Ah, Fall is here, or what I like to call “Leather Weather”.
I first fell in love with leather jackets working with Robert Geller, where he walked me through a new leather jacket straight from the factory in Japan on my very first day.
Since then, I created my own leather jacket line and amassed more leather jackets than any one guy should honestly have at one time.
A proper, staple leather jacket will not only last you forever, it’s timeless and extremely versatile, a no brainer when it comes to building your lean wardrobe.
Outside of the suit, a leather jacket will be one of the biggest investments a guy will make in his wardrobe. Just like a suit, there’s something transformative about putting on a properly fitted leather jacket.
There’s no other way to describe it: You feel like a badass. (...)
Keep in mind, these are rules of thumb and not set in stone, simply what I’ve observed as a designer and as a shopper. It will give you a realistic idea of what to expect when you go jacket hunting.
Personally, I would be VERY cautious of jackets under $500 (truthfully, even $500 is pushing it unless we’re talking used jackets – more on that later). I’ll give you some recommendations of jackets in prices later, but let’s get into the illustrated showdown:
Leather
The biggest factor in the price of the jacket? The quality of the leather.
Cheaper jackets will use leather that is corrected. Animals that have a lot of scarring, branding or knicks from how they are raised. These skins will be sanded down and sometimes faux leather grains will be pressed into it, as well as extra spraying of dyes and treatments to make them more uniform.
Because of these top coatings, corrected leathers will have an overly smooth, plastic feel, versus the soft, oily, uneven textured nature of uncorrected skins.
by Peter Nguyen, Effortlessgent | Read more: Image: Indiana Jones
[ed. One could make the argument that William Basinski is more famous for destroying his art than creating it - a form of Process Art. (Felix Gonzales-Torres and hisUntitled series using piles of candies is another form of process art). Personally, Disintigration Loops I-IV seems kind of monotonous to me, but art can be that too, right?]
You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a year, but you are aging, and your body is degrading. As your cells synthesize the very proteins that allow you to live, they also release free radicals, oxidants that literally perforate your tissue and cause you to grow progressively less able to perform as you did at your peak. By the time you reach 80, you will literally be full of holes, and though you'll never notice a single one of them, you will inevitably feel their collective effect. Aging and degradation are forces of nature, functions of living, and understanding them can be as terrifying as it is gratifying.
It's not the kind of thing you can say often, but I think William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are a step toward that understanding-- the music itself is not so much composed as it is this force of nature, this inevitable decay of all things, from memory to physical matter, made manifest in music. During the summer of 2001, Basinski set about transferring a series of 20-year-old tape loops he'd had in storage to a digital file format, and was startled when this act of preservation began to devour the tapes he was saving. As they played, flakes of magnetic material were scraped away by the reader head, wiping out portions of the music and changing the character and sound of the loops as they progressed, the recording process playing an inadvertent witness to the destruction of Basinski's old music.
Is this real life? How do we know that we are not hallucinating it all? What if we're plugged into a Matrix-style virtual reality simulator? Isn't the universe a giant hologram anyway? Is reality really real? What is reality?
We asked renowned neuroscientists, physicists, psychologists, technology theorists and hallucinogen researchers if we can ever tell whether the "reality" we are experiencing is "real" or not. Don't worry. You're going to be ok.
Jessica L. Nielson, Ph.D., Department of Neurosurgery, Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Brain and Spinal Injury Center (BASIC)
What is our metric for determining what is real? That is probably different for each person. One could try and find a consensus state that most people would agree is "real" or a "hallucination" but from the recent literature using imaging techniques in people who are having a hallucinatory experience on psychedelics, it seems the brain is hyper-connected and perhaps just letting in more of the perceivable spectrum of reality.
When it comes to psychosis, things like auditory hallucinations can seem very real. Ultimately, our experiences are an interpretation of a set of electrical signals in our brains. We do the best to condense all those signals into what we perceive to be the world around us (and within us), but who is to say that the auditory hallucinations that schizophrenics experience, or the amazing visual landscapes seen on psychedelics are not some kind of bleed through between different forms of reality? I don't think there is enough data to either confirm or deny whether what those people are experiencing is "real" or not.
Sean Carroll, Cosmologist and Physics professor specializing in dark energy and general relativity, research professor in the Department of Physics at the California Institute of Technology
How do we know this is real life? The short answer is: we don't. We can never prove that we're not all hallucinating, or simply living in a computer simulation. But that doesn't mean that we believe that we are.
There are two aspects to the question. The first is, "How do we know that the stuff we see around us is the real stuff of which the universe is made?" That's the worry about the holographic principle, for example -- maybe the three-dimensional space we seem to live in is actually a projection of some underlying two-dimensional reality.
The answer to that is that the world we see with our senses is certainly not the "fundamental" world, whatever that is. In quantum mechanics, for example, we describe the world using wave functions, not objects and forces and spacetime. The world we see emerges out of some underlying description that might look completely different.
The good news is: that's okay. It doesn't mean that the world we see is an "illusion," any more than the air around us becomes an illusion when we first realize that it's made of atoms and molecules. Just because there is an underlying reality doesn't disqualify the immediate reality from being "real." In that sense, it just doesn't matter whether the world is, for example, a hologram; our evident world is still just as real.
The other aspect is, "How do we know we're not being completely fooled?" In other words, forgetting about whether there is a deeper level of reality, how do we know whether the world we see represents reality at all? How do we know, for example, that our memories of the past are accurate? Maybe we are just brains living in vats, or maybe the whole universe was created last Thursday.
We can never rule out such scenarios on the basis of experimental science. They are conceivably true! But so what? Believing in them doesn't help us understand any features of our universe, and puts us in a position where we have no right to rely on anything that we did think is true. There is, in short, no actual evidence for any of these hyper-skeptical scenarios. In that case, there's not too much reason to worry about them.
The smart thing to do is to take reality as basically real, and work hard to develop the best scientific theories we can muster in order to describe it. (...) George Musser Jr., Contributing editor for Scientific American magazine, Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT 2014–2015
The holographic principle doesn’t mean the universe isn't real. It just means that the universe around us, existing within spacetime, is CONSTRUCTED out of more fundamental building blocks. "Real" is sometimes taken to mean "fundamental", but that's a very limited sense of the term. Life isn't fundamental, since living things are made from particles, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s a higher-level phenomenon. So is spacetime, if the holographic principle is right. I talk about the holographic principle at length in my book, and I discuss the distinction between fundamental and higher-level phenomena in a recent blog post.
The closest we come in science to "real" or "objective" is intersubjective agreement. If a large number of people agree that something is real, we can assume that it is. In physics, we say that something is an objective feature of nature if all observers will agree on it - in other words, if that thing doesn’t depend on our arbitrary labels or the vagaries of a given vantage point ("frame-independent" or "gauge-invariant", in the jargon). For instance, I'm not entitled to say that my kitchen has a left side and a right side, since the labels "left" and "right" depend on my vantage point; they are words that describe me more than the kitchen. This kind of reasoning is the heart of Einstein's theory of relativity and the theories it inspired.
Could we all be fooled? Yes, of course. But there's a practical argument for taking intersubjective agreement as the basis of reality. Even if everyone is being fooled, we still need to explain our impressions. An illusion, after all, is entirely real - it is the INTERPRETATION of the illusion that can lead us astray. If I see a smooth blue patch in the desert, I might misinterpret the blue patch as an oasis, but that doesn’t mean my impression isn't real. I'm seeing something real - not an oasis, but a refracted image of the sky. So, even if we're all just projections of a computer simulation, like The Matrix, the simulation itself has a structure that gives it a kind of reality, and it is OUR reality, the one we need to be able to navigate. (The philosopher Robert Nozick had a famous argument along these lines.)
by Marina Galperina, Hopes and Fears | Read more: Image: Erin Lux
[ed. Given the preceding post, the irony of this is not lost on me.]
From the masterminds who gave us a way to fake flawless photos of ourselves — and pretty much anything else our hearts desire — comes a new technology designed to enhance the pictures we take of landmarks, by ridding them of tourists.
Introducing "Monument Mode" by Adobe, an algorithm that can purportedly let you take a clear shot of anything, even in the most crowded locations.
"I've come here from India and I really want to take a photo of L.A.'s famous Hollywood sign, but I've been finding that very difficult to do," said Adobe engineer Ashutosh Jagdish Sharma while unveiling the app prototype in California last week.
"The problem is other tourists," he continued. "Whether it's the Tahj Mahal or the Eiffel Tower, it's always difficult to get that perfect monumental landmark shot thanks to other tourists who keep moving around and blocking the view." (...)
According to Adobe, the feature is possible thanks to a new algorithm that can distinguish moving objects (like tourists and cars) from fixed ones (like the Grand Canyon).
"One click and those obstructions are gone for good," reads the caption of a "Sneak Peek" video published by the company after Sharma's presentation. (...)
Some have taken to pointing out that Adobe has already been offering the tools, namely Photoshop, needed to remove people from images for many years.
"What makes the new feature so interesting is the ability to generate the expected image in real time," explains the Daily Dot's AJ Dellinger. "It allows the photographer to take a picture of its subject as if no one else is around, making it easier to get the shot they want on the first try instead of continuously snapping and hoping one turns out."
[ed. I love Los Lobos, one of the best rock and roll bands. EVER. And, now that Steve mentions it, this tune does sound a lot like them.]
Speaking of doing a lot of different records and working with a lot of amazing songwriters, I own a ton of the records that you've done over the years. One, in particular, I'd like to ask you about is Paul Simon's Graceland. I obsessed over that thing when I was young. Do you have any recollections of working on it?
Oh, I have plenty of recollections of working on that one. I don't know if you heard the stories, but it was not a pleasant deal for us. I mean he [Simon] quite literally – and in no way do I exaggerate when I say – he stole the songs from us.
Really...
Yeah. And you know, going into it, I had an enormous amount of respect for the guy. The early records were amazing, I loved his solo records, and I truly thought he was one of the greatest gifts to American music that there was.
At the time, we were high on the musical food chain. Paul had just come off One Trick Pony and was kind of floundering. People forget, before Graceland, he was viewed as a colossal failure. He was low. So when we were approached to do it, I was a way bigger fan than anybody else in the band. We got approached by Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin who ran our record company [Warner Bros.], and this is the way these guys would talk – "It would mean a lot to the family if you guys would do this for us." And we thought, "Ok well, it's for the family, so we'll do it." It sounds so unbelievably naïve and ridiculous that that would be enough of a reason to go to the studio with him.
We go into the studio, and he had quite literally nothing. I mean, he had no ideas, no concepts, and said, "Well, let's just jam." We said, "We don't really do that." When we jam, we'll switch instruments. Dave will play drums, I'll play something. We don't really jam. Especially in that era. Louie will be the first to tell you this – he was made to play drums. They forced him to play drums. He's not really a drummer by trade. He's never practiced a moment in his life. Not once in his life did he sit down at the drums because of his love for drumming. The other three guys made him play drums in the early days, so he sort of became drummer by default. He hates playing the instrument, I think. Again, you should ask him, but I don't ever ever, ever get the sense that he was one of those dyed-in-the-wool, John Bonham, let's-play-drums-for-three-days-straight kind of guys. So consequently, as the core band was comprised then, we never jammed - never ever. Not by accident, not even at soundcheck. We would always just play a song.
So Paul was like, "Let's just jam," and we're like, "Oh jeez. Well alright, let's see what we can do." And it was not good because Louie wasn't comfortable. None of us were comfortable, it wasn't just Louie. It was like this very alien environment to us. Paul was a very strange guy. Paul's engineer was even stranger than Paul, and he just seemed to have no clue - no focus, no design, no real nothing. He had just done a few of the African songs that hadn't become songs yet. Those were literally jams. Or what the world came to know and I don't think really got exposed enough, is that those are actually songs by a lot of those artists that he just approved of. So that's kind of what he was doing. It was very patrician, material sort of viewpoint. Like, because I'm gonna put my stamp on it, they're now my songs. But that's literally how he approached this stuff.
I remember he played me the one he did by John Hart, and I know John Hart, the last song on the record. He goes, "Yeah, I did this in Louisiana with this zy decko guy." And he kept saying it over and over. And I remember having to tell him, "Paul, it's pronounced zydeco. It's not zy decko, it's zydeco." I mean that's how incredibly dilettante he was about this stuff. The guy was clueless.
Wow. You're kidding me?
Clue... less about what he was doing. He knew what he wanted to do, but it was not in any way like, "Here's my idea. Here's this great vision I have for this record, come with me."
About two hours into it, the guys are like, "You gotta call Lenny right now. You gotta get us out of this. We can't do this. This is a joke. This is a waste of time." And this was like two hours into the session that they wanted me to call Lenny. What am I going to tell Lenny? It was a favor to him. What am I going to say, "Paul's a fucking idiot?"
Somehow or other, we got through the day with nothing. I mean, literally, nothing. We would do stuff like try an idea out and run it around for 45 minutes, and Paul would go "Eh... I don't like it. Let's do something else." And it was so frustrating. Even when we'd catch a glimpse of something that might turn into something, he would just lose interest. A kitten-and-the-string kinda thing.
So that's day one. We leave there and it's like, "Ok, we're done. We're never coming back." I called Lenny and said it really wasn't very good. We really didn't get anything you could call a song or even close to a song. I don't think Paul likes us very much. And frankly, I don't think we like him very much. Can we just say, 'Thanks for the memories' and split?" And he was like, "Man, you gotta hang in there. Paul really does respect you. It's just the way he is. I'll talk to him." And we were like, "Oh man, please Lenny. It's not working." Meanwhile, we're not getting paid for this. There was no discussion like we're gonna cash in or anything like that. It was very labor-of-love.
Really...?
Yeah. Don't ask me why. God knows it would have made it a lot easier to be there.
And Lenny put you guys together thinking it would be a good match?
Well, "It would be good for the family." That was it. So we go back in the second day wondering why we're there. It was ridiculous. I think David starts playing "The Myth of the Fingerprints," or whatever he ended up calling it. That was one of our songs. That year, that was a song we started working on By Light of the Moon. So that was like an existing Lobos sketch of an idea that we had already started doing. I don't think there were any recordings of it, but we had messed around with it. We knew we were gonna do it. It was gonna turn into a song. Paul goes, "Hey, what's that?" We start playing what we have of it, and it is exactly what you hear on the record. So we're like, "Oh, ok. We'll share this song."
Good way to get out of the studio, though...
Yeah. But it was very clear to us, at the moment, we're thinking he's doing one of our songs. It would be like if he did "Will the Wolf Survive?" Literally. A few months later, the record comes out and says "Words and Music by Paul Simon." We were like, "What the fuck is this?"
We tried calling him, and we can't find him. Weeks go by and our managers can't find him. We finally track him down and ask him about our song, and he goes, "Sue me. See what happens."
What?! Come on...
That's what he said. He said, "You don't like it? Sue me. You'll see what happens." We were floored. We had no idea. The record comes out, and he's a big hit. Retroactively, he had to give songwriting credit to all the African guys he stole from that were working on it and everyone seemed to forget. But that's the kind of person he is. He's the world's biggest prick, basically.
So we go back to Lenny and say, "Hey listen, you stuck us in the studio with this fucking idiot for two days. We tried to get out of it, you made us stay in there, and then he steals our song?! What the hell?!" And Lenny's always a politician. He made us forget about it long enough that it went away. But to this day, I do not believe we have gotten paid for it. We certainly didn't get songwriting credit for it. And it remains an enormous bone that sticks in our craw. Had he even given us a millionth of what the song and the record became, I think we would have been – if nothing else - much richer, but much happier about the whole thing.
Have you guys seen him since then?
No. Never run into him. I'll tell you, if the guys ever did run into him, I wouldn't want to be him, that's for sure.
That's an amazing story. I can't believe I never heard it before.
We had every right and reason to sue him, and Lenny goes, "It's bad for the family." When we told the story in that era, when this was going down, we were doing interviews and telling the truth. And Lenny goes, "Hey guys, I really need you to stop talking about it. It's bad for the family."
Amazing. Talk about bad for the family.
I know. Again, it's just so incredible how naïve we were back then. You can't even imagine that era of music when you'd actually listen to your record company president who told you to shut up because "it's bad for the family." Now, I'd tell him to go fuck himself.
That's our version of it. I'd love to hear Paul's version of it.
But he's much richer now and could probably give a fuck about it. It's still one of those things where I've not forgiven anyone involved in it. It still remains. I haven't let it go, as you can tell. It was just so wrong and so rude, and so unnecessary. It is an amazing moment in our history.
by Scott Caffrey, JamBase | Read more: Image: Los Lobos
[ed. Basically function over form but with more inter-disciplinary integration. A convergence of architecture, biology, engineering, neuroscience, 3-D printing, algorythmic modeling, and newly developed synthetic materials.]
The very nature of matter is being re-engineered as new sciences of design erode our orthodoxies. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of Neri Oxman, whose research initiative MATERIALECOLOGY and projects for the MIT Computation Group is transcending genres, fads and boundaries. Hers is a unique blend of architecture, computer science, material engineering and art that has her simultaneously commissioned to create medical devices for Boston’s Museum of Science and pieces for MoMA's 2008 exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. Here a dynamic and hybridized vision of matter cuts through the inertia of convention.
A former medical student at Hebrew University and the Technion Institute of Technology, Oxman made a final stop at the renowned Architectural Association in London before joining MIT as a presidential research fellow and PhD candidate in Design Computation in 2006. Since arriving, she has undertaken a startlingly large amount of design research driven by her belief that design should be focused on the local environment rather than form driven. By using software to create new composite materials Oxman has been able to replicate the processes of nature, creating materials that are able to adapt to light, load, skin pressure, curvature and other ecological elements. Oxman spoke to MATTER about her vision for the future of design and material construction and the projects she’s developing that might just help us get there a little bit quicker.
Andrew Dent: Why do you feel that your area of expertise and investigation has garnered so much interest from such a wide audience?
Neri Oxman: Thank you, this is humbling. Public interest is motivated by zeitgeist, but it also creates it. The ideas that I have promoted – often through small physical case studies- are evocative of an idealistic ambience in which emerging science and technology becomes a hopeful and hum anistic medium for broad cultural transformation. In this context, I think my work is communicative on several levels.
I try not to take on new work unless it potentially contributes to a general understanding of the way in which to create it. That is for me where all the fun is. So the work touches upon issues in design process that are applicable not only to architectural and design practice, but also to emerging areas in material engineering and digital fabrication. When exploring an integrated design approach that seeks to overlap with, and operate across, multiple fields design becomes innovative, richer, and more capable of broad impact. Design, ultimately, is about an ability to work through constraints. In the case of MATERIALECOLOGY these constraints are geared towards recreating the tools and technologies that are inherently related to the type of product at hand. In this way, the very instrumentality of design becomes a frontier of innovation.
For example, with Beast – a prototype for a chaise lounge – the aim was to completely rethink the Modernist project and consider physical behavior, not form, as the first article of production. Beast relates material properties to a general loading profile that would be exerted on the chaise when in use. Stiff and soft polymers are distributed in areas of high and low pressure respectively, and the height of each cushioning bump, as it appears on the surface area of the chaise, corresponds to our body’s pressure map, providing for comfort and support. The design process in this case was completely tailored to a new way of thinking about design and full scale digital fabrication, an industry still in its infancy. Imagine Mary Shelley’s mythical creatures; like them, Beast is an organic-like entity created synthetically by the incorporation of physical parameters into digital generation protocols. It is a Performative Chaise. It exploits and advances technological frontiers to create a form of responsive architecture. Here form follows force not unlike the way Mother Nature has it.
Secondly, I believe the work advocates a new approach to the culture of green; let me explain. So-called sustainable design standards relate to architectural functional components that are somewhat old-fashioned in their construction methods: think bricks, or the hegemony of metal. In the future, composites are going to occupy a much broader portion of the building industry and concrete will be something of the past. Currently, there exists a separation between materials used for structural engineering and materials used for environmental comfort. In my work I attempt to invent ways in which to integrate between the two.
Monocoque is a good example in which material properties are modified according to specific structural and environmental constraints. French for single shell, Monocoque, stands for a construction technique, which supports structural load using the object's external skin. Contradictory to the traditional design of building skins that distinguishes between internal structural frameworks and non-bearing skin elements; this approach promotes heterogeneity and variation of material properties. The project demonstrates the notion of a structural skin using a Voronoi pattern, the density of which corresponds to multi-scalar loading conditions. The distribution of shear-stress lines and surface pressure is embodied in the allocation and relative thickness of the vein-like elements built into the skin. The model was 3-D printed using the Poly-jet matrix technology which allows for the assignment of structural properties to multiple 3-D printed materials. This technology provides for an ability to print parts and assemblies made of multiple materials within a single build, as well as to create composite materials that present preset combinations of mechanical properties. Now imagine printing muscle that way.
Another significant aspect of the work lies in its capacity to translate physical phenomena into art or to express form-generating formulae as building prototypes. My contribution to Paola Antonelli’s Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA provided for such an opportunity. A series of four projects entitled Natural Artifice examined the relation between physical material properties and performance criteria such as structural load, heat transfer and insulation. All models were, in essence, expressions of forms front-loaded with data emulating their behavior a-priori to fabrication..
Raycounting for instance, examines the relation between light and geometry. A computational algorithm determines the curvature of the artifact for shading purposes depending on the location of one or multiple light sources relative to the desired location of shading.
Finally, I hope the work opens a new scale between architecture and material science. Designers should not always accept off-the-shelf materials but realize that they have the power to design and manipulate material behavior. This shift points towards a new way to classify materials and a whole newly dynamic notion of the idea of a materials library.
by Andrew H. Dent, Material Connextion | Read more: Image: The Beast, Neri Oxman
I had a friend named Owen Wells who passed away in 1993. Owen was a fine basketball player, good enough to play at the University of Detroit and then to be drafted by the Houston Rockets in the fifth round of the 1974 draft. He left the NBA after only one season, and then Owen became a basketball nomad. He played in Australia. He played in Italy. He played in the Netherlands. He made a brief stop in the Philippines. But that stop was unforgettable, at least as Owen told the story.
It seems that, in the league in which Owen briefly played, you could bet on just about anything or anyone. Bookmakers worked the stands, taking baroque proposition bets. For example, you could bet that the American on your team would score more points than the American on the other team. You could make this bet by quarters. Owen vividly remembered one timeout huddle with his team leading by double figures late in the game. Everything in the huddle was calm and happy. Except for this one guy who came down from the stands, screaming at Owen, because the guy had bet on Owen in the fourth quarter against the American playing on the other team, and Owen was being outscored. The man was beside himself about the point difference — which, at the moment, was two too many. He also had a knife.
That is what I think of every time I hear about somebody’s fantasy team — a crazy person with a knife, screaming imprecations into the void and completely heedless of who might be winning or losing the game. I thought of that the first time I heard of Rotisserie baseball, and that was invented by a bunch of people who are friends of mine. I thought of it when the various press boxes I visited began to buzz with talk of which wide receiver my colleague was starting that day, or which kicker was due for a slump. On rare occasions, the rule about “no cheering in the press box” would be lit completely on fire because the running back on a team losing 38-0 scored a touchdown to make the game 38-7 but saved someone’s bacon in one of the 23 fantasy leagues in which he or she was involved.
For a long time, I’ve believed that the experience of being a sports fan was changing and becoming more vicarious as the games became increasingly distant and unaffordable and the players more distant and aloof. It began, dimly, with radio broadcasts and then with television, where players became less real people and more characters of the imagination. But vicarious fandom triumphed in a panoply of ways. Some people stayed or became fans through memorabilia collecting, staying close to The Game through its most basic accoutrements. Some people stayed or became fans because of the explosion in advanced analytics, through which you could get closer to the truth of what was happening on the field. And some people stayed or became fans through the phenomenon of fantasy leagues. Basically, I had nothing against any of these, even though the fundamentals of my own fanhood remained almost exclusively the compelling live theater of the performance itself. It wasn’t a zero-sum business. Sports are supposed to bring joy in as many guises as possible.
But even my patience began to run out as soon as the daily fantasy industry erupted and, suddenly, there were more commercials for DraftKings or FanDuel on my television set than there were ads for boner pills or appearances by Flo the Insurance Lady. Somebody was pitching too hard, and my internal Grifter Detection System, honed to a fine tolerance by years covering the state legislature in Massachusetts, went sailing into the red zone. Win millions! Behind the high-pressure tactics and the high-end sophistication of the relentless ad campaign was the unmistakable glow of the cheap carny midway, the faint call of the bozo over the water tank, and the smell of old and decaying cotton candy.
At its bottom, I thought, this was still somebody offering something for nothing. And now it was turning into an industry valued at over $2.5 billion, exempt from a 2006 federal anti-Internet-gambling statute by a carefully carved loophole. (Pro tip: It’s gambling.) The tawdry carnival tactics were being energized by the unregulated momentum of modern American capitalism, which owes as much to the rigged wheel as it does to anything else. What is called a sucker bet on the sawdust of the midway is called insider trading on the polished floors of the Wall Street trading houses, but the essential dynamic is still the same. This will not come to a good end, I thought. Gamblers began dancing in my head, their knives bright under the lights.
The first thing you notice when hanging around technology start-ups is the cultural importance that Silicon Valley ascribes to snacking. A company’s snack bar often stands as a rough proxy for the scope of its ambitions.
Square, Jack Dorsey’s payments business, has a gleaming coffee bar with a barista who conducts classes on the best ways to brew. On one trip to Facebook, I was treated to an otherworldly bag of popcorn. And just about every company has a refrigerator or two stocked with Hint, a subtly flavored brand of bottled water that seems to flow as freely in San Francisco as the tears of the people who were evicted to make room for the incoming software engineers.
Even when a start-up’s dreams are deferred, the snacks hang on, as I learned in a recent visit to the buses that were once owned by Leap Transit, a start-up that had aspirations of revolutionizing urban transportation.
Leap, which raised $2.5 million from some of the industry’s best-known investors, charged riders $6 to get across San Francisco, nearly three times the cost of riding a city bus. Its primary draw was luxury. Each bus had a wood-trimmed interior outfitted with black leather seats, individual USB ports and Wi-Fi. The buses also offered a steady stream of high-end snacks, sold via app.
I had come to the see the buses to find out what it looks like when a start-up bites the dust. The luxury vehicles were up for auction; Leap filed for bankruptcy in July. The end for Leap apparently came so suddenly that its founders didn’t have time to remove much from the vehicles. Inside each bus, sitting in an out-of-the-way parking lot near Oakland, Calif., was a state registration form pinned to the wall, a bundle of iPhone and HDMI cables, and a display case full of snacks. Among the choices were packages of That’s It — vegan, gluten-free, non-G.M.O. fruit bars — and organic, paleo Simple Squares.
Leap is one of at least several dozen tech companies that have failed this year. Their deaths are illuminating; dead start-ups show us which investors’ theories are bogus, which technologies aren’t ready for prime time and which common ways founders overextend themselves.
In particular, Leap’s death suggests one emerging cause of start-up doom, a problem that also did in the anonymous social network Secret: too close an association with Silicon Valley’s tech-bro sensibilities.
Leap, in retrospect, was a bold idea that might have had legs. Muni, San Francisco’s public bus system, is overloaded and underfunded, and the success of ride-hailing apps like Uber suggests a public willingness to try new tech-enabled options. But in its design and marketing — in its full-frontal embrace of the easily pilloried paleo-snack-bar techie lifestyle — Leap exuded a kind of bourgeoisie exceptionalism that fed into the city’s fears of gentrification and won it few fans. As I stood inside the abandoned buses, it became obvious why the start-up failed: Leap was created by and for techies. It was born inside the bubble, and it could never escape.
One week ago, my 10-year-old niece turned me into a Minecraft addict.
I’ve known about Minecraft for years, of course. Who hasn’t? The creative block-building game, first developed as a side hobby by one Swedish guy and now a massively profitable division of Microsoft, is the world’s biggest videogame. I’ve dabbled with it on occasion, if only because it became something my job as a game critic wouldn’t let me ignore.
Emphasis, though, on dabbled: I’d bring it up on a laptop and poke around its cubist worlds, my little block-arm waggling its endless Arsenio fist-pump, blocks of wood and cobblestone and dirt slowly filling my TARDIS-like pockets. I’d usually run around until I died from starvation. One time, I dug a hole straight down until, poof, magma! And then I’d quit.
I’d quit because I wasn’t sure what to do next, or what the allure of vaguely accurate geological strata was, or why the game was as allergic to explaining itself as David Lynch. I relegated Minecraft to a mental bin labeled “experimental amorphous time suck.”
I followed it half-interestedly, dutifully chronicling its burgeoning celebrity. I curated lists of players’ architectonic feats when editors requested them. I covered the game’s milestones the way armchair astronomers might describe some celestial phenomenon, distantly awestruck by the spectacle.
And then my niece intervened. I’d noticed her playing the game on an iPad a few months ago. She’d built a kind of amusement park slash farm with her cousin in the game’s monsters-free creative mode. It was an a-ha moment, seeing all of her ideas corralled and reified, thinking about all the time and thought that must have gone into assembling them. She’d crawl into a chair or lie on the couch while playing, clutching the screen like a doctor scrutinizing a medical chart, her thumbs skating quietly across the glass, gesturally willing worlds into existence.
I’d just bought Apple’s phablet-sized iPhone, so I was sitting in the living room as she’s playing and thinking, OK, I have a few minutes here, let’s give Minecraft: Pocket Edition a try—partly to see how the game works on a phablet, partly to see if she’ll notice. As it’s downloading, I have my first latecomer’s epiphany: it’s only 24 MB! That’s 1990s-PC-gaming small. Worlds teeming with possibility are spawning from an instruction set you could fit on a pile of floppies.
I fire it up. Minecraft makes little thwick sounds as you navigate its menus. My niece’s head pops up. “Is that Minecraft?” she asks. Busted. Apparently there’s no mistaking that thwick.
“Yep. I’m just getting a world started,” I reply, nonchalant, like I’m making a martini.
This is the part where the critic who’s supposed to think smart things about videogames foolishly pretends to know what he’s doing. My niece is smarter than this, of course, which means she has my number instantly. But she’s also kind. And patient.
She watches me fumble around in survival mode after the game’s sun sets. I’m schlepping armfuls of resources but shelterless, like bait on the hook of a fishing rod held by no one. Something behind me sounds angry, then two or three things sound angry, and then, thwack, I’m knocked backward, then backward again.
Goodbye, saplings. Goodbye, cordwood. Goodbye, apples, sugar cane, black wool, and piles of raw pork. Hello, groaning, hissing, face-punching darkness.
Surviving
“You need to build a shelter,” my niece says after I croak. “To hide from the monsters.”
So I do, after forging a new world to skip back to precious daylight, strangely compelled as she talks me through excavating the chocolate and tan speckled sides of a hill at the edge of a pond. A duck-billed chicken squawks as it flaps in the water behind me. A pig clambers down the hill’s orthogonal slope and stops to watch. The dirt cubes disappear one by one, making sounds like gravel underfoot. I carve out just enough space to squeeze in a crafting table I made from raw wood, a furnace I made from stone, a torch I made by converting wood to charcoal and sticks, and myself. Another click and I’ve made a crude wood door to seal myself in, and crucially, the scary things out. It’s like a Lego hobbit hole, only in Mirkwood.
This is where Minecraft‘s hooks begin sliding into my gray matter. I’m in here, the monsters are out there. I have light and fire and all this other stuff I can use to build better stuff, they have an overriding desire to chew my block-face off, but nothing like the trove of resources feeding a boundless catalogue of stone to computer age inventions, all of it lying in the world’s conceptual cracks and literal crevices, iceberg-like, if I’m diligent enough.
I know virtually nothing about the latter at this point, of course, but the part of me that shivered visualizing text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure‘s phantasmagoric descriptions of its subterranean rooms over three decades ago is suddenly awake and listening, the game spooling up old neural pathways. It’s atavistic, lighting candles against the dark. This is my jumping off point, my liminal moment.
Sometimes photographs deceive. Take this one, for example. It represents John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s rebellious gesture the day they won medals for the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, and it certainly deceived me for a long time.
I always saw the photo as a powerful image of two barefoot black men, with their heads bowed, their black-gloved fists in the air while the US National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” played. It was a strong symbolic gesture – taking a stand for African American civil rights in a year of tragedies that included the death of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.
It’s a historic photo of two men of color. For this reason I never really paid attention to the other man, white, like me, motionless on the second step of the medal podium. I considered him as a random presence, an extra in Carlos and Smith’s moment, or a kind of intruder. Actually, I even thought that that guy – who seemed to be just a simpering Englishman – represented, in his icy immobility, the will to resist the change that Smith and Carlos were invoking in their silent protest. But I was wrong.
Thanks to an old article by Gianni Mura, today I discovered the truth: that white man in the photo is, perhaps, the third hero of that night in 1968. His name was Peter Norman, he was an Australian that arrived in the 200 meters finals after having ran an amazing 20.22 in the semi finals. Only the two Americans, Tommie “The Jet” Smith and John Carlos had done better: 20.14 and 20.12, respectively.
It seemed as if the victory would be decided between the two Americans. Norman was an unknown sprinter, who seemed to just be having a good couple of heats. John Carlos, years later, said that he was asked what happened to the small white guy – standing at 5’6”tall, and running as fast as him and Smith, both taller than 6’2”.
The time for the finals arrives, and the outsider Peter Norman runs the race of a lifetime, improving on his time yet again. He finishes the race at 20.06, his best performance ever, an Australian record that still stands today, 47 years later.
But that record wasn’t enough, because Tommie Smith was really “The Jet,” and he responded to Norman’s Australian record with a world record. In short, it was a great race.
Yet that race will never be as memorable as what followed at the award ceremony.
It didn’t take long after the race to realize that something big, unprecedented, was about to take place on the medal podium. Smith and Carlos decided they wanted to show the entire world what their fight for human rights looked like, and word spread among the athletes.
Norman was a white man from Australia, a country that had strict apartheid laws, almost as strict as South Africa. There was tension and protests in the streets of Australia following heavy restrictions on non-white immigration and discriminatory laws against aboriginal people, some of which consisted of forced adoptions of native children to white families.
The two Americans had asked Norman if he believed in human rights. Norman said he did. They asked him if he believed in God, and he, who had been in the Salvation Army, said he believed strongly in God. “We knew that what we were going to do was far greater than any athletic feat, and he said “I’ll stand with you” – remembers John Carlos – “I expected to see fear in Norman’s eyes, but instead we saw love.”
by Riccardo Gazzaniga, Films for Action | Read more: Image: uncredited
[ed. Yes, I know... Columbus Day is over, and with it that one last barbeque before winter sets in. But after reading a number of accounts the last few days, I sense a tide turning against this holiday. Columbus and his bloodthirsty Spanish confederates were some of the most vicious and pathologically genocidal armies that have ever existed, killing millions. If you don't believe it, click on this link (from the following essay). In his spare time he also spearheaded the transatlantic slave trade. It seems time to 'de-holiday' this holiday and recalibrate grade school curiculums.]
Columbus’ landfall in the Western Hemisphere was the opening of Europe’s conquest of essentially all of this planet. By 1914, 422 years later, European powers and the U.S. controlled 85 percent of the world’s land mass.
White people didn’t accomplish this by asking politely. As conservative Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington put it in 1996, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
In fact, European colonialism involved a level of brutality comparable in every way to that of 20th-century fascism and communism, and it started with Columbus himself. Estimates of the number of people living on the island of Hispaniola when Columbus established settlements range from 250,000 to several million. Within 30 years of his arrival, 80 to 90 percent of them were dead due to disease, war and enslavement, in what another Harvard professor cheerily called “complete genocide.” Contemporary accounts of the Spainards’ berserk cruelty really have to be read to be believed.
Formally, of course, European colonialism largely ended in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Yet informally, it has — behind the mask of what Pope Francis recently called “new forms of colonialism” — continued with surprising success.
Thus European colonialism is the central fact of politics on earth. And precisely because of that, it is almost never part of any American discussion of politics. Anthropologists call this phenomenon “social silence” — meaning that in most human societies, the subjects that are core to how the societies function are exactly the ones that are never mentioned.
If we maintain the social silence around colonialism, our past and present will always be bewildering, like the above list. But if we break the silence, and talk about what truly matters, the confusing swirl of war and conflict can suddenly makes sense.
I first fell in love with leather jackets working with Robert Geller, where he walked me through a new leather jacket straight from the factory in Japan on my very first day.
