A brand new documentary series is coming to VICE.
Let It Kill You is a suitably intense examination of the nexus between skateboarding and art. It’s a potent cluster-bomb of epiphanies, inspiration, freedom, poignancy, paint and shredding, and if you liked Epicly Later’d – or any of our other skateboarding films over the years – you’re going to love it. Starting from the 28th of May on VICE YouTube, Let It Kill You will arrive in six revelatory episodes and is backed up by a wide supporting cast – including Andrew Reynolds, Kevin ‘Spanky’ Long, Michael Burnett, Tommy Guerrero, Elissa Steamer, Andrew Allen and many more.
#documentary#vice#art#skateboarding
Is it possible that we’re seeing Europe’s far-right surge play out through the designs of party drugs? According to Dr Zoe Dubus, a researcher specialising in psychotropic drugs, Nazi-branded pills are “starting to circulate in France” and have “been spotted since early 2024 in Switzerland, Iceland, and Holland.” Testing in Zurich revealed this design has also been used to make 2C-B (in 2023) and MDMA (this year). Meanwhile, far-right political parties have made massive gains in Brussels of late, a situation lubricated by a grim uptick in youth support.
We don’t yet know where exactly the branded pills are coming from, but Dr Dubus suggests there are “several different manufacturers” with at least one of the batches “made by a very amateur chemist.” It’s hard to tell if the special design had been ordered by neo-Nazi drugs gangs, drugs gangs looking to sell to neo-Nazis, or just drug gangs trolling for attention.
“People just press ’em into whatever they want for the fun of it,” opined one Redditor. Others said it was done for “marketing” purposes, and a couple believed it was a reference to the fact the original Nazis were themselves tweakers, often meth-ed up to the eyeballs for days on end while conducting their barbaric rampage across Europe.
Dr Dubus isn’t optimistic: “Some could be trolls. But some could really be linked to Nazi groups that very openly discuss their use of psychedelics on forums,” she says.
Full article at the link in bio.
✍️Simon Doherty
For many of us, commemorating a death is a pretty somber affair, complete with black mourning gear, sad organ music and brown wooden boxes being lowered into dirt. But in Ghana, there’s an appetite for a more personalized resting place, one that reflects all the color and joy of someone’s life.
Coffins at Kwei Carpentry Workshop, Accra, come in endless shapes and sizes: A giant fish, a cigarette packet, a human-sized chili pepper. According to workshop director Eric Adjenty Anang, 33, the design is usually based on aspects of a person’s life, profession, or personality. “So if they were a farmer, the family of the deceased could decide based on which crop he farmed,” he explains. “If they were making cocoa, the coffin could be a chocolate bar.”
Often, the decision-making process becomes a healing tool for loved ones. “It’s always fun discussing with them because when they show up, you feel kind of sad and stuff. So as soon as I start talking to them, I try to bring in a bit of humor, you know,” he says.
Once commissioned, Anang and his small team of trainee student carpenters set about bringing the design to life out of wood and nails, a process that can take a month or more. Read the full interview through the link in bio.
Every June, hundreds of thousands of people pile into cars, buses, trains, and planes to make the pilgrimage to Glastonbury festival. For more than 50 years, it’s been a week-long insanity farm for music lovers of every tribe. A place where you can drink warm lager and dab dodgy MDMA, then lose yourself in some sort of murky hobbit den filled with sculptures made from car exhausts while a DJ in a top hat plays electro swing.
For the last three decades, photographer @liambaileyphotography has been there every single year. He works with only one rule in mind: that the camera remains focused on the people who attend, rather than the bands onstage.
Read the full interview through the link in bio.
✍️ @jak_th
📸 @liambaileyphotography
In 2003, Canadian photographer Naomi Harris (@mapledipped ) was sent on an assignment to a house in Montreal to cover the Pornstar Académie, an online reality show to discover Canada’s next top porn star. The French-Canadian contestants, who had been whittled down from hundreds to a select cast, were spending their time living, web chatting to viewers (who had to pay $35 to enter the website and vote for their favourites) and shooting content, be it sexy, or actual sex.
Montreal––which would later become the home to PornHub’s parent company––was a major player in porn. The show’s creators were hoping to draw on the success of reality TV talent shows like American Idol in the US and Star Académie in Quebec. “This was Survivor meets Temptation Island meets Big Brother, all rolled up in a very Quebecois bow,” Harris says.
Harris, originally from Toronto, was living in New York at the time. Her work is “bright” and “poppy”, she says. “I want to smile––the world is a sad place as is. So even if it's a dark subject matter, I still want to bring a little humor to it, if I can.”
Harris remembers the contestants were sweet, seemingly very young, and that a lot of them, being French-Canadian, didn’t speak English. She visited Montreal for two weekends for the cover story for the now defunct Canadian men’s magazine, Toro.
In the house, the process Harris observed was “much more involved” than it would be today, with bulky cameras shooting video that had to be manually uploaded, and webcams straddling computers.
The Académie shots offer a glimpse into a kind of proto OnlyFans, before the internet was everything and everyone had cell phones, let alone smartphones. If anyone knows what became of some of these would-be porn stars, we’d love to know!
@niche_t_
Ryan Townley is a figurehead in the world of skateboarding, but his collage art is where he is most self-critical: “Sometimes when I’ve created art and posted it, it’s a bit of imposter syndrome," he says. "You’re like, do people actually like this or is it just because I skateboard?”
Townley makes his collages out of old magazines he finds from thrift stores and yard sales – and his designs are now iconic at Welcome Skateboards, a US-based skateboard deck brand. In our next episode of Let It Kill You, we meet up with Ryan Townley, to get insights into his artistic background, childhood experiences, and skateboarding career. Additionally, we hear from his close circle about his decisions to pursue professional skateboarding and fine art.
“He’s one of the icons of the brand at this point,” says Jason Celaya, owner of Welcome Skateboards. “All of us want to make a mark on skateboarding and he embodies that.”
The full episode is available to watch now through the link in bio.
A new VICE documentary, The Cartel’s Cash Catch, investigates the plight of the vaquita and the underground trade that poses a critical threat to the species’ survival, delivering the totoaba maw to faraway consumers in China and the United States.
During the three-year investigation, VICE spoke to figures on all sides of this ecologically disastrous industry, including the fishermen who illegally catch the totoaba despite bans on the practice, and the organized crime syndicates, both Chinese and Mexican, who see the thriving demand for totoaba maw as an irresistible opportunity.
Watch now through the link in bio.
Anyone who’s worked in hospitality will know the mayhem, but then there are high-end restaurants. Are they actually as chaotic as they are portrayed in The Bear? I spent a day in one to find out.
When I arrive I can just about see the back of Harry Kirkpatrick, aka “KP”, the head chef at the Michelin-starred London restaurant, Trinity. It’s 9.40 a.m., and KP is in the kitchen, chopping. Trinity, in the affluent Clapham area—home of the new-age Sloane types—has been here since famed chef Adam Byatt opened it in 2006. It’s consistently featured in the National Restaurant Awards’ top 100 UK restaurants, and has consistently held a Michelin star.
I’ve come to shadow, stalk and flap about in the kitchen, to get a sense of what it actually takes to make it at this level, and to hopefully capture how this specific kitchen operates.
Read the full long read through the link in bio.
✍️ @niche_t_
Ah, pigeons. Rats of the skies. People love to hate them, but one German town is taking it to a more murderous level: In a wild referendum this June, they have voted to slaughter them on mass.
In Limburg an der Lahn, in the west of Germany, 53 percent of voters chose to exterminate every single member of its pigeon population. This referendum happened on the same day as the EU elections which saw an unprecedented upsurge in the far right.
“Today's result was unpredictable for us,” the town’s mayor Marius Hahn (SPD) admitted to German news outlet Der Spiegel.
As for how they actually enact the results of their referendum, the town has opted to enlist the help of a neck-snapping falconer, who will first lure the pigeons into traps and hit them on the head with a stick.
Animal rights activists are, understandably, pretty shocked by this: “It can’t be that we kill animals just because they annoy us,” Limburg city pigeon project manager Tanya Muller told the Sky News.
Yesterday, the Romanian national team surprised the world by beating Ukraine 3-0 in a group stage match at Euro 2024. It was just the second time Romania have ever won a game in a European Championship, so the country’s population went suitably bananas, celebrating wildly in the street after goals from Nicolae Stanciu, Razvan Marin, and Denis Dragus saw them over the line in their first game of the tournament.
The victory – and the flashy manner in which it was achieved – have got Romanians dreaming of the glory days of the mid 1990s, when they could credibly claim to be among the best sides in the world. It’s also got them wondering if today’s team might repeat a stunt for which its entire 1998 squad are still remembered today – bleaching their hair a matching shade of blond in a sassy yet ultimately futile show of bravado.
Led by the talismanic Gheorghe Hagi, the best player Romania has ever produced, the team had dared their coach Anghel Iordānescu to shave his head completely bald if they were able to qualify early from their group. When they achieved this by swatting aside Colombia and a dismal England, the players decided to get new looks themselves, taking the plunge on the matching dye job.
“Our families were in complete shock,” remembers forward Adrian Ilie, whose strike partner Gheorghe Craioveanu has some vivid memories of his own: “They butchered us. It was so painful, I could only sleep on one side of my body for about three days.”
Sadly, this show of team spirit backfired. “We’ve angered God,” Iordānescu fretted to the press, concerned his newly bleach-blond team had cursed themselves after they slumped to a draw against Tunisia in the final group stage fixture. A few days later, they lost in the next round to Croatia, crashing out of the tournament altogether.
So, after this latest famous victory, could we see the Romanian squad tempt fate once again by bleaching their hair en masse ahead of their next game? We’ll find out by Saturday evening, when they face off against Belgium in Cologne.
If you thought it was bad having your mom nagging you about still being single, try getting it from your government. In a world first, Japan’s capital is launching an official dating app to help boost the falling levels of marriage and childbirth in the country. The hope is to provide a “gentle push” to the nearly “70 percent of people who want to get married” but aren’t “actively joining events or apps to look for a partner", one government official told Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun.
Tokyo’s government isn’t taking matchmaking lightly: The app will entail a scrupulous registration process, in which users will have to provide documentation to prove they are “legally single” and willing to get married. Alongside this, singletons will be required to produce 15 pieces of personal info, including height, occupation, and educational background, all of which will be visible to their potential partners. And, just to make things extra romantic, an official tax certificate to verify their annual salary.
The city has already invested $1.28 million in the app, which is due to be launched this summer. It comes amid a population crisis Japan’s prime minister called “gravest crisis our country faces”: Births fell for the eighth year in a row to 758,631, a drop of around five percent. Last year, Japan saw more than twice as many deaths as new babies.
Government-sanctioned Tinder may not sound like a meet cute, but it does have a pretty big advantage: Commercial dating apps aren’t actually “designed to be deleted” – finding a long-term partner removes you from the customer base. Tokyo’s app really does have people’s best baby-making interests at heart. <3
