenham wearing Blood & Honour T-shirts. They recently turned up to a family music festival and stabbed someone, which is obviously a weird thing to do, but realistically they’re very easy to avoid, and there are a load of anti-fascists currently trying to make them fuck off forever.

All of that aside, the main political battleground in London these days is over whether ordinary people can actually afford to live here any more. With rents designed purely for the amusement of landlords and the tiny cabal of crooked bankers and overseas oil tycoons who can afford them, more and more people are being evicted and squeezed out to the suburbs. Despite this, squatting is no longer as common as it was in the 1960s, perhaps because it's been a criminal offence to squat a residential property for the past two years.

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(Photo by Henry Langston)

POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

PROTESTS

Back in 2010, it looked like London was moving into a great period of social upheaval, but eventually everyone gave up and went to Pret for lunch. The students mobilised in order to protest against the coalition government’s raising of the cap on tuition fees, and over one exciting winter it all played out in a series of marches and riots, which reached their most insane level of mischief when protesters took over and smashed up the headquarters of the Tory party. It was kind of hilarious but someone almost killed a cop with a fire extinguisher. You can watch our film about it here, mate.

Eventually, all the protests stopped and people started talking excitedly about how the schoolkids who’d been involved in these riots would now perhaps become politicised, and how London would never be the same again. However, what actually happened was that everyone got kettled in the snow for hours and hours and it didn’t change the government’s mind at all. Following that brutal anti-climax, the wind was knocked out of the movement and now students have returned to being mostly viewed as loutish dickheads.

These days most protests are quiet, disgruntled things that police don’t feel the need to charge at on horses. But even when shit gets real here it’s nothing compared to many European countries – there is no tear gas and police don't fire rubber bullets at people. London mayor Boris Johnson just bought some water cannons from Germany (thanks, Germany!) but he isn’t allowed to use them yet. So, for now, there are just good old-fashioned truncheons and more fucking kettles, which are so much worse than tear gas because they last for hours.

The widespread rioting that pock-marked the country in 2011 originated in a London protest against the police killing of Mark Duggan. It has been interpreted by some as a protest against the Metropolitan police's ongoing targeting and persecution of the city’s poorest communities (and by others as opportunistic looting, so take your pick). But the punishments meted out were so harsh – four years for Facebook posts saying some crap about starting a riot that never came to be, for instance – that it feels as though this won’t be happening again any time soon. Which is probably a good thing for everyone other than journalists.

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(Photo by Bruno Bayley)

WHERE TO EAT

St John, Farringdon 
26 St John Street, EC1M 4AY
At first glance, St John’s aggressively British menu – which includes bone marrow and devilled kidneys – does have a touch of the dry heaves to it. In reality, though, it’s one of the best restaurants London has, of any cuisine. Unfortunately, managing to make all things offal delicious is a rare skill, and this is reflected in the prices. But, unlike everywhere else in London, you get to sit on a chair rather than a kooky, upturned milk crate, so it’s worth it.
LINK

Needoo Grill, Whitechapel
87 New Rd, E1 1HH
There’s a legendary Punjabi joint in Whitechapel called Tayyabs – so legendary that everyone in London knows it's responsible for some of the best curries in the country, which means there’s always a massive queue to get a table. For that reason smart people go round the corner to Needoo Grill. It’s very nearly just as good, and you won’t have to wait in a snaking trail of people in the rain for an hour. It’s actually run by a defector from Tayyabs, so it’s not surprising that it’s basically a mini version of the definitive London curry establishment.
LINK

Bone Daddies, Soho
31 Peter St, W1F 0AR
As London follows dutifully in the food footsteps of the Big Apple Crumble, ramen places are regularly springing up – most of them densely packed into the culinary grid of Soho. Around here you can find udon at Koya, takeaway ramen at Shoryu Go and a few nice Korean places minutes away on Tottenham Court Road. Bone Daddies, however, serves the best broth, as well as consistent sides, like chicken karaage and chashu pork. Just try to ignore the anti-osteopathic bar-style seating and overbearing dad-rock soundtrack. Not one for the headache crew.
LINK

Negril, Brixton Hill
132 Brixton Hill, SW2 1RS
Let's face it: most hot food isn't great. For all the flavour and nutrition that makes its way through the average vindaloo, you may as well just pay an Indian man £25 (€31) to taser your arsehole. But things don't have to be this way; find out for yourself by visiting Negril, a Jamaican jerk place situated right on Brixton Hill. Unlike most restaurants with garden views of A-roads, Negril is the fucking bomb, and the staff don't seem like murderers. Share their signature platter – two quarters of jerk chicken, plantain, rice and peas, coleslaw, salad, salt fish fritters and chips – and bring your own bottle/can to arrange a tryst between their amazing hot sauce and some cold, cold beer.
LINK

Mangal 2, Dalston
4 Stoke Newington Rd, N16 8BH
It’s an East London Turkish staple with great food, and Gilbert and George eat there every single night. But most important is its Twitter feed. Example tweets include: “It's Gay Pride Day. It's Armed Forces Day. It's the first day of Ramadan. Gay Muslim soldiers must be delighted today,” and: “Man walks in to order a takeaway wearing a Mumford & Sons t-shirt. Speaks and acts every bit as a twat as you’d expect.” And who could ever forget: “Do you sometimes crave a dirty, juicy kebab after a night out in the town? A proper dodgy doner when you're drunk? Yeah? Well, fuck off.” When a man is tired of the Mangal 2 Twitter feed, he is tired of life.
LINK

Silk Road, Camberwell
49 Camberwell Church St, SE5 8TR 
This Chinese restaurant in Camberwell is considered one of the city's best. But it looks like a total shithole, which can make it hard to find for first timers. Don't expect tablecloths, waiters who speak English or sweet and sour pork. But if you want to flush your horrible system out with an industrial amount of fresh chilli, unusual delicacies, barbecue skewers and endless bottles of ice cold Tsingtao, then this place does the job. Don't expect to get a table for ten at short notice, though, because it’s popular. Tip: One order of pig feet is really enough for a large group, don't go nuts on that.
LINK

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(Photo by Bruno Bayley)

WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?

Full English
We’re not famous for our food, us Brits, and we accept that. However, we still kicked the shit out of everyone else when we first had a crack at breakfast. A proper English one of them is a full cooked meal of sausages, bacon, beans, eggs, toast and a handful of other variables, sometimes including cakes made out of fried blood, ideally washed down with a milky mug of tea. You can blow a tenner having your full English sullied with kale or gluten free bread, but if you want the real deal The Regency in Pimlico represents a dying breed of authentic greasy spoon cafes. Or you can head over to its pokier East End counterpart, E Pellicci, famously frequented by the Krays but now filled with builders, personable staff and Capital FM. Or, if you’ve got access to a kitchen, just cook it yourself (after all, all those Tescos you seem to be walking past every day have the shit you need for this pretty much stacked at the front).

Jerk Chicken
Notting Hill Carnival is one of the best street parties in the world, let alone the capital. But if you’re not a hardened West Londoner the reality of Carnival weekend can mean cursing whatever polystyrene box of jerk you panic bought as you touch cloth looking for a kind local flogging £5 (€6) entry to their personal shitter. Thankfully, Yum Yum in Ladbroke Grove – who specialise in comfortingly luminous yellow patties – Jerk City in Soho and the aforementioned Negril can be enjoyed all year round, minus the fear of getting tased by an overzealous police officer for taking a dump in a phone box.

Sunday Roast
An important weekly staple of British cuisine: roasted meat and potatoes with stuffing, vegetables, gravy and a Yorkshire pudding. These days every pub with a motivational quote on their chalkboard sign will do one for about £15 (€19) (which is an insane amount of money, considering that the only cooking you really have to do is turning on the oven and carving). You won’t have to look hard to find one, but when you do just know that the plate should be PILED with shit; this is not a subtle meal. The dream, of course, is to invite yourself to a local's home-cooked roast and while away the rest of Sunday in a haze of meat farts and Sunday supplements. Thankfully, London is a very friendly city – just knock on someone's door, ask for some lunch and they'll wave you through to their kitchen.

Chicken Tikka Masala
India looms large in England’s vision of itself, from the horrors of the Empire to the exported benefits of the Industrial Revolution, through the adoption of cricket by the Indians to the embracing of Indian food by the British. Chicken tikka masala is one of the most popular curries here – it’s red, it’s creamy, it's looked down upon by food snobs and it was invented in Britain. It’s basically the Heinz Tomato Soup of curry. It’s also totally banging, and when it drips off the end of your naan it’s going to stain the shit out of that £700 Nasir Mazhar jumper you just bought in a frenzy after reading a copy of i-D.

Brick Lane Beigels
If you’re pissed and it's late at night, the odds are you’ll end up eating some food cooked by someone with an avant garde concept of edibility. Perhaps you’ll choose a kebab intent on quite literally kicking the shit out of your stomach, or maybe fried chicken that changes the pH level of your skin. But if you’re anywhere near Brick Lane, you can forget these. Instead, you should go into either of the two adjacent bagel shops, order two hot salt-beef sandwiches and one salmon and cream cheese, then swan off like the alt-fast food connoisseur that you are.

A Kebab Intent on Quite Literally Kicking the Shit Out of Your Stomach, or Maybe Fried Chicken That Changes the pH Level of Your Skin
Because they're pretty good, really.

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(Photo by Jake Lewis)

WHERE TO DRINK

Soho

Soho is a maze that’s resisting gentrification with greater success than most parts of London. If you want to get pissed there, Sam Smith’s have many boozers in the area. They're one of the last truly independent brewery-run pub chains in the city, so while you can’t expect to see any branded lagers or even Coca-Cola on sale here, you can expect to pay shockingly little for good beer. The Glasshouse Stores on Brewer Street is a dimly lit basement bar, if you're into that kind of thing, and the The John Snow is a good one to stand outside on a sunny day if for some reason you want to socialise with bike couriers. The Cross Keys is a meeting place for obese Freemasons and is decorated with all sorts of wonky knick-knacks, like brass diving helmets and other similar detritus. Try to avoid it between the hours of 5 and 7PM though because, like all city pubs, it will be full of city cunts.

The Old Blue Last, Shoreditch
38 Great Eastern St, EC2A 3ES

This is our pub – we own it. It’s called The Old Blue Last and it’s the best fucking pub in the whole fucking world. It’s got three floors, it’s on the site of Shakespeare’s first theatre, it’s older than America, it puts on gigs (everyone from Winehouse and Lil B to The Arctic Monkeys and Wiley), there’s a secret bar on the top floor, it’s near our office and you should come. (But please don’t steal our glasses, and don’t do gak in our toilets.) You can learn all about it’s blotted history here.
LINK

The Holly Bush
, Hampstead
22 Holly Mt, NW3 6SG
Back in the day, Hampstead was full of people like John Keats and Lord Byron. Then it was full of people like Richard Burton and Peter Cooke; then it was full of Arsenal players; and now it’s gone full blown wank and is rammed with Russian plutocrats who order women from their iPads and leave their corpses in Hampstead pond. That said, there’s still nothing better than trekking through the Heath and ending up here to get really, really pissed on the quietest street in London.
LINK

(Photo by Bruno Bayley)

Queen's Head, Stockwell

144 Stockwell Road, SW9 9TQ
Fat White Family are the most exciting live band in London at the moment, and they use this place as a sort of base camp in which to play shows, get fucked up and pursue their agenda against the yuppies who are currently busy turning Brixton into one gigantic piece of expensive Italian cheese. They'll probably hate us for putting what is basically their house in a travel guide, but if there's one place in London to see a screaming man windmilling his cock and glassing a drummer in the face, it's here.
LINK

Clerkenwell

It’s a weird netherworld of yuppies, upmarket kitchen shops and other detestable things, but if you go to Clerkenwell on a weekend you get to enjoy some of the best pubs in the city. The Three Kings has a great name and a great sign, and if it’s a sunny day you can get a pint and walk into the churchyard across the road. I’m certain you’re not supposed to do it, but no one’s ever stopped me. The Jerusalem Tavern round the corner has a bit of a 14th century feeling to it and is attached to its own brewery – so no, you can’t get a fucking Foster's here. The Gunmakers is another great old-as-shit boozer, then there's The Betsey Trotwood, Ye Old Mitre... In fact, there are too many to list, but just ignore The Crown – it’s got a wanker thing going on.

Frank’s Cafe, Peckham
95 Rye Lane, SE15 4ST
This place is only open during the summer months, which is a good thing because it’s on top of a multi-storey car park and would be fucking miserable in December. It’s also probably the only bar-cum-art-gallery-cum-restaurant in London with both an incredible view of the city and cocktails capped at £7.50 (€9), AKA half the price of any other rooftop drinking spot. The only thing is, you’re going to want to head there early – straight after work or, if you’re unemployed, just after Tipping Point finishes – because it’s rammed by half 7 and they generally stick to a pretty strict one-in, one-out policy.
LINK

New Cross
While New Cross may well just be an A-road propped up by kebab shops and Christian bookstores, it does have some great pubs. The Hobgoblin has my favourite beer garden in London and is usually full of fine art students, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on how much you care about intercontextuality and microethnographic discourse. Also, Shia LaBeouf has gotten into two fights here. If this Venn diagram of fine art and public celebrity meltdowns doesn't excite you, go to The Royal Albert for quality beers and dependable pub food, or the Marquis of Granby for pool, cheap pints and arguments with elderly men.

Clapton FC
The Old Spotted Dog Ground, 212 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, E7 9NP
Obviously everyone here loves football, but let’s face it – the Premier League is designed to be watched on telly; they should just ship the fucker to Oman already. In its absence, we’ll spend more time watching our local non-league clubs and starting anarcho-syndicalist ultra groups, like first Clapton and then Dulwich have done (much to the surprise of the players, who’d never seen an anarchist or a fan before the black bloc showed up).
LINK

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(Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

WHERE TO STAY

Living in central London is like shitting thousands of pounds into a bucket that keeps telling you to fuck off to some Zone 5 housing estate. As such, we need help with our rent, so we’re pretty big on AirBnb. The flats will be tiny, but by gum we can absolutely guarantee that there’s a Tesco Metro round the corner.

Australians are a real problem here. They’re our huge, attractive, cultureless cousins, and our hostels are full of them vomiting on terrified Japanese people. So if you’re in the market for a dorm bed where you might actually get some sleep, Palmers Lodge are a pretty good bet (dorm beds from £19/€24 per night). Their two sites (at Swiss Cottage and Hillspring) are a little outside the centre of town, but they make up for that by being clean, providing free WiFi and giving you the peace of mind that comes from knowing you won't end up covered in Antipodean bodily fluids.

More central is Generator (beds from £10/€12). It's right next to Russell Square, which is the kind of place Americans think that all Londoners live in because it’s beautiful and reeks of Penguin Classics. We don’t live here, though – we live in prefab shit-shells eight miles down the road.

If you’re going to cough up for a hotel, Russell’s of Clapton (£98 per room per night) has the mix of taste and efficiency you'd expect from somewhere run by a former music manager. It’s well into East London too, which is obviously where all of the VICE UK office live, so you can fuck us all off by clogging up the queue at Tesco, complaining about the times we slagged off The Matrix and asking for Clive Martin's number.

If you’ve got money to burn, Ace Hotel (£199/€250 per room per night) is pretty fun. Bands stay there and the club beneath it has decent nights with sets by people like Boiler Room and Young Turks. The website says it's a place for "landmark creatives and renegade artists" but in truth we're neither of those things and we've never been refused entry.

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(Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

LGBT LONDON

These days Vauxhall is the huge fuck-off gay area. There are a series of clubs here where you can fuck, swallow and beat anything you fancy, and cum and vodka rain from the sky (meaning lesbians feel slightly left out). Fire and Barcode are good bets for dancing and fucking, and there are also some leather bars and bear nights in the area. If you do just fancy a quiet pint, though, The Royal Vauxhall Tavern is one of the city’s most famous gay pubs. If it’s plain banging you’re looking for, there are a myriad of saunas around where you can get yourself seen to. But yeah, unfortunately Vauxhall is really all about the men.

Woman or man, though, Soho has long been London’s gay mecca, and it’s full of places to drink, dance and pull. Clustered around Brewer Street and Old Compton Street are the most well known spots, including the triple-decker G-A-Y club and Madame Jojo’s burlesque bar. Hit up G-A-Y any day but go Friday or Saturday and you'll find the stupidest soundtrack, purplest decor and some of the cheapest drinks in London.

While Soho is home to the more mainstream spectrum of gay bars and clubs, East London provides some fun alternatives. The Joiners Arms is a cherished dive bar where your feet will stick to the floor, and The George and Dragon is a typically cosy English pub, only full of gays and drag queens. Both are on Hackney Road in Shoreditch, and both have fairly early doors, so after they close you can head over to East Bloc, Old Street's underground labyrinth of seedy corners and pulsating dance music.

Head as far as Dalston and you'll find Dalston Superstore and Vogue Fabrics, two raucous clubs that throw sweaty, fashionable gay parties. While Superstore drags in a younger and better-dressed crowd, Vogue Fabrics is a glorious melting pot of weirdness with no toilet doors. Both of these venues are welcoming to women any day of the week, but look out for Superstore's lesbian nights, which are better than anything ever going on in Soho.

Generally speaking, gay couples should feel safe enough to be affectionate with each other in public in most parts of the city, but sadly there’s always one homophobic bigot, so it’s not impossible that some idiot will take it upon themselves to shout abuse. At which point expect everyone standing around you to call him a fucking cunt and pat you on the back. Because this is London and we don’t like bigots here.

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(Photo by Bruno Bayley)

WHERE TO HANG OUT AND WHO TO SPEND TIME WITH WHEN YOU'RE SOBER

The British Museum
Great Russell Street, WC1B 3DG
As you well know, we used to own this planet. But then, at some point in the 40s, we were magnanimous enough to give it back. We did keep all the best stuff though, obvs – we’re not idiots. So come and bask in the glory of our plundering! Marvel at our beautiful Elgin Marbles! See the mighty pharaohs eunuched in a plastic box 200 yards from a Wetherspoons! Gaze in awe as the oldest and most noble of antiquities are filed into some dark drawers in the private archive because we just don’t have enough bloody space for all this awesome foreign stuff!
LINK

Edgware Road
The long stretch of road between Paddington and Marble Arch is home to a vast Asian community, so don’t expect many bars, but do expect great food, sweets and shisha. Almost every establishment on Edgware Road will serve shisha, mostly to wealthy young Arab men who are socialising and watching shit on their tablets. The shisha places open very late, most till around 3AM, so if you want to relax, watch some Lamborghinis speed by and give yourself grape-flavoured lung cancer then be sure to hit up Little Bahrain. This is also a great place to escape the onslaught of mindless drunkenness and potential violence that will no doubt pervade your visit; everyone on this road is courteous as fuck.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Bit of a genius one, this. It's right behind The Royal Courts of Justice, so it’s where all the lawyers hang out eating Itsu, but it’s also home to three of the best things in London: 1) The Hunterian Museum – a collection of medical curiosities in the Royal College of Surgeons, which has babies in jars, the skeleton of a giant and an entire circulatory system ironed into a big table; 2) Sir John Soane's Museum – one man’s insane collection of artefacts from around the globe, all displayed in his house – from Hogarth cartoons in his study, to Egyptian mummies in the basement and Roman shit everywhere else. And finally 3) The Seven Stars – the best pub for daytime drinking in Central London and if some lawyers win a case over the road, you can probably have some of their champagne.  

Hampstead Heath
It’s a huge swathe of countryside within the city, which means it’s where most teenage North Londoners go to take acid and smoke weed. There’s also a thriving dogging scene for those of you who want to fuck dangerous strangers in the woods.

(Photo by Bruno Bayley)

The Canals
Walk from Camden to Notting Hill, or from Bow to Islington – or from Little Venice to Brentford, if you really want to. The canals are a weird, outmoded series of veins connecting the city, which thanks to technology have been abandoned to real ale-drinking fans of fantasy fiction, who pootle along them in their barges, refusing to acknowledge the 21st century.

Obscure Political Groups
The harder it is to find a political group is, the cooler they probably are. So, people ramming their socialist newspaper down your throat are likely to be insufferable bores and are to be avoided. Meanwhile, if a group has a weird name and you don’t really know who they are, they’ll be way more fun. A recent example is a group called The Imaginary Party – I don’t know if they still exist, or if they ever really did beyond a tumblr, but their headache-inducing graphics are enough to tell you that they’re not staid leftie beard-strokers. London Antifascists have been known to put on decent club nights and spend the proceeds on a year’s worth of beating up racists, but that’s a pretty rare occurrence. Then there are the London Black Revolutionaries, or Black Revs for short, who go around pouring concrete over spikes designed to stop homeless people from bedding down for the night, or saving illegal immigrants from deportation. They’re good guys. Head to a demo, hit a pub or student bar afterwards, and see if you make friends with someone interesting.

(Photo by Luke Overin)

Gillett Square, Dalston
A while ago Stoke Newington High Street lost its charm beneath the weight of several thousand pairs of Air Max – but just off it Gillett Square retains something. It’s basically a pedestrianised square with a jazz club, a few food stalls and a slight air of instability. NTS Radio broadcasts everything from sludge shows and doom shows, to ragga and house shows from a hut there, and if you’re pretty you can probably sidle up to the DJ, give them a tin of lager and get on air. Basically, bring a blue plastic bag full of beer and sit about in the sun (which is actually the best thing you can do anywhere in London but but we had to make up some other shit to fill out a 10,000-word travel guide).
LINK

Greenwich
It’s literally the exact opposite of The Land That Time Forgot. It’s the Home of Time. If you stand there, you are, by definition, on time. And once the jokes about Greenwich Meantime get boring, there’s a big hill, a couple of decent second-hand stores and some nice pubs.

Primitive London
73-75 Shacklewell Ln, London E8 2EB
If you’re into pretty girls in obscure British sportswear brands and tall, handsome men who literally only ever wear black, check out Primitive London – a boutique on Shacklewell Lane that also throws the occasional party. They used to sell necklaces made out of kangaroo balls, which went down really well when they took the shop over to Tokyo for a couple of weeks, but haven’t taken off in quite the same way over here.
LINK

Anarchist Bookshops
Freedom, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX / Anarchist Bookfair
Brits aren't great at smashing the system but we're great at pontificating about it. To avoid becoming a Russell Brand acolyte, check out Freedom, an Anarchist bookshop that must be worth a shit because it recently survived its second firebomb attack. And once a year the Anarchist Bookfair comes to town and the UK’s anarchists gather to sell anarchist books and T-shirts to other anarchists. You’d think it’d be a convivial affair but they usually manage to disagree with each other about something. Anyway, you can catch some interesting talks about how not to get arrested in a riot, but sit by the door so you can leave if it becomes boring.
LINK / LINK

The Institute of Contemporary Art
The Mall, SW1Y 5AH
The ICA is on the Mall, which is the road that leads up to Buckingham Palace. So, if you come here to see an exhibition of outsider art by Costa Rican mental patients, or whatever, you can have a few drinks at the bar, watch a band and then stumble out, squint into the distance and chalk the Queen’s house off your list of stupid shit you’re supposed to see when you visit London.
LINK

Royal Parks
Like swans, these are owned by the Queen, which mean they’re a bit poncey and closed at night – but they are uniformly pretty. Regent's Park, Hyde Park, Green Park, Richmond Park – they’re all full of beds of roses and weeping willows and incongruous groups of teenagers playing football topless across about 50 groups of stoned, picnicking 40-year-olds. You’re going to spend a lot of time in London hellholes, so these are a nice, posh respite.

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(Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP

It’s worth finding a cab company phone number and calling one to pick you up if you’re staggering around late at night. Waiting for a black cab can be a pain in the arse, and obviously taking some random unlicensed taxi (which is just a man in a car) home in the small hours is a stupid thing to do.

Frankly, London’s been gentrified to the point of almost numbing safety, which is exactly the kind of thing we’ll all appreciate when we have kids (provided we can still afford to live here), but right now is just boring. Of course, you should still watch out for the same sort of crime you’ll find in any city; handbags and laptops can and will be lifted from beneath your table while you sit there, so keep an eye on them.  

Sure, there are gangs and turf wars and guns and all that shit, but unless you’re planning on embedding inside some Polish coke crew or intervening in the E3 turf war you’ll probably be OK. That said, this is the country that produced Richard III, Jimmy Savile, Harold Shipman, Joffrey, Henry VIII, the Child Catcher and all the rest of history’s greatest monsters, so you can never be too careful.   

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(Photo by Jamie Lee Curtis Taete)

HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST

No one likes it when tourists are slow everywhere, but you‘d have to be a real dick not to understand that they’re lost in our ridiculous, unplanned, chaotic city. Oyster Cards (what you need to ride the tube, mate) are a real fucker, and I’m always impressed that any tourist has managed to work out where to get one. So kudos on that, you lovable, slow-moving bastards.

We won’t necessarily be pissed off with you if you get sucked into the tourist vortex that is Leicester Square and its surrounding bars, but you might get pissed off with us for not warning you. I’ve never quite worked out what people do there; there are a couple of bars that are less nice than every other bar in the centre of town, a few multiplex cinemas – but who the fuck goes to see Maleficent when they’re on holiday? – and a fucking massive shop selling M&Ms memorabilia to idiots. I think that's pretty much it. I guess there are the guys who'll do a funny portrait of you in ten minutes, but I thought you had them in your country too? Maybe I was wrong.   

The shittiest of shitty tourists, however, are the ones who come to London for the shopping. The fucking shopping. You don’t have clothes at home? ASOS won’t deliver to your country? Ultimately, there are two kinds of shops that shitty tourists go to – the ones they can afford to shop in (all of whose stock is available online) and fancy ones they can’t afford to shop in, which are essentially just museums for the dumb. Who cares if the Rosetta Stone is round the corner in the British Museum? Here’s a £60 Harrods tennis ball!

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(Photo by Tom Johnson)

PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID

Bankers
Nobody likes bankers anywhere, right? London’s no different, except we’ve got a lot more of them because The City of London – the central square mile of real, old London – is pretty much the financial brain of the planet. This means that pubs around there are full of young men who are basically financial hooligans in suits. It’s like being at a Millwall game in the 80s, only with lots of posh people who make their money defrauding rogue nations, before using it to buy huge swathes of London and leasing that back to the rest of us. I have no evidence for this, but I bet they’re all pick-up artists. 

Anyone Barefoot
It’s London, not the beach. Are you impervious to tetanus as well as ridicule?

Stylish Heroin Users
It’s been a decade since the fucking Libertines exploded in a shit-show of hats and misery, and there are still people out there who think that junk is a decent fashion accessory. Frankly, it beat Kurt Cobain, it beat Coco Chanel, it beat Basquiat, Chet Baker and fucking GG Allin. It will beat you – you guitar-playing turnip. Choose life; choose E.

Comedians
Armando Iannucci, Chris Morris, Stewart Lee and Steve Coogan are all old as shit, and they’re still the funniest people in this country. These days, British comedy is basically people with haircuts repeating shit they heard in the Union bar, yet they’re all millionaires playing to ginormous, giggling crowds of morons and get more BBC airtime than ISIS. Fuck these guys.

Camden Town
Every city in Europe has a market area where crusties sell John Lennon posters and i-Pood T-shirts next to rudeboys hawking fake hash, but this is the only one so unpleasant that it’s tried to burn itself down twice in half a decade. Camden Town is the place where scenes goes to die. It is a machine designed to prove parents right about youth culture – it’s tacky, cheap, commercial and self-important. About a decade ago, it had a last hurrah thanks to the tireless good vibes of certain DJs and a few fun bands, but they’ve moved on now, and the place has been left in the hands of the steampunks, the cybergoths and the 50-year-old gakheads. Just walk up the road for ten minutes and you’ll get to Kentish Town, where you can drink at any of these pubs.

(Photo by Holly Lucas)

Kensington and Chelsea
A stupid place that has become so remarkably wealthy over the last decade that its new residents have managed to make Mohamed Al-Fayed, the bonkers Harrods owner, look like a loveable local cad – like Del Boy but with more conspiracy theories. There are 72 billionaires in London and they all live here. Most of them have come for the tax breaks, state protection and unbearable aura of "cool"  that London touts abroad; these are bored rich men who want to eat in restaurants where Lily Allen or Nicholas Serota may be at the next table. You can’t afford these restaurants, so why bother visiting?

The Bars Inside the O2
You may, for reasons of blind tribal loyalty, find yourself attending a gig at the O2 arena, a space at least three times the size of your home country. This is unfortunate, but these days it's the only place big pop acts (Rihanna, Kate Bush, Prince, etc) play. If you do end up going, then a) sorry it’s so far away from everything (stupid, right?) and b) don’t show up early just to loiter in the atrium and pay £200 for a microwaved steak in TGI Friday's. Oh, and also c) I was in a car with Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran once and he said the O2 was actually the best venue in London, because of the convenient parking. So, if you've driven to London, you'll be happy as a pig in shit here.

Oxford Street
All the exact same shops you know and love from every other high street in Britain, but at twice the price and with 45 times more customers. Ignore the bin drummers; find a Sam Smith’s pub.

Westfield Shopping Centres
Like Oxford Street but on multiple levels, just like Dante's Inferno.

(Photo by Joe Ridout)

The Strip
This is what everyone calls the long stretch of tarmac that runs from Kingsland Road to Stoke Newington High Street and it’s an absolute fucking nightmare. That said, you will inevitably end up there at some point and so it’s worth knowing that the back garden at The Haggerston is about as bearable as it gets and Birthdays [as mentioned above] puts on as good gigs as anyone else in town. In general though, these days weekends here are a fuckfest of people disappearing into basement drugs vortices and thousands of students spending so much money so noisily that they’re simultaneously driving house prices both up and down.

The Tube
One mistake lots of people first make when they come to London is relying too much on the tube. It may seem convenient, but it’s also deeply unpleasant during any sort of rush hour and is the only consistently hot part of Britain. Aware of how nasty it is down there, the London Mayor once ran a competition offering thousands of pounds to anyone who could work out how the fuck to cool it down in the summer; the competition eventually closed without a winner and we’re all still sweating. Buses are a lot nicer and actually, if you’re in central London, everything’s in walking distance anyway.

Upper Street
The worst street in the world. It’s a mile and a half of expensive chain stores, posh people ploughing their inheritance into doomed boutique cake shops, unfathomably charmless pubs and overpriced restaurants. It wasn’t always like this, but as London has grown and as transport to the centre has improved, places like Covent Garden reached peak dickhead and they had to spill out somewhere. Islington Council opened its arms and turned this long stretch into a mecca of consumption with all the personality of a helipad. It’s a shame because The King’s Head Theatre Pub is a great place, but these days if you find yourself on Upper Street, you should GTFO and head for Holloway Road.

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(Photo by Joe Ridout)

TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES

Tipping
For the most part, if a tip is included in a restaurant's bill it will seem like far too much for the service you've received. But there's not a lot you can do about that, unless you don't mind shouting down a master's student who's trying to make rent with a minimum-wage waiting job. If it's not already included, 10 percent of the total price is about right – but that's not hard and fast; scale it down a little if your waitress has coughed on your food or addressed you using a racist slur. Round up in cabs and don't bother tipping at bars – nobody who lives here does, and handing a hot barmaid an extra fiver just makes you look like a sleaze.

Handy Phrases
Aggy – When someone is being aggressive or irritating. 
Mate – Don't assume this means what you think it does. In the same way that "cunt" can be used affectionately, "mate" can also be used to preface you being glassed in the neck.
Moist – If someone directs this word at you, they're calling you a bellend, mate.
Allow – Basically means "don't". As in shouting "Allow that!" when someone's stealing your chips. 
Taking the piss – Americans seem to have a hard time both understanding this and saying it without sounding like idiots, but it can mean a) to mock someone, or b) that something is unreasonable, i.e: "He wouldn't lend you £50 for another gram? That's a piss take, mate."

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A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST WHICH SUMS EVERYTHING UP

All the other offices made a playlist of questionable local music, but this is actually really good and pretty much sums London up right now.  

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VICE CITY MAP

Alright then, that just about wraps it up. We'll see you in the British Museum laughing at the mummies.

Yours sincerely,

– VICE UK 

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Return to The VICE Guide to Europe 2014 homepage

It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: The Gregory family

Screencap via ABC

The incident: A cat freaked out. 

The appropriate response: Putting on some long sleeves and oven mitts and moving the cat to another room. Maybe calling animal control if it's really bad. IDK, I've never owned a cat.

The actual response: The owners of the cat called 911. 

Earlier this week, police in DeLand, Florida released audio from a 911 call they'd received about an angry cat.

In the recording, the son of a woman named Teresa Gregory tells the operator that his mum's cat "has gone crazy and has attacked her multiple times".

He also said that the cat, which is named Kush, had attacked his stepfather "multiple times". 

Teresa also made a call to 911. She told the operator that she thought the cat might be freaking out because she'd accidentally stepped on it earlier in the day. 

"We just need her out of our house. We don't know what to do," she told the operator. "She's in the living room and I can't get out. She's got us trapped in the bedroom."

According to the Orlando Sentinel, officers were dispatched to the couple's home at around 7:15PM. 

While speaking to the 911 operator, Teresa expressed some concern that the responding officers might also be attacked by the cat. "They might have to shoot her, I don't know," she said.

The officers didn't shoot the cat (which, for this column, is a surprise). They decided instead to call in animal control, who took the cat and put it into quarantine, where it will be kept for at least 10 days. It's unclear what will happen to the animal at the end of that period.  

Neither Teresa, her son, her husband or the responding officers required hospital treatment.

Cry-Baby #2: Kanye West

Image via Wikimedia Commons

The incident: Kanye West became annoyed that photographers were taking photos of him wherever he goes. 

The appropriate response: Stop making music, stop being on TV, divorce Kim Kardashian, move to a cabin in the woods, shut up. 

The actual response: He compared his experience to being raped. 

On Saturday, while performing at the Wireless Festival in London, occasional rapper and full-time troll Kanye West stopped singing to go on a 20-minute rant.

As is standard protocol for a Kanye West mid-set rant, it was reportedly rambling, made little sense and involved Kanye switching between first and third person.

A lot of the rant, which was conducted in full view of tens of thousands of people, is said to have involved issues of privacy.

Kanye began by complaining about his arrest for assaulting a paparazzi in 2013, saying that his reaction was similar to that of "a porcupine or a blowfish when they're angry”.

Kanye, who makes millions and millions and millions of dollars a year by being a famous person, then went on to say, “I don’t care what you do in life, everybody needs a day off, everybody has the right to say, ‘You know what? I need a minute to breathe.'"

Kanye isn't the first famous idiot to compare photography to rape; Johnny Depp and Charlize Theron have both previously received criticism for saying that paparazzi are, like, totally raping them. 

Which of these guys is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here:

Previously: A woman who set fire to her house because she saw a spider vs. a restaurant that fired a guy for giving away a free muffin

Winner: The restaurant!!!

@jlct

Adidas T-shirt, vintage shorts, Nike trainers

PHOTOGRAPHER: FREEL AND GORSE
STYLIST: JARELLE FRANCIS (LONDON LIFESTYLE LOUNGE) 
Hair and Make-up: April Taylor
Model: Zlata at M+P 

Vintage jacket, trousers and shoes

Nike vest

Vintage jacket, T-shirt and shorts, Juju jelly shoes

Valentino top, Ralph Lauren shorts, vintage shoes

Kara Crabb: one sophisticated ass lady

After my two-year-old butt sex article went viral recently for some weird, perverted reason, I decided to look it over again. Upon review, I was absolutely horrified. Not because of what I had written, but what I’d forgotten to mention. There are so many better, more obvious reasons why girls should literally only have anal sex and nothing else. I’m sorry for being so neglectful. It was truly an irresponsible disposal on my account, focusing solely on sensory delight and passivity – in reality, there are far more relevant reasons why every female ought to be prohibited from all sexual acts excluding anal intercourse.

They are as follows:

NO PREGNANCY

Never mind the purely selfish reasons why you wouldn’t want a human larva ruining your life – let’s look at this from a socio-environmental standpoint. The human population is expected to reach 8 billion by the year 2025. We have no way to feed all of these people, and what would we do with the sewage if we could? Even now, with 7 billion people on Earth, more than 200 million tons of human waste goes untreated every year.

Think about that before you freak out over a little poop on your boyfriend’s peener. It’s a small price to pay for not living a literally shitty existence. Overpopulation is a colossal nightmare that we, as a species, can no longer physically withstand. That is exactly why anal sex is so important.

You can’t grow a baby in your ass, but you can have an orgasm if you try a little.

If girls were to engage only in anal intercourse, there would be fewer humans on Earth, and therefore less resource depletion, and perhaps a better quality of life for the rest of civilisation. Only through these swollen, pulsating lips may we still find our planet hospitable. Forget those stupid solar roadways – anal sex can single-handedly lead us toward a future of sustainability and hope.

I am the bearer of objective truth.

LIMITED DISEASE TRANSMISSION

One might prefer the “stinky” to the “pinky” for one's non-propogational preclusions, but blowing loads into rectal tissue is practical for many legitimate reasons that further help control our steadily expanding population!

Diseases were predetermined to regulate human population densities on Earth because humans are gods and the universe clearly revolves around our existence, right? Now think about this: It’s easy to poison yourself with shit: cholera, hepatitis, Clostridium difficile (Hawt! New!). These are all cool, fun things you can get from digging around in people’s assholes. What a positive influence on our demography! Girls should really only be having the dirtiest, most-unprotected, anal-sex ORGY PARTIES because infectious disease is a material privilege in this short, sweet life. I should be canonised.

PHANTOM PHALLUS

I must especially apologise for failing to recognise the possibility that receptive males may also want to engage in anal intercourse with penetrative females.

While the act is commonly rejected in most het-cis relationships, I can personally attest to its reality. One time I met a guy off Craigslist (that story is not really relevant). He was comfortable with his sexuality (there’s no need to delve in my personal life right now), and he was interested in prostate orgasms (I don’t want to encourage unwanted attention by sharing this story).

I still believe that sexual dominance and pain are extremely fun and gratifying under the right circumstances – but thrusting an inorganic penile into another autonomous human being can be pretty all right, too.

PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE

Men, women, and children have all been players in the anal-receiving game since antiquity. In fact, it is debated whether academia itself grew from the edges of a child’s sphincter.

Pederasty was a socially accepted form of education wherein young male students developed erotic relationships with their teachers in exchange for private mentorship. Cultural views on actual penetration, however, are confused.

While depictions of anal sex in Greek and Roman art suggest that penetration was reserved only for slaves and whores, there ARE accounts of celebrated anal intercourse among companions throughout a variety of ancient civilisations.

Regardless of whether males were actually INSERTING their penises into their friends' buttholes or not, posterior stimulation bears definite cross-cultural synchronicity. It makes me wonder: Without anal sex, would democracy ever have been born? What about linguistics? Or spectator sports? Militaries?

In this vein we should all open ourselves to the fact that every race, creed, age, and sex are unified under ANAL SYNERGIC TRANSCENDENCE!!!

On that note – males, I would like to address the fact that many of you are messaging me, telling me how you’d like to convince your girlfriends to have anal sex with you. Why? Why? Why would you do this?

Why would you email someone you don’t know and tell her these things? Why would anyone care about this? Why? Why?

Follow Kara Crabb on Twitter.

Previously:

Why All Girls Should Have Anal Sex

Why Girls Should Never Have Anal Sex

Photo via Flickr user ronniegrob

In April 2010, former cocaine smuggler Douglas Spink briefly dominated headlines when police raided his property in Whatcom County, Washington. Inside, they found a Welsh tourist making use of what the press has since described as an animal brothel, replete with tail-less mice covered in Vaseline. Overnight, Spink became the poster boy for the bizarre, brutal world of bestiality.

But according to Spink and journalist Carreen Maloney – whose upcoming book, Uniquely Dangerous, deals with his case – that’s not quite how things went down. Maloney believes, based on court records, that the Vaseline mice, for instance, were a fabrication created by the local Humane Society, and Spink says the ordeal is a manifestation of a bigoted assault on him for being an outspoken defender of heterospecies relationships, sometimes known as zoophilia.

Spink doesn’t consider himself just another animal fucker. He describes himself as a counter-surveillance researcher (at Baneki Privacy Labs), a heterospecies writer and thinker, and a species-equality activist who cut his teeth in frontline direct action in the 1990s with Earth First. 

VICE recently spoke to Spink, in the final stretch of his current sentence, about his views on heterospecies identity, zoophobic bigotry, and our revilement of inter-species intimacy as a natural result of human solipsism and aggressively ecocidal policies.

VICE: First off, are you OK with being called a zoophile, or do you use a different term?
Douglas Spink: I tend to use "heterospecies" rather than "zoophile." I see it as the difference between calling someone gay and calling them a faggot.

I do not think that I'm terribly good as a categorical representative of heterospeciesists or any particular class. I'm a bit of an outlier, even in the communities where I feel most at home. A BASE-jumping, Chicago MBA–carrying, counter-surveillance-tech-developing, Asperger's-diagnosed oddball. Proudly so.

I have chosen a path of dissent from the default zoophobic stance in our current social sphere, and as a result I've been targeted and imprisoned. It's a thought-crime issue, not an action-based issue. My words are considered criminal, and enormous effort has been expended to censor me.

Can you tell me how you first got engaged in heterospecies identities and issues?
I was raised in a horse-centric environment, having learned to ride at age two. I was (and am) able to empathetically understand things from the horse's perspective. In biology class, I was presented with some counterintuitive claims of facts that were decidedly incongruent with what I knew from my firsthand immersion alongside equine companions, like "Animals were devoid of any interest in sex or sexuality, and bred purely based on instinct."

As a young teenager, I was able to learn about the (then new) horrors of factory farming from nonprofits like PETA. I became a lifelong (if imperfect) vegetarian, and my interest in activist work in support of non-human well-being kicked into high gear. Bring those threads together, and you get the question of heterospecies relations between humans and non-humans.

OK, so you questioned the treatment of animals early on, and animal sexuality – but how did you move past the initial taboos and start engaging with heterospecies intimacy?
Anyone who can really generate some sort of putative revulsion over the idea of two social mammals engaging in intimate relations is displaying a deeply problematic misunderstanding of what it is to be a social mammal. It's a manufactured taboo.

I hear, in private discussions, a dropping of the entirely manufactured taboo positioning and a curiosity about the topic itself. And yet, when our public faces are put back on – shocking! Disgusting! Revolting! Shameful!

That's different from folks who are genuinely made uncomfortable by discussions of homosexual (human) relationships. Our culture has a closet obsession with non-human sexuality. We deny it, but can't get enough of it.

Zoophobic persecution in any systematic sense is very much a modern phenomenon. I know we tend to assume that people like me have always been persecuted. But that default assumption doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Can you give a few historical examples where heterospecies relations were considered normal? Or the moment you think anti-heterospecies sentiment originated in modern culture?
The most compelling evidence is the vastly common theme of human/non-human couplings within the genesis stories of so many different cultures and religions. Clearly, this is not a concept that was beyond imagination in the vast majority of human cultures. If anything, the evidence suggests that it would be unimaginable for such things not to have taken place as part of routine social activities!

I do note that the rise of modern torture-farmed production of meat (and milk and eggs) for human consumption takes place step-by-step alongside the sudden (putative) freak-out over non-human sexuality and heterospecies relationships. Whether there's a causative link between those two variables is an open question within the research literature.

We are cutting ourselves off from the rest of the living world. What few pets we see on the street are almost certainly surgically mutilated – spayed or neutered – in order to make them de-sexed and socially crippled versions of themselves. We never see real non-humans, and thus can distance ourselves from the concept of non-humans as people.

Illustration by Julia Gfrörer

Historical precedent or not, critics of heterospecies relationships say it’s impossible for animals to give consent for a sexual relationship, so human-animal intimacy is at least coercive, but more often abusive. What do you say to that?
While it's not too difficult to see that pulling the skin from a still-living cow is harmful to her – something that happens hundreds of times a day in torture farms, 100 percent legal in the USA – it's not at all clear that equating sexual intimacy with abuse has any scientific or empirical basis.

People say any sexual interaction between a human and a non-human is "always abusive" because non-humans are unable to consent to being passive participants in a sexual act. But the zoophobic hate-law passed in Washington State in 2006 came about as a direct result of an interaction in which the humans were passive. People say non-humans cannot make their own choices about their own sexual activities. But a mare who prefers not to mate with a given stallion does just fine telling him "no" with her hooves. That's called "female mate preference," and it's an essential part of mammalian life.

If animals cannot consent to sexual intimacy with humans, then they cannot consent to such activity with anyone else, which means we live in a world of unrelenting, unpunished, unacknowledged rape. Which is obviously silly. It's profoundly insulting to the integrity and autonomy of sentient, self-aware, adult non-humans.

No means no, and that translates just fine. There's a deep tradition of awareness within the genuine animal rights world that specious mislabeling of heterospecies relationships as abusive does a profound disservice both to the humans and the non-humans involved in such relationships.

Humans can be cruel – horrifically so – when it comes to their treatment of non-humans. From bulls who are forcibly “electro-ejaculated” by having an electric probe rammed into their rectum to mares put in stocks and inseminated by veterinary technicians as they kick and fight, these kinds of overtly nonconsensual activities happen all the time. They're perfectly legal, too.

To me, that's a crime. That such rapes take place far more often in industrial torture-farming than in reciprocal, heterospecies relationships is impossible to deny.

So who are the people who get into heterospecies relationships? You’ve said you’re a bit of an outlier, but is there any commonality within the heterospecies community? For that matter, is there actually a community that views it as a primary part of their identity? Or is it just hidden and idiosyncratic?
The community, as fragmented and occasionally (perhaps often) dysfunctional as it is, exists. Sometimes there are heated political divisions between the “dog zoos” and “horse zoos” in the heterospecies community. And the rotten apples tend to smell strongest and be most easily picked out. But that doesn't mean they represent the wide body of apples in the barrel, eh?

It mirrors what one finds in, for example, the gay community. I mean, is there really such a thing as the “gay community” in the first place? Are twinks and leather bears really part of some cohesive social identity, simply because of their gender preferences? Also, as bizarre as it is to imagine that someone could be cured of homosexuality by having some mouth-foaming preacher scream at them that an imaginary Jee-zus hates fags, it's even more ridiculous to think that someone whose internal social nexus revolves around non-humans is going to be able to selectively exclude this essential component of their identity from the way in which they approach the most fundamental elements of both their self-construction and their place within larger society.

I'd say that heterospecies folks are generally and noticeably empathetic in essential nature. One of the key flags that will trip what we colloquially refer to as “zoodar” is that highly empathetic feeling they give off. They tend to quite visibly have “the gift” when it comes to working with non-human colleagues. They're often somewhat shy about that gift. They tend to be somewhat bookish and perhaps a bit more likely to be highly verbal and/or strong in math. I suspect this has to do with a wide overlap between heterospecies folks and the proverbial autism spectrum. Sadly, they tend to be scarred.

The scarring can be somewhat shallow or it can manifest in spectacularly destructive, self-hatred-driven exhibitions such as found in the case of Randy Pepe, a.k.a. Zoobuster. He was an admitted zoophile who turned on his community in the late 1990s, outing people who had trusted him and keeping a kill list on his website, where he bragged about those who had committed suicide, or whose non-human partners had been abducted and murdered, as a result of his sick campaign.

These scars all mirror what we'd expect from any dual-identity situation, i.e., closeted psychology.

You talk about persecution. How does that usually play out? Do you think the bigotry you feel you’ve experienced is similar to, say, that involved in the gay-rights movement?
The tragic reality is that bigotry toward heterospecies individuals primarily manifests itself in attacks on the non-human partner in the relationship. There are examples documented in this country of police abducting mares from (presumed) zoophiles and burning off their genitals with a blowtorch while forcing the human partner to watch the torture. What's been done to me, as a person, pales in comparison to the horror of knowing my loved ones – family members I would gladly put my life down to protect – were murdered while I was held in a solitary-confinement isolation cell in federal prison, unable to save them. It's quite difficult to pretend this is all motivated by a concern for non-human well-being when the first targets are always the non-humans involved.

Stigmatised or targeted minorities are subjected to a barrage of bizarre, counterfactual, essentially mythological assertions by the majority social groups. Look at how many “respectable” newspapers published the bullshit Vaseline-slathered-mice myth relating to my case in 2010. There's not a single actual recorded instance of Vaseline-slathered mice actually existing. I've also seen it in the almost-humorous lengths to which mainstream journalists will go in writing stories about me without ever contacting me.

Because the lies that are routinely told about us are so patently ridiculous, effort focuses in on silencing anyone who can and will directly confront the bigoted bullshit. I've been threatened with assassination (by a US Marshal), threatened with years in prison, been targeted by several (failed) efforts to frame me for new (nonexistent) crimes. But in the end it was worth it. A core precedent was set: No longer can zoophobes in this country batter and coerce people like me into silence with threats of violence.

It's essentially impossible not to see the obvious overlap between the excuses offered in justification of zoophobic bigotry when compared to those which were, until quite recently, offered in service of homophobic bigotry – justification based on citations from the Old Testament, and in particular Leviticus. I've developed a theory that, for some bigots in search of a bigotry, the fact that they're no longer (socially) empowered to hate gay folks has caused them to switch over to zoophobic bigotry as a handy substitute.

This comparison is not popular with many self-styled activists against “discrimination based on sexual orientation.” To them, the only legitimate sexual orientation dimension is straight/gay. Witness the ugly battles over whether trans folks are allowed to share the momentum of the successful gay-rights campaigns.

You seem to couch some of your arguments in the notion that you’re targeted for your sexual orientation. But as far as I’m aware, heterospecies is not recognized as a legitimate, legal sexual orientation. How do you contend with the fact that society and the legal system don’t acknowledge the validity of your self-described sexual orientation?
There is an “evolving consensus” amongst researchers who actually bother to study such things that a heterospecies orientation is indeed a legitimate sexual orientation, whatever “legitimate” means in this context. Turn it around: Where's the research suggesting that a heterospecies orientation is not a legitimate sexual orientation? There's no such research.

Whether the legal system, or society, acknowledges the validity of an empirically validated fact or not is not actually my concern. My own experience is that the legal system will bend itself into comical pretzels in order to avoid confronting the issue altogether.

Let the bigots justify their position. The transitive statement holds true:

1. Bigotry based on sexual orientation is wrong.

2. Heterospecies is a sexual orientation.

3. Therefore, bigotry targeting heterospecies individuals is wrong.

You talk about your vocal and open role as a heterospeciesist in terms of political dissidence, academic research and activism. What are your goals?
My work is entirely in support of full, reciprocal, respectful interconnections between humans and non-humans. Period. Zoophobic persecution is the other side of the coin of hatred of, disrespect for and rejection of full personhood on behalf of non-human people.

In the political space, I see zoophobic bigotry more as a manifestation of the breakdown of the rule of law in modern America: "The law doesn't exist to protect people like you." That transcends the heterospecies community and includes extra-legal attacks on people of color, trans folks, immigrants, those without lots of financial resources.

It's a betrayal of all the good things on which our country was originally founded (if imperfectly so: see treatment of Native Americans, slaves, women, and others): Equality, equal protection under law, and due process.

In part five, VICE News correspondent Ben Anderson goes to Washington, DC to speak with US senators and representatives working to improve the situation for Afghan interpreters. Although this is a bipartisan effort that would seem to have broad-based support in the capital, many interpreters are still not getting the visas they need and were promised, and are forced to remain in Afghanistan fearing for their safety.

Anderson speaks to one of these interpreters who, still in Afghanistan and unable to leave, fears he will soon be killed after learning that many of the Taliban members he helped Americans arrest and imprison have now been released.

Photo via Wikipedia Creative Commons

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of one to RACIST, with “one” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

–Sierra Mannie, an English and Classics major at the University of Mississippi (home of the Rebels!) wrote a scathing op-ed that was republished by TIME.com in which she shook her substantial fist at white homosexuals for stealing black female culture. During the course of her epic screed, she invoked twerking, large asses, Beyonce fandom, and "bottoming" for black men. To sum up her thesis, allow me to quote the master:

"You are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood. It is not yours. It is not for you. Let me explain. Black people can’t have anything. Any of these things include, but aren’t limited to: a general sense of physical safety, comfort with law enforcement, adequate funding and appreciation for black spaces like schools and neighborhoods, appropriate venues for our voices to be heard about criticism of issues without our race going on trial because of it, and solid voting rights (cc: Chris McDaniel)."

This rhetoric is, in a sense, a cousin to the tantruming child that screams to their mommy about life not being fair. Ms. Mannie (which sounds like a P.L. Travers character or something) is saying that because African-Americans are struggling as a group, white gays shouldn't say "you go, girl." Ignoring the fact that gay men have suffered plenty in just about every country, and often face violent respones to their sexual orientation, Mannie fabricates a universe in which the mere fact of being white and gay is some kind of privilege.

She also seems to forget that the many "black" cultural signifiers she is so fond of were made popular by black gays. Would there be a Beyonce without Ru Paul's drag persona? Ru was saying "fierce" and throwing shade in the 1970s and 1980s. Half the time, I can't tell the difference between Beyonce and Ru Paul. They probably buy their weaves from the same person.  

On Mannie's Facebook page (which I will not link out to here, because I am not a monster), under religion, she lists "What would Beyonce do?" Well, she'd probably start by not being so oblivious to cultural history, and just might be a bit more willing to accept the free-flowing share of ideas that makes for a harmonious society rather than choose to cast stones all day. That's, sadly, the problem with our discourse, and in some ways this very column is a part of that.

In certain circles of the internet, the game is to figure out who's "got it worse," whose privilege needs to be checked, and who is the most persecuted. Ranking news stories on their levels of racism is one of those things, though I've always hoped that this column's purpose was to shine a light on injustice in a humorous fashion. And yet, there are those who see this column as divisive. In truth, I believe we've all got it bad – white, black, Asian, Latino, LGBTQ, etc. The struggle is for everyone to stop asking for special treatment, and stop seeing their pain as more valid than others'. That concept of privileged pain is never more apparent in Mannie's piece than when she claims that gay men can hide, whereas black people cannot:

"The difference is that the black women with whom you think you align so well, whose language you use and stereotypical mannerisms you adopt, cannot hide their blackness and womanhood to protect themselves the way that you can hide your homosexuality."

This, of course, completely ignores the mass struggle of LGBTQ individuals to live out in the open. This discounts the fear of reprisal that gay men and lesbians had to accept as common when being affectionate with a lover, identifying publically as queer, or god forbid, having a more fluid gender identification. Mannie assumes gay people want to hide, and I believe that's as far from the truth as it gets.

Mannie really takes it home when, after what she must have assumed was a really cogent point, stopped to soak in the cheers. She imagined a world where her enraptured readers were "gasping at the heat and the steam of the strong truth tea I just spilled." This is the literary equivalent of calling your shot moments before striking out. 5

Photo via Flickr user Ron Cogswell

–Following a backlash from 12 black law students, Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, has agreed to remove replica Confederate flags from their campus. The flags were replicas of original Confederate flags in the campus's Lee Chapal, which also contains a statue of General Robert E. Lee. The group of 12, called the Committee, also demanded the school apologise for its role in the institution of slavery and condemn General Lee.

The old "heritage, not hate" argument reared its head again, when the school's paper published an editorial which called the notion of the school's display of the flag being an endorsement of slavery "ludicrous." I realise that there are people who hold up the secession of the southern states as a symbol of the fight for states' rights, but the right those states were fighting for was slavery and racial prejudice. Understanding and respecting history is admirable, but I find it very hard to justify this particular usage of the flag. The whole point of the statue and the flag is to lionise a man and a movement that supported an objectionable practice. Having the flag and the statue is, in fact, a sign that the school wants to honor those who endorsed a practice that hopefully, we all find objectionable. 7

–Just Add a Kid, a novelty shirt company, got "put on blast," as the kids say, for the above display which features a cardboard cutout of a black child wearing a monkey t-shirt. The company quickly issued a statement claiming a "mix-up" after the photo started getting shared around the internet. Granted, not every sales clerk at a novelty t-shirt store is aware of racial sensitivity. Perhaps the clerk just thought, "hey, black kids are cute and so are monkeys! Let's put 'em together!" By the way, does this mean I'll get in trouble when I refer to my young son as a "little monkey" in front of his friends? He loves bananas and lives in the jungle, so what's the problem? 8

The Most Racist Tweets of the Week:

SO SICK OF THE WORLD CUP OMFG ITS SO FUCKING ANNOYING UGH STOP NOBODY GAVE A FUCK BEFORE AND NOW ALL OF A SUDDEN EVERYONE IS A WETBACK

— HydroponicWeed (@Frankieshteen) July 8, 2014

I sent my nigger neighbor a postcard. It was a picture of a showgirl and I colored her face black. He should get it today.

— President Nixin (@PresidentNixin) July 10, 2014

I celebrate the Fourth of July not the force of jew lies.

— Kriegsson (@Kriegsson) July 3, 2014

Facebook has frozen me out multiple times for using the term nigger.

— Alex Linder (@AlexLinder5) July 10, 2014

Officially reached dune coon status.Middle gibberish is my name in camel jockey.Pajamas and flip flops 24/7. #racist? pic.twitter.com/KY7qwcaErM

— Christopher (@ChrisMMorin) December 18, 2013

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

Photos by Jonathan Mehring

As the saying goes: “Skateboarding is so hot right now." And thanks to skating's newfound global popularity, more and more outsider companies are trying to target that youth demographic. Historically speaking, most major brands that dive headfirst into the industry leave as quickly as they came. A large part of their inability to make it in the skate world stems from their failure to become a part of the skate community, to give back and help it grow. Instead they try to make a quick buck off the blood, sweat, and tears of the people who have been in the game since the very beginning. (It doesn’t help that their products often look and function like dogshit.)

One of the larger brands that has managed to avoid the typical corpo-pitfalls is Levi’s. Instead of throwing ridiculous amounts of money at skateboarding superstars to wear their jeans, they decided to put that cash into building skateparks for impoverished communities around the globe. Last year VICE reported on the skatepark they built in Bangalore, India, and recently they followed up that effort with a massive 21,500-square-foot park in La Paz, Bolivia. A 20-minute documentary on the building of the park premiered in Berlin earlier this week, and Levi’s was kind enough to fly me out for the premiere. Afterward I caught up with Erik Wolsky, brand manager of Levi’s Skateboarding, to ask about the campaign.

VICE: How did building skateparks around the globe become the cornerstone of your marketing campaign?
Erik Wolsky: It was a pitch from the Svire guys, the building crew out of Germany. They did a project in Hanover a few years ago. That was a huge success, and then they pitched the idea for the park in India because they met a guy who skated for Holy Stoked, the skate collective there. That idea was originally for a really small, easy, cheap build, and when we were asked if wanted to get involved I was like, “Why don’t we make that our whole platform?” And so we went all in on that project and made it three times the size of the original pitch because we wanted to get in and be like, “This is what we do. We build skateparks now.”

That was in India, and now you have one La Paz, Bolivia. How do you choose the locations for these builds?
It’s based on the person who wants to do something in their community. I meet these people, and if they have a reason for being there and a reason they want to do the park and continue to maintain it after it’s built it just makes sense. Just dropping in a park and then walking away and leaving it to the general public to keep it going doesn’t make sense to me. With Milton Arellano from Asociacion de Skateboard de La Paz and Make Life Skate Life he was like, “Bolivia needs a free skatepark for these kids, and we need to provide a community center for them so they have the space to skate and learn.” Once somebody like that gives me their story, that’s when we get involved.

You went down for the build; what’s La Paz like?
It’s crazy. Up in the hills is basically the ghetto and then down in the valley is where all the rich people live next to lots of amenities. The park sits between the two. It’s epic because you’re sitting in this skatepark looking out at massive snow-covered mountains and this huge city sprawled out below. You’re up 14,000 feet; it’s amazing.

What were the conditions of the build?
We had roughly 100 people working on the park from 15 different countries and nobody spoke the same language – people communicated through hand gestures and eye contact. We all camped on the site of the build. You had the park area down below, and all around it you had these little huts. They actually pulled the plastic up from the existing drainage space and used it to wrap around all of these huts, and that’s what we lived in for the five-week build. There were seven or eight of us in every single one of those huts, crashing on mattresses or palettes.

What’s the reaction from the locals been like?
Oh, it’s great! Milton is so stoked! He’s got kids out there every day skating it, and I think it’s only going to get better. I think Milton will build a really solid community out of it.

Where’s the next build?
Oakland, California.

Here is the online premiere of the Levi’s La Paz Skatepark video:

More stupid can be found at ChrisNieratko.com or @Nieratko.

Papal Revelations
POPE FRANCIS SAID TWO PERCENT OF THE CLERGY ARE PAEDOPHILES
He called child abuse a "leprosy" that's invading the church

(Photo via)

(via)

According to the Italian La Repubblica newspaper, Pope Francis has claimed reliable data shows that "about two percent" of clergy in the Catholic Church are paedophiles.

"Others, more numerous, know but keep quiet. They punish without giving the reason. I find this state of affairs intolerable," Pope Francis was quoted as saying.

However, a Vatican spokesperson has said that the quotes in the article did not match up with the Pope's exact words.

The pontiff bolstered the Vatican's laws against child abuse last year, and earlier this month begged for forgiveness from those who have been sexually abused by priests.
 

IDF vs Hamas
ISRAEL HAVE LAUNCHED A GROUND OFFENSIVE IN GAZA
But that hasn't stopped them from bombing a bunch of government buildings

(via)

Israeli naval commandos launched their first ground offensive into Palestine since the beginning of the recent conflict.

The purpose of the raid was reportedly to destroy a Hamas rocket-launching site in northern Gaza, before leaflets were dropped into homes in northwest Gaza, telling residents to evacuate ahead of what a military spokesman described as a “short and temporary” assault on the area.

According to Gaza's health ministry, 166 people – including 30 children and many civilians – have been killed by airstrikes in the city so far. 

Israel's military say they have staged more than 1,300 airstrikes in response to the 800 rockets fired by Palestinian militants; several IDF soldiers have been wounded in the conflict, but there have been no Israeli fatalities.

Despite international calls for Israel to stop the attacks, they have widened their target area, bombing homes, mosques and public buildings – including a disabled centre – that they claim are hiding Hamas weaponry. 
 

Archbishops Calling Bullshit
JUSTIN WELBY WARNED OF 'HYSTERIA' OVER RADICAL MUSLIMS
He said the number of young British people travelling to Syria is "extraordinarily small"

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (right) with Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds (Photo via)

(via)

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, UK, has warned that the British public are becoming "too hysterical" about the potential threat from radicalised Muslims.

"Clearly there is an issue with people going to Syria and coming back highly radicalised [...] But the proportion of Muslims who are radicalised is extraordinarily small," he said. "I am just edgy about developing a national culture of fear, because I don't think that gets us anywhere."

In an interview on The Andrew Marr Show, Welby also reaffirmed his opposition to gay marriage (but good news: he continues to "struggle with the issue") and said he was confident that a vote this week will allow women to be ordained as bishops.

Rounding everything off, he said that rich people should pay their fair share of tax and admitted that more cases of child abuse in the Church of England were likely to be uncovered by a new public inquiry.
 

Relatively Unimportant Scientific Breakthroughs
SCIENTISTS DEVELOPED A MATERIAL SO DARK YOU CAN'T SEE IT
Which seems completely pointless, but does have some benefits

This isn't Vantablack, it's just some black sand, because taking photos of Vantablack would probably break your camera. (Photo via)

(via)

Scientists have produced a material so dark that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. 

"Vantablack", created by British company Surrey NanoSystems, is so dark that the human eye can't understand what it's seeing, with all shapes and contours being lost.

The material was grown on aluminium foil, which – when crumpled – usually leaves a texture that looks a bit like a miniature valley, full of hills and peaks. 

However, in areas covered with Vantablack, where you expect to see hills "it's like black, like a hole, like there's nothing there. It just looks so strange", according to Ben Jensen, the firm's chief technical officer.

This may seem like a pretty pointless piece of development, but the material can apparently make astronomical cameras, telescopes and infrared scanning systems function more effectively, and has some military uses that Surrey NanoSystems isn't allowed to disclose.
 

Overwhelming Surprises
SEATTLE'S FIRST RECREATIONAL WEED SHOP RAN OUT OF STOCK THREE DAYS IN
After starting out with around 4.5 kilograms

VICE correspondent David Bienenstock buying legal weed in Colorado

(via)

Seattle's first and only recreational cannabis shop had to close after three days because it ran out of stock.

Cannabis City, the first shop to open since recreational cannabis use became legal in Washington, with at least 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of weed for sale, but they clearly needed more.

Amber McGowan, manager at Cannabis City, said the shop was only able to stay open as long as it had by limiting customers to six grams (2.7 kg) per purchase, rather than the legal limit of 28 grams (12.7 kg).

A message on the store's phone line said it would re-open on the 21st of July.

Dorothy Hunter is on a mission. Hunter, the owner of Paw’s Natural Pet Emporium in Richland, Washington, really wants you to feed your dog healthy food. It matters to her so much that she's eating nothing but dog food for a month. She’s chronicled the experience on her YouTube channel, where you can watch her scarf down dog treats, canned tuna pate and kibble. Before speaking to her about her project, I binge-watched her taste-testing videos, which accomplished the impossible feat of making dog food look delicious.

VICE: So you decided to only eat dog food for 30 days. What inspired that?
Dorothy Hunter: There are lots of times that we’ll meet companies that sell really good products that are using USDA or grade-A ingredients, but they aren’t allowed to put that on the package. I knew that, and I had a lot of confidence in these foods because we carry them in our store. Anyway, we had a car show coming up – we own a couple of hot rods – and I was just trying to get a bunch put out before the show that night, and on my way out of the house I grabbed a bag of snacks and they turned out to be Pure Bites. But I was like, “Hey. This is better than human food.”

Really? What do they taste like?
They taste like Goldfish [crackers], minus the salt. The ingredients are 100 percent cheddar cheese. So from there, I decided to do the Scout and Zoe’s chicken jerky, and she’s one of the ones who can’t put it on her package, but she uses the same USDA, grade-A chicken that we send to our restaurants. She doesn’t put anything else in it. It’s that simple. I have pride in what we’re selling – so much that I said, “I’ll put my mouth where my money is and eat my food.” 

Right, and now you’re exclusively eating dog and cat food for a month. How has that made you feel?
I know that the health professionals out there are like, “Don’t do this!” And I agree with them. But I’ve only got 11 days left and I feel great. Although, when I was doing all the different kinds of canned foods, I was experiencing what would be known as “dog gas”.

Dog gas?
Yeah, I had the dog farts. Bad. But now my main diet is the dehydrated food – Honest Kitchen and Grandma Lucy’s dehydrated dog food – and other stuff just to keep it interesting.

What’s the best thing you’ve eaten so far?
On the meat side, it would probably be the Scout and Zoe's dehydrated chicken. My favorite dried kibble is the N&D “nutritious and delicious” dog food. And the worst? Yesterday we tried some 96 percent tuna pate. As soon as I cracked the can open, I knew I was in trouble, because I hate pate. My husband did the video with me too, and it’s pretty funny. I really wanted to spit it out, but I had no place to spit it. So yeah, that was nasty. But you know what? These ingredients are so good for your pets. My advice to everybody is ingredient awareness. Flip the bag over and read the ingredients. Go and ask questions at the pet store you go to, or go to an independent pet store.

Have you convinced any of your family and friends to join in?
Oh, yeah. My husband samples some of the food with me on the YouTube channel. And my brother joined in. We had an ingredient intervention with him – he just moved here from Nebraska and wasn’t feeding his pets the best food – so I had an intervention. I went to his house, brought a whole bunch of treats out and we tried them, and he was like, “Huh, that’s not bad.” So we converted his pets, and his pets liked the treats. Then we left the bag out on the counter, and that night – when he and his wife were unpacking in their new house – she ate, like, half the bag.

She ate half a bag of dog treats? 
She actually liked them better than their other snacks at the house.

Wow. So if it’s good enough for your pets, it should be good enough for you. 
Everybody still has that stigma that dog food is nasty, nasty, bad stuff. Back in 2008, when they had the major recalls on, like, every pet food out there except for the good brands, that’s when the natural foods started taking off.

And what are you eating today?
I had the canine granola blueberry cookies for breakfast. And I think I’m going to go find a new snack or new can or something and try it along with my Grandma Lucy’s for lunch, and the Honest Kitchen for dinner. And for my grand finale, I’m going to taste – but not eat – the Green Cow Green Beef Tripe. I’m sure it's going to be nasty, because I’ve opened the cans before and they stink. But I’m going to taste it. And before I actually taste it, I want people to know how good that is for digestion and other health benefits for your pets.

@pardesoteric

Young wannabes doing their thing at a Techcrunch Disrupt conference in 2012. Photo via Flickr user JD Lasica

At the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, ads for Oakley sunglasses are everywhere. “Disruptive by design,” they declare – or, rather, #DESRUPTIVEBYDESIGN. Behind those words are grey images of blueprints and lasers and factories with big bolts like in Charlie Chaplin’s spoof Modern Times. Fittingly, the campaign is a collaboration with Wired, the foremost media enterprise devoted to the worship of all things new. In the Silicon Valley lexicon, disruption is such an overused incantation that it's almost dull. Now even sunglasses can do it.

The truth, however, is that disruption is not boring at all. It impacts people's lives every day – though much more often the lives of vulnerable working people, rather than those of the complacent fat cats all this talk of “disruption” is supposed to threaten. We need to be a lot more careful about how we throw that word around and, much more importantly, how we actually disrupt.

Jill Lepore’s recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Disruption Machine,” offers an important intervention. She questions the economic logic of the gospel of disruption being taught at business schools and startup accelerators – that forever disrupting the way of things means endless innovation, growth and progress. Lepore points out that this worldview overlooks the great bulk of the economy that rests on relative stability and rather marginal improvements. Compared to them, disruption is a bit of a sideshow. Even in tech.

A good way to start thinking about disruption is by asking questions like this: Who is being disrupted most? And who really benefits? 25-year-old startup CEOs – the people we hear talking about disruption the most these days – come and go. Some of them will manage to make a living on the basis of their disruptive ideas, and a few will get very rich, but most will end up going through cycles of boom and bust, disrupting themselves until they wind up working for someone else. The venture capitalists who fund them, and who so eagerly egg on their disruptive talk, hedge their bets and diversify their portfolios and will probably end up with plenty of money no matter what.

The most serious disruption of our economy in recent memory, the 2008 financial crash, is a particularly troubling example of this pattern. What caused the crisis? A financial industry gone recklessly amok, disruptively innovating complex instruments like derivatives and new ways of packaging mortgage-backed securities without regard for the consequences. Who suffered those consequences? Some well-paid bankers were laid off, but millions of people across the United States lost their homes, their jobs, or both.

A bailout arrived for the banks, and soon they rehired most of those who’d been laid off and kept – or even increased – their stratospheric executive bonuses. For people in other sectors who were able to get back to work, it was generally to lower-paying jobs. Foreclosed homes in many communities were acquired by big companies on behalf of Wall Street, rather than being bought back by individuals and families who lived in them. That disruption, in the end, only helped the fat cats.

No matter who causes a disruption – or, in some respects, even what kind of disruption it is – those who are best prepared to take advantage of it are the ones who win out. In 2008, the banks had lobbyists and PACs and their own former co-workers at the highest levels of government. The people left homeless or jobless, meanwhile, had little recourse but silence and a misplaced sense of shame. Disruption, then, tends to make our rampant inequality even worse.

Another kind of disruption is that of a resistance movement. We all watched, often with surprise and dismay, what happened in the wake of the 2011 uprising in Egypt. The initial pro-democracy wave created a massive disruption and forced a ruler from power. But the democratic forces were fairly marginal in Egyptian society, and that was just about the last we heard from them. Soon, the Muslim Brotherhood took power, having joined the protests only reluctantly. The group won elections not because its members sparked the unrest, but because for decades they had been building formidable networks throughout the population. Before long, they were crushed by the military, a vast apparatus fueled by billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Once again, entrenched power prevailed over the agents of disruption, and those who've suffered most have been working class Egyptians.

Disruption is essential, and a fact of life. This is a world rife with injustice and cruel inertia, and we should definitely explore creative ways of resisting those tendencies. We should be in the streets protesting when we need to, and we should be creating new kinds of organisations that push the boundaries set by old ones. But disruption, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a good thing unless those who are most vulnerable in society are poised to benefit.

There are ways communities can make that happen, or at least make it more likely. They can build strong, disciplined coalitions. They can organise workers and develop habits of self-reliance. An important recent conference in Jackson, Mississippi, for instance, focused on building resilient cooperative enterprises in black communities, which were especially hard-hit by the 2008 crisis. African Americans in the South know this lesson well. Decades earlier, the civil rights movement turned its disruptions into victories because of tight-knit networks like churches and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Disruption is not a word we should use lightly, or cynically, or in order to sell more eyewear. It is not a mere business model. Perhaps it should be treated more like a swear word, in the sense of being especially potent and rather seldom used. We draw our swear words from sexuality and religion – important things that can have dire consequences. Disruption is important and dire, too, and it’s time we talked about it that way.

Follow Nathan Schneider on Twitter.

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(Photo by Jamie Clifton)

Look, Barcelona is wicked. We know, we built it. It’s got Gaudi, Messi, the Mediterranean and parties that go on all night, every night. We’ve basically built the perfect tourist honey-trap, but now we have to deal with the fact that they’ve turned up in coaches and trains and cruise ships and on skateboards and are clogging up our city’s arteries and making us xenophobic.

While we try to figure out how not to hate the rest of the world for ruining our paradise, here's how to avoid the crowds and offend as few people as possible as you leech off of Barcelona.

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?
   Catalan Independence | Street Rage
– WHERE TO EAT
– WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?
– WHERE TO DRINK
– WHERE TO STAY
– LGBT BARCELONA
– 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

(All photos by Alejandra Núñez unless otherwise stated)

WHERE TO PARTY

Fifteen years ago, Barcelona was synonymous with dreadlocks, Manu Chao and stupidly cheap Moroccan hash. A lot has changed since then but going out in Barcelona is still a fundamentally hippy experience. As much as the city is trying to re-brand itself as "Miami on the Med", you’re still more likely to end your night sharing a street beer in a doorway that stinks of piss than on a yacht under the stars. This is not an entirely bad thing though, as 95 percent of Barcelona was built by Gaudi and yachts are for pricks.

Spain has more public holidays than anywhere else in the universe, and Barcelona makes the most of them by throwing street parties constantly. Each barrio has its own celebration, and there’s always cheap beer, mojitos that come in litre glasses and free live music, which isn’t always as terrible as those three words together would suggest. The best of these takes place over an entire week at the arse end of August in Gracía. People decorate the streets and put on communal barbecues to lure in the kids and nans, then unleash the local crust punks and industrial noise artists on them. It's fucking great and one of the best stages is run by the guys behind Heliogabal, a bar that regularly puts on tiny, amazing gigs – it's the spiritual home of the best music Barcelona has produced in recent years, such as Za!, El Guincho and Mujeres.

In the unlikely event that you visit the city and there are no Saints to commemorate, public fireworks displays or amazing music festivals going on (you already know about Primavera Sound and Sónar, they're great, get tickets), there are actual nightclubs, too. Apolo and Razzmatazz draw decent international DJs and live acts every weekend. The crowd can be a bit tourist heavy though, especially midweek. Catalans like to party, but unlike their Spanish cousins, they also work.

Bar-wise, the go-to area is still Raval and Joaquin Costa is where everyone in Barcelona starts their night. Its proximity to the MACBA – the contemporary art museum in all those skate videos that made you want to come here in the first place – means that there’s a random mix of 17-year-old skaters dropping acid for the first time and art historians rolling up and down the strip from 10PM onwards. Despite having been open for a decade, Betty Ford's is still the street's best place to drink. Further down towards Paral-lel is Olimpia, a bar on the site of an old circus that’s tucked away from the Benidorm-style architectural nightmare of the main drag, and serves as a last-minute pitstop before Apolo.

Talking of architecture, everyone in Barcelona lives in apartments, apartment blocks have roofs, and roofs are perfect for parties. These are basically the city’s backstage area, and like backstages everywhere they’re a bitch to get into and not always as fun as you’d expect. When they’re done right though it’s like the party scene in that Sorrentino movie but without the bad dancing. You should also follow backstage etiquette: try not to gurn too hard, keep your voice down and don’t throw up.

When the sun comes up you have exactly 45 minutes before it’s too hot to think, so you'll want to head to an “after”. These are places that open at dawn and don’t close until the sun is higher than you are. If you’re by Apolo, the bar opposite, El Rincon Del Artista, will let you in if you knock on the shutter and are still capable of speech. It’s popular with clubbers, but also off-duty cops, so it’s best to be subtle if you’re doing anything that would make your father ashamed.

At present, the Puerto Hurraco squat is the place to go for decent Sunday morning house sessions, but afters tend to start up and shut down quickly, so check it out beforehand unless you want to be wandering around deserted warehouse-lined streets for an eternity with no water and fewer functioning brain cells.

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WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?

Barcelona’s cannabis associations have earned the city a reputation as the new Amsterdam. The pot cafes that do exist here exploit a legal-loophole by registering themselves as "private clubs", but in reality pretty much anyone can join them. A cannabis club can legally grow its own marijuana and members contribute towards cultivation expenses, which are usually around €20 or €30 a month.

A huge number of these clubs have opened in Barcelona in the last few months, with 200 of the 500 clubs in Spain located in the city. Anyone wanting to join one will need to find a member to vouch for them, but the people working the counter will nearly always be happy to do so. In theory, any weed bought in the club should be smoked on the premises, but nobody’s going to barricade the door if customers want to take some back to their respective hovels. In fact, carrying less than two ounces is not a criminal offence, though smoking up in public is punishable with a fine.

Tourists are likeliest to be offered other drugs – cocaine, ecstasy, acid – by street dealers or beer vendors near clubs, but as with most cities, many people out late on the street trying to sell stuff are basically scumbags with shit gear. Anyone who tries some of the region's famous blue ecstasy should be careful and prepare for something very intense, and then prepare for night terrors, crushing paranoia, sleep paralysis and that old favourite: waking up screaming in a puddle of piss and sweat.

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POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

CATALAN INDEPENDENCE

Barcelona may have been part of Spain for centuries, but the locals still think of it as the capital of the old Kingdom of Aragon and Catalonia. This has led to an ongoing independence movement that is seeking to make Catalonia an independent state by booing Real Madrid and graffing as many walls as possible.

The economic recession and the government policies of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and previously José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, made even more Catalans despise Spanish rule. They don’t feel like their voice is represented in the capital, and they believe central government decisions usually go against their interests.

This could be an important year for those seeking independence. On the 11th of September it will be the 300th anniversary of the defeat that saw Catalonia surrender power to Madrid. In a ballsy move at the end of 2013, the Government of Catalonia declared that their would be a referendum on independence on the 9th of November this year, which will ask: "Do you want Catalonia to become a state?" and "In case of an affirmative response, do you want this state to be independent?" Because they’re hilarious, they didn’t bother to tell the central government about any of this, a decision which has left the suits in Madrid whatever the Spanish word for "narked" is.

Barcelona’s independence movement has some strong ties to the squat scene, which is still very much A Thing in the city. However, after years of operation, some squats have recently been shut down by the police.

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POLITICS, PROTESTS AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

STREET RAGE

Since the beginning of the economic crisis Barcelona has been kicking the shit out of itself. These days, it’s become pretty easy to spark a riot that leaves the whole neighbourhood in flames and everyone in hospital or prison. Every time there’s a political summit, a visit from the Prime Minister, a referendum, the closure of a squat or Barcelona win a football match, we all get together and try to overthrow the government by burning things.

This happens so frequently now that the media have taken to blaming shadowy "professional protesters", who it’s said come from all over the world to hooliganise us. Meanwhile, the Catalan Police have used the violent disturbances to demand better funding, so while the rest of the community has suffered cuts to health or unemployment benefits, the police have spent thousands of Euros on tear gas and rubber bullets.

If you’re in Barcelona and you find yourself in the midst of one of these protests, you’re probably best off getting out of the way and going home for a sleep. Or at least standing at the back. The police can be brutal, and probably won’t be checking passports before they fillet you with their horrible bouncing rubber bullets that can go round corners.

Immigration in Spain is pretty new, as a few years ago nobody in their right mind would come here to work. Back in the 60s and 70s, Spaniards were actually leaving themselves to seek work abroad. Nowadays, just like everywhere else in Europe, immigrants play a vital role in society and without them the country would simply collapse.

In Barcelona, immigrants mostly come from China, North Africa, India, Pakistan and Latin America. The government doesn’t make it easy for them, though. It’s common for them to have to wait hours, or even days, to get through various essential administrative procedures, such as requesting an ID card, and getting citizenship is a nightmare unless you’re called Diego Costa.

Fortunately, far-right and racist parties in Spain are not as strong as they are in other parts of Europe, but there is a sort of glass ceiling that immigrants find hard to break, leaving them stuck, for the most part, in low-income jobs.

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(Photo by Jamie Clifton)

WHERE TO EAT

Romesco
This is the place to find traditional food at a good price. Classic local dishes like grilled sole, artichokes coated in batter and roasted chicken are all done well and served at decent rates. You can expect to pay around €12 per person. The same waiters have been there since it opened, which means it’s either a great place to work or a terrifying place to quit.
LINK

Cat Bar
Home to probably the best veggie burger in Barcelona, Cat Bar is the place to go for vegan food, local beer and good music. Unlike that stupid place in London, though, it doesn’t have any cats in it. (Which frankly is good because they can give you something gross called toxoplasmosis and they’ve all got an attitude problem.) Fuck cats; long live Cat Bar.
LINK

Bacoa & El Kiosko
Burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers, burgers. Generation burger. Fucking burgers. Everywhere, burgers. That said, these are kind of the best burgers in the world, so you should go there, eat a milk-fed lamb one with a homemade bun and ketchup and then never eat a burger ever, ever, ever again.
LINK

Jaica
So you say your city lives in the middle of a series of motorways and beneath a flight path? That's good. We’re by the sea. The ocean. And all we do is sit around with our hot friends eating seafood, mostly at Jaica. Located next to the harbour, it’s where the healthier, happier, more tanned versions of you meet every weekend for vermut (Spanish brunch) of fried seafood and tapas. Go with a big group, and expect to spend around €20 each, roughly the same as a nice scarf, which we will never, ever need.
LINK

Xemei
Who even knew what Venetian food was until this place opened? Now, it’s a favourite. Genuine Venetian waiters know exactly what to recommend, but you’ll pay €50 for the first-class food. Still, it’s kind of worth it, especially if you've come to the end of your week-long piss-up in our city and fancy leaving your spare Euros behind so we can keep our hospitals open.
LINK

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(Photo by Lizzy King)

WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?

Bread with a Tomato
You want the Mediterranean diet? This is the Mediterranean diet.

Butifarra con Mongetas
Catalonia’s favourite sausage is the butifarra. It’s made with pork and spices, and while most people take the conventional route and eat it in a baguette, if you really want to eat like a local order it with white beans, which are called “mongetes” in Catalan. Sausages and beans, you can stretch to that I reckon, it's not like we're asking you to eat dog dick.

Panellets
All Saints Day on the 1st of November is a big day in Spanish culture, a national holiday that involves doing the rap bit out of "Never Ever" and eating these things called panellets. If you’re in Barcelona in October or November, hit one of the city’s bakeries to try this pastry with sugar, almonds, egg and lemon zest. Like everything else on Earth, you can also get it with chocolate.

Calçots
A calçot is a very glamorous vegetable that tastes a bit like an onion mixed with a leek. You grill them over a flaming barbecue, and dip them in romesco sauce. They’re so popular here that they’ve got their own barbeque feast, between the end of winter and the beginning of spring, which is called “calçotada”.

Paella
A word of warning: make sure that you get real paella from a restaurant where they cook it on-the-spot. Frozen paella sucks and dickheads keep trying to sell it to me.

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WHERE TO DRINK

Psycho
The nearby Apolo is one of the city’s most popular venues and an institution on Barcelona’s nightlife scene, and this is where everyone hangs out before and after the shows. Don’t be embarrassed by the fact that the people who run it decided to call it "Psycho" or that it refers to itself as a “rock n roll” bar – you’re abroad, don’t be a dick.
LINK

Born
The relatively sedate El Born neighbourhood is the place to head for a quiet drink on a sunny afternoon. Almost all the bars around here are pretty great, so just roll in and marvel at how crap your quality of life is back home.
LINK

Barbara Ann
If you’re the sort of person who thinks music peaked sometime around 1968, this is your joint. They play vinyl by the likes of Little Richard, you play on The Who-themed pinball machine, and legends of the Barcelona music scene hang out by the bar. It’s like punk never happened, never mind dubstep.
LINK

Nevermind Raval
This place has a skate ramp in it, so it basically looks like what your mum thinks cool bars look like, and mother knows best. Turn up, listen to grunge, drink €1 beers until 10PM, fall down a skate ramp, bad mouth rollerbladers – it’ll be great.
LINK

Gran Bodega Saltó
The Poble Sec neighbourhood has changed a lot in the last few years and is now one of the city's most lively areas. There are a handful of great bodegas around here and Saltó is the one we all actually drink at. So come and hang out with us.
LINK

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WHERE TO STAY

Airbnb is currently entering the last days of its Wild West era. Right now you can basically organise orgies and commit crimes in an endless list of strangers' living rooms – but like all good things, that won’t last for long. In Barcelona, the city council has recently come under pressure from the beleaguered hotel industry to stamp out what they see as unfair competition. It’s still hugely popular, though.

The city has a host of youth hostels, but Barcelona Central Garden Hostel (€25 a dorm) is one of the best. It’s located in a central spot in the Eixample neighbourhood, and everyone who stays here ends up falling in love with the owners and staff. Because I’m Spanish and I have a home, I’ve got no idea why, but honestly, they really do.

If you have some cash and don’t mind being part of Europe’s dispiriting war on the poor, Villa Olimpic (€120 a room) is located in a rapidly gentrifying old industrial neighbourhood. It’s got designer rooms, great customer service and fuck it, you’re a tourist, you've got your own city to save from yuppies.

If you’re A Rich Person then a) what are you doing on this scummy website? and b) check out the Hotel Casa Camper (€240 for a room) and let me know what it’s like. Camper is an old 19th-century Gothic tenement that has been restored by the architect Jordi Tió, they’ve got a former top chef from El Bulli running the restaurant and frankly it looks pretty great.

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LGBT BARCELONA

In recent years, Barcelona has become a truly gay-friendly city, so you shouldn’t be scared to walk down the street hand-in-hand with your partner and even kiss them if you want to. You might still find the odd clueless guy who will gawp at you, but that could happen anywhere, even sunny San Francisco.

Very close to Barcelona is the town of Sitges, which is basically the Brighton to Barcelona’s London. You’ll see plenty of rainbow flags being flown here, and it’s just a short train-ride away. It’s an especially good place to visit in summer or during their amazing fantasy film festival, when camp B-movie actors no-one straight has ever heard of mingle with the residents.

If you’re looking for gay bars in Barcelona, head to "Gayxample", which is part of the Eixample district located roughly between Gran Vía, Balmes, Aragó and Urgell streets. Another well-known hangout is the nudist beach at Mar Bella, although it’s not exclusively gay.

Even bigger and better than the annual Gay Pride parade in June is the world-famous Circuit festival in August. Thousands of men visit the city for a party that lasts 12 days – we have no idea where they get their stamina.

At any time of year, it’s worth checking out the various venues run by the Arena franchise, and be sure to stop by El Cangrejo, which is hands down one of the most fun bars in town, whatever your orientation.

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(Photo by Elektra Kotsoni)

WHERE TO HANG OUT WHEN YOU'RE SOBER

Hangar
Hangar is one of the most innovative and interesting places in Barcelona’s contemporary art scene. It’s an old industrial space that has been redesigned to encourage the creative process. You should check out Hangar's calendar as soon as you get to Barcelona as there’s a pile of great events going on there. If you’re in town for a bit longer, they also run some courses on how to be an artist, and the teacher is Picasso. It’s got 15 studios, video equipment, two sound stages and various bits of kit available to hire. Basically, it’s great.
LINK

Raval
Raval is the area where the city’s versions of you hang out. It’s full of struggling Catalan writers and artists trying to pull each other instead of getting on with their art. 

Granja Petitbo
This is where they make brunch. Brunch sounds like it’s for wankers, but since you’re on holiday you can just call it breakfast. Breakfast with quinoa.
LINK

Filmoteca
The best movie theatre in the city also has the distinct advantage of being the cheapest one. It offers a selection of documentaries, restored classics and a really great bar, for when you just want to get tanked up on the pints and stuck into some Almodovar.
LINK

Lupita del Raval and Heliogabal
Two of the best places to watch bands, be they Spanish ones you've never heard of, or English ones Spaniards have never heard of.
LINK and LINK

Dead Moon Records
The best independent music shop in Barcelona, bar none. They have a great vinyl collection that covers minimal, noise, dark wave and a whole lot of punk.
LINK

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HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP

The most likely way you’ll get stung as a tourist in Barcelona is that someone will lift your wallet. Everyone knows this, so don't expect any sympathy if you're stupid enough to stagger around Las Ramblas pissed at night hugging strangers without zips on your pockets. Be aware on the metro or in any other crowded place; Catalan pickpockets dress like ordinary tourists but are basically all David Blaines of thievery.

Be especially wary if you see a group of girls approaching you with folders, asking you to sign in support of some kind of vague cause. They don’t really want your signature. They want to distract you while they relieve you of your wallet, credit cards, passport and dignity, and steer well clear of the crowds of people gambling at Las Ramblas. They’re all chiefs and they're all trying to diddle you. Las Ramblas is pretty intense, it was there that I once saw a tourist getting attacked by a homeless guy using a dead pigeon as a weapon.

Oh, and I’m not really sure how to counter this one, but another favourite tactic for Barcelona’s thieves is to target the bag you’ve left on the beach when you go swimming. Urm, get a waterproof bag?

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(Photo by Clémence Polès)

HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST

Barcelona is filled with incredible history and architecture, but we sold it all to tourists to pay off our debts. These no longer belong to the locals: Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, the Cathedral; Parc Güell; Las Ramblas; the port and the Picasso Museum – they all now belong to cruise ship wallies. So, if you want to get along with the locals, either sink a ship or just sit in your hotel until dark apologising for existing.

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PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID

Street Beer Sellers
It might seem like a good idea to buy a drink from a guy who is grinning at you at 4AM with his hands full of cold beer cans. If you weren’t so drunk you’d have noticed that he just took those beers out of a sewer. As a rule, don’t drink anything that’s been in a place where rats go to die.

Prostitutes at Las Ramblas
They’re fucking terrifying.

Police
As terrifying as the prostitutes, but instead of vaginas that cost money, they have weapons and special cars. It’s best to just smile and keep walking.

Cruise-a-Holics
If you see a big group of people following someone holding an umbrella, you should avoid them at all costs. There are hundreds of cruise ships arriving in Barcelona every year and they have to carry the brollies because locals urinate on them from their balconies.

Tapas Bars for Tourists
If the tapas place you’re looking at seems suspiciously trendy, with brand new furniture, it’s probably a scam for tourists. The food will invariably be expensive and terrible, and you’ll only have yourself to blame.

La Baguetina Catalana
This chain of baguette and cake shops is open till very late. That probably sounds like a good thing. It isn’t.

Designer Gin and Tonic Bars
For some reason, gin and tonic bars became a really big deal in Barcelona a few years ago. Suddenly loads of them were opening up in a city where traditionally the cocktail culture has been only slightly smaller than the cricket one. Everything was bound to go wrong, and it did, but some are still hanging grimly on.

Bars at Las Ramblas
I’m not saying that the food in Las Ramblas bars is really bad or excessively expensive. I’m just saying that once I saw a man die in one of them and I fear it was because of one of these two reasons.

Chinese Restaurants
Barcelona has only a few decent Chinese restaurants. All the others serve identical dishes, none of which bear any relation to food that’s been anywhere near China.

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TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES

Tipping
In Barcelona, there are no strict rules about tipping. In fact, waiters, taxi drivers, usually won't expect you to tip them anything. They tend to have fixed salaries and their pay packets aren't filled out by tips, as in other countries. So don't worry, you can basically be as big a cheapskate as your conscience allows you to be.

Handy Phrases
Hello – Hola
Goodbye – Adiós / Hasta luego
Please – Por favor
Thank you – Gracias
I would like to have a beer / coffee / wine / whisky – Querría una cerveza / un café / un vino / un whisky
I want to kiss you – Quiero besarte
Useful Insults: gilipollas, imbécil, idiota, anormal, payaso, guiri de mierda

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A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF QUESTIONABLE LOCAL MUSIC

Here are some songs that reflect the tastes of the local DJs rather than the tastes of us at the VICE office.

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VICE CITY MAP

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De nada.

– VICE Spain

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The death toll in Gaza continues to grow as both the Israeli military and Palestinian militants show no signs of backing down. VICE News spent a few days in Gaza City surveying the damage and seeing how local residents were coping. 

Photos courtesy of Vivid Entertainment

Phil Varone’s life revolves around dicks and drumsticks. He played drums in Saigon Kick and the legendary hard rock band Skid Row. After he quit playing in Skid Row, he spent several years dabbling in typical Los Angeles post-fame ephemera – Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew, stand-up comedy – but nothing stuck until he moved to Vegas three years ago and found his true calling: swinger porn.

Porn was a natural fit for Varone. He claims to have had sex with over 3,000 women, and while on tour, his reputation for discretion allowed him to zip-line down the grapevine into the bedrooms of the swinger elite, regularly sleeping with the wives of rich and powerful men.

The only difference between Varone the porn star and Varone the rock star is that he now films his bedroom festivities. As the host and director of 100% Real Swingers, a porn series for Vivid Entertainment, he serves as an orgy whisperer. In one video, 100% Real Swingers: Kentucky Old Glory, he maintains a laid-back kayak-instructor vibe as he leads a handful of couples through a risqué game of cornhole and shows them how to properly build a glory hole. “No splinters!” he says.

Although Varone starred on Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew (he did it for the money), he isn’t some problematic horn dog. He's just another example of the forceful trajectory the American dream occasionally enacts on regular people  – an easy-mannered rock star who has had several mother-daughter threesomes and is easing into middle age as a porn director in Las Vegas.

This is his story.

VICE: How did your relationship with Vivid start?
Phil Varone: I approached them initially. I told them that I have a lot of footage from girls, stuff I’ve shot in my personal life. They explained to me that you just can’t release stuff: You need to have releases and proof that they’re of age, all that fun stuff. So we shot a sex tape. For the next tape, they asked me to shoot real swingers. The problem with swingers is anonymity; it’s what protects the lifestyle. I found a cast of swingers that was okay to do it. The way I shoot is very loose because you're dealing with real swingers – they're not actors. I make a cameo in them, but it gets a little hard to direct on camera and have sex at the same time, although I’ve mastered it.

How do you find swingers for your videos?
I’ve been in the lifestyle for 20-plus years. The word of mouth does it now. I don’t even put castings out anymore. It’s been so successful because I never have to deal with worrying if this couple is going to like this other couple. I’m in the lifestyle; I respect the rules and what the process is.

What are some of the rules?
Each level of swinging is different for people. You set up rules like, “If you’re going to be in the room with somebody, they have to be in the same room.” It all depends with each couple. My series is sex, so if a couple doesn’t want to have sex with another couple and we’re on a sex set, I’m screwed. By having friends that have already had sex with each other or find each other attractive, you eliminate that part of it. Each couple has their rules, which are sent to me way before the shoot. I have a questionnaire that they fill out. I’ve only had one crappy shoot, and I learned a lot.

What happened there?
I learned a cardinal rule: You have to make sure people like each other. Someone had backed out last minute, so we had to cast somebody else. Nobody liked them. They were also awful. From that shoot came the questionnaire and the list of rules. For instance, sometimes men can’t perform with cameras. With adult stuff we need to finish – we call it a pop shot. If you don’t perform, it strictly says you’re not getting paid.

How did you first enter the swinger community? 
My first wife and I dabbled. I wouldn’t say we were full in the lifestyle, but we definitely had friends that we played with. At that point I realised that my fetish was to watch my wife have sex with another man, or girls, whatever she liked.

You’re into cuckolding?
Actually, no. Cuckolding is when you degrade your husband. At the time I was in the band, I did the cuckold thing. I would go to these houses, and the men were some of the most powerful men. It was frightening because half of them could have made me disappear. And they have these beautiful trophy wives, and they did a cuckold or reverse cuckold thing. I’d have sex with their wives, and the wife would just degrade the husband like, “You wish you were a rock star, you piece of shit! His dick is bigger than yours.” I’m just sitting there like, “Holy shit. This is insane.” Or the husband would yell at the wife and call her a whore or a groupie – I’ll never say who these people were. They would erase me, these people, and nobody would look twice.

Were they turned on because you were a rock star?                                           
Absolutely. It was one of the main ones. It’s funny because the way I look – you know I’m tattooed – and the funniest thing I ever heard was “I’ve never had sex with one of your kind,” like I was a different race because I’m all tattooed.

Do you remember anything from your groupie days?
Something that stands out the most is the mother and daughters. For some reason my percentages were great for mother-and-daughter threesomes on the Poison tour – I had three of them. That’s like a fantasy story. Sometimes in your average life maybe you’ll get sisters, or something like that, but the mother-daughter shit is definitely Yankee Stadium. It’s the unicorn – man, those type of stories, you might even get a wink out of Ozzy for one of those. True story: A roadie went up to Ozzy and said, ”I finally got two girls last night!” And Ozzy said, “Yeah, I remember when I had my first beer.”

Are you addicted to sex?
To be honest with you, I don’t have a sex addiction. My agent called [about Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew] and said, “You had sex with a lot of girls didn’t you?” I said yes. I would have been better on the drug one because at that point I just went to rehab. What the show did for me was I dealt with the death of my mother. We brought my father on the show, and during the show’s taping, my grandmother passed away. It was a very emotional time for me because Dr. Drew is fantastic. I love Drew to death. He actually tapped into my subconscious, where I’d been storing my mother passing away and never really talked about it – that was the good stuff that I got out of that show. Other than that it was awfully done; the producers had no idea what they were dealing with. They were using the blueprint for alcohol addiction. They’re completely different things.

Do you think swinging can help secure a relationship?
No, I don’t think that swinging is a way to save your relationship. If you have a solid core relationship, which includes trust and honesty, you are ready to take the step into swinging.

What’s the craziest sexual experience you’ve ever had?
The weirdest was with the supermodel. I think she only liked anal; I didn’t ever see her vagina. Who doesn’t want to have anal sex with a supermodel? But this particular incident was weird because she had a dog, this little fucking dog that probably weighed a pound. Somehow it broke into the room. We locked it out during sex, because we had to hear this thing moaning and barking, but it somehow got through the door. The thing jumped on the bed and started humping my forearm while I was having anal sex with the supermodel. And I’m like, “Do I let the thing go, just let him hump my forearm?” If I throw him off, the dog’s gonna go flying, sex will stop, she’ll probably break up with me because I hurt her dog. I don’t wanna hurt any animals, so I was like, “You know what, who gives a shit?” I let the fucking dog bang my forearm while I was banging this supermodel anally. He finished, I finished – we’re done.

Wow. That’s like interspecies swinging.
Yeah, let me add that drugs had something to do with that as well. That was one of my decisions, and it wasn’t a good decision. It was chemically decided. Either way it was pretty strange.

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