A preppy wearing short shorts and boat shoes is like a needle of goodness in a haystack of awful grunge turds wearing cargo shorts with eight-hole Doc Martens with daisies painted on the toe. Comments/Enlarge |
See all
I have a feeling that if this was the guy who came to fix the office computers we’d never have that problem with the fucking email ever again.Comments/Enlarge |
See all
Cover drawing by Laura Park
A lot of the stories in this issue are very, very sad. But some of you people are cold and unfeeling. To help you to understand which emotions you should be experiencing, and when, we asked Johnny Ryan to draw a sadness meter. You will find it at the start of everything in the magazine this month.
VICE MAIL Letters - The Universal Sadness Issue Mother Smother, Schitzing Out, Gay Shame, Time of Waste...READ MORE
COMFORT FOOD The Warm Embrace of the Japanese Chubby Maid Café Dieting is, sadly, an important ritual for girls all over the world. But as with everything else they do, the girls in Japan take it just that little bit too far, right up to the point where it’s basically obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Eat and lose weight!” ...READ MORE
THE TROUBLEMAKER How Crucifucks Frontman Doc Dart Became a Man Named 26 On a Wednesday afternoon in February 2007, I shared a booth with a man named 26 inside the Travelers Club International Restaurant & Tuba Museum in Okemos, Michigan. We'd picked a spot far enough from the door to give us some respite from the winter blast, and...READ MORE
WORKSHOP WORKSHOP Seven MFAs Weigh Whether or Not It Was Worth It If you want to write highbrow fiction today, you've probably at least considered getting a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. Even though they are about the most impractical graduate degree you could ever have, MFAs are growing in popularity. Fewer and f...READ MORE
SKINEMA By Chris Nieratko GAPEMAN 2
Fuck. Google this DVD and look at the back cover. YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE BACK COVER! It made me want to vomit into my laptop. Dead center there is...READ MORE
PRAWNS AHOY! A Week on an Irish Fishing Trawler, With an Egyptian Crew, During Ramadan (and the Skipper Is Crazy) It's important that the last woman you see before you board a fishing trawler is reasonably hot. She doesn't need to be knock-you-down gorgeous-she just needs to look...READ MORE
SHEPPARD'S VIDEO-GAME PIE By Stephen Lea Sheppard MIRROR’S EDGE Mirror’s Edge is an innovative but controversial title that heavily divides players. I liked it, but it’s not for everyone...READ MORE
SO LONELY Wavves Loves the Music His Parents Hate Nathan Williams is 22 and makes music on his own in a lo-fi project he calls Wavves. He used to be in a band called Fantastic Magic, which actually managed to out-lo-fi Wavves. Once you hear Wavves you'll find that hard to believe. Each Wavves track that gushe...READ MORE
THE DUSTY GROUND AND THE DYING KOALAS Australia is in deep shit. It's the driest inhabited country in the world, and many parts have been in a state of perpetual drought since the mid-1990s. People across most of the country are now living under some form of water restrictions. You can't even spil...READ MORE
STUCK IN SASKATOON The corner of Avenue C and 20th Street West in the heart of Riversdale, Saskatoon, is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Canada. On a recent evening, the only open businesses here were a Chinese restaurant up the road and a pawnshop. Everything else was ei...READ MORE
AN ARCTIC WAVE OF TEENAGE SUICIDE Right now, more people are killing themselves in Greenland than anywhere else. Relative to the size of its population, the suicide rate here is the highest on earth. And the most disturbing part of the stats? It is children and teenagers who are driving the nu...READ MORE
BERLIN'S CITY OF NIGHT The Motzstraße is the epicenter of Berlin's gay sex scene. Here you can find dildos, poppers, S&M gear, S&M videos, S&M magazines, chokers, masks, harnesses, cock rings, anal lube, anal beads, those dildos that have fake horse tails on the end so you look like...READ MORE
MY OBAMA HAJJ Words and Photos by Sam McPheeters As someone raised on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, I have to report that the actual invitation to the 2009 presidential inauguration looked a tad underwhelming. Heavy linen paper and miniscule security threads gave the invite the feel of new cu...READ MORE
THE BRUTAL HILLS OF SICILY In the small Sicilian farming town of Niscemi, old women wear black shawls and men carry shotguns in the trunks of their cars. Most of them are used for hunting. The town, like so much of Southern Italy, suffers from a form of historical and architectural schi...READ MORE
EPICLY LATER'D Words and Photos by Patrick O'Dell First I tried to leave the skateboard world by leaving Thrasher, only to get sucked back in by VBS.TV. Now I have completed the regression by moving from a luxurious one-bedroom apartment in the East Village to a skate house in West Hollywood. Spanky ha...READ MORE
LIFE IN THE JUNGLE Calais is the closest point in France to the United Kingdom. Besides that distinction, it's basically sort of a shithole. And besides that distinction, Calais is also where thousands of refugees to France from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Somalia congre...READ MORE
THE WELSH SUICIDE CONTAGION A heart-shaped wreath is £40 from a florist in Bridgend, Wales; a crucifix can be up to £50 if you go for the three-foot-tall option. The tear shapes and traditional circular wreaths are all a bit cheaper-around £30-but that's still quite a bit of money for a ...READ MORE
THE BUSY GALLOWS OF IRAN Iran is the only country in the world that continues to execute children. 2008 saw six teenagers get the chair kicked from under them (that's right, hanging is the preferred method). Just a few months ago, on October 9 (one day after Iran's Day of the Child, a...READ MORE
WHO'S HUNGRY? An Interview With Issei Sagawa, Cannibal On the afternoon of June 12, 1981, a Japanese man named Issei Sagawa walked into the woods in Bois de Boulogne, France, carrying two suitcases. The postgraduate student at the Sorbonne had shot and killed a female exchange student, a classmate of his, the day ...READ MORE
TEARS OF A PORCELAIN CLOWN EGG Out of the blue, photographer Luke Stephenson emailed us 34 photos of eggs painted with the faces of famous clowns. He wrote, "I'm working on a new project called the Clown Egg Register. It's a selection of about 300 porcelain eggs from the collection held by ...READ MORE
RECORDS Music Reviews - The Universal Sadness Issue HARRY PUSSY
You'll Never Play This Town Again
This isn't just the best noise band of the 1990s, it is the best noise band of the history of ever. Drummer/singer Adris Hoyos was, is, and will forever sound completely...READ MORE
SUNNY SIDE UP Luminous Sex Toy Art Randy Polumbo is a softly spoken American artist who makes the snoozesome world of modern sculpture seem a hoot a minute. We defy you to bring us the head of any other young sculptor working today who regularly exhibits giant condom zeppelins and...READ MORE
PROTEST BY FIRE Most of us are pretty familiar with the hotbed of sad news stories that is Afghanistan. The hundreds of killed and injured troops, the thousands of dead civilians, the poverty and instability, but all of them start to look a bit unremarkable once you stumble u...READ MORE
SHOT BY KERN Photos by Richard Kern Richard Kern photographed Argentine-born Ana Lucia at her home in Mexico City. She told us that in middle school her nickname was "The Sweet Little Ass From Seventh Grade."
If you go to VBS.TV/shotbykern right now, you can watch her get naked and...READ MORE
JESUS WAS A TERRORIST Mindless Religious Violence Rife in India Barun Roy is the editor of The Himalayan Beacon, a monthly magazine based in Darjeeling that has a reputation for unswerving journalism and being more clued-up than anyone else. He explained how it's not just Al-Qaeda wannabes kicking up trouble in Indi...READ MORE
STREET POLL When Were You Saddest? Vice: When were you last saddest?
Adrian Tresa: Last Christmas. I was alone. Um, OK. So when were you last happiest?...READ MORE
ILLEGAL OPERATIONS Chinese Government Allegedly Harvesting Organs of Political Prisoners In 2006, David Matas, a prominent human rights lawyer, and his colleague David Kilgour released a report claiming that the Chinese government was using imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners as an unwitting organ transplant supermarket. Unsurprisingly, the...READ MORE
TOO LOUD Katie Stelmanis is Often Disappointed In school I was never afraid of the jocks or the pretty kids because I knew that they'd never amount to anything. I was always scared of the drama kids and nerds, because they weren't afraid of anything. Every nerd kid I knew then is now either a politician or...READ MORE
FLATLINER This Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy Is Killing Me It's 1994 and I’m lying on a cold, hard X-Ray table in the cardiac catheterization room of the Methodist Hospital in Houston. The nurse administers some Valium and Demerol IV to relax me while a cardiologist sticks needles in the right side of my groin, thread...READ MORE
ELECTRIC INDEPENDENCE Regular readers may have noticed the absence of this column in Vice for most of last year. For those who cared, I can only mumble a sheepish apology and promise to write it more regularly. What amazing new music have you missed out on? Quite a lot, I suspect, ...READ MORE
