Uwe Boll's Auschwitz.

Uwe Boll is a German film director. He is currently making a holocaust film called Auschwitz, but everybody seems to hate him and so he is angry. His film was not financed because he knew the concept would be shot down instantly as it is horrifically shocking, and so he just added a few grand onto the budget of the film he was already receiving cash for. Clever! When Stanley Kubrick was making a holocaust film, he had to abandon it because it was unwatchable. Boll says that "I think my movie will be almost unwatchable for most people."
Vice called him up to let him vent his frustration about not being in the pool of Oscar-nominated directors, and also to figure out why the hell not: http://www.viceland.com/blogs/uk-film/2010/09/09/uwe-boll-rants-about-his-auschwitz-movie/. It seems that the reason is possibly due to his earlier movies that were based on video games (Alone In The Dark, House Of The Dead), as they appear in the imdb's bottom 100 films... oops.


Maybe you would like to watch the trailer for Auschwitz:

Shot by Kern.

Richard Kern cuts the crotch out of transparent thongs and puts them on 18-year-old girls. He makes use of soap suds, patent leather and empty fields. He has made films with titles like 'Death Valley 69' and 'Detachable Penis'. No, Richard Kern is not a paedophile - he is a world famous underground photographer. While his work can appear tasteless and extreme, it is supported by a raw artistic quality. The girls look comfortable, the shots appear natural. The proof that he is not just in it for the nudity is exemplified by his fully-clothed photograph of the wonderful Eva Green, despite her tendency to whip off her bra for films...







Vice magazine's VBS.tv is currently making a series of videos about Kern called 'Shot By Kern: Europe'. The first episode from London is now available to watch here. He is surprisingly charming!

A Greek Tragedy.

Everyone's talking about British politics this week. Even school kids on election day were like 'yeah, our school is closed because it's a polling station' - I'm pretty sure that when I was 9 years old the only political thing in my life was the percentage price increase on Toys'R'Us products. But anyway, forget that. Let's talk about the Greeks! They're totally having the worst time ever, and reading about their nightmare economic crisis makes our hung parliament situation feel pretty darn good. The basic issue is that Greece is in debt to a lot of countries right now, which means they are experiencing heavy budget cuts, riots, protests, people are burning things...the country is basically throwing a huge tantrum. The mistakes made by powerful members of parliament and rich little aristocrats have gotten Greece into a suitably sized disaster, which sadly means that non-rich people + wage cuts + tax increase = CHAOS. Germany has been persuaded to offer a 110 billion euro bail-out package for them, which implies that Greece is now too desperate to even control itself. Regular people formulated a national strike on May 5th to oppose all the money being taken from them in various ways, and then it got violent and three deaths occurred in banks which had been set on fire. See - madness.

There's always something philosophically enriching about watching a horrific scenario unfold elsewhere, as it makes home appear infinitely better. But while we're a fair few miles away, we have to remember that Greece was a cheerful European nation just like us not too long ago. So with all the recent voting problems and an ultimately indecisive nation, Britain had best watch its back. I love how before the election the newspapers were using Greece as a 'look guys, this WILL happen if Conservative get in power!' tactic, whereas now, after realising that Britain has absolutely no no idea what it wants, the general media consensus is more like 'ok, so, just thank God we're not in this much shit'.

Just for a taste of what's going on over there, Vice magazine got in contact with their Greek office and posted up a nice interview here with a bit of inside information on the state of things. Imagine 'Carrie' eating hummus and feta cheese and it's probably a good allegorical representation. Banks are smashed up, there are confused Nazi symbols on industrial dustbins, people are dying from the anarchy - the gentleman at Greek Vice also took a few pictures for public viewing:






Word on the street is that photography in Greece is now being regulated by an emergency law enforced by police, so anyone who can get out a shot of what's going on is very talented/brave/sneaky. Things have started to involve tear gas and riot police, which...yep, it makes me a little bit worried about who becomes the next British Prime Minister. I'm thinking maybe we should be a bit more terrified, as Greece was previously quite sane and stable - imagine the recession happening all over again with a new government, and suddenly your neighbours are throwing hand grenades at ice cream vans because their pension got slashed.

A Greek collection of photographers known as Redeye Connection managed to steal a few photographical glimpses into what is now happening over there.


People were snapped smashing the windows of a bookshop and throwing plant pots at other plant pots, which suggests that maybe things have just dissolved into complete uncontrollable panic. The police have started to get a bit irritated as people are ignoring rules, and so a few beatings have occurred. There's a rather gory shot of somebody's arms...


A civil servant called Stella Stamou screamed and screamed about how angry the people are, boulevards of Athens lay in flames and carnage, and my favourite inspirational bit came from an old jeweller who was quoted in the Guardian as saying "What people forget is that we Greeks don't like authority. We have always resisted when we think something is unfair. We fought against the Persians at Marathon, the Germans during the second world war and we will fight the IMF because in reality we no longer have a government. It is foreign forces who are in charge of us now."

HOWEVER...it's not all plain sailing for us on our little British island away from the violent madness of smashed up Athens - if Greece doesn't get some sort of debt relief, our own banks could be affected. Hello 'credit crunch' number two...

Chunks.

I generally find that Vice magazine's website puts forth some darn good things to look at. Yes, some of it is trying painfully hard to look like soooo original and hip man, but, equally, a lot of the content is (in my opinion) mentally enriching, like all the recent North Korea features. So today they pointed out some site to check out over the bank holiday lack of activity. And is it wrong that I was quite seriously amused by these sort of immature but ok-to-laugh-at-if-nobody-is-looking pictures posted on a website by David Keyes? I think he must have a spectacularly large heart, really, if he spends his entire week finding little bursts of human error to make the whole world smile to themselves during a moment of boredom. I wonder what he looks like. I wonder if he has a job. I'm now really worried that every week I'll suddenly find myself checking his website, almost religiously, to see if he can out-funny last week's world picture idiocy.

(click the images to see them properly, otherwise they definitely will not be very funny)

Red Bull Reporting.

So I went to London on Tuesday with 'Red Bull Reporter' to watch the opening night of the Red Bull Music Academy in Shoreditch. This involved me having my train tickets and accommodation paid for, an evening of quirky foreign musicians at Vice magazine's own venue 'The Old Blue Last', and some free Red Bull the morning after. All in all it was a pretty insane night, as everybody was openly arty and wacky and interesting and generally not English. The report is now on the website here, and below are a few photos by Scott Webster.

Noam Chomsky.

Remember the crazy intellectuals who you never really saw at high school except for in exam rooms? You know, the ones with no siblings and seven cats, who could regurgitate a three-hundred page textbook while you were snorting milk and trying to master the concept of French subjunctives? Well, Noam Chomsky was one of those kids. But he wasn't just one of those kids - he turned into one of those adults too. In fact, he's been one of those adults for a while now (he's 81). Anyway, Naom Chomsky has done quite a lot of stuff over the years, like once he re-invented linguistics with his 'generative grammar' theory, and then he became controversial in his critical view of US foreign policies because of the Vietnam war, so now he's a rather large cultural icon. Vice's VBS.TV recently got Kate Albright-Hannah to hunt him down in Ireland for a thorough chat about a lot of clever things.
Here's the video: http://www.vbs.tv/watch/vbs-meets/vbs-meets-noam-chomsky

VICE: The Best Of Student Party Photos.

Vice magazine's website has posted up its 'best of' section for the student party photos.



A couple of mine even ended up on there.

Vice & Vodafone Heroes: Henry Holland

Vice teamed up with Vodafone and spent the last few months working on a series of projects with some of their most talented friends, making short films, flying planes, building high-fashion wendy houses - that sort of thing. Obviously Vice brought cameras along to film everything too. There are loads of celebs on the website, and you can investigate each individual project by clicking on their floating head when the site loads up. You can see it all here - http://bit.ly/69amgQ.


Featured Hero: Henry Holland.

Henry Holland is an extrovert British fashion designer and is also pals with Agyness Deyn. He happens to work just around the corner from the Vice magazine office, and he's always knocking around Great Eastern Street in flamboyant trousers. Somewhere along the line him and Vice came up with the idea of building him a miniature, literal, House of Holland in the middle of his studio and somehow, Henry and Vice both went along with it without bursting into laughter. He even designed a bunch of exclusive work to sell from inside his petite fashion cottage. Vice brought along a camera for the House warming and now the place is part of their Heroes project with Vodafone.