 THE APPALACHIA ISSUEIn his State of the Union address in January 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a "war on poverty." In part, he said, "[We] must pursue poverty... wherever it exists-in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant-worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites as well... | |
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  FATHER BEITING'S HOUSEFather Ralph W. Beiting put the Vice staff up in his guesthouse while we were in Kentucky. He's been trying to rescue Appalachia from poverty for 50 years now. He should change his name to Monsignor Sisyphus.... | |
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 MAN OF THE MOUNTAINSMy Odyssey in AppalachiaThe first part of the house out here was made in the 30s. There was two families raised in that house. I had 11 brothers and sisters. I'm the seventh son. I had four sisters and they're all gone but one. My bedroom was in the back part of the house. That part was on there when I was born, about 45 y... | |
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 HOMER'S HOMESThis is the shack that Homer and his 11 brothers and sisters were born into.... | |
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 FAMILY PLOTHomer Buries His KinI'm the oldest caretaker of this graveyard. It isn't that big. The first person got put in here a long time ago. Luther Thompson. He's a great-great-uncle of my family. My step-pap was his brother. That's the second grave yonder next to Luther. That was his brother.... | |
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 TEN YEARS' BAD LUCKThings Turn AroundI lived in Columbus most of my life, though I was born down here in Kentucky. I moved back up here four years ago to help my dad. He lives next door. He's getting a little older-you know how that gets. He's not doing real good. When I got here, I wanted to get a home with my mom but that fell throug... | |
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 TIDBITSNEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK
This was the only black guy we saw the whole time we were down there and he wasn't fucking around. That's an airbrushed portrait of Left Eye, Aaliyah, and Tupac on the hood of the candy-apple-red Caddy he had parked outside the motel room he was living in, which-when... | |
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 LOAD SIXTEEN TONS AND WHAT DO YOU GET?A Broken BackI had 22 years in the coal mines, all underground. I started down there when I was about 22. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world when I was young. In fact, up until the time I was injured I'd been planning... | |
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 AFTER THE MINESMotorcycles Are My Retirement PlanI started working in the mines in about '69 or '70, when I was 17 years old. I just worked part-time during the summer. In '73, I hired on full-time. I worked 22 years there. I started out underground, then I moved to the outside for 18 years. I was a preparation foreman. That's the guy who gets the... | |
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 STEVE & DONNYThe Farley brothers live out in this trailer with their mother.... | |
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 CRISIS AT THE COURTHOUSEWhat Exactly Is to be Done?The town elders have gathered at the Inez courthouse to talk about what the heck they're going to do to save their town from its veritable sinkhole of problems-everything from financial disaster to drug addiction to total isolation.... | |
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 THE GREAT FLOODThe Coal Industry Drops Thick Black Piss Over the Hills of KentuckyIn October 2000, there was a flood in Inez, Kentucky. The EPA called it the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of the eastern United States. It was way worse than the 1989 Exxon Valdez... | |
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 STRIPPED MOUNTAINBefore: The little building front and center is one of the few remaining homeplaces in the mountains outside of Mud, West Virginia. The majority of the town has been uprooted by the expansion of Arch Coal's Hobet-21 surface mine, which covers over 12,000 acres of former hills and hollers. Thi... | |
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 WALK IN MY SHOESI Dare YouI'm originally from West Virginia. My sisters all moved down to Ohio for work and they just stayed there. I didn't go because I couldn't leave my momma. See, she had her legs took off from diabetes. It's called sugar diabetes. It's like a blood disorder that gets in your bones, and if you hurt yours... | |
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 CLEAN MOUNTAIN AIRNo More Pills in the HillsI'm a recovering addict. I was a junkie. My drug of choice was cocaine, crack... Whatever I could shoot up, basically. My dad bailed me out of jail, the workhouse in Columbus. He brought me back up here and after about a week he had me thrown in jail in Floyd County to sober me up. I was there for 2... | |
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 MY MANSIONA Home of My OwnI grew up in what I guess you'd call a chicken coop. It was this place that used to be a chicken house. It had concrete floors, but we made a living place out of it. Eventually it burnt down. It was rough living there. It was hard when I was a child. I've worked since I was 12. I started out just si... | |
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 MOUNTAIN MOMMADestiny Steps InI'm 21 and I was raised in Louisa, Kentucky. I love it here. It's peaceful. It's quiet. I have two kids, Destiny and Jacob. They're one and two years old. I'm raising them on my own because their dad was unfaithful. He pays child support and he sees them once a week for about four or five hours. I m... | |
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 LBJ DAYA Hometown Girl Jots Down Her NotesThis memoir of Lyndon B. Johnson's visit to Kentucky was handwritten by Inez,
Kentucky native Shelba Pack Brown on April 24, 1964. We maintained the spelling and grammar just as it was because we like the way it sounds. That's all. It's not to be funny.... | |
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 FAMILY TRADITIONThe Appalachian WayMartin County, Kentucky is dry. That means unless you can make moonshine, you ain't getting drunk. If you want to crank it up, you need to head over the bridge into Fort Gay (yeah, yeah), West Virginia. That's where the Wildcat bar is.... | |
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 WELCOME TO NOTTSDon't let the bastards grind you down" was one of the key quotes from the 1960 Albert Finney movie Saturday Night & Sunday Morning. Finney's character Arthur Seaton was an angry working class young man who was intent on escaping the drudgery of factory work and the limited opportunities afforded out... | |
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 THIS IS POVERTYAnd It's Really Bad for Your Healthhave lived in Radford since 1963 and I've seen the place change a lot. The fact of the matter is that family life has gone down and anti-social behaviour has become more of a problem.... | |
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 HOW TO MAKE IT AS A SINGLE MUM OF FIVELiving Next Door to RottweillersI've lived here in Brockstow all my life. When I was 17 I got pregnant with Sinead and I had her at 18. I was with Sinead's dad Terry for three years and then he started taking brown (heroin) and stuff.... | |
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 HOW TO ROBBy a Radford Gang MemberThe first day we were in Radford and St Ann's, we kept asking people about how the area got its reputation for violence. People like the councillor on Page 38 told us the reputation was undeserved and was manufactured by the media to make for a good story. All the recent shootings of young kids w... | |
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 TO LIVE & DIEIn St. Ann'sWe went up to the St Ann's area of Nottingham late on Saturday night to talk to a family who live in a council house on a notorious road called Kingsthorpe Close. While we were driving there, the white taxi driver told us that he hoped we were wearing bullet proof vests because people get shot th... | |
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 IN MEMORIAMThis was in The Meadows housing estate. A couple of weeks previously, Nathan Williams, aged 17, was shot in the estate's shopping centre. It was broad daylight and witnesses say it was after an argument over a pushbike. Here one of his friends pays tribute to him by wearing her specially made R.I.P ... | |
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 DRUG DEALINGOr The DoleWe met up with this guy on Sunday afternoon in Radford. All the time we were talking to him, his wife was beeping the horn on his car really urgently and stressing out like she wanted him to leave really quickly. Then we looked down at his leg.... | |
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 COAL EVERY DAYKeeping the Trade Alive, JustSteve Brierly is a coal merchant with a business on Ilkeston Road. We met him outside the chip shop when he was knocking off for the day. The next day we went back to his yard and talked about how the whole industry was screwed... | |
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 WE DON'T FEEL SAFESince They Tore the Old Houses DownJohn Mullins lives in an area of Nottingham called The Meadows. It's essentially one large estate of small houses linked by tiny alleyways and passages with a shopping precinct in the centre. That's where they have the shrine to Nathan Williams pictured here.... | |
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 MINER'S WELFARELife After The Coal Board Closed DownGeorge Mills runs the show down at the Clifton Miner's Welfare Social Club, deep in the heart of The Meadows area.
I used to work in Gedling pit in Nottingham in the early 1950s. It was very hard work. ... | |
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 GARY THE LANDLORDA Drink At Radford's Busiest PubThe Marquis is a meeting point for The Radford Boys, which is a collection of men born and bred in the area. Most of them had fathers and grandfathers who worked in the old Player's cigarette factory, the Raleigh bike factory (where they used to make Choppers) or one of the mines. None of these p... | |
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 KILLING STUDENTSFriendly Fires Avoid a ManglingI first saw Friendly Fires live a few years ago at The Dublin Castle in Camden when the band were still at university and went under the awful name First Day Back. They sounded like an incredible cross between LCD Soundsystem and At The Drive In, but needed more than just a punk-funk tendency, some ... | |
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 GRIMEWATCHFor this issue, Grimewatch jumped on the back of a stolen Mini Moto and rode all the way up the motorway without a helmet to the city of Nottingham to see what the local grime scene had to say. Nottingham isn't particularly well known for grime. They talk kinda funny up there, so not many MCs are po... | |
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 PAPER BOY BLUESRumble Strips on £7.50 a WeekI started to get into pop music in the early 80s and, to me, Rumble Strips sound like all my favourite groups from that time of industrial disputes, yuppies and riots.... | |
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 ELECTRIC INDEPENDENCEIt is hard to believe that Norway's Skatebård could ever top the off-kilter brilliance of his debut, Skateboarding was a Crime (in 1989), but somehow he has. Released in 2002 on the Telle label (what happened to them?) to no fanfare whatsoever, that album didn't have much to do with skateboarding at... | |
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 NORWEGIAN KRAUTROCKEating Pickled Eyeballs With 120 Days120 Days are from Norway which is a very peaceful, prosperous country that's totally removed from the place that the rest of the issue is about.... | |
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 VARIETY CLUBFrolics At Sunday LunchtimeGary Skyner (pictured above) does regular stand up comedy slots at Radford Variety Club's famous Sunday afternoon adult cabarets. Hosted by a couple of guys called Jesus and Pav, the show consists of two appearances by a stripper, adult bingo (bingo with lots of swear words and jokes) and then a ... | |
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 RADFORD BOYSA Beautiful HumourI'm a Radford boy. I was born here in Sinnon Street, Radford, at home. There were no hospital births in those days.
My father was a bricklayer. I'm a bricklayer. I'm a Radford boy. We're all Radford boys here. The Variety Club is ... | |
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 THE COOBER PEDY ISSUEWelcome to CPFor this issue of VICE we spent a week living in the amazing contradiction of an outback town that is Coober Pedy. We were curious about this particular place for so many reasons that it was hard to know where to start. You see there's gazillions of dollars worth of natural opal under the ground in ... | |
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 UNLUCKY MINERStriking Out in CPI've lived in Coober Pedy for 28 years now, although it was never my plan. In 1977, I decided to move to Perth but didn't get any further than CP. I didn't come here to go mining, just to visit a friend on my way through to WA. When I first arrived, we had a big party and my mate started telling eve... | |
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 LUCKY MINERStriking Gold In CPI've been mining for 25 years and although times are generally pretty hard about two months ago I found an opal worth about one quarter of a million dollars. I've shown it to everybody and no one has seen opal like this. I'm still celebrating!... | |
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 THE LONE DJBig Bad Kev Brings Music To CPBeyond the odd jukebox, it's not easy to get a music fix in Coober Pedy. We spent our first few days looking for a local band to interview, or maybe a record store of some sort, and found absolutely nada. Then, just when we were beginning to think that all hope was lost, we turned on our hire-car... | |
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 THE VICE GUIDE TO THE BARS OF COOBER PEDYDrinking is the national sport of Coober Pedy. It averages 45 degrees Celsius outside, the sports oval is a dust bath at best (and a mud bath at worst), and if you live here you're either unemployed or you work like a total miner ie. really, really hard. Any way you play it, you're probably going to... | |
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 TOWN CLOWNOne Hungarian's Strange Life In CPThere's no way you can miss Irvin's place. His property sits at the top of a hill where he has somehow managed to acquire more random, insane shit than you have ever seen in one spot. Ever. We spent about four hours in his office, and even then didn't get through a millionth of the schmack that w... | |
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 GRUB'S UPWaiting On CPOf the 4,500 or so people living in Coober Pedy, approximately 600 are Greek which means it's probably the only bit of desert in the world where you can get a killer lamb gyros with tzatziki and a side of three different types of saganaki. From what we could tell, there are two main restaurants i... | |
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 VICE FASHION - KIDS OF CPFirst up, we have to make very clear that we had nothing whatsoever to do with the outfits in this shoot. We turned up to meet the models with a bunch of gear for them, only to find that they had gone and self-styled using clothes from the one and only new clothes store in town. There was nothing we... | |
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 LISTEN TO PROGAN STONEThis is the first instalment of a new music column written by none other than myself, Progan Stone. Every issue I'll be filtering through piles of music to tell you what's hot. I'm not going to tell you what's not cause while negativity is always tempting, this column is meant to be inspirational an... | |
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 THICK SKINSTough Guy Of CPWe met Rhino one night at The United Bar. Over a dozen Bourbon and Coke's and a Jager shot or two, we found him to be a truly agreeable and pleasant dude. At the end of the binge Travis, our photographer, asked him how he got his nickname and Rhino head-butted him so hard he nearly went down. | |
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 SOUND UNDERGROUNDChilling In The World's Biggest DugoutI took some time off after compulsory military service in Greece about 34 years ago and came to visit my uncle in Coober Pedy. He told me how easy it was to find opal. I thought I would simply find my fortune and return to Greece within a year. I learnt that you can plan some things in life, but not... | |
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 TIDBITSCoober PedyPET ROCK 1
The most successful communities in the world are those that take their natural resources and convert them into something that others have a need or want for. It would seem Coober Pedy is screwed.... | |
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 TWENTY-SIX FEET UNDERGetting Lost Forever In CPPeople who live in Coober Pedy make city kids look like pampered assholes. Life in the outback is often harsher than a straight-up hash pipe, and death is something that you tend to become pretty familiar with-especially when you throw in an occupation like mining where your iBook is traded for a se... | |
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 LITERARY / I WANT MY DVDSA Family of My Own: The Dream I Thought I Missed
Father Ralph W. Beiting
Father Ralph Beiting, who as you may well have noticed figures prominently in this issue of Vice, has written about 30,000 books. They are all independently ... | |
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 SMALL TOWNSWelcome to LaisvallThis issue was going to be called the Poor Issue. We looked at the numbers and found there were a lot of poor people in the north. Through out Scandinavia, that's where the economical depression has ravaged, it's where everyone is on welfare or on sick leave, and it's where no companies will go. We ... | |
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 SNOW PATROLI Love it HereI was four when my father got me my first snow scooter. I can't remember any of it, but it must have been something special because here I am, and all I can think about is driving my scooter all year round.... | |
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 DYNAMITE GUYCan't Stop, Won't StopThis habit of blowing things up started back when I was about 17. My dad was in road construction and always had dynamite and fuses in his basement. I would nick dynamite and I would blow things up. One day I had assembled my own dynamite stick and fuse and I lit it up and the fuse went up in a ... | |
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 NO KIDS ON THE BLOCKWhere Did All the Babies Go?There are two kids in this district. Two, in a community of this size! When I was a kid in '65 there were loads of children here. There were 175 throughout the village. Us kids, we would do what kids do. We rode our scooters. There were no age limits back then. I got my first scooter in '66. We woul... | |
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 MEET THE KIDS OF LAISVALLSimon, 15
Vice: How do you like living in Laisvall?
Simon: It's ok. There aren't that many cops here. Not until Easter.
What are your classmates like?
They're alright now. I'm supposed to be in grad school, but I got held back. I ... | |
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 POLICING THE WILDERNESSFrostbite and North KoreansThere are two and a half of us working in this area. Two and a half cops in an area the size of Holland and Belgium together. When I get off duty now, around four o'clock, there will be no one. Usually there are no cops around during weekends either. There aren't that many serious crimes in Laisvall... | |
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 BROKEN KNEESAnd Not Much MoreI used to be a concrete worker, but I've just gone through knee surgery. They operated on me using spinal cord anaesthetics, and I thought that was a bit uncomfortable. I didn't mind that big old needle. I've been through those kinds of things before. It was the actual surgery that was awkward. I wa... | |
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 HOLD A GRUDGE?Not Me!I'm 20 years old now, and I am unemployed. I specialized in Economics in grad school. I never really felt like it was completely my thing, but I still kept going. When we were kids Laisvall School was still open, but there was only one girl in our class. It was weird. She wasn't ugly or anything, bu... | |
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 AIR COMBATSmall Town, Small PlanesI'm still in school. I'm 18 years old. I don't know what I want to do when I'm older. A few years back, I absolutely didn't want to work in the mine. I thought I wanted something better. But I'm not sure anymore. If it was still there I might feel differently about it.... | |
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 CHOOSING POVERTYModern Life Is War Are Always TouringBeing on tour is pretty miserable. It's all about sleeping on floors, peeing in bottles and showering with no hot water (if you're lucky). It's a lot like living in poverty actually, and chances are that you'll blow what little money you make playing on booze because you get so bored doing nothing b... | |
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 ROYAL POVERTYMonarch Aren't Living LargeMetal has always been small town poverty's own soundtrack. Still, Monarch aren't your usual acne-scarred, faux Satanists from the sweaty, hairy armpits of Northern Europe. Like Thorr's Hammer (which was basically the younger, poorer version of Sunn 0))) Monarch are fronted by a cute girl rather than... | |
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 COMINGS AND GOINGSI Miss That Crazy DaneI was out of school at 15 and went out at sea for six years. Then I came here because my brother worked in the mine. In those days, all the workers lived in barracks. It was like the Wild West out here. There was a lot of poker and boozing.... | |
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 THERE'S ROOM AT THE INNIf You're NorwegianI bought this hotel six years ago. It was cheap because everyone knew that the mine was closing down. Back then, it was used as housing for the workers. The big guns didn't stay here of course. They stayed down at the real hotel. It used to be proper fancy. I own that place too, but it's been ruined... | |
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 LIVE BY THE PIPEBob Hund Moves on to Greener PasturesBob Hund, also known as Bergman Rock, has been around forever and ever. And right now we've been hearing a lot of rumours about them, including that they've started playing live again, for the first time in years. That's great news, but we've also been hearing stories about how they sleep in a metal... | |
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 GET THE HELL OUTSmall Town Girls Don't Stick AroundMy whole family worked in the mine. My dad, my step dad, and my mum. My grandfather still works there. He's taking care of closing the mine. I'm 23 now, but when I was about 15 I was a cleaner in the mine. It felt safe since my whole family was there. I knew no one could fuck with me. But being a cl... | |
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 ALL BANDS ARE SHITExcept JakobinarinaIceland is so expensive that if you're drinking in a bar in Reykjavik and it's your round, you might as well pull one of the kitschy Viking war-axes off the wall and use it to slice out your own kidney. This is because Iceland is blessed with vast amounts of natural resources and geothermal energy a... | |
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 RECORDSMy parents volunteered for Father Beiting in the early 1960s. When my mom died in '92, Father Beiting came to do the funeral mass. He saw me and said, "Do you want to come back as a volunteer?" I said, "Well, let me think about it." Next thing I knew, I was here. And I've been here ever since.... | |
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