New Site, Same Vice

The new VICE Germany website is up and it finally matches what the American edition has been doing—cleaner, better organized, and still reliably nude. This issue features Zaida, half-Egyptian, photographed by Richard Kern in the particular way Richard Kern photographs women: direct, undecorated, effective. More of his work is on VBS.TV if you need more of his work, which you might.

There’s a memorial piece for Dash Snow, the artist and photographer who died of a heroin overdose a few weeks ago. Snow was one of those people whose life and work were so thoroughly entangled that the death reads almost like a final gesture—not that this makes it less of a waste. The tribute handles him with the kind of seriousness VICE reserves for people it actually liked. Also in the issue: an argument that waterboarding is for cowards. Sure.

The German team is keeping up reasonably well—translating content, writing their own—but the Americans have already found the one thing that cuts through in German election season: a CDU campaign anthem performed by an unwashed, permanently drunk character named Leslie who looks like he sleeps next to the Neptunbrunnen fountain. Someone put him in front of a keyboard and hit record. Whatever it is, it works, in the specific way that something terrible and accurate always works. I’ve been planning to vote Pirate Party, and this only confirms it.