Thursday, January 15, 2015
A River Runs Through It
A biography of Jimi Hendrix's Electric Lady Studios, its ownership and other black memories.
Jimi Hendrix had initially wanted to turn the two cavernous bottom floors of 52 West Eighth Street into a club, like it had been when he first visited the space. For almost forty years it had been the Village Barn, a novelty western-themed bar, and then, for a brief time in 1968, a nightclub called the Generation Club (you can watch videos of Hendrix sitting on the side of the stage there while Janis Joplin sings). It was Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s mix engineer, who suggested he found a studio—a place where Hendrix could have some financial and artistic autonomy—rather than a club, which Kramer insisted was a waste of money. Despite being the highest paid musician in the world, by the time Hendrix played Woodstock, in 1969, he was swamped with money problems. He was always the sort of performer who preferred to push boundaries and do the unexpected, and he was spending well into the six figures to record. He complained that crowds wanted to hear only his hits, so the studio was to be a place where Hendrix could have some freedom—something that despite his outwardly freewheeling look, riotous onstage antics, and easy come, easy go attitude, he had very little of. As Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor, recalled in the New York Times, “Musicians know that I’m a night person, so when someone’s got a technical question—how do you hold the guitar pick for this, how do you finger that chord?—they call. Back when Jimi Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios, he was on the phone all the time; we talked about how to mike a guitar amplifier and where he should place the mike in the studio.” (...)
Tucked into the whirl of Greenwich Village, Electric Lady could have become a priceless real-estate curio. Instead it has continued to be a place where great American music is born. Unlike many historical sites in Manhattan, Electric Lady Studios has a strict but logical door policy: no tours, no strangers. For the most part, the only people admitted are those who have come to make music—the artists and their retinues.
Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even, when one gets a chance to go inside. There is something about Electric Lady that feels sacrosanct. From the moment the discreet, glass-paned door buzzes and lets you through, disbelief sets in and does not fade as you walk down the bordello-red staircase. These are the steps where a very shy Jimi Hendrix, only weeks away from his death, told a very young Patti Smith his never-to-be realized plans for a universal love orchestra, an orchestra where, as Smith wrote in her memoir, “musicians from all over the world in Woodstock… would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his studio.”
When I first went to Electric Lady, ten years ago, Richard had booked the oval-shaped Studio A for Baraka to record in, and among the things I remember now is the way, late in the night, the red lights made the room gleam—as if the three-story building were a collection of bedouin tents set into the bow of a very fine, Jules Verne–built boat. There are no straight walls on the first floor of Electric Lady. Most of the studio’s rooms are lit by antique lamps and overhead mood lights that change color and make light shows against the white walls. Now a leather Eames recliner sits in the lobby and, next to it, a wooden record cabinet containing records from the studio’s most recent clients: Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, Daft Punk. There are Moroccan and Persian carpets and objets d’art throughout the building, such as a working 8-track with Ray Charles and Dolly Parton tapes that the current studio manager, Lee Foster, found and painted scarlet. There is a tiny hole in the door of an upstairs bathroom that Keith Richards cut for his microphone cord, so he could record his guitar solos in private. In a hallway there is a framed picture of the old Village Barn that Patti Smith gifted to the studio. In Studio B, the control board is caped in soft aubergine velvet. Another bathroom, painted a deep mauve, is papered with Barbra Streisand records and Polaroids of U2 hamming it up. And all along the walls of the first floor there are hundred-foot-long murals, painted in teal, pink, and purple, of astromen and -women trapped inside cosmic embryos: images, the artist Lance Jost recently told me, that are intended to paint the viewer into a spacecraft that is “hurtling through time and space.” As Erykah Badu put it, having pulled over her tour bus so that we could talk, “The artwork puts you automatically in Jimi Hendrix’s world… You don’t know what time it is, you don’t know what year it is, you’re just in a warp, in a wormhole or a vortex. There were many times that I would sleep there for days and didn’t see the outside world. I would take a sponge bath in the bathroom.But I didn’t mind that, because the mural in the bathroom makes me feel like I’m going into another part of myself. And just to see those people painted on those walls—those people are living still! And breathing through those walls. They are characters who are frozen in one position for the rest of time, who have millions of stories, depending on who lays their eyes on them. And those stories touch all our senses, and they have contributed to many of our songs, I’m sure.”
It’s easy to use words like vibe and surreal to describe Electric Lady, but it is almost impossible to understand the brave new world Hendrix was trying to forge with his studio if one doesn’t know that, in 1968, the idea of a studio owned by an artist—and one that had been built to allow artists to sit in the control room—was almost unheard of. Studios operated for the most part under the ironfisted grip of record companies. Engineers of that era were largely technicians, so much so that they often wore lab coats and cut their mixes in sterile, scientific environments. “There was a real boundary line between one side of the glass and the other, so Jimi’s idea was that it would be a safe haven for artists,” the Electric Lady’s architect, John Storyk, told me last summer. (...)
What is most incredible, to me, about Hendrix’s ascent and decline is how rapid and culturally defining it was for someone who lived for such a brief time. Not too long before Hendrix went vanguard and donned a British brigadier’s jacket, stopped conking his hair and curled it into a wispy Afro, thereby reinventing (but never quite losing) his painfully shy, poor-boy past to become a peacock of a performer, a god of rock, he was just a nameless, guitar-playing journeyman on the touring circuit once offensively known as “the Chitlin Circuit.” Hendrix would travel the Deep South, playing behind his childhood heroes. He also played for acts that were embarrassing and gimmicky, as a YouTube clip of him backing the duo Buddy and Stacey shows. Working behind them, Hendrix appeared for the first time on television on a Nashville-based R&B program called Night Train. Like so many other black musicians, he was a skilled laborer in his craft, but his ability to be flamboyant and vanguard mattered little while he was touring the circuit, and ultimately it served only to get him fired from Little Richard’s band.
Still, the circuit was where he learned the showmanship that Rolling Stone later would mock as being that of a “psychedelic superspade.” And, as songs like “Bold as Love” suggest, it is impossible to believe that he didn’t also learn the most technical, uneducable tricks of the trade from these acts. Before Hendrix claimed the title, Ike Turner was a reigning master of the vibrato, and Hendrix’s playing and showmanship have traces of Turner, a violent man whose fists have all but erased what he could do with his fingers when they strummed a guitar. Hendrix’s performed wildness was borrowed from Little Richard and Chuck Berry, his quickness from Bo Diddley, and (from the man he might have admired most of all) his smoothness from Curtis Mayfield. These were the people on the circuit who would lay the foundation for much of what Hendrix would later aspire to do—and would also serve as a template for what not to do when he became the frontman of his own group.
by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Believer | Read more:
Image: via:
Jimi Hendrix had initially wanted to turn the two cavernous bottom floors of 52 West Eighth Street into a club, like it had been when he first visited the space. For almost forty years it had been the Village Barn, a novelty western-themed bar, and then, for a brief time in 1968, a nightclub called the Generation Club (you can watch videos of Hendrix sitting on the side of the stage there while Janis Joplin sings). It was Eddie Kramer, Hendrix’s mix engineer, who suggested he found a studio—a place where Hendrix could have some financial and artistic autonomy—rather than a club, which Kramer insisted was a waste of money. Despite being the highest paid musician in the world, by the time Hendrix played Woodstock, in 1969, he was swamped with money problems. He was always the sort of performer who preferred to push boundaries and do the unexpected, and he was spending well into the six figures to record. He complained that crowds wanted to hear only his hits, so the studio was to be a place where Hendrix could have some freedom—something that despite his outwardly freewheeling look, riotous onstage antics, and easy come, easy go attitude, he had very little of. As Les Paul, the guitarist and inventor, recalled in the New York Times, “Musicians know that I’m a night person, so when someone’s got a technical question—how do you hold the guitar pick for this, how do you finger that chord?—they call. Back when Jimi Hendrix opened Electric Lady Studios, he was on the phone all the time; we talked about how to mike a guitar amplifier and where he should place the mike in the studio.” (...)Tucked into the whirl of Greenwich Village, Electric Lady could have become a priceless real-estate curio. Instead it has continued to be a place where great American music is born. Unlike many historical sites in Manhattan, Electric Lady Studios has a strict but logical door policy: no tours, no strangers. For the most part, the only people admitted are those who have come to make music—the artists and their retinues.
Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even, when one gets a chance to go inside. There is something about Electric Lady that feels sacrosanct. From the moment the discreet, glass-paned door buzzes and lets you through, disbelief sets in and does not fade as you walk down the bordello-red staircase. These are the steps where a very shy Jimi Hendrix, only weeks away from his death, told a very young Patti Smith his never-to-be realized plans for a universal love orchestra, an orchestra where, as Smith wrote in her memoir, “musicians from all over the world in Woodstock… would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn’t matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language. Eventually they would record this abstract universal language of music in his studio.”
When I first went to Electric Lady, ten years ago, Richard had booked the oval-shaped Studio A for Baraka to record in, and among the things I remember now is the way, late in the night, the red lights made the room gleam—as if the three-story building were a collection of bedouin tents set into the bow of a very fine, Jules Verne–built boat. There are no straight walls on the first floor of Electric Lady. Most of the studio’s rooms are lit by antique lamps and overhead mood lights that change color and make light shows against the white walls. Now a leather Eames recliner sits in the lobby and, next to it, a wooden record cabinet containing records from the studio’s most recent clients: Kanye West, Lana Del Rey, Daft Punk. There are Moroccan and Persian carpets and objets d’art throughout the building, such as a working 8-track with Ray Charles and Dolly Parton tapes that the current studio manager, Lee Foster, found and painted scarlet. There is a tiny hole in the door of an upstairs bathroom that Keith Richards cut for his microphone cord, so he could record his guitar solos in private. In a hallway there is a framed picture of the old Village Barn that Patti Smith gifted to the studio. In Studio B, the control board is caped in soft aubergine velvet. Another bathroom, painted a deep mauve, is papered with Barbra Streisand records and Polaroids of U2 hamming it up. And all along the walls of the first floor there are hundred-foot-long murals, painted in teal, pink, and purple, of astromen and -women trapped inside cosmic embryos: images, the artist Lance Jost recently told me, that are intended to paint the viewer into a spacecraft that is “hurtling through time and space.” As Erykah Badu put it, having pulled over her tour bus so that we could talk, “The artwork puts you automatically in Jimi Hendrix’s world… You don’t know what time it is, you don’t know what year it is, you’re just in a warp, in a wormhole or a vortex. There were many times that I would sleep there for days and didn’t see the outside world. I would take a sponge bath in the bathroom.But I didn’t mind that, because the mural in the bathroom makes me feel like I’m going into another part of myself. And just to see those people painted on those walls—those people are living still! And breathing through those walls. They are characters who are frozen in one position for the rest of time, who have millions of stories, depending on who lays their eyes on them. And those stories touch all our senses, and they have contributed to many of our songs, I’m sure.”
It’s easy to use words like vibe and surreal to describe Electric Lady, but it is almost impossible to understand the brave new world Hendrix was trying to forge with his studio if one doesn’t know that, in 1968, the idea of a studio owned by an artist—and one that had been built to allow artists to sit in the control room—was almost unheard of. Studios operated for the most part under the ironfisted grip of record companies. Engineers of that era were largely technicians, so much so that they often wore lab coats and cut their mixes in sterile, scientific environments. “There was a real boundary line between one side of the glass and the other, so Jimi’s idea was that it would be a safe haven for artists,” the Electric Lady’s architect, John Storyk, told me last summer. (...)
What is most incredible, to me, about Hendrix’s ascent and decline is how rapid and culturally defining it was for someone who lived for such a brief time. Not too long before Hendrix went vanguard and donned a British brigadier’s jacket, stopped conking his hair and curled it into a wispy Afro, thereby reinventing (but never quite losing) his painfully shy, poor-boy past to become a peacock of a performer, a god of rock, he was just a nameless, guitar-playing journeyman on the touring circuit once offensively known as “the Chitlin Circuit.” Hendrix would travel the Deep South, playing behind his childhood heroes. He also played for acts that were embarrassing and gimmicky, as a YouTube clip of him backing the duo Buddy and Stacey shows. Working behind them, Hendrix appeared for the first time on television on a Nashville-based R&B program called Night Train. Like so many other black musicians, he was a skilled laborer in his craft, but his ability to be flamboyant and vanguard mattered little while he was touring the circuit, and ultimately it served only to get him fired from Little Richard’s band.
Still, the circuit was where he learned the showmanship that Rolling Stone later would mock as being that of a “psychedelic superspade.” And, as songs like “Bold as Love” suggest, it is impossible to believe that he didn’t also learn the most technical, uneducable tricks of the trade from these acts. Before Hendrix claimed the title, Ike Turner was a reigning master of the vibrato, and Hendrix’s playing and showmanship have traces of Turner, a violent man whose fists have all but erased what he could do with his fingers when they strummed a guitar. Hendrix’s performed wildness was borrowed from Little Richard and Chuck Berry, his quickness from Bo Diddley, and (from the man he might have admired most of all) his smoothness from Curtis Mayfield. These were the people on the circuit who would lay the foundation for much of what Hendrix would later aspire to do—and would also serve as a template for what not to do when he became the frontman of his own group.
by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, The Believer | Read more:
Image: via:
The Truth About Your Smile
I had braces for seven years of my life—a clumsy mix of pallet expanders, headgear, and invasive lip-bumpers that bulked my skinny face at a time when I was already awkward enough without them. I was one of those middle-schoolers whose parents forced orthodontics on them when they were too young to realize what a great investment it was in their future. Instead, I adopted a coping mechanism of smiling with my mouth closed, a practice subsumed by a general feeling that I would forever be ashamed of my smile. What I didn’t realize then was that my teeth were about to look amazing. Like really amazing.
By ninth grade, the timely convergence of puberty and my braces removal made me feel like Pippi Longstocking blossoming into Jessica Chastain. Diligent toothbrushing through the awkward years paid off! Everywhere I went, people told me I had beautiful teeth: strangers, teachers, friends, parents of friends. People I didn’t know asked me everything from what toothpaste I used to whether or not I had my teeth professionally filed (the answer: never). A TSA agent once told me, as she scanned my luggage, “You have a perfect smile”.
When people compliment a feature of yours repeatedly, vanity leads you to maintain it, and over time I realized that a lot of what we think is good for our mouths are myths propagated by popular culture—or by companies trying to sell us something, like whitening strips, punishingly strong mouthwash, or air-flossers that imply through their advertising that they are sufficient to give us the Perfect White Smile we’ve always wanted. Don’t believe the hype, y’all. I’ve spoken with several dentists about proper oral hygiene and technique (I’m a nerd like that) and the reality is much more humble. Our mouths are pretty complicated, and there isn’t one miracle product that solves all the problems (and this make sense, because that’s also true for hair, diet, and skin). The good news is it’s easy to maintain a fresh breath, white teeth, and other forms of smile-related world domination—but you have to know the rules.
Here are the best “healthy smile” tips I’ve picked up over the years. (...)
Floss More, Brush Less
A dentist in Virginia once told me about this experiment: go 4-5 days without flossing, then floss. After you floss, ball the string up in your hand and smell it. You will never go without flossing again.
The moral of the story is this: the worst bacteria that causes bad breath and cavities lingers near our gum line and flossing is the only way to get them out. Luckily, its actually a lot easier to knock plaque off our teeth than we think, so flossing followed by a light brush is sufficient to keep your mouth squeaky clean. In fact, some dentists suggest that if you had a choice between flossing or brushing you'd be better off just flossing. It's that important. As my best friend's father—a dentist—once told me: “floss more, brush less”.
By ninth grade, the timely convergence of puberty and my braces removal made me feel like Pippi Longstocking blossoming into Jessica Chastain. Diligent toothbrushing through the awkward years paid off! Everywhere I went, people told me I had beautiful teeth: strangers, teachers, friends, parents of friends. People I didn’t know asked me everything from what toothpaste I used to whether or not I had my teeth professionally filed (the answer: never). A TSA agent once told me, as she scanned my luggage, “You have a perfect smile”.When people compliment a feature of yours repeatedly, vanity leads you to maintain it, and over time I realized that a lot of what we think is good for our mouths are myths propagated by popular culture—or by companies trying to sell us something, like whitening strips, punishingly strong mouthwash, or air-flossers that imply through their advertising that they are sufficient to give us the Perfect White Smile we’ve always wanted. Don’t believe the hype, y’all. I’ve spoken with several dentists about proper oral hygiene and technique (I’m a nerd like that) and the reality is much more humble. Our mouths are pretty complicated, and there isn’t one miracle product that solves all the problems (and this make sense, because that’s also true for hair, diet, and skin). The good news is it’s easy to maintain a fresh breath, white teeth, and other forms of smile-related world domination—but you have to know the rules.
Here are the best “healthy smile” tips I’ve picked up over the years. (...)
Floss More, Brush Less
A dentist in Virginia once told me about this experiment: go 4-5 days without flossing, then floss. After you floss, ball the string up in your hand and smell it. You will never go without flossing again.
The moral of the story is this: the worst bacteria that causes bad breath and cavities lingers near our gum line and flossing is the only way to get them out. Luckily, its actually a lot easier to knock plaque off our teeth than we think, so flossing followed by a light brush is sufficient to keep your mouth squeaky clean. In fact, some dentists suggest that if you had a choice between flossing or brushing you'd be better off just flossing. It's that important. As my best friend's father—a dentist—once told me: “floss more, brush less”.
Sucking On A Clove Fights Bad Breath
Gum, mouthwash, and mints can't address odor that ultimately comes from the stomach, but cloves (yes, the little sticks that you often put inside of potpourri and Jack-O-Lanterns) have been proven to kill odor-causing bacteria in the mouth—they don't just mask it like gum or mouthwash or mints do. My family have all known about this and practiced it for years (my parents and I all carry around little tins filled with cloves instead of mints, and I think its because we love garlic-y hummus but we hate bad breath). I suck on one before important meetings and hot dates.
For chronic conditions like halitosis, however, you should see your doctor; bad breath originates from bacteria/food in the stomach, not the mouth. The good news about bad breath originating from the stomach, too, is that there are certain foods that mask persistent scents like garlic (which stays in your system for two days, usually). Breath-boosting foods include: leafy greens, apples, lemon juice, and turmeric. Eat these things before going on a date and you're golden!
Gum, mouthwash, and mints can't address odor that ultimately comes from the stomach, but cloves (yes, the little sticks that you often put inside of potpourri and Jack-O-Lanterns) have been proven to kill odor-causing bacteria in the mouth—they don't just mask it like gum or mouthwash or mints do. My family have all known about this and practiced it for years (my parents and I all carry around little tins filled with cloves instead of mints, and I think its because we love garlic-y hummus but we hate bad breath). I suck on one before important meetings and hot dates.
For chronic conditions like halitosis, however, you should see your doctor; bad breath originates from bacteria/food in the stomach, not the mouth. The good news about bad breath originating from the stomach, too, is that there are certain foods that mask persistent scents like garlic (which stays in your system for two days, usually). Breath-boosting foods include: leafy greens, apples, lemon juice, and turmeric. Eat these things before going on a date and you're golden!
Ramen in Japan, Ramen in America
[ed. See also: Food and Consequences: Ramen and Momofuku Ramen 2.0 ]
In the first issue of Lucky Peach, Ivan Orkin wrote about what it was like to be a Jewish guy from New York running two of the most popular ramen shops in Tokyo. Now, three years later, he’s moved back to the States to open two more shops in New York. If there’s anyone who can talk about the differences between the two ramen cultures—and what it’s like making ramen in each of the cities—it’s this guy.
It's Harder to Make a Proper Ramen Noodle Here
First of all, I daresay that bread and pastry production are more sophisticated in Japan. When I’m in Tokyo, there’s pastry everywhere! Everywhere. There are amazing loaves of white pullman bread, baguettes, and croissants. It’s all cooked hourly. Here in New York, where are you going to find fresh, warm bread? You’re going to have to seek it out.In Japan, flour companies have different divisions that make flour for noodles. In general, this flour is milled as much as ten times more finely than it is here. The flour doesn’t need to be as absorbent here in the U.S.—it’s primarily for bread production. So there’s not as much of a reason to mill it as fine. The result is that it’s harder to make a proper ramen noodle here, since the flour is just not fine enough.
Relative to pasta, ramen noodles are on the low end of the water-content spectrum—some can contain as little as 26 percent water. In Tokyo, where we make our own noodles, my machines have these giant, very heavy rollers. When you initially mix your flour in the hopper, it’s not all clumped together; it’s usually very feathery. As you push it through these rollers, it rolls into a sheet. Without the additional water, there’s a tremendous amount of force that’s needed to press the flour into dough. The more refined your flour, the better it will bind with water, and the better the texture of the final noodle.
When I talk to our flour salesman in Tokyo, I can say, “I’m thinking about making a tsukemen noodle, and I want it to be aromatic and have a chew,” and he’ll send me samples that make sense. Then we can talk on the phone and I can say, “I want my ash content to be a bit lower or higher” or “I want to be able to see more or less of the grain color in the noodle.” I can really talk to them and have a super intellectual conversation, and at the end of the day you’re able to make a really good product. (...)
You Can't Get Good Chicken Fat Here in the States
In Japan, you can get great chicken fat for cheap. It’s orange and it doesn’t taste funky—it almost tastes like chicken soup. At the ramen shop where I went with Chang for Mind of a Chef—69 ’N’ Roll One, the one where you’re not allowed to talk—the chef just covers the whole top of the soup with a slick of this amazing chicken fat. It’s so delicious.
You can’t get good chicken fat here in the States. A USDA plant needs approval for each part of the animal they want to use: necks, wings, heads, whatever. A guy at one of the chicken farms we use says he throws all his chicken fat away; it’s too much of a hassle to get it USDA approved, and nobody wants to buy it.
So I use whatever I can get. It’s not bad. It’s good, but it’s not as delicious. At the shop, people are like, You could use Flying Pigs Farms or whatever, and it’s like, Yeah, but they want $15 per pound for their birds. Then they’ll say, Why don’t you use pastured, sustainable, organic meat? And I’m like, Will you pay $25 per bowl of ramen?People think that’s terrible, but it’s like, What the fuck—you don’t want to pay! They want me to have some fucking lady in upstate New York picking carrots out of the ground and carrying them to my restaurant. But they don’t want to pay for that.
by Ivan Orkin, Lucky Peach | Read more:
Image: Lucky Peach
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
When I Grow Up
The theme-park chain where children pretend to be adults.
Several decades ago, the district of Santa Fe, on the western edge of Mexico City, was an industrial zone devoted to strip-mining. After the gravel and sand pits were depleted, they became enormous garbage dumps where scavengers roamed. In the nineties, the government initiated a reclamation project, and the area is now filled with high-rise condominiums, luxury hotels, and office towers occupied by multinationals, set along manicured highways that are free of trash or pedestrians. In the middle of this invented neighborhood is the Centro Santa Fe mall, one of the largest in Latin America. With more than five hundred stores and an indoor skating rink, it draws twenty-two million visitors a year. At one end of the mall is KidZania, a theme park for children that opened fifteen years ago, and has since spread to cities in a dozen other countries, including Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, and Istanbul.
Rather than offering thrill rides, like Disney World, or video-game arcades, like Chuck E. Cheese’s, KidZania gives children between the ages of four and fourteen the chance to enact the roles of grownups in a lavishly realized, scaled-down world. If the neighborhood of Santa Fe is the realization of a contemporary urban vision—corporate, sanitized, market-driven—then KidZania is a quirky, child-size iteration. Known before its international expansion as La Ciudad de los Niños (The Children’s City), the KidZania in Santa Fe—like all the franchises it has spawned—is uncanny in its realism. Its brick-paved streets are lined with buildings in the style of different historical periods, like an authentic cityscape that has evolved over centuries, with storefronts bearing the logos of familiar brands like McDonald’s and Sony. From a child’s perspective, KidZania is an enclosed, enticing world—resembling the outside one but oriented to children’s capacities and interests. Kids can roam freely, since the only traffic is a slow-moving, if clamorous, fire truck and a similarly unhurried ambulance, both of which perpetually circulate through the town square, under a roof that has been painted indigo to represent a sky in the twilight hours, as if it were always—excitingly—just past bedtime.
Whereas Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks promise fantasy and wish fulfillment, KidZania is a proudly mundane municipality: children can work on a car assembly line, or move furniture, or put out a fake fire with real water. KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking debit card. Children receive a check for fifty kidzos upon arriving at KidZania, and can supplement that with the “salary” they earn for participating in an activity. The most popular of them, like training to be a pilot on a simplified flight simulator, are not as remunerative as the less popular, like being a dentist. (You peer inside a dummy’s mouth.) Children can spend their kidzos on renting a car—small electric vehicles moving around a go-kart track that is sponsored by companies like Mercedes-Benz or Renault—or at the mini city’s department store, which bears the name of a regional chain and is stocked with covetable trinkets.
KidZania even has its own “language”—short phrases that are delivered in a combination of English and something that an alien in a low-budget sci-fi movie might speak. “Kai!” is an informal greeting usually delivered with a gesture peculiar to KidZania: the first two fingers of the right hand splayed over the heart. “Zanks!” substitutes for “thanks.” The valediction “Z-U!” is used everywhere from Santiago to Seoul. The adults who staff the establishments and guide the children through the activities are called Zupervisors, and when speaking to children in their native language they end conversations with the exhortation “Have a productive day.” (...)
The Santa Fe park opened in September, 1999. Eight hundred thousand people came in the first year, twice the number anticipated. Corporate sponsors, upon whose investment the business model depends, also embraced the concept, and there are now more than eight hundred worldwide. “KidZania is a good platform in terms of building brand loyalty,” Maricruz Arrubarrena, one of KidZania’s Mexican executives, told me. “Kids don’t have a lot of loyalty—they have a lot of options. In KidZania, the brands can work with the kids when they are kids, and in the future build a more loyal client.”
The Santa Fe park was so successful that, in 2006, López expanded to the Mexican city of Monterrey. (Laresgoiti had sold his share to López in 2002 and moved to Florida, where he launched Wannado, a theme park similar to KidZania. It closed in 2011.) Like the Santa Fe park, the Monterrey branch was owned and operated by López’s company, but later that year the concept was taken to Tokyo under a franchise operation. Franchises have since opened in Seoul, where kids can manufacture ramen noodles, and in Mumbai, where there is a scaled-down Bollywood studio—one of López’s partners is Shah Rukh Kahn, the actor. KidZania opens a London branch this spring. (...)
Although KidZanias look much like one another, the behavior of their visitors varies by nation. In Mexico, kids tend to spend their kidzos immediately after earning them; in Japan, it is difficult to persuade children to part with their kidzos at all. López jokes that when KidZania arrives in the U.S. kids will demand the introduction of a credit card. In Lisbon, kids mostly come with their parents, whereas in the Gulf states they are often accompanied by nannies or dropped off by drivers. KidZania tries to be sensitive to local mores, but López also sees a role for the company in implicitly promoting the values of a Western, market-driven democracy. In KidZania Jeddah, which is scheduled to open in Saudi Arabia later this month, girls will be permitted to drive cars, a privilege denied their mothers.
A few years ago, López’s marketing department came up with an origin myth for KidZania: kids, having seen what a mess adults had made of the world, founded their own country, whose borders children cross every time they visit the park. A KidZanian Declaration of Independence was written, which outlines the six “rightz” of childhood: to be, to know, to create, to share, to care, and to play. It concludes with the national motto: “Get ready for a better world.” To López’s frustration, children who visit KidZania are largely unaware of this invented history. He hopes eventually to educate them about it—perhaps by producing a KidZania movie. “Usually, all these stories start with a movie or a TV program, and then that story comes all the way to a theme park—that’s what Disney does,” he told me. “We started from the theme park, and have to go backward.”
López believes that his young visitors are getting ready for a better world, whether they realize it or not. “We are empowering them to become independent,” he said. “What they love most, on the second or third visit, is their independence. They have their own kidzos; they can make their own decisions. This is their world, where they are not being told what to do. Even if you go to Disneyland, you are guided—you are supposed to walk a typical way. But here children are by themselves. We don’t tell them anything. Just cash your check, get money, and start spending money—that is the only thing we tell them.”
Several decades ago, the district of Santa Fe, on the western edge of Mexico City, was an industrial zone devoted to strip-mining. After the gravel and sand pits were depleted, they became enormous garbage dumps where scavengers roamed. In the nineties, the government initiated a reclamation project, and the area is now filled with high-rise condominiums, luxury hotels, and office towers occupied by multinationals, set along manicured highways that are free of trash or pedestrians. In the middle of this invented neighborhood is the Centro Santa Fe mall, one of the largest in Latin America. With more than five hundred stores and an indoor skating rink, it draws twenty-two million visitors a year. At one end of the mall is KidZania, a theme park for children that opened fifteen years ago, and has since spread to cities in a dozen other countries, including Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Mumbai, and Istanbul.Rather than offering thrill rides, like Disney World, or video-game arcades, like Chuck E. Cheese’s, KidZania gives children between the ages of four and fourteen the chance to enact the roles of grownups in a lavishly realized, scaled-down world. If the neighborhood of Santa Fe is the realization of a contemporary urban vision—corporate, sanitized, market-driven—then KidZania is a quirky, child-size iteration. Known before its international expansion as La Ciudad de los Niños (The Children’s City), the KidZania in Santa Fe—like all the franchises it has spawned—is uncanny in its realism. Its brick-paved streets are lined with buildings in the style of different historical periods, like an authentic cityscape that has evolved over centuries, with storefronts bearing the logos of familiar brands like McDonald’s and Sony. From a child’s perspective, KidZania is an enclosed, enticing world—resembling the outside one but oriented to children’s capacities and interests. Kids can roam freely, since the only traffic is a slow-moving, if clamorous, fire truck and a similarly unhurried ambulance, both of which perpetually circulate through the town square, under a roof that has been painted indigo to represent a sky in the twilight hours, as if it were always—excitingly—just past bedtime.
Whereas Disney’s Magic Kingdom parks promise fantasy and wish fulfillment, KidZania is a proudly mundane municipality: children can work on a car assembly line, or move furniture, or put out a fake fire with real water. KidZania has its own currency, kidzos, which can be used in branches around the world, or deposited in the central bank and accessed with a realistic-looking debit card. Children receive a check for fifty kidzos upon arriving at KidZania, and can supplement that with the “salary” they earn for participating in an activity. The most popular of them, like training to be a pilot on a simplified flight simulator, are not as remunerative as the less popular, like being a dentist. (You peer inside a dummy’s mouth.) Children can spend their kidzos on renting a car—small electric vehicles moving around a go-kart track that is sponsored by companies like Mercedes-Benz or Renault—or at the mini city’s department store, which bears the name of a regional chain and is stocked with covetable trinkets.
KidZania even has its own “language”—short phrases that are delivered in a combination of English and something that an alien in a low-budget sci-fi movie might speak. “Kai!” is an informal greeting usually delivered with a gesture peculiar to KidZania: the first two fingers of the right hand splayed over the heart. “Zanks!” substitutes for “thanks.” The valediction “Z-U!” is used everywhere from Santiago to Seoul. The adults who staff the establishments and guide the children through the activities are called Zupervisors, and when speaking to children in their native language they end conversations with the exhortation “Have a productive day.” (...)
The Santa Fe park opened in September, 1999. Eight hundred thousand people came in the first year, twice the number anticipated. Corporate sponsors, upon whose investment the business model depends, also embraced the concept, and there are now more than eight hundred worldwide. “KidZania is a good platform in terms of building brand loyalty,” Maricruz Arrubarrena, one of KidZania’s Mexican executives, told me. “Kids don’t have a lot of loyalty—they have a lot of options. In KidZania, the brands can work with the kids when they are kids, and in the future build a more loyal client.”
The Santa Fe park was so successful that, in 2006, López expanded to the Mexican city of Monterrey. (Laresgoiti had sold his share to López in 2002 and moved to Florida, where he launched Wannado, a theme park similar to KidZania. It closed in 2011.) Like the Santa Fe park, the Monterrey branch was owned and operated by López’s company, but later that year the concept was taken to Tokyo under a franchise operation. Franchises have since opened in Seoul, where kids can manufacture ramen noodles, and in Mumbai, where there is a scaled-down Bollywood studio—one of López’s partners is Shah Rukh Kahn, the actor. KidZania opens a London branch this spring. (...)
Although KidZanias look much like one another, the behavior of their visitors varies by nation. In Mexico, kids tend to spend their kidzos immediately after earning them; in Japan, it is difficult to persuade children to part with their kidzos at all. López jokes that when KidZania arrives in the U.S. kids will demand the introduction of a credit card. In Lisbon, kids mostly come with their parents, whereas in the Gulf states they are often accompanied by nannies or dropped off by drivers. KidZania tries to be sensitive to local mores, but López also sees a role for the company in implicitly promoting the values of a Western, market-driven democracy. In KidZania Jeddah, which is scheduled to open in Saudi Arabia later this month, girls will be permitted to drive cars, a privilege denied their mothers.
A few years ago, López’s marketing department came up with an origin myth for KidZania: kids, having seen what a mess adults had made of the world, founded their own country, whose borders children cross every time they visit the park. A KidZanian Declaration of Independence was written, which outlines the six “rightz” of childhood: to be, to know, to create, to share, to care, and to play. It concludes with the national motto: “Get ready for a better world.” To López’s frustration, children who visit KidZania are largely unaware of this invented history. He hopes eventually to educate them about it—perhaps by producing a KidZania movie. “Usually, all these stories start with a movie or a TV program, and then that story comes all the way to a theme park—that’s what Disney does,” he told me. “We started from the theme park, and have to go backward.”
López believes that his young visitors are getting ready for a better world, whether they realize it or not. “We are empowering them to become independent,” he said. “What they love most, on the second or third visit, is their independence. They have their own kidzos; they can make their own decisions. This is their world, where they are not being told what to do. Even if you go to Disneyland, you are guided—you are supposed to walk a typical way. But here children are by themselves. We don’t tell them anything. Just cash your check, get money, and start spending money—that is the only thing we tell them.”
by Rebecca Mead, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Nishant Choksi
A Football Sunday With Richard Sherman
Maple Valley, Wash. — Richard Sherman is calm, quiet and engaged. Barefoot and dressed in sweats, he’s staring at a 70-inch flat-screen TV mounted on a living room wall. His girlfriend, Ashley, and his father, Kevin, are also here, watching the Cowboys-Packers playoff game in the cocoon of Sherman’s 9,435-square-foot mansion outside Seattle. It’s drizzling on the full-length basketball court and the Koi pond out back. A Domino’s pepperoni and sausage pizza is on the way. Suddenly, Sherman leaps to his feet, knocking the remote off a couch armrest and onto the floor.
“That’s 71 Trap! 71 Trap!”
The play isn’t even over yet. The Packers are doing something wacky with their coverage: Cornerback Sam Shields presses the outside wideout on the three-receiver side for about three steps, then peels off and steps into the flat, walling off an open man. The trap is meant for Tony Romo. The quarterback’s head begins to dart. He panics and scrambles to his right before being sandwiched by Packers linemen.
“Got him!” Sherman shouts.
Ashley and dad are still lounging. They’re used to this by now. But I’m at a loss. What happened?
Sherman reaches out with both hands.
“Give me the notebook,” he says. “71 Trap. It looks like a simple man coverage, but this corner has whoever stops in the flat, and the safety takes that receiver going up the sideline, and the linebacker or nickel takes the slot guy if he…”
But you can’t see the safety on TV…
“Right,” he says. “With TV, you kind of have to assume certain things are true.”
This is how the best cornerback in football watches NFL games: He diagnoses, he plots, and he guesses. The guesses will be confirmed over and over again during film-study sessions throughout the week to come, but this is a first look at the upcoming NFC Championship Game through Sherman’s eyes.
He hands the notebook back, and then the doorbell rings. The pizza is here. Time to eat.
To get to Sherman’s house from downtown Seattle, you drive 10 miles down I-5 South, east on 405 past Renton (where the Seahawks’ facility rests on the edge of Lake Washington), and along a stretch of heaven called SE Petrovitsky Rd. It is a coniferous escape route from the hassles of the city that takes you past rushing creeks and small ponds and the occasional mom-and-pop store. Turn into a quiet neighborhood and pass the horse farm and there’s Sherman’s house, which he bought for $2.3 million in June from, of all people, the NBA’s Jamal Crawford.
Several media outlets published links to the address, giving fans easy access that would otherwise take some digging to find online. And fans began showing up at his gate, even entire football teams of 12-year-olds filing off school buses in full uniform, pleading for autographs. Sherman stopped talking to local media for months as a result.
Fans soon got the hint and stopped showing up by the busload. And he started talking again. After Sunday’s divisional-round win over the Panthers—a 31-17 victory in which Sherman snagged his first career playoff interception—he was the last player in the locker room talking to a media scrum. Seahawks PR rarely steps in anymore. Sometimes a straggler will try to sneak in a few private questions after the group disperses, and Sherman almost always obliges. He drops some quote-bombs that make Twitter waves for beat writers and must-hear sound bites for TV stations. Of teammate Kam Chancellor, Sherman said, “He plays in a dark place … He damages people’s souls.”
In short, NFL play-callers are boring. Sherman estimates about 26 teams run the same handful of plays on third down. Of the teams he’s played over the last two years, he can think of three that don’t: New England, Denver and New Orleans.
“New Orleans runs a bunch of stuff out of a bunch of different formations,” he says. “And then they have a few plays that look like they’re drawn in the dirt. It just looks dumb, but if you’re not prepared for it, it’s going for six.”
“That’s 71 Trap! 71 Trap!”The play isn’t even over yet. The Packers are doing something wacky with their coverage: Cornerback Sam Shields presses the outside wideout on the three-receiver side for about three steps, then peels off and steps into the flat, walling off an open man. The trap is meant for Tony Romo. The quarterback’s head begins to dart. He panics and scrambles to his right before being sandwiched by Packers linemen.
“Got him!” Sherman shouts.
Ashley and dad are still lounging. They’re used to this by now. But I’m at a loss. What happened?
Sherman reaches out with both hands.
“Give me the notebook,” he says. “71 Trap. It looks like a simple man coverage, but this corner has whoever stops in the flat, and the safety takes that receiver going up the sideline, and the linebacker or nickel takes the slot guy if he…”
But you can’t see the safety on TV…
“Right,” he says. “With TV, you kind of have to assume certain things are true.”
This is how the best cornerback in football watches NFL games: He diagnoses, he plots, and he guesses. The guesses will be confirmed over and over again during film-study sessions throughout the week to come, but this is a first look at the upcoming NFC Championship Game through Sherman’s eyes.
He hands the notebook back, and then the doorbell rings. The pizza is here. Time to eat.
To get to Sherman’s house from downtown Seattle, you drive 10 miles down I-5 South, east on 405 past Renton (where the Seahawks’ facility rests on the edge of Lake Washington), and along a stretch of heaven called SE Petrovitsky Rd. It is a coniferous escape route from the hassles of the city that takes you past rushing creeks and small ponds and the occasional mom-and-pop store. Turn into a quiet neighborhood and pass the horse farm and there’s Sherman’s house, which he bought for $2.3 million in June from, of all people, the NBA’s Jamal Crawford.
Several media outlets published links to the address, giving fans easy access that would otherwise take some digging to find online. And fans began showing up at his gate, even entire football teams of 12-year-olds filing off school buses in full uniform, pleading for autographs. Sherman stopped talking to local media for months as a result.
Fans soon got the hint and stopped showing up by the busload. And he started talking again. After Sunday’s divisional-round win over the Panthers—a 31-17 victory in which Sherman snagged his first career playoff interception—he was the last player in the locker room talking to a media scrum. Seahawks PR rarely steps in anymore. Sometimes a straggler will try to sneak in a few private questions after the group disperses, and Sherman almost always obliges. He drops some quote-bombs that make Twitter waves for beat writers and must-hear sound bites for TV stations. Of teammate Kam Chancellor, Sherman said, “He plays in a dark place … He damages people’s souls.”
This is Sherman in media mode, delivering Randy Savage rhetoric with a Chris Rock cadence and a Denzel smile. This Richard Sherman raises teammates to mythic proportions, turns a postgame interview into an offseason-long sports culture debate, and cashes endorsement checks from Campbell’s Soup and Beats by Dre. But I came to his house to see the other Richard, the guy who writes and speaks intelligently about concussions, race, society and above all, football. (...)
What some teams call a 288 special—two identical post routes on one side of the formation and a crossing route from the other side—the Seahawks call “Dino.” The Cowboys run a route combination featuring a streaking tight end, a hitch from the slot receiver and a deep in from the outside receiver. The Seahawks call it “Ram,” a nod to Dick Vermeil and Mike Martz, who developed and perfected it with Kurt Warner in the late 1990s. Seattle uses this language to anticipate and identify what teams will run before they run it.
“If it’s third down,” Sherman says, “a lot of times you can look at the formation and know the play, especially if it’s a team you’ve played this season.”
How is that possible?
What some teams call a 288 special—two identical post routes on one side of the formation and a crossing route from the other side—the Seahawks call “Dino.” The Cowboys run a route combination featuring a streaking tight end, a hitch from the slot receiver and a deep in from the outside receiver. The Seahawks call it “Ram,” a nod to Dick Vermeil and Mike Martz, who developed and perfected it with Kurt Warner in the late 1990s. Seattle uses this language to anticipate and identify what teams will run before they run it.
“If it’s third down,” Sherman says, “a lot of times you can look at the formation and know the play, especially if it’s a team you’ve played this season.”
How is that possible?
In short, NFL play-callers are boring. Sherman estimates about 26 teams run the same handful of plays on third down. Of the teams he’s played over the last two years, he can think of three that don’t: New England, Denver and New Orleans.
“New Orleans runs a bunch of stuff out of a bunch of different formations,” he says. “And then they have a few plays that look like they’re drawn in the dirt. It just looks dumb, but if you’re not prepared for it, it’s going for six.”
by Peter King, MMQB | Read more:
Image: Rod Mar for Sports Illusrated/The MMQB
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
BPA Replacement Could Be Just as Bad For You as BPA
"Bisphenol A," aka, BPA is a compound found in many polycarbonate plastics, like your old Nalgene water bottle from summer camp. It's everywhere, and it's been linked, as the authors point out, to obesity, cancer, and childhood neurological disorders. Study after study showed the chemical was harmful and so eventually, manufacturers relented and started using "bisphenol S," aka BPS, as a substitute. If you buy something that says "BPA-free" on it, there's a pretty good chance the manufacturer just swapped out BPS for BPA.
This would be a great triumph for consumers, except that now it seems that BPS is just as bad.
The Washington Post reports the findings study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which show that BPS has at least one unfortunate similarity to BPA in the way it affects Zebrafish. The study showed that caused the same "precocious" neurological behavior in zebrafish larvae as BPA, indicating that the overall effect of BPA and BPS could be similar on humans. In particular, the affects could be similar on childhood neurological development.
by Mario Aguilar, Gizmodo | Read more:
Image: uncredited
A Teenager’s View on Social Media - Written By An Actual Teen
[ed. See also: the second installment to this essay, plus this response from an "Old Fogey".]
For transparency, I am a 19-year-old male attending The University of Texas at Austin. I am extremely interested in social media’s role in our society as well as how it is currently evolving. Thus, the views I provide here are my own, but do stem from observation of not only my own habits but my peers’ habits as well.
This article will not use any studies, data, sources, etc. This is because you can easily get that from any other technology news website and analyze from there. I’m here to provide a different view based off of my life in this “highly coveted” age bracket. That being said, I'm not an expert at this by a long shot and I'm sure there will be data that disproves some of the points I make, but this is just what I've noticed.
I think the best way to approach this would be to break it down by social media network and the observations/viewpoints I've gathered over the years.
Facebook
In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can't really leave. It’s weird and can even be annoying to have Facebook at times. That being said, if youdon't have Facebook, that’s even more weird and annoying. Weird because of the social pressure behind the question, “Everyone has Facebook, why don't you?” and annoying because you'll have to answer that to just about everyone in classes you meet who makes an attempt to friend you or find you on there.
Facebook is often used by us mainly for its group functionality. I know plenty of classmates who only go on Facebook to check the groups they are part of and then quickly log off. In this part Facebook shines—groups do not have the same complicated algorithms behind them that the Newsfeed does. It is very easy to just see the new information posted on the group without having to sift through tons of posts and advertising you don't really care about.
Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because they provide the means to talk to those people who you weren't really comfortable with asking for their number but comfortable enough to send them a friend request.
Facebook is often the jumping-off point for many people to try to find you online, simply because everyone around us has it. If I met you one time at some party, I’m not going to try to check Twitter or Instagram to find out who you are. Instead, many opt for the ease of Facebook and the powerful search functionality that gives you results of people who you actually have a chance of knowing (unlike Instagram, whose search functionality, although it improved slightly in the last update, leaves much to be desired)
In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can't really leave. It’s weird and can even be annoying to have Facebook at times. That being said, if youdon't have Facebook, that’s even more weird and annoying. Weird because of the social pressure behind the question, “Everyone has Facebook, why don't you?” and annoying because you'll have to answer that to just about everyone in classes you meet who makes an attempt to friend you or find you on there.
Facebook is often used by us mainly for its group functionality. I know plenty of classmates who only go on Facebook to check the groups they are part of and then quickly log off. In this part Facebook shines—groups do not have the same complicated algorithms behind them that the Newsfeed does. It is very easy to just see the new information posted on the group without having to sift through tons of posts and advertising you don't really care about.
Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because they provide the means to talk to those people who you weren't really comfortable with asking for their number but comfortable enough to send them a friend request.
Facebook is often the jumping-off point for many people to try to find you online, simply because everyone around us has it. If I met you one time at some party, I’m not going to try to check Twitter or Instagram to find out who you are. Instead, many opt for the ease of Facebook and the powerful search functionality that gives you results of people who you actually have a chance of knowing (unlike Instagram, whose search functionality, although it improved slightly in the last update, leaves much to be desired)
by Andrew Watts, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
'Do you like my eel skin purse and spray-on dress?'
The conventional leather industry is being shaken up by new fashion innovators that are developing leather-like fabrics out of unlikely materials, such as fish skin and fruit.
Waste salmon and eel skins, a by-product of the food industry, are now being turned into high end accessories by start-up Heidi & Adele.
Founded 18 months ago by Heidi Carneau, a former Goldman Sachs director, and serial entrepreneur Adele Taylor, the fashion business works with a salmon factory in Iceland and an eel processing plant in Korea to make the “eco exotic” leathers.
Fish leather is just as strong as other leathers on the market and takes dye easily, so Heidi & Adele’s range of bags, purses, and oyster card holders come in a dazzling array of colours.
The finished leather has striking scales and patterns that are similar to reptile leather, but without the “guilt factor”.
“Python has been very big in the past few years, but many of those manufacturers source snakes illegally in Indonesia,” says Carneau, who is hoping to appeal to the ethical fashionista.
“Python are inflated while alive to stretch the skin then their heads are chopped off. It’s horrendous - the next fashion scandal waiting to break.” (...)
Footwear brands Puma and Camper are currently experimenting with one of these eco alternatives, made entirely from pineapple leaves.
Pinetex has been developed by former leather consultant Carmen Hijosa after she discovered the material in the Philippines.
“It is made from pineapple leaf fibres that are a waste product of the pineapple harvest,” Ananas Anam founder Hijosa told the Telegraph. “It can be made into any kind of fashion accessory such as bags, shoes, and hats, as well as furnishings and interiors.”
by Rebecca Burn-Callander, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Pinatex
Waste salmon and eel skins, a by-product of the food industry, are now being turned into high end accessories by start-up Heidi & Adele.
Founded 18 months ago by Heidi Carneau, a former Goldman Sachs director, and serial entrepreneur Adele Taylor, the fashion business works with a salmon factory in Iceland and an eel processing plant in Korea to make the “eco exotic” leathers.Fish leather is just as strong as other leathers on the market and takes dye easily, so Heidi & Adele’s range of bags, purses, and oyster card holders come in a dazzling array of colours.
The finished leather has striking scales and patterns that are similar to reptile leather, but without the “guilt factor”.
“Python has been very big in the past few years, but many of those manufacturers source snakes illegally in Indonesia,” says Carneau, who is hoping to appeal to the ethical fashionista.
“Python are inflated while alive to stretch the skin then their heads are chopped off. It’s horrendous - the next fashion scandal waiting to break.” (...)
Footwear brands Puma and Camper are currently experimenting with one of these eco alternatives, made entirely from pineapple leaves.
Pinetex has been developed by former leather consultant Carmen Hijosa after she discovered the material in the Philippines.
“It is made from pineapple leaf fibres that are a waste product of the pineapple harvest,” Ananas Anam founder Hijosa told the Telegraph. “It can be made into any kind of fashion accessory such as bags, shoes, and hats, as well as furnishings and interiors.”
by Rebecca Burn-Callander, The Telegraph | Read more:
Image: Pinatex
The War on Drugs Is Burning Out
The conservative wave of 2014 featured an unlikely, progressive undercurrent: In two states, plus the nation's capital, Americans voted convincingly to pull the plug on marijuana prohibition. Even more striking were the results in California, where voters overwhelmingly passed one of the broadest sentencing reforms in the nation, de-felonizing possession of hard drugs. One week later, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD announced an end to arrests for marijuana possession. It's all part of the most significant story in American drug policy since the passage of the 21st Amendment legalized alcohol in 1933: The people of this country are leading a dramatic de-escalation in the War on Drugs.
November's election results have teed up pot prohibition as a potent campaign issue for 2016. Notwithstanding the House GOP's contested effort to preserve pot prohibition in D.C., the flowering of the marijuana-legalization movement is creating space for a more rational and humane approach to adjudicating users of harder drugs, both on the state level and federally. "The door is open to reconsidering all of our drug laws," says Alison Holcomb, who led the pot-legalization push in Washington state in 2012, and has been tapped to direct the ACLU's new campaign against mass incarceration. (...)
The trajectory of the citizen-led drawdown of the Drug War is clearest in California – where four years ago the pot-legalization movement's biggest stumble, ironically, helped clear a path for one of the anti-Drug War movement's most transformational successes this past November.
Pushing the envelope back in 2010, California activists qualified a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana. At the time, Holder warned the Justice Department would "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana prohibition in California. Eager to pre-empt a constitutional crisis over fully legal weed, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger steered passage of a half-measure – an October 2010 law decriminalizing marijuana use.
The Governator's gambit worked. Decriminalization helped take the wind out of the sails of the legalization campaign, which failed at the ballot box. But having spurred the legislature to action, pot activists indirectly scored a huge victory for criminal and racial justice. Possession of up to an ounce of marijuana became an infraction, like a parking ticket, with a maximum $100 fine. And the California law applied to users of any age – not just tokers 21 and over.
The impact of this tweak has been remarkable: By removing low-level youth pot offenses from the criminal-justice system, overall youth crime has plummeted by nearly 30 percent in California – to levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration. And decriminalization didn't lead to any of the harms foretold by prohibitionists. Quite the opposite: Since the law passed in 2010, the rate of both high school dropouts and youth drug overdoses are down by 20 percent, according to a new research report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Non--marijuana drug arrests for California youth, meanwhile, are also down 23 percent – fully debunking the gateway theory.
Decriminalization in California, the report concludes, has reduced the harms of prohibition for thousands of California teens. "Fewer young people," its authors write, "are suffering the damages and costs of criminal arrest, prosecution, incarceration, fines, loss of federal aid and other punishments." Perhaps most important, the Darren Wilsons of California have one less pretext to disrupt the lives of the state's Michael Browns.
In November – building on the success of decriminalization and on public disgust at the state's criminally overcrowded and ruinously expensive prison system – California voters took an even bolder leap with Proposition 47, which reduced possession of hard drugs including cocaine, heroin and meth from a felony to a misdemeanor. (Prop 47 also de-felonized nonviolent theft of less than $950.)
In a year of record-low voter turnout, Prop 47 passed with 59 percent support, thanks in part to endorsements from nationally prominent Republicans like Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich. The new law is expected to affect 24,000 drug convictions a year. And the reduction in the ranks of the incarcerated will create savings, the state estimates, in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars annually." Innovatively, Prop 47 captures those savings and steers them into community programs. "This is the first voter initiative to literally take money out of the prison budget and put it into prevention and treatment," says Lenore Anderson, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, which spearheaded the campaign for Proposition 47.
The new law also allows current convicts to petition to get their sentences- reduced retroactively. In the cases of some convicts under California's notorious "Three Strikes" laws, this will mean the difference between a continued life sentence and freedom. Additionally, as many as 1 million Californians will qualify to have felony records expunged – removing what Anderson calls the "Scarlet- F" from their chests – opening doors to fuller integration in society, with fewer obstacles to getting a job, finding an apartment or enrolling in public assistance.
"We're not only stopping overincarceration," Anderson says. "We're also going to clean up its legacy."
November's election results have teed up pot prohibition as a potent campaign issue for 2016. Notwithstanding the House GOP's contested effort to preserve pot prohibition in D.C., the flowering of the marijuana-legalization movement is creating space for a more rational and humane approach to adjudicating users of harder drugs, both on the state level and federally. "The door is open to reconsidering all of our drug laws," says Alison Holcomb, who led the pot-legalization push in Washington state in 2012, and has been tapped to direct the ACLU's new campaign against mass incarceration. (...)The trajectory of the citizen-led drawdown of the Drug War is clearest in California – where four years ago the pot-legalization movement's biggest stumble, ironically, helped clear a path for one of the anti-Drug War movement's most transformational successes this past November.
Pushing the envelope back in 2010, California activists qualified a ballot initiative to legalize recreational marijuana. At the time, Holder warned the Justice Department would "vigorously enforce" federal marijuana prohibition in California. Eager to pre-empt a constitutional crisis over fully legal weed, then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger steered passage of a half-measure – an October 2010 law decriminalizing marijuana use.
The Governator's gambit worked. Decriminalization helped take the wind out of the sails of the legalization campaign, which failed at the ballot box. But having spurred the legislature to action, pot activists indirectly scored a huge victory for criminal and racial justice. Possession of up to an ounce of marijuana became an infraction, like a parking ticket, with a maximum $100 fine. And the California law applied to users of any age – not just tokers 21 and over.
The impact of this tweak has been remarkable: By removing low-level youth pot offenses from the criminal-justice system, overall youth crime has plummeted by nearly 30 percent in California – to levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration. And decriminalization didn't lead to any of the harms foretold by prohibitionists. Quite the opposite: Since the law passed in 2010, the rate of both high school dropouts and youth drug overdoses are down by 20 percent, according to a new research report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Non--marijuana drug arrests for California youth, meanwhile, are also down 23 percent – fully debunking the gateway theory.
Decriminalization in California, the report concludes, has reduced the harms of prohibition for thousands of California teens. "Fewer young people," its authors write, "are suffering the damages and costs of criminal arrest, prosecution, incarceration, fines, loss of federal aid and other punishments." Perhaps most important, the Darren Wilsons of California have one less pretext to disrupt the lives of the state's Michael Browns.
In November – building on the success of decriminalization and on public disgust at the state's criminally overcrowded and ruinously expensive prison system – California voters took an even bolder leap with Proposition 47, which reduced possession of hard drugs including cocaine, heroin and meth from a felony to a misdemeanor. (Prop 47 also de-felonized nonviolent theft of less than $950.)
In a year of record-low voter turnout, Prop 47 passed with 59 percent support, thanks in part to endorsements from nationally prominent Republicans like Rand Paul and Newt Gingrich. The new law is expected to affect 24,000 drug convictions a year. And the reduction in the ranks of the incarcerated will create savings, the state estimates, in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars annually." Innovatively, Prop 47 captures those savings and steers them into community programs. "This is the first voter initiative to literally take money out of the prison budget and put it into prevention and treatment," says Lenore Anderson, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, which spearheaded the campaign for Proposition 47.
The new law also allows current convicts to petition to get their sentences- reduced retroactively. In the cases of some convicts under California's notorious "Three Strikes" laws, this will mean the difference between a continued life sentence and freedom. Additionally, as many as 1 million Californians will qualify to have felony records expunged – removing what Anderson calls the "Scarlet- F" from their chests – opening doors to fuller integration in society, with fewer obstacles to getting a job, finding an apartment or enrolling in public assistance.
"We're not only stopping overincarceration," Anderson says. "We're also going to clean up its legacy."
by Tim Dickenson, Wired | Read more:
Image: Victor Juhasz
How Tobogganing Works in 2015
The front page of Monday’s National Post informed me that North American parks are witnessing a “war on the toboggan.”
“Dubuque, Iowa, is set to ban toboggans in nearly all its 50 parks,” reporter Jen Gerson wrote. “Other cities, including Des Moines, Iowa; Montville, New Jersey; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Columbia City, Indiana, are following suit by restricting certain runs or posting signs warning people away. . . . In Canada, Hamilton has restricted sledding on pain of a hefty fine for almost 15 years.” (...)
When I was a young kid on vacation in the Laurentians, my mother would zip my sister and me up in our ski jackets and toss us outside the very moment there was snow on the ground. We would go up and down the hill until one of us was frostbitten or injured. My mother’s level of participation consisted of making us hot chocolate when we returned home. I have no idea what she did while we were out risking our necks. I assume she was reading, since mom always managed to blast through great stacks of books and magazines when we headed up north. As for my dad, he often was in the garage, where he pursued a hobby restoring World War II–era US Army jeeps.
As any modern parent knows, this is not how tobogganing works in 2015. The idea of sending young kids out on their own is considered dangerous since, in their childish stupidity, they presumably will pick a too-steep hill and crash. Or they will arrive safely at the bottom of the hill and glide right into the arms of a waiting pedophile.
What happens instead is that the whole family goes out to the hill together as part of their weekend “quality time.” Maybe mom gets on the toboggan, to steer the thing, and keep the kids safe, and prove she is a Fun Mom. Maybe dad takes pictures on his smartphone to post to Facebook. The whole thing lasts about ten minutes, because that’s how long it takes one parent to get bored and the other to get cold. Also, the kids are whiney—because mom and dad, mom and mom, or dad and dad are both in attendance, so, hey, why not. (...)
It’s common for culture critics to lament that our obsession with safety has made children risk-averse and less adventurous. And it’s true—they are. But what we don’t talk about nearly as often is how this affects parents. I just spent the last two weeks on winter vacation with my young children, who now are around the age I was in my rock-hopping and tobogganing prime. During this period, I dutifully accompanied them through the whole gamut of wholesome outdoor activities. In two weeks, I read exactly half a book, and restored zero army jeeps.
According to one study I’ve seen, twenty-first century parents spend something like three times as much time with their children as parents did in the 1960s—despite the fact that we also are working harder to make money. When I go home tonight, I will help my kids with their homework (despite the fact that my assistance won’t statistically help them do any better in school), then I will hover over them to ensure they eat the nutritious parts of their dinner, referee their arguments, read them books (look, Facebook, we’re enjoying Dr. Seuss!), and, finally, lie with them in bed until they fall asleep. At this point, the day will be over, and I will go to sleep, too. Thus do the child-free, late-evening hours—which my wife and I might otherwise use to drink cocktails, talk, and watch television together—evaporate into nothingness.
“Dubuque, Iowa, is set to ban toboggans in nearly all its 50 parks,” reporter Jen Gerson wrote. “Other cities, including Des Moines, Iowa; Montville, New Jersey; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Columbia City, Indiana, are following suit by restricting certain runs or posting signs warning people away. . . . In Canada, Hamilton has restricted sledding on pain of a hefty fine for almost 15 years.” (...)
When I was a young kid on vacation in the Laurentians, my mother would zip my sister and me up in our ski jackets and toss us outside the very moment there was snow on the ground. We would go up and down the hill until one of us was frostbitten or injured. My mother’s level of participation consisted of making us hot chocolate when we returned home. I have no idea what she did while we were out risking our necks. I assume she was reading, since mom always managed to blast through great stacks of books and magazines when we headed up north. As for my dad, he often was in the garage, where he pursued a hobby restoring World War II–era US Army jeeps.As any modern parent knows, this is not how tobogganing works in 2015. The idea of sending young kids out on their own is considered dangerous since, in their childish stupidity, they presumably will pick a too-steep hill and crash. Or they will arrive safely at the bottom of the hill and glide right into the arms of a waiting pedophile.
What happens instead is that the whole family goes out to the hill together as part of their weekend “quality time.” Maybe mom gets on the toboggan, to steer the thing, and keep the kids safe, and prove she is a Fun Mom. Maybe dad takes pictures on his smartphone to post to Facebook. The whole thing lasts about ten minutes, because that’s how long it takes one parent to get bored and the other to get cold. Also, the kids are whiney—because mom and dad, mom and mom, or dad and dad are both in attendance, so, hey, why not. (...)
It’s common for culture critics to lament that our obsession with safety has made children risk-averse and less adventurous. And it’s true—they are. But what we don’t talk about nearly as often is how this affects parents. I just spent the last two weeks on winter vacation with my young children, who now are around the age I was in my rock-hopping and tobogganing prime. During this period, I dutifully accompanied them through the whole gamut of wholesome outdoor activities. In two weeks, I read exactly half a book, and restored zero army jeeps.
According to one study I’ve seen, twenty-first century parents spend something like three times as much time with their children as parents did in the 1960s—despite the fact that we also are working harder to make money. When I go home tonight, I will help my kids with their homework (despite the fact that my assistance won’t statistically help them do any better in school), then I will hover over them to ensure they eat the nutritious parts of their dinner, referee their arguments, read them books (look, Facebook, we’re enjoying Dr. Seuss!), and, finally, lie with them in bed until they fall asleep. At this point, the day will be over, and I will go to sleep, too. Thus do the child-free, late-evening hours—which my wife and I might otherwise use to drink cocktails, talk, and watch television together—evaporate into nothingness.
by Jonathan Kay, The Walrus | Read more:
Image: B.W. Muir/Forest History Society
Monday, January 12, 2015
CONSTELLATION VELA—Claiming that the mere thought is an “absolute nightmare,” WR 67c, a terrestrial planet from the distant Gamma Velorum star system, expressed its profound terror Wednesday at the possibility of one day gaining the capacity to sustain human life.
The 5.2-billion-year-old celestial body, which is located roughly 1,100 light years from Earth, said that for both its own sake and that of its entire solar system, it can only hope to never possess the necessary planetary characteristics and chemical elements needed to support either a deep-space human outpost or, more gravely, an entire human colony.
“Luckily, with my high levels of atmospheric sulfur dioxide, methane, and radon, there’s no way any human could survive on my surface for more than a few seconds,” said WR 67c, adding that it is “incredibly lucky” to have developed extremely violent and widespread volcanism in addition to its poisonous atmosphere. “But I don’t know, what if I produce a magnetic field that blocks out stellar wind and cosmic radiation? What if I develop an axial tilt that fosters a mild global climate? It’s terrifying to admit, but my surface temperature already sometimes drops to 120 degrees Fahrenheit at night, and their species can technically survive in that.”
“Stuff like that really freaks me out,” the extrasolar planet continued. “The real doomsday scenario would be someday acquiring a breathable atmosphere rich with oxygen and ultraviolet-absorbing ozone. At that point, I might as well just hurl myself at the nearest black hole and be done with it.”
The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
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