Smith Journal - Fall 2016

Fo fa r d lle eca n pa des, pe on rp e la ma ne n s. s H cou is r co ed lle th ct e s io t n ree t te lls s of th Ne es w to r y Yo r k of i a ns ci e ty arc in h o tr f an si ti

on

.

THINK ADVEN ERS. TURE RS. MAKE RS. WR I T E RS. INVEN TORS. + PAPER PLA OF NY NES C.

9 771839 767006 01 VOLUME 18 AUTUMN 2016 AUS $11.95 INC GST NZ $12.95 INC GST UK £8.50

WHERE BABY DINOSAURS COME FROM | LIFE LESSONS FROM GRAYSON PERRY | THE POWER GLOVE PLASTIC FOOD FROM JAPAN | MASTER FISHING LURE MAKERS | THE RISE AND FALL OF THE 414s A HOMAGE TO ROADIES | BUCKMINSTER FULLER | TERRIBLE SUPERHEROES + THE CYBORG DRUMMER

@ R

EXTT A _ AU EX A

Editor Adrian Craddock adrian@smithjournal.com.au Creative Director Neil Smith neil@smithjournal.com.au Editorial Assistant & Online Editor Chris Harrigan chris@smithjournal.com.au Designer Emily Chamberlain emily@smithjournal.com.au Writers Myke Bartlett, Ben Birchall, David Craddock, James de Leo, Paul Edwards, Mark Hay, Koren Helbig, Chris Hollow, Joshua Hunt, Andy Isaacson, Sophie Kalagas, Leta Keens, Ingrid Kesa, Dyani Lewis, Ronan MacEwan, Jess Matthews, Andrew Mueller, Vanessa Murray, Gemma Nisbet, Luke Ryan, Paul Verhoeven, Sam West Photographers Drew Anthony Smith, Evgenia Arbugaeva, Jean-Baptiste Courtier, Josh Cuncliffe, Jason Fulford, John Harland, Matthew Johnson, Birgit Püve, Jon Reid, Ricky Rhodes, Matt Sav, Helge Skodvin, Troy Stains, Pete Tarasiuk, Brad Torchia, Andrew Watson, Holly Wilmeth, Irwin Wong Illustrators Sara Hingle, Timothy Rodgers, Karolis Strautniekas (represented by Folio) Cover Photograph taken by Jason Fulford. It is from the book Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith, edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert.

Insert Dymaxion Map designed by Buckminster Fuller .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

General Manager Gaye Murray Brand & Marketing Manager Brendan McKnight Marketing Co-ordinator Irina Rybakov Group Advertising Manager Claire Piras Operations Manager Bree Higgerson Retail Sales & Circulation Manager Alissa Relf Production Manager John Harland Subscription Co-ordinator Danielle Wilson Proofreader Mel Campbell IT Manager Josh Croft Administration Kim Woodward, Angela Thompson & Sue Paul .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

National Advertising Manager Jarrod Kris jarrod@smithjournal.com.au +61 433 796 247 .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Subscriptions & Shop smithjournal.com.au/shop Retail Orders retail@frankiepress.com.au .

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Smith Journal is published by frankie press. frankie press is an imprint of Morrison Media.

Post Office Box 823, Burleigh Heads, Qld, 4220. Telephone : +61 7 5576 1388 Fax : +61 7 5576 1527 Views expressed by authors are not necessarily those of the publisher.

Copyright is reserved, which means you can’t scan our pages and put them up on your website or anywhere else.

Reproduction in whole or part is prohibited. Email addresses are published for professional communications only.

Aust & N.Z. Distributor : Gordon & Gotch Distribution enquiries : circulation@frankiepress.com.au International distribution enquiries : export.ops@seymour.co.uk

smithjournal.com.au

kwp!CPR12874_Sm

Contents ............................................................................................................................................................

013

070

106

Smith Stuff An assortment of interesting products and stories.

Fake Feasts What’s the story behind those plastic plates of food you see in Japanese restaurants?

Beating the Odds There’s a good reason they call Jason Barnes the Cyborg Drummer.

022

077

108

Roadies We pay homage to the unsung heroes of rock ‘n’ roll.

Dressed to Kill Worn by everyone from Indiana Jones to WWII pilots, the A-2 bomber jacket is a symbol of American swagger.

Calypso One of the most famous characters in Jacques Cousteau’s films was his trusty boat, Calypso.

032 The Big Bang For years, palaeontologists have been trying to answer the question: how did dinosaurs mate?

036 Flying Colours You can tell a lot about New York City by the crumpled paper planes that lie on its streets.

038 Things I Know One of the world’s most famous artists explains the life lessons that shaped him.

042 The Rise and Fall of the 414s Meet the teenagers who pulled off one of the most audacious computer hacks in history.

046 Off the Hook It takes a certain kind of craftsperson to make a good fishing lure.

054 Master of a Dying Art Joe Mullins stares into the face of death nearly every day.

059 My Opinion: Jon Morris The author of The League of Regrettable Superheroes knows a thing or two about what makes a good comic book character.

080

110

Moving House Andrew Mellody has come up with a clever way to spend nearly all of his time helping others.

My Influences: John Safran Australia’s most rebellious documentary maker talks about the things that inform his work.

083

114

My Opinion: Nick Frost The star of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz explains how meeting Simon Pegg changed his life.

Quack Devices Prostate Warmers. Head Shakers.

Shock Helmets. Welcome to the strange world of dodgy medical gadgets.

084

117

The Big Picture Maxim Grew runs a camera startup that’s blowing up. Literally.

New Horizons Californian artist j.frede likes to make fictional landscapes by sticking old photos together.

086 Great Man of History You’d be pressed to find a more interesting life than Buckminster Fuller’s, the 20th century’s ultimate ideas man.

090 Great Balls of Fire Some people collect stamps.

Others collect cars. Phil Bland has a more unusual obsession.

096 Framed Ink When people die, their tattoos usually go with them. A group of ink enthusiasts are working to change that (and their solution is not for the squeamish).

122 Grapes of Wrath Next time you pick up an expensive bottle of vino, take a second to ask yourself whether it is real.

126 The Power Glove Nintendo’s most infamous video game controller led to the evolution of an important technology.

129 My Opinion: Gillian Welch The queen of Americana music talks about the mystery that surrounds her birth.

060

101

130

The Weather Man Evgenia Arbugaeva struck up a profound friendship while photographing meteorological stations in the Arctic.

Mine Craft Nothing says style like a piece of furniture made out of an old marine mine.

How to Move a Museum You thought moving house was hard?

Try packing up an entire museum.

068

105

136

Iconic Symbol Sometimes the simplest designs are the hardest to achieve. Case in point: the humble toilet symbol.

Listen Up: Courtney Barnett Sometimes she sits and thinks, and sometimes she just sits and listens to Cyndi Lauper.

Random Testing We take a look at some of the hardest (and strangest) exams in existence.

THE ROOM THAT I GREW UP IN HAD A BIG JARRAH SHELF THAT STRETCHED ALONG ONE WALL. WHEN I WAS A KID, IT CONTAINED ALL KINDS OF ODD MEMENTOS. There were football trophies (the kind they handed out for participation), tin lunch boxes, and a pair of tap dancing shoes that I wore during a primary school performance of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. The most prominent place, however, was reserved for an old pair of model F1 racers – one yellow, one red.

These cars played a special role in my formative years. They were mounted and intended purely for display. But, back in the day, I liked to get more hands-on with them. When mum went out to do the washing, I’d unscrew the bolts that attached the cars to their plinths and set up a race.

My preferred venue was the corridor that led down to the kitchen. It had solid floorboards, and was a perfect place for Yellow and Red to hash out their intense rivalry. The track witnessed some fairly courageous battles. The two cars would do anything to win, often swerving into each other, or taking risky shortcuts underneath furniture. Things got particularly brutal when I introduced a small ramp made out of comic books; the battle suddenly took to the air.

In the end, though, the rigour of the races took its toll. By the time I hit puberty, the cars were battered beyond recognition. Their front fenders had been demolished by collisions with the skirting boards, and there were even teeth marks on their tyres from times when my dog, Calvin, got in on the action. At this point, it only seemed fair to retire them. I just let them stay on their plinths and collect dust in peace.

The experience I had playing with the cars stayed with me, though. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of models. After Yellow and Red came a perfectly to-scale version of Blackbeard’s pirate ship, a working miniature rocket and a couple of pint-sized dinosaurs. If it was a model of something that once existed, I was fascinated. I just loved the craftsmanship that went into making fake versions of real things.

A good deal of the articles in volume 18 of Smith Journal focus on this skill. We learn how models can be used to whet people’s appetites in Japan. We meet some craftspeople who make fishing lures that perfectly imitate marine life. And we turn the spotlight on Joe Mullins, the man who creates models of human heads in order to help crack cold cases.

In a way, all these stories centre on a basic question: is it possible for humans to convincingly reproduce the subtleties of nature? It turns out it’s a tough one to answer. Just like the matter of whether Red or Yellow was the fastest, the difference can be hard to pick.

AC

smith stuff

Photo: Jean-Baptiste Courtier

THE WHITE HELMETS These chaps aren’t part of a circus. They’re proud members of the White Helmets, a group of stuntmen from the Royal Corps of Signals, the part of the British army that deals with battlefield communications.

we will have you jumping through fire with confidence and style.” Indeed, instructors are said to actually prefer applicants who’ve never ridden a motorcycle before, and have therefore acquired no bad habits.

The White Helmets began in the 1920s as a means for motorcycle messengers to show the public what their machines could really do.

Today, they exist as an earthbound equivalent of the Royal Air Force’s aerobatics squad – a spectacular yet benign demonstration of military power and discipline.

The group’s aesthetic is probably best described as quaint, with riders required to wear navy blue dress uniforms during their performances. The actual white helmets they use are old-school, open-faced, and imbued with the mystique often attending military headgear: not until graduation day, when a rider makes his or her first fire jump, are they entitled to wear them.

As with most specialist branches of the military, many apply to the White Helmets, but few make the grade. Selection takes place every November, and runs for two weeks. The recruitment page of their website reassures, “Don’t worry if you have never ridden a motorcycle before, we will teach you everything you need to know, and before long

Of course, there are other tricks the team has to learn along the way, too. The full repertoire includes wheelies, mid-ride juggling, and fitting nine people onto a moving motorcycle.

For obvious reasons, the group prefers sturdy vehicles for these routines, specifically British

750cc Triumphs – although 250cc Hondas are also used for the early stages of training.

Booking the White Helmets for a performance is cheaper than one might expect: if your event is close to their base in Dorset, they can be had for as little as £1,000 (A$2,000). Perhaps not coincidentally, their 2016 schedule has them performing most weeks, at events including fairs and fetes all over Britain.

Like almost every aspect of the military, the underlying mission of these shows has its own acronym – KAPE, or Keeping the Army in the Public Eye. It may seem a frivolous advertisement of what the military prefers to think of as its definitive virtues – order, precision and trust in one’s fellows. But one thing’s for sure: the White Helmets’ intricately choreographed routines would certainly end messily if these traits weren’t taken seriously. whitehelmets.co.uk AM 013

SMITH JOURNAL

>>

DALÍ’S COOKING ADVENTURES Salvador Dalí did some wacky shit in his time, but the stunt he pulled in the winter of 1955 has to be among his best.

He took his friend’s Rolls-Royce, filled it with 500kg of cauliflower and drove it from Spain to France. His explanation: “Everything ends up in the cauliflower.”

Yeah, we don’t get it either. Anyway, the stunt turned out to be an early indicator of one of the artist’s great passions: food.

In 1973, he even published Les Dîners de Gala, a cookbook of his favourite meals. The recipes include such delicacies as Conger of the Rising Sun (eel) and Thousand-Year-Old Egg. Helpful. CH

HEAVYWEIGHT BOXES Sixty years ago, a Canadian miner named Leo May had a big idea: wouldn’t it be great if there was a lunch box sturdy enough to double as a seat? He figured it would take the pain out of trying to find a place to perch while you ate your sandwich. May eventually decided to try manufacturing this invention in his basement. But when he was inundated with orders, he moved into a factory. These days, the company he founded, L May MFG, is still going. Its most famous design is the Original Miner’s Lunchbox, which is crafted from high-grade aluminium and is strong enough to last a lifetime.

Depending on your appetite, it comes in either large or small. lunchbox.ca CH

UP THERE You never know when you might need to re-grease the pistons on a stubborn locomotive or spend a night in the forest stalking a moose. That’s why it’s worth stocking up on the workwear-inspired clothes made by Melbourne brand Up There. Their brilliant badger shirt is made of heavyweight Japanese cotton twill and features expandable pockets (perfectly sized for an iPhone full of Bruce Springsteen albums). Their olive worker jacket is also a killer, with a waxed cotton upper that screams, “Shut up, I’m busy welding a gate.” uptherestore.com DC

PEACE OF THE PUZZLE

SIMPLE SAMPLE

Behold! Japan’s answer to Lego. It’s called Tsumiki, and its pieces are shaped like little triangles that wedge together. The structures they create tend to be slightly more abstract than their Danish counterparts, but that’s all part of the appeal. A basic Tsumiki kit costs around $100, and can be purchased – with the help of Google Translate – through the website of More Trees, a conservationist group dedicated to protecting forests. shop.more-trees-design.jp RM

When did novelty beers become such a big thing among craft brewers? These days nearly every brand has a couple of weird gimmicky flavours. Not Melbournebased brewery Sample, though. Its team is going back to basics, and working by a one-word motto: purity. They even adhere to Germany’s Reinheitsgebot – a 500-year-old Bavarian law, which dictates that brewers should only ever use four ingredients: barley, hops, water and yeast. That’s not to say that Sample’s booze is boring. From its razor-sharp American-style Pale Ale to its hoppy lager, the brand is all about bold flavours.

Its graphic design isn’t half bad, either.

Sample’s founder, Vedad Huric, used to be an architect, which explains why Sample’s labels hum with sharp lines and nice fonts. Simply put, it’s beer that’s ideal for creatively minded palates. Definitely worth a sample. samplebrew.com.au LR

smith stuff

CURIOUS LIFE: CONNIE CONVERSE

MAKE YOUR OWN BACTERIA

Born in small-town New Hampshire in 1924, Connie Converse was a talented, if quiet student. She won a full scholarship to college, only to drop out after two years.

Her reason? New York’s post-war folk revival was calling. But while Greenwich Village contemporaries such as Woody Guthrie and Odetta found chart success, Connie struggled to get an audience outside intimate gigs. It probably didn’t help that she was ahead of her time; while other artists reworked traditional numbers, Connie’s songs painted witty, affecting tales of ordinary misfits – women who roamed and lived unfulfilled lives. Ultimately, Connie became one of these characters herself. In 1974, she disappeared, leaving only a note saying, “I just can’t find my place.” Her music might have vanished with her, had it not been for a collection of recordings made at a kitchen table during the 1950s. Completed by a New York producer in 2009, these songs formed the basis for Connie’s long-awaited and (presumably posthumous) debut LP, How Sad, How Lovely. MB

When we were young, if you wanted to mess around with the building blocks of life you had to get a degree in bioengineering. Now, playing God is as easy as buying one of these kits from Amino Labs. It lets you program bacteria DNA to create all sorts of weird shit.

The starter pack keeps it simple by teaching you how to make a nightlight out of a nondangerous strain of E. coli. After that, there are heaps of cool add-on projects, including ones that let you engineer your own beer yeast, make perfume, or even design your own medicines. amino.bio CH

BOVINE ART Natural beauty can be the most profound.

Just take these sculptures from the Spanish design studio Estudi Moliné.

How are they made? We’re glad you asked.

Someone gets a block of salt and leaves it in the company of a cow who lovingly licks it. The resulting shapes are beautiful, albeit hard to interpret. What are the cows trying to express? Are the sculptures an existential exploration of life within the dairy industry? Or perhaps they contain a biting critique of the European debt crisis.

Either way, the things would look good in any lounge room. estudimoline.com JDL

A SERVE OF GOOD DESIGN Most painters prefer to work on canvas. But every year, a select few try their hands at painting on table tennis bats instead. The rackets are then displayed at the Art of Ping Pong, a charity auction in London that pits artists against each other in an effort to come up with the best design. Why table tennis? Well, competition founder Algy Batten really likes ping-pong, for a start. The last auction took place in November, but preparations are already underway for this year’s competition. Or should we say, tournament. theartofpingpong.co.uk CH 015

SMITH JOURNAL

THE SPLAYD

THE WRITING ON THE WALL In Japan, shops and restaurants often hang decorative curtains called noren over their doorways. They serve two purposes: 1) they keep the elements out, and 2) their cute illustrations tell people what kinds of products they can buy inside. The genuine articles are usually quite large, but Spanish store Fantastik has begun selling miniature versions you can hang on your wall. Looking for a colourful ode to the ice cream or Japanese beer? There’s a noren for that. fantastik.es CH

It’s a wonder that no one has ever bothered to build a hall of fame for Australian inventions. At the very front you could have the hits – the Hills Hoist, the bionic ear, the black box recorder. Further down you could put a few lesser-known things – maybe the plastic spectacle lens. And then if there’s still space, perhaps in the back of the men’s toilets, you could find a spot for the Splayd, Australia’s “all-in-one food-to-mouth transport device”. The thing was created in 1943 by Sydneysider William McArthur, when he noticed how difficult it was to juggle cutlery while eating food on your lap at a barbecue. He decided to create an object that put the power of a fork, spoon and blade into one hand. Demand for the product eventually dried up in the ’90s. But, during its heyday, it was the ultimate in cutting-edge design, with around 5 million sets sold. SJ

THE ANIMAL TRANSLATOR Derek Abbott is an electrical engineering professor in Adelaide with a peculiar interest: the way that animal noises are interpreted in different languages. A few years ago, he started compiling a big chart on the subject. It includes information such as how the bark of an English dog (“woof woof ”) differs form that of a French dog (“ouah ouah”). Most of his research happens during science conference tea breaks. He’ll bowl up to a stranger from, say, Tokyo, and ask him about the noise a bee makes in Japanese (turns out it’s “boon boon”).

One of his favourite discoveries is the Hungarian word for a dove’s call.

“It’s ‘burukk’ – quite beautiful, much better than our pedestrian ‘coo’.” The most disappointing animal, overall, he reckons, is the cow: “They all make a mooing sound. I was hoping some crazy language would come up with something more exciting than that.” LK

ACROSS THE BOARD Things change. Life is fluid. Material objects come and go. That’s why this pegboard from Melbourne-based furniture makers Plyroom is so handy. It’s made from renewably sourced birch plywood and can be rearranged to suit your shifting needs. It’s the perfect size to keep above a desk, and the best bit is if you get into the habit of using it to store your keys, wallet and phone, you’ll never leave the house in a scramble again. plyroom.com.au SW

WIRELESS MUSIC DESERVES ® BOSE

SOUNDLINK MINI ®

BLUETOOTH SPEAKER II ®

ENJOY YOUR MUSIC ON THE GO, EVERYWHERE YOU GO. BOSE.COM.AU | 1800 173 371 ©2016 Bose Corporation. The Bluetooth word mark is a registered trademark owned by Bluetooth SIG, Inc. and any use of such mark by Bose Corporation is under license.

HOT BIRDS Birds can be dodgy bastards. Swooping, stealing shiny objects, doing that annoying thing your little brother does where he mimics everything you say. We even caught wind of an alarming tale recently where a flock of rabid seagulls hijacked a city-bound train. Shocking. You’d understand, then, why we might feel a little cagey about the prospect of surrounding ourselves with these dubious feathered pests. That said, we can definitely handle these hand-knitted beauties from New York-based design studio Various Projects. Made from 100% alpaca wool, they’re guaranteed to behave. They don’t talk back. They’ll just stare at you blankly and sit motionless on your lap. Cool. various-projects.com SK

KEEP IT LIGHT We have an obsession for EDC. Every Day Carry – basic items such as a pen, pocketknife or torch that ensure you’re prepared for a range of daily scenarios.

If you’re of a similar mind, you might want to consider adding the Brass Peanut Lighter and clip to your collection. Its solid brass case contains an old-school wick lighter. Since it weighs in at just 20 grams, you won’t notice it’s there until you need it. bestmadeco.com JDL

FLYING THE FLAG

SLEEPING WITH THE FISHES We like to think of Daniel Durnin’s Water Bed as the triathlete of the leisure craft industry – it involves boating, cycling and sleeping. According to Durnin, the nifty little amphibious vessel is about “the weight of a grown man” and able to sleep two. It can be attached to a bike and towed around on land, sit quietly in the water like an aquatic tent, or putter along via a solar-powered outboard motor (or oars if you’re energetic). The Water Bed is yet to go into production, but Durnin is trying his darnedest to make it happen. LK

From the designers who brought you “tinsel tassels” and “animal-mask notecards” comes another superfluous yet weirdly covetable plaything: flag dominoes. For reasons that appear completely arbitrary, this version replaces the game’s dotted-dice motifs with “silk-screened nautical signs used to communicate numbers zero to six”. It may be hard to follow initially, but what the game lacks in discernible logic it makes up for with the fact you can learn about international maritime code. And once you’ve mastered that, there’s always the company’s “moon dominoes” — featuring images of lunar phases — to go on with.

Count us in. fredericksandmae.com JM

smith stuff COTTAGE INDUSTRY What is this!? A cottage for ants? Nah, it’s a tiny model of a classic Aussie workers’ cottage. The design was a big hit in Brisbane during the mid-19th century, and it clearly struck a chord with model builder Marcus Bree, too.

Bree’s company, the Little Building Co, sells kits that allow people to recreate classic Australian architecture. The range includes terraces, cabins and even a mammoth Queenslander. You can also build your own mini-Sydney Opera House – though it’s the suburban stuff that’s making us want to crack out the wood glue. littlebuildingco.com CH

THE DYMAXION MAP

INTERESTING YARNS Developed in Britain, this seat is made from the fleece of a Herdwick sheep, a breed known for its dark, wiry yarn.

When the wool is melded with bio-resins, it forms a sustainable alternative to fibreglass. We reckon it’s worth owning just for the gag value. Imagine the puns!

You’ll have your mates rolling on the floor when you ask, “Would ewe like a seat?”

Bloody hilarious. Or should that be Hairlarious! Am I right? solidwool.com JM

We left a little something for you on page 88. It’s a copy of the Dymaxion Map invented by futurist/designer/ mathematician Buckminster Fuller.

The thing is special for a few reasons.

For one, it manages to present the world as an icosahedron (a 20-sided shape) while hardly distorting the size of each continent. Also, Fuller deliberately jigged it so that when you look at the map flat, the earth’s land masses seem like one single archipelago.

He hoped that this would encourage a feeling of global togetherness and peace. Isn’t that nice? SJ

TOOLS OF THE TRADE The ancient Egyptians were among the first people to really appreciate copper. They liked how easily they could shape it to make weapons and tools, and went to great lengths to get their hands on the stuff. It’s a passion that’s being carried on by Travis Blandford and Harriet Devlin. Together, the Melbourne duo run Grafa, a small workshop that makes copper gardening tools. Blandford, originally a fitter and turner, spends most of his time in the company’s Melbourne workshop forging trowels, forks and hoes, while Devlin spearheads the administrative side of things. But when the orders flood in, she ditches her computer and lends a hand crafting wooden handles. “I’m a gardener,” she says, “so I’m particularly interested in timber. I take a lot of joy in sanding and finishing.” As metals go, copper is famously expensive. So why use it? “It doesn’t rust,” Blandford says. “It’s also infinitely recyclable.”

Indeed, all the materials they use are upcycled from scrapyards around Melbourne. (Blandford has a knack for stumbling across the stuff.) Their main reason for using copper, however, is a little more esoteric: Blandford claims copper actually makes your garden healthier, and can increase the yield of your crops. “It assists with moisture retention and nutrient uptake,” he says. There’s a bit of debate around the science of this idea, but one thing’s for sure – Grafa’s copper tools certainly look awesome. grafa.com.au SJ 019

SMITH JOURNAL

KEEP IT ROLLING

WAYNE COYNE In the wake of The Flaming Lips reissuing their seventh album, Clouds Taste Metallic, we spoke with the band’s frontman Wayne Coyne about music, creativity and interior design.

Does the inside of your house look like a Flaming Lips stage show? I think so. Bits of everything that we’ve done are scattered throughout it. Luckily it gets cleaned up once in a while. If it was just up to me it would probably be unlivable. Do you think someone’s home can impact their creativity? Yes and no. If you’re creative, nothing will stop you. No matter what is happening, you will find a way to do your thing. And if you’re not creative, almost anything will get in your way. It’s as simple as that. What was your childhood house like?

Full of dudes doing man things. But my mother was a very quiet person – she did a great deal of listening. As I’ve gotten older I’ve understood what a great thing that is, to listen to someone’s story. I think that’s where I got this idea of wandering around the world with my ears open. How do you keep your music fresh after 30 years in the biz? It’s not like we’re building a railroad. Art’s not that hard to do – it actually gives you energy. CH

Swiss-made Bolex movie cameras were once a highly desirable piece of kit for aspiring cinema directors. They were famous for their convenient size, sharp footage and high build quality. Hell, even the likes of David Lynch and George Lucas started out on the things.

But in the mid-’70s, the company’s fortunes changed. It struggled to compete with products from larger manufacturers, such as Kodak, and ultimately faded into obscurity. And that’s how things would have stayed had a couple of indie filmmakers not recently decided to revive the brand. In 2013, Joe Rubenstein and Elle Schneider were granted a licence to put the Bolex name to a new camera called the D16. It looks just like a classic 16mm camera, but shoots ultra-detailed digital video in RAW. It still accepts original Bolex lenses, though, meaning at last you can confidently dust off the old home movie gear in your grandpa’s sock drawer. digitalbolex.com DC

STORM BREWER There aren’t many problems that a nice cup of tea can’t fix. And whether it’s blistered feet or romantic woes that are your issue, the lightweight Scout Storm Kettle will ensure a hot brew is always close to hand, even in wet and windy weather. Long favoured by fishermen and camping enthusiasts on the west coast of Ireland – where its makers, the family-run Kelly Kettle Company, are from – the Scout works without gas and petrol; instead it uses combustible materials such as twigs, paper or dry grass.

The 1.1L bottles boil about four cups of water in minutes. kellykettle.com.au GN

CAT’S CRADLE This bed from French feline furniture brand Meyou is pretty easy on the eyes. It’s made out of beechwood and felt, and offers a cosy place for your animal friend to slink into after it’s spent a stressful afternoon napping in the sun and pissing on your towels.

Adorable little jerk. meyou-paris.com IK •

_

_

Tom is saving endangered species because we invest his money in conservation.

Change the world by changing where you bank. bankaust.com.au/change

mecu Limited ABN 21 087 651 607 AFSL 238431 trading as Bank Australia. Consider terms and conditions from Bank Australia before deciding whether to apply.

roadies THEY LUG THE GUITARS, CHECK THE MICROPHONES AND KEEP THE BACKSTAGE FRIDGE STOCKED. BUT IN THE STAR-OBSESSED WORLD OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, THE WORK OF ROADIES OFTEN GOES UNRECOGNISED. TO RECTIFY THIS, WE’VE TURNED THE SPOTLIGHT ON SIX OF THE INDUSTRY’S BEST, BOTH PAST AND PRESENT. Interviewer Chris Harrigan

Photo: Jon Reid

G EOF FRO STEVENS ON Roadied for Queens of the Stone Age and the Dandy Warhols. Based in Newcastle, New South Wales.

My mates call me the Leather Prawn. I’ve never seen another roadie who wears leather on the job, but I find it protective – especially when people spill drinks on you. Things can get rough when you’re a roadie. But it rarely feels like a job.

Every day’s different, and it allows me to travel.

It’s long hours, though. When I go on the road, I barely even get to see my hotel room. In the old days, when you’d finally packed up the show, the band would want to go out, so you’d take them out and make sure there was no trouble. We don’t party like we used to, though. It’s gotten more professional. I miss the old days. It was fun. But when you hit your 40s, you start to feel it. We’ve punished our bodies really badly – the lack of sleep, the food you eat on the road.

I had young kids years ago, and I’d come home really late and know they’d be getting up in a few hours, so I’d stay up and wait for them. The hardest thing was being away from them.

Occasionally I’ll bring them to gigs and get them to plug stuff in. They love it. If they wanted to become roadies, I wouldn’t discourage them. But they’d have big boots to fill.

023 SMITH JOURNAL

Photo: Drew Anthony Smith

B E N D ORC Y I I I Roadies for Willie Nelson. Based in New Braunfels, Texas.

One of my first jobs was as a professional ice skater in Houston. That was right before the Second World War. Then I was in the military, and when I got out I started working for Nudie Cohn, the famous tailor. My job was to deliver suits to movie sets, and through that I met John Wayne.

I became his valet, and when we went on trips to Vegas I would do a little work for other people: Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash – even Elvis, when he was younger. That’s how I got into the roadie business. Well, Willie Nelson actually says I was the first roadie, ever. That’s probably true.

I still go on the road today, though I’m too old to load the gear in and out like I used to – I’m in my early 90s. I mainly stock the beer wells and bring the band stage towels and ice. I don’t really think about retirement. When Willie quits, I’ll quit. I feel like a part of the band, just another one of the guys. I love the road. I love the people I’ve worked with. They were all good times – though I can’t tell too many stories, in case they sue me. That’s kind of the rule of the road.

Photo: Brad Torchia

TA NA D OUGLAS Roadied with AC/DC, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osborne and Elton John. Based in Los Angeles, California.

I was the first female roadie in the world. It was hard; audiences would heckle you. But being a woman actually made me a more valuable roadie.

Band managers soon realised that no guy wants to be shown up by a girl, so the other road crew would all work harder and faster when I was around.

When I was around 17, I was asked to become a full-time roadie for a new band. They didn’t have a name yet, but apparently they were going to be huge. So I went to the house where the band lived in St Kilda for an interview, and there were Malcolm, Angus and George Young. They sat me down and said they wanted someone who’d be totally fucking loyal. I took that seriously, and that was the start of AC/DC. The Young clan took me in – I actually lived with them in the house. I’d been looking for a family all my life, and I finally found one. Later, when they played Sunbury, they got into a fight with Deep Purple over who would close the festival.

Someone pushed Angus, and all of a sudden there was a big brawl. I’d told them I’d be loyal, so I fucking cold-cocked Deep Purple’s tour manager. Boom. If you can handle the shit we’ve been through, you can handle anything.

025

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo: Matt Sav

J OE RYA N Roadies with Tame Impala. Based in Perth, Western Australia.

Roadies normally wear all black on stage, but with Tame Impala they asked us to wear white lab coats. It feels appropriate: with the amount of cables and equipment we’ve got on stage, there’s a definite mad scientist vibe going on.

My advice to other roadies is to always carry your tech torch. You’ll never know when you need it – even if it’s just to open a beer. We work really hard, and it can be stressful. One time, we were playing an outdoor festival and we had $20,000 worth of gear on stage. Then these clouds appeared, and rain came bolting in hard. Our projector screen blew offstage, and we ended up pouring a pint of water out of the keyboard. We only pulled the plug when the lightning started. I thought we were all going to get electrocuted.

I’m proud of the work we do. The best part of the job is watching people’s faces getting melted by the music and visuals: we put a lot of effort into that. Aside from that, you get to tour the world. That’s pretty nice too. The worst part?

The 22-hour days. But give me the time and the place, and I’ll be there.

Photo: Josh Cunliffe

I A N ‘P I G G Y ’ PEEL Roadied for Bob Marley, Madness and Bob Dylan Based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland.

I quit roadying in 1984 – there just wasn’t enough money in it. Recently I started wondering what had happened to all the old boys from those days, so I put a reunion together, and people were just in tears; they thought they’d never see each other alive again. A lot of us aren’t doing real well. I know of at least 26 Australian roadies who’ve committed suicide.

The bands and promoters did really well out of the music industry, but the people who built it for them – the roadies – didn’t. There was no protection for us: no super, no insurance, nothing.

If someone had said thank you, had given us some recognition, perhaps we wouldn’t be in this situation. A lot of guys need help, but they’re too proud to say anything – except to their mates.

That’s why I created the Australian Road Crew Association. It’s a non-profit that makes sure roadies in crisis receive help. If someone wants to track down an old mate, I can find their number and they can call them up and say, ‘‘Look, I’m doing it hard.” The next step is to get an income stream, so we can help anyone in financial trouble.

027

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo: Holly Wilmeth

J OHN N Y STA RBUCK Roadied with the Rolling Stones and Billy Preston.

Based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

When I was young, live music was my passion.

But I was a hippie and I didn’t have any money to get into gigs. So I started offering to unload bands’ gear for them if I could go in for free. I must have been okay at it, because within a few years I was working for Billy Preston, who played keyboard with the Beatles. When he went on tour with the Rolling Stones, I went with him. I ended up staying for 30 years.

I did everything except the guitars. Then during rehearsal one day, their guitar tech, a guy called Chuch Magee, had a massive heart attack. He died right in front of us. I was devastated. After the funeral, I asked who they hired to replace him.

They laughed and said, “You.” It scared the crap out of me: I’d never even changed a string before.

But Keith said, “Look, it’s just a hunk of wood with some metal bits attached.” He told me to approach it like a scientist.

They had 65 guitars, and it was my job just to change the strings and do the tuning. In 2010, I thought the Stones wouldn’t play again, so I retired. Of course, they’re still going, but I’m too old. It’s easier for them: they only have to work two hours a night. •

Illustration courtesy of Omni Reboot. More images can be viewed at omnireboot.com.

the big bang EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT DINOSAUR SEX (BUT WERE TOO AFRAID TO ASK).

Writer Vanessa Murray

AT A BRITISH SCIENCE CONFERENCE IN 1987, A PALAEONTOLOGIST NAMED DR BEV HALSTEAD INVITED A WOMAN ON STAGE AND POLITELY ASKED HER TO DROP HER SKIRT.

showed how brontosaurs could have had rear-mounting sex: by intertwining their tails in order to connect their genitals.

A tense, collective breath echoed around the auditorium as the garment hit the ground.

Halstead had a reputation as an eccentric, but the stunt seemed uncouth, even for him. What on earth was he up to?

The crowd squirmed. But that didn’t bother Halstead. He wanted to make a stir. He also wanted to make a point. Halstead thought the mating habits of dinosaurs were a vital part of palaeontology. And yet only a handful of his peers bothered to write about the subject.

A combination of prudishness and a lack of evidence seemed to stand in the way. Halstead was trying to change that. He was trying to open the door for a new discussion.

Halstead explained that the woman was his partner, Dr Helen Haste. She had graciously agreed to help him demonstrate an aspect of brontosaur behaviour that he was studying: sex.

Unfortunately, though, it didn’t really work.

Very few followed Halstead’s lead, and even today dinosaur sex is still a relatively obscure field of research.

Wearing a pair of skin-hugging tights, Haste walked over to a box near the podium. She rested her hands on it, leaned over and extended her left leg up into the air. “Imagine this is the female brontosaur’s tail,” Halstead said grandly. He then stepped in closer, lifted his own leg and curled it around Haste’s.

Those who did pick up the torch are still stuck on the same few basic questions. Did male dinosaurs have external penises? What position did dinosaurs mate in? How could a gargantuan female sustain the weight of a male, or vice versa? How did long-necked dinosaurs have sex without fainting from loss of blood pressure to their tiny brains?

..........................................

The pair stood swaying for a moment so that the image could sink in. Then Halstead offered an explanation. He said the strange formation

There’s one obvious hurdle in the way of finding answers to these mysteries. No one

has ever unearthed a dinosaur’s reproductive organs – the soft tissue is simply too delicate to endure the ravages of time. And without knowing what dinosaur genitals look like, it’s tough to know how they were used. The only thing that is certain about dinosaurs and sex is that they did it, and they did it well enough to roam the earth for more than 150 million years.

When pushed, most palaeontologists will tell you that dinosaur coitus probably involved ‘cloacal kissing’: the matching of slit-like openings that were used for both sex and excretion. When the stars (and the cloacae) aligned, the male would deploy an internal penis-like organ to deposit sperm into the female. It’s a similar method to the one used by a lot of birds and reptiles. The only difference is that male dinosaurs had to make sure they kept one foot on the ground so that they didn’t crush their mates.

There is another theory, though. Some people believe male dinosaurs did indeed have hulking, big external penises. These experts point to the fact that a few very old species of birds (ones that are evolutionarily close to dinosaurs) are, ahem, well endowed. >> 033

SMITH JOURNAL

<< Penis or no penis, it’s safe to assume that dinosaur mating sessions were a sight to behold. “Trying to imagine two 20-tonneplus animals with telephone pole-sized tails getting down and dirty? It’s difficult,” says Dr Stephen Poropat, a palaeontologist at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Dinosaurs ranged greatly in size – some were the size of chickens, others were as tall as five-storey buildings and weighed tens of tonnes. The smaller ones would’ve had to go about things pretty quickly – taking any time to enjoy it would have been dangerous. But sauropods like Argentinosaurus were huge and would have probably been quite leisurely; I think they could’ve taken as much time as they wanted or needed to.”

Poropat also points out that pre-mating rituals such as strutting, dancing, and fighting, probably differed from species to species. “A dinosaur’s physical characteristics would have greatly influenced how it went about attracting a mate. Some dinosaurs like Velociraptor and Ornithomimus had feathers, and they probably used them for courtship and display, like many birds do today.”

Of the all the dinosaurs that have been identified, one species’ sex life is debated more than any other: the Stegosaurus. The spikes along its hips and spine were effective at repelling attacks, but presumably didn’t lend themselves to rear-mounting.

So how did they do it? Some think mating stegosaurs angled themselves to face each other belly to belly. The other view is that the male turned away from a standing female and backed up, kind of like reversing a car.

Ken Carpenter, from the Utah State University Eastern Prehistoric Museum, doesn’t buy this. He insists the female squatted on her forelimbs and raised her rear and tail into the air, like a cat. The male then positioned himself behind her, slightly off-centre. He rested his forearms on a non-spiky section of her back, aligned his cloaca with hers and… you know.

The image is enough to make you blush.

In fact, for some people it’s so exotic and strange that it’s kind of arousing. Over the past few years, an unlikely subgenre of literature has arisen around the idea of dinosaurs going at it. It’s called dinosaur erotica. Titles including Taken by the T-Rex, Ravished by the Triceratops and Running from the Raptor leave little to the imagination, but sell well – at least, enough for some writers to quit their day jobs.

Of course, these texts are pretty liberal when it comes to science (they usually involve a lot of human-on-dinosaur-action), so they don’t offer much when it comes to understanding the truth about sex in the Mesozoic period.

For that task palaeontologists continue to rely predominantly on the study of exhumed skeletons. Every year, new fragments of

THE SPIKES ALONG A STEGOSAURUS’S HIPS AND SPINE WERE EFFECTIVE AT REPELLING ATTACKS, BUT PRESUMABLY DIDN’T LEND THEMSELVES TO REAR-MOUNTING.

information are unearthed, which help fill in the blanks. One of the most significant discoveries of recent times is the concept of ‘medullary bones’. They’re bits of calcium-rich tissue that are only present in the skeletons of pregnant female dinosaurs. Why is that interesting? It allows experts to start deducing more about what everyday life was like as a knocked-up dinosaur.

For example, not too long ago a group of palaeontologists noticed something unusual about three T-Rex skeletons that contained medullary bones (meaning they were pregnant when they died): they were each surprisingly small. In human terms, they were teenage mothers. Why would the dinosaurs be sexually active at such a young age? The most popular theory is they were desperate to pass their genes on as quickly as possible.

After all, they lived short and dangerous lives, and their window for breeding could be cut short at any time.

This explanation doesn’t exactly gel with Halstead’s somewhat romantic view of dinosaur sex. When he started thinking about the subject in the swinging ’70s, he envisaged courting and playfulness. He saw something… tender.

“Tropical reptiles spend an awful lot of energy just flirting. They just live happy lives,” he once told an interviewer. “That’s how I like to envision dinosaurs. It must have been… well, charming is the word.” •

When our founders swapped their family’s cleavers for pruners to establish St Hallett, they instilled in us the knowledge that change takes a dash of faith and a mountain of dedication. Our St Hallett Butcher’s Cart Shiraz is a tribute to these earthy attributes; be proud, do it once, do it right.

Visit the St Hallett Facebook page and explore your earthy side.

/ STHALLETTWINES

Photographs taken from the book Paper Airplanes: The Collections of Harry Smith, edited by John Klacsmann and Andrew Lampert.

flying colours FOR DECADES, ONE MAN SCOURED THE STREETS OF NEW YORK IN SEARCH OF FALLEN PAPER PLANES. HIS COLLECTION TELLS THE STORY OF A CITY IN TRANSITION. Writer Luke Ryan

HARRY EVERETT SMITH WAS A GENIUS WHO WAS ALMOST CERTAINLY INSANE.

they were gifted to the Smithsonian in 1984 all but one box was lost.

..........................................

The surviving part of the collection was recently documented in a new book called Paper Airplanes. It contains a series of photographs that showcase the ingenuity and creativity inherent in each plane’s design. “Some look like they could fly, others are maybe some form of outsider art,” says Andrew Lampert, the book’s co-editor. “There are tyre tracks and foot marks on many of them, the result of being trampled by bustling crowds who couldn’t have cared less.

Harry must have been one of the only people looking down at them, searching them out, and storing them away.”

He assumed many mantles throughout the course of his wandering, improbable life: poet, artist, filmmaker, Beat icon (he designed book covers for Alan Ginsberg). But whenever anyone asked him exactly what he did, he preferred to say he was an anthropologist: a man who sought to understand the world.

The answer wasn’t intended to be facetious; Smith treated his life (1923-1991) like an extended – albeit chaotic – study. His passion for archiving and cataloguing curious items was legendary. He collected Ukrainian painted eggs, tarot cards, out-of-print folk records, Native American patchworks, and string figures.

Smith also loved finding used paper airplanes on the streets of New York City. It was an obsession that occasionally threatened his safety; there are stories of Smith running in front of moving cars to pick up crumpled “samples” he’d spotted from the other side of the street.

Such behaviour raised the eyebrows of those around him, but also resulted in an enormous quantity of artefacts. Smith is believed to have compiled thousands of planes; however after

The one thing that ties the planes together is Smith’s own handwritten annotations, setting out in exacting detail the where and when of their discovery. A typical example reads: “April 26, 1967: East 8th St. (north side) between 2nd Ave. & 3rd Ave.” In a lot of ways, the planes paint a portrait of New York in flux. Some are made out of Mad Men-style office stationery. Others are constructed from receipts, psychedelic concert posters and pages from the Bible. Observed together, these planes form a peephole into a complex place and time – and the personality of their curator: a half-crazed dreamer who chose to notice what others ignored. • 037

SMITH JOURNAL

things i know WITH TURNER PRIZE-WINNING ARTIST GRAYSON PERRY. Interviewer Adrian Craddock Illustrator Karolis Strautniekas

AVOID CLICHÉS When I was young, my mum decided that she fancied our milkman and had sex with him. I sometimes jest that this is why I’m allergic to clichés. You see, my job as an artist is to sort of negotiate around clichés. Because the minute something is declared cool, you know it’s on its way to death.

MY FIRST ROLE MODEL WAS FICTIONAL

WHEN IN DOUBT, MUDDLE THROUGH I decided to go to art school when I was about 16. I didn’t know what I was getting into.

I didn’t know what an artist did. I just muddled through. I never actually intended to be a ceramicist; it was a chance thing that just happened to have a bit of mileage. It suited my temperament; I’m quite patient and careful and I’m good with my hands.

I was quite shy and introverted as a child.

I had a very well-organised and powerful fantasy life. All my games revolved around the same basic scenario. My teddy bear, who I called Alan Measles, was the leader of a rebel kingdom. He was a life force. His country had been invaded by the Germans, and he was the head of the underground resistance. It was a huge metaphor for my stepfather being in the house. I didn’t have a good male role model, so I manufactured one.

ART IS A LONG GAME

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A BIT KINKY

SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS CAN BE GOOD AND BAD

When I was about eight or nine years old, I had a pottery lesson at school. We had to wear these blue PVC smocks that snapped up the back.

I remember mine being a bit small. It was tight and shiny, and it was put onto me by this pretty teaching assistant who looked a bit like Dusty Springfield. And I think I was turned on by the whole situation. I was a real pervert very young.

You do need to be slightly self-conscious in order to be your own critic. But at the same time self-consciousness can get in the way of just messing around. If you become more successful, it can even affect basic things like doodling on a piece of paper. You become aware that it could end up being worth thousands of pounds. What used to be fun

I think art is serious play. In many ways it’s the same impulse. You’re sort of trying stuff out, riffing on it and enjoying yourself. A big problem when you go through puberty is you become more self-conscious. You become aware that there are such things as great artists, and you look at what you’re doing when you’re 12 or 13 and you realise that it is not much good. A lot of kids stop doing it then. They don’t realise that it’s a long game.

and playful is now a commodity and will get a lot of attention. That can be inhibiting.

PUT IN THE HOURS My advice to young artists is turn up on time, put in the hours and be nice. Even if your art is just placing drawing pins next to each other in an interesting way, you’ve got to do it for a long time before you become good at it. Nobody wants to go to an art gallery and see something average. They want to see a special thing that nobody else can do.

THE PUBLIC ALWAYS HAS EXPECTATIONS Making contemporary art used to be kind of a rarefied activity that not many people got involved in and the audiences were relatively small. And then around the early ’90s it exploded into this huge thing. There were loads more galleries, loads more collectors and loads more dealers. And because we had a group of artists in Britain who were “provocative”, people expected to go to an art gallery and be a bit shocked. They wanted to go, “Wow! Look at that huge blue penis!”

And then they would want some kind of explaining. They’d go, “What is it about, though? Why is it a big blue penis?” They wanted a theme park plus Sudoku.

>> 039

SMITH JOURNAL

THE FUNNIEST ARTWORK I EVER SAW WAS A STUDENT VIDEO OF A HORSE WEARING A HORSE COSTUME. I JUST PISSED MYSELF WHEN I SAW IT.

<<

THERE SHOULD BE MORE HUMOUR IN ART Humour is not overly represented in art. It’s sometimes seen as trivial and lightweight. But artists and curators forget that people come to museums on their day off. They come in for leisure. They want to see their lives reflected.

And if you’re a British person, humour is a huge part of your life. It’s the lifeblood of our country. It’s how we gel, bond and socialise. So, I want to make art partly about that, as well as all the serious things.

NOTHING’S FUNNIER THAN A HORSE IN A HORSE COSTUME The funniest artwork I ever saw was a student video of a horse wearing a horse costume. It was a really bad horse costume, too – one that was badly made. I just pissed myself when I saw it. Whether it is good art or not I don’t know. It was a bloody good joke, though.

ART SHOULDN’T FEEL LIKE HOMEWORK The problem, I think, is that some people think that good things are always difficult.

You don’t want to have to go to an art gallery and feel like you have to do your homework.

The greatest films aren’t difficult. You don’t go to really, really brilliant films and think, “You know what? I had to work really hard to enjoy that”. So why should it be any different when you walk into an art gallery? You can be complex, and poetic, and moving and funny and yet still be accessible.

television programs. Or whatever. There’s no recipe. As an artist, you’ve got to be on guard all the time. The slightest little silly idea can pan out into something that makes a great artwork.

THERAPY IS USEFUL My biggest breakthrough moment was probably getting a show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. That was the show for which I was nominated for the Turner Prize. I was on a roll at the time. I was going well. I was having a lot of ideas. I was also in therapy. What effect did that have on my life?

Huge. It’s informed my view of the world.

My lens is polished.

EMBRACE YOUR FANTASIES I think in the past, when the art world was small and elitist, there was an idea that popularity was vulgar. Nowadays one of the most important currencies is attention.

So, in the modern world, having a good relationship with the media is quite useful.

I’m not that bothered that they’re interested in me being a tranny. I sort of encouraged it. It’s given me a strong identity in the crowded cultural landscape. That part of me all started when I was 12 and borrowed some clothes off my sister. I asked her and she lent me a few of her ballet dresses. I just had a sex fantasy and thought it would be an interesting idea to put it into practice. It’s good advice for anybody, I think: if you’ve got a sex fantasy, try it out and see what it’s like in real life. As long as it’s legal. •

ALWAYS BE ON GUARD FOR IDEAS

..........................................

My ideas come at any point at any time, quite often during conversations or observations about the world. Or books I’m reading or

Grayson Perry: My Pretty Little Art Career is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney until May 1.

This picture of Neil Patrick comes from a documentary called The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers.

the rise and fall of the 414s MEET THE RAGTAG GROUP OF GEEKS WHO HACKED INTO A NUCLEAR WEAPONS FACILITY JUST FOR A LAUGH. Writers Luke Ryan and Paul Edwards

TIMOTHY WINSLOW KNEW HE WAS IN TROUBLE WHEN HE HEARD THE TONE OF HIS MOTHER’S VOICE.

They saw the machines as confusing and foreign. They could hardly work out how to turn one on, let alone discuss the intricacies of hacking.

..........................................

Winslow knew, however, that he needed to co-operate. He was young; he’d just met the woman of his dreams, and he had his whole life ahead of him. He didn’t want to go to jail.

It was about 9am when she barged in to his bedroom and woke him up. “There are two men at the door,” she said. “I think they said they’re from the FBI.” Winslow had a sinking feeling. The 20-year-old ripped off his covers and paced down the hall of his Milwaukee home. Sure enough, there they were: a pair of men dressed in dark suits. They introduced themselves and explained the reason for their visit. They had it on good authority that he’d played a role in one of the most significant computer crimes in U.S. history.

Winslow’s mother collapsed into a chair and began to weep.

The men were invited into the kitchen. It became clear early on that they weren’t playing.

They wanted answers. But when Winslow started to talk, he realised it was going to be hard to give them what they wanted. Since it was the early ’80s, only a small section of the public knew anything about computers – and the FBI agents were not part of this clique.

So, he decided to tell them everything. ..........................................

The first time Winslow saw a computer was in 1975, when a maths teacher at his high school brought one in to class. The man showed off a few basic programs before asking which of his students wanted a try. Nearly everyone shot up their hands, including Winslow.

He was passed over, but he couldn’t let the opportunity slip. At the end of the class, he asked the teacher if he could come back after school and try it on his own.

Running his hands over the keys was a defining moment for Winslow. “At the time, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said in a recent CNN documentary about his life. “I thought I’d become a bus driver or something. Everything seemed boring, but then I touched a computer and that was exciting!”

It was love at first sight. He became determined to learn everything he could about the magical machine. Initially, that meant enrolling in a few programming classes at school. But, after a while, Winslow wanted more. He wanted to muck around with computers in his spare time. So, he signed up to something called the Explorer Scouts Club, a local after-school computing program co-run

by IBM. It was full of like-minded geeks who bonded over a common love of programming languages and text-based adventure games.

It immediately felt like home.

Over the next few years, Winslow formed a close bond with some of the other teenagers at the Explorer Scouts Club. Among them were two guys named Neil Patrick and Gerry Wondra. Patrick was three years younger than Winslow, and incredibly intelligent. Wondra was a bespectacled kid with a passion for building electronics. Both of them felt often like outsiders.

Winslow enjoyed seeing Patrick, Wondra and the other kids every second Tuesday at the Club. After some meetups, they would even go to a nearby park and eat sandwiches for dinner. On one occasion, someone brought up the concept of computer networking. >> 043

SMITH JOURNAL

<< In particular, they mentioned a presentation they’d seen in which two computers were connected by a device called a modem.

To Winslow, the idea was mind-blowing.

“I instantly thought, ‘Wow. I can manipulate a computer in another place from my own house.’”

Wondra was similarly impressed – so much so that he decided to build a modem from scratch. Back then, the devices were fairly primitive. Each modem was connected to a phone landline, and had an assigned number.

If someone wanted to link two computers together, they would have to pick up their phone, dial the number of the modem they wanted and then place the receiver onto a special cradle. It was like a fragmented version of the internet in which you had to ring the owner of every site you visited, and only one person was able to be on a page at once.

Winslow and the group were thrilled with their new gadget. At first, they spent most of their time exploring ‘electronic bulletin boards’.

These were public spaces where people from around the country met to shoot the shit. But, after a few months, that became old. The novelty of the bulletin boards wore off after they bought their own modems and computers to use at home. So, they shifted their focus to something different: using the technology to poke around in places they weren’t supposed to be. In particular, the goal became hacking into private networks – modems that belonged to big corporations. It was a ballsy idea – and something that, at that time, nobody had ever really bothered trying.

The group’s first step was dialling a bunch of numbers in hope that they’d somehow stumble on one that belonged to a connected modem. It was a time-consuming process, but every now and again it worked. The problem was, though, that even when they did make contact with another modem, a screen would pop up asking them for a password. And it was impossible for Winslow and his mates to know what to enter.

Or was it? One day, they had the bright idea of trying a few of the default passwords that popular modems commonly shipped with – words like ‘system’ and ‘admin’. It proved to be shockingly effective. The boys quickly discovered that a lot of people never bothered to change their passwords after they unboxed their modems. Suddenly, the information highway was open.

The first proper ‘hack’ that Winslow can remember doing was into the systems of his old high school. It was only the tip of the iceberg. The targets quickly became more ambitious. The group successfully got into the

systems of a bank in Los Angeles, a plumbing company in Florida, and a taxidermist in Alabama. Amazingly, they even gained access to the computers of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear weapon research facility in New Mexico.

On paper, these breaches sound exceptionally dodgy. But the truth is that the group’s motivations were pretty harmless. They never intended to hurt or steal from anyone – the driving force was just pure curiosity. The boys would walk in, have a look around and go straight back out, cleaning up their path as they went. “We were Explorer Scouts,” says Winslow. “We had a code. We were trying to be kind to these computers.”

Of course, that’s not to say the boys didn’t occasionally get a kick out of being mischievous. One time, they managed to get an office printer to spit out an entire ream of paper. On another occasion, a computer was reprogrammed to say movie quotes at unexpected moments. Their favourite thing to do, though, was find and play video games, which often came standard with expensive computers. The boys sometimes even created new high scores. On the page where players were asked to leave their names, they’d put a cryptic message: ‘The 414s’. A reference to Milwaukee’s area code, it sounded slick and tough – almost like a street gang. And, after a while, the numbers became the group’s unofficial nickname. Their calling card.

As fun as all the shenanigans were, they couldn’t last forever. Trouble eventually started when the boys became sloppy. More and more, they did things that made it easier for authorities to track their movements: they returned to the same systems over and over, and performed hacks during business hours, when people were around to notice. They also got lax about cleaning up after themselves.

On June 3 1983, Wondra hacked into the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and accidentally deleted a bunch of billing records as he tried to cover his path. The documents had no impact on the health of the institutions’ patients, and the group assumed that no one would notice. But they were wrong. An administrator clocked the whole thing, and tipped off the FBI, which was able to trace the source of the intrusion.

And that is what had brought the two suited men to Winslow’s kitchen. ..........................................

After the agents left, the house fell silent.

Winslow called a couple of other members of

the 414s and found out that they’d also been visited. The fun was well and truly over. All they could do now was prepare for the worst.

The onslaught began with the media. When journalists got hold of the story, they were amazed. The hacks were a world first, but at the same time, they sounded, well, surprisingly familiar. Specifically, they bore a striking resemblance to the 1983 film WarGames, in which a young Matthew Broderick manages to hack into a nuclear missile facility from his bedroom.

The boys bristled at this comparison. In WarGames, the central character comes close to triggering a doomsday event. The 414s, on the other hand, would never have been so careless.

When they accessed Los Alamos, they only tinkered around a non-classified computer.

They were careful. They had a code. They were Explorer Scouts.

The question was whether the law would see it the same way. For almost six months, the answer was unclear. No one knew what to charge the boys with. Since hacking was new, there weren’t any laws around it.

Eventually, a decision was made to let the boys off lightly. Winslow and Wondra were found guilty of making harassing phone calls. They got a $500 fine and two years’ probation. Patrick, who was 17 at the time of the investigation, was too young to be charged, and received no punishment.

Most of the 414s lost touch once the trial was over. But their legacy still lingers. The attention they brought to computer hacking prompted the U.S. Congress to pass a suite of laws. They remain the basis of cybercrime legislation even today.

Of course, computers have changed a lot since the early ’80s. These days, hacking is a different game – a more malicious one. The act has become associated with thieves, governments and radicals. As Winslow says, it’s a world of chaos. “Digital security is locked in a perpetual, ever-accelerating arms race and it’s never going to stop,” he says. “It’s always going to be a mess, a system where the bullies write the rules.”

In a way, it’s enough to make you nostalgic for a time when a bunch of teenagers could somehow manage to harness the world’s information – and use it to play video games. “I mean, we could have caused some pretty major issues, but we never even thought about it,” says Winslow, who is now a network security engineer and still living in Milwaukee. “We were just trying to have a good time.” •

A TEST RIDE ON THE ALL-NEW FORTY-EIGHT® ISN’T FOR EVERYONE. IT’S A SKINNY BIKE WITH FAT TYRES AND A BIG ENGINE. REDESIGNED FRONT AND REAR SUSPENSION, MAG WHEELS, PEANUT TANK, BLACKED-OUT POWERTRAIN AND STANDARD ABS. IT’S GOT A SERIOUS ATTITUDE, SO YOU’D BETTER BRING YOURS.

FREEDOM WITHIN REACH. H-D.COM.AU/FREEDOM Overseas model shown.

off the hook CREATING A GOOD FISHING LURE REQUIRES PATIENCE, FINESSE AND AN UNUSUALLY HIGH TOLERANCE FOR BEING AROUND SHARP OBJECTS. WE TAKE A LOOK AT THE LIVES OF SIX PEOPLE WHO HAVE MASTERED THE SKILL. Writer Leta Keens

Photo: John Harland

FR E D A R BO G A ST 18 94 –1 947 When Fred Arbogast was 12 years old, he went on a long fishing trip with his dad and caught absolutely nothing. The experience shat him so much that he vowed to learn everything he could to avoid repeating it. He kept his vow. Arbogast went on to become a committed student of fishing, and in his 20s even set a world record for distance casting. He also established himself as a world-class lure maker. His specialty was working with different kinds of rubber – a skill he first picked up from working at a Goodyear tyre factory in Ohio. In fact, one of his most famous lures took the form of a fish wearing a synthetic ‘hula skirt’. Called the ‘Hawaiian Wiggler’, the colourful piece of tackle proved a surprise hit with both bass and with fishermen who had a thing for tiki culture.

047

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo: Ricky Rhodes

W ILLIA M SH A K E SP E A R E J R 18 69–1 95 0 Before you start wondering, this isn’t the same guy who wrote Macbeth. This is the other William Shakespeare.

You know, the one from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He was actually something of a writer, too. He published a book on finance, before following his passion and getting into the fishing tackle trade. His first breakthrough lure design was called the ‘Revolution’. It was made out of metallic floats, and looked a little like a miniature space station. After that his company put out something that looked like a little wooden minnow. Both lures made a bucketload of money, but were relatively tricky to make. As a result, Shakespeare always took pride in fitting his factory with all kinds of sophisticated machinery. In fact, when World War II broke out, the place was used to produce a bunch of high-powered military equipment, including aircraft controls.

Photo: John Harland

LAU R I R A PA L A 1 90 5 –1 975 This Finnish craftsman is responsible for starting the world’s largest lure company. He was born Lauri Saarinen, but his name was changed at the age of seven, when he and his mother relocated to a new village.

The person in charge of registering the move got confused and accidentally recorded the family’s surname as Rapala – the Finnish word for mud. It turned out to be the first of many misfortunes. After the move, an economic depression hit and Rapala had to join the workforce. Thankfully, things got a lot better when, in his 20s, he started making fishing lures out of cork and aluminium foil. His minnow design was so effective that soon everyone wanted one. In 1962, Life even did a big article on Rapala’s company. It was printed in the magazine’s highest-selling issue – the one with a cover story about Marilyn Monroe’s death.

049

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo: John Harland

JA ME S H E DDO N 18 4 5 –1 91 1 On a warm day in 1894, a beekeeper named James Heddon was sitting by a lake in Michigan, waiting for a friend.

To pass the time, he picked up a piece of old broomstick and started whittling. Slowly, the wood took the shape of a small frog. And when Heddon was done, he threw it into the water. The act caused a flurry of activity. Out of nowhere, a giant bass jumped up and chomped the frog. Heddon was amazed. He worked out that if he carved more little figures and attached hooks to them, he could catch fish. At the time, producing lures in this way was a revolutionary idea, but Heddon didn’t initially realise it. He just thought the carvings would be fun to give away with his honey. But when his lures started becoming more famous than his bees, it clicked, and he founded a company dedicated specifically to producing tackle. More than 200 years later, it’s still going.

Photo: American Museum of Fly Fishing

ME G A N BOY D 1 915 –2 0 0 1 Megan Boyd hated fishing – she found the idea of killing innocent animals off-putting. But that didn’t stop her from taking an interest in the ancient art of tying fishing flies. Her creations were legendary. Even Prince Charles was a fan. He’d regularly trek up to Boyd’s cottage in Scotland to buy from her. By all accounts, the place was pretty humble. Until the early ’80s, it had no electricity or telephone connection.

There wasn’t even any running water. The lack of amenities never bothered Boyd, though. All she wanted was a quiet place to do her work. Money and accolades meant nothing to her. In fact, when she was eventually offered a British Empire Medal for her services to fishing, she declined to pick it up from Buckingham Palace. Her reason: it would have meant leaving her dog, Patch, at home alone.

051

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo: Andrew Watson

E R IC MO L L E R 1 90 7–1 98 1 Eric Moller started making lures in the ’60s, after he retired from cutting railway sleepers on the Queensland coast. Learning the craft was a fairly tough process: during his early tinkering, he lost half a finger while preparing some wood. But he eventually got the hang of it, and invented a series of lures that worked remarkably well on Australian fish, especially barramundi. He preferred to do most of his work in his back shed, a space he shared with a flock of homing pigeons. His favourite method was hand-carving lumps of hardwood into shapes that resembled fish and painting them with intricate patterns. However, he once told an interviewer that the vibrant colours he used were primarily meant to appeal to fishermen, rather than fish. “After all,” he said, “fish aren’t bloody art critics.” •

EL VALLE DE BAROSSA PRESENTA

RUNNING WITH BULLS GARNACHA AND TEMPRANILLO

Discover the spirit of Spanish Garnacha and Tempranillo grown in the heart of the Barossa

master of a dying art FORENSIC SCULPTOR JOE MULLINS USES CLAY TO REBUILD THE FACES OF PEOPLE WHO’VE MET A MYSTERIOUS END. Writers Mark Hay and Adrian Craddock Photographer Matthew Johnson

LOOMING OVER THE SCHOOLS AND APARTMENT BLOCKS OF KIPS BAY, MANHATTAN, IS A DULL, BLOCKY BUILDING WITH A MORBID PURPOSE. ..........................................

It’s the headquarters of New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner.

Every week, the remains of people who have died from criminal violence or suicides arrive here, and effort is made to identify them.

Some of the bodies are easy to process; they’re freshly deceased with clear indicators of who they were – dental records, fingerprints, DNA. But not all the cadavers are like that. About a dozen times a year the examiners on duty get what they call “skeletal corpses” – bodies that are have gone through such a long period of decomposition that almost no soft tissue remains. And these are incredibly difficult to put a name to.

Whenever such cases arise, the office enlists the help of forensic anthropologists: people with a deep understanding of human skeletons. They can help (with varying degrees of certainty) decipher the age, ethnicity, and gender of a decomposed body. These details are then thrown out to the public in the hope that someone might step forward with more information.

But if no leads come back, an investigation can stall. And, at this point, it’s easy to feel that the cause is lost – that a skeleton will end up getting filed away and forgotten. The name of the person it belonged to will remain a mystery. The circumstances of their death will stay unknown. And, most depressingly, their family will never get the closure of knowing that they were found.

Every now and then, though, the Medical Examiner’s office will try one last-ditch method to name these lost souls: they will make a call to someone like Joe Mullins.

Mullins is a forensic artist, and an expert in a very rare skill: he can reconstruct a dead person’s face by layering clay onto a replica of their skull. His sculptures are then photographed and distributed to police and media. And since these images offer a lot more than a basic written description, they sometimes trigger a spark of recognition – and a breakthrough in a case.

Mullins’ craft is based on the fact that all the basic details of someone’s facial features are written into their skull. That said, his sculptures are not perfect reproductions.

It’s impossible for him to tell what sort of expression a person wore, whether they had any distinctive scars, or how they tilted their

heads, so he purposely leaves them looking slightly generic. Yet even the basics of a face can catch the eye of someone who knew it.

Like many who practise the craft of facial reconstruction, Mullins arrived at his job in a roundabout way. Trained in fine arts, he was once a graphic designer, “doing people’s logos, letterhead, business cards – that kind of stuff ”.

However, his life changed 17 years ago when he went to have lunch with a friend who’d just started working at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Virginia. Walking down the hall to his friend’s office, Mullins happened to catch a glimpse of staffers doing a facial reconstruction.

Back then, the Center had just begun working with the technique. It wasn’t the first to use it. The art of three-dimensional facial reconstruction can be traced to the late 19th century, when a Swiss anatomist named Wilhelm His recreated the face of Johann Sebastian Bach after taking a plaster cast of the composer’s skull. A number of sculptors followed his lead, and in the early ’40s the technique eventually migrated into criminal investigations. >> 055

SMITH JOURNAL

“IT BECAME PERSONAL. YOU’RE SITTING IN FRONT OF THIS GUY FOR, LIKE, FIVE DAYS. AND YOU WANT TO HELP.”

<<

When Mullins saw the reconstruction process for the first time, he immediately recognised it as a way to use his artistic skills for a greater good. “It’s like art with a purpose,” he says.

“I mean, all art has a purpose. But this was something I could do to help restore the identities of victims who have lost them.”

Within a few months, he’d wrangled a job at the Center. It involved common forensic tasks, such as digitally ageing the faces of kids who had been missing for a long time and working with composite photography. The role also allowed him to get his first hands-on experience with forensic sculpting. Mullins can still remember it; a NCMEC wonk handed him a replica of an identified person’s skull, and a few snippets of information about their age, sex and ethnicity. Mullins got to work, applying 26 markers to key parts of the skull. He then used these markers in tandem with a chart that showed how thick tissue is on different parts of an average human face. When he’d finished sculpting, he took a photo of the bust he’d built, and touched it up on a computer. At first, he worried that he’d got it all wrong. But when he was shown a picture of the person whose skull he’d been assigned, he got a big thrill.

It was surprisingly close.

As of today, Mullins has built faces from hundreds of skulls. At least 30 of them have led to successful identifications. It’s fulfilling work, but it comes at an emotional cost. Mullins says that when he closes his eyes he can recall nearly every face he’s rebuilt. It’s hard to detach from the horrible details of their deaths. Especially when it comes to children.

The scale of the task facing reconstructionists often troubles Mullins, as well. There are around 10,000 unnamed skulls in storage across the U.S., and only a handful of people in the country who can make forensic

sculptures. The Center recently started using a digital modelling system that allows Mullins to work more quickly than he could with clay. But even if every reconstructionist had access to the software, they could never clear the backlog.

That’s why, a few years ago, Mullins developed a clever plan to get more people involved with forensic sculpting. It centred on using the skills of those in the fine art world.

The idea stemmed from his connections with the New York Academy of Art, an institution co-founded by Andy Warhol in 1982. It is one of the last schools in the U.S. to teach the skill of building clay human forms on wire frames from the bones and muscles up. That means that a lot of students there are uniquely adept with sculpture and anatomy. “They’d already got the introduction to forensic art,” he says.

“All I had to do was open the door, flick the lights on, and say, ‘This is something that you can do.’”

The way he saw it, the whole thing was win-win. Students could learn something new, and their work would go towards clearing New York’s logjam of unidentified skulls.

But the project was surprisingly hard to pull together. The first problem Mullins ran into came from city officials. They were reluctant to hand over real human skulls for the students to study. Thankfully, this issue was solved when the office of the Chief Medical Examiner acquired a 3D printer, which could faithfully replicate the skulls. But that wasn’t the end of it. Administrators at the Academy of Art also had trouble getting students interested in the class. And even after they’d cajoled some into attending, everyone worried that these artists might have trouble adhering to the golden rule of facial reconstruction: you can’t use creative licence. A good reconstructionist only lets the form of a skull guide them. At most, discretion

can be used in features like hair – but only to make it as nondescript as possible to keep the focus on the face. This scientific approach was a stark contrast to the work students were used to.

Despite these doubts and obstacles, Mullins persisted. And in January 2015, his idea finally became a reality. In a barren studio scattered with easels and frames, Mullins laid down a set of unidentified replica skulls before some students. They played it by the book – and by day four of the week-long workshop they found themselves staring into the eyes of 11 very human faces.

“It became personal,” says Marco Palli, a Venezuelan Master of Fine Arts candidate who took part in the class. “You’re sitting in front of this guy for, like, five days. And you want to help. You start going to websites seeing if anybody’s missing that you can identify. It becomes a part of you.”

The best part of the project was that it led to some skulls actually being identified. The attention that surrounded the first workshop meant that Palli’s sculpture got pictured in the New York Times, and one of the paper’s readers recognised the face.

It was a moment of great validation for Mullins – proof that his plan had worked.

He was so encouraged that he returned to the Academy for another workshop last January.

And he’s even talking about trying to expand the program to other schools. He knows that only a small percentage of the students he teaches, if any, will ever consider a career in forensic arts. But it doesn’t matter. There’re just so many skulls to get through. And the more help, the better.

“Any skull sitting unidentified on a medical examiner’s shelf is unacceptable,” says Mullins.

“They each deserve a name.” •

Durable clothing that you want to wear.

AVAILABLE AT DRIZA-BONE HQ STORE (92 RUPERT STREET, COLLINGWOOD), DRIZA-BONE CITY STORE (185 LITTLE COLLINS STREET, MELBOURNE) AND DAVID JONES STORES NATIONALLY. VISIT: WWW.DRIZABONE.COM.AU

opinion

JON MORRIS ON WHY SOME SUPERHEROES SUCCEED, AND OTHERS FAIL. Interviewer Ben Birchall

WHEN I WAS IN KINDERGARTEN, A BUNCH OF KIDS AND I WERE PLAYING SUPERHEROES. EVERYONE WAS PICKING CHARACTERS FROM TV – THE HULK, SPIDER-MAN, BATMAN – BUT I PICKED A CHARACTER CALLED RAGMAN. ..........................................

He was a vigilante from the DC universe who dressed in a skin-tight suit of rags. I was really anxious that someone would pick him before I did. Looking back, I shouldn’t have worried – no one was going to pick Ragman. But I was just obsessed with characters who didn’t get a lot of attention.

Later in life, I started thinking about why some comic book characters succeed, and others get consigned to the superhero scrapheap of history. And it turns out the rules for making a good superhero also make a lot of terrible ones. But there are some things that are consistent.

First, you need an origin story that can be summed up in about two sentences. Anything more than that is too complicated. Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider, gained the proportional powers of a spider and, after a personal tragedy, became SpiderMan. Great – that’s all you need to know.

On the other hand, I was just reading about a character called Adam Blake the Boy Wizard.

His origin story is that his father invented an atom-smashing machine that also gave you the power of atoms (whatever that means), and he turned the machine on his baby son, Adam.

But he also made a ring that could grant wishes. And then he got abducted by aliens.

I can barely keep track of that story.

As far as powers go, you want things that people can imagine themselves using. Superman’s flight, his super-strength, Spider-Man’s agility – even Batman’s deductive reasoning – these are all powers that we kind of wish we had.

We flatter ourselves with the superheroes we gravitate towards. Go to any weightlifting gym, and the number of Superman tattoos you’ll see is through the roof. These people value strength and so they tell themselves, in a lot of ways, “I’m like Superman”.

It’s also important that your character hides their light under a bushel. That lets the reader submerge their identity into the character.

Superman is moral and powerful, but he hides all that behind the shitty job he has to hold down and boring clothes he has to wear. Everyone in the world feels that to some degree when they get dressed for work, or just if they have to go into the world and deny something about themselves.

Speed Centaur is a really peculiar example of a superhero whose power is always on. He is a centaur 24 hours a day, so he has to wear a rubber horse mask over the top of his body and pretend to be a horse. That’s hard for people to find an emotional or psychological connection to. As far as names go, simplicity is good. Take Spider-Man: he’s a man, who’s also a spider. The reader can quickly move from that point forward. Then look at Mother Hubbard, or Red Bee. Just from the names, I couldn’t tell you what those characters do.

Of course, if you take a step back from any character, they’re all equally absurd. There’s nothing objectively more philosophical or Shakespearean about Spider-Man than there is about Red Bee or Speed Centaur or the hundreds of characters who never made it.

Take Superman, for instance: he’s an alien who just happens to look like a white man from Earth, can jump over buildings, and shoot lasers from his eyes This all sounds ridiculous. If you pitched it in 2016, you might get a children’s show out of it. But you probably wouldn’t get a billion-dollar-a-year media empire. • Jon Morris edits Gone and Forgotten, a blog dedicated to lesser-known superheroes. He has also written a book, The League of Regrettable Superheroes, published by Quirk Books.

IT TURNS OUT THE RULES FOR MAKING A GOOD SUPERHERO ALSO MAKE A LOT OF TERRIBLE ONES. 059

SMITH JOURNAL

the weather man WHEN RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHER EVGENIA ARBUGAEVA JOURNEYED INTO THE ARCTIC TO PHOTOGRAPH REMOTE WEATHER STATIONS, SHE CAME ACROSS A MAN WHO LEFT A LASTING IMPRESSION ON HER. Interviewer Adrian Craddock

061

SMITH JOURNAL

A FEW YEARS AGO, MY FAMILY AND I WERE ON A DOG-SLEDDING TRIP IN SIBERIA WHEN WE GOT CAUGHT IN A SNOWSTORM.

..........................................

Thankfully, my dad was prepared for the situation. Being a seasoned sledder, he’d already mapped out a bunch of places we could shelter if the weather got bad. One of them was a remote meteorological station. It was fairly close, so we decided to speed over there and ask if we could spend the night.

From the moment I arrived at the station, I was really intrigued. It was staffed by about ten people, who were all employed to take weather readings. They lived in a very strange psychological atmosphere, being used to not seeing other people for years at a time. I started to wonder: who in their right mind would go to such a faraway place and work there?

After I came back from the trip, I started to research other remote stations. Being a photographer, I saw them as something I really wanted to capture.

I found out there was only really one way to visit these places: an icebreaker ship that departed once a year and delivered supplies.

The problem was that I didn’t know how to get myself on board. So, I wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin’s Arctic advisor. He started his career in Tiksi, the Russian port town where I grew up, so I thought maybe he could help me. I introduced myself and explained my idea: to do a photo project about life at meteorological stations. I didn’t think it was going to work. But I received a reply with his signature. And it was a key to all doors.

My two-month journey on the ship began in late 2013. It didn’t go quickly. I was expecting that the atmosphere would be friendly, but everybody was depressed. After their work, the crew would just go to their own rooms and watch DVDs. The only friend that I made was a priest called Father Dimitri. Whenever we got near a station, he and a group of people would be choppered in for a few hours.

The workers would unload a year’s worth of food, while Dimitri went and blessed the place with holy water. Staff at the stations also liked to confide in him. A lot of them really wanted to talk.

I was allowed on the helicopter most of the time, but I found my visits were very frustrating. I work very slowly, so nothing was really coming out of them.

That changed when we travelled to a station at Khodovarikha on the Pechora Sea – one of the most isolated meteorological outposts in Russia.

There must have been about seven of us in the helicopter on the way over, including a young couple called Rita and Ustin. Unlike the rest of us, their ride was one-way. They had been employed to help run the station, and ideally take over from the man who was currently there. He had been living and working alone for many years.

When we landed, a middle-aged meteorologist came out to meet us. His name was Slava. He didn’t seem like anyone else I’d come across on the journey. Most people were happy to see us when we arrived – they would chat and prepare tea. But Slava just sat there chain-smoking, looking at everybody with huge eyes. I had a feeling that he wanted everybody to finish as soon as possible and go away.

I could somehow relate to his pain and discomfort. He loved this place – it was his little world – and now all these people were invading it and making noise.

I eventually went up and introduced myself, asking a few questions about the station.

Somehow, Slava started talking about this boat that he’d made himself. I asked where it was, and he replied, “Do you want me to show you?” I agreed, and we disappeared. It was a way for him to escape all the fuss.

We walked for about three kilometres, during which Slava told me about the birds that visited in the summer, and what life at the station was like. He spoke very slowly, as if every word was meaningful. He seemed like a Buddhist monk or something – a very pure person. Talking to him just felt incredibly natural.

Once he’d shown me the boat, I flew back to the ship. I had a feeling that I’d found what I was looking for, and made a decision to visit him again. I needed to photograph this guy.

Throughout the rest of my time on the icebreaker, I thought a lot about how I could return to Slava. And, when the supply trip finished, I decided to contact a company that does helicopter trips, and organise for them to fly me back. I wanted to contact Slava to let him know all this. But I couldn’t; there were problems with his radio.

I was worried. But I chose to take the risk, and flew out on New Year’s Eve. I brought a lot of stuff with me – oranges, champagne, sausages, cheese, vegetables. I also brought a bird as a gift. I carried it in my coat. I remember the people at the airport found that funny. It was like, “Who is this strange girl? She hired her own helicopter. She’s alone. She’s going to this God-forgotten place. Plus she has a bird.”

>>

SLAVA JUST SAT THERE CHAIN-SMOKING, LOOKING AT EVERYBODY WITH HUGE EYES. I HAD A FEELING THAT HE WANTED EVERYBODY TO FINISH AS SOON AS POSSIBLE AND GO AWAY.

063

SMITH JOURNAL

065

SMITH JOURNAL

HE WAS THE REAL THING. HIS MOTHER HAD GIVEN BIRTH TO HIM IN THE COLD. HE COULDN’T SEE HIMSELF LIVING ANYWHERE ELSE.

<<

We took off and hurtled across the tundra.

The first thing I saw when we landed was an old dog. Then Slava came out. He didn’t seem surprised at all.

I said, “Do you remember me?”

He said, “Yeah, of course I remember you.”

I said, “I’m going to stay here for three weeks, is that okay?”

He said, “Sure.”

He helped me unload the helicopter then showed me to my bedroom. Apparently the last guy who had used it was a meteorologist who got evacuated after he went crazy. One day, he just went outside naked with a gun, saying he was protecting the station from aliens. He said he was hearing voices. The weirdest thing, though, was that his name was Evgeniy – the male version of mine.

I was very quiet during the first few days at the station. I just slept a lot. It was the time of year when the sun didn’t rise at all. The wind sounded like a baby crying in the distance, and the ocean was full of ice. When the waves came in, it made a horrible sound like somebody gnashing their teeth. It was all very strange.

After a while, though, I came to. I met up with Rita and Ustin again, but their spirits were so heavy. It was clear that the Arctic was very foreign to them, and they were only there because they couldn’t get jobs in their village.

They lived in a separate part of the station to Slava, and would sometimes go weeks without seeing him. Their shifts didn’t align, they said, and, plus, “he just likes to be alone”.

I was very conscious of entering Slava’s world at a comfortable pace. I didn’t want my presence to be a big disturbance. So, one day, I went to his room to have tea and a chat. And that’s when I started to get to know him.

Slava was a kind person. No matter what you said, there would be zero judgment at all.

Everything was received with smiles or nods.

He seemed to understand the largeness of nature, and his place in it. He wasn’t running away from anything. In fact, he was very content, with no ambitions about buying things, about career, about anything really.

He was the real thing. His mother had given birth to him in the cold. He couldn’t see himself living anywhere else.

Slava explained that he came to Khodovarikha after he met his wife, who he was still married to. They became involved when he was on vacation from another station. For ten years they had tried to live a normal life in a cosy town. But, in the end, Slava realised he needed to be in nature. He returned to the Arctic, and eventually got the job at Khodovarikha. He said that the first time he stepped on the place he loved it immediately.

Slava got a lot of satisfaction out of performing his duties. Every three hours he had to go outside and make measurements – the speed of the wind, the depth of snow, the temperature.

Then he’d walk back to his office, record everything in a data book, and transmit it.

The rest of his time was devoted to chores.

He collected firewood from the frame of an abandoned lighthouse, and melted snow for water. He watched the news and read a lot, too. His favourite writer was Hemingway.

One thing he didn’t do a lot of was cook.

Meteorologists can make requests about what supplies they want dropped, and Slava usually just ordered a bunch of biscuits. He lived on the things. Whenever I cooked something, he’d usually say he wasn’t hungry. I’d ask, “What did you have?” He’d say, “just some tea with biscuits.”

I remember I did get him to eat properly on New Year’s Eve. I made lots of food, and set

up this big table in his room. He was very, very happy that day. He said that this was the first time he had celebrated New Year at the station. We all had champagne and I made a toast to Rita and Ustin. I said something like, “Congratulations on a year in the Arctic.”

Their reply was pretty confusing: “We’re not in the Arctic, are we? We’re in the Antarctic.”

They really had no real understanding of the place they were in.

I think Slava actually had a pretty good relationship with Rita and Ustin. But he didn’t like talking about his retirement much. He did mention it once when I lent him my satellite phone. He called his sister and she gave him the idea of maybe spending some time fixing up their parents’ house in the country. I think it was actually the first time he had talked to his sister in almost two years.

She had a lot of news for him. She even said that his niece had a baby girl around a year ago. That made Slava really excited. He got off the phone and he started thinking about a gift he could buy for her. “Do they make little bicycles for girls?” he asked.

Slava never did use the satellite phone to call his wife.

When I finally had to leave, he was very helpful. He didn’t want me to forget anything. The helicopter arrived and I walked out. Before I got on, I screamed back at him, “Slava, why do you never ask anything about me?”

He said, “Why do I need to ask? I already know you. You are the girl from the North.”

He was right.

I don’t think I can explain it, but he was probably one of the few people in my life who has understood me. •

random testing SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST DIFFICULT EXAMS ARE ALSO SOME OF THE STRANGEST. Writer Chris Harrigan Illustrator Karolis Strautniekas

T HE L ON DON TAXI DRIV ER EXAM

T H E C H IC K E N SE XING E XA M

If you want to become a London cabbie, the first thing you have to do is pass ‘The Knowledge’ – widely regarded as one of the most difficult exams in the world. Successful candidates have to prove they know the city’s layout better than Prince Charles knows tweed. That means being able to instantly recall the location of around 25,000 streets, as well as countless businesses and landmarks. Trainees spend years driving around with a map to prepare. Of course, the rise of GPS (and Uber) is threatening this tradition, but it still lives on. After all, nothing beats the feeling of having a taxi driver who actually knows their way around.

Egg producers are pretty picky when it comes to taking in new chickens: they really only want females. But the task of working out the gender of a newly hatched bird is actually pretty difficult. Just ask anyone studying for the Zen Nippon chicken sexing exam in Japan. They can spend up to three years learning the skill. Apparently, the trick is to look at the chicks’ nether regions to see whether their cloacas are hiding tiny, willy-like appendages. Sounds easy enough, but with more than 1000 possible cloaca configurations to decipher, it’s anything but. To pass, students have to sort 400 birds in 36 minutes, with 99 per cent accuracy.

T HE ALL SOU LS FELL OWSH IP EX A M

T H E MA ST E R C IC E R O NE E XA M

Getting in to Oxford is hard enough. But scoring a fellowship at the university’s elite All Souls College is downright diabolical. The three-day-long entrance exam is famous for its abstract exam questions, which have included such doozies as “Should intellectuals tweet?” and “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?”

At least it’s easier than it used to be: the exam once required students to write a multi-page essay on a single word, such “comedy” or “water”. That section was finally scrapped in 2010 after it was agreed that it didn’t really tell you anything useful about the person writing it (unlike, say, their opinion on Nazi-themed orgies).

When you go to a fancy restaurant, it’s pretty common to get advice on how to complement the food with wine. But if you want a beer with your meal – well, that’s different. You have to make that choice on your own. Thankfully this is starting to change, as more places begin employing beer sommeliers – also known as cicerones. Becoming a professional sud specialist isn’t as easy as knowing your ales from your lagers: the two-daylong master cicerone exam involves – among other things – a rigorous blind tasting where candidates have to isolate the off flavours in deliberately botched brews. Only 10 per cent of applicants end up passing – the same rate, coincidentally, as the infamous Master Sommelier exam. •

069

SMITH JOURNAL

fake feasts DOES THIS DISH MAKE YOU FEEL HUNGRY? MAYBE LOOK A LITTLE CLOSER. IT’S ACTUALLY AN EXAMPLE OF ONE OF JAPAN’S MOST PECULIAR CRAFTS: THE CREATION OF PLASTIC FOOD. Writer Joshua Hunt Photographer Irwin Wong

071

SMITH JOURNAL

ETSUJI ISOZAKI RUNS ONE OF TOKYO’S BUSIEST KITCHENS.

“Only in Japan do so many restaurants display the dishes they offer so proudly and so beautifully.”

..........................................

Every day, while most people in the city are just heading to work, he and his staff of 60 are turning out dishes with precision and speed. Fresh pizzas are set out to cool, sushi is prepared, and rice is heaped into bowls. The work requires great skill and concentration, and doesn’t let up until dusk. Right up until the sun goes down, there are things to take care of: pancakes to stack, donuts to ice and golden omelettes to plate.

In total, the group prepares around three dozen dishes at a time – although you wouldn’t guess this from the way the place smells. The aroma that wafts throughout the three-storey building is uniform, no matter what combination of food is on the day’s menu. It’s the scent of cooked vinyl resin and paint – sweet and sickly with a hint of smoke.

In any other kitchen, this would be a cause for concern. But at the Maizuru Food Sample Company it is the smell of success.

For over 50 years, the business has specialised in manufacturing an uusual product: detailed plastic replicas of nearly every dish imaginable.

These ‘samples’ are displayed by restaurants across Japan, with the intention of indicating what they have to offer. They are designed to take the guesswork out of navigating a menu – both for those who can read Japanese, and those who can’t.

“You might call the food samples we make cultural products,” Isozaki tells me as we walk through the building’s various workshops.

In his book Japanese People Eat with their Eyes, journalist Yasunobu Nose attributes the ubiquity of replica food samples to the Japanese habit of ‘tasting’ dishes first by sight, then with their tongues. As for where the objects actually originated, it depends on whom you ask. Nose claims that it started with a man named Soujiro Nishio, who previously made wax models of organs and diseased limbs for doctors in Kyoto.

range of Japanese and American-style dishes.

Some of them attracted as many as 20,000 customers each day, meaning table service was complicated. It also didn’t help that a lot of Japanese diners were still unfamiliar with American-style foods. An early answer to these problems was to leave cooked examples of dishes at the entrance, where customers could decide what they wanted in advance, cutting back on waiting time and confusion. But this proved to have mixed results; during Japan’s hot, humid summers, sample dishes would spoil before the lunch hour was finished.

A competing, more widely accepted theory of the sample’s origins is decidedly less morbid.

It suggests that a man named Takizo Iwasaki was working at a boxed lunch company in Osaka when he supposedly struck upon the idea. Iwasaki was down on his luck at the time, with a seriously ill wife and a stack of bills he couldn’t afford to pay. After his power was cut off, he spent his evenings pondering his troubles by candlelight. One night, he pressed a finger into the molten wax as it sloughed off a burning candle. When he noticed that the wax had captured his fingerprint exactly, he realised the material could also be used to make models of foods. His first sample was an omelette cast from a mould he made himself.

That’s where Iwasaki saw his opportunity.

He started renting his wax models to restaurants and cafeterias for a fee of ten times the amount it would usually cost them to make a fresh dish. Restaurateurs saw this as a bargain. The arrangement cost them far less than the 30 fresh display dishes they were used to wasting each month. The popularity of the replicas soon spread, and became a staple at all but the most high-end restaurants in Japan. In the ’70s, advances in technology meant the samples could be made out of plastic, which is hardier than wax. But Iwasaki kept pace with these changes. The business he founded still remains the gold standard. Today, it holds more than half of the market share in selling food samples.

Whatever the truth about the origins of replica food, it’s clear that the stuff first hit the mainstream during the ’20s, when Japan’s middle class was going through a period of growth. At the time, there was a department store boom in major cities including Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. And among the most popular aspects of these shopping centres were vast cafeterias, which served a wide

The number two maker in the industry is Maizuru. A big part of its success is the skill of its artisans, the majority of whom are women.

“Japan is still a very traditional society in many ways, and women tend to do the cooking in most households,” Isozaki tells me. “And I’ve found that those who are skilled in preparing real food tend to be the most skilled when preparing replica food.”

>>

ONE JOURNALIST CLAIMS THAT IT STARTED WITH A MAN NAMED SOUJIRO NISHIO, WHO PREVIOUSLY MADE WAX MODELS OF ORGANS AND DISEASED LIMBS FOR DOCTORS IN KYOTO.

073

SMITH JOURNAL

<<

One of a few exceptions to this gender rule is Kojiro Akizuki, who says he has worked at Maizuru for nearly 30 years. Standing before his work desk, the skilled veteran prepares six bowls of nattō – a traditional Japanese breakfast consisting of gooey fermented soybeans heaped over fluffy white rice.

“The process for each aspect of the dish begins with silicon moulds,” he tells me. “Each grain of rice and each individual soybean are produced by pouring coloured vinyl resin into a silicone mould, which is then baked and cooled before being painted by hand.”

The moulds, he says, are created by pouring silicone over real grains of rice and soybeans, and slices of fish from the restaurants that will eventually display the model food.

In the next room over, stacks of dusty drawers stretch to the ceiling. Each drawer is packed with the raw materials Akizuki needs to forge his creations. One drawer is filled with small, delicate slices of cucumber; another with boiled eggs; others overflow with dabs of wasabi, filets of fatty tuna, and thin cuts of

marbled beef. They still look slightly fake, but after they are carefully arranged and coated with a glossy sheen of shellac, that will change.

In fact, by the end of the process, they’ll probably look better than the real thing.

“I’ve learned over the years that making a faithful copy of a dish is not always the right thing to do,” he tells me. “When it comes to colour, we often use our imagination and take artistic licence in order to achieve a look that is bolder than real food.”

Some dishes are easier than others. In one room, sushi is shaped and moulded with a graceful technique that would impress any real sushi master. Next door, a woman hunched over a short desk pours golden yellow liquid into beer mugs, then tops them off with a creamy white head.

“Now,” Isozaki says. “Doesn’t that look good enough to drink?”

On my way out of the Maizuru workshop, I notice a handful of young men and women fashioning food into particularly unusual shapes and sizes. Noticing that this has caught my attention, Isozaki chimes in.

“They’re making iPhone cases,” he tells me. “These have become top sellers for us, popular both with Japanese people and with tourists.”

These novelties are sold at Maizuru’s retail shop in Tokyo’s Kappabashi neighborhood.

They’ve become a vital source of income for the company. Japan’s sluggish economy means times are tough for sample food makers. It also doesn’t help that modern replicas last a lifetime, and hardly ever need to be replaced.

There is some opportunity to pick up a bit of the slack by exporting – but it’s limited. The Asian countries where samples have shown promise have developing economies where manufacturing is cheap. They’re learning to do the work themselves; a copy of a copy.

I ask Isozaki if he could ever imagine a future where his company only makes magnets and iPhone covers.

“I don’t want to think of such a thing,” he tells me. “But life is unpredictable. After all, who would ever imagine that they’d spend their life making food that isn’t real?” •

MELBOURNE DRY GIN HAND CRAFTED . BATCH DISTILLED . NON CHILL FILTERED MELBOURNEGINCOMPANY.COM | FACEBOOK: THE MELBOURNE GIN COMPANY TWITTER/INSTAGRAM: @MELBOURNEGINCO

dressed to kill BOMBS. BABES. CARTOON CHARACTERS. THE PICTURES THAT U.S. PILOTS PAINTED ONTO THEIR JACKETS WERE THE ULTIMATE MIDDLE FINGER TO HITLER AND THE NAZIS. Writer Leta Keens

077

SMITH JOURNAL

Photos courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration

DURING WORLD WAR II, THE AVERAGE LIFESPAN OF A U.S. BOMBER PILOT WAS 13 MISSIONS. ..........................................

In other words, the job was one of the deadliest in the whole military.

It’s no wonder, then, that commanders used to cut airmen a little slack when it came to discipline. They even turned a blind eye to what would normally be a serious offence: the vandalism of uniforms.

Throughout the conflict, guys in the U.S. Air Force had a habit of painting on things that they weren’t supposed to, including the leather jackets they received on completion of basic flight training. They used a whole range of images. Some were vaguely menacing – shark’s teeth, tigers, the grim reaper – but most were benign, sometimes verging on the cheerful – cartoon characters, planes, busty pin-up girls, outlines of home states. Tough-sounding lyrics and slogans were also a favourite. Photos of the 401st bomb group (pictured) show jackets with lines such as Grin ’n Bare it, Hi-Ho Silver and Goin’ my way.

“Most of the jackets were painted by American boys, 18 to 24 years old,” said Jon Maguire, co-author of Art of the Flight Jacket: Classic Leather Jackets of World War II, during an interview in 1995. “They were right out of high school and college. They painted almost anything that reminded them of home.” The best examples, according to New York collector Leighton Longhi, “express a zany individualism”.

The artworks weren’t just about creative expression, however; they also gave clues about a serviceman’s tour of duty. Many featured neat rows of bombs – each one depicting a successful mission. Some were even emblazoned with swastikas. This wasn’t an indication of sympathy for the enemy, but rather represented the number of German planes a person had destroyed.

The process that went into creating each artwork was fairly rudimentary. If an airman wasn’t up to doing it himself, he’d hand it off to someone else in the squadron who was better with a brush – often, a sign painter.

Occasionally, they also enlisted the skills of European street artists.

With or without decoration, the Air Force’s leather jackets eventually became a symbol of American swagger during the war. The so-called A-2 design was the most popular type.

Conceived in the 1930s, it was snug in fit and quite practical for fighter pilots, who often sat in heated cockpits. It wasn’t so great for crewmen at the back of a plane, who usually wore warmer fleece-lined parkas (but loved their A-2s so much they’d often have them on underneath).

The jackets were actually considered so cool that GIs, who weren’t eligible to get them via the regular channels, bought them on the sly from companies that made them unofficially.

There are even stories of German soldiers wearing ones they’d pinched from captured American airmen.

After the war, many servicemen continued to wear the A-2 in civilian life. Their look was cemented into popular culture by wearers including James Dean, Steve McQueen and, much later, Indiana Jones. Even today, a number of companies still make replicas of the garment, some of which are indistinguishable from the real thing. Authentic examples are also auctioned off occasionally in various stages of disrepair, and can fetch thousands of dollars.

Strangely enough, America’s former enemy Japan is one of the most popular markets.

Sadly, the tradition of covering uniforms in illustrations has largely died out in the U.S. military. It continued throughout the Vietnam War, but tapered off shortly after.

Even if today’s troops wanted to pimp out their clobber, it wouldn’t be easy – a lot of military uniforms are now made of synthetic materials, and are impossible to paint. The result: there’s little to no chance of any decorated jackets ever coming out of Afghanistan. •

079

SMITH JOURNAL

moving house A FEW YEARS AGO, ANDREW MELLODY GOT FED UP WITH SPENDING ALL HIS TIME WORKING TO PAY RENT. SO, HE DECIDED TO BUY A CARAVAN CALLED GENIE AND REFOCUS HIMSELF ON WHAT REALLY MATTERS: DOING GOOD IN THE WORLD. Writer Koren Helbig Photographer Peter Tarasiuk

IN 2012, A STRANGE POSTER STARTED POPPING UP ON TELEPHONE POLES AROUND INNER-CITY MELBOURNE. IT FEATURED A PICTURE OF A GUY SMILING, AND A BEGUILING HEADLINE: BACKYARD SPACE?

in Melbourne with large, caravan-sized backyards. He then created a shortlist of the most promising ones and went door-knocking.

People were nice enough, and usually let him in for a cup of tea. But no one agreed to let him set up on their land.

..........................................

Thankfully the posters proved more effective.

They garnered around 20 offers, and, after a while, an artist in Northcote consented to sublet her backyard. Once Mellody had moved in, he set about the job of making the caravan more liveable. He installed a new window and converted the cupboard next to the fridge into a home-brew hotbox.

By the time he was done, the caravan felt surprisingly comfortable. “My friends have affectionately named her Genie,” says Mellody, “because she’s a lot bigger inside than you’d assume, like a genie bottle.”

The person in the picture was Andrew Mellody. He’d created and distributed the poster for a very specific purpose: to help him make a drastic lifestyle change.

Mellody figured that if he could learn to survive on hardly any money, he’d have more control over the way he spent his time. In particular, he’d be able to devote more hours to volunteering for good causes and less on working to pay for bills and rent.

So, he decided to give it a crack. He packed up his stuff, moved out of his share house and bought a clapped-out caravan from the ’70s.

It was his new home. All he needed was a cheap place to park it.

Putting up posters actually wasn’t the first way Mellody tried finding a spot. He initially just reached out to his mates on Facebook and hoped for the best. When that failed, he stepped up his efforts. He trawled through Google Earth, looking for properties

Mellody’s background meant he was well prepared for all handiwork. Before embarking on the caravan experiment, he spent two years building and testing challenges for the Survivor TV series in China, central Brazil, Micronesia and west Africa. Prior to that, he volunteered at a primary school in the Maldives and with a human rights group in the Philippines. Travelling through these developing regions was exciting. But it also exposed Mellody to a lot of inequality, and cemented his desire to make a difference.

So did the caravan plan actually help him fulfil this ambition? All signs point to yes.

Since moving in, he’s been able to drop down to working just one day a week, and spends the rest of his time getting involved with good causes. Last March, when a cyclone devastated Vanuatu, Mellody and his girlfriend Nicole Precel even organised a series of music gigs in Melbourne to raise money. The project was so successful that Mellody, Precel and another mate, Aleksei Plinte, decided to start a social enterprise called Co-Ground. It tackles poverty through live events. Mellody has already mustered a team of 30 volunteers, and, in October, received an Anti-Poverty Award from Connections UnitingCare.

Mellody doesn’t find it too difficult to keep Co-Ground ticking along from his caravan.

He has a solar panel to power his lights and computer, and uses his phone for internet.

Every now and again, though, there are hiccups. Not too long ago, a vehicle from a nearby car park slammed right into the back of Mellody’s digs and moved it about a metre.

“An older woman from the fish and chip shop across the road accidentally hit accelerate instead of brake,” Mellody says. “I got 11 friends to help move Genie back into place. Potentially her bones are no good any more but only time will tell when we actually try to move her again.

For now I don’t really care. I’m happy here.” • 081

SMITH JOURNAL

FOR REAL LIFE

opinion

NICK FROST ON THE FRIENDSHIP THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE. Interviewer Luke Ryan

THE BEST THING YOU COULD SAY ABOUT ME WHEN I FIRST MET SIMON PEGG WAS THAT I WAS A PRETTY GOOD WAITER. ..........................................

It was 1992 and I’d just come back from staying at a kibbutz in Israel. I was working at a Mexican restaurant called Chiquito in the north of London and feeling very much like a big fish in a tiny pond. The place was filled with huge personalities and heaps of drinking, partying and recreational dope smoking.

Chiquito or not, it was a pretty good life.

Then this girl started working there. She was a wee Scottish thing. We became close friends really quickly and I wanted to take it further, but of course she had a boyfriend. I hated him without even meeting the guy. And then three weeks later, she introduced me to Simon at a party. It was like love at first sight. We spent two hours comedy sparring, making each other laugh our arses off while the rest of the party faded around us. In the end, I think I ended up liking Simon more than I did her.

We bonded over comedy first and foremost.

Simon’s a great collector of things and he has an instinctive feel for what makes great comedy. We’d hang out and he’d introduce me to these brilliant new stand-ups, or we’d watch classic movies and mind-bending sketches.

We were really into Reeves and Mortimer and I remember him introducing me to Annie Hall. Our friendship was essentially the plot from Pygmalion, where this very posh English man teaches a street urchin to be a lady.

Simon taught me to be a lady.

Spaced was the first project we did together.

By that point we’d been friends for more than five years and I’d grown a bit jealous that Simon hadn’t asked me to work with him yet.

I was still working as a waiter, but as Simon became more successful in his own comedy career, the circle of mates we were hanging out with had started changing too – we met people like Edgar Wright, Jessica Hynes, David Walliams, Matt Lucas, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt. One by one, these guys were being picked up by cable TV, and eventually it was Edgar, Jess and Simon’s turn. They created Spaced, and wrote a character based on me.

Fortunately, they also asked me to play him.

If a friendship is going to be lifelong, it has to evolve. It can’t just remain the same way it was in the beginning. Simon and I have been friends for 21 years now and it’s outlasted all the other friendships I had when I was 20.

You catch up with so many old friends from your youth and it just feels stale, because it’s always looking backwards. I think the reason Simon and I work so well is because we went through these changes, and we never talked about them. Our friendship just evolved without ever losing sight of the core dynamic: the ability to make each other laugh more than anybody else.

I think as a society we’re fundamentally uncomfortable with the idea of male friendships. We’re not quite sure how to address them, so we use snarky buzzwords like “bromance”. It’s this fear that if two male friends are really, really close and they love each other, then obviously they’re going to start fucking. But look at the Hell’s Angels.

They used to freak out squares by kissing each other on the lips. I love that. Me and a lot of my male friends, years and years ago, were staunch lip-kissers for just this reason. I don’t kiss Simon on the lips, but I feel like it almost every day. I reckon that’s true friendship. • Nick Frost is an actor, comedian and author.

His memoir Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies is on sale now.

IF A FRIENDSHIP IS GOING TO BE LIFELONG, IT HAS TO EVOLVE. IT CAN’T JUST REMAIN THE SAME WAY IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING. 083

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo courtesy of The Intrepid Camera Co.

the big picture A GROUP OF GUYS FROM THE U.K. ARE DETERMINED TO REVIVE THE ART OF LARGE FORMAT PHOTOGRAPHY. EVEN IF IT NEARLY KILLS THEM. Writers Koren Helbig and Chris Harrigan

THERE ARE ALL KINDS OF HURDLES THAT PEOPLE IN STARTUPS CAN FACE ON THE ROAD TO SUCCESS – FLAKY INVESTORS, BAD PRESS COVERAGE, OR A CHANGE IN THE ECONOMY. BUT FOR MAXIM GREW, A BUDDING CAMERA MAKER IN HOVE, ENGLAND, THE LEARNING PROCESS WAS PARTICULARLY TOUGH. HE EXPERIENCED A HICCUP THAT NEARLY CLAIMED HIS LIFE. ..........................................

The incident occurred at the small workshop that Grew and his partners use as the base for their business, Intrepid Cameras. One day, they were manufacturing parts when someone noticed a plume of smoke. A dust extractor had broken and within minutes the whole place was enveloped in a cloud of sawdust. It was becoming hard to breathe, and if the smoke turned to flame, the whole thing could blow.

“We need to leave!” Grew yelled. The group burst out onto the street, red-faced and sputtering. A neighbour who’d walked over to complain about the noise took one look at the bedlam and bolted.

In the end, the dust eventually cleared and the workshop was spared a fiery fate. It was a lucky outcome – both for them and their customers. With the workspace back in action,

Grew could get back to his mission: saving an unusual piece of photographic equipment from extinction by producing it at a fraction of the usual cost.

Grew sells what are called large format cameras. They’re a piece of kit that originated in the 19th century. Back then, film-enlarging technology didn’t exist, so the only way to make a sizeable, high-quality photo was to take it on a big piece of film. And that meant using massive cameras.

The original design was basically a big box with a lens on one end and a place to put large bits of film on the other. As simple as it sounds, it was able to take some seriously impressive shots, particularly of landscapes (check out the work of Ansel Adams for proof ). The thing is, though, the cameras also had a few drawbacks: they were really heavy and hard to lug around. That meant that when smaller, more convenient models entered the market in the 1960s, most of the old manufacturers stopped making large format cameras. Prices soared, and only an elite club of diehard fans continued using them.

And that’s how things might have stayed, had Grew not had his novel idea. It came to him while he was studying product design at university. He needed to make a working gadget for a class project. He’d always wanted a large-

scale camera, but could never afford one.

So, he decided to kill two birds with one stone.

Grew constructed the device using inexpensive birch wood and computer-controlled machines. It was so lightweight and cheap to make that he decided to put the design online, and see if anyone else might be interested in one. To his surprise he was inundated with requests. And just a few months later, he and his friends found themselves in that stifling hot workshop with the faulty dust extractor.

In truth, it actually wasn’t the only time things had gone awry. In April, the Intrepid team also got in a bit of bother when they took off to the Isle of Skye in Scotland. The plan was to climb up Beinn na Caillich – a perilous scree – and take some test shots. They were only halfway up when the fog set in, and they lost their path. “We realised all we had on us was a tiny bit of cheese and a packet of crisps,” Grew remembers. “We were sitting there for an hour thinking, ‘This could be it.’ Then it cleared, and we got some really nice pictures.”

It was a rattling experience. But it also forced Grew to slow down and become attune with nature. And, in a way, that’s what large format photography is all about. “It takes a lot of time,” Grew admits. “But there’s a kind of therapy to it. I think a lot of people have bought into that because they want a bit of escapism.” • 085

SMITH JOURNAL

great man of history FUTURIST AND INVENTOR BUCKMINSTER FULLER SAW HIS LIFE AS ONE LONG EXPERIMENT THAT HINGED ON A SINGLE QUESTION: HOW MUCH GOOD COULD HE CONTRIBUTE TO HUMANITY BEFORE HE CARKED IT. THE ANSWER, AS IT TURNED OUT, WAS QUITE A LOT. Writer Leta Keens Illustrator Sara Hingle

BORN: July 12, 1895, Milton, Massachusetts ............................................

DIED: July 1, 1983, Los Angeles ............................................

AS A KID, RICHARD BUCKMINSTER FULLER JR WAS CONVINCED HE LIVED IN AN EXCEPTIONALLY FUZZY WORLD. A PAIR OF COKE-BOTTLE GLASSES EVENTUALLY SOLVED THE PROBLEM. BUT EVEN AFTER THAT, HE ALWAYS HAD A SPECIAL WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS. Depending on who you ask, Bucky – as he was known to virtually everyone – was either a genius or a crackpot. On one hand, he was the engineer/mathematician/architect/ cartographer who invented the geodesic dome and was a consultant for NASA. On the other, he was the guy who thought evolution was a load of rubbish and that dolphins were descended from early humans. Whatever side you come down on, however, there’s one thing that’s irrefutable: the man was one of the most unique figures of the 20th century.

Bucky’s talents surfaced fairly early on in life.

In kindergarten, he created a complicated geometrical structure out of dried peas and toothpicks, and was lauded as a mathematical

prodigy. He wasn’t exactly a typical nerd, though. He liked getting his hands dirty. A fair whack of Bucky’s childhood involved pottering around the woods, sometimes making tools out of the bits and bobs he collected. At the age of 12, he even came up with an ingenious way of propelling a rowboat using an umbrella.

When, as an adult, he was eventually accepted in to Harvard, Bucky decided not to major in maths, dismissing it as “too easy – just a sort of game you played”. Instead, he enrolled in humanities. It didn’t last long. In 1913, the university expelled him for throwing a massive on-campus party for a group of vaudeville dancers. Administrators graciously allowed him back two years later, but then ousted him again for “lack of sustained interest”.

Bucky never let the fact he didn’t graduate hold him back. After Harvard, he worked as a textile mill mechanic and a labourer in a meatpacking plant. The jobs taught him a lot about metals and tools – knowledge that would ultimately kickstart his career as an inventor. His first significant creation came during WWI: a device that helped navy ships rescue pilots who had crash-landed in the sea.

When that failed to catch on, he teamed up with his father-in-law, a New York architect, to manufacture bricks out of wood shavings. The business only lasted a year before it went bust.

It was around this time that Bucky, now 32, had some sort of a spiritual experience. Out of work and depressed, he found himself standing on the shores of Lake Michigan contemplating suicide. Suddenly he heard a voice inside his head. It said he didn’t have the right to kill himself, and that he had a responsibility to use his intellect to help others. “You do not belong to you,” it said. “You belong to Universe.” (In Bucky’s world, the word ‘universe’ always stood alone, capitalised, and with no ‘the’ in front of it – almost as if it were a person.)

The incident had a profound impact on Bucky.

He spent the next couple of years as a recluse, reading books and contemplating what to do with the rest of his life. A great social experiment began formulating in his mind.

It centred on a simple question: how much positive influence can one person have on humanity? At some point in the late ’20s, Bucky chose to devote his life to finding an answer.

One of the first steps of “the experiment” was creating a detailed ledger to record the results. Thankfully for Bucky, he was already an avid diarist. In his 20s, he created a running document called the Dymaxion Chronofile (‘Dymaxion’ is a combination of the words ‘dynamic’, ‘maximum’ and ‘ion’). >> 087

SMITH JOURNAL

DYMAXION MAP INSTRUCTIONS 1. POP THE MAP OUT 2. GLUE THE TABS AND ASSEMBLE 3. ENJOY

THE FULLER PROJECTION MAP DESIGN IS A TRADEMARK OF THE BUCKMINSTER FULLER INSTITUTE ©1938, 1967 & 1992. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, WWW.BFI.ORG

<<

In it, he logged his entire life. The idea was to create an entry for every 15 minutes that he was awake. “I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not,” he said. “So I must put everything in.”

The Chronofile grew exponentially after Bucky’s epiphany. By the time of his death, the thing was 200,000 pages long, containing notes and sketches, copies of letters, newspaper cuttings and even mundane scraps such as dry cleaning bills. It’s quite possibly the most detailed representation of a human life in history.

Some of the more significant notes in the Chronofile relate to architecture. Bucky saw this discipline early on as an effective way for him to change the world. In 1927, he started designing futuristic housing. One project was an apartment block, which could be transported anywhere in the world by zeppelin. Another, the Dymaxion House, was hexagonal in shape, portable, and made primarily out of metal. He only ended up building two prototypes of the house, one of which is now in a Michigan museum and looks a bit like an aluminium pumpkin.

After giving up on the Dymaxion House, Bucky’s focus moved to revolutionising the automotive industry. He built something called the Dymaxion Car, a three-wheeled vehicle that was meant to fly as well as run on the road. Unfortunately, it too had a short history – the prototype crashed after three months, killing the driver and seriously injuring one of the passengers, and only two further vehicles were ever made.

There was also a Dymaxion Map (pictured).

It depicted the earth on a single sheet without distorting the size and shapes of the continents.

To engender a more egalitarian attitude to the planet, it could also be reconfigured so that any region was at the centre. The map revealed a lot about Bucky’s worldview. In his words, it showed “a One-World Island in a One-World Ocean”. The continents were not separate but rather part of a singular system. Bucky often explained this with an analogy. “We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one,” he once said. “It took billions of years to develop. We’re not going to get another… Our fate is common.”

Around the same time Bucky patented the Dymaxion Map he also started developing his own system of geometry based on 60-degree angles, using the triangle as its basic unit.

From this emerged his most famous invention – the geodesic dome, a series of struts that lock together and support a covering skin. Even today, it’s considered the strongest and lightest means of enclosing space.

In 1953, the Ford Motor Company built the first commercial geodesic dome at its Michigan headquarters. It got a huge amount of press, and the structures started popping up all over the world. Even the U.S. government got in on the action. The Pentagon hired Bucky to design geodesic domes to house radar equipment, the U.S. Pavilion at the Montreal Expo in 1967 was a geodesic dome and the Marine Corps used lightweight portable domes as shelter.

The success of the geodesic dome made Bucky rich and cemented his place on the international lecture circuit. He enjoyed the travel associated with this new life, but sometimes had trouble keeping up with which time zone he was in. He solved the problem

in a typically unusual way. He took to wearing three watches at a time: one for where he’d been, another for where he was going and the third for wherever he was at the time.

In his lectures, Bucky occasionally spoke about the ways he hoped his domes could shape the future. He envisaged one day creating entire climate-controlled cities inside them (he reckoned settling people at the North Pole would help solve overpopulation). But for all their promise, the domes never did take off as housing. Their unconventional shape was a hard sell for most homebuyers. The numerous seams also meant waterproofing was a nightmare. Most of them leaked like crazy, including Bucky’s own home.

In truth, very few of Bucky’s creations fully achieved the purposes for which they were intended. His utopian vision for the future often conflicted with practicality. But it’s unlikely Bucky would care that he isn’t remembered as a great inventor. After all, he never considered himself one. He was more interested in encouraging people to view the world differently. He was more interested in being dynamic.

“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do,” he told an interviewer in 1972. “Think of the Queen Elizabeth [ocean liner … There’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

Just moving that little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. It takes almost no effort at all… If you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole ship of state is going to turn around.”

His headstone reads: Call me trim tab. •

“WE ARE ON A SPACESHIP; A BEAUTIFUL ONE. IT TOOK BILLIONS OF YEARS TO DEVELOP. WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET ANOTHER.”

great balls of fire YOU KNOW THAT SONG THAT GOES “CATCH A FALLING STAR AND PUT IT IN YOUR POCKET”? WELL, THERE’S A GEOLOGY PROFESSOR IN PERTH WHO IS TAKING IT LITERALLY, AND SCOURING THE DESERT FOR METEORITES. HIS NAME IS PHIL BLAND. Writer Dyani Lewis

091

SMITH JOURNAL

EVERY NEW CHUNK OF SPACE ROCK THAT’S DISCOVERED HAS THE POTENTIAL TO TEACH US MORE ABOUT THE SOLAR SYSTEM.

ON THE LAST DAY OF 2015, PHIL BLAND FOUND HIMSELF SPEEDING ACROSS AUSTRALIA’S LARGEST SALT LAKE ON A QUAD BIKE. IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN EXHILARATING, BUT THERE WAS SOMETHING THE GEOLOGY PROFESSOR COULDN’T GET OUT OF HIS MIND: HE FELT STRANGELY HEAVY. .........................................

The clothes on Bland’s back were caked in thick layers of mud. But that wasn’t what was weighing him down. It was worry.

Bland wasn’t alone. He’d travelled to Lake Eyre from Perth with a colleague from Curtin University and one of their students. He’d convinced the pair to join him by promising an exciting adventure. He said they’d be searching for a unique and valuable treasure.

But things weren’t going as Bland had hoped.

For three days, he and the group had endured the searing December heat without finding a thing. Morale was low. Everyone was exhausted. And now there was a new problem: a blanket of rain clouds was bearing down, threatening to bury their prize forever.

For a second, Bland contemplated calling the whole thing off and taking a moment to scream obscenities into the shimmering emptiness around him. But before he could, his radio let out a noise.

“We’ve seen it!” a crackly voice said. It was his colleague, phoning in from the cockpit of a light aircraft overhead.

Instantly re-energised, Bland dismounted his bike and started running, scanning the ground as he went. Everything seemed clean and featureless. Then he saw it: a small hole.

Bland fell to his knees and reached inside.

He began frantically removing handful after handful of mud. He sank his entire arm into the cavity – right up to the shoulder – and thrust his fingers through the clay. There was something down there. It was hard. He wrapped his fingers around it and pulled.

Bland had found what he was after: a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old meteorite.

It was a moment of sweet vindication.

For 15 years, Bland had been developing a way of tracking the space rocks that fell across Australia. He called his system the Desert Fireball Network. It consists of 32 cameras scattered across the outback; each is programmed to monitor the skies and send email alerts every time an object is observed entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

Bland had faith his fireball network would work – he’d already tested a pilot version on the Nullarbor Plain. But now he had cold, hard proof. And it weighed around 1.6 kilograms.

The question of why anyone would dedicate so much effort to finding meteorites is a complex one. After all, they aren’t exactly hard to get your

hands on. On eBay, you can pick up a shard of space rubble for as little as it costs to buy a coffee.

Want to flaunt your space oddities? Meteorite earrings might be for you. Want your kitchen to feel more cosmic? How about an extra-sharp knife forged from extraterrestrial iron?

The truth is, however, that meteorite collecting is still a hugely important field of scientific research. Why? Because every new chunk of space rock that’s discovered has the potential to teach us more about the solar system.

The reason for this has a lot to do with how meteorites were originally formed.

When the solar system was about 100,000 years old, a pancake-shaped disc of gas surrounded the sun. From this cosmic soup, molecules coalesced into globs, globs fused into rubble, rubble into clumps. These clumps grew into larger bodies that eventually collided and became the planets and moons. On the other hand, asteroids – the source of most meteorites – are the bits of matter that never went on to form planets. Their chemical compositions have remained unchanged for billions of years, and hence contain fascinating clues about what conditions were like at the very beginning of the solar system.

Aside from all that, there’s another reason meteorites fascinate people like Bland. It’s something more basic: the profound feeling that comes from touching an object that has travelled through the vastness of space. >>

Page 090-091 A meteor is captured flying across the night sky above Branchina Gorge, South Australia Page 093, clockwise Professor Phil Bland in the middle of Lake Eyre Martin Cupak configures a newly installed Fireball observatory at Sylvania in Western Australia Professor Phil Bland digs a new meteorite out from the mud under Lake Eyre Researchers walk to a new search zone between Coober Pedy and William Creek, South Australia Left The first meteorite found by the Desert Fireball Network All photos courtesy of the Desert Fireball Network

<< Of course, not everyone has the same reaction.

A sizeable section of the public finds the idea of rocks falling from the sky kind of frightening.

In fact, Bland is sometimes asked if his network could be used to warn authorities about incoming meteorites that could do damage to built-up areas. He has to patiently explain that it couldn’t. Bland only receives notifications from the network after an object starts burning up in the atmosphere. By then, it’s only a matter of seconds before impact.

In any case, even if the network could be tailored to perform this function, it wouldn’t be particularly practical; there have only ever been a handful of instances where space rocks have actually harmed anyone. Perhaps the most famous was when a meteor exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013.

It caused a window-shattering shockwave, and a flash of light 30 times brighter than the sun.

The damage bill: around $33 million.

As for someone actually getting directly hit by a meteorite, there’s only one recorded example.

It happened in 1954. A woman named Ann Hodges was napping at her home in Alabama when a cricket-ball-sized rock fell through the roof and ricocheted onto her side. Luckily, she survived with just a nasty bruise.

The meteorite that hit Hodges ended up being donated to the Smithsonian. It’s what Bland calls a ‘fall’ – a space rock collected by someone who knows exactly when it landed. They’re fairly rare in the scheme of things. Of the 50,000 meteorites that have ever been collected, there are only around a thousand ‘falls’.

Another – much more common – type are called ‘finds’. These are space rocks someone stumbled upon months, years, or perhaps millennia after they plummeted to earth.

The rarest meteorites, however, are ones that have had their fiery descents photographed (like Bland’s). These are valuable for two reasons. Through triangulation, scientists can often work out where these meteorites landed, and – more importantly – which part of the solar system they came from. That’s a big deal when you consider that space agencies spend billions of dollars on collecting reliable geological samples. If experts had a way to consistently decipher the origins of each meteorite that fell to earth, it would be a gamechanger. A space rock found in the desert could suddenly offer as much information as one collected by a distant probe.

The Desert Fireball Network isn’t actually the first system to offer this potential. Four similar tracking networks were set up in the

1960s and ’70s in North America and Central Europe. The thing is, though, they weren’t particularly effective. They recorded thousands of fireballs, but were useless when it came to directing scientists to impact zones. “They recovered, like, one meteorite in 10 years,” says Bland. Constructed near forests or grassy prairies, “they were built in pretty much the worst possible places for finding a little black rock on the ground”.

That’s what makes the Desert Fireball Network different. It’s spread over a landscape that is almost empty – a place where meteorites can’t hide.

Bland gives off a sense of pride when he explains that the system is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere. Like anyone with the belief that they are onto a good idea, he oozes enthusiasm for his work – better than being an astronaut, is how he describes it.

Of course, it isn’t all fun. After finding that first meteorite at Lake Eyre, Bland is now preparing for the next hunt. That means more hot days, more quad bikes, and more searching. The Fireball Network will give him and his team a hand on their journey, but it won’t guarantee an easy ride. No matter how well you stack the odds in your favour, Bland says, “you always roll the dice”. •

Photo courtesy of NAPSA

framed ink HOW WOULD YOU FEEL ABOUT HAVING THE TATTOOS OF A DECEASED LOVED ONE HANGING IN YOUR HOUSE? Writer Christopher Hollow

TATTOOS OCCUPY AN AWKWARD SPACE IN THE ART WORLD. THEY’RE ALMOST LIKE PAINTINGS WITH AN EXPIRY DATE. ..........................................

When a tattooed person dies, so too do the artworks on their body. The colours and lines are lost forever. The intricacies in the ink become a memory. They’re burned or buried – never to be seen or appreciated again.

This idea has never sat too well with Chris Hamm. He owns a tattoo parlour near Cleveland, and has a body covered in expertly rendered oddities. A proud gorilla takes up half his chest; the name ‘Clarence’ is scrawled below his collarbone; and his left arm is awash with rockets and planets.

For a long time, whenever Hamm looked in the mirror, it saddened him to think his family and friends wouldn’t be able to appreciate his tattoos after he was gone. He thought of all the time and money he’d invested in them – it just seemed like such a waste.

So, he decided to do something about it. In mid-2015, he formed an organisation called the National Association for the Preservation of Skin Art. Its purpose: increasing the longevity of great tattoos.

NAPSA’s approach is two-pronged. On one hand, the group focuses a lot of energy on encouraging people to take pictures of their tattoos and share them online. However, for some, photographs don’t quite cut it. They want to preserve the look and feel of the real thing. And that’s where NAPSA’s other service comes in. The group has developed a way for people to have their tattoos removed and framed after their deaths.

The actual mechanics of NAPSA’s preservation process are a little hazy. The organisation’s content director, Victoria Hilbert, says that a lot of the details are “proprietary”. But she is willing to say that the group works closely with funeral directors.

They’re the ones in charge of removing the tattoos, and bathing them in chemicals that prevent decay. The skin is then handed over to a pre-determined loved one, who can hang it up wherever they please.

So far NAPSA has removed around 20 tatts, and that number is slowly growing. Hilbert says she actually has plans to use the service herself when she passes away. She wants to preserve two of her tattoos, including one of a bird on her shoulder. “It’s a personal piece that I want to give to any children I may have,” she says. “The second tattoo is a peony flower and the start of a larger piece that I’d like to donate to a museum.”

The idea of gifting skin to a public gallery isn’t as radical as it sounds; there are actually quite a few tattoo collections on display across the world. One of the largest is at the Medical Pathology Museum of Tokyo University. It houses more than a hundred human skins tattooed in the traditional Japanese irezumi style, including many full ‘body suits’.

NAPSA has yet to offer the possibility of preserving an entire human hide, but that’s not to say there isn’t demand for it. Take Geoff Ostling (a.k.a. Heavily Tattooed Bear).

He’s a retired history teacher from Sydney whose body is almost entirely adorned with Australian wildflowers. When he dies, he has arranged for his skin to be flayed and donated to the National Gallery of Australia. “The taxidermist lined up to do it is an expert on the preservation of Australian marsupials and birds,” he says. “That’s an art in itself.”

Of course, such arrangements are not without ethical quandaries. One of the main ones is economic: if it becomes more normal for tattoos to be displayed in public, is it just a matter of time before they become commodities? Could tattoos end up being sold to collectors and galleries in the same way as Warhols or Picassos?

“I can absolutely see it happening,” Hilbert says. “Especially with the quality of work that’s coming out today.” • 097

SMITH JOURNAL

PREFER PIXELS? You can discover new articles, videos and adventures every day at smithjournal.com.au

www.smithjournal.com.au

THINKE RS. ADVEN TURER MAKER S. S. WRITER S. INVENT ORS. PAPER + PLANES OF NYC.

For fall dec stor en ade y pap s, of one a er pla ma city nes n in sco tra . His ure nsi coll d tion ecti the . on stre tell ets s the of New

Yor

k

in

sea

rch

of

SUBSCRIBE TO THE MAG

L IN OO SI K D E

Volume 18 of Smith journal is packed with interesting people and unexpected stories.

HOM E / AB OU T T HI S VOLU M E / S U B S CR I B E & S HOP / PAS T VOLU M E S / S T OCK I S T S / E - NE W S L E T T E R

WELCOME TO THE SMITH BLOG // ADVENTURE HISTORY SCIENCE D.I.Y. PHOTOGRAPHY DESIGN ARTS LIFE FACEBOOK INSTAGRAM TWITTER VIMEO

A WEEKEND AT THE SHACK If you’re looking for a bush getaway that comes with a mid-century caravan, a (refurbished) 1920s tram and a tiki bar, The Shack in Kyneton, Victoria is the perfect place. » READ MORE

SEARCH

LEARN HOW TO GROW AND PRESERVE FOOD WITH GROWN & GATHERED Ever wanted to turn your backyard into a workable farm? Or learn how to pickle food? Grown and Gathered’s new workshops will show you how to do both.

POPULAR CATEGORIES ADVENTURE/ ARCHITECTURE/ ARTS/ AUSTRALIA/ BEER/ BOOKS/ CLOTHES/ DESIGN/ DIY/ EUROPE/ EVENTS/ FILM/ FOOD/ GIVEAWAY/ HISTORY/ LEARN/ LIFE/ MELBOURNE/ MUSIC/ PHOTOGRAPHY/ READ/ SCIENCE/ SHOP/ SUNDAY READING/ SYDNEY/ TECHNOLOGY/ THIRSTY THURSDAY/ UK/ USA/ VIDEO

Sign up to our fortnightly e-newsletter or find us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.

mine craft AN ESTONIAN ARTIST HAS COME UP WITH A CLEVER WAY OF DEALING WITH THE MARINE MINES LEFT OVER FROM WORLD WAR II: HE TURNS THEM INTO STRIKING PIECES OF FURNITURE. Writer Luke Ryan Photographer Birgit Püve

101

SMITH JOURNAL

IN A LOT OF WAYS, THE NAVAL CONTACT MINE IS A PERFECT WEAPON.

myself receiving orders for custom items from all over Europe.”

..........................................

Even though Karmin has now been making the pieces for over a decade, the process is still arduous. “Each piece takes around one and a half months to create,” Karmin tells me. “It’s very time and resource consuming.”

It’s simple to make, difficult to detect and – most importantly – built to last.

In World War II alone, more than 550,000 of the things were thrown into the world’s oceans.

They were deployed in such a haphazard way that even today, nobody knows exactly how many are still floating around. One thing’s for sure, though: there are a lot of them.

Since October 1945, mines have sunk or damaged 15 U.S. Navy ships. The things even wash up on European beaches from time to time.

They’re dangerous, bad for the environment and hard to dispose of – a nuisance by nearly every metric. But Estonian artist Mati Karmin has found a silver lining. He’s come up with a way of converting the weapons into something positive: comfortable pieces of furniture. “Mines are just this perfect form,” says Karmin. “A cylinder and two hemispheres – from that you can create almost anything.”

He’s not lying. Karmin’s business, Marine Mine, has a catalogue that includes everything from armchairs and beds through to cabinets, aquariums, toilets and an immensely creepy baby carriage (it comes with a mobile constructed from old hand grenades).

Karmin first started making mine furniture because of a fortuitous discovery. While waiting at an auto shop to have a flat tyre replaced back in 2002, he wandered around the back of an abandoned house and found a huge mine shell just sitting in the backyard. In need of a new fireplace, Karmin hauled the thing home and set about converting it into a perfectly spherical furnace.

Friends saw his handiwork and immediately wanted one of their own. “It started as a hobby, an idle art project. But then after a few years word started spreading and suddenly I found

Getting hold of the mines can be a hassle, too.

Most of the one Karmin uses come from an ex-Soviet fortress on the island of Naissar, just 15 kilometres from Estonia’s capital, Tallinn.

The place was originally part of a Russian plan to control the region by filling the Gulf of Finland with mines. And that means the base was once home to a huge stockpile of explosives.

Most of these weapons ended up being decommissioned and sold for scrap metal when the Soviets retreated in 1993. But a few were just left sitting on the island.

Back in the mid-2000s, acquiring the mines was fairly easy, and Karmin bought a bunch.

Times have changed. The weapons are now extremely rare. “There are so few left that are in good condition,” says Karmin. “The ones I own are probably the last of them. But at least this way they won’t be forgotten.”

Even the mines that Karmin does have are pretty rough. After decades of neglect, they’re covered in rust. In fact, one of the first steps in the furniture-making process is cleaning this layer off. After that Karmin gets to work precision-cutting, welding and detailing. “We do everything by hand, using the same small crew of craftsmen and upholsterers so that all the furniture has the same look.”

Karmin is reluctant to pin any one philosophy on his work, although he does say it’s intrinsically linked to the rhythms of the Baltic Sea. “The sea is this living contradiction. It has brought us wealth, but also conquerors. It is alluring, but has killed so many. We own it, but can never control it.

I just wanted to catch a small fragment of that with my furniture. To take this destructive thing and transform it into something beautiful.” •

Page 101 Mati Karmin with his dog, Ruts Right, clockwise A desk made by Karmin One of Karmin’s fire places

iconic symbol

Writer Chris Harrigan

IN 1976, THE UNITED STATES CELEBRATED ITS 200TH BIRTHDAY. IT WAS A JOYOUS OCCASION, BUT ONE THAT PRESENTED AN UNUSUAL PROBLEM. ........................................

Authorities were expecting thousands of international travellers to fly in for the festivities. Many of them wouldn’t speak English. All of them would need to find a bathroom when nature called.

People from the Department of Transport had nightmares about confused tourists clogging up airports and train stations looking for a place to relieve themselves.

They desperately needed a way to succinctly point out the location of public toilets (and other facilities) without using a single word of English. And they needed it fast.

Two graphic designers, Roger Cook and Don Shanosky, were approached for the job.

There wasn’t much money for the project, but the chance to leave their mark on the country’s most vital infrastructure was too good to pass up.

Cook and Shanosky’s first step was to look at different toilet signs around the world. Most included images of men and women. But they varied widely from toilet to toilet.

Restrooms in England, for instance, were often adorned with pictures of top hats and lavish fascinators, while toilets in Poland

opted for the more abstract – slightly raunchier – triangles and circles.

The duo soon realised their symbol needed to be free of any cultural baggage. It also had to be simple, so that it could be read quickly and from a distance. That left one obvious option: the stick man.

The figure they settled on was so basic that it became known as ‘Helvetica Man’ – a reference to the rounded, no-thrills font used on most of the world’s street signs. Helvetica Woman followed soon after. She was created by adding a triangular dress.

The toilet symbol was finished.

Once Helvetica Man had been cast for the role, Cook and Shanosky were able to use him as the basis for other symbols the DoT needed. By donning a hat and a sash, he could represent airport customs. Putting a passport-sized book in his hand made him an immigration official.

Throughout the process, Cook and Shanosky refined their designs hundreds of times. It was a gruelling process, but one that clearly worked. After the symbols were installed in a few key transit centres, they spread outward across the rest of the country. Before long, Helvetica Man and his friends were adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the global body in charge of global warning signs. They were now international celebrities.

Given how effective the toilet symbols have been, you might think that people would have stopped trying to improve them. But designers are a competitive lot. Some have redrawn the figures with their knees bent, as if trying to keep their bladders from exploding. Others have chosen to be more explicit about anatomy. But none of these updates have matched the pared-back simplicity of Cook and Shanosky’s originals.

There is one symbol, however, that could maybe do with a makeover. The International Symbol of Access, also known as the Wheelchair Symbol, has recently come under fire by disability activists for depicting wheelchair users as being too passive. In the current, ISO-approved symbol, Helvetica Man’s head dangles from his neck with an unnatural stiffness, and his posture makes him look like he needs to be pushed around.

So, a group of activists have gotten together with some designers and drawn up a new symbol. In their version, Helvetica Man is leaning forward, and his arm is positioned backwards, as if he is moving independently.

Whether ISO will ever adopt the symbol, however, is unclear: it would have to first be approved by the organisation’s technical committee, then by symbols experts from across the world, and finally by each of ISO’s member countries.

It’s proof again that coming up with something that looks simple is usually anything but. • 105

SMITH JOURNAL

beating the odds WHEN JASON BARNES LOST PART OF HIS ARM IN AN ACCIDENT, HE THOUGHT HIS DRUMMING DAYS WERE OVER. BUT THEN HE CAME ACROSS A PROFESSOR WITH AN INGENIOUS SOLUTION. Writer Paul Edwards Photographer Troy Stains

JASON BARNES DOESN’T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT THE ACCIDENT. ..........................................

All he can recall is that it happened while he was servicing a restaurant’s exhaust fan in Atlanta, Georgia. He had rubber waders on and was standing in a small puddle of water.

Everything was going fine. Then there was a pink flash of light.

Around 22,000 volts of electricity entered through his left arm and exited the right side of his body. It took him a day to wake up.

The damage to Barnes’s right hand was so severe that it was rendered unusable, and the decision was made to amputate. The worst bit: when Barnes wasn’t working as a repairman, his greatest passion in life was drumming.

Trying to play music after his amputation was enormously frustrating. But Barnes got some solace in knowing he wasn’t the first drummer to try overcoming such a setback. Def Leppard’s Rick Allen famously managed to carry on performing after losing his arm in a car crash. He did it by building a drum kit with a complex set of foot pedals. Barnes chose to employ a different method. At first, he tried taping a drumstick to his stump. It was a struggle – without his hand, he couldn’t do basic things like moderate how hard he hit the skins. But getting back on the stool felt so good that he didn’t give up. He started dreaming about ways he could get better. He started dreaming about a robotic arm.

He spent a month in hospital, and when he was released, despondency set in. “I was extremely depressed. I ended up losing my house because I couldn’t pay any of my bills, and I moved back in with my mother.”

That’s when a guy called Gil Weinberg came in to the picture. He’s a robotics expert from Georgia Tech’s Robotic Musicianship group.

His biggest claim to fame is developing a marimba-playing robot named Shimon that can listen to and actually jam along with other musicians. “Jason had a teacher who saw my work with robots online,” Weinberg says. “He contacted me because Jason had been talking about the idea of a robotic arm.”

After a while, Barnes got sick of feeling shitty.

He made a concerted effort to snap out of it, and move forward. “You can only be depressed for so long, you know?” he says. “I was like, ‘What the hell,’ and I dragged my drum kit out of the garage.”

Barnes and Weinberg were introduced and immediately got to work. In nine months they had a prototype. The design centres on two sticks. The first stick works through a series of sensors that pick up electrical signals from the muscles in Barnes’s arm, responds to those

signals, and establishes the beat. The second stick – like Shimon – has a mind of its own; it listens to the music, detects the tempo and improvises its own rhythms.

It’s a powerful combination. Barnes is now able to achieve rhythms he couldn’t have dreamed of before the accident. For example, he can perform three distinctive stick patterns at once. Feats like these have earned him a new moniker: the cyborg drummer.

But the technology that powers the arm doesn’t sit well with everyone. A recurring question from critics is whether or not a robot can ever truly improvise music with soul.

Weinberg challenges the premise of these arguments. “Soul is the heart of music,” he says, “but maybe soul is a quantitative thing, and the more computation you get, the smarter you get – at some point you develop something that is like soul.”

Weinberg emphasises that his creations are not an attempt to replace humans, but rather the opposite. “We want to inspire humans through interaction with robots, and, whether it’s robots like Shimon or Jason’s arm, to make humans better musicians.”

On this point, Jason couldn’t agree more.

“The arm has opened up a lot of options for me in terms of playing styles. The possibilities are endless.” • 107

SMITH JOURNAL

calypso THERE’S SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A MAN AND HIS BOAT. FOR PROOF, YOU NEEDN’T LOOK FURTHER THAN JACQUES-YVES COUSTEAU’S LOYALTY TO THE GOOD SHIP CALYPSO. Writer Andy Isaacson

IN WES ANDERSON’S MOVIE THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU, BILL MURRAY PLAYS A MAN WHO IS AN EXPERT ON “EVERY ASPECT” OF THE OCEAN. ..........................................

He travels the world conducting dives, making documentaries and studying creatures of the deep. His life is so exciting that it seems like the stuff of pure fantasy. Except it isn’t.

It’s based on the adventures of French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

For over 40 years, Cousteau and his teams explored the riches of the world’s oceans. He searched submerged caves in the Caribbean, found shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea, and swam with sharks in the Indian Ocean. His documentaries made his fans feel like they were right there with him. Viewers got to know his sense of humour, his arsenal of equipment and his crew. They also became familiar with Calypso, the boat that Cousteau took on nearly every one of his exploits. The vessel actually became so famous that John Denver wrote a song about it. “Aye Calypso the places you’ve been to,” it goes. “The things that you’ve shown us, the stories you tell.”

Calypso started life as Royal Navy minesweeper. But after the Second World War, it was turned into a ferry that serviced the

Maltese coast. That’s where Cousteau found it. With the help of an Irish millionaire, he acquired the ship and outfitted it with a “false nose”—an underwater observation chamber built around the prow. He also bestowed it with a motto, Il faut aller voir: ‘‘We must go and see for ourselves.”

From its maiden voyage in 1951 until the 1990s, Calypso logged over a million nautical miles. The boat encountered breakdowns, hurricanes, and sand banks; in the Suez Canal, she was almost mistakenly sunk during the 1956 Egypt-Israel conflict. But throughout everything the Calypso stayed strong.

Well, almost everything. In January 1996, Calypso was anchored in Singapore’s harbour when a passing barge accidentally pierced its hull. The boat that had explored many shipwrecks suddenly became one itself.

Cousteau wished to see Calypso repaired, but he never managed it. The famed explorer died the following year, after which the boat was towed to France. Two decades passed of ownership disputes and lawsuits. Meanwhile, the boat’s wooden frame was left to moulder.

Then, this past January, came happy news from the Cousteau Society, run by Cousteau’s widow Francine: Calypso will sail again! Finally financed and fully refurbished, the iconic ship is expected to leave its shipyard home by summer of 2016 “to begin its new life.” Il faut aller voir. • 109

SMITH JOURNAL

my influences: john safran ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST TALENTED WRITERS AND DOCUMENTARY MAKERS HAS ALWAYS HAD A THING FOR PEOPLE WHO PUSH THE BOUNDARIES. Interviewer Adrian Craddock Illustrator Timothy Rodgers

WRITE LIKE THE MASTERS

by William Cane If you’re a young writer, sometimes you get this feeling that everything you do has to be completely new. It’s almost like no one is allowed to know what your influences are.

But this book by William Cane explains that you don’t really have to feel like that.

It explains that many famous writers, from Hemingway to Shakespeare, have published works that were clearly inspired by other people, and there is no shame in that. When I read that, it really affected me – it made me think, “Hey, if I just cop to the fact that I have all these influences I might be able to do something interesting.” ..........................................

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK As a kid, I used to watch this movie on videotape every weekend. I’d just watch it again and again and again. It actually made me want to become an archaeologist for a while. I remember one time in grade six I was talking to my parents about what I wanted for my birthday. I loved Michael Jackson, so getting a book about him was one option.

But the other thing I was considering was a whip, because Indiana Jones had one. In my head, it felt like a really big thing. It was like, “Am I going to become an entertainer or an archaeologist?” I ended up getting the Michael Jackson book. So maybe that was the turning point.

PICTURE STORIES FROM THE BIBLE

by M.C. Gaines There are a few religious texts that have had a big impact on me. I came across this one when I was at Sunday school. It is like a comic strip version of the Bible stories. All the colours and stories in it are so vivid. The book starts with a panel that says something like, “In the beginning there was nothing and then God created light.” When I first read that I started thinking, Hang on, what happened before that panel? What happened the day before day one? That was the start of me being fucked in the head about religion. ..........................................

IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLIONS TO HOLD US BACK

by Public Enemy I wasn’t a wild or dangerous kid. I was kind of the opposite. I was quiet and always tried to be polite. So, hip-hop represented something really interesting to me. One of the first things that really challenged me was Public Enemy. I’d listen to it and there were all these bad words. Who knows? Maybe it steered me down the wrong path. Maybe my work would be more politically correct now if I didn’t listen to all that stuff. ..........................................

ANSWER ME!

by Jim Goad and Debbie Goad Around the time I was 18, I used to go down to this bookshop on Brunswick street called PolyEster Books. One day I was in there

and they had this zine called Answer Me! It did this thing I loved: it was aimed at the counterculture, but it also mocked the counterculture. It just pulled the rug out.

I thought it was really funny. It was actually created for the audience it was attacking. It was almost like, “You reading this zine right now, you’re a phoney. You think you’re so much better than the mainstream, but you’re not!” ..........................................

STEAL THIS BOOK!

by Abbie Hoffman I never wanted to be a filmmaker when I was growing up. But in 1997, an opportunity arose. I saw this ad on the ABC saying they were looking for young filmmakers who had never been on TV before. So I sent something in and got a spot on Race Around the World.

When they told me I was accepted on to the show, I had to work out what I was going to do. What inspired me was some of the things I had consumed when I was in university.

One of them was a book called Steal This Book. It was by a guy called Abbie Hoffman, who was part of this group in the ’60s called the Yippies. They did a lot of pranks. Hoffman once did this thing where he convinced a lot of people to come to the Pentagon – they were going to hold hands and try to levitate it.

I just soaked all that stuff up.

>> 111

SMITH JOURNAL

<<

ROGER & ME

by Michael Moore When I came back from Race Around the World, people said I had to watch this film called Roger & Me, where Michael Moore goes and confronts the chairman of General Motors. So, I watched it and thought it was really great. But I feel a bit conflicted about Michael Moore these days. On one level, we’re using the same toolbox. On the other hand, he’s much more sneering. He often just tries to reassure his audience that they are on the right side of history. My stuff is kind of the opposite of that. I try to make my audience feel a bit disorientated. ..........................................

THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY

by Erik Larson I bought this book a few years ago because it had the word ‘devil’ in the title. At first, I just thought it was about the history of the Chicago World’s Fair in the late 1880s. But once I got further in, it became apparent that it was about this killer, H.H. Holmes.

He worked out that all these crowds were going to come to Chicago for the fair, and he enjoyed murdering people, so he built a hotel to lure them in. Anyway, I read this book and I just remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” And at the end it said, If you were wondering how I reconstructed all of these events so vividly, I based it on a technique that Truman Capote used. And that led me down a bit of a rabbit hole… ..........................................

IN COLD BLOOD

by Truman Capote I used to always think that I should only read non-fiction because then I’d learn something.

It was almost like, “I can’t waste my time reading fiction!” But In Cold Blood made me start thinking differently about that. It

showed me how someone could write non-fiction in the style of a novel.

Today, you think, “Who cares! Everyone does that.” But at the time it was published, that was quite interesting. ..........................................

MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL

by John Berendt After I read In Cold Blood, I went on Amazon and was looking around. And at the bottom of the screen was one of those boxes that said, If you like Truman Capote, you might like these other books. One of them was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. So I got it. The story goes that the writer, John Berendt, had just decided to move to the American South for some reason and while he was there a murder happened. After that he kind of goes around and meets all these colourful yahoos, and paints a portrait of the town. When I read all this, I thought, “I really want to do a book like this.” The problem was I didn’t know what to write about. It’s kind of embarrassing – even back then, I already knew about the death of Richard Barrett, the guy I eventually wrote about in my book Mississippi Murder, but I didn’t realise that he would be an interesting subject. I actually spent about two weeks walking around Melbourne asking people if they knew about any murders. I was that slow. ..........................................

MUSIC VIDEOS

by Spike Jonze Before Spike Jonze directed Her and Being John Malkovich, he did a lot of video clips.

They are a huge influence for me. The thing I liked about him was that he was alternative but he wasn’t pretentious. He realised that the problem with the mainstream is that it can sometimes be a bit plastic and unemotional, so he made films that were warm. I kind of attempted to follow that. It didn’t really work, though, because everyone thinks I’m a sarcastic arsehole. But at least I tried. •

SPIKE JONZE MADE FILMS THAT WERE WARM. I KIND OF ATTEMPTED TO FOLLOW THAT. IT DIDN’T REALLY WORK, THOUGH, BECAUSE EVERYONE THINKS I’M A SARCASTIC ARSEHOLE.

quack devices THE MACHINES USED BY MEDICAL CHARLATANS IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY WERE OFTEN CREEPY AND BEAUTIFUL IN EQUAL MEASURE. Writer Paul Edwards Photographer Matthew Johnson

STEVE ERENBERG OWNS A SMALL MUSEUM IN UPSTATE NEW YORK THAT LOOKS A LITTLE LIKE AN S&M DUNGEON.

electricity were still being explored. “Electricity was considered the wonder drug of its time,” says Erenberg. “A patient would feel something happening and they’d think it was healing them.”

..........................................

One the most graphic symbols of this trend is what Erenberg calls the “Quack Shock Helmet” (pictured). It looks like a prop from A Clockwork Orange, with a metal headpiece and two cups that cover the wearer’s eyes. The machine’s inventor claimed that it cured various ailments by shooting sparks of electricity around the brain. In truth, all it did was cause pain.

It’s called the Radio Guy Collection, and it’s pretty much an accumulation of different curiosities that he’s picked up over the last 30 years. At first glance, the place doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason; it contains everything from prosthetic limbs and gas masks to vintage radios and anatomical models. But if you look closer, it is possible to pick out one field that Erenberg has a particular interest in: he’s among the world’s leading collectors of vintage quack devices – machines that claim to deliver health benefits, but, in truth, do nothing.

Most quack devices fall into two categories.

The first are gadgets that were created with a genuine intention to cure a medical problem but were later disproved. The second are items that were built by conmen who knew they were bogus, and just wanted to fleece suckers.

Erenberg’s collection contains both sorts. A big chunk of his wares come from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a kind of golden age for medical quackery. It was a period when scientists were still mapping the functions of the human body, and the medical applications of

In truth, the look of the devices is the main appeal for Erenberg. He isn’t a doctor or a scientist; he’s an art enthusiast with a background in architecture and advertising.

And to him, the machines are almost like sculptures – “tribal art” from the industrial age.

Erenberg actually has a thing for devices that deal with the head. In particular, he loves objects that claim to cure a condition that he personally suffers from: hair loss. Over the years, he’s picked up examples that range from the horrific (a headpiece that massaged the scalp with spiky pads) to the downright silly (a machine called the Head-Shaker, which works by – you guessed it – simply shaking the head).

Of course, not everyone has such a generous view of the machines. Throughout history, there have been many people who have devoted their lives to exposing quack devices. Perhaps the most famous is Bob McCoy, who, before his death in 2010, operated the Museum of Quackery in Minneapolis. He saw himself as an enemy of pseudoscience, fighting against the spread of ridiculous gadgetry with no scientific backing. One of his favourite things to do was demonstrate items from his museum on TV shows across America. For example, he once turned up on Late Night with Conan O’Brien with something called the Prostate Warmer: a blue light bulb that was designed to heat men’s privates, and improve their libidos.

The one thing that ties nearly all of these gadgets together is their aesthetic. They’re built to look as ‘scientific’ as possible, with dramatic-looking knobs, shiny metals and dark woods. The idea was to convince patients that they were receiving sophisticated treatments, which in turn allowed quack doctors to charge more money. “The things look better than they needed to,” Erenberg says. “There’s mahogany, there’s brass, there’s bevelled glass. They looked beautiful.”

In the end, McCoy never did manage to stamp out quackery. It’s still around today, although it’s more likely to take the form of strange diets and unproven supplements than elaborate machinery. Erenberg has no interest in these new fads. In fact, his collection of quack devices doesn’t contain anything made after 1930.

“Beyond that, it starts to just look like medical stuff you’d recognise,” he says. “It doesn’t have the Victorian steampunk charm to it.” • 115

SMITH JOURNAL

new horizons CALIFORNIAN ARTIST J.FREDE COLLECTS PEOPLE’S OLD PHOTOS AND ARRANGES THEM TOGETHER TO MAKE FICTIONAL LANDSCAPES. Interviewer Adrian Craddock

117

SMITH JOURNAL

How did the Fiction Landscapes project start?

I was shopping in a flea market in Hollywood and there was a guy who had bins of people’s old photos. There were just so many of them. He told me that he bought them from estate sales.

When people passed away, he went and bought their photos up. I was curious, so I bought a handful. And when I got home, I was laying them out and accidentally fell upon this process.

I figured out that I could draw lines between different landscapes that weren’t associated.

How has it worked since then? I sometimes look for images at different antique stores, but this guy has millions. It’s kind of insane.

So, I go down there nearly every Sunday, get as many as I can and create works.

What kind of photos do you look for? I’ve made about 20 pieces so far, so I’ve sort of learned what does and doesn’t work. There are certain elements I seek out, such as contrasts between the sky and the foreground. I also try to avoid ones that are people-heavy.

What is it about old photos that fascinates you? The images are almost like time capsules that we can never access. The context of each photo is stripped away, and the imagery

reveals very little about the person who took it. Some are very peculiar, and you wonder “What is going on?” You can’t help but daydream.

Do you have a favourite shot? There are some I haven’t used yet that are just sitting in my stack. One is of a man in a wheelchair going up a hill on a highway. One of my other favourites is a photo of a landscape that was painted as a backdrop for a 1950s rodeo show.

It’s like double fiction.

Do you ever use your own photographs?

No. I don’t want to curate my own life into it.

What other rules do you have? I do not alter the photos in any way. I never cut them or crop them or do anything like that.

I tried overlapping the photos in the early experiments, and quickly decided that was not the right way. That felt like a collage, and I don’t see the process as collage.

What’s the largest number of photos you’ve used in one piece of work? Probably around ten. It’s not that much harder to do longer ones. If the photos lend themselves, you could make the landscape go on forever.

How long does it take to create each work?

Some of them have taken months and months; others have happened instantly.

I’ll tape up some arrangements on my studio wall, or even in my living room, and just stare at them for a week. Sometime the next morning I’ll know it doesn’t work and I’ll take it apart and add it back to the pile. Other times I’ll live with it for a while and think, “Okay, that piece is actually done.” There’s a certain magic to it that I don’t know if even I understand.

What is your best arrangement? There is one with a guy on a horse next to a photo of a hot air balloon. That one I really love because both images are really beautiful.

Plus, the landscapes match perfectly. It’s so exact that it looks like I Photoshopped it.

It’s just wild.

What do you hope people take away from the works? I hope people have an emotional reaction to them. I hope that they can see the work and feel the same kind of magic that I feel when I see it. I’m unapologetically sentimental. A lot of people in art really steer away from that. But I have no issues with it whatsoever. •

119

SMITH JOURNAL

121

SMITH JOURNAL

grapes of wrath THE MYSTERIOUS WORLD OF WINE FRAUD IS FULL OF CHEATS, HIGH ROLLERS AND DODGY BOOZE. Writer Ben Birchall Illustrator Karolis Strautniekas

THOMAS JEFFERSON HAD A THING FOR EXPENSIVE VINO. IN FACT, THE FOUNDING FATHER ONCE WENT AS FAR AS DESCRIBING “HIGH FLAVOURED WINES” AS A “NECESSITY OF LIFE”.

and Bill Koch (brother of billionaire political donors Charles and David) both snapped up bottles, as did the publisher of Wine Spectator magazine. They cost in excess of $100,000 each.

..........................................

There were a few slight problems, though: there was no definitive proof that the initials etched onto the bottles were legit, or that the wine was as old as it was claimed to be. Many of the people who bought the wines chose to ignore these concerns. But, in 2005, the truth finally surfaced.

With that in mind, it doesn’t take a genius to work out why Jefferson thoroughly enjoyed his time as a diplomat in France. During his tenure, he supposedly made a point of building an incredible wine cellar. He bought bottle after bottle from the country’s most famous vineyards – Lafite, d’Yquem, Mouton, Margaux – and had each of them engraved with his initials.

For centuries, it was unclear what happened to this collection. Had it been completely consumed? Had it been gifted away after Jefferson returned to the U.S. in 1789? It wasn’t until the 1980s that a German music mogul named Hardy Rodenstock claimed to have the answer. He said that an associate of his had found the bottles hidden inside a bricked-up chamber in Paris. And, according to him, they were almost perfectly preserved.

When Rodenstock put his find up for auction, wine collectors from around the world came running. Christopher Forbes (son of the American entrepreneur Malcolm Forbes)

There was talk of exhibiting a few of the bottles in a museum, and someone thought it would be a good idea to check their authenticity. Uncomfortable questions were asked. Historians were consulted. And the wines were found to have been engraved with a modern dentist’s drill.

Suddenly, the collectors’ investments didn’t seem so sound. They’d been stung by a swindle that goes all the way back to Roman times: wine fraud.

It’s difficult to gauge exactly how common such crimes are – wine fraudsters aren’t big on publishing annual reports. But most experts agree that it’s more widespread than the public would expect. Some even go as far as saying

that up to five per cent of all wines sold are not what they appear.

There are two ways to perpetrate the crime.

The first: refilling the bottle of an expensive wine with something that’s inferior. The second: label fraud. The Wine Forger’s Handbook describes this as “pouring cheap stuff into a fake bottle with a fake label that imitates the good stuff ”.

It’s a risky business, and it takes a certain person to pull it off. Maureen Downey has met them all. She runs Chai Consulting, a business that helps big wine collectors manage their inventories. Her talent for spotting counterfeits has given her the nickname the Sherlock Holmes of Wine.

Downey reckons there are a few distinct categories of wine fraudster. There are the “too good to be true” types who invent fancy-looking wines that don’t actually exist in real life. There are the “sense of history” types who trade on significant names like Jefferson’s. Then is the “greed” type, who artfully recreates rare wines for people with big chequebooks.

Then there’s Rudy Kurniawan – all three rolled into one. >> 123

SMITH JOURNAL

<< Downey first encountered Kurniawan, the world’s most notorious wine swindler, in 2000. “He was buying $40 or $50 Napa Valley merlot,” she says. “And then in 2002 all of a sudden he had all of these 1940s and ’50s Pomerols, and that just doesn’t happen.”

Back then, Kurniawan was a mysterious figure. The only thing people knew about him was that he was in his early 30s and born in Indonesia. That, and he somehow had access to the world’s rarest wines.

Over time, Kurniawan’s star rose. He began driving a Lamborghini, wore Hermès suits and attended exclusive parties. (He always turned up with a rare vintage or two.)

Of course, the whole thing was based on a ruse. When Kurniawan was eventually arrested in 2012, authorities discovered a counterfeiting factory in his house. His kitchen was full of doctored corks, traditional French wax and fake labels, some of which he had printed on his home computer. There was also a book that explained how to make good wines taste like exceptional wines through the art of blending.

Part of what allowed Kurniawan to get away with it for so long was the nature of his clientele. A good chunk of them – even those who were experienced – didn’t actually know much about the flavours of ultra-rare wines.

“The people who were drinking all this had no clue what 1947 Lafleur is meant to taste like because so few people have ever gotten to drink it on more than one occasion,” says Downey.

“If there’s one thing that we can definitively say after all of this counterfeit wine stuff is that no one can taste for authenticity. No one.”

One of Kurniawan’s other weapons was confidence. He managed to align himself with some of the wine world’s most reputable names. So, when people saw his bottles at auction, they felt assured that they were making a safe purchase. It wasn’t until Kurniawan started making mistakes that people second-guessed him. For example, in 2008, he tried selling a vintage from the ’40s with a label that didn’t even exist until 1982.

Kurniawan was ultimately jailed for ten years.

It was the first time someone in the U.S. had been incarcerated for wine fraud. The conviction sent shockwaves throughout the wine trade, engulfing big-timers far and wide.

David Doyle, co-owner of Rockpool Bar & Grill in Sydney, spent millions on Kurniawan’s wines.

Bill Koch was also burnt again. He purchased a vast quantity of French wines from Kurniawan, many of which he ended up describing as “moose piss”.

The arrest led to many vintage wine traders reassessing the way they authenticate their inventory. “You have to look for inconsistencies,” says Nick Stamford, managing director of Australian wine auction house MW Wines.

“You have to think, ‘Is this wine as old as the label says?’”

So what’s the secret to spotting a fake? Spit.

Or at least that’s what Downey says. She reckons polishing a bit of saliva onto the neck of a bottle helps her see inside. That way she can examine the cork, label and sediments for things that look out of place.

Elsewhere in the industry, technology is coming into play. Winemakers are trying everything they can to protect the collectors of the future, including fitting their bottles

BILL KOCH PURCHASED A VAST QUANTITY OF FRENCH WINES FROM KURNIAWAN, MANY OF WHICH HE ENDED UP DESCRIBING AS “MOOSE PISS”.

with trackable microchips and special rings that indicate when a bottle has been opened.

Philippe Hubert, a physicist at the University of Bordeaux, is even testing the age of wine by measuring the gamma rays it emits. As terrifying as it sounds, he looks for minuscule traces of something called cesium 137 – a radioactive isotope that only entered the earth’s atmosphere after the atomic bomb was dropped. No cesium 137 = the wine was definitely made prior to 1945.

But to Stamford, even testing for gamma rays doesn’t necessarily fix things. “One of the issues is that even Rudy would still use old wine to refill a bottle. He’d use a 1984 average vintage from an average chateau, and put it in a bottle of 1982 Petrus (worth US$3,000$5,000). A gamma ray is going to say that’s the right age. It’s just not the right wine.”

Downey is even more skeptical of the new technology. “Nobody gets a bottle of wine and takes it to get gamma rayed,” she laughs.

“I think if anything, technology is going to make the life of a counterfeiter much easier. Because producers who depend on technology to protect their brands are just emboldening and giving counterfeiters substantiation in the future.”

Indeed, it seems like counterfeits will always be difficult to spot. But there’s solace in knowing that the world’s greatest forger is behind bars, right? Downey’s not so sure.

She reckons the $50 million worth of counterfeits that Kurniawan admitted to selling might only be a drop in the ocean.

“There is millions of dollars of Rudy’s wine that’s still out there. None of it’s been destroyed. How scary is that?” •

the power glove NINTENDO’S MOST INFAMOUS VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER WAS MORE THAN JUST A PLAYTHING. IT WAS THE PUBLIC’S INTRODUCTION TO A REVOLUTIONARY IDEA: VIRTUAL REALITY. Writer Paul Verhoeven Photographer John Harland

THE FIRST THING THAT STRIKES YOU WHEN YOU PUT ON THE NINTENDO POWER GLOVE IS THE WAY IT FEELS. YOUR ARM IS INSTANTLY TRANSFORMED INTO A MASHUP OF DARTH VADER AND A VHS PLAYER.

musical notes and even interpret sign language. A few investors expressed interest, including Atari. But Zimmerman ultimately chose to join forces with a self-professed hippy, programmer and experimental musician. He was Jaron Lanier – the man who coined the phrase “virtual reality”.

teenage video game savant who hustles his way across America. In one scene, the hero butts heads with Lucas Barton, a pre-teen idol and gamer whose signature affectation is a proudly brandished Power Glove. In the film’s most quoted moment, Barton tells Fred Savage’s character, “I love the Power Glove. It’s so bad.”

Together, Lanier and Zimmerman started a company, and developed the glove’s applications further. One of its first contracts was with NASA, which wanted to use the glove to control robots. A few medical research companies bought the device, too. They wanted to use it to study hand tremors.

The line was intended ironically, but it actually turned out to be true. Mattel’s Power Glove was bad. It used cheap parts, and wasn’t nearly as effective as hoped. When it was released, gamers found it hard to use.

..........................................

It’s an addictive sensation – and a big part of why the Power Glove ultimately became one of the most famous game controllers in history.

The other reason? At the time of its release in 1989, the device offered something the world had never seen before: a way for people to interact with their screens through hand gestures. It opened the door for a major technological breakthrough: virtual reality.

The earliest prototype of the Power Glove was made by a young inventor named Thomas Zimmerman in 1982. Back then, he had just graduated from M.I.T. and was having trouble finding work. One day, while tinkering in his parents’ garage, his mind drifted back to an idea he had while studying: a machine that allowed people to play air guitar and actually make music. He thought he’d have a stab at making the concept a reality, so he combined an old gardening glove with ten dollars’ worth of electronics.

His creation impressed everyone who saw it.

Among other things, it could play basic

It was Mattel, however, that really took the glove into the mainstream. The toy company first came across the device in a pitch meeting, and saw it as a way to expand into the video games scene. The story goes that a marketing executive was invited to try it out with the boxing game Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! She thrust her fist towards the television and knocked her virtual opponent out in one blow.

Shortly after, Mattel decided to license the device, and partner with Nintendo to make it into a video game controller.

The Power Glove was introduced to the world through a massive promotional campaign.

Most memorable was a film called The Wizard, which was basically a feature-length Nintendo commercial. Staring Fred Savage, it’s about a

The other problem was that only one game was made specifically for the glove. This meant the controller’s capabilities were never fully realised, and its popularity didn’t last. After only about 12 months, Mattel discontinued production.

The Power Glove dream still lives on, though.

A small community has arisen around those who modify the glove to perform modern functions. For example, Dillon Markey, an animator on the cult TV show Robot Chicken, has turned his into a tool for stop-motion.

A couple of DJs also use the glove to make electronic music. Some people have even adopted the Power Glove as a bold fashion piece. Our advice: if you see one of these brave souls wandering down the street, it’s worth giving them a high five. Just don’t be surprised if they don’t reciprocate. Those things are collector’s items. • 127

SMITH JOURNAL

opinion

GILLIAN WELCH ON HOW BEING ADOPTED SHAPED HER MUSIC. Interviewer Adrian Craddock

I DON’T REMEMBER EVER BEING TOLD I WAS ADOPTED. I JUST REMEMBER KNOWING. ..........................................

It must have been explained to me at some stage, so that I would understand, but I was clearly very young. I must have been a toddler.

I always knew the story: My [adoptive] parents were told they couldn’t have any more kids after my sister was born by caesarian, so they tried to adopt. But they were musicians, so the agency would never give them approval. One night, they performed on Jack Paar’s talk show, and after they were finished, the next guest was the comedian Bob Newhart, with whom they’d toured. Jack said something like, “Mitzie and Ken Welch – aren’t they wonderful?” and – on national TV – Bob said, “Yeah, they’re wonderful. You know, they have been trying to adopt a baby for years and haven’t been able to.” A very pregnant 18-year-old college girl saw that and contacted my parents the next day. She said, “I have a baby for you. It should be born in about two weeks.” It was me.

How did being adopted affect my music? It’s complicated. It takes many forms.

For one, I had a very musical childhood. My mom and dad both played piano. They both sang. It was their careers, but beyond that they truly loved music. My mom, who has passed away now, she would just sing everywhere. You would go out to the grocery store and she’d be singing while she shopped. As a kid it was embarrassing. Now, of course, I do the same thing. I sing on the street, and sing in public, and don’t think about it. I have a song in my head, and I end up singing it out loud.

The other thing about my adoption is I became emotionally independent at a young age. I was always just a tiny bit apart, just a tiny bit different. That has permeated all the way through the way Dave Rawlings and I play.

Ever since Revelator, we made all of our records ourselves. We started our own label when the majors were starting to crash. It even goes to stuff like when we went on tour in Australia we drove ourselves. There was no tour bus.

People said, “I can’t believe you’re going to drive for 20 hours or whatever. Aren’t you going to be bored?” And I said, What are you talking about? I’ve virtually never been bored in my life. I’m fascinated with everything. I’m good at looking. I am a very patient viewer of the world.

The circumstances around my birth gave me some aspect of that – why I look at the world the way I do. I understood at a very early age that the world is a mysterious place.

In some ways, I feel like I kind of made myself – because when you’re adopted you don’t look at your family and say “Yep, this is who I am.

This where I came from.” You really have to ask yourself, “Who are you? What are you?”

In fact, I’ve never known anyone who I was related to by blood. Even now, I occasionally wonder what it would be like to look at your brother and see the same eyes staring back at you, or to look at your grandma and see the same hands.

The truth is my background kind of made me more of a humanist. I’ve got no problem singing a 150-year-old folk song, because I have full confidence that people are going to connect with it. We’re all flesh, blood and soul. We’re all the same. • Gillian Welch is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. She lives in Nashville.

I BECAME EMOTIONALLY INDEPENDENT AT A YOUNG AGE. I WAS ALWAYS JUST A TINY BIT APART, JUST A TINY BIT DIFFERENT. 129

SMITH JOURNAL

how to move a museum HOW DO YOU TRANSPORT A COLLECTION OF PRECIOUS MUSEUM ARTEFACTS FROM ONE LOCATION TO ANOTHER? AS NORWEGIAN PHOTOGRAPHER HELGE SKODVIN RECENTLY FOUND OUT, IT’S A MASSIVE PAIN IN THE ARSE. Writer Chris Harrigan

131

SMITH JOURNAL

IN 2013, THE STAFF AT THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM IN BERGEN, NORWAY, FINALLY GOT AROUND TO A TASK THAT THEY HAD BEEN PUTTING OFF FOR A LONG TIME.

..........................................

They decided to renovate the elegant but dilapidating mansion the institution had called home for nearly 150 years. The job wasn’t as easy as just calling in the builders, though. First, there was the matter of what to do with the menagerie of taxidermy animals that resided within its walls. The collection, parts of which dated as far back as 1850, was priceless, and the museum’s curators had nightmares about a clumsy tradesman accidentally snapping off an antler or tripping over a preserved tortoise shell.

So, a decision was made: all the specimens would have to be moved and placed into storage. It would not be an easy job. The collection included animals of almost every class, from tiny invertebrates through to towering giraffes. To complicate things further, many of them were in less-than-perfect condition, and their hides were brittle. There was also the issue of scale: the museum was used to moving items from time to time, but a mass migration of this size was almost unheard of. It was a logistical challenge of the highest order.

Nearly everyone involved felt daunted by the undertaking. But when local photographer Helge Skodvin heard about it, he had a different reaction. He saw it as a unique opportunity to take some incredible pictures.

Like many people who grew up in Bergen, he’d always had a special place in his heart for the museum, having spent his childhood exploring its dimly lit halls. “It was a magical place,” he remembers. “The idea of roaming through it by myself felt like I was getting the keys to my childhood fantasy.”

So, he decided to ask the museum if he could document the move. At first, administrators were hesitant; they were concerned that he’d get in their way. But with some convincing, they finally agreed.

The move began at a glacial pace. Items had to be assessed, carefully wrapped and carried out of the building one at time. The best estimates said the whole process would take a year, minimum. This would have been troublesome for any other photographer. But Skodvin, who lived just 200 metres from the museum, wasn’t fussed. “At the start of every day I would text the head of the project, and they’d say, ‘Oh, today we’re doing the elephant,’ and I’d grab my camera and just come running.”

Aside from the project manager, Skodvin also formed relationships with other people involved with the move, particularly five specialists who were called in from Sweden and Denmark.

These women were experts in the world of museum conservation, and helped handle many of the animals. “They had to be really careful,” he remembers. “You weren’t allowed to touch the animals with your hands, and it took a long time to do anything.” Some of the older beasts, which had been preserved using cyanide, even needed to be cleaned by a massive vacuum cleaner before they could be handled, in case any toxic dust particles were disturbed during the move.

Health risks aside, Skodvin felt extremely lucky to be able to witness the move. It was a rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain, and capture the fascinating world of museum logistics. He came to appreciate the armies of people it takes to function – insurers, cleaners, truck drivers, curators, and movers. All of them have to perform their role perfectly for things to go smoothly.

In many ways, what Skodvin saw was just a larger version of what every museum goes through when it sends items out on touring exhibitions. The goal is the same: to get an extremely expensive object from point A to point B without damaging it.

Probably the most challenging moves are those which involve fine art. On these jobs, the process starts with temperature. Paintings are usually kept at a constant of 21 degrees Celsius. But this can be a challenge when works are travelling from, say, European winter to Australian summer. To minimise the risk, professional art handlers will often build customised, temperature-controlled crates for each item. These boxes can take hours to construct, and can almost be considered works of art themselves.

Security is another thing that’s taken very seriously. When a contractor is paid to handle the transportation of a museum piece, they’re expected not to let it out of their sight.

“When we send items overseas, we actually have airport clearances which let us go out on to the tarmac with the item, and watch things being loaded into the plane,” says Ian Charman, the business development manager at IAS Fine Art Logistics, Australia’s biggest art transportation company. “We note where each item is on the plane, and wait for it to take off. We even stick around for half an hour afterwards just to make sure it doesn’t return.”

Of course, even with all this care, mistakes do occasionally happen. In 2000, two porters at Sotheby’s in London accidentally destroyed a highly collectable Lucian Freud painting when they thought the crate it was being stored in was empty, and fed it into a crusher.

The Natural History Museum in London has had its share of mishaps, too. Back in 2013, the skull of an extinct bison was broken while it was being moved to another location. Not long after that, a display of insects was also damaged in transit during an exhibition.

Lorraine Cornish felt these incidents more acutely than most. As head of conservation at the Natural History Museum, she helps oversee the safe handling of more than 80 million precious specimens. >>

SMITH JOURNAL

Photo courtesy of Helge Skodvin/Moment/INSTITUTE

133

<< Recently she’s been involved in one of the most challenging moves of her career. For the past 37 years, a dinosaur skeleton affectionately known as ‘Dippy’ has greeted visitors to the museum. But in 2015, the decision was made to send Dippy on a tour around the country.

This means that every one of her 292 bones needs to be taken down, checked for structural issues, and packed up.

The task should take a team of five just a couple of weeks to complete, but it’s what’s going to replace Dippy that is eating up most of Cornish’s time. If all goes to plan, from 2017 visitors will be greeted by another massive skeleton in the museum’s main hall: a giant blue whale. Currently, the whale is in another wing of the museum, suspended six metres in the air. Cornish’s first job was to work out how to get it down – no easy feat given that the skull alone weighs almost two tons.

“We spent a year planning everything before we moved it down,” she says. It’s required a

lot of what Cornish calls “whale watching” – walking along the skeleton just looking at it and thinking. Only after talking with engineers did the process of taking it down, bone by bone, finally begin. “You can predict what you think might happen,” she says. “But on the day, sometimes it just doesn’t go your way. You’ve got to be flexible.”

It’s a chaotic process, moving large, delicate and inestimably expensive artefacts around, but it’s one that Cornish says makes her job all the more satisfying. “There’s always the unknown,” she says. “It’s how you approach it that’s the challenge.” It will take another year to finish moving the blue whale into its new position, and Cornish knows she has a lot of work ahead of her. But, she says, she’s compelled to see it out. “It can be a very emotional journey, working with these old objects. You get very intimate with them, crawling around them, lifting them, cleaning them. You bond with them.” Experience tells her how she will feel when the project is finally complete: “extremely happy, but also bittersweet”. Letting go can be hard.

Skodvin’s experience in Bergen bears this out, too. He was amazed at how tenderly the conservators treated each item, all the while coming up with ingenious ways to get the job done. “They invented things as they went along,” he says. When some of the larger members of the animal kingdom wouldn’t fit through the museum’s doors, holes were cut through walls. The next stage was to freeze the animals, to make sure any pests living in their fur didn’t come with them. But the museum’s freezing facilities were too small to accommodate the whole brood. Calls were made, some favours were pulled, and a solution was eventually found: an ice cream factory in the city agreed to take them in for three weeks.

These days, all the animals are safely locked away in a temperature-controlled, fire-proof warehouse. They will stay there for another four years, at which point the migration will occur again in reverse, and the museum will reopen. That process will likely be every bit as labour-intensive as the evacuation. Here’s hoping that when it happens, Skodvin will be there again to record it. •

WIN ONE OF FIVE LAMPS

SUBSCRIBE TO SMITH JOURNAL Do stories about thinkers, makers, and adventurers light up your life?

Then subscribe to Smith Journal and you could win one of five protractor lamps (RRP $320 each) from the good folk at Page Thirty Three (pagethirtythree.com). Designed and handcrafted in Australia, they are the perfect companion for a late-night reading session.

A one-year subscription costs only $47.80 and includes free postage.

FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS & PAST VOLUMES, FREE CALL 1800 069 918 OR VISIT SMITHJOURNAL.COM.AU/SHOP Price is valid for Australian customers. For international prices, please see our website.

listen up: courtney barnett EVERYONE’S GOT A SONG THEY’RE A BIT EMBARRASSED TO ADMIT THEY LIKE. WE ASKED ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S MOST BELOVED SINGER-SONGWRITERS TO DISCUSS HERS. Interviewer Paul Edwards Illustrator Timothy Rodgers

I PROBABLY FIRST HEARD CYNDI LAUPER ON THE RADIO WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN SYDNEY. ..........................................

I wasn’t really listening to a lot of pop music at the time, because my parents were mostly into jazz and classical. So, when I started hearing other stuff it was exciting. And ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ was one of the first things like that.

More than anything, the song just made me really happy. I remember dancing around to it with my friends. It felt like the whole thing was about us. It was like, “We are girls, and we want to have fun. This song couldn’t be more tailored to us.”

Life was pretty straightforward back then.

I was just going to school, hanging out with my older neighbour, and playing tennis on the weekends. I think I was too young to appreciate Cyndi Lauper as a feminist icon or anything like that. Even today, I only really know about her hits. I don’t even know what I’d say if I met her. Maybe I’d just say, “Good work. You’ve done some amazing stuff in your

life.” I really try not to idolise people or put them on a different level.

The ideas of fashion and popularity are really complicated to me. They’re both just weird contests amongst people. And when it comes to my own work, I try not to think about those kinds of things too much. I try to just write songs for myself – I write music that I want to listen to. And if you can let go of the outcome – how people are going to judge it – then that is great. But, realistically, it’s a pretty hard thing to totally put out of your mind.

Music can be weird sometimes. There is good stuff out there that goes totally unnoticed and there is bad stuff that gets praised undeservedly. I guess, in the scheme of things, Cyndi Lauper isn’t considered as cool as some other bands. People can be a bit funny about the ’80s. There were a lot of crazy things going on, but there were actually some good songs. Plus, if there hadn’t been the ’80s there wouldn’t have been the ’90s.

There wouldn’t have been this desire to do something that was the opposite.

Did ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ actually influence the way I write? I don’t think so.

Well, maybe. It is just such a perfectly crafted pop song, isn’t it? It’s such a catchy hook. You might forget the verse but you’ll never forget that chorus. I’ve always been a fan of a good chorus. For example, I loved Nirvana as a kid.

And if you think about it, they just play heavy pop music. Their songs are so catchy, but they are delivered in a heavier way.

I’ve never tried to actually learn how to play ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, but it would be a fun one to cover. It probably wouldn’t sound as good. It would be really hard to get the same attitude and vibe. Sometimes people think the simpler a song is, the easier it is to learn, but often that isn’t the case. If I did it, it would probably sound like a high-school cover band.

But I definitely think it’s good to have a copy on hand for special occasions. It’s good to just put it on every now and again and remember how sick a song it is. It is just so over the top.

It gives off good vibes – party vibes. It gets you in the mood to dance. • Courtney Barnett is a singer-songwriter based in Melbourne. Her debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is available through Milk! Records.

by Jake D.

©2016 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.