A load of the author's empty co-codamol packets

I probably talk about opiates as much as the next guy. And, like the next guy, most of my rare conversations tend to revolve around heroin, because Kurt Cobain, Irvine Welsh and your year 8 PSE teacher have all done a great job of ensuring it’s the only poppy derivative most of us really know anything about. Ask someone what codeine is, however, and they’ll either stare at you blank-faced, mutter something about purple drank and DJ Screw, or half-remember their doctor once recommended it for period pains.

In the UK, Codeine, for anyone not into Dirty South hip-hop or self-medicating, is an over-the-counter opiate painkiller, semi-regulated by the pharmacists that sell it. It’s also a drug I’ve been addicted to for a decade, ever since my girlfriend at college introduced me to recreational pharmaceuticals – a cheaper, slightly less illicit alternative to swapping cash for baggies of teething powder and boric acid in the back of a stranger’s Audi.

If you’re not a regular codeine user, it’s a very easy drug to get hold of; you ask for it and the person at the till gives it to you. But when you get into it – and by “into it”, I mean going through multiple boxes a day – it becomes a little more tricky. Generally, British pharmacists will only sell you one packet once a week, though drug stores vary: some are tight, some don’t give a shit. There’s one place I used to go, for instance, that would give me two bottles of codeine linctus, the liquid form, and two boxes of co-codamol pills, codeine mixed with paracetamol, every week. I loved that pharmacy; it made my life very easy.

If you don’t have the luxury of an easy-going counter attendant, you learn to lie to your pharmacist as to why you use the drug, and very occasionally they believe you and let you buy more in one go. In contrast, I’ve spent hours in the past driving between multiple towns and cities to get what I need for the day. When you’re working full-time, this becomes an issue; you very quickly learn that, by some bizarre anomaly in the process of time, seconds, minutes and hours become considerably shorter when you’re racing around for more pills before you have to clock back in after lunch.

Besides the time it takes to acquire the drug every day – from around 30 minutes, up to about three hours – it then takes around half an hour to extract the pure codeine from whatever it’s blended with. You’ll need 250mg for a good dose of euphoria. That comes to about 32 pills of co-codamol (a single packet), which equates to about 16g of paracetamol. All that paracetamol in one go equals an agonising, drawn-out death from liver and kidney failure, so you’ll want to get rid of that. I’m not going to go into the details, but considering codeine is soluble in water and paracetamol isn’t, it doesn’t take a masters in molecular chemistry to work out what you need to do.

One stage of the extraction process

At times, just like any other addiction, all this foreplay can end up feeling like a part-time job – an unpaid internship for the minor satisfaction that is everything finally coming together. And that’s not the only downside; there are plenty more negatives to contend with: the dulling of your conscience, the torment and agonising pain of withdrawal, dealing with the negative opinions of others, handling a fucked up sleeping pattern and how it can lead to the absolute obliteration of important, meaningful relationships.

However, all of these quibbles are suppressed by the memory of the first time, and the pursuit of reaching that same high. It’s a tired old cliché, and one I’m all too aware of, but even though you know you’re never going to hit that point again, the bright, perfect pleasure – free of all the hate, pain and negativity in the world – you once felt keeps you hooked. Though the reality is that I’ll never feel that same bliss again.

Please don't think I'm endorsing going down your local pharmacy, buying up all the co-codamol and extracting every last grain of the stuff that gets you high. In fact, I’d advise against it – the whole rigmarole of daily use starts to become a pretty tedious chore about a year in, and the cost is around the same as a ten-a-day smoking habit. I’ve always felt that I know what I’m doing and that I minimise the risks in the best way I can, though admittedly my risk-reward ratio could be a little off at this point, ten years into an addiction I can't overcome.

A bottle of codeine linctus

I’ve discussed my addiction with my doctor, asking him how much damage ten years of daily codeine use will have done to my body. He told me that since the amount of paracetamol left in the finished product is unknown every time I take it, there’s no sure way of telling the harm I’ve caused myself – though a blood test early last year told me my liver and kidneys are still in good nick.

I’ve tried quitting before, but the longest I managed was three months. Coming off codeine, my unadulterated brain reminds me why I started taking it in the first place: depression, anxiety and a general distaste for life. I didn’t care if it killed me in the long-term, and that apathy for being isn’t something I’m particularly keen to have present on my mind, so I continue extracting because it subdues all those feelings. I’ve been to an addiction centre once, but that clearly didn’t work as I’m still using now.

It’s a funny place to be, in the midst of codeine addiction. In Britain, it’s technically a legal substance, so the same discourse doesn’t exist around it as, say, heroin, or any other drug that provokes mental images of teary families on sombre news reports. Which is maybe why my friends – who all know exactly what I do and how I do it – don’t get too involved in my drug use (that, or because they know I’m very headstrong on the subject and would probably just ignore whatever they had to say). But it's still damaging, and something I'm fully aware I shouldn't be doing. 

Co-codamol pills ready for the extraction process

Of course, that weird middle ground also means I’m not left with many places to turn when it comes to my addiction. In my ten years of taking codeine, I’ve only met two people who knew how to extract it properly. From what I can tell online, codeine in the UK is commonly viewed as a drug bored housewives use to tide over the void between lunchtime chores and afternoon TV.

There are some in the US who use codeine the same way I do, but most mix cough syrup containing codeine and promethazine with Sprite to make a drug called lean, or purple drank (or sizzurp, or Texas tea, or purple jelly, or a load of other stuff depending on where you’re from). The lifestyle around lean is vastly different to the codeine culture I know here – all Three 6 Mafia, styrofoam cups and backyard parties. Not quiet, blissed out evenings on my sofa in front of the telly.

The past ten years have been a decade of continuity, leading a life where codeine is both in the backdrop and foreground of everything I do. My relationships have always fallen apart thanks to my inability to summon the courage I need to quit, and the dulling of my conscience has led to a regrettably long list of mistakes and bad decisions. I realised a long time ago that drugs don’t solve anything – that they’re just a way to tone down the fall out from the self-perpetuating cycle I’ve found myself in. 

I figure I’ve got to quit eventually, but the problem there is that going through withdrawal isn’t exactly compatible with a full-time job. Although you can function, it’s a hellish existence. For now, I’m happy to stay on the ride; even when it’s not at its best, there's always the promise of a relative peak again sometime soon. So at least I’ve got that going for me. 

More stories about addiction:

I Dated a Mephedrone Addict for Two Very High Months

Addiction Isn't a Disease, I'm Just a Dick

Bucharest Is Not a Good Place to Be a Heroin Addict

In late June, Berlin’s central Kreuzberg district became the scene of a tense standoff between a group of refugees squatting in an abandoned school and the district authorities. The refugees had moved into the school after authorities destroyed refugee camps just a few months earlier. As more and more squatters moved in, the governing Green party faced pressure to resolve a situation where hygiene was deteriorating and crime was becoming an issue.

On June 24, authorities attempted to evict refugees from the school. With the refugees refusing to leave, the school and surrounding neighborhood block was besieged for eight days by riot police, protesters and press.

VICE News was on the scene from day one and documented the events that would ultimately mark the climax of Germany's refugee protest. We gained access inside the school to document the situation and were also on the scene as negotiations between authorities and refugees were taking place to resolve the standoff.

1972

I’m in a Pentecostal church somewhere in a swampy track of Alabama working as a portrait photographer for a church yearbook company. I drove here from North Dakota and have been eating white cross Benzedrine to stay awake and buzz through the tedium. Today is Saturday and I’m scheduled here through Monday. I find the preacher, a big galoot with rheumy eyes, and he shows me a Sunday school room where I can set up my portable studio. Two chaste young women, Jan and Janice, show up to help me with forms and whatever else I might need. They bring families into my room to be photographed, and after one group leaves I say stupid things like, “Bring in the next victims.”

I arrange families in oval compositions on benches and boxes, standing and sitting. Crying babies and brooding teens, moms and dads grinning like they mean it. I do a moronic patter and tricks with hand puppets for the kids. I have two strobe lights on umbrellas and a boom with a hair-light snoot, another strobe aimed at the canvas background. I’m shooting 12 exposure rolls of color with a twin-lens Mamiya camera. A couple of weeks from now a sales crew will be here with color proofs and special deals on portrait packages. Homogenized happiness and American families on the wall above the fireplace.

During a break the preacher wants to know have I accepted the Lord Savior Jesus Christ into my heart?

“Yeah, sure,” I tell him. “I was baptized when I was a little kid.”

“That’s not the same thing, son. You need to think about the future beyond the life you are living. You need to wash away your sins.”

“Yeah, well. Thanks for your concern.”

Last week my boss told me I need to bring up my sales average; my pictures aren’t all that great and I don’t earn any bonus unless sales go up. He tells me when he was a photographer, before he got promoted, he used to get so worked up by a good Sunday sermon he would volunteer to get re-baptized. Every time he did it, sales went up.

“You got baptized and your sales went up?”

“Each time I accepted Jesus Christ as my savior, even when he was already my savior, my sales doubled.”

“Yeah, well. I could use a bonus.”

I finish today’s scheduled appointments and the sun is low so I go outside and stand in a thicket of weeds to get a good picture of the church building. I go eat a couple of burgers at the local A&W then back to my room. I’m having dirty thoughts about my helpers, Jan and Janice, when everything below my waist starts itching, intensely. I pull down my pants and I find chiggers, an entire population of the little fuckers, like tiny specks of rust with microscopic legs, from my ankles to my pubes, eating me alive. I go out and hop in the car and drive ten miles in both directions looking for a drug store but nothing is open. Back in the room I strip and shower but the chiggers are firmly embedded. I figure I need to kill the parasitic cocksuckers but all I’ve got is a tube of Ben-Gay menthol I use for my sore neck. I squeeze out the tube and rub it in from the waist down. This turns out to be a mistake.

I’m on fire. My dick is so hot and red I could light cigarettes off the tip. I drink most of a pint of scotch and don’t get to sleep until an hour or so before the alarm goes off. It’s time to go to church so I eat a couple of Bennies and take a cold shower. My lower half still itches but the burn has quelled from broil to bake. The blood-sucking mites are gone to the wind and my lower half is dotted with runny pustules. I put on my Sunday suit and tie and when I get to the church the service has already started. The preacher is talking about sin. My camera is out of film but I walk around and take pictures anyway.

It’s baptism Sunday and the preacher calls for those who are seeking salvation. Up front a plexiglass aquarium/baptismal hot tub. Janice, the cuter of my two helpers, takes the call and heads up front. I’m bundled with electric nerve-endings and I’m ready to scratch the itch with a wire brush. I need to laugh and scream and run in circles. The preacher wants to know who else will be saved today, who of us needs to be cleansed of our sins. “I do,” I volunteer loud enough to hear above the ringing in my head.

A church deacon takes me to the dressing room. He gives me a skeptical look, a baggy pair of swim trunks, and a tee shirt. A minute later I’m standing next to the holy bathtub in front of the congregation and suddenly I need to pee. My legs look like festering road kill. The preacher man is wearing waders like he’s going trout fishing. He’s got Janice, who has changed to shorts and a tee shirt, and he dunks her under and he yells nonsense up to the heavens. His hands have full access to Janice and maybe he doesn’t have a boner but I doubt it.

I’m led forward and down some steps into the pool. The preacher man looks at me and down at my legs and steps backward like he’s been hit in the chest. I don’t know if it’s my pocked legs or the warm yellow billows of urine that have taken him aback. He grabs me and yells holy hell in my face and I would start screaming but he dunks me backward and under and all I can do is glub.

A month later my boss calls and tells me I’ve got a big sales bonus coming and it’s all from this church. I tell him praise the lord.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

All hands on the pussy pot products. Photos via the author.

I’m not a big pot person. I can’t really find my “therapeutic window” when it comes to smoking weed. I know exactly how much cocaine or meth I can handle in one sitting and morphine doses will ebb and flow with the consistency of my usage, but when it comes to smoking weed, every single toke is one too many, and I end up getting so “in my head” that I want to jump through an open window. I sound like my dad now, but pot is c-r-a-z-y these days. It’s goddamn super-pot. Pot on speed. Pot enhanced with more pot and then thrown in a bouncy castle blender of THC and shaken up to be even stronger. I’ll do any drug in the world, but I usually shake my head “no” to a bong.

So, when I heard about Foria, the world’s first cannabis lube designed especially to enhance female sexual pleasure, I thought that this would be an excellent way to beat my pot fear. My head wouldn’t be doing the work, my vagina would, and I trust my vagina more than I trust my head.

Last week in Los Angeles, I met up with Matthew Gerson, Foria’s creator (or “Wellness Director” as he is referred to by his collective, The Aphrodite Group). After I emailed Foria asking for samples for my story, he was eager to hang out and talk about his creation.

Gerson has this theory about females, sexuality, and plants. I think I’m with him.

“I have some marijuana plants growing right now,” he explained. “And you spend time with this plant; it’s a fascinating weed. Marijuana is essentially a very horny female plant. It’s the female that is harvested and secretes the fluid, wants to be pollinated, and when it’s pollinated becomes stressed out and produces more and more. There’s this weird connection between the human female and the female plant. We have evolved with plants. We have a receptor that successfully absorbs THC. We have that capacity to absorb the pollen the plant secretes because our physiology co-evolved.”

Gerson isn’t your stereotypical pot activist, and maybe that’s because he isn’t one. Aesthetically, he’s not granola in the slightest, and he admits he only got into working with cannabis when the idea for Foria was dreamed up. In his 20s, Gerson was studying to become a Buddhist monk, but soon changed his focus from the monastic to aspirations of health and wellness. (He’s a big Paul Farmer believer and all about lessening human suffering.) Gerson then started Sir Richard’s Condom Company with his friend Mark Batiste when inspired by a friend’s TED Talk. It was an experiment in branding and safe sex that took him and Sir Richards to Haiti.

“I was in that company for three years,” Gerson explained. “It got me a little more interested into the sex side of health.”

“I haven’t been a pot smoker for a long time. It’s a strong medicine for me. The pot is better but there’s more knowledge floating around and you can self-medicate, but you can also do it so, so wrong. I had used pot in my life with partners while being intimate. There’s something there, you know? I started doing research, and marijuana as an aphrodisiac is pretty well documented. Chinese medicine, Hindu practices, as well as many other cultures,” Gerson said. “No one just smokes pot anymore there are all these super refined ways of doing it. Soon I was introduced to oils. So, being from the world of condoms and sexual health, when I hear oil, I immediately thought of lube. I used coconut oil in Foria because it’s a really good one for feminine hygiene. It happens to mist really well.”

Gerson surrounded by the greenery he no longer partakes in. Photo via Facebook.

Gerson talked with physicians (he also grew up raised by two of them) and made sure what he was going to make was safe. It was. Cannabis is not evil, it’s natural and non-toxic. Foria went through many phases, Gerson developed the best version of pre-lube (remember Foria should not actually be used as a lube, a few sprays an hour before sex is the trick) he could working closely with proprietary scientists who could help him perfect the dosage and potency. No pesticides, no molds, no nothing. So far Foria is only available in California for people with medical marijuana cards. (Gerson admitted, until it can be purchased in other states and countries, he’s fine with helping people DIY it at home. Kind of a poor man’s version of Foria.)

But more importantly, Gerson was fixated on the idea that there were no products out there to help women who couldn’t orgasm. Women who felt like pleasure was an issue and couldn’t even relax during sex to get there. For a sex-obsessed culture, we are juvenile when it comes to actually conversing about pleasure, our bodies, and how to get off. Viagra and Cialis exist because men can keep impregnating until they are old as fuck. Women hit menopause and their sexual pleasure becomes nonexistent to their health. It makes me want to scream when I think about some women who have never had an orgasm.

Gerson set me up with enough Foria to get my vagina super-stoned, and I thanked him generously.

“I’m going on a much needed vacation,” he said. “But you can email me if you need anything.”

On the way home, I was curious, and I couldn’t wait. I decided to test the Foria orally first. I sprayed my mouth about five times, and then four more about ten minutes later. Plus, Gerson had mentioned that in their initial studies, women had reported that they got a head high when they sprayed Foria into their mouths, but when sprayed into the vagina, they did not. However, through the prostate, people did get a mental high. I wanted to see how strong the head high would be.

I went grocery shopping and cruised home. My roommate had a friend over, so we hung out for a while, and after about an hour or two I realised I was stoned. But not that horrible, immediate, my-hands-are-made-of-plastic-and-my-family-hates-me awfulness I got from smoking pot – just a really mellow, relaxed feeling. I felt light and calm, like the first wave of shrooms before it gets real, or the difference between crushing up an oxy and snorting it, versus just swallowing the pill whole. It was a slow-grow high. Maybe pot could be lovely? Like, really lovely.

A close up of the goods.

After my oral realisation, I shot up off the couch and went into my bedroom to spray Foria onto my vagina. I knew my boyfriend would be home from work soon and I wanted to give the THC enough time to get my pussy nice and stoned.

I wasn’t expecting immediate results from Foria. Like Gerson said, this wasn’t magic. When his team first started having women test out Foria they used a huge range of ages; women in their 20s reported more intense orgasms, multiple orgasms, and a full body experience, while older women (some as old as 70 plus) said it helped them access pleasure they hadn’t been able to get to in years. It was more profound. They were sleeping better. Well, duh.

“You can’t reproduce sex. Like, let’s do those exact mechanics again and it will be the same. No, it doesn’t work like that, and we have to look at the plant the same way. We have to work within these conditions,” Gerson had said. “So many things affect it... food, alcohol, what’s your relationship to your partner, your mood that day... That’s part of our job: to be OK with that level of uncertainty. People want to know exactly what is going to happen if they take Foria and I can’t answer that. We try to pose it as, ‘Here’s this group of women who used it and what they reported to us... you might find your experience is similar.’ We are trying to experiment safely with this proven medicinal herb.’”

The first night my boyfriend and I banged with Foria, I was already stoned so everything felt great. He ate me out and got stoned from licking the stuff off me and it was killer. However, we have a healthy sex life and I have never had trouble orgasming. My trouble was with pot itself.

I decided to dose my vagina with Foria religiously for a week.

Every morning I gave it four sprays and again in the mid-afternoon. My boyfriend and I had a lot of sex and monitored how things were changing, if they even were. Sex was intense. I noticed certain things felt different and orgasms were longer, way crazier, and felt enhanced. When we were just banging the old fashion way, I felt it all over in a more focused sense, like everything was working outwards from my stoned little cunt. I mean, without sounding too granola here, it was pretty good, and I don’t know if that was the mixture of the Foria between my legs and my mouth.

As the days went on, other weird things happened. When I was hiking up in the Hollywood trails and doing sprints with my pal who was helping me get in shape, I suddenly (in the middle of my brutal, exhausting, gross work out) noticed my vagina getting all riled up. My body was in disgusting pain and my genitals felt totally turned on. It was nuts.

However, I was more excited to get head stoned and bang then to just dose my vagina. But wasn’t this still the point? Gerson had this whole theory about how we need to all just slow down and relax, to think about the overall health and wellness in our day-to-day lives, and how healthy sex and pleasure can really play a part in that.

“I don’t understand why the sexual response and the pleasure experience that we derive from our sexuality has been sort of banished into one aspect of our human experience, either with a partner or masturbation in a very limited function,” he said. “Then we have this huge part of living a well-adjusted happy life and yeah, our sexuality creeps into that, but allowing the pleasure of sex to inform our approaches to health and wellness seems to make a lot of sense. They are the power centres of our body.”

Orgasms make you happy. We need that pleasure and release. Maybe we are at the point where we need a THC-infused oil to chill us out and force us to do that?

I’m not sure if Foria completely changed my sex life, because my sex life was already pretty awesome, but it did make me realise that cannabis is an aphrodisiac that kind of rules when it’s not smoked from a soda can. Having proper doses and understanding what worked for me enhanced my relaxation, as opposed to that jumping-out-of-a-window feeling I mentioned earlier.

I’m still using Foria. I’m going to keep getting my pussy high. As Gerson said, it’s a slow-grow and I don’t want the experience to end. Plus, it’s fun to fuck when your genitals are stoned!

Follow Mish on Twitter

If you know even the vaguest thing about skateboarding, you’ll know who Chad Muska is. Over the past decade he’s been one of the biggest names in skating, produced music for people like KRS-One, Raekwon, U-God and Biz Markie, created a bunch of gallery-exhibited art and featured on a series of video games you probably learned all the cheats for.

I caught up with Chad recently before a Supra demo at Frontside Gardens – a skate park in London's Hackney built out of material from a demolished local warehouse – to talk about art, skateboarding and the joys of Tibetan meditation.

VICE: Hey Chad. So, first off, tell me about the obstacle you've built at Frontside Gardens.
Chad Muska: Yeah, it's right in the middle here. I like the whole project that's happening here right now – using reclaimed materials to make this place. The idea was brought me – and paid for by Supra – to create an obstacle and help add to this place.

Cool. I saw you finishing off a mural earlier, too.
On top of the obstacle I was asked to paint a piece, too, so I was like, 'OK, why not?' I wanted to paint something that connected my skateboarding and my art together, and a representation of something that was inspirational growing up to me. Christian Hosoi was a major influence for me; I wanted to pay homage to one of his boards, The Rising Sun, and recreate that in a different way, writing "Infinite" above it. It represents something important growing up for me and will hopefully inspire the next generation, too.

How are you enjoying your UK summer residency so far?
It's been great. London is moving. There's a lot of energy within this city – it's what I've grown up around all my life. I thrive off this creativity and pushing the limits of fashion, music, skating. London's a representation of that movement. It's a blessing to be this old and skate with these guys and do what I love to do.

Chad Muska at Frontside Gardens 

Have you been making the most of it?
Dude, we skated all day – until 11 or so. We pretty much had some food and hit the sack. I don't party like I used to; I'm a little more mellow, doing things I can use my mind with more: art, skating, design. I have nothing against partying, but I'm straying away from that world a little bit now.

I normally come to London and hit the whole nightlife scene, too, but at the moment I'm just staying more away from it. I like to wake up in a city and walk around early and venture into a gallery or museum. I've spent a lot of my life in a blur and I've missed out on a lot. I never got to see these places except for the skateboarding aspect. As a skater you see these places through a local's eye, but I almost want to catch up on the tourist aspect. People say “You've been to Paris – have you been to the Louvre?" Or, "Have you seen the Tate?” And I'm like, "I skated in front of them; I've never been inside them!"

You've had some involvement in the Long Live South Bank initiative. Why does it matter to you as a non-native Londoner?
South Bank is beyond London; it's a representation of the history of skateboarding, and it's just such an iconic place. It's also a meeting ground – someone can come from anywhere and meet skaters and be a part of the city. It's a cultural landmark, not just for London but also the world. Europe retains history when America is constantly ripping down the old. It's as important as Big Ben. The architects who designed it must have been thinking in terms of flow and movement, not just hard angles. And although it wasn't designed intentionally for skateboarding, it provides the perfect area to practice the art of skating.

Agreed. You've had a few art shows recently – do you consciously channel skating in your work, or is more abstract than that?
It's really the same to me. Whether you're painting, designing, photographing or skating it's all a type of artistic expression. At one point I thought I was escaping skateboarding through art, but I realised there was a direct connection to it. Where I'm at right now with my art is conceptual minimalism, which utilises elements that are all born of skateboarding. I use concrete, steel, resins and things that, in a way, represent my life.

The skate community has its own thriving art scene, but do you ever feel held back in the art world beyond that because you're a professional skater? 
I'm sure there are all kinds of things people would like to say, but if I listened to the things people say I wouldn't be where I'm at today. If someone wants to challenge what I do, I almost like that even better. I truly felt that I have something to offer the art community, and I will continue to create these things until the day I die. Whether they're accepted now, later or after I'm dead, it doesn't matter.

Chad Muska for Supra

Are you still making music?
Not as much lately. I'm very obsessive-compulsive with every action of my life. When I'm skating it's just skating; when it's designing it's strictly design. Right now I'm more into scoring for videos, but music will always be there and be part of my life – even though, strangely enough, I'm listening to less music now. I'm more interested in natural sound. A lot of what I listen to is where my art's going; its very minimal and textual. I'm into a lot of meditative music, like singing bowls.

Gregorian chanting?
Yeah, that stuff's cool. Mostly a lot of Tibetan meditation. I like music that's suggestive and not necessarily literal.

What are your thoughts on a whole generation becoming acquainted with you through playing as you on the Tony Hawk games?
It's a little weird. We're in a generation of kids who might not have grown up seeing me skate as much because I've had some absences here and there in the industry. So you get a lot of kids coming up to you, like, "You're my favourite skater on Tony Hawk's." I wouldn't want that to be my legacy, you know what I mean? Although, anything that can turn kids onto skateboarding is a good thing, as long as they get out of the digital world and don't sit there and think they're skateboarding. Same thing for my shoes. A lot of people say, “These non-skaters are wearing your stuff – rappers, actors, musicians. That's whack!” That's not whack, because maybe they might eventually buy a skateboard. It's cool when things outside skateboarding culture embrace it.

Where would you say the boundaries of skateboarding are still being pushed?
Man, it's continuing to progress in ways we may have never imagined. That's beautiful because it not only ensures the future of skateboarding... things need to continue and progress, otherwise it gets boring and stale. We're reaching a divide in skateboarding now where there's the mainstream culture of contests, winners and the grand event, then at the polar opposite there's core skateboarding, street skateboarding, homies building a ramp in their back yard.

It's still skateboarding at the end of the day, but for me skateboarding was never about training, practice and contests. Skateboarding isn't about being the best, it's about having fun and the physical and mental challenge. What worries me are these show parents who want their kids to grow up and win big comps and prizes.

As long as skateboarding stays around I'm happy with it. It's been amazing to ride this journey out and continue to be a part of it and make a living off doing what I love to do. It's an amazing blessing and I never take one second for granted. 

Thanks, Chad.

More skate interviews on VICE:

Lucien Clarke Doesn't Know How He Became the MVP of UK Street Skating

Spencer Hamilton Knows How to Sell Pro Skateboarding

Lizard King Wants to Keep Skating Forever

In this episode of Canadian Cannabis, Damian visits with two weed-oil enthusiasts (Dablo Escobar and Earl Capone) who show off their wax cooking method. Here's a preview: it's very, very sketchy. After that, he goes to Jim's Weeds, a no-holds-barred compassion club in Vancouver that was recently raided by the police. That's where Damian got his first taste of Phoenix Tears; an extract designed especially for cancer patients.

At the moment, Health Canada does not support the sale of extracts.

Stay tuned for Episode 3 of Canadian Cannabis, where we visit patients across the country to learn how cannabis can relieve HIV, Multiple Sclerosis, and epilepsy symptoms. Damian asks them how they feel about Canada's restrictive marijuana laws.

ISIS social media image of ISIS fighters parading with captured Iraq security forces vehicles

History seems to start just before every humanitarian intervention, the full and often compromising account of what led to the latest war in some place where they are always fighting – the record of who killed who with weapons from which government – lost amid the deafening roar of Western self-satisfaction, the world's ostensibly do-gooding imperial powers relishing the opportunity to be admired as simple concerned bystanders who could stand by no more. Whenever an altruistic set of airstrikes begins, the average news consumer – and I called my mother to check – is left with the impression that bombs are being dropped on bad people who are doing bad things (no one really knows why) by good people trying to do their best.

So it is with Iraq, where once again the dropping of explosive ordinance is being reported on in humanitarian terms with little in the way of historical context. “Obama authorises airstrikes in Iraq to stop genocide,” reports a headline in USA Today, the newspaper you might read when on holiday. The story provides some basic facts on the Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group that has taken over much of Northern Iraq and nearly all of Syria’s oil fields, but we learn little about its motivations, how it came to be and what role those who now want to bomb it may have played in its creation. What we learn, courtesy of President Barack Obama, is that “America is coming to help.”

It warms the heart, this altruistic offer of help from the leader of a nation-state motivated by rational self-interest, but what’s left out – what's always left out – is any real context. What led us to this particular moment in time? Was there anything that the benevolent governments in the West maybe did before, like perhaps kill a half-million or more people in Iraq, that would drive so many people to an Islamic militant group? To ask is to be anti-American, or at least a huge buzzkill, but the answer is unequivocal: yes, yes, at-least-half-a-million-times yes. The US absolutely created the problem it’s now courageously “coming to help” solve, and that it created that problem by dropping lots of bombs should trouble those who now argue that dropping some more is somehow a serious solution.

When I say the United States “created” the Islamic State (or “ISIS” as it's sometimes known), one may very well think I'm also about to tell you that jet fuel can't melt steel and that Bush knocked down the towers. But this is no convoluted conspiracy involving holograms and crisis actors. It’s quite simple and tragic: The United States invaded Iraq, killed an ungodly amount of people who had friends and family who loved them, unleashed a wave of terrorism across the Middle East – turns out, watching one's mother die in a US airstrike does not nurture moderation – then installed and armed a sectarian Shiite leader in Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, who proceeded to kill, torture, and generally alienate the Sunni population of Iraq, which is now, not coincidentally, lending support to the Islamic State’s vicious brand of Sunni extremism.

By arming Iraq's military, the United States also effectively armed ISIS, which captured much of Iraq's high-powered weaponry when it swept through the north of the country. The US also facilitated the shipment of weapons to a hodgepodge of rebel groups fighting in Syria, with some of those weapons no doubt finding their way into the hands of those whose commitment to liberal democracy is no stronger than dictator-for-life Bashar Assad’s. Add all that up and you have, as with the Taliban and al-Qaeda before, another instance of the United States arming a future foe and then creating the conditions necessary for them to thrive.

“What a mess,” said Peter Van Buren, a former State Department official who oversaw reconstruction efforts in Iraq (an experience that turned him into a whistle-blower). When I asked him if he agreed that the US government helped create ISIS, Van Buren was blunt: "Absolutely." The 2003 invasion turned Iraq into a training ground for radical Islamic groups – and gave legions of young men a reason to fight for them, a recipe for disaster compounded by US support for a sectarian strongman. “Maliki has been our man in Iraq, or at least we have believed that, since the US installed him in 2006,” he told me. "From day one, Maliki has alienated and persecuted the Sunnis,” so it should come as no surprise that many would prefer a Sunni extremist group to a repressive Shia state.

Photo via WhiteHouse.gov

There are some figures in the mainstream blaming America for ISIS, but for all the wrong reasons. Hillary Clinton, the once and future presidential candidate, told a former Israeli prison guard turned journalist at The Atlantic that America had created ISIS by not sufficiently committing itself to the war in Syria.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad – there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle – the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said. An editor at The Wall Street Journal likewise suggested that ISIS was empowered by a failure to take “decisive action” in Syria, never mind that the “decisive action” politicians like Clinton had in mind was aimed at taking out Assad, not ISIS, one of the groups fighting his regime.

President Obama has also been busy massaging recent history with the help of a compliant elite press. In an interview with a mustachioed horse's ass at The New York Times, Obama rejected the idea that insufficient American arms-peddling created ISIS, arguing that the “idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms” to the Syrian opposition and have that lead to something good “was never in the cards.”

What Obama didn't mention, and his interviewer didn't deign to go into, was that the United States did in fact arm the Syrian opposition, mostly by proxy. In March 2013, the Times itself reported that, “With help from the CIA, Arab governments and Turkey have sharply increased their military aid to Syria's opposition fighters.” The “scale of shipments,” according to government officials quoted in the piece, “was very large,” though some in the Syrian opposition expressed uneasiness at the time, telling the Times that “whoever was vetting which groups receive the weapons was doing an inadequate job.”

But those details are lost in the rush to humanitarian war since they suggest that a past intervention sold on humanitarian grounds failed to prevent the evil that exists today – and probably made it worse – to the point that the President of the United States won’t even rebut his hawkish critics by pointing out that he actually did arm Syria’s rebels.

“Be that as it may, professor, what do we now?” a concerned citizen might ask. “Do we let people die because you hate America?”

Well, friend: there is a genuine humanitarian crisis in Iraq and, since it helped create the disaster that is now unfolding, the United States does have a duty to help out. But – and this is really important, guys – bombing Iraq has never once made the situation there better. It has actually made things a lot worse, leading to body counts beyond the most committed jihadist’s wildest dreams (while creating loads of new jihadists, the presence of which can be cited to justify the next intervention).

The absence of a good answer to a problem like ISIS is not a good reason to embrace a snake-oil cure that has proven time and again to be worse than the disease. The US military is not a humanitarian organisation, nor should it be expected to behave like one. If America wants to help, it should offer those fleeing the violence in Iraq the ability to seek refuge in the United States – and promise those who stay behind that it will never ever bomb them again.

Follow Charles Davis on Twitter

Rokit hat, Umbro jacket

PHOTOGRAPHER: CARL WILSON
STYLIST:  ANNA CURTEIS
Hair: Rebecca C Amoroso
Models: Hannah, Ellie and Emma @ Models 1; Clary Moore, Ellie Crewes, Anu Ambasna, Emily Rose England

Roxy jacket, Rokit jumpsuit

Vintage top, Rokit skirt

Motel top

B.Tempt'd by Wacoal bra, River Island skirt

Rokit jacket, Wildfang top

Vintage T-shirt, River Island playsuit 

More important life advice from Will and his work here.

Although you might have never uttered the words "I'm a huge Robin Williams fan," I could probably rattle off at least five of his movies that you love, or that at the least made you very happy for a while. Robin Williams was omnipresent through a lot of our childhoods. Somehow, through the range and progression of his roles, he was able to rise up and meet my generation at whatever level of maturation we were at, from the age of about four onward until he stopped existing.

Learning how to channel grief is hard, especially when it's over someone you didn't know personally. I draw pictures, as do a lot of people I know. Robin Williams was a fan of comics and illustration, so I asked people to submit drawings of him in tribute.

Out of hundreds of submissions, here are the 15 I thought were best.

Alex Fine

Nick Gazin

Brian Butler

Killer Acid

Serena Dominguez

Rick Altergott

Mathilde Van Gheluwe

Penelope Gazin

Zack Soto

Matt French

A.T. Pratt

Spencer Hicks

My Parents Had a Party, Long Island, NY

Last summer, my parents decided to throw a party to celebrate life. I wasn’t quite sure what my mum had planned other than an entertaining night with good food and company. As I entered my parents' house that evening, I was greeted by a little person my mum had hired from an adult entertainment agency. He was dressed as a cop and demanded that each arriving and unsuspecting guest show his or her ID… or else.

Okay, a little weird, but nothing too extreme. As the party continued, two of the cocktail waitresses and one of the male servers started taking off their clothing, and suddenly they were naked and the lap dances and the tequila ice-luge/body-shot demonstrations began. At first, many of their guests were unsure of how to react to the nakedness around them. I, for one, was amused and a bit surprised to see adults whom I have known my entire life getting smothered in breasts and bathed in booze at my parents' house.

As the night progressed, two additional strippers arrived to perform for the guests, and the little person quickly stripped down to join in the show. Slowly and surely, more and more guests began to loosen up and really experience the celebration of zany fun that my mum had planned from the start. The hours went by fast; everyone was merrily drunk, including the dog sitter. After a long night of hard partying, the talent was paid, the guests sent off with coffee and we all went to bed. The next morning may have been even more fun as we conducted the post-party critique, with mum wearing the little person's uniform, which he had somehow forgoten to take home that night. 

Amanda Dandeneau is a photographer based in Brooklyn. See more of her work (and more pictures of her parents) here.

On the 8th of August, nearly three years after the United States pulled out of Iraq, President Barack Obama ordered airstrikes to commence on Islamic State positions in northern Iraq, as the group's fighters advanced toward the Kurdish capital of Erbil. 

A page from Sex Picnic

Tonight, Broken Fingaz Crew – one of Israel's only existing graffiti collectives – launch a new hand-drawn zine at the opening night of Kartel, an arts space in downtown Haifa. Sex Picnic shows lusty girls locking lips with cave-eyed skeletons, amphibious women with reptile heads holding their legs apart and bony figures fingering a kneeling woman. It’s not really the kind of thing you’d stick up on your wall ahead of, say, your grandparents coming round.

“I have all these tripped out, psychedelic dreams, and kind of bring them alive in the work,” says 28-year-old BFC leader Unga, whose surname remains undisclosed for good reason (police generally aren’t fans of people spraying paint all over public property). “This one's literally a picnic that everyone’s invited to.”

BFC have spent their career appalling people; their fluorescent sketches are counted as among the first examples of graffiti culture in Haifa, a city known for clamping down hard on street art, despite its reputation as Israel's liberal culture mecca. “To this day, as soon as our work goes out, within two or three days in gets painted over,” Unga explains. “You learn not to get too attached to it.” 

It’s not just the city council the four-man clan have come up against. When they formed in 2005, a club night the crew were organising in Tel Aviv to launch a set of artworks was shut down because the flyer depicted a black woman performing sexual acts – scenes deemed blasphemous and too explicit by venue owners. It’s likely BFC would have felt far less opposition in Tel Aviv than they do in Haifa; in 2011, City Lab reported that the Tel Aviv municipality was providing 40 percent annual funding for the city’s Museum of Art, an institution known for platforming homegrown street artists.

“Haifa buffs everything,” says David Hevion Melech, co-owner of Kartel. “Nothing lasts more than a few weeks. It sucks, because there are so many good artists here, but as a visitor you can so easily miss it all.”

Despite that setback, Melech and Ghost Town Crew – the 20-strong music and installation art collective he belongs to – were able to convert an old port-fermenting factory into the vast arts and live music venue it is now. Opening today, Kartel aims to become the Haifan creative community's first and primary meeting place. “Everyone in the area’s arts scene knows each other here,” says Melech. “It’s a small and local crowd. We want to host exhibitions for three days at a time every two weeks and screen films from nearby emerging artists.”

I meet Unga under the arch of a disused railway in east London and, like the rest of the collective – who all flit between London and Israel’s third largest city – he’s almost impossible to keep tabs on. “None of us own mobile phones. I haven’t had one for about three years,” he says. “People can’t really reach any of us, but that’s how we like it. I hate Instagram and the selfie culture, too. It’s disgusting because it teaches 16-year-­old girls that it’s OK to be fake.”



Unga met BFC co­-founder Tant when they lived as children in a tiny, 40-person­ commune in the foothills of Mount Carmel, northern Israel. With their artist parents, the pair stayed in small pods once occupied by the British Army during the First World War’s Battle of Megiddo. After ten years at the camp they took over a squat in Haifa with fellow BFC members Deso and Kip.

There, inspired by copies of influential France-based journal Graffiti Art, art nouveau printmaker Ephraim Moses Lilien and painters like Albrecht Dürer and Gustav Klimt, they began peppering the city’s back­-alleys with the doodles they’d cultivated from childhood. “I think we were the first generation [of graffiti artists in the city],” says Unga. “Or at least we took over directly from NRC [Nuclear Rabbit Crew], who started slightly before us.”

A page from Sex Picnic

“When we started writing back in 2001, there was pretty much nothing on the walls,” Kip told City Lab. Nudity, comic book gore and liberal use of colour were staple traits; in one mural there was a scalped, bearded man with lasers for eyes sat next to a luminous pink-skinned cross dresser with a Hitler moustache. “I was going out in the night and seeing the drawings from the bus on the way to school the following morning,” Unga remembers.” No one knew what I was up to the night before, and it felt good. As a teenager, you have this urge to do something illegal.”

In 2012, 

after a stint in the Israeli army at 18 – “I wasn't a fighter or anything; I made sure I wasn’t. And yeah, I hated it” – Unga and the rest of BFC were contacted by London curator Charlotte Janson (of independent arts label NO WAY) about putting on a retrospective in London, their first ever show outside Israel. “It’s generally a nightmare to find them – no­ one has a phone and everyone has multiple names,” says Janson, who was introduced to the crew’s work by a friend.

Ahead of the show later that year, Janson rented a flat in Bethnal Green for the four main members to stay in. “Fifteen of them showed up,” she says. “They all got sick, and this tiny place turned into a kind of refugee incubator, with friends from their hometown sleeping in the bathroom and on the kitchen floor.”



“When we came to London, we wanted to draw everywhere,” remembers Unga. “But there’s a feeling of acceptance here; graffiti is safe and part of the furniture. Where we’re from, graffiti is a punk movement, and we wanted to bring that energy to the show.” How did they do that? “By showing orgies, frogs raping fat men – that kind of thing.”

Since then, the collective have shown in galleries around the world,­ from Vienna’s Inoperable Gallery to the annual Art Beijing fair. 

A wall in Hackney Wick while BFC were in a spat with another graffiti crew



Flicking through Sex Picnic’s pages, it’s clear the group’s work has gained focus over time. Gone are the scalp-less laser warriors and Hitler fetishists; its focus is now on playful sexual deviancy and pulpy necrophilia. Some of the zine's characters were first painted on the banks of the Regent’s Canal in Hackney Wick, ­the scene of a graffiti battle back in April, when the crew were visiting Janson to plan the zine’s launch.

“We had a person painting over them every night,” says Unga. “One of the spots was insanely hard to get to. You had to climb over a bridge, through a factory and then a window. We nearly got arrested a few times getting to it, but every morning it was painted over.” The back and forth was fairly sinister: drawings (“patterns of girls fucking skeletons and people with frog’s heads”) were defaced and marred with slurs. “KILL ALL MEN,” was one; “KILL YOURSELF,” the clan’s response. 



Walking back from the railway arch, Unga periodically stops to eyeball a nearby tag he recognises, or to take me through the concept of a mural we spot by a guy he knows. I absorb as much as I possibly can, turning my dictaphone off only to change flat batteries. Under a week later, he and Charlotte will fly back to Haifa on a one-way ticket.

Sex Picnic is currently available to purchase at ghostowncrew.com and will be on show for three days at Kartel, Israel.

@jackstuartmills

My Night with London's Late Graffiti King

Why Does This Stupid Collection of Boobs and Graffiti Exist?

Tagging the Revolution in Northern Syria

Mercifully, the summer movie carnival is packing up its wanton destruction and parade of barely legal teens and leaving town for another year. What we are left with now is the cinematic equivalent of tepid gruel for every meal. Between August and November, the filmgoing public is treated to a cavalcade of movies that the studios are ambivalent about at best, and completely ashamed of at worst. 

The films released in the next three months surely seemed like a good idea at the time (It's a sequel to a movie that was popular ten years ago! We got Sylvester Stallone! It's based on a TV show from the 1970s! It's very cheap to make and stars Ethan Hawke!), but for one reason or another, it just didn't work out and now the studio wants to release the finished product quietly. These are the kind of films that both critics and moviegoers are comfortable ignoring. That's why I love this time of year the most. It's a welcome respite from the bombastic, ubiquitous advertising hype of the summer. Also, I can comfortably dislike a movie without someone telling me how I didn't "get it" or threaten to murder my first-born son on the eve of a full moon, then force me to drink his blood.

It's become standard practice to flame critics who disagree with the cultural consensus, especially when the movies are genre entertainment based on comic books. The vocal fanboy community has a real knack for coming to agreement on the merits of films, TV shows, etc. relatively quickly. Joss Whedon is a genius. Man of Steel was overrated. Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a smart political thriller. The Lost finale was shit. These are cultural truisms, because enough people got together on the internet to form that consensus.

The tendency for group-think has metastasised into an aggressive distrust of alternative opinions. Marshall Fine, a syndicated film critic, was the subject of death threats when he was the first person to publish a negative review of The Dark Knight Rises. David Edelstein of New York magazine was also taken to task for the first negative review of The Dark Knight. With the internet's ability to aggregate everything, we can now follow a movie's critical response in the same way we keep track of medal counts during the Olympics.

It's not just Batman films that inspire aggressive responses though. Out of 280 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes for the Pixar movie Up, only five of them are negative. One of them, from former Salon.com and current Village Voice film critic, Stephanie Zacharek, produced the following screed from a commenter named groanamox:

"Why do I have to read this stupid little shit Stephanie Whatever about what a failure Up is. She spews all over everyone at Pixar except a hired gun, the incredible Incredibles director. Yes, he is brilliant, but so are all of the other folks who put his vision on the screen. If you don't care for this animated feature, there is no need to bring out some phony STANDARD of EXCELLENCE that this know nothing little shit Stephanie has complete knowledge of. She is no where as a critic. The standard does not exist. She is new and is trying to take down a gentle giant Pixar for absolutely no other reason but to show she has clout. She has nothing. No knowledge, no compassion, no nuance. How easy it is to love genius. How difficult to criticise with aplomb to nurture new and talented directors. How I hate the vicious stupidity of shits like Stephanie. Don't publish her anymore. I won't read her."

The "gentle giant" of Pixar is a multi-million dollar company that employs hundreds of people on a 22-acre campus in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's not a person. It's an organisation that seeks to profit from the work that they make, not a human being. The Supreme Court finally made it the law of the land with Citizens United, but geeks decided that corporations were people a long time before that.

The "standard of excellence" that this commenter found so false is completely subjective, but that doesn't prevent others like them from damning anyone on the flip side of the critical divide. The very first negative review of Up, from professional contrarian Armond White, was so universally despised that it created its own army of think pieces either supporting his bravery or decrying the sheer temerity required to dislike a movie everyone else already said they thought was a masterpiece. Once the book of public opinion is closed on a movie—which, in today's media environment, takes about five hours after the movie is released—the book is closed.

This phenomenon continues, with Stephanie Zacharek back in the crosshairs of genre film fans. She dared say that Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy "works so hard to advertise its disreputability that it comes off as anything but." Needless to say, her opinion was met with a fair share of vitriol. 

A selection of anger directed toward a movie reviewer who didn't like a comic book movie

It got so bad that another Village Voice writer felt the need to come to Zacharek's defense and call out a specific commenter's sexist, homophobic bon mot, "She's just pissed because she lives in the Village full of gay men and no one wants any of her old, dried out pie."

Ignoring the fact that this commenter has no intimate knowledge of Zacharek's vagina, nor her frequency of sexual intercourse, it's kind of beside the point to say that she was the subject of sexism. People deploy such tried and true rhetorical devices as racial slurs, homophobia, and thinly veiled threats of violence on the internet every second of the day. That's not an excuse, but it most certainly is an unavoidable side effect of freedom of speech as it has evolved online. The unspoken problem here is that a clear-headed review of a movie starring a talking raccoon could engender such venom from an adult.

It is fair to say that the modern blockbuster—starting with 1977's Star Wars and going forward to today's Marvel-dominated landscape—is made for children first and foremost. Kids buy toys. Kids sleep on bed sheets featuring their favourite characters. Kids watch cartoon spinoffs on the vertically integrated corporate siblings of movie studios. They eventually grow up with the same level of affection they had for said movie, and keep spending money on re-releases, reboots, sequels, and merchandise.

I still buy toys, and go to midnight screenings of Tim Burton's Batman. I'm a part of this feedback loop of fandom; fully aware that I'm just a cash machine for multi-national corporations. It's totally irrational to be so passionate about such things into adulthood, but those of us still in thrall to sci-fi/fantasy either don't see it that way, or find ways to rationalise it. That's why we often respond badly to an outsider (especially one in a position of authority) trying to force us to wake up from our collective dream.

When one of these movies works for the general audience and becomes successful, the fact that the movie is for children is used as a bludgeon to smite anyone with a contrary opinion. The white knights for Guardians of the Galaxy or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ask why one would expend so much energy critiquing a movie for people who can't legally drink beer. It's a kids' movie, they scream to anyone who will listen. Just enjoy it! Yes, it is a kids' movie, and now adults are arguing about the relative merits of a kids' movie. Who's the real fool in this relationship? In truth, we all are.

Both the critic and the average audience member are on the same basic level when it comes to the usefulness of judging a movie where seven-foot-tall turtles ride skateboards in between product placements. Each side is arguing about something trivial. As silly as it may seem to critique a movie designed to appeal to the under-18 set, it is equally absurd to defend that movie from people who get paid to tell you what they think about said kids' movie. Everyone who participates in the cultural ecosystem by publicly declaring an opinion about a movie where men in rubber spacesuits punch each other is at least a little bit crazy, me included.

I spent a good long while anticipating the release of Guardians of the Galaxy. The promotional materials promised a delightful romp through the neglected corners of the mighty Marvel universe. Perhaps I am the proverbial "joyless cunt," but the finished product struck me as the same sort of pre-packaged, focus-grouped, foam-padded, processed-cheese-product, action-adventure spectacle we get every weekend from the motion picture industry. It's film as momentary diversion, something to forget after you're finished picking the popcorn out of your teeth. Even though I knew what I was getting into, I still expressed my displeasure. I still said something. Of course, I said something because I get paid to say something, and that's what drives all of this discourse, both the product and the response to the product.

Guardians was a tad less crass than Transformers: Age of Extinction or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, more genial and amusing than a Christopher Nolan mopefest, and a significant visual upgrade from the bland colour palette of every other Marvel film, but it's still a barely-there trifle engineered to get kids to buy toys. Movies, like literally every other business, operate on the simple supply-and-demand principle. The human appetite for pleasant, non-threatening, positive entertainment seems unquenchable, which requires infinitely more supply. We need products, especially products with the insane public demand and pent-up anticipation of a film based on a known property.

I am not arrogant enough to presume that the entertainment industry owes the world anything more than what we demand. I am a capitalist. I love money. I like having it, and then spending it on RoboCop T-shirts. I don't begrudge anyone their right to make more money by calling two hours of explosions and close-ups of Megan Fox's ass a movie. I was lucky enough to be born an American, and goddamn it, I want to see Megan Fox's ass!

These movies are products—blatant transactions between two parties: the audience and the gristle factory that churns them out. And yet there is a large portion of the United States that refuses to acknowledge what these movies are, and that causes them to lash out at anyone who dares take them down from their exalted pedestal.

Perhaps its the identification with childhood, with the time in a person's life when the only truly detestable things were vegetables and homework, that causes the faithful to lose their shit in the face of a difference of opinion. When I was a child, motion pictures were made by kindly Willy Wonka-types like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for purely artistic reasons. It wasn't until the generation that grew up with Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park came of age that they realised there was more to it than that.

To some, Empire Strikes Back was made with love and care, whereas The Phantom Menace was a shitty, shameless cash grab. Really, both films were made with financial gain in mind, and calling one art and the other commerce is missing the point. George Lucas's decision to demand that 20th Century Fox grant him the merchandising rights to Star Wars made him a billionaire. No one who just wants to make art for the sake of art even considers selling toys. Shrewd businesspeople do, though.

This may seem like a more cynical age, but it's not. There are still scores of us who are capable of being transported to another world by an expensive, epic feature presentation. They can't stand it when a smug professional film critic swings into their fantasy with a bunch of naysaying. Sure, it's just a movie, but when you're eight years old (either physically or emotionally), it's not just a movie. It's a whole hell of a lot more than that. I wish I could say I was still able to be a part of that group that can engage fully with entertainment for the sake of being entertained. Even if I was, I don't think I'd ever threaten to murder someone who isn't. The divide between the two schools of thought in film criticism has never been more pronounced, but one would hope that eventually, both sides can learn to coexist in the same universe.

Follow Dave Schilling on Twitter.

More film stuff:

'Freddy Got Fingered' Is the Most Underrated Film of All Time

I Was an Accidental Nigerian Film Star

The Cannes Film Festival Can Be a Pretty Miserable Place

All illustrations by Nick Gazin

At some stage in our development we all shit ourselves. Wastefully, most of you squares fall out of practice when your newborn incontinence privileges are revoked, not taking the craft back up until you're too close to death to truly appreciate it.

From the shitty reception my scatological anecdotes tend to receive in polite company, I’ve come to realise that I’ve shit myself more than your average woodland creature. I’m working on a theory that everyone has discolored their unmentionables at least once during adulthood, they just don't dare admit it. You know who you are. You just bundled up that grubby little memory with your soiled undies and disposed of it. In the interest of pioneering an openness on the subject, I’m quite happy to publicly air my dirty laundry and recycle it for your reading pleasure.

It will serve as a memoir of those plops destined to escape the standard fate of their nameless brothers. A testament to those happy, lucky few that dared to dream and lived to experience the delicate embrace of my underwear. If you’re deterred by the slightly anti-climatic nature of each chapter (SPOILER ALERT: shit hits the pants,) don’t worry – each combine to form a larger, more meaningful story arc. A true coming-of-age story of intestinal insubordination and colonic revolt. A tale of bowels who refused to bow down to societal pressure or the will of their master.

Chapter I: A Shit in a Million

I must have been 13 or so, and a relative novice in the undie-sullying game. My little brother Jake and I were strolling home from school, chatting away, blissfully unaware of the punishing trial being plotted by my colon.

As we began to climb the steep incline that led to our family home, my gut began to shift slowly and uncomfortably like a drunk driver stirring in a drunk tank. I’ve got this covered, I remember thinking. I was young, arrogant, and headstrong. In as few as four careless strides, things went from manageable to bad to worse. It was coming.

My face turned as white as a squash enthusiast. I deployed preventative tensing measures, but the dark forces were mounting – the outer chamber had been breached. I masked my discomfort as best I could, but close as we are, Jake saw a change in me. He knew something was up. I couldn’t let on, knowing he’d have no sympathy.

It peeked out. One inadvertent clench of my butt cheeks, and I was done for. There was still a good 60 metres until we reached home. Like a weary gunslinger, I waddled bravely on. I couldn’t keep up the front and risked sharing my burden with Jake. Not really appreciating the severity of the situation, he laughed and began shadowboxing centimetres from my troubled gut. A flinch triggered an involuntary squeeze. The turtle was beheaded. I’d shit my pants.

As I was wearing those old-school baggy grandpa boxers, there was no safety net. I tried to play it off. “I feel all right actually,” I mumbled, a little too chirpily, taking off at a suspicious pace. I felt it bounce and trail stodgily down my hamstring like a slug in the breeze. Then with a stealthy flick of my school pants, my poop was liberated. I didn’t look back.

The sounds of Jake's guffaws alerted me that I’d been rumbled. Beaming complacently up at me was a perfectly spherical, meatball-sized ball of phosphorus orange dung. Oh, how it glowed. I might have gotten away with it, if I hadn’t birthed a scaled-down replica of the sun.

Eventually the laughter died, and we stood over my ungodly creation in silent awe.

Chapter II: No Shit Without Fire

My little brother’s 20th birthday took place on a pleasant summer’s evening. A group of us were getting drunk, gathered around a bonfire in my yard. In an effort to mark out the celebration from merging into the dateless mishmash of forgettable piss-ups, we played Edward Fortyhands: competitors must duct tape a 40-ounce of malt liquor to each palm and the first to drain both wins.

As an overweight, alcoholically-ambidextrous urinal personality, with terrible circulation and a can-do attitude, I was odds-on favorite. I was making serious headway through the left-hand bottle when nature called, but only to spitefully inform me that I’d already shit my pants.

A shart, as stealthy as it was soggy, slipped under the radar of my ever-faltering warning system; it was an un-ignorable, but not devastating, quantity. Still, my years of field experience told me: this ain't over.

While the others prodded the fire and joked, I hovered, weighing up my options. An unscheduled pit stop could jeopardize my title hopes. My warped sense of pride just couldn’t take that.

Decision reached, I positioned myself on the far side of the fire and toasted my little brother with a short speech, rounding off with “Happy Birthday!” Then, with a sharp 180-degree turn, I pivoted to reveal a bare booty, ceremoniously parted my cheeks and ejected a bursting, viscous fountain of liquefied crap, coating the open fire. With each telling, the trajectory grows more cartoon-like in its explosiveness.

Laughter and revolted surprise rang out. No one saw that shit coming. One witness let rip a manic cackle, only to have his laughter muffled in his throat by an eruption of upchuck, as if he were chuckling at his own drowning.

The fire sizzled. I bowed deeply, then nimbly began the operation of using newspaper and my boozy prosthetics to cleanse my asshole. I finished drinking my bottle first. I was the victor, but at what cost?

The next day I did think to myself, Fucking hell, Sam. You’re fucking 22. You’ve got friends with kids going to primary school and here you are shitting on an open fire to entertain your friends. That morning, I made a vow never to shit on an open fire again. I’m taking it one step at a time. Each day is a challenge, but I didn’t shit on an open fire yesterday, I haven’t shit on an open fire today, and I can only hope my resolve will hold and I won’t shit on an open fire tomorrow. 


Chapter III: Merde, Je Me Suis Chier Dessus

When I was about 10, my family would vacation at a postcard-perfect campsite on a cliff overlooking the sea in the south of France. One night, I awoke with seafood coming back to life in my stomach. The urgency of the situation was obvious. I whipped on a T-shirt and some stripey briefs, then scrambled for some toilet paper and made a break through the pitch black campsite towards the distant glow of the communal toilet.

As I bolted between tents, my gut performed lumbering somersaults. With my focus occupied on the psychic strain of compressing my internal sphincters, my foot caught on the tent, and I hit the deck hard. On impact, I instantly shit my pants.

The remainder of the walk was a slow, teary, squelchy one. My tighty-formerly-whities were bulging and hemorrhaging spurts of poop. An inspection showed the tide of sludge had coated my little baby dick brown. I mopped myself up, cried, and scrunched up my tainted pantaloons.

Yet to accept shitting my pants as a unique, hilariously quirky character trait, I was mortally embarrassed and couldn’t handle my family finding out I’d shit my pants like a little shitty pants pants-shitting baby. Disposing of the trace evidence was crucial. I bombed back to my tent and shotput-tossed the contaminated undies over the cliff and into the darkness. The perfect crime. 

I awoke to my mum's humming, as she hung out the washing on the makeshift line between our tent and the chain link fence that separated us from the cliff face. Only some light chafing confirmed that the night’s stinky mishap wasn't an ugly dream. To my horror, I spotted my undead briefs glaring back at me, dangling smugly from a bush in plain sight. The fuckers had come back to haunt me.

Before I could do anything, my mum caught sight of them and with an “ooooooops!” plucked them down, assuming they’d gone astray from the washing process. She held them in her hands, looked at them for half a second, then without a fuss or so much as a word or a look, went and rid me of them once and for all. I don’t think I could have loved my mum more in that moment.

Chapter IV: The Host with the Most (Shit in their Pants)

I was hosting a house party in college and everything was going swimmingly. People were saying things like "nice party," and I was saying things like "thanks." En route to the bathroom, I bumped into a girl I know, who offered me a line of ketamine. Ket isn’t really my cup of tea, or at least not in an environment where any interaction is required. It tends to transform me into a hunched, jittery, jabbering gorilla, wrestling my wayward motor functions.

Not wanting to be a wet, ungrateful blanket, I accepted, despite the line looking a tad adventurous. In the toilet, I dwelled on an intriguing tile and promptly forgot the purpose of my visit. As I left, with mind elsewhere, my sworn enemy – the shart – crept out of me from behind.

There’s nothing like a full diaper to jolt you back into consciousness. Fuck, I thought. I’d better keep this on the down-low if I want any chance of impressing women. Then, realizing the potential of a steaming pant-full for weirding someone out, I reconsidered. I surveyed the crowd milling around, evaluating who would be the most deeply affected by the official announcement of my little bundle of joy.

I locked eyes with some smooth guy who was peddling coke, casually leaning on a wall. The kind of dude that just reclines, expression icy blank, nonchalantly soaking the party in, as if any proactive involvement in a party, or even a smile, would irretrievably fuck up their laid-back persona. I introduced myself, with something like “All right, mate. I’ve just shit myself. Like, my pants, right now, they’re full of shit. Like, loads. Trust me!”

He barely flinched and coolly stated, “Yeah, you should probably do something about that.” Disappointed, I agreed.

An absence of toilet paper had me hobbling through the party and up to the third floor. Still ketty, I was overthinking every factor of outwardly appearing like my pants weren’t harboring an ass-fugitive. To conceal my discomfort, I forced a bob to the music as unnatural and wooden as a private school boy at his first rave. I tensely negotiated meets and greets, hastily excusing myself before the stench had a chance to hit.

The lack of a functioning light bulb had me washing up blind, adding another unwelcome layer of difficulty to an already gloomy and confusing process. And in the end, I drunkenly blabbed to enough people in confidence that word of my classified incident became common knowledge.

Chapter V: Shit on the Dance Floor

A stale, moderately-stabby house party led me and my friend to abandon ship for our unavoidable, regular dancing destination. We were good and drunk and pretty drugged up, but nowhere near enough to justify the events that unfolded in my pants.

While pon de floor, it dawned on me that I needed to drop the kids off, so I cut through the crowd and headed for the toilet. Upon finding it closed, I just shrugged and forgot about it, since there was dancing to be had.

Another bomb of molly had us laying siege to the dance floor, and we set about getting our vigorous fucked-up wiggle on. The tunes were ringing out. I was adrift in the wonder of my own tingly, squirming enjoyment before coming to and slowly becoming aware of a separate, less tingly warmth residing in my butt crack.

A probing shuffle confirmed my fear: I’d shit my pants. Fortunately (kind of), I was drugged beyond the point of giving a shit. I didn’t want to go home, and neither did my mate, so fuck if I was I going to let a healthy serving of unplanned poop dictate the destiny of our evening. With no toilet available, I just continued throwing it down, limiting my range of hip motion and trademark footwork to preserve my fragile, unwanted gift. There was a lot of compensatory fist-pumping in play.

I conducted all conversations with the opposite sex with my torso hunched in an attempt to widen the distance between their nostrils and my polluted undies, striving to avoid eye contact with my mate pissing himself (figuratively) in my peripherals. It seemed the club’s general aura of sweaty brow masked my ripe stank.

About an hour later, the night came to a halt. That night at least, with the MD swilling around my system, I still couldn’t bring myself to the logical decision, and figured I’d just hose on down at the next venue. Ain't no party like a shitty pants party, 'cause a shitty pants party don’t stop.

We headed to collect some surplus wine we’d stashed under a car before heading in. While rooting about for our mislaid hooch in the shadows of a Mercedes, a gruff, threatening voice boomed out 
“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WITH MY CAR YOU LITTLE FUCKING CUNTS! I’M GOING TO FUCK YOU UP!”

We rose to see a mammoth, mean-looking dude pounding towards us, looking pretty intent on, and more than capable of, kicking the festering shit into me, and out of my mate, respectively. His long-range threats allowed us to begin soothing him from afar with apologetic gesturing and pilled-up earnestness. We shrewdly managed to dodge a beatdown, under the condition we fucked off immediately, without our wine.

I’ve never been more in need of a drink, so after a minute or two in hiding, I commando crawled back and began fumbling about for that sweet, sweet hooch. Once more he emerged, his rage heightened. And once again our panicky repenting managed to cool him, this time playing my ace in the hole, wheeling out the trusty shitty-pants card. 


“Mate, we're really sorry, it's just I’ve shit my pants. I really, really could do with that drink. I mean, please, my pants are full of shit, as we speak. Please, please, please let me grab the wine, and we’ll be on our way.”

He shot down my pleas, showing little to no sympathy to my shitty predicament. I tried to sneak back one final time and upon hearing his murderous boom, we figured it was time to run. In our bulging eyes, the night was still young. We roamed the streets for an hour or so, searching fruitlessly for a club we’d heard of but never been to. Eventually, the effects faded and our outlook dampened. My chafing evolved into full-blown diaper rash and suddenly I yearned for a shower. I hovered for the taxi journey home and the taxi guy graciously ignored the deep, muggy stench. 


Follow Sam Briggs on Twitter.

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If you've heard of a place called Varosha lately, you're unlikely to think of what it once was – a sunny millionaire's playground on the sea – because today it's one of the world's biggest ghost towns. Its crumbling houses and buildings are slowly being reclaimed by nature, a reminder that an unresolved conflict isn't over just because people aren't killing one another there anymore. But it may hold the key to reunifying the divided country of Cyprus.

The Turkish army invaded Cyprus during the summer of 1974, and Varosha's population went from 39,000 to zero almost overnight. The two waves of Turkish attacks were a response to a coup by Greek-Cypriot nationalists. The Turkish troops captured Varosha during the second wave, which began 40 years ago this week. Since then, no visitors other than Turkish patrols have been allowed inside.

The grim anniversary of the war that resulted in the capture of Varosha brings new hope that a solution can be found to revive the town. A grassroots effort by people from both communities of this bitterly divided country, along with renewed geopolitical interest in Cyprus, has motivated more efforts to find a solution. 

Turkey invaded in order to counter Greek-Cypriot nationalism in Cyprus, to suppress citizens who wanted to unite politically with Greece, which at the time was ruled by a far-right military junta. Turkey then claimed to be protecting the Turkish minority on the island by invading. One month later, the second invasion set the stage for what would become of Cyprus ever since then.

The invasion and partition of the island resulted in the killing of around 1,500 Turkish-Cypriots and 8,000 Greek-Cypriots due to Turkish bombardment, as well as what has been labeled ethnic cleansing by both sides. Turkey occupied the northern 36.2 percent of Cyprus and continues to do so to this day.

When the fighting stopped soon after the invasion, the result was a partition of the island between the Greek-Cypriot south, an internationally recognised EU country, and the Turkish-Cypriot north, a breakaway state only recognised by Turkey. The two sides are separated by a UN buffer zone, referred to as the “Green Zone.” Varosha lies just north of the Green Zone in the Turkish occupied part of Cyprus.

Unlike other towns, it was not resettled, as many towns on both sides of Cyprus were. The Turkish army has kept a tight lock on Varosha, knowing it is important enough to be used as a bargaining chip against the Greek side. This has resulted in 40 years of sustained decay that has arguably become the most obvious symbol of Cyprus's unresolved conflict. 

It was possible to get to Varosha but only on the outer edges, where the fence is located. There I saw life going on as normal in the neighbouring town of Famagusta. People swam and sunbathed at the beach, used the functioning hotels, and drank at beach bars. All the while, just behind a fence, buildings were crumbling. The vast majority of the beach is permanently closed, leaving only a small strip. And of course, to jump over the fence into Varosha – or even take a pictures from the outside–is to risk arrest.

The first thing I saw as I approached Varosha was a hotel building that is one of two directly hit by Turkish airstrikes. The damage from the bombing is still visible. The bodies were all removed, but the site of the battle wasn't otherwise cleaned up. 

Before the division of Cyprus, Greek-Cypriots and the Turkish-Cypriot minority lived in each other's midst throughout the island, albeit not always peacefully. This is no longer the case, but the desire to reopen and restore Varosha has drawn people from both sides.

Serdar Atai, a Turkish-Cypriot who lives near Varosha compared living with the abandonment of Varosha to "being forced to sleep with a dead person every day." He and other Turkish-Cypriots have been working together with Greek-Cypriots to lobby for Varosha's reopening through the Bicommunal Famagusta Initiative. George Lordos is one of the Greek-Cypriots involved in the initiative who had to flee Varosha during the invasion, leaving behind a home and family business. The initiative has been advocating for the reopening and restoration of Varosha, and the return of property to its rightful owners. It has conducted studies through Eastern Mediterranean University on the costs and engineering needs involved in the restoration of an entire town that has been closed for 40 years.

Turkish-Cypriots, the Cypriot minority, once worked in Varosha, and proponents of its reopening say it will be a chance for Greek and Turkish Cypriots to live and work together again, paving the way for a wider reunification of the island. The plan has run into opposition from both communities in Cyprus, and from Turkey. Turkish-Cypriot hardliners want Turkey to retain control of Varosha, perhaps because it's a useful bargaining chip against when they need something from Greek-Cypriots. Some Greek-Cypriots reject the plan because they see a deal with an illegal occupier as granting legitimacy to a breakaway state that has no rights to the land in the first place.

Mertkan Hamit, a Turkish-Cypriot member of the initiative was part of a team who conducted a public opinion poll that showed that the vast majority of Turkish-Cypriots do support the plan even though most of those who would return to Varosha would be Greek-Cypriots. Mertkan and Serdar were quick to cite the economic benefit of having Varosha back, saying the area around it has been especially hurt by the occupation, and Varosha would help them just as much as it would the Greek-Cypriots. 

A wider look at Cyprus shows that Varosha may be closer than ever to being freed. The discovery of natural gas in Cypriot waters, and increased desire to be less dependent on Russia has sparked renewed geopolitical interest in resolving the Cyprus question. US Vice President Joe Biden visited Cyprus and met with the leaders of both sides this year, hoping to announce a deal on Varosha. Though the deal fell victim to political deadlock, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that he will soon visit Cyprus. 

Natural gas and the possibility that Varosha could be reopened could create momentum for a solution to Cyprus. But so far, the writing on the crumbling walls of Varosha says that the Cypriot question hasn't been answered. 

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