Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers

In early August of 2022, 69 days before the 12th annual High Sierra Fly-In—an event known as American aviation’s Burning Man—Trent Palmer hoisted himself into the cockpit of his red, white, and blue bush plane, the Freedom Fox, and fired up the engine for another cruise into the valleys north of Lake Tahoe. Palmer, wearing flip-flops, shorts, and a Trent Palmer limited-edition trucker hat (“Fly Low, Don’t Die,” $40), is not your typical bush pilot, hauling mountaineers and machinery. Thanks to a prodigious YouTube following, he’s one of the most prominent of a new breed of lower 48 adventurers who are landing their fat-tire planes on and in mountaintops, ridgetops, river canyons, mountain meadows, dry lake beds, and grass and dirt airstrips, mainly in the American West, and mostly on land managed by the federal government.

Here was Palmer, 34, his handsome face smooth of whiskers but strong of jaw, moving through his preflight checklist, which included ditching his flip-flops in favor of bare feet, both of which were hovering over the rudder pedals. He jiggled the center control stick, rising up from the floor between his legs, which he used to tame the Freedom Fox’s direction and pitch. He said “Clear” and pushed the starter button, and the propeller coughed and revved, eventually producing a throaty thrum. The plane’s wings and fuselage were the color of Old Glory; several dozen stars spanned the cockpit’s exterior. An observer would be forgiven for mistaking Palmer’s craft for an Air National Guard stunt plane.

Palmer tweaked the throttle and steered toward the runway. He spoke into his headset: “Stead traffic, Freedom Fox, taking runway two-six at alpha two. It’ll be a westbound departure.”

I sat to Palmer’s right, a motion-sickness bracelet on my left wrist, anti-nausea gum in my mouth, and a gallon-size ziplock at my feet. The copilot’s control stick started bobbing around between my legs in sync with Palmer’s. The Freedom Fox, an immaculately maintained, high-wing, single-engine tail-wheel plane with burly 29-inch bush tires, monster shocks, extended wings, and a 140-horsepower fuel-injected turbocharged engine, climbed from Reno-Stead Regional Airport at 1,500 feet a minute. The stamped alkaline flats of the Great Basin gave way to the dense pine forests of California’s Lost Sierra, a huge swath of mountainous backcountry about an hour north of Reno. On the horizon, the jagged crest of the Sierra Buttes came into view. Palmer, who was piping a Shakey Graves tune through the headsets, exuded competence, bonhomie, and (in the confines, I couldn’t help but notice) a pleasant, soapy smell.

He had agreed to take me along as he executed a series of “short takeoffs and landings”—STOL, for short—which epitomize bush flying, whether the assignment is depositing researchers onto a remote airstrip in Alaska’s Brooks Range, competing in STOL competitions, or landing “off-airport”—on ungroomed terrain, nowhere near a runway—as we were about to do next to California’s Stampede Reservoir.

Palmer seemed happy to be flying without cameras and a YouTube agenda. “How are you feeling?” he asked, this polite ambassador and evangelist of his winged pastime, this member of a band of nine bush-pilot buckaroos called the Flying Cowboys, social media influencers all, using their platforms to spread the bush-flying gospel to the uninitiated.

In one 2018 video, Palmer and two other young pilots fly to a northern Nevada mountaintop and set up base camp. One pilot paraglides off the summit. In a voiceover keyed to uplifting synths and soaring drone shots, Palmer says, “More often than not, we work away all the golden years of our lives, years we’ll never get back, all in an attempt to enjoy the remaining few.”

“I say it doesn’t have to be that way,” he continues. “What I’m saying is to stop waiting, stop dreaming, and start living. Life is too short to eat dessert last.”

“You know the drill,” he concludes. “Like this video if you do, subscribe if you haven’t, [and] come be my wingman.” Then he whispers “Peace,” flashes the V, and slaps his hand over the lens.

The result? Followers. Half a million of them. Palmer grosses about $150,000 a year from various income streams, including YouTube.

Palmer’s reach transcends his channel. Delve into chat forums—conversation hubs with names like BackcountryPilot.org, SuperCub.org, and, on Facebook, Big Tire Pilots – STOL Pilots – Backcountry Pilots – Mountain Pilots—and you’ll inevitably encounter mentions of Palmer and occasional references to “the Trent Palmer Effect,” which refers to his ability to bring new participants into the recreational bush-flying game, whose presence gooses both demand for planes and their prices.

One of Palmer’s closest friends refers to him as the “Convincer in Chief.” Partly because of Palmer’s charms, the plane he purchased for $39,000 in 2015 is now worth five times that, and people hoping to buy one like it face more than a three-year backlog for a factory-built plane and two years for a DIY kit. “I’m basically flying a plane I can’t afford,” Palmer told me.

We returned to the Freedom Fox, which when empty weighs a bit more than a golf cart. Palmer throttled up and lifted off within 150 feet or so, and soon we were circumnavigating the Sierra Buttes, streaming east across Plumas County, and finally swinging south, following the Highway 395 corridor. (...)

What happens to the complexion of the lower 48’s commons when this new breed of bush pilot can legally land their planes deep in the backcountry? (I would learn later that flyboys were landing just downrange from my own home, along the Tahoe Rim Trail.) Most of them profess an understanding of the basics: stay away from designated wilderness, national parks, national seashores, wilderness study areas, national wildlife refuges, tribal land, and Area 51, which are all strictly off-limits… unless they aren’t.

I asked Palmer about the legality of landing on the shores of Stampede. He told me that he’d heard from his friend and bush-flying mentor, Kevin Quinn, that doing so was legit. But Palmer didn’t want to contact the relevant land managers to fact-check Quinn’s claims, for fear of poking the bear.

Don’t poke the bear” is a common refrain on backcountry-flying message boards, the posters referring either to the big land-management agencies—the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—or the Federal Aviation Administration, for which the piloting community seems to harbor a reflexive antipathy. “Asking what a pilot thinks about the FAA is like asking a fire hydrant what it thinks about dogs,” is an old saying. Another goes, “We are from the FAA and we are here to help—and everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” (...)

South of the 49th parallel, big-tired bush planes with a wheel at the tail rather than the nose—taildraggers—are suddenly all the rage among aviation enthusiasts in the noncommercial, nonmilitary wing of American flying known as general aviation, or GA for short. Workaday pilots have acquired a wild hair. In a throwback trend reminiscent of the telemark-skiing revival of the late 20th century, they’ve been ditching their nose-wheel-equipped airplanes—the forgiving design preferred for smooth landings on asphalt—in favor of retrograde tailwheel bush planes flown by generations of Alaskans.

Taildraggers are trickier to handle, can be as pricey as a Ferrari (anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 for a used Cessna or Piper Super Cub or a new Carbon Cub), and, given the inexperienced tailwheel pilot’s predilection for throwing the craft into a violent loop when taking off and landing, costlier to insure. And yet, within the past 20 years, but especially in the past ten, with a post-pandemic surge of all things plein air, the new breed of lower 48 bush pilots have been enthusiastically STOLing their planes onto and off of backcountry locales that had never before seen the likes of bush wheels, floats, or skis.

by Brad Rassler, Outside |  Read more:

Images: Brad Rassler; markk

[ed. I used to fly in Alaska, everybody does (or did). It was the only way to get around - to prized fishing spots, hunting areas, cabins and just beautiful backcountry. I didn't have a burning desire to fly at first, but with my job (habitat biologist) and the number of hours spent in small planes and helicopters it seemed like a good idea to know what to do in an emergency. For example, one time my partner and I got picked up late in the day - last flight from one small village to another - Alukanuk (Yukon Delta) to Unalakleet in Norton Sound. Couple hours. The pilot had been working all day and was exhausted. Not long after we took off I noticed our plane would occasionally drop several hundred feet for no apparent reason. I was in the backseat but my partner looked over and saw that our pilot was falling asleep. She gently nudged him and he woke with a start and made a few jokes - "just checking out some muskrats", or "that's why they call us bush pilots, we fly from bush to bush...haha". Not so funny. This kept happening over and over again. Anyway, he finally opened the side window and asked for a cigarette. After that my partner kept feeding him one after another. It kept him occupied enough to finally make it - barely, we were all sweating final approach in the early evening twilight. After that I just said to myself, I've got to learn how to fly these things. And... always try to sit in the front seat.]

Photograph from the series Mono-Pines/Mono-Palms, from the book Second Nature, by Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank

via: Harper's

[ed. The first time I saw a microwave tower (or whatever they are) dressed up like a tree (and a bad one at that) it just made me laugh... a goofy metaphor for our times.]

The Journey: LVMH

The Journey: Staying with pointlessly-shiny websites that don’t really make any sense, here’s a GLORIOUS example of ‘budgets? PAH! We work in luxe, darling, and budgets are things that the little people have to worry about!’ as an ethos. LVMH is apparently a VERY INNOVATIVE COMPANY in lots of different ways – while you might think that the best way to learn about that innovation might be to, I don’t know, read the business’ annual report, or to look through its portfolio of companies, or to listen to a talk with their head of innovation, you are WRONG! The best way, it turns out, is to access ‘The Journey’, a text-lite and VERY gnomic website which itself is just a portal to a bunch of equally-confusing and similarly-gnomic other websites! I love this so much – the fact that it uses copy like ‘navigate through LVMH’s new innovation territories and opens windows into the Group’s possible futures!’, which means literally nothing! The fact that it’s not really clear why you would want to click on anything! The fact that for some reason all of these innovative concepts are presented as strange, mirrored rectangles in some sort of strange space desert! The assumption that I have either the time, or the patience, to spend a few hours parsing whatever the fcuk LVMH thinks this all means! Well done EVERYONE, this is very special indeed.

via: Web Curios

[ed. I suppose when you have gazillions of bucks no one really cares, just make it edgy and original. LVMH = LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.]

Natural History Museum, Wildlife Photographer of the Year, 2023

Bertie Gregory, Whales Making Waves

Joan de la Malla, The Dead River

Natural History Museum, Wildlife Photographer of the Year, 2023
via: (more here)

Insurance Companies Have Discovered New Ways to Rip You Off

Insurance is one of those things that we all need and pay a ton for the privilege of having — but also never think about, hoping we never have to use it, and knowing that if we do, it will likely be a hellish experience. Unfortunately, as premiums for everything from home insurance to car insurance skyrocket, more of us are being forced to dwell on the opaque and convoluted insurance industry.

In the past year, real-estate developers have reported rate increases of up to 50%, and auto insurance has spiked 17%. And the home-insurance crisis is so bad, more people are forgoing coverage each year. (...)

Today's insurers say they are selling "peace of mind" and hawk themselves as neighbors who are always there when you need them. But that sense of security does not ring true for people who feel cheated when insurers use a morass of loopholes and exclusions to deny claims while continuing to raise premiums or cancel policies altogether. For insurers, the best-case scenario is that they keep getting paid by customers who never face disaster, and therefore never need their insurance. So when the bills for a catastrophe come due, companies are not eager to pay out. Not so neighborly after all.

Behind the curtain

Insurance is an esoteric, byzantine, and secretive business, so most of us only see the tip of the iceberg — the rejected claims, the raised costs, the revoked coverage. What we don't see are the complex systems that insurers have created to keep us in the dark, collect as much data as possible, and squeeze profits from the customers they are meant to serve. And the further integration of technologies like AI is only supercharging the industry's capacity to rip us off while allowing companies to evade public awareness and accountability.

In years past, insurance policies were based largely on broad demographic categories like age and gender. Now, with the vast range of data insurers have access to, consumers are charged not just based on their objective risks but also based on how much they are willing to pay — a practice called price optimization. To make those predictions, insurers gather and analyze data about individuals to create detailed personal profiles, looking at everything from whether you smoke cigarettes to your shopping habits to which internet browser you use.

As Duncan Minty, an ethics consultant for insurers, recently wrote, "It's difficult to think of data that they haven't been collecting about policyholders."

That data is fed into proprietary models for analysis to determine how much to charge a particular consumer. The personalized prices that the algorithm spits out are not just based on how risky a person is compared to other similar people but also on metrics like Customer Lifetime Value — or the predicted net profit that a customer will deliver over their lifetime.

To determine that magic price tag, insurance companies drill down into the nitty-gritty details of your life. They might look at your home's roof using drones and automated image analysis, or where you're driving based on data from a smart device in your car, or what kinds of foods you're eating by looking at nutrition trackers. They might also look at your credit score, ZIP code, social-media posts, and battery-charging habits. This data can then be used as proxies for social categories like class and race or to make moral judgments about your personal responsibility, which factor into decisions for prices and policies. (...)

Insurers justify possessing so much data by saying that it's all in the name of fairness. Everybody should be charged according to their own risk. The only way to know that fair price is for insurers to have a vast amount of information about each individual. But how exactly they reach those decisions is largely unexplained. We have to guess, piece things together, and reverse engineer the results. And the outcomes seem to always favor insurers above all.

A recent survey found that most people are opposed to these kinds of surveillance programs: "68% of Americans would not install an app that collects driving behavior or location data for any insurance discount amount." However, that lack of consumer support has not stopped companies — insurers are starting to make such programs mandatory. For instance, health insurers can mandate employee participation in corporate wellness programs that track lifestyle data, and auto insurers can mandate smart devices in your vehicle if you've been deemed higher risk.

The direction the industry is heading is to use this flood of data to optimize pricing to the extent that your insurance policy is dynamic and constantly changing. For example, insurers are testing new business models like on-demand insurance: Rather than purchase an annual contract for something like car insurance, every time you drive, your insurance would activate, and when you aren't driving, it would deactivate. Each of these activations would be treated as a new transaction with a new contract — and a new price. Driving to get groceries on a sunny weekend morning might cost less than, say, picking up your kids during rush hour on a rainy evening. This emerging model is spreading as insurers experiment with new products such as single-day heat insurance that you can activate using a mobile app.

Colm Holmes, formerly the CEO of Aviva and now CEO of Allianz Holdings — both massive multinational insurers — summed up the problem with this model in a 2020 interview: "The use of data is something I think regulators will have to look at, because if you get down to insuring the individual, you don't have an insurance industry — you just create people who don't need insurance and people who aren't insurable."

Holmes is saying that the end result of this direction is that risky people lose their access to insurance while everyone else never needs to use their insurance — undermining the entire purpose of insurance as a way of collectively pooling risk. We're already seeing this as more people have their home-insurance policies canceled and claims denied. It could also mean endless profits for the companies: Millions of people pay in, while the insurer rarely, if ever, needs to pay out. To keep companies from becoming the architects of their own demise by pursuing that financial incentive, Holmes is saying that regulators need to step in to enforce limits. Otherwise we would have no real insurance to speak of.

Nickel and diming

At her keynote during the recent International Congress of Actuaries, Inga Beale, the former CEO of the UK insurer Lloyd's of London, shared a story about trying to file a home-insurance claim after her roof had been damaged in a hailstorm. Beale's insurer had required her to get three independent quotes for repairs, fill out a stack of paperwork, engage in long interactions with a claims handler, and on and on. Eventually, Beale was so frustrated by the whole process that she decided to just pay for the repair herself. Beale was a professional underwriter in the highest echelon of the insurance industry, but she was also the victim of claims optimization, the insurance-industry practice where consumers are offered payouts not based on what they fairly deserve but based on what they are willing to accept.

From the freedom of retirement, Beale was taking aim at insurers' obsession with finding exclusions — that is, reasons not to underwrite risk or cover claims. She saw this as antithetical to the social purpose of insurance. What's the point of having insurers if they don't want to insure anything risky? Beale called these practices a systemic feature of an industry that has become too profit-oriented and risk-averse. I'll go even further: To boost their own profits, insurance companies are becoming increasingly antisocial and antagonistic. You may hate your insurer, but they probably hate you more.

One possible way insurers limit how much they pay on claims is by simply paying less on a batch of claims and seeing how many customers complain. If the number of complaints doesn't reach a certain threshold — say, 5% of claim decisions result in a formal complaint — then the amount paid is lowered even further with another batch of claims. The process of lowering payouts, which can be automated by AI tools, is continued until that threshold of complaints is reached.

Insurers can also use their data-driven analysis of customers to predict who is prone to complain and preemptively offer them a fairer deal than those who are more likely to just accept what they are offered. Or, they can target customers with low credit scores — which indicates they might have money troubles and need cash right now — and offer them a quicker, no-hassle process in return for a reduced payout.

In addition to dragging out claims until customers just give up, recent reporting by ProPublica found that the health insurer Cigna uses a system that helps doctors instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, forcing customers to go through a tortuous appeals process. "Cigna adopted its review system more than a decade ago," writes ProPublica, "but insurance executives say similar systems have existed in various forms throughout the industry."

by Jathan Sadowski, Business Insider/Yahoo Finance | Read more:
Image: Tyler Le/Insider
[ed. Surprise, surprise. Actually, the thing about on-demand insurance is a new one to me. I used to know someone who's wife worked in insurance claims, and it's true, she just threw out 30-40 percent of claims upfront to see who would spend the time and effort to complain (and to whom?). See also: It Shouldn’t Be This Easy to Lose Your Health Insurance (NYT).]

Long Story Short: Kepa Maly - Lāna'i and the Spirit of Place

[ed. I've met and talked to Kepa a couple times about items in our old home on Lanai. I'm sure he'll have an influence on the future reconstruction of Lahaina having conducted ethnographic studies there, such as this one: Volume I (Part 1): He Wahi Mo'olelo No Kaua'ula me Kekahi 'Aina O Lahaina I Maui. A Collection of Traditions and Historical Accounts of Kaua'ula and Other Lands of Lahaina, Maui (pdf). Here he talks about his upbringing on Lanai and some of its old traditions and stories (there's also a Part 1). See also: To Know Lāna‘i Once Again - Kepā Maly is restoring authenticity to the stories of the island he loves (Maui Magazine).]

Jerry Sisemore, Waiting for Ray (Wylie Hubbard). Texas honkey tonk, 2023.

via: Jerry Sisemore/markk

[ed. See also: Live in Garland, TX.]

Cheeseburgers in Paradise

Uncertainty And Delays Are Too Much For Some Lahaina Businesses. They’re Calling It Quits.

For more than 30 years, Cheeseburger in Paradise, founded in Lahaina, occupied a prime waterfront spot on the town’s Front Street.

The iconic eatery drew hordes of tourists and locals, serving up to 1,200 people a day, employing a staff of about 50 people and generating more than $7.5 million a year in revenue.

On the restaurant’s Facebook page, repeat visitors to Maui called it their first stop on the island each time they visited.

But the Aug. 8 Lahaina fire destroyed the restaurant. And amid an uncertain and puzzling path ahead toward redevelopment, the owners of the popular eatery have decided to call it quits in Lahaina.

“I don’t believe for a second that they are going to let anybody build on the ocean again,” Laren Gartner, co-founder and owner of Cheeseburger in Paradise, said in a recent interview.

She said that questions about soil toxicity, a debris-removal process that may take years to complete and government lethargy in the face of real economic threat have added to her concerns about Lahaina’s financial future.

The owners of Cheeseburger in Paradise are among dozens of Lahaina entrepreneurs who are deliberating over whether to try to rebuild or reopen their businesses, with some deciding that the risks are too great and the likely delays too long.

Another entrepreneur who is throwing in the towel in Lahaina is Charlie Osborn, owner of Island Printing and Imaging, which combined commercial printing and art reproduction, an essential service in a community that employs many artists who sell their work in shops and galleries around the islands.

His shop on Limahana Place, which he ran since 2011, burned down in the fire.

“My customer base was mostly Lahaina and the majority are now out of business,” said Osborn, who is a photographer.

He said before the fire, he had 400 customers who were a mix of businesses and individuals.

The printing company’s departure is a blow, some said. (...)

Lack of concrete information from state and local government officials about Lahaina’s future is making it difficult for businesses to go forward, according to Lahaina’s entrepreneurs.

“If they gave us information for timelines then we can start to plan,” said Sne Patel, president of the Lahaina Town Action Committee, an organization of business owners and community advocates founded in 1988.

Patel, who is director of sales and advocacy for Maui Resort Rentals, also serves as vice chair of the Maui County Liquor Control Commission, where he is trying to find ways to help businesses relocate from Lahaina to other places on the island.

“We are working to help business pivot faster to the other side of the island,” Patel said. (...)

Nobody knows for sure how many of Lahaina’s businesses will wait out what may be years of uncertainty to open again in town. Business owners, some of whom also lost their homes in the conflagration, have dispersed all over the country in the weeks following the fire.

People are losing contact with each other, Morrison said.

“We’re all just disconnected, kind of like during Covid,” she said. “I don’t know how to reach anybody because before, I just walked down the street and talked to people, and now, they are just not there.”

Gartner said she believes that fewer than half of Lahaina’s restaurants and bars remain interested in a future on Maui, based on what she witnessed at a recent Liquor Commission meeting. She said that before the fire, about 50 firms in Lahaina had liquor licenses but that at a recent meeting, only about 21 businesses appeared to be there in person or represented by attorneys.

Patel said the Lahaina Town Action Committee formerly had a total membership of about 90 members, including about 50 business members. He said that about 45 of the business members lost their businesses, many of them on Front Street, and the organization is no longer sending them invoices for membership dues. (...)

Patel’s group organized one of the most effective business meetings held on the island on Sept. 5, when small business owners were able to pose questions to top government officials. Following this event, Patel said, he got some new inquiries for membership.

Some Lahaina restaurants are actively looking for retail locations elsewhere on the island but finding there isn’t much available space, Patel said. Some are considering going into temporary, pop-up locations that would operate something like tiny homes, giving them a venue until they can find permanent locations, he said.

Re-establishing businesses in Lahaina may take a very long time because of all the logistical issues, he said.

by Kirstin Downey, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Cheeseburger in Paradise
[ed. Pretty predictable. Developers, local activists, Hawaiian rights groups, homeowners, hotels, businesses (like this one), tourism boosters, historical preservation societies, upcountry corporate landowners (water rights), lawyers (many, many), and politicians. It'll be a while before the whole mess gets sorted out. See also: A Plea From Native Hawaiians: The Future of Maui Rests on Honoring Its Past; and, Yes, Maui Is Open. But the Loss of Lahaina May Reshape Tourism. (NYT)]

Sam Gross
via:

Alpine Butterfly Knot

via:
[ed. A handy knot to know (and easy to remember).]

With ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ Scorsese Tells the Ultimate Gangster Story

“Can you find the wolves in this picture?” Uneducated Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is reading aloud to himself from a children’s book on the advice of his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro); the older man thinks it might help his nephew acclimatize to the predominantly Indigenous town. It’s not the most subtle of clues as to what Killers of the Flower Moon—based on David Grann’s nonfiction book—will be about: There are real wolves hiding in plain sight in Martin Scorsese’s latest film, and they really aren’t that hard to spot. They’re white.

This isn’t to say that the filmmaker is being too explicit or lazy in his storytelling. Instead, getting straight to the point highlights just how clueless, or in denial, Ernest is. Arriving in Oklahoma with the simple hope of getting a job, Burkhart doesn’t seem that flummoxed by the unique dynamic of the town, where rich Native Americans employ white, poorer men. The oil found in the land that the Osage Nation was arbitrarily given by white men changed the game, and Hale—who goes by the modest nickname “King”—became an ally and is beloved by his community. For seemingly purely altruistic reasons, he offers Ernest a job as a taxi driver; but already King’s demeanor hints at what he is really after, for those who can notice it.

De Niro hasn’t given such a complex, funny, and deeply disturbing performance in a long while. His King talks to Ernest as if to a son, telling him in more or less subtle terms how things are to be done in these parts. He’s also a master at saying one thing to mean another, making for moments when DiCaprio gets to be at his best: confused, but too insecure to say so, as vulnerable as in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, a performance that marked a real return to form. King referring to “pure blood” Native people doesn’t mean much to Ernest, but it also takes him by surprise. In his language, King walks a fine, confusing line between loving the Osages and describing them as obstacles toward his goal of mass estate ownership. Here’s a man at peace with his split personality because perhaps, to him, it isn’t split at all. Everything is a justifiable means to an end, whether those means consist of learning the Osage language and grieving their losses, or murdering members of the community. Playing this psychopathic character completely straight, De Niro baffles the audience, too. The effect is one of whiplash and cognitive dissonance while Scorsese takes his time, over the first hour, to slowly but surely let the horror creep onto the frame. Almost without knowing it, King’s genocidal master plan has revealed itself, seeping into the narrative like poison.

For the banality of evil (as De Niro rightly referred to it at the film’s Cannes press conference) to take hold, however, you don’t just need men like King. Ernest, as his name announces, is always enthusiastic to do as he’s told without thinking too much. Like a leaf in the wind, this useful idiot lets himself be pushed around easily. He drives for an Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), on King’s suggestion and falls in love, marries, and takes care of her, but also participates in the slow extermination of her entire family for his uncle’s sake. It is the bold choice of an experienced filmmaker (some would say in his “late” era) to have at the center of his film a man with no center, and to offer the audience no direct access to his thoughts. Where Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill in Goodfellas shared his reflections on his life as a gangster with some level of insight, Ernest gives us nothing but his contradictory behavior, which we experience in the present tense. Ernest is a man torn but who doesn’t know it, whose only excuse might be that he has been brainwashed from the start by King’s (and America’s) white capitalistic ideology, which Scorsese highlights as he did in his gangster pictures. Establishing the story of the Osages in the film’s first few sequences, the filmmaker relies on his beloved combination of slow-motion and bluesy guitar when oil bursts out of the ground and the oppressed tribe dances under the unexpected black gold rain. As is always the case with Scorsese’s coolest sequences, the swagger of this stylized moment is not to be taken at face value, but instead speaks to the appeal of our vices. Sharon Stone shooting a glance at De Niro and walking off in Casino was the beginning of his downfall, but in Flower Moon’s context of white supremacy, this technique takes on new depth: While it is exciting to see the Osages win over their colonizers, it is also dispiriting that they should even have to play into their capitalist game to survive.

by Manuela Lazic, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: Apple TV/YouTube

[ed. Interesting to compare Scorcese's late-life efforts with someone, say, like Woody Allen.]

Teri Loyer, Palmer, AK

Photo: markk
[ed. Nice artist, nice person. Totally Photo Design - Email: INFO@TOTALLY.PHOTO]

Anselm Feuerbach, Remembrance of Tivoli
via:

6 Lessons From 21 Months of Logging

[ed. Same thing. Except 12 years.]

Since the end of 2021, I’ve uploaded ~3 logs a day, with the average one being 50-100 words. These are small thoughts, usually epiphanies jotted into my phone in a rush, touched up and published the next morning onto a pinned Substack page.

I’ve started a lot of weird experiments, but this one stuck.

I’ll even admit that I consider my logging practice to be more important than my practice of publishing essays.

Here’s why:

1. Practice your prose — Logging lets you practice shaping ideas into sentences, without having to worry about the puzzle of essay writing. Structuring and refining thousands of words is a different skill. With logging, all you have to do is write one great paragraph. The reduced scope is liberating. It’s writing without headache. I publish 3x more words through logs than essays.
2. You see the world differently — Logging forces me to snap out of auto-pilot and pay attention. Once you build a habit of recording your observations, it gets you to look at things more closely and from different perspectives. Any ordinary day is filled with revelations, but only if you care to notice. After I capture something, it clears out my thought loop, and gives me a fresh slate to see new things. It’s a feedback loop: the more you log, the more you notice.
3. It's a lo-fi second brain — My old note-taking systems were impersonal and mechanical. I’d hoard quotes from books or articles, and then manually organize them into some private structure that was impossible to maintain. Logging inverts the typical note-taking habits in three big ways.

• Original — These are your original reflections. Through logging, you build a mosaic-portrait of your life. It doubles as an archive of your memories and a bank of personal sources to draw from.

• Loose — No organization required. I have over 200,000 words jammed into 21 monthly text files. Categorizing, linking, and grouping is forbidden. It’s just reverse chronological. All my past thoughts are searchable, and I’m building Margin Muse so that relevant logs pop into my margins as I write.

• In public — Sharing my logs in public forces me to write in coherent sentences. Private note-taking systems tend to devolve into chicken scratch.

1. Freedom to go off-brand — Logging is anti-strategic. I don't have the self-consciousness of a tweet or the perfectionism of an essay. I assume most people don’t binge-read my logs, so I have no pressure to perform or narrow my scope like an entrepreneur would. It’s pure capture and expression.
2. Momentum — So many of my essays and tweets start out as logs. I often scan the past few days to sense the themes that are emerging. These are the ideas ready to be written. If ever I get stuck on an essay, it’s often because it felt urgent, but had no presence in my latest logs. Instead of starting from a blank page, you can copy in some recent logs and thread them together (this is my exact strategy for loglogog). It comes out easily.
3. It works even when you're busy — I was slammed in April and May and had no bandwidth to write essays. I still logged. I wrote 13,000 words. Logging is resilient. You don't need to make time for it. It's ambient. It's simply about making the habit to write down the thoughts you’re already having.

by Michael Dean, Dean's List |  Read more:

[ed. Sounds familiar. These are great observations. Logging=blogging.]

Original 1851 Reviews of Moby-Dick

On the occasion of its 170th publication anniversary, here are the very first reviews of Herman Melville’s leviathan-sized opus of obsession, revenge, and meticulously detailed whaling practices.

*

“To convey an adequate idea of a book of such various merits as that which the author of Typee and Omoo has here placed before the reading public, is impossible in the scope of a review. High philosophy, liberal feeling, abstruse metaphysics popularly phrased, soaring speculation, a style as many-coloured as the theme, yet always good, and often admirable; fertile fancy, ingenious construction, playful learning, and an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing that narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous; all these are possessed by Herman Melville, and exemplified in these volumes.”

–London Morning Advertiser, October 24 1851

*

“This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed … The result is, at all events, a most provoking book,—neither so utterly extravagant as to be entirely comfortable, nor so instructively complete as to take place among documents on the subject of the Great Fish, his capabilities, his home and his capture. Our author must be henceforth numbered in the company of the incorrigibles who occasionally tantalize us with indications of genius, while they constantly summon us to endure monstrosities, carelessnesses, and other such harassing manifestations of bad taste as daring or disordered ingenuity can devise…
We have little more to say in reprobation or in recommendation of this absurd book … Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.”

–Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25 1851

*

“Of all the extraordinary books from the pen of Herman Melville this is out and out the most extraordinary. Who would have looked for philosophy in whales, or for poetry in blubber. Yet few books which professedly deal in metaphysics, or claim the parentage of the muses, contain as much true philosophy and as much genuine poetry as the tale of the Pequod’s whaling expedition … To give anything like an outline of the narrative woven together from materials seemingly so uncouth, with a power of thought and force of diction suited to the huge dimensions of its subject, is wholly impossible … [Readers] must be prepared, however, to hear much on board that singularly-tenanted ship which grates upon civilized ears; some heathenish, and worse than heathenish talk is calculated to give even more serious offence. This feature of Herman Melville’s new work we cannot but deeply regret. It is due to him to say that he has steered clear of much that was objectionable in some of his former tales; and it is all the greater pity, that he should have defaced his pages by occasional thrusts against revealed religion which add nothing to the interest of his story, and cannot but shock readers accustomed to a reverent treatment of whatever is associated with sacred subjects … [T]he artist has succeeded in investing objects apparently the most unattractive with an absorbing fascination. The flashes of truth, too, which sparkle on the surface of the foaming sea of thought through which the author pulls his readers in the wake of the whale-ship,—the profound reflections uttered by the actors in the wild watery chase in their own quaint forms of thought and speech,—and the graphic representations of human nature in the startling disguises under which it appears on the deck of the Pequod,—all these things combine to raise The Whale far beyond the level of an ordinary work of fiction. It is not a mere tale of adventures, but a whole philosophy of life, that it unfolds.

–London John Bull, October 25, 1851

by Book Marks, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Oceanfront Vistas

 photo: markk

Behind the AI Magic That Lets Amazon’s Prime Vision Show the NFL Like Never Before

Some viewers of Amazon Prime’s “Thursday Night Football” matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Denver Broncos got a special experience: seeing what was going to happen on a play before it actually happened.

Viewers who watched the game in Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats, one of Amazon’s three broadcast options, saw the unveiling of a feature called Defensive Alert that is powered by artificial intelligence to identify potential blitzes before the snap. The model highlights players it believes have a high probability of blitzing (crossing the line of scrimmage to rush the passer) with a red circle that appears under them.

As Sam Schwartzstein, one of the minds behind the model with Prime Vision and the Amazon Machine Learning team, eagerly watched his model work its magic on every snap, on one play, he became confused at why his program was highlighting a nickel corner who wasn’t giving any indication that he was blitzing. “Why are we highlighting this guy?” Schwartzstein yelled in fustration.

Was this a flaw? Did the machine get this prediction completely wrong? Schwartzstein, a former offensive lineman who played at Stanford with Andrew Luck, prided himself on being able to identify potential blitzes. His years of experience as a player and analyst told him the nickel wasn’t much of a threat.

Right before the ball was snapped, the inside linebacker dropped to the nickel’s side and the nickel finally moved toward the line of scrimmage. The program sniffed out this blitzer well before Schwartzstein, watching the game from a wide-angle camera shot. The weirdest part about this is no one really knows how Defensive Alert did it. It’s a self-learning program that has analyzed thousands of plays and movement patterns to understand how defenses move as a whole when certain players blitz.

The model is trained not to identify the usual four down linemen that typically rush the passer. It’s trained to identify unique players who rush the passer on 60 percent or less of snaps. It’s being fed tracking data from Next Gen Stats, which is derived from RFID chips in every player’s shoulder pads. The data includes the players’ acceleration, their orientation and where they are facing. From all that data, the machine starts to understand familiar movement patterns from the defense as a whole, which helps it predict which player is going to blitz.

“We’re highlighting things, starting at line set,” Schwartzstein said. “It’s happening in real time as information is coming in from the shoulder pads. And so you can see all this data coming in and (the model) gets more confident the closer we get to the snap because defenders have to more clearly define their roles the closer they are to the timing of the snap. One of the coolest features for me is we’re not just highlighting it at one time and sticking with it. It is on and off based on where players are moving throughout the play on both offense and defense.” (...)

The goal is to get viewers to see the game as the quarterback does. The quarterback isn’t certain who is going to blitz, especially early on when the defense is showing its initial disguise. But as the snap nears, players start to move around to get close to where they have to, to execute their assignments. The initial alignment and movement help the quarterback figure out who is blitzing or not. The best quarterbacks are coming to conclusions from their wealth of experience or film watching. The machine is processing information the same way, but it has an abundance of data that has been fed into it to pull from in an instant.

Some skeptics believe Amazon is using a delay to see the blitzes coming and highlighting the player on the live feed. Though the processing required for Prime Vision to paint visuals does add some delay (usually three seconds or less), the model that powers Defensive Alert does not use that delay. The team has spent considerable effort to produce predictions as fast as possible — even installing dedicated hardware in Amazon’s state-of-the-art production trucks. There is no person or program trying to trick the audience about prediction capabilities.

Again, Schwartzstein doesn’t know exactly how the model is making some of these predictions. It’s learning on its own as it keeps getting data, but don’t worry, football purists. The model is also getting input from a panel of actual football people that includes former players and coaches like Andrew Luck, Geoff Schwartz, David Shaw, David DeCastro, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Andrew Whitworth, Nate Tice and Andrew Phillips.

The panel of experts reviews the film of the model making predictions and makes sure it’s identifying legitimate threats and not looking at players who could not be rushers to the well-trained eye. Some of their feedback, along with that of Schwartzstein, who provides feedback on every play, is fed back into the system. (...)

Just to ease the minds of concerned fans, teams cannot use this model to their advantage in games. Communication with the quarterback is cut off after 15 seconds of the play clock has expired and there’s no way to get information to the quarterback fast enough. Also, coaches in the booth don’t have access to the Amazon broadcast. Technology usage is extremely restricted for teams. They don’t have access to tracking data during games, and even when they are looking at their tablets, they are looking at stills, not video.

by Ted Nguyen, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Amazon Prime
[ed. Feels like AI could transform football strategy into something similar to what we see with chess these days - more statistical probability, less imagination/intuition. Maybe there'll be transistors on every moveable part of a player's body at some point (soon?).]  

Deer Are Everywhere, but We Barely Know Them

On June 4, 2013, Buck 8917 did something weird, for a deer: He took a long, purposeful walk.

Researchers from Penn State had captured and put a GPS collar on the adult male that spring in Bald Eagle State Forest, about 15 miles northeast of State College, Pa. Put a tracker on most deer and you’ll find they stick pretty close to their home range, which was true for 8917. He sauntered, stopped to forage or bedded down for a nap mostly within an undulating square mile of forest full of towering hemlock and tangled rhododendron. But on that June day, he made a one-mile beeline, hiking to the top of a rocky ridgeline, where he seemed to while away the afternoon before walking directly home.

Then, in 2015, after two mating seasons, two hunting seasons and thousands of laps around his home range, Buck 8917 died — unsurprising given he was about 4 years old. It was where he died that surprised the researchers: that same ridge he’d visited just once in the two years he’d been collared.

Researchers don’t have a good explanation for Buck 8917’s odd visit, but it’s an example of the unexpected behaviors they observe while paying uncommonly close attention to the hoofed mammals, which are so frequently found across the North American landscape that we often take them for granted.

These discoveries are an outgrowth of the Deer-Forest Study, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Pennsylvania Game Commission, the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry and Penn State. Now in its 10th year, the study has tracked more than 1,200 white-tailed deer around 100 square miles of Pennsylvania forest. It aims to be the most sweeping effort ever undertaken to understand North America’s most widespread large animals, as well as the impact they have on the vegetation and soil in our nation’s forests.

“It should be called the Forest-Deer Study because we’re really studying the forest,” said Duane Diefenbach, a Penn State ecologist and co-leader of the project.

On that front, Dr. Diefenbach and his colleagues have made some significant discoveries.

For example, the scientists have learned that Indian cucumber root, a flowering herb beloved by ungulates, won’t grow in soil high in manganese. That is a consequential finding because land managers often use the prevalence of the native plant as a way to measure deer population and set hunting quotas.

Research has revealed an interconnectedness between deer health and the fluctuating nutrients in forest vegetation. For instance, Canada mayflower makes up the bulk of a deer’s diet in the spring, when lactating does and antler-growing bucks need calcium and phosphorus and the plants contain extra doses of the nutrients.

But a decade of spying on deer has also yielded surprising revelations and quirky stories about the animals themselves. The scientists haven’t been shy about sharing this “serendipitous research,” as they call it, publishing more than 700 posts on the Deer-Forest Study blog. They’ve detailed everything from how much drool deer produce a day (two gallons) to what happens when a deer slinks back into the woods after a traffic collision (if it’s lucky, it limps but perseveres). Some entries, like Dr. Diefenbach’s account of Buck 8917’s mysterious death march, have attracted many readers.

“It just took off and we had no idea why,” said Jeannine Fleegle, a Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist who works with Dr. Diefenbach on the blog. “That’s when we realized this could really get a lot of attention on the project.”

Ms. Fleegle has blogged about one of the study’s most captivating characters, Doe 12866, in a series titled “The Real Does of the Deer-Forest Study.”

Like Buck 8917, this doe was remarkable for her get-up-and-go. Collared in Rothrock State Forest in January 2017, Doe 12866 was fitted with a vaginal implant transmitter that would notify the researchers when she gave birth, which she did the following May. To get to her “maternity ward,” as Ms. Fleegle called it, the very pregnant doe embarked on an all-night, six-mile hike to State College city limits, where she fawned in a patch of woods behind a housing development.

Does exhibit high birth-site fidelity — the tendency to return to locations where they had previous success raising their offspring — so it’s possible that Doe 12866 had given birth in State College before. It’s also possible that she left the woods for the city to avoid predators. The researchers saw Doe 16601 do something similar when she fawned near the intersection of two roads at the edge of a forest.

“Why would she choose to have her babies at the confluence of roads given the vast nothingness of the surrounding area?” Ms. Fleegle asked in a post. “Maybe 16601 is using us.” (...)

Deer hunters play an important role in the study. Their hunting in designated areas of the forest, while staying out of others, helps researchers see how the landscape responds. Each year, participating hunters are asked to fill out a survey describing their experiences and observations. Over a decade of research, the team has gleaned new insights about how deer make it (or don’t) through hunting season, including how attuned they are to hunting pressure.

Take Doe 8921, also known as Hillside Doe. On the afternoon before rifle season, as humans tramped around the forest scouting out their hunting spots, Hillside Doe was looking for a spot of her own. She settled on the steepest (you guessed it) hillside in her home range, an inhospitable stretch of terrain covered with “boulders the size of suitcases,” Dr. Diefenbach said.

By 4 a.m. on opening day, Hillside Doe was bedded down in her safe space, as if someone had “texted her a message deer season was about to get started,” Dr. Diefenbach later wrote on the blog.

In the days that followed, the deer retreated there again and again, her behavior reflecting the schedule of the hunters looking for her. While they sat still in their deer stands, she sat still in her hiding place. Once the forest emptied out, Hillside Doe wandered among the hunting camps, feeding or perhaps, as Ms. Fleegle suggested, “doing reconnaissance.” 

by Ashley Stimpson, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Barbara MacDonald/Alamy

‘Stop Making Sense’: Concert Doc Hasn’t Aged a Day

As the song goes, same as it ever was. “Stop Making Sense,” Jonathan Demme’s concert film featuring Talking Heads, was kinetic joy personified when it premiered in theaters in 1984. Now, in a new restoration in honor of the 40th anniversary of its filming, it’s back — and, except for a few of the baggy ‘80s outfits, this dream of a movie hasn’t aged a day. Watching it leaves you lighter, happier, younger — dancing your way out of the theater to the Heads’ irresistible beats.

Demme filmed “Stop Making Sense” over several performances at Los Angeles’ Pantages Theatre in December 1983, as a pure caught-in-the-act documentary (there are, appropriately, no talking heads interrupting the flow), and it’s magical. The opening is tiny and hypnotic: a single beam of light, a skinny young man (Talking Heads leader and singer David Byrne) in a light suit and white sneakers, a guitar, a cassette deck playing a drum track. And slowly, things grow: bassist Tina Weymouth joins Byrne for the next song, then drummer Chris Frantz, and more — keyboardist/guitarist Jerry Harrison, guitarist Alex Weir, percussionist Steve Scales, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, backup singers Ednah Holt and Lynn Mabry.

We see the crew moving set pieces on stage, and we watch as a world is created, one in which people find giddy joy in making music together. Watch Byrne and Weir, in “Burning Down the House,” wildly jogging side by side as if they suddenly, happily became one person. Watch Weymouth’s perfect, tiny pointed-toe prances, adding soft punctuation to the beat. Watch Frantz, looking very non-rock-star in his blue polo, mouthing the lyrics as he drives the rhythm. And watch Holt and Mabry, two beaming beacons of energy, playfully interacting with everyone else on stage; they’re like our guides on a musical pleasure cruise. Demme’s cameras don’t just capture this, sweat and all, but become part of it — dancing, interacting (Scales playfully sticks out a tongue at the camera; Byrne at one point offers it a microphone), bringing us onto that stage, letting us live the music with them.

And Byrne, looking both impossibly youthful and ageless, gives a performance of staggering confidence and charisma, whether dancing with a lamp (it seems to magically float) in “This Must Be the Place,” running endlessly in “Life During Wartime” or unblinkingly staring at the camera as he malevolently drones “Swamp.” At one point, he seems to become a marionette: the vertical line of the microphone stand dividing him in two, with gyrating arms and legs seemingly independent of each other. It’s as if the music possesses him — and us.

For a lot of us, this music is the soundtrack of our very young adulthood; you may find yourself unable to stop grinning at the shimmery, deliciously endless intro to “Girlfriend Is Better,” or bouncing up and down in your seat along with Holt and Mabry, or realizing that, despite the passage of time, you still know every word of each song. Watching it last week, I couldn’t always tell whether the applause and cheers were coming from the movie or from the live audience. It was as if the line separating life and art had blurred, and we were all happily caught within it.

by Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Talking Heads/Stop Making Sense

Ticketmaster Torment: Who Can Fix It?

Today’s ticketing landscape is like a disorienting video game.

When tickets for a hotly anticipated show go on sale, set your alarm. Queue for hours online. When the floodgates open, watch out: A chunk of tickets are already being sold at marked-up prices, as artists try to undercut scalpers and reclaim revenue. Careful! Bots and bad actors appear, hoarding tickets to resell for a profit on websites like StubHub and SeatGeek.

Failed on the primary market? Start over: Avoid fraudulent sites. Fend off bots that swarm social media sites. Remember: Fees will cost you.

 

Few are winning this game, particularly for shows anywhere larger than a midsize club. In Seattle, most large venues have exclusive deals with Ticketmaster or AXS, or are operated by Live Nation or AEG, AXS’ owner. Fans have little choice but to submit to increasingly hefty fees. Tickets sold on the primary and secondary markets have fees averaging 27% and 31% of the ticket price, respectively, per the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Fans are fed up.

Michelle Sterioff, of Kirkland, is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Ticketmaster and Live Nation Entertainment in California in December.

Sterioff accuses the companies of “anticompetitive and misleading conduct” in their handling of pre- and general sales for the Eras Tour, criticizing exorbitant ticket prices, excessive service fees and a failure to block bots and scalpers from depleting inventories.

The suit alleges the company has a tight grip on the secondary market, and has eliminated competition on the primary by “coercing major concert venue operators to enter into long-term exclusive contracts.” (...)

Though the AG’s office pushed legislation to ban the use of ticket bots in 2015, it has only enforced the law once, against two Massachusetts-based companies. Similar federal legislation, the 2016 BOTS Act, also has rarely been enforced.

Enforcement is challenging, said the AG’s office. In order to bring cases forward, ticket sellers need to provide evidence of bots. If ticket scams are committed by entities or individuals abroad, prosecution is even more difficult. (...)

The country’s largest events promoter and venue operator, Live Nation, merged with ticketing giant Ticketmaster in 2010. As one company, it controls over 70% of the market for ticketing and live events. Though the company posted a record $3.1 billion in revenue in 2023’s first quarter, Ticketmaster maintains it has lost market share since the merger as the secondary ticket market exploded.

Concerns over the company’s dominance go back decades.

In the mid-1990s, Seattle’s Pearl Jam claimed Ticketmaster threw its weight around to scoop up astronomical service fees and demand exclusivity from venues and artists. The hubbub triggered a federal investigation. But the band’s Ticketmaster-boycotting Vs. Tour was a logistical nightmare, the antitrust criticism died down, and the investigation was closed. By 1998, the band agreed to play some Ticketmaster venues.

Seattle booking agent Ali Hedrick doesn’t think Live Nation is “the evil enemy that the general public thinks they are.” The real culprits, she said, are the unscrupulous resellers, who can make more money than artists or promoters on a ticket resold for double or triple face value.

And it’s not just about revenue.

Promoters and the prominent indie acts represented by Hedrick and her agency, Arrival Artists, have limited ways of combating resellers who snag tickets and can’t flip them, leaving “sold-out” shows 17-20% under capacity. No-shows hurt the artists and clubs, who depend on merchandise and bar sales, while fans miss their favorite bands.

Even efforts to beat back resellers can shut fans out.

One of Hedrick’s artists has an upcoming two-night stand at a 5,500-capacity room in Boston. After a “scalper scrub,” an analysis of ticket buyers designed to weed out resellers, she and the artist found more than 425 tickets went to likely resellers who made multiple purchases.

They used to automatically void the tickets, which is still the most likely recourse. But even then, it’s fans who bought on the secondary market who may be left without tickets.

Hedrick said trying to tamp down on resales is “a huge pain in the ass.” For a tour on which she has a supporting act, Hedrick said a “huge portion” of the total ticket count went to brokers — with set limits on ticket prices, in an attempt to control the secondary market.

Speculative ticketing is another issue.

Jim Brunberg, a Portland venue owner based in Washington, said “a million” of these tickets were listed online for an upcoming Devo concert before real tickets went on sale. “Seats” at the show were selling for $140-$415. Face-value tickets were $89.

Brunberg said his employees turn away patrons with speculative tickets at nearly every show. Beyond lost profits at the bar and merch tables, fans scream at security when they realize they don’t have tickets. That erodes trust, said Brunberg, a musician himself, making “the entire industry feel like an unsafe place to spend money.” (...)

Onetime Washingtonian Zach Bryan has emerged as a vocal critic. Naming his recent live album “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster,” the Navy-man-turned-country/folk-rock-star plotted a tour avoiding all Ticketmaster-affiliated stages. He’s working with AXS to establish a face-value ticket-exchange similar to one Pearl Jam has with Ticketmaster, capping ticket prices and pledging to invalidate tickets sold by third-party resellers.

“I have met kids at my shows who have paid upwards of 400 bucks to be there and I’m done with it,” Bryan wrote on Instagram last year. “I believe working class people should still be able to afford tickets to shows. … I am so tired of people saying things can’t be done about this massive issue while huge monopolies sit there stealing money from working class people.” (...)

Ticketmaster and indie venues agree: The multibillion-dollar resale market is out of control. A recent watershed moment was the COVID-19 pandemic, when cybersquatters and bots sharpened their methods as the live music scene was silent.

Indie music halls are fighting back. Some use systems that weed out bots by selling a maximum of four to six tickets per buyer. But it’s like cutting the heads off a Hydra.

The bots are too sophisticated. Mimicry websites use the logo, name and photo of real venues — cybersquatting — to sell fake or secondary market tickets.

by Margo Vansynghel and Michael Rietmulder, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Luke Johnson/Taylor Swift

[ed. I recently checked out the process for buying some Olivia Rodrigo tickets for an upcoming concert in Seattle. You have to apply to a lottery (which quickly closed) and be selected there before even being eligible to jump into the scrum of actual ticket sales the minute they're available. What a screwed up process.]