Postcard from the sculptor Alexander Calder to Marcel Breuer, handwritten in ink. On verso, Calder has drawn a map to his home (ink and red pencil), reminiscent of the design for his mobiles.

Alexander Calder to Marcel Breuer, 1947 Apr. 2.

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Three Cheers for Jeff Bezos

I’ll say it: let’s celebrate Jeff Bezos purchase of the Washington Post.

Before going further let me acknowledge the potential downsides. Bezos is an outside buyer with no history in the news or newspaper business, something he readily acknowledges. More potentially worrisome, he’s the primary owner and CEO of Amazon, a company with deep stakes in numerous critical policy debates ranging from state sales tax policy, union organizing, worker rights and wages, the book and entertainment businesses, telecom, international trade, not to mention its unimaginably large footprint in the Internet cloud.

We’ll have to watch and wait to see how the new Post covers this multitude of issues in which its owner has a direct financial interest.

That said, for years the Post was effectively subsidized by the parent company’s ownership of Kaplan test prep, which gave the Graham family and the whole paper a huge stake in the rather dubious for-profit education business. So the kind of very rich people who can afford to own major metro newspapers tend to have other irons in the fire which potentially compromise their paper’s reporting. It kind of goes with the territory. It’s also worth noting that the Post was a family-dominated rather than a family owned paper; it’s actually a public corporation, a fact which has loomed large in its recent struggles.

If the Bezos Post doesn’t run pieces on Amazon’s sweat shop-like warehouses or monopolistic practices, the brand will become a joke and the paper will die. Could happen. We’ll simply have to wait and see.

Finally, Amazon, as much as I (as a book reader) and this company (as a user of the Amazon ‘cloud’) use it, is basically the poster boy for the low-wage, faster, faster, faster economy which is doing so much to create the economically polarized society so many of us lament. This is a big part of Alec MacGillis’s beef in this quick write up he did on the sale at The New Republic.

So with all that, here are three reasons why I think this is a good thing.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:

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Rob Jamieson, Tokyo And Mount Fuji
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In Praise of Older Men

I was fighting off the flu, but I’d wrapped myself in a dress, cinched the waist tight, and now sat, flushed and underfed, sipping down a hot toddy (my cold medicine) in a hotel bar. At 34, I’d agreed to meet for drinks with a man 24 years my senior. A painter, he was dressed as he’d been when we met—at a literary party in TriBeCa, to which he was accompanied by one of his nude models—in a fleckless Savile Row suit. He wore it effortlessly, in the way only men over 50 can. He had the solemn good looks of a Roman senator and brushed his dark hair, thick as a horse’s mane, straight back from his temples. Realizing where we’d sat, he laughed: Leering down at us from the wall was an early work of his, something from the ’80s. “They actually hung that up in here?” He then presented me with two gifts: a book about his “old friends on the New York scene back in the day” and a small wooden frog on a stick, a Japanese toy. The first established the access he offered; the second seemed to comment on my place in our burgeoning relationship. The tone had been set, and I was prepared to play my part.

Every time we write about our romances, we’re recounting the private coming-together of two individuals, drawing on conversations no neutral party was present to overhear. In other words, there’s a limit to the perspective a person can have about herself—but there are patterns. My own began to emerge at the age of eight, with a glimpse at the VHS cover of Last Tango in Paris. There he was, a thoroughly weathered, silver-haired Marlon Brando, awash in that oversaturated amber light so redolent of the ’70s. Sitting on the floor with a much younger woman—both hunch shouldered and naked as apes, their legs intertwined, her arms tugging at his neck—he kept his head back, chin tilted up at a slightly aloof angle. His domineering posture, and that amber glow, spelled out something complex and unmistakably adult. (...)

Part of what lends the older man his appeal is how he appears to have arrived from a distant and still exotic land, the kingdom of Adulthood. He’s a prince in that realm, and he has all his shit together—unlike most of the talented men my own age. After all, what does Maria Schneider see in Brando in Last Tango? She has her fiancé, but he’s too wrapped up in the beginnings of his career to pick up on the sexual boredom she practically exudes from her glowing pores. By contrast, the older man in the empty apartment, however damaged he may be, gives off the deep, low frequency of hard-earned experience. And since we live at a time when the physical differences between 30 and 50-year-olds can be negligible, this added dimension is often an advantage. I think of the writer and how I liked to lay my hand on his head; mostly bald, he had a finely shaped, elegant skull. His nose had a pronounced arc that to me looked patrician and out of step with the times, the combined effect being that of a patinated profile on a coin. I imagined I could feel the hard-bitten years of striving under my fingertips, and now here he was, safely on the other side.

But a man’s choice to date much younger may also reveal a self-conscious impulse to remain relevant, to beat out the younger competitors waiting in line. While it’s surely possible for one’s true partner to be a cool decade or two her senior, you may discover you’re merely the latest installment in a decades-long series, never seen wholly for who you are but rather as a representative of a type. You risk becoming, essentially, the romantic interest in a Philip Roth novel.

by Alex Mar, Elle |  Read more:

Image: Hector Perez/The Licensing Project

River Wedding

The bride wore an elegant sleeveless white gown. The groom donned a purple and yellow striped shirt with purple tie. Both wore hip waders.

Kodiak has been the scene of unique weddings before, but the marriage of Dake Schmidt and Kadie Walsh may take top prize. On Saturday afternoon, the pair waded in the middle of the Buskin River, accompanied by their wedding party.

For the operators of MemoryMakers Tour and Guide service, the scene was a reminder of how they work and play.

"That's about as Kodiak as it gets," Schmidt said after emerging from the water.

Schmidt, a fishing guide and photographer, and Walsh, who also runs Smarty Pants Graphics, met about nine years ago at the former Buskin River Inn, a hotel and restaurant on the banks of the river.

Since then, they've worked together and lived together as Schmidt opened a photography studio and ran his fishing guide business. Walsh started her own graphic design business and continues to help with the guiding operation.

A one-year hiatus in their long friendship only cemented their bond. "It was a long time coming, supposedly," Schmidt said of the ceremony and his friends' reaction to the announcement.

Groomsmen and bridesmaids alike carried fly fishing rods into the river — the groomsmen's were strung in yellow, the bridesmaids' in purple.

The wedding couple's rings arrived in the mouths of a pair of fresh-caught king salmon kept in a cooler for the purpose.

by James Brooks, ADN via Kodiak Daily Mirror |  Read more:

Image: AP, Kodiak Daily Mirror, James Brooks 

Rere here: http://www.adn.com/2013/08/05/3009125/kodiak-couple-exchange-vows-in.html#storylink=cpy

Taken

On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with bigPotential!”

They pulled into a mini-mart for snacks. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.

He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.

No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.

Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

Later, she learned that cash-for-freedom deals had become a point of pride for Tenaha, and that versions of the tactic were used across the country. “Be safe and keep up the good work,” the city marshal wrote to Washington, following a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband.

Outraged by their experience in Tenaha, Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson helped to launch a class-action lawsuit challenging the abuse of a legal doctrine known as civil-asset forfeiture. “Have you looked it up?” Boatright asked me when I met her this spring at Houston’s H&H Saloon, where she runs Steak Night every Monday. She was standing at a mattress-size grill outside. “It’ll blow your mind.”

The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, cops drive a Cadillac Escalade stencilled with the words “this used to be a drug dealer’s car, now it’s ours!” In Monroe, North Carolina, police recently proposed using forty-four thousand dollars in confiscated drug money to buy a surveillance drone, which might be deployed to catch fleeing suspects, conduct rescue missions, and, perhaps, seize more drug money. Hundreds of state and federal laws authorize forfeiture for cockfighting, drag racing, basement gambling, endangered-fish poaching, securities fraud, and countless other misdeeds.

In general, you needn’t be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence.

by Sarah Stillman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson.

Andrew Pershin, Over the Hills
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Porn Sex vs Real Sex: The Differences Explained With Food

h/t The Dish

The Science of Champagne, the Bubbling Wine Created By Accident

A glass of champagne is often synonymous with toasting some of life’s biggest moments—a big promotion at work, weddings, the New Year. So too, is the tickle that revelers feel against their skin when they drink from long-stemmed flutes filled with bubbly.

There’s more to that fizz than just a pleasant sensation, though. Inside a freshly poured glass of champagne, or really any sparking wine, hundreds of bubbles are bursting every second. Tiny drops are ejected up to an inch above the surface with a powerful velocity of nearly 10 feet per second. They carry aromatic molecules up to our noses, foreshadowing the flavor to come.

In Uncorked: The Science of Champagne, recently revised and translated into English, physicist Gerard Liger-Belair explains the history, science and art of the wine. His book also features high-speed photography of champagne bubbles in action and stop-motion photography of the exact moment a cork pops (potentially at a speed of 31 miles per hour (!). Such technology allows Liger-Belair to pair the sommelier with the scientist. “Champagne making is indeed a three-century-old art, but it can obviously benefit from the latest advances in science,” he says. (...)

Europeans, though, once considered the bubbling beverage a product of poor winemaking. In the late 1400s, temperatures plunged suddenly on the continent, freezing many of the continent’s lakes and rivers, including the Thames River and the canals of Venice. The monks of the Abbey of Hautvillers in Champagne, where high-altitude made it possible to grow top quality grapes, were already hard at work creating reds and whites. The cold temporarily halted fermentation, the process by which wine is made. When spring arrived with warmer temperatures, the budding spirits began to ferment again. This produced an excess of carbon dioxide inside wine bottles, giving the liquid inside a fizzy quality.

In 1668, the Catholic Church called upon a monk by the name of Dom Pierre Pérignon to finally control the situation. The rebellious wine was so fizzy that bottles kept exploding in the cellar, and Dom Pérignon was tasked with staving off a second round of fermentation.

by Marina Koren, Smithsonian |  Read more:

Image: by Flickr user _FXL

Alex Colville, Dog and Priest 1978
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Josh Alan, Guidance Is Internal 2012
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SkyTruth, the Environment and the Satellite Revolution

Somewhere in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the nearest landfall, there is a fishing ship. Let’s say you’re on it. Go onto the open deck, scream, jump around naked, fire a machine gun into the air — who will ever know? You are about as far from anyone as it is possible to be.

But you know what you should do? You should look up and wave.

Because 438 miles above you, moving at 17,000 miles per hour, a polar-orbiting satellite is taking your photograph. A man named John Amos is looking at you. He knows the name and size of your ship, how fast you’re moving and, perhaps, if you’re dangling a line in the water, what type of fish you’re catching.

Sheesh, you’re thinking, Amos must be some sort of highly placed international official in maritime law. ... Nah.

He’s a 50-year-old geologist who heads a tiny nonprofit called SkyTruth in tiny Shepherdstown, W.Va., year-round population, 805.

Amos is looking at these ships to monitor illegal fishing in Chilean waters. He’s doing it from a quiet, shaded street, populated mostly with old houses, where the main noises are (a) birds and (b) the occasional passing car. His office, in a one-story building, shares a toilet with a knitting shop.

With a couple of clicks on the keyboard, Amos switches his view from the South Pacific to Tioga County, Pa., where SkyTruth is cataloguing, with a God’s-eye view, the number and size of fracking operations. Then it’s over to Appalachia for a 40-year history of what mountaintop-removal mining has wrought, all through aerial and satellite imagery, 59 counties covering four states.

“You can track anything in the world from anywhere in the world,” Amos is saying, a smile coming into his voice. “That’s the real revolution.”

Amos is, by many accounts, reshaping the postmodern environmental movement. He is among the first, if not the only, scientist to take the staggering array of satellite data that have accumulated over 40 years, turn it into maps with overlays of radar or aerial flyovers, then fan it out to environmental agencies, conservation nonprofit groups and grass-roots activists. This arms the little guys with the best data they’ve ever had to challenge oil, gas, mining and fishing corporations over how they’re changing the planet. (...)

“I can’t think of anyone else who’s doing what John is,” says Peter Aengst, regional director for the Wilderness Society’s Northern Rockies office.

by Neely Tucker, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Debbie Hill

Henk Helmantel, Croatian Onion 2012

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Deconstructing Harry

The trouble with Harry Nilsson was worsening. It was his voice. One of pop music's most precious gifts, his three-and-a-half-octave range, was escaping the singer-songwriter. Where once there were angelic rays of falsetto, now came rasps and gasps. Nilsson simply could not sound like Nilsson.

He awoke on the morning of April 2, 1974, in a rented Santa Monica villa that had been built for Louis B. Mayer and was later owned by the Rat Pack actor Peter Lawford. It was the same home that Lawford had rented to his brothers-in-law Robert and John F. Kennedy more than a decade earlier, the getaway bungalow to which they had allegedly smuggled Marilyn Monroe for secret trysts. But for Nilsson, it was a frat pad and an artist's sanctuary. Sleeping beside him among the empty bottles of brandy and a cocaine-streaked coffee table was John Lennon, his friend and the producer of Nilsson's in-progress album, Pussy Cats. The two spent the morning as they had several others during their time in L.A.: hungover, laughing, trying desperately to remember who said what to whom the night before.

The pair returned to the studio that afternoon, but a new song wasn't coming together as they'd hoped. According to the new biography Nilsson: The Life of a Singer-Songwriter, distractions and disruptions were common during these sessions. It had already been quite a week. The pair of friends had begun production on Pussy Cats, then known as Strange Pussies, in late March, and the drinks were flowing from the first afternoon. Five days in, they sat zonked out in front of a mixing board. Nilsson, once a pudgy-faced Brooklyn kid with a choirboy voice, had grown out his blond hair and mangy beard. As was typical when he gained weight, he'd begun to bloat. Earlier in the week, they were visited by Lennon's former bandmate Paul McCartney, who was accompanied by Stevie Wonder, when a recording session broke out.1 This was normal stuff in L.A.'s anarchic '70s music scene. Luminaries colliding, impromptu sessions turned coke binges turned creative confabs. Just a week earlier, the whole gang collaborated on Mick Jagger's solo song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)." Though that song wasn't released for 12 years, its creation was offhanded and easy. But on this day in early April, it wasn't so easy for Nilsson.

Finally free of the crowd for a spell, Nilsson sat down on a Tuesday afternoon to record the vocals for a new original called "The Flying Saucer Song." But he found that he couldn't crack the upper reaches of his register. "The Flying Saucer Song" is a typically Nilssonian composition in that it's completely atypical of anything he'd recorded before it — it concerns three drunk men (all voiced by Nilsson) in a bar recounting the spotting of an unidentified flying object. The song was supposed to feature the playful, boyish tone that Nilsson had put to effect on so many songs before. Only he sounded like a chain-smoking coyote. After several takes, with the band waiting patiently, he gave up on the song. It didn't make the cut on Pussy Cats.2 Nilsson's vocal cords, his currency and his identity, were hemorrhaging. Bleeding, from their base. He'd been singing through the pain for a week in an effort to impress Lennon, his hero and friend. In the process, he nearly lost everything.

In the weeks leading up to that moment, Nilsson and Lennon had made a mess of Los Angeles. This was during the period known as Lennon's Lost Weekend, the 18 months he spent apart from Yoko Ono, when he decamped to L.A. with her former personal assistant May Pang. In March '74, Nilsson and Lennon were tossed from a Smothers Brothers3performance at the Troubadour after Lennon, smashed on a conveyor belt of Brandy Alexanders, grew unruly. When they were ejected onto Santa Monica Boulevard, Lennon reportedly punched a photographer named Brenda Mary Perkins as she attempted to snap a Polaroid of the inebriated singer. On another night, well past 3 a.m., Lennon reportedly told Nilsson, "I'd love to get some girls and some acid and fuck 'em." Nilsson called a female friend straightaway, who just happened to have a fresh batch of acid and a girlfriend on the way over. The two met up with the women and drank and dropped LSD and screwed for two days straight. Nearing the end of their gluttonous tear, Nilsson shouted, "I can't take any more pleasure, John! … It's gotta stop!" He later called it Lennon's real "lost weekend."

by Sean Fennessy, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: Michael Putland, Getty Images

Jarek Pucsel
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