The Japanese Tattoo Legend Who Trained Ed Hardy & Inked the Yakuza || The Horihide Interview

sabukaru had the honour of meeting one of the most legendary figures in the entire history of tattooing. Horihide, born Kazuo Oguri and now 95 years old, is the man who built the bridge between Japanese irezumi and the Western tattoo world at a time when that bridge did not exist, and most people on both sides were not looking for one.

Working out of Gifu, Horihide moved through a world where traditional Japanese tattooing carried deep associations with the Yakuza and organised crime, preserving the art form through decades of cultural underground while opening it to the West in a way that had not been attempted. American tattoo artist Sailor Jerry spent years building a correspondence with Japanese artists and absorbing the aesthetics from a distance. That connection eventually brought Ed Hardy to Gifu and into Horihide's circle, making him the first non-Asian artist ever invited into the traditionally closed world of Japanese irezumi.

What Hardy brought back from that encounter traveled across the ocean and became the foundation of what contemporary tattoo culture looks like worldwide: the large-scale body suits, the narrative compositions, the color philosophy that now exists in studios on every continent. Most people wearing Japanese-influenced tattoos today are carrying a lineage that traces back to Horihide without knowing it, and sabukaru traveled to Gifu to sit with him, hear it directly, and document it in full.

 

Barcelona is Explosively Delicious || I'll Have What Phil's Having

Venture with Phil to enjoy a world-class breakfast of foie gras and eggs, a tapas crawl and even a vermouth bar.

He’s also in for a lesson on all things jamón, Spain’s most prized culinary export.

 

Manu Chao || La Radiolina (Full Album)

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The Fans Who Made A Second Division Club Famous Worldwide

FC St. pauli is the most famous second division in the world. The left leaning values of anti-homophobia, anti-racism, anti-fascism and anti-sexism that permeate the club has become their trademark. However little is known about the club’s successes on the pitch.

We met with St. Pauli fans to discuss the clubs most important moments of the last couple decades, to explain more about the on pitch performances that have helped the club gain its current status.

The Most Important Object Ever Designed (Documentary)

The chair is barely 5,000 years old. For most of human history, it didn't exist. People squatted, knelt, or sat on the floor. Across vast stretches of civilization, China before the 10th century, much of South and Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, sitting up on legs was strange. The chair, when it finally appeared, was almost always a marker of power.

This is how a wooden frame with four legs became one of the most loaded objects humans make. From Tutankhamun's golden throne to the Greek klismos. From the Ming horseshoe-back armchair to the Shaker meetinghouse. From Thonet's No. 14 — the first piece of furniture ever made for the world rather than for a person, to the modernist break of Breuer, Rietveld, Mies, Perriand, and Aalto. From the Eames lounge to Wegner's Round Chair on the Kennedy-Nixon debate stage. From Bertoia's lattice of welded steel to Newson's hand-hammered aluminum Lockheed Lounge, which sold at auction for $3.7 million.

Across five thousand years, the chair has answered the same question, again and again: who deserves to sit?

 

Marcus Gad, Tamal || For All (Full Album)

Sit back, relax and hit play.

 

Bourdain's Brazil Episode Nobody Taks About || Parts Unknown

Bahia is not the Brazil of carnival postcards and beachside caipirinhas — it is the African heart of the Americas, a place where the brutal, unforgivable machinery of the slave trade left behind a food culture so profound, so spiritually loaded, and so unapologetically itself that it stands as one of the most important culinary traditions anywhere on earth, and Bourdain arrives with the kind of raw, open-chested honesty that this place demands and most food television could never handle. Pour something strong, sit down, and watch Bourdain reckon with a place that is equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking and completely impossible to forget.

 

The Life and Art of Edgar Degas || Art History Explained

Edgar Degas remains one of the most celebrated and controversial Impressionist painters in art history. This film tells the story of a visionary artist who made it his life's work to capture the vibrant, fleeting world of 19th-century Paris, from smoky bars and cafés to circuses, racecourses and the dancers the corps de ballet at the Paris Opéra. Nearly half of his oil paintings and pastel works depict ballerinas practicing, performing or at rest. With a sharp and attentive gaze, Degas immortalised the most intimate and transient moments of human life in paintings, pastels and sculptures in images that continue to fascinate audiences to this day. Degas himself once wrote about the off-guard quality of his work, “It is as if you looked through the keyhole.” Born in 1834 into a wealthy family whose banking riches spread from Paris to Naples, Edgar Degas was brought up in privileged surroundings and took to art from an early age. As his art developed, he made little attempt to idealise his subjects, often contravening traditional techniques by cropping his pictures in sudden places and choosing asymmetry over conventional compositions. In doing so, he became one of the most original and daring artistic voices of the Impressionist movement, alongside contemporaries such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro. But who was the man behind the masterpieces? Degas was an artist unapologetically candid about the realities of his era, and like all the most arresting artists, his personality was complex, contradictory and full of fascinating nuance.

 

Nirvana || Bleach (Full Album)

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One Of Skateboarding's Most Iconic Photos, Charlie Samuels talks retro New York City & Harold Hunter

Today we’re taking a look at the story behind one of skateboarding’s most iconic photos. The Harold Hunter yellow taxi cab skitching photo from New York in 1989. This photo is shot by Charlie Samuels.

This photo has been used on everything from snowboards, to Supreme shirts. It’s a centerpiece in the shop and people ask about it all time, so here is the story of the photo direct from Charlie Samuels mouth!

 

The Scandalous Secrets Of The Louvre

Within the Louvre, the world’s most famous museum, lie secrets of murder, madness, and manipulation. This documentary unearths the truth behind the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa and uses modern brain surgery to solve the 450-year-old mystery of a king's death. From the cannibalism that inspired The Raft of the Medusa to the "Glass King" who smashed his own golden helmet, we join archaeologists and historians to reveal the dark history hidden behind the frames of the world’s greatest masterpieces.

Censurados || Censurados (Full Album)

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Manchester United || For the Glory (Full Movie)

Winners of 20 Premiere League Titles, 3 UEFA Champions Leagues and 12 FA cups, Manchester United it one of the most award winning football teams in the sport.

 

Turn It Around || The Story of East Bay Punk (2017)

A documentary spanning over 30 years of the California Bay Area's punk music history with a central focus on the emergence of Berkeley's inspiring 924 Gilman Street music collective.

 

Inside Copenhagen with Rune Glifberg, the Danish Destroyer

For the premiere episode of Locals, VICE’s Ben McQueen—creator of our acclaimed series Let It Kill You—heads to Copenhagen with skateboarding legend Rune Glifberg, aka “The Danish Destroyer.”

From vert skating and local food to Danish architecture, galleries, and museums, Rune takes us through the city that shaped him. This is Copenhagen through the eyes of one of skateboarding’s most iconic figures.