Radiohead

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Directed by Tony Kelly for American Apparel from Tony Kelly Photography on Vimeo.
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Taster's Choice

by Frederick Kaufman

It’s springtime in Colombia, and coffee experts from every part of the globe have convened in Santa Marta, a small city on the Caribbean coast. It is time to award the coffee industry’s most prestigious prize. The taste mavens make ready: Alberto Trujillo is deep into his pre-sip calisthenics, which consist of knee bends and alternating leg shakes. The Tijuanan has to prime his body, nose, and mouth for the so-called cupping that’s about to commence. As any java snob can tell you, to cup is to scrutinize the tastes and aromas of freshly brewed coffee. But Trujillo is no ordinary java snob, and what he’s girding for is no ordinary cupping. He has been certified by the Coffee Quality Institute as a licensed Q Grader, a person who can boast experience in everything from roast identification to sensory triangulation. And he’s about to serve as a judge in the annual Cup of Excellence competition.

Alongside Trujillo stands Geoff Watts, vice president of coffee and an unroasted-bean buyer for the Chicago gourmet retailer Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea (winner of Roast magazine’s 2007 Macro-Roaster of the Year award). It’s early morning, the day’s competition will begin in short order, and Watts is sucking deep breaths, recalibrating his olfactory system, waiting for his mouth to reset. “Toothpaste is insidious,” he murmurs.

Trujillo, Watts, and 18 other coffee connoisseurs will soon sample the 29 brews that have made it to the semifinals. Ten of these sit in front of each judge, in identical white cups with only a number to identify them, meticulously arranged in 20 straight lines on six broad tables. Each cup holds 11.5 grams of ground beans, measured out to the hundredth of a gram.

The competition began four weeks before, when 513 fincas (farms) from across this coffee-obsessed nation submitted samples of their finest unroasted beans. Now, after marathon tasting sessions with Colombian judges, the contestants have been whittled down to the chosen few displayed on the white tablecloths of this convention center. In the three hour-long cupping trials that will soon commence, a panel of internationally renowned tasters will reject half of the remaining lots. Tomorrow Trujillo, Watts, and their cohorts will rank Colombia’s top coffees and name the champion.

The vibe among the judges is more geeky than gastronomical. The majority of them are roasting techs and quality-control wonks decked out in socks and sandals. Now they advance toward the cupping tables, clutching clipboards and calculators. Meanwhile, the heavyset chief judge, Paul Songer, tells me about the future of his noble calling. He earned his tasting bona fides after a two-year program in Applied Sensory and Consumer Science at UC Davis, and he believes that coffee gourmandism has the potential to rival oenophilia’s cultish obsessiveness. Watts notes that while the fruit of the vine incorporates about 200 different taste-bestowing elements, more than 800 distinct flavor- and aroma-imparting compounds have been detected in java. “In 30 years or so,” he says, “our taste in coffee will match our taste in wine.”

Of course, this bold future of coffee is already here — it’s just insufficiently blended. The elaborate rituals of, say, a Blue Bottle coffee shop already make a $4 Starbucks latte look like Folgers. But the fetishization of coffee has yet to extend beyond an elite circle of urban stimulant junkies. It will take all the business acumen and marketing wherewithal of coffee nerds like Songer and Watts to see the rest of us through to the day when the humble bean will become one of the most carefully cultivated crops in the world, when a cup of joe will explode into a stratosphere of price and a near-infinite selection of exotic varietals, each as renowned in its own right as Pinot Noir or Cabernet Sauvignon.

Everyone in this room is banking on the prospect.

The first Cup of Excellence competition was held 12 years ago in Brazil. Any farmer in the nation could submit beans for consideration. A panel of importers, roasters, and expert sippers selected a winner, which was then sold for exorbitant sums in an Internet auction. Susie Spindler, executive director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, masterminded the format, which was exported to countries across Latin America and to Rwanda. She now has her eyes set on Burundi, Kenya, and Tanzania. “Cup of Excellence has completely changed the infrastructure of how coffees are sold,” she says.

Once upon a time, coffee-growing countries were focused solely on maximizing the volume of beans produced. But the more that bean quality has affected price, the more impassioned coffee-producing nations have become about divergent strains and varietals. At last year’s Colombian Cup of Excellence, the winning beans, called Finca La Loma, caused a scandal. They garnered a score of 94.92, the highest in the history of the Colombian coffee industry, and judges declared that the velvety brew was exceptionally sweet and smacked of clover and watermelon. A 2,000-pound microlot sold at auction to a consortium of international buyers for $40.09 a pound, which translated to a staggering street value of $260 a kilo in Japan.

All this was good news for the peasant who produced Finca La Loma on his 20-acre coffee patch. But it was also good news for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia, a nonprofit that represents the country’s half million growers. The organization, known by the nickname Fedecafé, trumpeted the fact that Finca La Loma was Castillo, a newfangled bean varietal bred by its scientific arm. This hybrid had been designed to withstand the dreaded Colombian coffee rust, a fungus that can devastate entire fincas. At Fedecafé’s behest, growers across the country had ripped out heirloom strains like Bourbon, Caturra, and Típica and replaced them with Castillo. But some farmers resisted, largely because they were not convinced that Castillo tasted quite as delicioso as Colombia’s traditional varietals.

Soon after Finca La Loma’s victory, dark rumors began to circulate suggesting that the winning bean was in fact a Caturra strain, delicate and vulnerable to coffee rust but renowned for taste. This was no picayune point of contention, for Colombia had recently registered its lowest level of coffee production in more than three decades. Castillo was supposed to save the industry from what The New York Times dubbed “peak coffee.” Now the Fedecafè9’s creation had been besmirched.

Cafecert, an independent coffee auditor, examined the disputed results, and while it could have deployed near-infrared spectrometry to differentiate between the chemical makeup of Caturra and Castillo, the auditors opted instead to visit the finca and count coffee trees. At which point the truth emerged: The Finca La Loma blend was about 30 percent Castillo—not the PR coup Fedecafé was hoping for, but not totally embarrassing either. The international scandal fizzled into a low-grade brew-haha, but it illustrated just how much the Cup of Excellence has come to matter to the growers, buyers, and comandantes who inhabit this new universe of coffee.

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Driverless Cars Legal in Nevada

[ed.  Crashing your computer now takes on a whole new meaning.]

We recently told you that Google was lobbying Nevada legislators to make driverless cars legal on state roads, and now it’s official – Assembly Bill No 511 just passed! The legislature makes it legal for Google’s automated Prius and Audi TT fleet to cruise Nevada roads. But this isn’t just about the next industry Google is aiming to take over – read on for a closer look.

Several companies have been working hard to create technologies that bridge the gap between today’s driver assistance tech and what they see as tomorrow’s driverless cars. The idea behind this is that driverless cars could avoid more crashes caused by distracted driving.

But just how far can this go – would you trust your car to drive you to work? And who will write the software to make this possible? We know one thing for sure: we’d rather have a Google, Apple or Linux car than risk the Microsoft blue screen of death while traveling 80 miles an hour to work. Check out the video below to see what Mashable thought of the driverless fleet.

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Wild Alaska Salmon Burgers

by Kirsten Dixon

We’ve been saving scraps and trim from filleting whole sockeye salmon to make burgers for our staff dinners. When we make burgers, we can scrape enough flesh from the backbone carcass of the fish with a spoon to add an extra burger or two. We don’t waste a thing. Take a look at the photo included in this article to see how much meat can be salvaged from a discarded salmon carcass. It really is remarkable.

When we make salmon burgers, we puree part of the salmon meat and cube another part of it. This textural variation makes a nice firm burger without having to add any egg or bread filler into the patty. We just add in herbs, seasonings and spices to give our burgers a little zing, shape them, and grill or sauté them. I like red onions, either pickled or grilled, with salmon. We’ve been using smoked paprika from Spain as a nice complement to salmon burgers lately. The lime and cilantro add a refreshing summer touch. We’ve had a little habit lately of making our own root chips and other vegetable crisps to serve with burgers. We’ve been sprinkling dried sea lettuce over our chips as a kind of salty accent.

Wild Alaska Salmon Burgers

1 pound boneless, skinless Alaska sockeye salmon

2 tablespoons minced cilantro

2 tablespoons green onion, thinly sliced

1 clove garlic, peeled and finely minced

Juice of half a lime

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

1 pinch smoked paprika

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Dice half of the salmon into 1/8-inch cubes. Puree the other half in a food processor. Combine both the salmons together in a medium bowl. Combine together the cilantro, green onion, garlic, lime juice, soy sauce, sesame oil, and smoked paprika. Add this mixture into the salmon, stirring to gently combine. Season the salmon with salt and pepper.

Shape the salmon into 4 patties and chill until ready to grill or sauté.

Makes 4 burgers.

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photos: Tyrone Potgieter

Bunny Slippers

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Money Market Madness

Here we go again:

Forget for a moment the IMF, and instead direct your gaze upon the MMF: Money Market Funds. These are a type of mutual fund that is, according to the SEC, required by law to invest in low-risk securities. They pay dividends that are supposed to reflect short-term interest rates. They are not (repeat NOT) federally insured.

Except they were.

Recall that during the credit crisis, these supposedly uninsured, supposedly low risk vehicles for squeezing a few pennies more out of cash fell below their One Dollar ($1) benchmark. When that happened, the Fed and Congress rescued them with a bailout as well.

Why on earth taxpayers were on the hook for an investment 3rd parties made is beyond my comprehension. Investors in equities were not made whole for their losses, that is the chance they took. Investors in bonds were not made whole, unless they were clever enough to lend to banks. Despite the foolishness and bad investment judgment of creditors to Bank of America, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, etc. were made whole.

The idea of systemic risk sure comes in handy from time to time.

And guess what? It appears that we are once again, looking at systemic risk of the banks and money market funds, who once again, made some very ill-advised lending. Only this time, instead of giving money to home buyers who could not possibly ever pay it back, they lent money to Countries, who could not ever pay it back.

Here is Randall Forsyth in this morning’s Barron’s

“RETURN-FREE RISK.” That’s just one of the turns of phrase that Jim Grant has tossed off over the years as editor of the invaluable Grant’s Interest Observer and as Barron’s most illustrious alum.

The term could well apply to major money-market funds, which provide yields barely visible to the naked eye but could suffer collateral damage from any potential fallout from a possible default by Greece. Grant was way out ahead of the crowd by pointing out in his latest issue, dated June 17, that the five largest money funds, Fidelity Cash Reserves (FDRXX), Vanguard Reserve Prime (VMRXX), Fidelity Institutional Money Market Market Portfolio (FNSXX), Fidelity Institutional Prime Money Market Portfolio (FIPXX) and BlackRock Liquidity TempFund (TMPXX) held an average of 41% of their assets in European banks’ short-term debt. Fitch Ratings added in a report last week that the top 10 money funds, with assets of $755 billion, had about half their assets in European bank liabilities.

Where the Choices Are Endless

by Seth Sawyers

When I was 18, I left the skinny part of Maryland and woke up in a place paved over with asphalt, girded by concrete, nourished by it. I awoke fascinated by the mechanized hum, disoriented, wide-mouthed before the man-made angularity, the downtown steel visible from the top floor of the college library. I woke up that September in the middle of the great flowering of the American Dream. I woke up in the suburbs.

There were strip malls crammed with a Blockbuster Video, a Hair Cuttery, an H&R Block, maybe a stand-alone Chi-Chi’s in the parking lot. Others had take-out Chinese places called Golden Wok or Golden Dragon, Dollar Generals hanging on like old scabs, liquor stores. There were always liquor stores. Some sold good wine but most sold vast stacks of warm beer, half-pints of Hennessey, plastic-bottle vodka, endless lottery tickets printed out on crink-crank printers. You slid your money and your older brother’s driver’s license to a Korean man or that Korean man’s teenaged daughter or his short and grumpy wife. They took your money from behind translucent bulletproof glass and you went back to your dorm room to drink your Natural Light until the ceiling spun. There were Korean men, but there were also Chinese men, and the difference was that Korean writing has circles while Chinese writing looks like a game of pick-up sticks repeated into infinity. There were Indian men and Pakistani men and though they didn’t look all that different, it turns out they are not the same. There were dark-haired, sun-starved, shadow-bearded Jewish guys in white dress shirts and black slacks with pleats in front. There were lots of Asian girls and also Muslim girls with scarves on their heads who may as well have been from Jupiter. There were, of course, black people. Black girls ran the front desk at Susquehanna Hall, where I lived. They had scholarships and studied hard and laughed hard and had enough attitude to fill refrigerators. The black guys were tall and dark and moved in their baggy jeans like dark princes, hair cut very close to the skull or else worn in dreadlocks captured in elaborate cloth reggae hats that crowned their heads like broken-down beehives.

There were people who looked like me but whom I did not know, could not know. There were alternative white kids who pierced their noses and lips and, from what I heard, their nipples. There were science-fiction kids who argued over whether Star Wars or Star Trek had the more fully developed world. The Women of Diversity had a whole hall to themselves. There were gay boys, sleek and shiny and scented. There were girls in glasses who read poetry and liked it and who drank coffee and liked it. I had just woken up in the suburbs, but these people had been waking up there for their entire lives. They came from places called Arbutus and Glen Burnie and Catonsville and Crofton and Odenton and Columbia and Bowie and Laurel and Greenbelt and Silver Spring. They came from the great paved-over America, the land of housing tracts named for forgotten trees and ruined creeks, the land fought over and won by 7-Eleven, Exxon, Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Payless Shoe Source, Best Buy.

Amazingly, overwhelmingly, you could choose, all the time. At the university where I found myself, there were a thousand classes to which they assigned numbers and for which someone had written descriptions printed up in a thick booklet made of cheap paper. I’d selected mechanical engineering as my major but didn’t know why. What was Linguistics? Language and Scientific Value? Fluid Dynamics? The Philosophy of Religion? Computational Methods? I did not know. I did not know about a lot of things, and so I played it safe. I took English 100, History 100, Political Science 100, Precalculus. We were 18, 19, fully grown but clueless. I admired, then, 20-year-olds who read books, who knew how to pack bowls, who had been to New York or the Grand Canyon, who knew what sex was like.

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Hand Shadows

image credits:  here and here

Always On

by Elizabeth Rosenthal

Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems.

There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.

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Ball of Fire

by Jonathan Penner

I’d never heard of him. Found his book, The Ghastly One, on sale at Skylight Books; a whole volume on Andy Milligan, the Staten Island schlockmeister usually referred to as the more prolific, “worse” Ed Wood. I knew enough about Milligan’s awfulness to be intrigued and found Jimmy McDonough’s paperback unforgettable, moving, and brilliantly put together. I sought out his other three books and they were all funny, compulsively readable, staggeringly well researched and ragingly well written. What kind of gutter-dwelling genius would write not only The Ghastly One, but Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, a vast, fevered journey through the life, times and music of the infuriating icon; Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, the tragicomic biography of sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer, soon to be a major motion picture from David O. Russell; and Tammy Wynette, Tragic Country Queen, a bittersweet, evenhanded appreciation of a singular talent most simply worship, deride or ignore? Who was this Jimmy McDonough, who had bushwhacked a course through the night traps and neon thickets of America’s postwar counterculture? I had to know. I requested an interview and got a “yes.” Learned he lives in Portland. Drives a Dodge Dart. Loves rayon shirts, Casino and Eyes Without a Face.

But he wouldn’t or couldn’t meet me. Or even talk on the phone. He agreed to field questions lobbed in over the Internet and returned answers honed to an off-handed perfection.

Maybe it’s that he’s a reclusive crank; maybe he’s just a control freak. Or maybe it’s that Jimmy McDonough knows how to get a subject to come alive on the page; that getting prose to read like a person’s talking, requires prose writing, and not just talk transcribing. “I’d like it to be accurate,” he says. “Other than that, bombs away!”

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Ai Weiwei

Fascinating documentary about the artist Ai Weiwei, recently released on bail in China after three months of detention on charges of inciting subversion.  Well worth watching in its entirety (50 min.) or jump to any spot and still be amazed.

The Chinese legal authorities released the dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Wednesday after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China’s eroding human rights record.

“I’m released, I’m home, I’m fine,” Mr. Ai said in English after being reached on his cellphone shortly before 12:30 a.m. Thursday. “In legal terms, I’m — how do you say? — on bail. So I cannot give any interviews. But I’m fine.”

Photographs of Mr. Ai taken as he arrived after 11 p.m. Wednesday at his vast studio in the Caochangdi arts district of northeast Beijing showed him smiling, wearing a blue T-shirt, and with his trademark bushy beard streaked with gray. The shirt hung loosely on him, his girth reduced during his time in custody.

The release of Mr. Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside of China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of Beijing bowing to international pressure on human rights, though the terms of his release may silence him for months or even years, giving hard-liners here at least a partial victory. Mr. Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Arab world percolated on the Chinese Internet.

China’s move to douse any flicker of dissent was the harshest in years outside of the restive ethnic regions in the far west, and the vast majority of those detained in the crackdown were, like Mr. Ai, held in secret locations for weeks with no legal justification.

Chinese officials announced in May that the authorities were investigating Mr. Ai on suspicion of tax evasion, after police officers took him from the main Beijing airport on April 3 as he prepared to board a flight to Hong Kong. Supporters of Mr. Ai said the tax inquiry was a pretext to silence one of the most vocal critics of the Chinese Communist Party.

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Pastoral Romance

By Brent Cunningham

Betty Jo Patton spent her childhood on a 240-acre farm in Mason County, West Virginia, in the 1930s. Her family raised what it ate, from tomatoes to turkeys, pears to pigs. They picked, plucked, slaughtered, butchered, cured, canned, preserved, and rendered. They drew water from a well, cooked on a wood stove, and the bathroom was an outhouse.

Phoebe Patton Randolph, Betty Jo’s thirty-two-year-old granddaughter, has a dream of returning to the farm, which has been in the family since 1863 and is an hour’s drive from her home in the suburbs of Huntington, a city of nearly fifty thousand people along the Ohio River. Phoebe is an architect and a mother of one (soon to be two) boys, who is deeply involved in efforts to revitalize Huntington, a moribund Rust Belt community unsure of what can replace the defunct factories that drove its economy for a hundred years. She grew up with stories of life on the farm as she watched the empty farmhouse sag into disrepair.

Recently, over lunch in Betty Jo’s cozy house in a quiet Huntington neighborhood, I listened to them talk about the farm, and I eventually asked Betty Jo what she thought of her granddaughter’s notion of returning to the land. Betty Jo smiled, but was blunt: “Leave it. There’s nothing romantic about it.”

Leave it? But isn’t Green Acres the place to be? Listening to the conversation about food reform that has unspooled in this country over the last decade, it’s hard to avoid the idea that in terms of food production and consumption, we once had it right—before industrialization and then globalization sullied our Eden. Nostalgia glistens on that conversation like dew on an heirloom tomato: the belief that in a not-so-distant past, families routinely sat down to happy meals whipped up from scratch by mom or grandma. That in the 1950s, housewives had to be tricked by Madison Avenue marketers into abandoning beloved family recipes in favor of new Betty Crocker cake mixes. That the family farm was at the center of an ennobling way of life.

Evidence of the nostalgia abounds. There is an endless series of books by urban food revolutionaries who flee the professional world for the simple pleasures of rural life, if only for a year or so: Growing A Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land; Coop: A Family, a Farm, and the Pursuit of One Good Egg; The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir. A new crop sprouts each year. There’s Michael Pollan’s admonition, in his bestselling book Food Rules, to not “eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” And then there are countless articles about the young and educated putting off grad school to become organic farmers. A March 5 piece in the New York Times is typical. Under the headline, “In New Food Culture, a Young Generation of Farmers Emerges,” it delivers a predictable blend: twenty-somethings who quit engineering jobs to farm in Corvallis, Oregon—microbrews, Subarus, multiple piercings, indie rock, yoga. This back-to-the-landism is of a piece with the nineteenth-century, do-it-yourself fever that has swept certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, complete with handlebar mustaches, jodhpur boots, classic cocktails, soda shops, and restaurants with wagon wheels on the walls.

The surest sign that this nostalgia has reached a critical mass, though, is that food companies have begun to board the retro bus. PepsiCo now has throwback cans for Pepsi (the red-white-and-blue one Cindy Crawford famously guzzled in the 1990s) and Mountain Dew (featuring a cartoon hillbilly from the 1960s) in which they’ve replaced “bad” high-fructose corn syrup with “good” cane sugar. Frito-Lay is resurrecting a Doritos chip from the 1980s (taco-flavored, a sombrero on the package). When nostalgia is co-opted by corporate America and sold back to us, as it invariably is, the backlash can’t be far behind. Consider this the opening salvo.

It’s unlikely that most serious food reformers think America can or should dismantle our industrial food system and return to an agrarian way of life. But the idea that “Food used to be better” so pervades the rhetoric about what ails our modern food system that it is hard not to conclude that rolling back the clock would provide at least some of the answers. The trouble is, it wouldn’t. And even if it would, the prospect of a return to Green Acres just isn’t very appealing to a lot of people who know what life there is really like.

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Best Seats in the House

Photograph by CAPT. JOHN PELTIER USAF

Lt. Col. Gabriel Green and Capt. Zachary Bartoe patrol the airspace in an F-15E Strike Eagle as the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches May 14, 2010, at Kennedy Space Center, Fla. Colonel Green is the 333rd Fighter Squadron commander and Captain Bartoe is a 333rd FS weapons system officer. Both aircrew members are assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C.

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