Vice Magazine – Volume 19, Number 10
Theme: On the Wagon
This issue of Vice rolls in with a typically provocative and offbeat mix, beginning with a ride-along at the Chuckwagon Championships—hailed as perhaps the most American event imaginable. From there, it veers sharply into darker territory with a piece on a Christian pastor in Tijuana who claims he can “pray away the gay” in the slums, a troubling glimpse into cross-border faith-based conversion efforts.
A lighter diversion comes in the form of Vice's own birthday, with a look at the company’s astrological birth chart, examining what the stars supposedly say about the mag's chaotic spirit. Meanwhile, Jemima Kirke, artist and former Girls star, bares her pregnant belly and opens up about motherhood and maturity in “One in the Oven.”
As ever, Vice delivers both absurd and artistic flair with “Celebrities as Food,” a weird, stylized feature, and “Zak Loves Mandy,” profiling a couple making art and porn until death do them part. The salmon run in Bristol Bay gets an earthy, environmental feature in “Something Fishy,” looking at both the bounty and perils of Alaska's fishing boom.
A more eerie offering, “The Forgetful Ghost,” brings a melancholic, ghostly touch before pivoting to world affairs with “Bush-League Rebels,” a disorienting profile of Congo’s fractured resistance groups. In “Death of the American Hobo,” the mag tracks the final gasps of a once-proud underground culture at the National Hobo Convention. And in “Shiva’s Wedding,” readers are taken to the Himalayas for a story of love and ritual far from modern urban life.
The issue closes with a fitting profile of King Dude, a musician making satanic merch and gloomy Americana music, cementing his role as a kind of dark mascot for the Vice sensibility.
