Photo by Dirty Dirty Wrong

Lady Lila Stern is one of Los Angeles's fastest rising dominatrixes. When Mike Kulich from Skweezme.com told me about Stern, he described her as “a nice, Jewish, New England girl who rose the ranks to become one of the top pro-dominatrixes in LA.”

A nice, Jewish dominatrix may sound like an oxymoron, but Stern fits the bill. Two years ago, she launched her career when she was just another floundering actress struggling to pay her bills. Looking to find ways to earn extra money, she started working in the sex industry because domming fit her strong personality. Soon she was screwing with guys as a full-time job.

Since then Stern has discovered the perks of her job. Unlike Hollywood actresses who aren’t named Meryl Streep, dominatrixes can see their careers get bigger as they age and become more experienced. Stern’s occupation has also allowed her to find her “inner domme” and transform from a kinky, submissive New Englander into a dominant superwoman. As an ode to her budding career, Stern recently got a large tattoo of a mermaid holding a human heart. “People see the heart and tell me, ‘You know she's under the water,’” she said. “I don't give a fuck where she is!”

Interested in learning more about Stern’s work, I met with her last month to discuss her clients, sex work's perks, and how to make it as a dominatrix in Hollywood. 

VICE: How did you become a successful dominatrix?
Lady Lila Stern: They have these parties, and you go to three or four parties. It was pretty crazy to be honest, because even though I had a lot of experience in my personal life, it is a lot different—these people are strangers. That's why we have clients that stay such a long time. It's kind of incredible; you can build such an intense relationship.

What do the majority of your clients come to you for?
I do have clients who are into fetish as well as slaves. It's a pretty good mix of both. 

What’s the difference?
They are very different clients. A guy that comes to me for a foot-fetish session doesn't necessarily want to be degraded and told what a tiny penis he has. Slaves are a little easier to deal with because they're more submissive. More recently there's been an emergence of sensual domming, which is like foot fetishes and smothering—things like that I get a lot of calls for.

Why has your clientele changed?
It's hard for me to say because I've only been pro-domming for two years, but honestly I think it's probably [a good thing]. I think it's happening because a lot more people are open. You know there was that whole 50 Shades of Grey—a very tame version of S&M, but I'm not completely against the book. I think it opened up a lot of people who were afraid to go there [to see a dominatrix] because they thought they'd beat the crap out of you and yell at you, and that's obviously not what domming is.

How has working as a dominatrix changed your personal life?
I've met so many powerful, amazing women that have become my world. Relationships can be funny, but it's translated into my personal life amazingly—it's made me feel so powerful and strong. Relationships are a little tough. When I started domming, I was in a relationship for a number of years with a guy who was heavily into kink. At first it was awesome, but then it got hard as he got a little jealous. I've just realized that I'm going to have to be with a very strong man. Most of the dommes I know are lesbians, or at least have a strong preference for women. What's strange about me is that I am attracted to men who are dominant in their lives. I like to think that anyone who isn't okay with what I do isn't the right person for me, or as my mother says, “You sure don't make it easy on yourself.”

What about the job appeals to you?
I make people's fantasies a reality. It makes me feel like I'm helping people. Pro-dommes are obviously around for a reason. You're providing a service for people—a lot of who have wives or girlfriends, who either are afraid or [in the past] they told [people about their fetish] and they were shunned [becuase of] it—so it feels really good to let people feel some satisfaction and feel fulfilled. I met some people in the industry who helped me find my inner-domme. 

How did that affect you?
That's when I fell in love with it, because I knew it was in me—but it was a strange thing when I started because I don't naturally get off on hurting people. It feels very intense, and sexy, and real. I'm myself doing what I do; it brings out a power that I didn't even know I had. Domming has changed my whole life. I have never been happier in my whole life. I get to wake up every day and be kinky. That's pretty awesome.

Follow Sophie Saint Thomas on Twitter. 

GIFs by Daniel Stuckey

Happy belated Fourth of July! Time for some GIFs!

Belgium is pretty boring, EVEN considering it's the home of chocolate seashells and this anus-themed hotel. Belgium's soccer team is also very boring (and not very sexy as far as shirtless World Cup superstars go), so we combined chocolate and the asshole hotel into one beautiful poop factory.

Suffering from a viral illness, Serena Williams walked from her double match at Wimbledon. Everything is not coming up Serena at the Williams house tonight! 

Does watching the short film Random Stop feel like you're watching a POV video game about a man killing a Georgia cop execution-style? Good. That's the point. 

VICE News went inside Salinas Valley State Prison, a maximum-security prison home to gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood and Mexican Mafia. They spoke to a transgender inmate named Trixie who used to belong to a prison gang that she considered “more important than my family.”

Proving once again that Texas is the only state worse than Florida or Arizona, a woman ran over two men at a Houston gas station and then drove away. 

What do Americans love more than videos of hit-and-runs, incarcerating non-violent offenders, and Tila Tequila's titties? Offensive T-shirts, duh!

Speaking of Tila Tequila's titties, this week the allegedly pregnant prophet and conspiracy theorist published several advice columns and the first chapter of her autobiography on her website. The literary masterpieces include glorious lines like, “I knew that not only was I one ‘down ass bitch,’ but I also knew that I was beautiful.” We look forward to reading more op-eds by Miss Tequila! 

Follow Mitchell Sunderland on Twitter. 

Photos by the author

Editor's note: Names have been changed to protect the identity of minors. 

The 9-1-1 call about the Slender Man stabbing flabbergasted everyone from local moms to ABC News, but no one sounded more discombobulated than the 9-1-1 dispatcher himself.

Waukesha is boring—the sort of place with few crimes beyond theft. A few weeks after the stabbing, 9-1-1 dispatchers reportedly received a call stating that someone had broken into a garage and substituted a blue-and-yellow bike for a silver one. It was almost an improvement. The idea that young, local girls could commit violence against one another is mindboggling to Waukesha residents. 

Inadvertently macabre billboards line the highways leading to the crime scene. “INJURIES. THEY CAN SURPRISE YOU,” one says. At another intersection, a restaurant marquee declares: “THE BONEYARD! WHERE CHILDREN EAT FOR FREE!“

Instead of talking about the crime, locals sell candles out of their backyards and cut hearts out of construction paper for a shrine built on the side of the road where Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier’s victim dragged her body to safety. The bathroom where Geyser and Weier first considered stabbing their friend reeked of weed when I visited Wisconsin a few weeks ago. According to NBC News, the girls planned to execute her in the David’s Park public restroom because it had a drain in the floor that would be good for the blood to pour into. Instead, with a game of hide-and-seek, the girls allegedly coaxed their friend to the woods, where they stabbed her 19 times with a five-inch blade.

“I hate you,” the victim allegedly screamed, according to New York magazine. “I trusted you.”

Twelve-year-old girls say “I hate you” constantly, but in this particular case, the utterance seems justified. 

According to the New York Times, one girl stated that they went into the woods and then “stabby, stab, stab.” The victim dragged her body through this clearing and was later discovered by a bicyclist.

In Wisconsin, local culture centers on tight-lipped niceties masked by large smiles. Reactions to tragedy usually shilly-shally between vague Christian impulses, like charity and silence in the face of gossip. Neighbors will leave a cheesy casserole on the sufferer’s stoop, then duck home—saying zilch about the offering or what prompted it, not even to the victim.

But in contrast to their parents, teenage girls in Wisconsin want to talk about the case. They have a lot to say about girl-on-girl violence, for starters, and are patently unsurprised by the fact that Geyser and Weier concocted their stabbing plan while still in middle school. According to teenage girls, feeling inclined to stab someone is common at their age.

“Middle school sucks,” Bethany, a 16-year-old from Waukesha, said, munching Oreos. “It’s a terrible time, and it would drive anybody crazy.”

“Girls are just mean when they’re in middle school,” Eliza, a 15-year-old from the same county, told me over the phone. “Middle school is where it really starts. I think it depends on how mentally strong you are, and how much you can take. But yeah. It can make you insane, I think.”

A 17-year-old from Waukesha named Jenny said that grown-ups in the area want to see Weier and Geyser punished more than teenagers do. “The victim’s family is getting all of this support—there’s a whole shrine set up for [the victim] in the cul-de-sac, even though she isn’t dead.”

“But as far as the stabbers,” Jenny continued, “there’s a lot of hatred toward them. A lot of disgust.” She was then quiet for a long time.

“I had a really rough time in middle school,” she said finally. “It’s when you’re learning about all the stuff that’s gonna happen to your body. And you’re like, ‘Shit. I dunno.’ And then everyone keeps it to themselves because they don’t want anyone to know that they’re going through puberty—like, gross—so they keep it inside, which is unhealthy and enough to drive anyone crazy.”

“It’s boring and scary to talk about at school because kids just react how their parents react, saying how fucked it is that small children are capable of murdering their own friends, and if you say the wrong thing, you’re like a monster, probably,” said Caroline, a 16-year-old whose high school “plays Waukesha" in sports. “People want to pretend it’s evil so that they look good, and also because they want to think something like this would never happen to them. They react how they think they should react because they’re afraid to say it’s just childhood boredom gone wrong.”

The women’s room at David’s Park where Weier and Geyser planned to stab their victim

It had been a while since I had reflected on the nightmare of middle school. But speaking to teenage girls in Wisconsin over Skype, or on the phone, or sprawled out on some living room rug, I was viscerally reminded of its horrors. Unless you’re lucky enough to get your period in high school, which carries its own outsidery trauma, puberty and middle school are inextricably entwined. Hunched over from weird new cramps, 11-to-13-year-old girls love to hurt one another, simply by sowing what they’d be afraid to reap. It’s not empathy, exactly, so much as projection. Teens’ capacity for full-blown embarrassment allows girls to torture one another in excruciatingly resonant and gender-specific ways. Of course, stabbing is gender-neutral, and calling 19 stab wounds “bullying” would be an understatement, but the teenage girls I spoke to believed the incident belonged to the same spectrum as “mean girl” behavior.

Every one of the teenage girls I spoke to asked me not to use her name for the piece, lest girls at school “go crazy” and “get all vengeful.”

“Girls are bitches,” Caroline said softly. “At my school they flush peoples’ pants down the toilets, and during gym class they replace the heavy girls' clothes with smaller clothes.”

“This one girl at my school, her friends decided they didn’t like her, so they took her Uggs and poured lotion in them and destroyed her locker,” Caroline’s friend MacKenzie countered. “She had to leave the school. She came back a few years later, and her mom started an anti-bullying club. But her mom ended up being the biggest bully of them all, writing things about the other girls in newsletters. Now they’re in Florida.”

When I asked if they’d ever seen girls get violent, most of the girls I interviewed laughed like I was the stupidest person in the world.

“Didn’t you go to high school?” Eliza asked.

The drain that Weier told police the blood could “go down”

“In fourth grade, people were talking about this one girl behind her back,” Caroline told me. “At first she was really sad and just cried about it, but then she brought a bat to school and said she was going to kill everyone with it. She doesn’t go to our school anymore, but I don’t think she was crazy. Just sad.”

“Also the puberty stuff we mentioned,” MacKenzie reminded me.

“Yeah,” Caroline said. “Fourth grade was the beginning of that for the more developed girls.”

“At the beach one time these girls were punching each other,” another sophomore girl named Letesha admitted to me over the phone. “The hitting sounded softer than I thought it would, but they were bleeding.”

Slides at David's Park

In a recent phone call, Geyser’s lawyer, Anthony Cotton, echoed the idea that 12 is a weird age. “11-to-12-year-olds lack empathy,” he said. “They lack judgment.”

Jenny, for her part, agreed. “At that age it’s difficult to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and be empathetic. I don’t remember what part of the brain... but it’s not fully developed yet until you’re, like, 20-something, so on one hand it’s like, what if [Weier and Geyser] grow into bigger monsters? On the other hand, it could just be a phase.”

When I asked whether the stabbings had come up in conversation with any of their peers, Jenny and the other teenage girls I interviewed all gave the same sort of negative response. People their age were afraid to say the wrong thing, they explained, and although they wanted to talk about it and were happy to talk to me—girls their age could be so mean about the weirdest things.

“It really only comes up during ghost stories,” MacKenzie said. “Like, we’ll be telling scary stories and someone will say, ‘Wanna hear a true one?’”

Follow Kathleen Hale on Twitter. 

Photos by Elizabeth DeGideo

How does America show off its national identity, and what the hell does American culture even consist of? One small town an hour outside of Albany, New York, chose “Redneck Summer” as the theme for their annual Fourth of July parade and decided portable hot tubs in the back of pickup trucks and trophies made of Budweiser cans and deer antlers were the most appropriate ways to celebrate the good ol’ USA.  

This was the first sign we saw on the road leading into the Village of Salem that told us we were in the right place. There were no green signs letting us know how many miles away we were, just this. “Nu Yu Hair Studio, for When your Mullet Needs a Trim.”

We quickly learned most of Salem’s 2.9 square miles were blocked off for the parade, forcing us to find an alternative route on one of their three roads. Don’t mind the Yankee in front of us; clearly they didn’t understand they were in redneck country. 

This was the first thing we saw after parking our car on Main Street. Notice the sweet piece of Americana posing behind him. This guy was from the volunteer fire department, the organization that puts on the parade each year. 

A note on rural American culture: Yes, our ancestors raped, burned, and pillaged the Native Americans, gave them 24 bucks for Manhattan... capitalism at its finest. We set up shop and gave birth to what would eventually be one of the most hated nations on the planet.

But the people who set up shop—immigrants from the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Germany, and various parts of Europe—took what they learned from the Native Americans (not their own potato-less countries) and, with the help of a few million slaves, farmed the fuck out of most of America. That's only arguably what's being referenced here:

It's a pickup truck filled with water that holds a young farmer in an inflatable, camouflage seat. More commonly referred to as a “redneck hot tub”.

“The water’s cold, but it’s still great,” he said.

Moving on, the parade became more bizarre. 

It is unclear what this is supposed to represent, but the sign reads “Redneck Grocery Getter,” and in the bed of the truck were two women with tattoos and about seven blond children. Note the jug of moonshine glued to the front.

This fine sliver of Americana depicts an old-fashioned truck with what appears to be a deer sanctuary attached to the back of it. It comes complete with a robotic deer, a baby on a four-wheeler waving an American flag, and a sign that says, “Start 'Em Right, Start 'Em Young.” Whatever the fuck that means. 

This was another one we couldn’t figure out. This appears to be a tractor with a clothesline, a headless mannequin on the front, and a metal shingle roof (a version of the classic American motor home?). On a closer look, spectators could see the “Hi Mam” sign on the front of the ride and the small boat it’s tugging behind it.

The boat’s name is "The 1972 Plastick Pleasue Craft." The messages sprawled all over it read: “Four sail or not... still thinkin’ on it,” “For Rent: Daytime: $40 Nightime: $50 Ice fishin': $250 Off Season," all “pur hour.” Onboard was a wooden mermaid with an American flag hat behind a glued plastic bald eagle, another headless mannequin in a bikini, a pink plastic unicorn with wings, and a few more scantily clad mannequins. It was damn confusing, but was it "redneck"?

Imagine being hunched over in a field all afternoon, plowing away. The part of your body that will be hit the most is the neck, and because all of your ancestors are German or Irish, a.k.a. white as fuck, your neck is going to burn to a nasty shade of red, and that's where we get the term.

So where do tractors that tow boats and pink plastic unicorns fit into the equation?

This horse is a "Redneck Lawn Mower." So that’s what that is. Must be a slow ass horse. Something tells me these farm people have a more efficient way of cutting the grass. 

I asked 17-year-old Jordan Keys (pictured below) what made him a redneck. “We go muddin' every day. I mean we pound our vehicles every day. I mean I milk cows every day, we sow land every day, we cut wood every day. It’s our daily lives.” 

Oh, those legs. Note the moonshine barrels their trailer hitch is carrying. We actually ran into these dudes a little later on at the gas station. They had no moonshine for sale but plenty of weed. 

In case any Yankees forgot where they were again. 

Every small town has a Li'l Sebastian. This sign reads “Mules and Rednecks Made This Country GREAT.” I can think of a few mules that continue to make this country great, but they hail primarily from Mexico and don’t walk on four legs. Not sure what this (or any mules) still do for our country, but hey, not sure what shows like Duck Dynasty do for us either. 

This lifeless, spray-painted, vintage Camaro held no back windshield, a toddler with no car seat, and a cooler in the back between two passengers. The machine that pulled it along? A John Deere tracker complete with a dude in suspenders, some more blond babies, and a dog with a red bandanna. 

Europeans like Italians and the French seem proud of the parts of their culture we stereotype them for. Meanwhile our equivelants to pizza and pasta are hamburgers and hot dogs, and our canard à l'orange is turducken. The closest thing we have to a café culture are pub crawls, which we didn’t even fucking come up with, so that’s hardly accurate.

Still, in much of Middle America, families have been there for generations, their ancestors tracing back to the original settlers. And who were those original settlers? Poor farmers whose families have blossomed into what people now call rednecks. Outside of all of the parts of our culture that we borrow, shit like souped-up grocery carts and driveable hot tubs are the only things we really have to call our own.

Of course the number of people who actually take this shit seriously is limited (I hope), but it still begs the question: What is American and what parts of our culture make us unique? To Fred Russo, one of the main organizers of the parade, being a redneck is, “simply put, a hardworking individual.” And that sounds pretty fucking American to me. 

Follow Gabrielle Fonrouge on Twitter.

The author's stash

On the first night of my return to smoking pot, after the kids are asleep, my husband tells me, “I think you’re good; you can probably stop now.” I look down and find I’ve blown through half the joint I’ve been nervously puffing at like a cigarette. I’m annoyed with him for micromanaging me because I am not at all stoned—and then, of course, I am in an instant waaaaaayyyyy toooooooo stoned and grateful for his kindness in a mute, fairly immobile way.

As I wonder (fuzzily, not entirely silently) at the extreme potency of the marijuana I have just smoked, I notice that the remote I’m holding is pointed at the Amazon on Demand screen, and it’s frankly terrifying to realize that inside the neon-bright little boxes—boxes that move, to my awe and horror—are hundreds of movies, and the whole thing is organized in a way that I cannot parse but that I know is based on my preferences. MACHINE, MY PREFERENCE IS TO HAVE ONE PERFECT MOVIE ON THIS TV. I don’t want to look at hundreds of titles, many of which are cartoons or shows my children like, which is sending me into a guilty, bad-mothering place. (NO, I DO NOT WANT TO WATCH DORA THE EXPLORER, AMAZON, YOU GUILT-TRIPPING ASSHOLE!)

“I’m kinda lost here,” I mumble to my husband. He thinks I’m joking. I toss the remote at him, hunch further into the couch, and wait for my magic movie to appear on the magic box. Mad Men! Over the next week, as I watch my regular shows stoned, I’ll come to understand how wooden and artificial most dialogue is, but Mad Men really holds up and deepens, you guys! I audibly groan during instances of sexism, my husband looks over at me, and I feel a little self-conscious because I think I am mouth-breathing. The pauses are so pregnant on this show! About halfway through the episode, I look down at the Google doc I have open and realize there is no reason for me to be recapping and analyzing the show as I am, and also that I am not good at typing while stoned.

Oh, the non-crisis of my bourgeois existence! I’m a mother of two small children, comfortably inhabiting the sort of suburban life I once defined myself by rejecting. When you’re younger, you separate yourself from the imagined mainstream crowd by your taste in music, fashion, and humor—but most of that fades away when everybody’s kids are in school together, everybody goes to Whole Foods for gluten-free cereal, everybody’s too tired to wear anything but MomClothes™, and everybody’s music tastes have been washed away by the Frozen tsunami. Once you have children, many of the markers that signified your Totally Unique Being are lost to you, and it’s easy to find yourself wondering, as you look admiringly at your friends’ Honda Odysseys with their impressive capacity, how, or if, or why, you are who you are—then a child throws himself or herself into your arms and demands your full attention and love, and you are too grateful to ponder questions of existence.

Nostalgia is the most powerful and pervasive of thirtysomething habits, though, and lately I’ve found myself wondering what could make me feel transgressive again. There’s nothing subversive about drinking; it’s just a minor tweak on the same suburban-mom stereotype (“Mommy’s Time Out Pinot Grigio” is a real thing). I’ve weaned myself off the mild antianxiety meds and antidepressants I once took, and though I absolutely needed them at times, I wonder at their strength and influence. At the risk of sounding like a dirty hippie, wouldn’t the occasional toke be better than the scrips-and-wine relaxation method adopted by so many of my fellow once-hip surburbanites? And couldn’t weed—countercultural, Costco-incompatible weed--connect me to a younger, hipper, less stereotypically mommish version of myself?

My decision to adopt weed as my drug of choice wasn’t random. I used to be the kind of stoner who owned a pair of four-foot bongs (christened the Godfather and Apollonia) and smoked from them using a camping lighter, clearing bowls with the flourish that comes from spending long Southern California days practicing such skills. The year after college, which I spent in a Hollywood apartment with my boyfriend and a guy friend on a diet of In-N-Out, weed, and 2:00 AM burritos, was my habit’s peak, or nadir, depending on how you view that sort of lifestyle. After that, I took a break from pot. In 2001 I moved to New York, where I drank more, went on antidepressants, and smoked mostly at parties. My husband—who grew up in New York and thus was over his stoner period at a frighteningly young age—got a job in DC, and in the six years since we started our family my pot intake has been limited to the very occasional joint shared during rare trips without the kids.

So I knew weed; knew it in the same deeply nostalgic way that I knew the taste of Animal-Style at In-N-Out, more than a decade after leaving California. Except I didn’t know how to get any.

Not a good place to try to get weed, as it turns out. Photo via Flickr user Bearden

Before beginning my experimental return to stonerdom I figured it would be easy to score weed, but I underestimated the depths of my uncoolness. Between snack duty and kindergarten orientation, I don’t know many open smokers, or anyone who sells pot. Every day “Buy some marijuana” remained on my to-do list next to “Costco run” made me more nervous that I wouldn’t be able to find any, which I know is not good. Preliminary paranoia is not cool.

Employees at my local Whole Foods smoke, as I know from marijuana-centric conversations among shelf stockers I’ve interrupted. Maybe during one of these interactions, or at check-out, after we’ve established a connection—HAHAHAHA WE BOTH HATE YOUR CORPORATE OVERLORDS BUT MY FEELINGS ARE COMPLEX BECAUSE I’M SUPPORTING THEM LET’S NOT GET INTO IT—I could, very subtly, ask, WHERECANIGETSOMEWEED? Foolproof plan, right?

My lowest point comes in the Kinko’s parking lot, when I spot a dreadlocked black guy in a Bob Marley T-shirt and think, Hey! I should ask that guy! Follow-up thought: What is wrong with me? Why has the pursuit of drugs brought out my basest assumptions? This man should sell me a bag of expensive oregano and then arrest me for criminal stupidity and racism.

I consider asking the dad next door whom I’m friends with, but it’s tricky, because in our corner of DC suburbia there’s a complicated tangle of cladestine vices: Some of the dads smoke pot semi-openly but the moms just… don’t. We are the primary caregivers, charged with keeping constant vigilance over our broods using problem-solving skills and speedy reflexes to manage crises. These responsibilities don’t make it easy to develop a weed habit.

Clearly, there’s some sexist shit at play here. At some point, our circle of parents came to an unspoken understanding about who does the smoking and who does the caregiving. Moms can’t get stoned and stare into fire pits, because they’re making sure children don’t run into the fire; they can’t get stoned and vibe out on some music, because they’re putting the babies to bed. And since I’ve been more than a little judgmental about the dads I know who get stoned and chill while their wives do the parenting, going to these same dads for a weed connect feels a little hypocritical. But I finally text my friend and awkwardly ask if her husband, THE pot-smoking dad, can hook me up.

He graciously offers me a joint, gratis, but I’ve come to realize that back in my stoner period I rarely bought my own stash—so in an entirely symbolic effort to correct my earlier etiquette failures, I insist on buying an eighth. I’m an adult, and I buy my own weed!

Little boxes on a hillside, little boxes full of parents secretly getting high... Photo via Flickr user Frank Maurer

For a few days, until I get a simple faux-cigarette one-hitter, I struggle to smoke enough to get a little high, but not so much that I get blotto. This is a delicate balance. With the benefit of decades of experience, I can gauge how much alcohol will take the edge off or get me buzzed or give me a hangover. I don’t have the same control when it comes to smoking pot. While drinking wine, I can answer work and school emails, take care of household issues, plan my son’s medical visits, and talk normally with those around me. Being stoned, on the other hand, closes off certain parts of modern life to me. I cannot deal with much of the internet, smartphones, the goddamn Roku machine. With the amount and quality of pot I am smoking, I can look at Twitter for no more than five minutes at a time, intently watch Mad Men or Gravity, laugh at grotesque cakes on Pinterest, fall into obsessive music holes, mutter things about Mad Men/music/horrible cakes/Twitter to my husband, and eat avocados whole. That’s pretty much it.

One afternoon, when I have an uninterrupted block of three hours to myself, I take a few hits, put on some Harry Nilsson, sit in a rocking chair in my sunny living room, and pretend I’m a lady of the Laurel Canyon, circa the year of my birth. Then I do pretty well on the Slate News Quiz. Why am I taking the Slate News Quiz? Because I am a grown-ass woman who likes doing news quizzes, and indulging in substances I have not enjoyed during the day for more than a decade will not make me a decade younger, or a decade different.

Clearly I still know how to smoke pot and how to be stoned, but it doesn’t make me any less momlike. If anything, I feel more deeply entrenched in a particularly middle-aged furrow of weird old music, cultural criticism, and NPR. Smoking pot may change your experience of the things you like, but it doesn't change you. I’m not suddenly able to relate to Miley Cyrus and her 4/20 Bangerz 4 Lyfe thing with some of the Youngs, because I am not, nor was I ever, someone who would relate to Miley Cyrus. Even at the height of my stonerdom, I rejected the dumb, deeply embarrassing aspects of weed culture—drum circles, pot-leaf icons, that whole murder-jester pipe aesthetic—so why would I engage with that shit now that my age has liberated me from it? In hindsight, now that I’m actually high, it seems bizarre that I would seek out pot in a quest to be less defined by the cliches of adult life. If I wanted to meaningfully challenge the codes and boundaries of my bourgeois suburban life, developing a weed habit is maybe not the best way to go about that.

I am coming down from this afternoon of epiphany, Harry Nilsson, and News Quiz crushing when my five-year-old comes home. This day marks the one time I have smoked pot when either of my kids have been awake and in the same zip code as I am, and while I’m not stoned anymore, I still feel nervous. Does he sense this? Is that why he looks up from his Legos, fixes his huge blue eyes on me, and suddenly asks me to CHOOSE BETWEEN HIM AND HIS SISTER?

The Sophie’s Choice question, for the first time ever, on an afternoon of illicit activity, is a lot to take in, and I react like I’ve been hit by a very cute, very crazy truck. Finally, I reply with the expected script: I love you both, I could never choose. He keeps pushing: If you had to choose between me and her, who would it be? I become more insistent—I will never have to choose, it would be impossible. You and your sister are like parts of my body, my limbs! I couldn’t choose between parts of my body! He will not let it go: Well then, if you had to choose your right arm or your left arm, which would you choose? Oof. Bravo, sir.

Any other day, this conversation would have been approached carefully, lightly, with more attention paid to the reassurance and love he was asking for. But it felt unbearably fraught and intense in the wake of the pot, and served as a very definite admonition from the universe to absolutely never, ever smoke pot anytime my children are conscious and in the same county, ever.

The last night of my experiment before we go on vacation, I find the sweet spot: I inhale just the right amount from my one-hitter and decide to fix myself some Costco chicken salad left over from my son’s pre-K graduation. The tastiness of the food makes me do a little dance, which might have made me self-conscious as a younger person. But I’m in my home, surrounded by people I love, and who love me even in my most pathetic moments, and I’m an adult lady who can dance in her house and squeal about the gloriousness of adding grapes to mayonnaise-based prepared foods without fear. My husband and I are about to watch some MasterChef Junior, which is just right, and I will make lots of hilarious, perfectly-timed jokes that will amuse us both to no end, and I know there are avocados left for later, because I am an adult, and I bought them.

Jessica Roake lives and writes in the DC suburbs.

Anthony McIntyre (right) outside his cellblock with Pat Livingstone in 1992

On July 21, 1972, the Provisional IRA detonated 19 bombs across Belfast in the span of an hour. Known as Bloody Friday, the attacks claimed the lives of nine people and injured 130 others. At the time, it was one of the most violent acts that had happened during the Troubles. If you were the one who planned it, you’d probably want to keep quiet, right?

Three decades later, the man who claims to have been behind that day felt differently. Speaking to researchers who were compiling the “Boston College Tapes,” an oral history of the Troubles, Brendan Hughes, former officer commanding of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, admitted to being in charge.

Part of the reason behind his decision to revisit the past was that his interviewers—academics based at Boston College between 2001 and 2006—had been given guarantees from their institution that testimonies from their work would not be published until after their subjects, who were republican and loyalist paramilitaries, were dead and that the police and politicians would never be allowed access to them. The promise didn’t quite work out.

In 2011, the British government tried to get access to 85 tapes, including Hughes’s interview, with the assistance of the US Department of Justice. They were looking for an interview that purportedly implicated Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, by the IRA. Three years later they were successful. In April Gerry Adams was arrested on the basis of this evidence. He was later released without charge.

I spoke to one of the three men behind these tapes, Anthony McIntyre, himself a former commander in the IRA. Speaking from his home in the Republic of Ireland, he told me more about his background, and why, as a former Provo, he decided to create an archive of people admitting to grizzly acts of political violence.

VICE: Hi, Anthony. Stupid question, but why did you join the IRA in the first place?
I joined in 1973 when I turned 16. I’m from South Belfast, and I didn’t come from a republican background, but I romanticized the movement nonetheless. Growing up, you’d see people being arrested or shot in the street. If a foreign army did the same in London, what would people who lived there do?

Your activity landed you imprisoned in Long Kesh for 18 years, four years of which were on blanket protest, alongside the 1981 hunger strike. What did you do?
I was convicted of shooting a member of the Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), in 1976, for which I was given a life sentence. When it happened I was the leader of the IRA in South Belfast, and I’d been given impetus to shoot this man under the auspices of senior command, because our intelligence believed he was an armed member of the UVF.

What was it like in Long Kesh?
It was tough. It was a battle against the prison administration. We were locked in cells 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without reading material except the Bible, which was used as toilet and cigarette paper. During that time, the hunger strikes confirmed my hatred for the British, but I’ve since also learned of disputed evidence suggesting Sinn Féin had the opportunity to broker a deal, which I’m inclined to believe.

When were you released from prison?
I was released in 1992 when they were releasing life-sentence prisoners. Ten months later I started a PhD in history at Queen's University in Belfast. I’d already completed a degree via the Open University while still in prison after punitive measures had eased. I also did some freelance journalism and wrote about how the republican project had disintegrated.

Anthony McIntyre

In an article you wrote in 2009, you said that Sinn Féin’s subsequent endorsement of the 1993 Downing Street Declaration, which affirmed the right of Northern Ireland to self-determination, marked the “capitulation” of republicanism. This declaration arguably led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which you have endorsed. Aren’t these two positions inconsistent?
It was a republican capitulation, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing—the IRA surrendered in 1916 as well, don’t forget. I no longer believe there's any justification for an armed campaign, but I'm not going to pretend that the Good Friday Agreement was a victory for republicanism. It was a serious defeat. What the British government did was strategically include republicans but exclude republicanism. Today, it seems to me that all Sinn Féin has done is chase office, when what they should have done is stayed out of such institutions and pursued their radical position through lobbying and protest—not by becoming the people they previously opposed, and not through armed conflict.

The Boston College project began in 2001, three years after Good Friday. Why did it start?
It just needed to be done. It felt like the armed conflict was over, even though the IRA had yet to announce it, which they did in 2005. It seemed a good time to capture these people’s stories before they died, and a dominant “official” history could suppress the multiplicity of narratives that these voices represent.

How did you select interviewees?
Many of the people I interviewed I knew or had previous experience with. Nonetheless, whether they were pro- or anti-Sinn Féin, what mattered was that I could trust them not to tell anyone about the project, particularly members of Sinn Féin’s leadership.

Who did you imagine would listen to these tapes?
I hoped that whoever got access to them would use them to create a reconstruction of republicanism so as to examine its motives. Each interview we did was embargoed until after the interviewee had died, and we were given a cast-iron guarantee by Boston College that they would not hand over the tapes—a guarantee that turned out to be worth fuck all.

And Gerry Adams got arrested because of that broken guarantee. How do you feel about that?
It's not a good feeling. It causes me great anguish that people have been arrested, because this was not what the project was about. The project was about gathering historical evidence, not prosecution evidence. I did not want to make a political intervention. Whether other people wanted to use it for that purpose is another matter. I didn't want to use it to have a go at Gerry Adams.

Surely you were aware of the potential risk that the material would be used in this way?
I wasn't, no. Absolutely not. Why would I have done them in the first place if this was the case?

Sinn Féin has claimed these tapes were compiled in order to get people in trouble. What's your response?
The argument that it was "maliciously compiled" would have to show that there was some intellectual dishonesty, and that we prompted people to say things that weren't true to maliciously present Gerry Adams as a member of the IRA.

So you didn't do that?
No. I reject the idea that people were chosen simply because they would have a go at Gerry Adams. I don't see the historical value of doing that. Perhaps there was a structural tendency to get people who were not sympathetic to Sinn Fein, but I don't believe that undermines their testimony, because Sinn Féin should not be allowed to determine what the truth is.

Anthony McIntyre visits his former cell block with his son in 2007

The Good Friday Agreement drew a line under crimes committed during the Troubles by treating them as acts of war, but some of the wounds haven't healed, and crimes are unsolved. Do you think this will ever be resolved?
I don’t, no. There’s never going to be a way of appeasing everyone. I don't see how it can be done. All I think you can do is recover as many narratives as possible so that historians can arrive at judgments. But a more just society has to be based on the future, because ultimately the dead don’t vote.

What do you hope happens in Northern Ireland? Are you still a republican?
To me, republicanism is over. But can I see a future for republicans if they behave in a rational manner and pursue justice and politics. Unfortunately, there are still people who think that political violence is the way forward, but for me it's an absolute waste.

Thanks for speaking with me, Anthony.

Follow Huw Nesbitt on Twitter.

The Greenhouse app highlighting how much money each industry gave Republican Congressman Mike Simpson before the last election

With US politics swimming in so much corporate money that it's pretty much an oligarchy, it can be hard to keep track of which particular set of lobbyists is trying to milk more cash out of health care, fossil fuels, and other very important issues from one week to the next.

But thanks to 16-year-old Nick Rubin, keeping track of just how much politicians have sold out has become a lot easier. He created Greenhouse, a new browser plug-in that operates under the motto "Some are red. Some are blue. All are green." The plugin aims "to shine light on a social and industrial disease of today: the undue influence of money in our Congress." It sounds like a bit of a lofty aim for an app, but it's actually pretty simple and effective—it provides a breakdown of a politician’s campaign contributions when that politician's name comes up in an article. It is currently available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and is completely free. As you can imagine, reading about how your member of Congress voted in a recent health bill becomes all the more enlightening if you know how much money the health industry showered him in at the last election.

I spoke to Nick Rubin about the plugin, politics, and what he calls the "money stories" behind what you read in the news.

VICE: Hi, Nick. So how did you come up with the idea for Greenhouse?
Nick Rubin: Back in seventh grade, I gave a presentation on corporate personhood, and ever since then I’ve been really interested in that issue. I think the one problem is that the sources of income for members of congress haven’t been simple and easily accessible when people have needed it. More recently, I’ve been teaching myself how to code, and I thought that something like Greenhouse that puts the data at people’s fingertips would be a perfect solution. It really is the intersection of these two passions of mine—coding and politics. I made it after school and on weekends on my computer.

Why the name?
Well, green is the color of money in the US, and house refers to the two houses of Congress [the Senate and House of Representatives]. The name also implies transparency; greenhouses are see through and they are built to help things thrive.

Where did you get the information on the politician’s donations?
It uses the data from the last full election cycle which was 2012. This is simply because it’s just the most complete set of data that we have. But the browser does provide access to the most up to date 2014 information by just clicking the name of the politician on the top of the window or the OpenSecrets.org link in the popup. So the 2014 data is just one click away.

I’m intending to update the data as a whole later in the election cycle as the 2014 contributions are more complete—these are updates I’m currently working on—as well as thinking of other ways I can expand the tool.

Nick Rubin

What are your political views, and how are they relevant to the tool?
I want a system that works, and so do other kids my age. I want Greenhouse to be a nonpartisan tool. What concerns me is the sheer amount of money being pumped into the system because there really is a lot. During the development of Greenhouse and looking over these numbers and seeing how much is being donated—it’s really scary.

How does Greenhouse work?
It works by highlighting the name of any member of Congress on any website, and when you hover over these names a little box appears that shows detailed contribution information with amounts and where those amounts have come from. It’s basically a list of the top-ten industries from which they receive their money. My goal was to create something that promotes transparency. It would be great if people used it on sites where they’re reading about politics every day. For example, if you’re reading a piece on Congress votes for energy policy, you might see that a sponsor has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the oil and gas industry. I like to say that Greenhouse allows people to see the money story behind the news story.

What money stories have you personally uncovered?
I’ve noticed a lot of trends. I’ve been working on something called the “Story of the Day,” which is me tweeting every day a story where if people used Greenhouse on the story they’d learn something very interesting and see the money story for themselves. These stories are all over. People who use it will be able to form their own opinions about the possible influences of money in politics. 

What do you hope from Greenhouse?
I just want it to educate people because that’s really the first step toward a solution. That’s exactly why I designed Greenhouse with simplicity in mind, so that everyone—even kids—are able to understand it. In terms of whether Greenhouse will solve this issue—well, education is the first step. I really do believe that increased transparency will help fix the problem. Easy access to data empowers voters to make better decisions. Once people are informed, they will reject elected officials who are motived by money instead of principles. But for now, I’ll leave the solution to others.

What are you going to do next?
At the moment, Greenhouse is my focus and I want to keep it fully updated and keep improving. One aim of mine has come out of the phenomenal response I’ve had from people that have downloaded the browser. People have got in contact asking to work with me to make versions of the tool for them. This is absolutely something I want to do.

So could you make a Greenhouse app for other parts of the world?
The first thing would be finding a reliable data source. But sure, why not?

Cool. Thanks, Nick.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter

All photos courtesy Liberty in North Korea (LiNK)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow Jakob Dorof on Twitter.

Here's an unsettling NSFW short film from Canadian body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. Watch this one out after office hours, so no one will be quietly judging you as you watch a naked woman in an unbroken 9-minute short ask to have an unlicensed mastectomy from a creepy unseen doctor.

The Nest was commissioned by the International Film Festival Rotterdam for a retrospective exhibition at EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam. In the short,  Cronenberg continues to explore familiar themes—from the relationship of body and mind to the fear of authority. The film opens up with a topless Celestine (Evelyne Brochu) sitting uncomfortably on the edge of a metal table and speaking directly to one Dr. Molnar, played by Cronenberg himself. The setting, which appears to be a garage or unfinished basement, is obviously an unorthodox place to have major surgery. Celestine does not mention the setting and instead questions the doctor’s credentials and convictions. She grows more troubled as the conversation progresses, revealing the purpose of her visit, stating that she believes insects have infested her left breast. The work maintains a pitch black humor in its exchanges. Frank conversations about the value of an entomologist and ways to eradicate the nest of insects by removing her nipple and creating a sort of “hatch” for them to escape into some sort of jar they would prepare drive the emotions, if not a plot. Dr. Molnar is there to play the devil’s advocate, noting that the insects may not wish to come out. They may cower in fear or may be unable to fly. All shot in one take, point-of-view from Cronenberg’s head-cam, The Nest builds in complexity as each character’s beliefs and intentions remain uncertain in a state of reality and Cronenbergian sci-fi horror. 

The film will be online until September 14, coinciding with the end of the exhibit in Amsterdam. Watch, share, and be well. 

Jeffrey Bowers is a tall mustached guy from Ohio who's seen too many weird movies. He currently lives in Brooklyn, working as an art and film curator. He is a programmer at Tribeca Film Festival, Rooftop Films, and the Hamptons International Film Festival. He also self-publishes a super fancy mixed-media art serial called PRISM index.

Cruiser bikers doing their thing on the streets of Denver. Photo via Flickr user Nick Nunns

Like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury in the 60s, or select swaths of Brooklyn in the early 2000s, Denver’s Baker neighborhood is currently in the midst of a familiar transition: A poor but artistically vibrant community has suddenly been “discovered,” attracting big money and changes to the landscape. Now it’s poised to end up a decaffeinated version of the culture that originally made it famous. The two most iconic villains in Baker’s story are the Denver Cruiser Ride (a weekly faux-Burning Man parade of costumed bros riding the bicycle equivalent of an SUV) and the Punch Bowl Social (a Costco-size bowling alley that attracts upper-class beer-pong enthusiasts). As a Baker resident, I have a readied list of grievances against this crowd that I can deliver at a moment's notice—but whenever I do, I can't help sounding like a bigot attempting to rally a mob with my hate speech.

In 2012, I wrote an editorial for Denver’s alt weekly, Westword, calling cruiser bikes antiquated cartoon tanks, and argued that anyone who rides one was not a “serious bicyclist.” I accused them of being too drunk and dangerous on the roads, unaccustomed to the silent rules of riding a bike in the city. The Denver Cruiser ride was, to me, “the most unenlightened bunch of Philistines that our city has ever been forced to contend with,” and I self-aggrandizingly appointed myself the Carrie Nation of cyclists, stating that “someone needs to speak up and tell them to go the fuck home.”

The story received a plethora of comments, all but one or two exhibiting an impressive level of scorn and vitriol. In my eight years as a journalist, I have yet to receive hate mail with this kind of passion. One choice example: “Your writer is a fuckin’ prick. HE is the dude who is ruining cycling for everyone! I bet he’s the doucher riding in the middle of traffic like he owns the road….GTFO BRO.”

"Now you've got a target on your back you miserable piece of shit," read another.

One of the editors at Westword said that the volume and venom of the comments reminded him of reactions to immigration-policy stories. Reading these angry replies was a visceral experience for me, strengthening my resolve to despise cruiser bikes all the more. I ignored pleas for bicycle bipartisanship. Hating cruisers became a part of my identity, and I found myself smugly staring down these motorcycle-size bikes as they rode down the sidewalk (the fucking sidewalk!) of Broadway Avenue. “I don’t think I could seriously date anyone who attends the Denver Cruiser Ride,” I’d say, repeatedly bringing up the subject at dinner parties, pontificating about how they were ruining the neighborhood. 

If you replaced “cruiser bikes” with “Jews” or “blacks,” I sounded just like Edward Norton in American History X.

I wasn’t alone in this. Throughout the Baker neighborhood a general tension was felt about the Punch Bowl Social, which had become the hive of the weekly Cruiser Ride. With their 900-seat capacity and club-remix DJs, the bowling alley/restaurant was attracting swarms of wealthy meatheads who, up until then, mostly remained in the Lower Downtown neighborhood (LoDo)—the site of Real World Denver and countless disturbing anecdotes involving roofies.

Bumper stickers began popping up around the neighborhood reading “Keep LoDo Off Broadway,” referring to the main strip of Baker containing all our favorite bars, boutiques, and bookstores. The Punch Bowl and Cruisers were responsible for an increase in crime, I’d say—without any statistical proof. The neighborhood had been getting steadily more popular over the last decade, causing rent to skyrocket. One by one the musicians, artists, and writers who had made the neighborhood what it was were unable to afford it, and relocated to cheaper and more dangerous neighborhoods (which will, no doubt, experience a similar fate once the locusts drift that way in ten years time). Thankfully, we had an easily identifiable demographic toward which to channel our hate.

If you were a service-industry artist who rented a house in Baker, the changes were an economic nightmare. If you were a business owner on Broadway Avenue, the fiscal boom was worth the cultural bloodletting. Soon other bars were inviting the cruisers to come in for a pit stop, where they would guzzle down expensive cocktails like Ken & Barbie versions of the Hells Angels for an hour or two, before collectively hopping on their whale wheels and riding to the next alcoholic pillage down the road, cheering and belching all the way as “Blurred Lines” thumped from someone’s rolling speaker system.

I’d been DJing off and on at a Broadway Avenue bar for the last year or so, and was recently disappointed to learn that the bar owners had offered their hospitality to the Denver Cruiser Ride. The bar’s architecture carried a certain Bukowski romanticism, sprinkled with the Tarantino aesthetic of vintage movie posters and rockabilly danger. And now, for two hours on a Wednesday night, it would be home to a crowd who probably consider The Hunger Games a challenging piece of literature.   

As an underfunded writer with an ever-increasing rent to pay, last Wednesday I reluctantly agreed to take the Cruiser Ride DJ gig.

I arrived early, setting up my gear before the troops arrived, then went outside to smoke the customary joint in an alley. But once outside I stopped, noticing a Denver Policeman foot-patrolling the area, a phenomenon I'd never witnessed there before. Damn cruisers, bringing cops into our neighborhood, I thought, walking the extra block to another alley to smoke. (Despite what you may think, public consumption of marijuana is even more illegal in Denver than it used to be.)

Killing time while flooding my skull with THC, I read a recent editorial by Ann Coulter on my phone, where the manically divisive conservative argued that America’s increased interest in soccer was due to immigrants and socialism and “can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay.”

“If more ‘Americans’ are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law,” Coulter writes. “I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.”

The essay was wildly, beautifully, unintentionally ridiculous, perfectly illustrating the transparent xenophobia and racism of those who fight against the inevitable shifts of national demographics. It reminded me of a bit I’d seen days earlier on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, in which the British comedian strung together clips of Europeans expressing anti-immigrant sentiments.

“The French want to preserve their way of life and don’t want to adopt the culture’s, traditions, and customs of these foreigners,” one woman grumbled.

“You haven’t seen crime yet, but if you let the Bulgarians come here, you will,” lectured another man with a stabby finger.

“Me and my wife used to go out on a Saturday night, have a few drinks with the locals,” complained an Englishman in one vintage clip. “We can’t go down to the locals anymore—they’re full-up with noisey foreigners.”

My blood went cold and I dropped my smoldering joint on the ground, realizing (perhaps through a THC-induced widening of neurochemistry) that I sounded exactly like these bigots whenever I moaned about cruiser bikes and the Punch Bowl Social.

They drive up crime.

They drink too much and can’t be trusted on the road.

They caused the increase in rent (the economic equivalent of “driving down property value” for the renting-classes).

They should go back to LoDo, where they belong.

Walking back into the bar and turning on my DJ equipment, I looked out at the crowd of Denver Cruiser Ride patrons that were beginning to file in. Scanning them with my judgy eyes, I realized that a lot of them probably weren’t the wealthy residents I’d originally pegged them to be—they just dressed as though they wanted to be mistaken for entitled brats. This made me think of Arthur Miller’s 1946 novel, Focus, where a Gentile man buys glasses that cause him to be mistaken for a Jew, which results in him being ostracized while living in an anti-semitic part of New York City.

The persecution he endures would be reprehensible whether he was Jewish or not, but the fact that a new pair of glasses can inspire all kinds of assumptions against his character highlights how trivial, reactionary, and childishly dangerous a racist or anti-immigrant mentality can be. And how easy it is to get blindly caught up in it.

Suddenly I felt like the diner rednecks in Easy Rider, who sized up Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper with their long-hair and beads, calling them inhuman “troublemakers” who should be “put in a cage,” and threatening that they wouldn’t make it out of the city-limits. The crewcut diners eventually catch up with the hippies late at night, murdering one and injuring the other two in their sleep.

Thankfully, I’d never encouraged any kind of violence against the cruisers or Punch Bowl patrons, and would gladly condemn anyone who did as a petty asshole. (Admittedly, I have daydreamed of spraying them with my garden hose when they ride past my house.) Still, this epiphany broke my heart. Having grown up in a conservative, working-class town where I used to wear make-up and drop ecstasy before sauntering into the local cowboy bars, I always identified with the hippies in Easy Rider, not the intolerant bigots.      

Earlier in the day, I’d been told that the cruiser-crowd had been requesting the DJs play more “party music,” instead of the obscure indie and psych-rock they’d been spinning each week. I’d whined about this at the time, citing the indignity of a budding professional music critic like me succumbing to the shallow tastes of these people. But once the bar was full and I began flipping through LPs, I found that our musical ven-diagrams were more intimate than assumed.

There was plenty of blues, punk, and country that I’m sure they wouldn’t have cared for, but I also had Jay-Z, Daft Punk, Outkast, and the Gorillaz—party music for everyone. They may not have been familiar with my Lykke Li, Janelle Monae, or Yelle selections, but they danced to them just the same.   

The bar was typically empty when I’d DJ on Wednesday nights, but now there was a large crowd having a blast to the music I’d picked out for them (a heartwarming dynamic for even the most bitter of DJs).

Suddenly the divisions between myself and the cruiser scene began to appear a bit silly. They ride a different type of bike than I do, attend different concerts, order fancier drinks and have different social rituals. The classist in me wanted to point out that they have more money, and hence drive cars for transportation and bikes only for fun, but it was difficult to sustain this attitude while looking into the mass of humanity assembled on that dancefloor.

After riding my bike home later that night, I looked up the old story I’d written about the scourge of Denver Cruisers, attempting to recapture the sharp antagonism I’d once held for these modern yuppies. Scrolling through the comments—so venomous, so hungry to despise—I came across one reader with a very practical message of diplomacy for both myself and my detractors: 

“I have had two road bikes and now have a cruiser,” she wrote. “It has a four speed hub. After reading your article I think we should have a course on writing without the negative comments. There is too much hate and egotistical correspondence on the internet. Perhaps we should just start being nice to each other on the roadways. I have seen bikes blocking the roads on Saturday morning rides. They are courteous and wave me by when the way is clear. Most of the cruiser rides are not recreational users of the road. Some of us haul groceries or ride to work. Please play nice as we are all in the same sandbox."

In the hope of never feeling like Ann Coulter or an English racist again, I will try.

I promise.

Josiah Hesse is a journalist from Denver, Colorado, covering the local music, comedy, marijuana, and political landscapes. Follow him on Twitter.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

Edinburgh might have the castle, the parliament, the Japanese tourists, the neo-classical architecture, and the advantageously low murder rate, but Glasgow has all the fun. Scotland’s largest city is pretty drunk, yes, but we also punch above our weight culturally, with a dynamic music scene, one of the world's most iconic art schools, and some of the best pubs and clubs in Britain. So taps aff ya dafties, 'cos here we fucking go.

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?
   Self-Important Sectarian Bigots | Glaswegian Authority Issues | Immigration
– WHERE TO EAT
– WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?
– WHERE TO DRINK
– WHERE TO STAY
– LGBT GLASGOW
– 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

Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHERE TO PARTY

The beauty of Glasgow nightlife is that most clubs exist on the awkward Z-shape formed by Sauchiehall Street, Union Street, and the Clydeside, so you can roll between it all—the last, desperate gasps of indie, top 40 R&B, taps aff techno, eccie-fuelled happy hardcore and the welcoming thud of underground house—in less than 20 minutes. What it also means, though, is that any arsehole can pop his head in, so Glasgow tries to get round this by booking DJs to play the smallest, loudest spots possible.

One of the finer small, loud spots that people have been diving into in recent years is La Cheetah. They say the capacity's 200 (I swear I've seen nearly double), but you suffer the ceiling drips and disco-tarred shoes because it comes with Funktion 1 as standard and books heroes like Theo Parrish, Moodymann, and Legowelt. That, and you can get a drink for £2 ($3). And you wonder why we want independence.

Though not strictly in Glasgow, any house and techno fan worth their chip-in has been to Club 69: the notorious basement club under a curry house in Paisley. Seriously, if Paisley didn’t have a cathedral and a university, it would probably put 69 on the tourist brochure, it's that fucking good. Punters are bussed out from the center for low-key parties that, since the 90s, have been the old guard’s bragging rights and the newcomers' initiation ritual. Basically, you haven’t seen acid house played live until you’ve seen dozens of kids with eccie masalas in their guts sweating aggressively at a DJ shoved inside a chicken cage.

Glasgow’s licensing laws mean that alcohol is only served in shops until 10PM, in bars till midnight and clubs till 3AM. What this means, other than Dial-A-Booze making a killing on £30 ($50) bottles of Morgan Spiced rum, is that afterparty culture reigns supreme in Glasgow. One of the few illegal club spots to have gone legit is the Unit. It’s better now as well—honest. No more dogs, corrugated iron, and police shutdowns. It’s got lights and everything. One night, make the trip over the motorway. It’s a feat of communal endeavor to keep-the-fuck-going that Glasgow relishes in.

Because of the quirks of our subway system—it's one line that circles through the city center, South Side, and West End—subcrawls have become pretty popular, particularly among students. The rules of the subcrawl are simple: buy an all-day ticket for £4 ($7), get off at every stop (there are 15), and have a drink at the first pub you see. Things usually get interesting once you arrive in the less-than-salubrious environs of Ibrox, Govan, and Kinning Park, and by the time you get to the later stops, you'll be doing well to make it past the bouncers, but if you've got ten hours and a liver to kill, it's pretty fun.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH DRUGS?

Although it may not be the case for much longer, Glasgow is still a part of the UK, and so our drug laws are the same as everywhere else in Britain. Weed is still technically illegal, but the only people who give a shit are passing police officers. There’s not a huge amount within town, though, and unlike many cities, being offered drugs on the street is very rare in Glasgow.

Doormen here are notoriously strict, and anyone caught—or even just suspected of—taking drugs in a pub or club will be thrown out. The Arches club came close to losing its license back in February, when a 17-year-old schoolgirl collapsed and died after taking a bad pill on the premises. This came in the wake of a similar scare last summer, when green "Rolex" pills killed six people around Glasgow in the space of a couple of months, so people should exercise real caution when putting stuff in their body.

Crack and meth are rare, but Glasgow was once renowned—if that’s the right word—for being the heroin capital of the UK. That title always had more to do with the quantity of addicts than the quality of product, though—one dead user tested positive for anthrax a few years ago. In any case, most Glaswegians are under no illusions about the "glamour" of heroin, and it’s certainly not regarded as socially acceptable, so don't do it, basically. And frankly, how awful a cunt must you be if you want to spend your holiday on smack?

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POLITICS, PROTESTS, AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

SELF-IMPORTANT SECTARIAN BIGOTS

Religion has been in decline in Scotland for years—just 54 percent of the population identify as Christian, down from 65 percent in 2001—but because it’s become so entangled with football and politics, we seem unable to rid ourselves of its sectarian trappings, even though many on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide will only ever enter a church to be married or buried.

The most obvious manifestation of this occurs every summer, when, for a host of arcane and impossible-to-defend reasons, a certain stripe of Glasgow's Protestant community takes it upon themselves to dust off their woodwind instruments, dress up like dicks, and parade through the city to commemorate William of Orange's victory over the Catholic King James II in a battle that took place (in Ireland) so long ago, you'd struggle to believe they can count so high using only their fingers. These parades are known as Orange walks, and not only are they offensive and inflammatory to Catholics (particularly when their route passes through traditionally Catholic areas), but they’re an embarrassment to everyone else who lives here: Traffic slows to a crawl to accommodate these lamentable conga lines of self-important bigots, while hangovers citywide are exacerbated by their flute-based hymns of hatred wafting through open windows.

Rangers and Celtic, the local football teams whose rivalry has become symbolic of—and symbiotic with—the tension between Protestants and Catholics, have both made efforts to curb the singing of sectarian songs on matchdays, but progress is slow. You’ll still hear Rangers fans going on about being “up to our knees in Fenian blood," for example, while members of Celtic’s "Green Brigade" of ultras still sing pro-IRA songs. Sometimes, of course, we are able to laugh at the pettiness of it all: A few years ago, in the Rangers-supporting stronghold of Larkhall, the local branch of Subway was forced to repaint its storefront black, because locals interpreted the original color—green—as a tacit expression of support for Irish republicanism (no, seriously).

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Photo by Liam Turbett

POLITICS, PROTESTS, AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

GLASWEGIAN AUTHORITY ISSUES

Glasgow has always been highly politicized: Russian communists once believed that the British revolution would begin on the streets of Glasgow, and it almost did during the battle of George Square in 1919, when the army was called in to deal with 60,000 Red Clydeside workers who briefly managed to raise the red flag over the city chambers. Seventy years later, similar numbers took to the streets in protest against the poll tax and were ultimately victorious in repealing it (to the surprise of absolutely no one, Glasgow was one of the first cities in the UK to host a Margaret Thatcher "death party" last year).

For years, the relationship between protesters and police remained cordial, but with the gradual erosion of civil liberties in the UK, that’s changed: Anti-austerity activists at the University of Glasgow were forcibly evicted from (and then allowed back into) the building they were peacefully occupying, and a few weeks later, a royal wedding street party in Kelvingrove park (less a celebration of Will and Kate’s nuptials than a collective thumbing-of-the-nose at the city’s stringent new legislation regarding public assembly) was ruined by violence. The most common protests these days are against austerity cuts, fascist political organizations, and sexism.

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Photo by Chris O'Neil

POLITICS, PROTESTS, AND JUST HOW RACIST IS EVERYONE HERE?

IMMIGRATION

Immigration is on the rise here, but it's hardly a new phenomenon: During the potato famine of the mid 19th century, the arrival of thousands of Irish Catholics into a city that was overwhelmingly Protestant became a source of huge civil unrest, and even today, tensions linger between the knuckle-headed on both sides. The truth, of course, is that Glasgow's history and culture was tremendously enriched by that influx—we've got them to thank for Arthur Conan Doyle, Billy Connolly, Frankie Boyle, and Celtic's 1967 European Cup win—and while only about 2 percent of Glaswegians self-identify as "ethnically Irish" today, that figure doesn't come close to telling the true story of their impact.

There are loads of people of Pakistani origin, many of whom can trace their roots back to the first wave of arrivals in the 1950s, after Pakistan won its independence from the British Empire. Those early generations faced the same problems here—suspicion, discrimination, and lack of employment—as they did in the rest of the UK, but today, Pakistanis play an increasingly important role in business and local politics—many, in fact, have become ardent supporters of Scottish independence.

We also have around 10,000 Chinese, who arrived after the collapse of the agricultural economy under Mao and settled in the Garnethill area, where our very own Chinatown is located (don't get your hopes up: It's literally just a supermarket with a Paifang facade) and similar numbers of Polish and African immigrants. The question of Scottish independence will have a huge impact on Glasgow's future demography: If we vote in favor of it, the SNP plans to introduce a far more liberal and open immigration policy.

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WHERE TO EAT

Sarti
42 Renfield Street, 121 Bath Street, and 133 Wellington Street
There’s little to choose between these three family-run Italian restaurants, which all offer great food, friendly service, and some Italian shit strewn around the place.

The Squid & The Whale
372 Great Western Road
OK, so it takes its name from a minor mumblecore “classic” and calls itself a "cantina," but honestly, it’s really not that annoying. The food (a mix of Mexican, American, and Creole), the extensive selection of beers, and the decent DJs make it pretty fucking real, actually.

Stereo
22 Renfield Lane
Glasgow has three dedicated vegan restaurants—the 78 and Stereo’s sister establishment, Mono, are the others—but this place gets the nod for its tapas menu.

The Ubiquitous Chip
12 Ashton Lane
Traditional Scottish fare that's well worth the expense. Like every other establishment on Ashton Lane, however, it crowds up quickly.

Hanoi Bike Shop
8 Ruthven Lane
This West End Vietnamese joint is becoming insanely popular—it's relatively cheap, a bit weird, and somehow it made its way onto Beyonce's Instagram recently. Which, frankly, is probably the sexiest thing to ever happen in Scotland.

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Photo by John Beck

WHAT DO LOCALS EAT?

Chippies
Sadly, Glasgow is no longer the heart-disease capital of the UK, but we’ll still deep-fry anything with molecules. Old-fashioned fish-and-chip shops are growing scarce these days, having been edged out by the inexorable rise of "street food," but places like the Blue Lagoon and the Philadelphia still do suppers so greasy they’ll turn your guts translucent.

Buckfast
Commotion Lotion. Wreck the Hoose Juice. Coatbridge Table Wine. Like Beelzebub, whose viscous micturition it tastes like, it’s been distilled from, Buckfast goes by many names. This highly-caffeinated tonic wine, brewed by monks in Devonshire and blamed by politicians for most of Scotland’s societal ills, has an awful reputation, yet we stubbornly go on consuming it, without irony or apology. Why? Because Buckfast gets you fucked fast.  

Square Sausage
For some reason, non-Scots always seem to regard square sausage—or Lorne sausage, to give it its proper name—as some kind of outrageous affront to the principles of meat geometry. The appeal for us, however, has always been quite simple: Stick a slice in a buttered roll, add a fried egg, slather some ketchup on top, and hey, presto—you've got a burger you can eat for breakfast.

Munchy Box
Ever find yourself standing in a takeaway thinking, Chips or naan? Onion rings or pakora? Kebab meat or chicken tikka? Glaswegians don't. For us, where fast food is concerned, there is no "or," there is only "and," which is how the munchy box—a cardboard pizza box stuffed to the gills with all of the above, and containing as many as 3,000 calories—came into being. It usually includes a desultory scraping of salad, but it's bad form to eat that decorative shit.

Irn-Bru
OK, there are a few hard-and-fast rules to stick by when it comes to consuming Scotland's national soft drink. Cans (chilled, obviously) are acceptable if you've no other option, but never drink it from plastic bottles—it just doesn't taste right. A 75cl glass bottle—known as a "ginger boatil"—is always the optimum delivery method, and if you're hungover, it's a near-guaranteed cure.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHERE TO DRINK

The West End isn’t great for clubbing: The Queen Margaret Union is a ball ache to get into unless you’re with a member, ditto for the Glasgow University Union—which is historically populated by rugby-playing misogynists anyway—and Viper is pretty much the last-chance saloon. It does, however, have some great pubs.

The Halt Bar (160 Woodlands Road) is a traditional Glasgow local, where old soaks and young folks commingle happily, and which hosts a range of popular open-mic nights. The Stravaigin (28 Gibson Street) is a little younger, hipper, and—crucially—open until 1AM, which gives you an extra hour of binging time, should you need it.

The Oran Mor, a converted church at the top of Byres Road, is pricey and often overcrowded, but you should try and make it to one of their "A Play, a Pie, and a Pint" events, where, for the reasonable sum of £11 ($20), you will get exactly what's advertized.

Over on the other side of Kelvingrove Park, the Finnieston area has undergone a remarkable gentrification process. Ten years ago it was all slumlords and understocked 24-hour shops; today, it boasts boutiques, bistros and cool little bars like Big Slope (36 Kelvingrove Street) and Lebowskis (1008 Argyle Street).

And so to the city center. You’re going to end up on Sauchiehall Street at some point, so you may as well familiarize yourself with the place. Firstly, it’s pronounced Saw-kee-hall, and the eastern end is basically a shopping precinct, but as you head west towards Charing Cross, the bars, clubs, and venues take over. The best of these are probably Nice 'n' Sleazy’s (421 Sauchiehall Street)—a Glaswegian institution renowned for its well-curated jukebox, preponderance of local indie luminaries, and selling Buckfast by the glass—and Broadcast, which is literally next door and caters to much the same crowd (there are more than enough indie kids to go around in Glasgow). Sleazy’s is open till 3AM every night while Broadcast only opens late from Thursday to Saturday, but both offer live music, DJs, and serve great food.

Finally, if you’re looking for something a little more different, try the The Grand Ole Opry (2 Govan Road). It’s a country and western club, but there’s no dress code, and the booze is criminally cheap—always a perk of partying with the senior citizenry. On Gun Club nights, the septuagenarian alphas will assert dominance over their rivals by demonstrating their prowess with a six-shooter, and once this bizarre ritual is over, everyone stands in a circle and sings "Dixie" while solemnly folding a confederate flag. It’s profoundly fucking weird.

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Photo by Jonathan Tollan

WHERE TO STAY

The usual chain hotels are all present in Glasgow city center, but if you’re looking for somewhere affordable and well located and a bed that doesn’t feel like several salarymen have topped themselves in it, your best bet is to look elsewhere. The citizenM (60 Renfrew Street) is great and rooms are sometimes as little as £55 ($95) a night. If you’re looking to go cheaper still, the Euro Hostel (318 Clyde Street) is basic, but at £10 ($17) a night for a dorm or £20 ($34) for a private (en-suite) room, basic is more than you deserve.

The Art House (129 Bath Street), The Grand Central Hotel (99 Gordon Street), and the Blythswood Square Hotel (11 Blythswood Square) are good options for those with a fatter wallet, and anyone looking to base themselves in the West End could do worse than the Hilton Grosvenor (1 Grosvenor Terrace), which looks onto the botanic gardens and is handy for Byres Road and Great Western Road. If your money-to-sense equilibrium is really out of whack, Hotel Du Vin (1 Devonshire Gardens) is the city’s swankiest destination.

One thing to bear in mind about all these places, of course, is that Glasgow is hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014, and during that two-week period every local hotelier and Airbnb hustler with an empty broom cupboard or spare coffin will be out to bleed you dry.

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Photo by Flickr user Spider.Dog

LGBT GLASGOW

Back in January, UKIP's Scottish chairman fumed that Glasgow was "for gays, Catholics, and communists," an endorsement so ringing we should have put it in letters 20ft high on a billboard over the Kingston Bridge. Yet while we’ve come a long way in a short space of time—homosexuality was only decriminalized in Scotland in 1980—the gay scene here is still relatively small and concentrated around a few long-running local institutions.

The Polo Lounge and AXM (formerly Bennets) are the biggest and best-known of these, and handily, they’re just around the corner from each other, a few streets south of George Square. Wednesdays are student nights, and they’re generally the most popular.  The Polo is perhaps the more upmarket of the two, and it also operates the Riding Room, which hosts live music, burlesque shows, and magicians. Delmonica’s is another stalwart, though it’s more of a bar than a club, and is famous for its karaoke nights.

With the addition of Speakeasy and FHQ, the city’s first (and so far only) female-only club, as well as Lock Up Your Daughters, a local collective who publish queer zines, host filmmaking workshops and stage a club night at the Flying Duck, the scene is growing, although gay clubs in Glasgow are more about camp, easygoing fun than bacchanalian debauchery. There was an infamous night at the Arches (it’s always the Arches) a few years ago when Glasgow briefly turned into a Police Academy movie and two policemen on a routine inspection walked in on a 30-strong orgy and were mistaken for strippers, but that sort of thing is pretty rare. Homophobia, however, isn’t much of a problem: gay bars have been a fixture of Glaswegian nightlife for more than 30 years—some, like the Waterloo, have been serving the community for even longer than that—and even the most yokel-minded ned generally knows better than to start any trouble.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

WHERE TO HANG OUT WHEN YOU'RE SOBER(ISH)

Kelvingrove Park
In summer (not that we get much of one), Glaswegians often gather here to eat, drink, and make merry. The police tend to be officious pricks about the drinking part—it’s been illegal in public places since 1996—but if you can find an out-of-the-way spot, there’s no better way to spend a sunny day.

The West End
Glasgow's bohemian enclave is really a second, more chilled-out city centre, its skyline dominated not by shopping malls and nine-story Cineworlds but the gothic spires of the university and Kelvingrove art gallery. Despite the continual presence of pissed students and Waitrose mums, the West End never loses its charm.

The South Side
You'll probably spend most of your time in the West End and city center by default, but it's worth heading South to check out the Burrell art collection, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's House for an Art Lover, and the Shawlands area, which contains plenty of good bars and restaurants.

Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow's art and music scenes are what attract all those North American students (and their parents' money) to the city, and despite the recent fire at the School of Art, things are more vibrant and exciting on those fronts than they have been in years. You'll encounter all sorts there: geniuses, weirdos, Marxists, crustafarians, conspiracy theorists, even the occasional normal. You don't even have to be studying there to hang out: unlike other student unions in Glasgow, the Vic is open to anyone, and many people who've never even taken a class end up becoming weirdly attached to the place.

The Barras
"Hang out" might be a bit strong, but it's certainly worth paying a visit to this East End fleamarket, if only because it's one of the last authentic "Old Glasgow" landmarks. It's gone downhill in recent years, but you can still find a bargain or two, and the adjacent Barrowland Ballroom is the best live music venue in Scotland.

Mono
A bar that’s also a venue, that’s also a vegan restaurant, that’s also one of Glasgow’s best record shops, Mono is beloved by local artists and musicians. The staff can be a bit up themselves, but if you pulled pints in a place like this, you probably would be, too.

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HOW TO AVOID GETTING RIPPED OFF AND BEATEN UP

Glasgow has the highest homicide and violent-crime rate in the UK, but that statistic is slightly misleading: knife crime, which was once widespread enough to qualify as a civic pastime, has dropped by 67 percent since 2007, and homicides are also decreasing at a rate faster than the national average. Are there parts of the city that would make your eyes pop out on stalks? Sure, but the chances of you accidentally wandering into places like Govan, Possilpark, or Castlemilk are pretty slim.

The city center can be rowdy, but it’s rarely unsafe: Sauchiehall Street, for example, has a bad reputation, but even at weekends, the only real danger you’re likely to encounter is a pissed hen party squawking at you from the window of a passing fire-engine limo. More troubling is the recent spate of sex attacks on women, most of them occurring on the South Side, which prompted thousands of residents to march through the area in protest. The attacks aren’t related, but some of the suspects are still at large, so obviously don’t stumble around pissed on your own.

Finally, Glasgow has a longstanding problem with poverty, and if you’re in the city center, you will almost certainly be panhandled by beggars, alcoholics, and drug addicts. Whether or not you want to give them money is entirely up to you, but don't feel threatened by them. If you sense anyone getting pushy or aggressive, just walk away.

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Photo by Jonathan Tollan

HOW NOT TO BE A SHITTY TOURIST

In the same year that Glasgow was ranked as the UK’s most violent city, we were also voted its friendliest, and we do tend to be quite welcoming of tourists, even if we secretly question the wisdom of going on holiday to somewhere world-renowned for its terrible weather. Life is literally too short (North Korea has a higher life expectancy than certain parts of the city) for us to get too worked up about the behavior of outsiders, but we do find some stereotypes more offensive than others. As a general rule, therefore, try not to make a big deal about the following: deep-fried Mars bars; how much prettier Edinburgh is; your own nation’s superiority at football; how creepy the Krankies are; the length of time since our last fix... you know, the basic stuff.

There isn’t space to get into the finer points of "Glesga patter" (the local dialect) here, but it's always worth remembering that the word "cunt"—whilst verboten everywhere else in the English-speaking world—can actually be a term of familiarity, even endearment, in Glasgow. Should someone refer to you as such (e.g. "Here mate, ken the way tae tha Necropolis? This cunt's askin''), don't be offended, just go with it.

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Photo by Patrick D Bortz

PEOPLE AND PLACES TO AVOID

Jakeys
Whereas junkies will simply sidle up to you, ask for a weirdly specific amount of change, and be on their way, jakeys—older, drunker, and more persistent—want to be your friend. They'll tell bad jokes, bum your cigarettes, regale you with boring tales of their night's exploits, make some well-intentioned-but-kinda-lecherous comment about the female members of your group… and then ask for a weirdly-specific amount of change. Basically, if a pissed old man taps you on the shoulder and says, "Knock knock" just shout something like, "ICH KANST NICHT SPRECHEN SIE ENGLISCH!" and run away.

Neds
Neds are the classic Glaswegian archetype, and you'll find them pretty much everywhere: aimlessly roaming the streets in packs, pissing in your garden, cruising around town blasting Avicii with the windows down, giddily writing "FANNY" on your windshield the morning after a snowfall, you name it. However, city center and West End neds, having been exposed to art students and gay people, tend to be worldlier and more tolerant than their provincial kin, and if they do decide to engage you, it’ll almost always be in a mockingly verbal, rather than physical, manner. Don’t rise to the bait and you’ll be fine. The trade-off is Guy Fawkes Night—it belongs to them, like The Purge with Roman candles.

Rangers and Celtic Fans
The Tartan Army (supporters of the Scottish national team) are awesome, and fans of Partick Thistle—the city's "third" team—are chill too. Old Firm fans, however, are a fucking nightmare. It was bad enough when Rangers and Celtic were half-decent footballing forces, but in these bleak days of Scottish football, their rivalry boils down to a bald man and a severed head bickering over a broken comb, and each set of supporters have only their hatred of each other to define them. Owing to Rangers’ recent financial turmoil and subsequent relegation, they haven't played each other for more than two years now, but when they do, the city center will inevitably become a warzone.

The North Side
The similarly poverty-stricken East End has improved in recent years, but despite pockets of regeneration in places like Ruchill, vast swathes of North Glasgow remain post-industrial, post-employment, and, in many cases, post-hope shitholes.

The Merchant City
The Merchant City was built on the profits of slavery, but these days, it turns a profit by overcharging aspirational drinkers and diners, whose main requirement for a good night out is being able to boast about spotting minor Scottish showbiz entities. If you're not going for the gay clubs, avoid.

The Savoy Centre
Here’s the thing: As a Glaswegian, I’m glad that the Savoy still exists, because by rights, our oldest, shabbiest shopping center ought to be a multi-story Westfield Shopping Thingy by now. Its persistence is a tribute to the purchasing power of the city’s pensioners, who stubbornly haunt its tawdry tat stalls, beauty salons, and Chinese-medicine centers like ghosts of a bygone age. But let's face it: Unless you've got an urban renewal photography Tumblr, you don't want to go anywhere near it.

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Photo by Jonathan Tollan

TIPPING AND HANDY PHRASES

Tipping
Much the same as in London and the rest of the UK—10 percent in restaurants and taxis—except we tend to give homeless people money more often because we're not yet as frigid and as heartless as the English.

Handy Phrases
Hello: Hawl
Goodbye: Catch ye after
Please: Gies it, fuck sake
Thank you: Sound
Idiot: Dafty
Yes, I was very drunk: Aye, I were mad wae it
A good person: Goodcunt
Someone: Somecunt
Everyone: Everycunt

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A YOUTUBE PLAYLIST OF QUESTIONABLE LOCAL MUSIC

This playlist should be enough to persuade you to sack off Edinburgh for Glasgow.

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VICE CITY MAP

So there you go. When you get here, don't blame me if you have a shitty time—we've done our best.

Love,

VICE Glasgow

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Photo via US National Archives and Records Administration

Andrew Worthington was born in 1987 in Akron, Ohio. His first novel Walls comes out on Wednesday from Coping Mechanisms. He lives in New York City with his girlfriend. What we like about his writing is that it feels honest. He doesn't ham it up, or try to capitalize on his idiosyncrasies. He also has some weird affects that would have been beaten out of him in a creative writing class, or by a New York City book editor, if he'd been in contact with one. He uses big words and is occasionally unguarded. In short, he's a natural writer, telling a story because he has to—he's not somebody reading the latest so-and-so and seeing a reflection of his own life, and then copying the so-and-so's shape. 

I spent most of the time during that week thinking about those things. We split into groups to follow one of the instructors on hikes, and when Julia wasn't in my group I waited at the intersections of trails hoping to glimpse her baby-blue jacket. I sat in my top bunk in the camping lodge, slowly humping the mattress. I had seen it in the movies. Wet patches showed up on my underwear. I noticed in the morning, but I was too tired to care, because I hadn’t fallen asleep until two hours before.

Most of the guys wanted Samantha Terry, as I had expected from the start. Initially I was intrigued to hear them vocalize it in a really roundabout way, through games of truth-or-dare and other recess excuses for gossip and disclosure, although eventually I became annoyed for the same reason. It was also almost exclusively guys who announced their likes. Brian, the most talented basketball player and the presumed prince of our grade, had pronounced his like for Samantha Terry, the presumed princess of our grade. Unfortunately, his best friend, Kyle, had the same crush, and he decided to announce it soon after Brian. I offered what I considered to be risky hints about Julia Darrows, but everyone was so lost in their dawning pubescent terror that what I considered a big deal didn’t even register for them.

They had us play a game every day during free time. It was called scouting. It was like hide-and-go-seek, except that the seeker had to stand in one place, and the hiders could only hide in a certain area. Most of us hid behind trees, and the goal was to sit still and not be seen. I don’t know how any of us lost. CVEES was the week that we learned more than ever before about nature: our own nature. None of us went home that week feeling that we had gotten what we wanted.

In the weeks after CVEES, I began writing my first journal. At first, it consisted mostly of inane lists, and poems inspired by Will Smith. Eventually, I dedicated a page in my journal to Julia Darrow. I titled it “The Julia Page.” It was actually three and a half pages long. I wrote about my previous likes, including one to our fourth-grade teacher the year before, as well as a detailed history of my thoughts on Julia. It restated much of what I have already said, but as I saw those thoughts on the page—“The Julia Page”—they stopped bouncing around my skull. I kept the journal under my mattress, but I knew I would let someone see it. I showed it to Nicole Delmedico, who worked the same crossing-guard shift that I did, and whom I considered to be a close, nonsexual friend. I approached her locker, where she was putting on her crossing guard uniform.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It is something I wrote,” I said, “I would just like to hear what you think about it.”

“OK…”

She stood there reading it. She didn’t make a facial expression the entire time. She seemed to be concentrating. I wanted her to smile or frown or raise her eyebrows or grunt a laugh, I didn’t care which, but I couldn’t stand the blankness. When she finished she folded the pages and held them at her side.

“This is crazy,” she said, and she placed the pages in her hoodie pocket.

“Give it back.”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

I grabbed at her back pocket, but she shifted away. I kept trying to reach it, and she kept moving away. Our old second-grade teacher, Mrs. Black, came out her classroom.

“What are you people doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Nicole, and she began walking away.

I smiled mechanically at Mrs. Black and began walking backward, before turning around to follow Nicole. She was outside, telling the other two crossing guards about it as they walked to the four-way stop. I ground my teeth. When I said hello to the other two, it was evident that they knew that I knew that they knew something I didn’t want them to know. I hoped that Nicole wouldn’t do anything more with “The Julia Page,” but I also knew that wasn’t likely, and I was right. She gave it to Kyle, who shared it with Brian, who shared it with my close friend John. I sat next to the three of them at the lunch table as they talked about me in the third person. They were making plans to type it up and print out copies, and then sell those copies. I realized I was faced with a choice: Either I could tell on them, and lose their friendships, or I could go along with it, and lose my dignity. I decided to go along with it. John was the only one of them with a computer at his house, and so his parent’s dining room became the headquarters for the operation. At first, they seemed surprised with my willingness to help them with the project, but I acted like it didn’t matter.

“Are you sure you won’t get in trouble?” asked John’s mom. We were huddled around his family’s computer.

“Yeah,” said John. He stopped typing and turned to her briefly. “He’s sitting right here. He’s fine with it, aren’t you, Tom?”

“Yeah, I’m fine with it,” I said.

They typed up “The Julia Page,” and I also gave them my lists and poems to publish too.  It was agreed that we would charge $7 per copy and would split all the profits four ways. I didn’t take into account the fact that I was both the author and a partner in their venture, and they didn’t either. We sold 13 copies that Monday before the AM school bell even rang: $7 a copy, $91. I had a feeling that it was selling too fast. I started making restrictions on whom it would be sold to, and, of course, that only helped to increase its popularity.

Word of “The Julia Page” spread across the lunchroom like the plague, and by the time recess came it had scandalized our playground, infecting even the introverts who sat by the fence under the shade. I should have quarantined myself the moment I put the pen to the page. Julia Darrow knew about it. I saw her reading it by the jungle gym. I only glanced at her a couple times, but I knew she was gazing at me with dizzy anger. I couldn’t think. The worst part was I didn’t care. I wrote these things, and there wasn’t any slander, and if there was, it was against myself. I looked over to the other side of the playground and saw Kyle fighting with Danny, whom I wasn’t friends with yet at the time. Apparently, Kyle had refused to sell a copy to Danny. Now Danny was ripping off Kyle’s shirt. Recess ended, and our gym teacher Mr. Guzman came over, and then he grabbed Danny’s shirt. I made my way to the lines that were forming for our return to class. Mr. Guzman escorted Danny and Kyle into the building. Our teacher Mr. Blair came out and opened the doors and we filed inside. I locked eyes with him, although his spectacles were in the way, which only intensifies the act of locking eyes with another person.

“Mr. Maddox,” he said, “Can I have a word?”

I shrugged. He pulled a copy of “The Julia Page” out of his back pocket. 

“Can you explain this?”

“No. And I didn’t do anything wrong.”

He raised his eyebrows and shook his head. His face got red and he motioned for me to go to the empty art room across the hall. I looked at the art on the walls; it must have been from kindergarteners because they couldn’t even color within the lines.

A few minutes later, I was joined by John, Kyle, and Brian. Mr. Blair came in and slammed the door. “What the hell is this?”

None of us said anything.

“You wrote this Mr. Maddox?”

“I did.”

“And you let them sell it?”

“I am selling it too.”

“You guys never thought you were doing anything wrong?”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” yelled Kyle.

“How much money did you guys make?”

“About $168,” said John.

“Where is it?”

“It’s our money,” said Kyle. “We earned it.”

“Did you know it is illegal to sell materials on school property without permission?”

“That’s not true,” said Brian.

“Where is it?”

“It’s right here, in my pocket,” said Kyle. He pointed to a pocket in his cargo shorts.

Mr. Blair walked over and ripped the button off the pocket. He put the money in his shirt pocket. We were sent to the principal’s office. The principal must have gotten sick of seeing us in her office, because she left soon after we arrived. Mr. Blair sat in her office. He called us in one by one. I was last.

“I see a guy before me with so much potential,” said Mr. Blair. “But you’re just wasting it all away. You have no ambition.”

“I do,” I said. “I don’t know. Whatever.”

He shook his head. Whatever. I was glad when the day was over. I didn’t feel guilty. I felt embarrassed. We got detention. My parents got called. I got grounded. I didn’t care about getting disciplined, but what I did care about was that the topics in “The Julia Page” were discussed so abstractly and so remotely by the people who were telling me it was wrong. It was as if the problem was immediately evident and there was no need to discuss whether it was a problem, and why. Erections were never discussed. Romance was never discussed. It seemed like the problem was more in their own unwillingness to acknowledge what had occurred.

The Columbine shootings took place a week later. I didn’t find out until two days after, because I was so distracted with the fallout from “The Julia Page.” Everyone wondered what could make anyone do that. Theories were postulated, but everyone wanted to just not think about it, to just make sure it didn’t happen in our town. For the next ten years, we had school shooting drills every month or so. During those drills, we turned off the classroom lights and sat in the corner and the principal spoke in code over the loud speakers.

Nicole Delmedico apologized to me for handing over “The Julia Page” to Kyle. She said she had liked him, and had hoped that would make him like her. It hadn’t. I called Julia 19 times one day until her father answered. I asked for Julia. He put her on the phone. I asked her if she wanted to go out. She said OK. We never went out. We never really even talked. I was dating her but nothing happened. The next fall I didn’t talk to her at junior high, either. She started wearing nicer clothes. She started putting on makeup. I wasn’t as drawn to her after that. One day at lunch someone asked me what had happened with us.

“We broke up,” I said.

“Who broke up with who?”

“We just broke up.”

“So she broke up with you, right?”

“No.”

I looked at her across the lunchroom, but I didn’t stare.

I constantly had to find something new to look at, or else my eyes got sore.

Last February, stylist and producer Jamie Ortega published the inaugural issue of Sumzine. It's named after the concept that everything we buy should add up and revolve around sustainability and slow fashion. Growing up with a conscientious lifestyle in California, Ortega hopes the zine will foster a discussion about buying less and buying better in a world consumed by fast fashion. The biannual zine can be found in print at boutiques like Opening Ceremony and the Voyager Shop. 

The first issue of the zine was a passion project that was completely self-funded. But this time around, Ortega has launched a Kickstarter campaign in order to raise $15,000 by July 13 for the second issue, due to drop in September. The new issue, which has a uniform theme, features interviews with Brianna Lance (The Reformation) and Marina Polo and Brit Cosgrove (Svilu). It also boasts photography by Bob Jeusette, Sam Crawford, and Shanita Sims. 

We called up Jamie to talk about how the new issue, the importance of buying sustainable fashion, and why caring about how your clothes are produced is cool.

VICE: How did Sumzine start?
Last year, I had the idea of doing it as a blog just to show people how to buy less and buy better. I wanted to introduce this hodgepodge idea of sustainability, whether it is buying an ethically sourced designs or organic fabrics or something up-cycled. Then I thought it wasn’t really a concept that could compete in the blog-arena, because blogs are all about endorsements. After I left my job at Saks, I did a lot of freelance and I met the right people. The synergy of everyone made me think that it could work in a print format.

How did you get interested in sustainable fashion?
Being from California, recycling, and doing things mindfully is my second nature. My first shopping trips were not at the mall, they were at Savers. So I have always been in that mindset of being resourceful. Seeing that I did fashion for so long, I saw so much waste, especially in luxury fashion. It is just an extension of my lifestyle. I saw what happened with the slow food movement, but there wasn’t that excitement with slow fashion. 

What was the reception of the first issue?
The first issue I wanted people to see the concept behind the zine. Whether you’re middle class or you’re not, we have seen the hysteria behind fashion evolve so rapidly, especially in downtown New York. We have seen all the boutiques replaced by H&M and Forever 21 in SoHo. It is this fast fashion palace instead of the chic shopping destination that it was before and that is because people can’t afford to buy at a high price point anymore. [This zine] is speaking to the moment that needs to happen. Everyone feels the same way, but until you synergize it into one voice and make it tangible, people forget it's something we should be doing.

Is this issue different? What are you excited about?
This issue is different because it has a theme, which is the uniform. Also, I am collaborating with some really cool artists. The first issue I had such a short timeline, because I wanted to publish it for Fashion Week. I had a three-month timeline to get all of the content in, so I didn’t have a lot of time to collaborate with others. A lot of the content I produced myself. So this time, we have a creative energy, a theme, and a really cool cover star, Charlotte Carey.

Are the pieces you style with only vintage or sustainably made?
It’s a mix, because it is not realistic to say you can never buy a new piece of clothing. I think it is more about the relationship you have with clothing. It is more about getting out of the mentality of going out and buying an outfit just for one night.

Why is it important to support Sumzine?
We are trying something new, and the Kickstarter is for people who want to join a team and come along the ride with us. It is not just about creating cool imagery. It is about challenging how we think about fashion. The editorials have nothing to do with trends or specific designers. We don’t have an agenda other than reminding people to buy less and buy better. 

Follow Erica on Twitter.

In our attention-deficit throw-away society, very seldom is there room for the little guy (or gal) to say their piece in the spotlight. Our new series, Profiles by VICE, aims to change that. Profiles by VICE is a weekly distillation of our eccentric and idiosyncratic world. In each episode we take an intimate look at issues, people, and communities that burrow deep into the underbellies of society.

If this piques your interest—and we can't see why it wouldn't, unless you're one of those humans who's not interested in other humans, in which case we don't know what to tell you other than, "Get your head out of your ass"—watch the series trailer here, and check out this handy episode guide:

• Slut-Shaming Preacher: We travel to Arizona to meet up with campus preacher Brother Dean Saxton, a student at the University of Arizona, whose "You Deserve Rape" sign has caused outrage among the student body.


• An Inside Look at the Exotic Animal Trade: We travel to Ohio to rescue a cougar, then to Texas for an exotic livestock auction and undercover visit to a gaming ranch where the animals are sold and hunted for up to $15,000 a piece.


• Reserection: The Penis Implant: We travel to Miami (obviously) to speak to one of the leading penis doctors in the country and find out what it scosts to get your penis operated on.


• My Homie Sells Homies: We travel to New York City's forgotten borough, Staten Island, to find out how a guy named Sugarman created a small vending-machine empire—and how he subsequently lost it, one quarter at a time.


• Blind Gunslinger: We travel to North Dakota to meet Carey McWilliams, the first completely blind person in the US to acquire a concealed-carry permit.


• Prison, Bling Ring, and Redemption: We travel to Los Angeles and talk to Alexis Neiers about her struggles with addiction, her criminal involvement in the real-life Bling Ring, and her new life as a sober mother.


• Teenage Bullfighters: We travel to Merida, on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, to meet Michelito Lagravere, who at 14, became the youngest bullfighter ever.

Profiles by VICE airs every Monday on VICE.com.