It was late on Sunday the 16th of September, 2018 when 16-year-old Cemeren Yilmaz lay dying on a patch of grass between Ashmead Road and Westrope Way. He was already bleeding from a deep stab wound inflicted by one member of Bedford’s Black Tom gang when two more 15-year-old gang members, Ramon Djauna and Caleb Brown, arrived on the scene. They were carrying a hammer. One of them struck Cemeren on the head with it, a blow that caused a compressed fracture of his skull, lacerating his brain and damaging it irreparably.
Cemeren groaned: “I think I’m going to die.”
We know he said this because Djauna was standing over him, filming the attack on his phone at the time. Cemeren begged him for mercy. Instead, Djauna posted the video to Snapchat.
Imagine a world without sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Then remove cigarettes and alcohol from the equation. For good measure, why not banish meat too. And then to top it all off, let’s pretend that neither speaking nor reading exist on our plane. This is the reality of a Vipassana silent retreat, and in this world there’s only one thing to do: meditate.
Sometime after the talking-head segment on how to make an award-winning anal scene, but before the stage invasion that led Lil Wayne to declare he’d “died and gone to heaven”, this year the AVN Awards – known as the “Oscars of porn” – spent a few minutes facing the reality and finality of death.
Late on 9 February 2008, a Saturday night, I left a gig at Koko and made my way up Camden High Street in north London toward my house. I didn’t get very far before I was stopped by a policeman who told me that Camden was “on fire”, which struck me as unusual. Going the long way round, I found myself stood on a bridge over Regent’s Canal watching the most famous pub in British indie music burn.
It’s a hot, dusty Sunday afternoon in the Joshua Tree desert. I’m in a tent trying to hold my body in something I’ve just been told is called a warrior pose while Wolves In The Throne Room’s “Prayer of Transformation” gives way to Sleep’s “Holy Mountain”. This is black metal yoga at Desert Daze festival, and it’s surprisingly meditative. “Yoga teachers tend to focus on things that are light and positive,” explains Alissa Nelson, our black metal yogi, “That can be great, but when people are in a certain place that doesn’t resonate. Black metal can be dark and gory, but it plays on that dark aspect that’s in all of us.”
Brands run the world. By the time the average American child is three years old, they’ll be able to recognise 100 brand logos. Likewise, when the average British teenager starts double-dropping pingers on a weekend they’ll soon learn their Mitsubishis from their Teslas, their Skypes from their Spongebobs, their Anonymous masks from their puckering Donald Trumps.
It was midnight on Monday the 11th of April, 2016. Fourteen-year-old Lucas Markham had set out for his girlfriend Kim Edwards’ house on Dawson Avenue in the small market town of Spalding, Lincolnshire. In his backpack, rolled inside a black T-shirt, were four kitchen knives. When he arrived at the back of the house, he clambered onto the roof of a shed and knocked three times on her bedroom window. He waited, but before long he realised that Kim, who was also 14, was fast asleep. Lucas walked back home alone.
It was 9:30AM on an uncomfortably hot Friday morning, and in the gallery of Court 10 at the Old Bailey Antonitza Smith sat alone. Below her, flanked by guards and wearing the navy-blue suit she had delivered to him at Belmarsh Prison, was her only son, Damon. The 20-year-old’s curly hair had been cut short. They were both waiting to learn the sentence that the judge, Richard Marks QC, would hand down that morning.
Helal al Baarini is 21 years old and a native of Homs, Syria. He fled to Jordan in 2012 and came to England in February 2016.
When Detective Sergeant Steve Fulcher heard that taxi driver Christopher Halliwell – the lead suspect in the disappearance of Sian O’Callaghan five days earlier – had refused to tell officers anything during his arrest, he made a decision that, in a cop show, would be described as “not doing things by the book”. In the real world, Fulcher’s actions were later described by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) as a “catastrophic” breach of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
When the smell of rotting human flesh became too much for the residents of Block E to take, the caretaker on The Peabody Estate first tried to mask it with bubblegum-scented air spray. When that didn’t work, somebody eventually decided to call the police.
The other day I found myself watching Central Intelligence, a 2016 goofball action romp starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as a unicorn-loving super-spy who saves the world by teaming up—for reasons which are still not altogether clear to me—with his old schoolmate, an accountant played by Kevin Hart. Look, I know it’s not going to win any Oscars but I was on a plane at the time. Nobody wants to strap in to 12 Years A Slave at 35,000 feet. Anyway, there’s a scene where the pair jump out of a skyscraper together through a plate glass window in a hail of bullets. I’m sure you know the type, whether or not you’ve had the pleasure of Central Intelligence. As the glass shatters and they burst into the air, the voice you hear isn’t The Rock’s or Kevin Hart’s, but the sheer, uncut exhilaration of Damon Albarn screaming: “WOOOO-HOOOOO!” It’s a dumb moment in a dumb film, but hearing “Song 2” in a Hollywood blockbuster almost exactly 20 years after it first came out was a weird and timely reminder of what a transformative impact that song, and the self-titled album it appears on, had on Blur’s relationship with America and their whole career.
You can get a lot of things for free on the NHS, but a five foot cylinder of nitrous oxide isn’t supposed to be one them. Mind you, that hasn’t stopped plenty of people figuring out that stealing NOS cylinders from hospitals in order to sell the gas in balloons at parties, festivals and raves can be a highly lucrative venture. With punters happy to spend £2 to £5 on each balloon, even a smaller 3ft cylinder can be converted into about £700 of pure profit.
We live in a “post-truth” world now, don’t we? You know it, Donald Trump knows it, even the lexicographers charged with keeping dictionaries hip know it. But while we might know it, many of us still don’t fully understand it. How can such a large chunk of the voting population just not give a fuck about the facts?
A lot of us have had a rough time in 2016, but spare a thought this Christmas for the families of the poor men and women of the once proud legal highs industry. There’ll be no presents under the tree for their kids this year, not since the Roflcopter factories were shuttered and all the Meow Meow labs closed down. Things just haven’t been the same since the 26th of May this year, when the Psychoactive Substances Act came into effect, banning the sale of legal highs in the UK.
Lauri Love will be extradited to the US to face charges related to his alleged involvement in #OpLastResort, a UK judge has ruled today.
Early in the evening of 25 October 2013, a man dressed as a UPS delivery guy arrived at Lauri Love’s family home in Suffolk holding a box. When Love’s mum answered the door, she was told that only her son could sign for the delivery. She called him downstairs, and when he emerged wearing his dressing gown, he was told that the man was in fact an officer of the National Crime Agency, and that he was being arrested on suspicion of hacking into a long list of systems, including those controlled by the US Federal Reserve, NASA, and the FBI. Love asked if he still got to keep the box.
For almost a century, our screens have been filled with wise guys and goodfellas. Whether it’s The Godfather or Tony Soprano, we love to watch guys in Italian restaurants taking care of business; the Mafia film becoming a trope as well-worn as the Western.
London is a city at war with its poor, governed by a political class apparently bent on demolishing enough social housing that oligarchs, bankers and property developers might be left alone to carve it up for their own savage, greed-crazed reasons.
Tyrannical despots, vast quantities of narcotics, women seen as second-class citizens: it’s hard to imagine how reporting on the war in Afghanistan could have prepared Kim Barker for Hollywood. But since her 2011 memoir The Taliban Shuffle was adapted by Tina Fey for her new film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Barker has been getting a taste of the Hollywood lifestyle.
It’s the opening day of the Don DeLillo Conference at the Diderot University in Paris and the guest of honour stands at the back of the Buffon lecture hall. He wears a leather jacket, burgundy sweater, black jeans. He is 79 years old. I ask him: “Is it strange to attend a conference dedicated to yourself?”
Having created both Gorillaz and Tank Girl during almost 30 years as a graphic artist, Jamie Hewlett has finally been tempted into a gallery for his debut art show. He was inspired, like so many before him, by Googling “tramp sex”.
“Why is it that all the writers one admires are always arseholed?”
Men often think of themselves as lone wolves. Lone wolf being ambitious in the office. Lone wolf on Tinder. Lone wolf playing Fallout 4 alone in a flat, eating lasagne out of the microwave carton. As we get older and life inevitably starts flinging shit at us, we might start to wonder whether there’s a reason most wolves hunt in packs.
In the last five years, Greece has become as synonymous with their interminable financial crisis as it has always been with democracy, philosophy and yogurt. Just last week, the left wing government lead by Syriza put two fingers up to the International Monetary Fund and told them that they’re not going to pay them back the €300m they were supposed to until at least the end of June, when they absolutely promise they’ll come up with the full, erm, €1.5billion they now owe them.
If you work for the tourist board of a small Mediterranean island, British clubbers are presumably seen as something of a mixed blessing. Sure, they’re going to fill your hotels, eat at your restaurants and buy enough sambuca to double your GDP, but they’re also going to get lairy, keep their soundsystems going until 4am and end up performing drunken sex acts on your picturesque cobbled streets.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunals (IPT) are the most secretive court cases in Britain. They are the only place you can go and complain if you think you’re being illegally spied on by MI5, MI6 or GCHQ, or even by the police or local government. The only time they’ve actually found against the authorities was when Poole Borough Council spied on a family to see if they were lying about which school catchment area they lived in. Of course before you can make a complaint you have to somehow know that you’re being secretly spied on, which is pretty tricky. Even if you do, the IPT most likely won’t grant you access to the evidence against you, give you the right to cross-examine anyone, let you appeal or even tell you what their reasoning was when they hand down their verdict. Sometimes they won’t even tell you whether you’ve won or not. Needless to say, they almost always meet behind closed doors.
This is the VICE Guide to Europe 2014. A travel guide featuring: pork, anarchists, bicycles, politicians, fishermen, racists, tear gas, cocaine, pizzas, techno, beer, football fans, bands and waiters.
Yes, the build-up to today’s European elections has been dominated entirely by a one-man publicity machine. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other groups of narcissists out there who aren’t at least as deserving of your attention. So, before you go to cast your vote for UKIP, let’s review some party political broadcasts from other groups – groups who also refuse to adhere to the staid PR conventions of Westminster’s “Big Three”, like using decent microphones and not putting giant CGI monsters in your videos.
When Colombian National Police finally put a bullet through Pablo Escobar’s head in December 1993, he was running what was probably the most successful cocaine cartel of all time, worth some $25 billion (£15 billion). You can do pretty much anything you want with that kind of money, and Escobar did, building houses for the poor, getting himself elected to Colombia’s Congress and running much of the northeastern city of Medellín as his own personal fiefdom.
Kevin EG Perry: Collected Works 