The Red Bulletin February 2014 - US

a beyond the ordinary magazine

february 2014

swell times zipping up in Alaska’s frigid surf scene

hardpop

beats, bass, and hope in the city of juarez

10 YEARS? LIKE! Celebrating a decade of Facebook

WINTER’S

WARRIOR Snowboarder Jeremy Jones and the quest to save our seasons

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TUNE IN SUNDAY FEBRUARY 2ND 3:30PM ET/12:30PM PT REDBULLSIGNATURESERIES.COM

THE WORLD OF RED BULL

28

Alaska surfING

No sun? No problem.

A die-hard group of surfers brave single-digit temperatures and take on the waves off of Homer.

Scott Serfas (cover), Scott Dickerson, Greg Von Doersten

analog boys

For years, Jeremy Jones explored peaks via helicopter and boarded down faces no one thought possible. Then he began to rethink his carbon footprint and ponder the future of his sport. The result was a return to mountaineering and getting up peaks the old way. But he didn’t stop there. On page 58, Jones tells us about his nonprofit Protect Our Winters and the uphill battle he’s waged to change minds both within and outside his industry on climate change. He’s not the only exceptional throwback talent in our pages this month. If photographer Ian Ruhter’s jawdropping landscapes (page 44) recall Ansel Adams, it’s because the camera he uses is as analog. And fills the back of a truck. Wait, no. It is a truck. Enjoy ... the red bulletin

“ Climate change

is not this far-off deal.”

Jeremy Jones, p. 58

05

february 2014

48

at a glance Bullevard 10 ten Years of facebook You like? We like. Mostly.

longboardING

At the World Longboarding Championships in Brazil, skaters put it in four-wheel drive— downhill.

Features 28 Alaska Surfing

Braving the icy winter waves off the coast of Homer

42 Blitz Kids

British pop punks turn it up for 2014

44 Ian Ruhter

Developing a mobile photo lab 75 mph on a skateboard. Downhill

58 Jeremy Jones

74 hardpop club

In crime-ravaged Juárez, one nightclub manages to attract world-class DJs to perform to a packed house.

10 Ten Years of facebook

Expanding from one dorm room to a billion users, Facebook—for good or for ill—changed how we interact.

The backcountry snowboarder fights climate change one slope at a time

66 Danish Spacemen

Aiming for the stars from the yard

74 Hardpop Club

Reviving Juarez at a vital nightclub

Action

66 dIY SPACECRAFT

Want to go to space but the whole NASA thing is kind of a drag? Just go ahead and build your own spaceship.

06

85 clubBING in cape town

By day, it’s a surfer’s paradise beach bar—but at night Aces’n’Spades transforms into a rock ’n’ roll haven.

84 85 86 87 88 90 92 93 94 96 98

Get the gear Robby Naish nightlife Cape Town, South Africa travel Sharkdiving off of San Diego training Reggie Bush WFL World Run Ready, set, go!

My city Vienna music Broken Bells gaming Sleep is for the weak Buyer’s guide Watches save the Date Events for your diary magic moment Mark Webber

the red bulletin

Thiago Diz, Katie Orlinsky, zhu Jia ‘The Face of Facebook’, Copenhagen Suborbital, press handout

48 Longboarding

FOR

EVERY

THERE

ARE

POUND SIX

OF

ALGAE

POUNDS

OF

RISEABOVEPLASTICS.ORG PHOTO:

ZAC

NOYLE

IN

THE

PLASTIC

OCEAN

contributors Who’s on board this issue

The Red Bulletin United States, ISSN 2308-586X

The Red Bulletin is published

by Red Bull Media House GmbH General Manager Wolfgang Winter Publisher Franz Renkin Editors-in-Chief Alexander Macheck, Robert Sperl Director of Publishing Nicholas Pavach U.S. Editor Andreas Tzortzis Deputy Editor Ann Donahue

Scott Dickerson

Marcelo maragni & thiago diz Excitingly styled and incredibly courageous. That’s how the two photographers described the “tribe” of longboarders in Teutônia, Brazil. “I was surprised how fast the riders were,” says Maragni.

His colleague Diz adds: “They thundered past me so closely that the draft felt threatening.” One of the riders even torpedoed Diz’s camera bag. “I needed 10 minutes to collect my stuff again,” he says.

Get rolling on page 48.

bernd hauser His reporting from Africa has won awards, but Hauser’s commute to the job site was a bit shorter this time. The Danish space center, where Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen work, is less than a mile away from Hauser’s apartment in Copenhagen, so he cycled.

What impressed him the most was the scientists’ endurance: “They’ve been working for years on their crazy project. Despite all setbacks they get up to work every morning.” Aim for the skies on page 66.

08

Among the lucky few who get to combine their passions with their career, photographer Dickerson expounds on his shots of surfing in Alaska.

“Growing up surrounded by the wild beauty of Alaska, it’s no surprise I chose photography as a career. How I became so passionate about surfing remains somewhat of a mystery, even to myself. The only explanation I can offer is that some of us are just born with a love of the ocean.” See how Dickerson and his crew ride the frigid surf on page 28.

Copy Chief David Caplan Production Editors Nancy James, Marion Wildmann Managing Editor Daniel Kudernatsch Assistant Editors Ulrich Corazza, Werner Jessner, Ruth Morgan, Florian Obkircher, Arek Pia˛tek, Andreas Rottenschlager Contributing Editor Stefan Wagner Contributors Lisa Blazek, Georg Eckelsberger, Raffael Fritz, Sophie Haslinger, Marianne Minar, Boro Petric, Holger Potye, Martina Powell, Mara Simperler, Clemens Stachel, Manon Steiner, Lukas Wagner Creative Director Erik Turek Art Directors Kasimir Reimann, Miles English Design Martina de Carvalho-Hutter, Silvia Druml, Kevin Goll, Carita Najewitz, Esther Straganz Chief Photo Editor Fritz Schuster Photo Editors Susie Forman (Creative Photo Director), Rudi Übelhör (Deputy Photo Director), Marion Batty, Eva Kerschbaum Repro Managers Clemens Ragotzky (manager), Karsten Lehmann, Josef Mühlbacher Head of Production Michael Bergmeister Production Wolfgang Stecher (manager), Walter O. Sádaba, Christian Graf-Simpson (app) Finance Siegmar Hofstetter, Simone Mihalits Marketing & Country Management Stefan Ebner (manager), Elisabeth Salcher, Lukas Scharmbacher, Sara Varming Marketing Coordinator Kevin Matas Distribution Klaus Pleninger, Peter Schiffer subscription price: 6 USD, 12 issues, www.getredbulletin.com, subscriptions@us. redbulletin.com Marketing Design Julia Schweikhardt, Peter Knethl

Katie Orlinsky It’s not the first time we’ve relied on photographer Orlinsky for a tricky assignment in Mexico. After shooting pointy boots enthusiasts in dangerous narco drug-war territory in northern Mexico for the Bulletin’s January edition last year, we asked the veteran of conflict zones to head to Juarez for this month’s story on the Hardpop club. “A few years ago, I wouldn’t have left my hotel room after sundown. And there I was photographing at a nightclub. It was surreal.” Lights out, page 74.

“A few years ago, I wouldn’t have left my hotel room after sundown.” katie orlinsky

Advertising Dave Szych dave.szych@us.redbull.com (West Coast) Michelle Koruda michelle.koruda@us.redbull.com (East Coast)

Advertising Placement Sabrina Schneider Printed by Brown Printing Company, 668 Gravel Pike, East Greenville, PA 18041, www.bpc.com

The Red Bulletin is published in Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.A. Website www.redbulletin.com Head office Red Bull Media House GmbH, Oberst-Lepperdinger-Strasse 11-15, A-5071 Wals bei Salzburg, FN 297115i, Landesgericht Salzburg, ATU63611700 Mailing address PO Box 1962, Williamsport, PA 17703 U.S. office 1740 Stewart St., Santa Monica, CA 90404, (310) 393-4647 Austria office Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 (1) 90221 28800.

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For customer service customerservice@redbulletinservice.com Write to us: letters@redbulletin.com

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10 years of facebook

what are you up to?

Mark Zuckerberg

The man who did away with anonymity

shutterstock, Corbis, nasa, picturedesk.com, getty images

In February 2004, a student at Harvard put up a web page where users were expected to register with their real names and disclose personal details. It had to be a joke—who would be willing to do that, experts griped, and they waited for it to flop. That sophomore was Mark Zuckerberg; he is now a billionaire and Facebook is the most popular site on the web after Google.

1 Comment

The Red Bulletin “Great pic! Mark looks like a young Machiavelli. You can see more pictures by Zhu Jia and his friends in ‘The Face of Facebook’ at the ShanghART Gallery in Singapore.” facebook.com/shanghartgallerysg

Like us!

Friday Reads Every Friday, users post what they’re reading.

10

Who What Wear The trends on the world’s catwalks.

Stylefruits Great tips for her; eye candy for him.

George Takei From Star Trek to social media hero.

Milky Way Scientists Interesting shots, updated daily.

Awkward Family Photos The name says it all.

Bill Nye The Science Guy explains our world to us.

the red bulletin

Best of Retro-Future

Riddle

Who am I? He has the most Facebook fans in the U.S. Who is it?

(Turn the page for the answer.)

OLD SCHOOL DOCKING STATION An iPhone dock for everyone who wants to hold a real receiver. The dial comes via an app. etsy.com/shop/ woodguy32

Born:

Oct. 17, 1972

Joined Facebook:

Dec. 19, 2008

Number of fans:

78.4 million

Days in a coma:

10

Friends

getprojecteo.com

Valentine’s Day

Music

Joy and pain The songs users listen to most when they change their relationship status.

In a relationship

Status

1. Don’t Wanna Go Home by Jason Derulo “No matter day or night, I’m shining” 2. Love on Top by Beyoncé “Every time you touch me I just melt away”

Likes

3. How to Love by Lil Wayne “It’s hard not to stare, the way you moving your body” It’s complicated

Status

1. The Cave by Mumford & Sons “It’s empty in the valley of your heart”

INSTANT LAB The mobile photo lab.

It converts iPhone shots into Polaroids.

2. Crew Love by Drake “This ain’t no f--king sing-along.

So girl, what you singing for?”

the-impossibleproject.com

3. A ll of the Lights by Kanye West “Her mother, brother, grandmother hate me in that order”

I F**king Love Science Dinosaurs, space, sensational stuff.

the red bulletin

Getty Images (3), shutterstock (2)

sonymusic, idockit.com, Instant Lab, projecteo, CORBIS, hob, shutterstock (4)

Crazy in love: Beyoncé

PROJECTEO Choose nine of your Instagram pictures, wait a few weeks, and a slide projector the size of a matchbox arrives by post.

9Gag What makes Facebook laugh?

Lotsa gags.

Humans of New York There’s Humans of Berlin too.

Reef Girls Bikini models doing what they do.

24 Comments

Jamie Oliver New tasty recipes to cook up every day.

The Red Bulletin “Hmm, must be one of my friends. But then I don’t actually know all my friends.”

Grumpy Cat Laughing is infectious. So is a bad mood.

For the Record The Red Bull Music Academy’s new book.

Amazing Things in the World Pictures of the world’s wonders.

11

It is ...

Eminem In a head-to-head battle of Facebook popularity, rappers beat athletes in total numbers of fans.

Athletes

Michael Jordan 24.6 million

LeBron James 15.3 million

Kobe Bryant 17.3 million

Lil Wayne 48.7 million

Drake 31.6 million

Eminem 78.4 million

getty images (3), reuters (2), picturedesk.com (2), universal music,

Rappers

10 years of facebook

Bullevard

Social Circuit

Hackers and dogs

Mary Lyn added a new photo 2 minutes ago

There are more than 7 billion people in the world. Over a billion of them are on Facebook, and they could all become your friends. Even if you don’t want them to.

Forbidden Relations

What Facebook likes to delete

Have you ever wondered why one of your photos has disappeared?

Facebook has all content moderated by low-paid workers in countries such as Morocco and India. In 2012, one such moderator leaked the company’s guidelines to the press.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, FB ID #4 (numbers 1 to 3 are test IDs) was hacked in 2013 …

Some of the things that get deleted: Naked butts or nipples. That includes breastfeeding women whose nipples are visible.

Men’s nipples are OK. Camel toe, as seen on ladies with too-tight pants. People sitting on the toilet. Semen, drunk people, or people who are asleep and have had their faces drawn on by somebody. Illegal drugs. The one exception: All images of cannabis are allowed.

source: facebook

Boo is more popular than Beast (1.6 million likes).

Perhaps because Beast doesn’t wear blue Crocs like Boo, instead padding around barefoot, as does his owner, Mark Zuckerberg.

corbis, REUTERS (2), picturedesk.com (2), GEPA pictures, sony music, getty images

False nipple alarm. Wow, what a huge pair of … elbows. Mistaken for something else and deleted.

Share Lock shared a new post about an hour ago

The most popular dog in the world is Boo, with his perfect teddy-bear face.

The most beloved dog in the world is Boo, with over 8.5 million likes. This sweet hound’s popularity comes from his perfect teddy-bear face and positive attitude. “I am a dog. Life is good.”

... by a user with FB ID #77,821,884, one Khalil Shreateh. The Palestinian web developer promptly had his Facebook page deleted. It is active again and already has more than 44,000 subscribers, but …

… soccer team Real Madrid is way more popular, with the most Facebook fans among Palestinian sports enthusiasts at 185,056.

And they have over 44 million fans worldwide.

One of Real’s most loyal fans is none other than ...

Crime

Hook, line and sinker Don’t fall for the posting technique known as likejacking. Here are the five most common ruses: Win an iPad! Just fill out this questionnaire ...

Click here to see the shocking video (and to share it with all your friends).

Handsome stranger! I see your profile picture.

Me in love straight away. You marry me?

Do you want to see who’s visited your profile?

Download this software! (Not a virus, honest!)

Amazing! She’s only 16, but she did this!

Rap­per Pitbull, who, with 40 million fans, is the most popular dangerous dog on Facebook, is a friend of both CR7 and J Lo.

... her Facebook friend Cristiano Ronaldo is playing. The most expensive soccer player ever is also the world’s most popular sports star on Facebook, with over 65 million fans.

... Jennifer Lopez (28 million likes), who regularly jets to Spain for matches in which ...

Facebook to start charging. Pay now!

the red bulletin

13

Bullevard

10 years of facebook

Facebook World

The Light of Friendship It may look like a satellite picture of the Earth, but this is a record of Facebook usage. Every line represents a connection between two people on Facebook. The only dark places are uninhabited areas like the Sahara and Siberia … and countries where Facebook is banned, such as China.

Playing Games

Proceed with caution!

Facebook games are the new Solitaire: Computer games for people who don’t play computer games, and it’s very easy to become addicted.

Angry Bird hates the following games 2 hours ago 1. Candy Crush Saga The crystal meth of gaming. Your first fix is free, but then you’re addicted. The aim is to string together colorful sweets. Over 100 million players do so.

2. Pet Rescue Saga If Candy Crush Saga is meth, this game is crack with funny animals. The idea is to save them by stringing crystals together.

3. Dragon City This mix of Farmville and Pokémon is all about breeding dragons—but at least you don’t have to string anything together.

Don’t be fooled by pretty colors: Dragon City is a merciless time waster.

14

342 Friends

That’s what the average Facebook user has. In real life we only have six.

Ann Dead shared a last post 3 hours ago

Life Event: Death

Dying Online press handout, shutterstock (2)

In 50 years, will Facebook be the world’s digital graveyard?

The Facebook Zombies According to estimates, 10 to 20 million Facebook users have died since the social network was first conceived. Nobody knows how many of their profiles have been deleted and how many of these people are still haunting Face­book as ghosts. By 2065, at the latest, the number of dead users will outstrip the number of those living.

the red bulletin

The Suicide Machine This is how to delete yourself from the Internet.

You log in to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine website, via Twitter or Facebook, and that’s it. Doing so automatically deletes all your messages and friends on Facebook, blocks wall posts, and makes your profile private. Your last words go up as a message, namely that you are committing “web 2.0 suicide.” suicidemachine.org 12 Comments

Sign Out Forever “It’s no longer functioning perfectly on Facebook but we’re working on that.”

15

Bullevard

10 years of facebook Y

Self-help

Kainrath

= Yes

N

To post or not to post?

Can Talk

Great photo! You want to share it with everyone—which is fine. Just remember: The Internet never forgets.

Can I ask you out for a drink?

N

Is it of you?

Stop, thief!

Y N

Are there people in the picture?

Are you in the picture?

Y

Is there a woman in the picture?

N

Y Does it show a sweet little kitten with adorable little eyes?

N

Dietmar Kainrath “Real friends give it their best shot.”

N

Are you alone?

How old are you again?

Y

N

Y

Are you wearing clothes?

Y

Y 1 Comment

= No

Do you look good?

Y

N

Does she look good?

Y

N

N

Don’t do it!

Is she naked?

Y

N

Still alive and kicking

N

Y

Will it lead to protests by any of the following groups: Feminists, pacifists, socialists, environmental activists, capitalists, lobbyists, royalists?

Do you want to stay with her?

N

Y

N

Y

So could we say that what you’re posting doesn’t meet all social and legal standards?

N

N Can what you’ve posted be traced back to you?

Y

Are you sober? (Are you under the influence of any other substances?)

Y

N

Y

Are you sure it’s not boring?

If in doubt, you probably shouldn’t

N

Can you delete it later without a trace?

Y

Are you posting at work?

Y dietmar kainrath

According to hoax announcements on Facebook and Twitter, Justin Bieber died more than 50 times in 2013.

That’s more than any other pop star. The most common cause of death was a drug overdose. The next most common was a plane crash. After that, it was him crashing his Ferrari. Of course, these are just attempts by Bieber’s detractors to reduce his devoted fanbase to tears.

N

Is it your wife?

N N

No, you can’t!

Post it!

Has anyone seen you?

Y Don’t do it

picturedesk.com

It’s a nasty old world out there, and people like lying online because it’s just so easy.

Y

Is it boring?

Justin Bieber

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The 1,000-Year-Old Man

“Equating aging with death makes no sense.”

Cambridge scientist Aubrey de Grey’s research focuses on the abolition of aging. He believes that the first man who will live to 1,000 has already been born.

Don’t you think that we would be bored if we lived a long time?

This comes up a lot. I don’t think it is a sensible question.

Some people get bored now. They spend their life in front of the television. But that is because they have not been shown what life has to offer. I already have at least a thousand years’ backlog of things I need to do. I think it is crucial to give people a better opportunity to make the most out of life.

Would you like to live a thousand years?

I don’t have any idea how long I would like to live. The reason I don’t is because I know I’m going to have better information on the topic nearer the time. I have no idea whether I would like to live to 100. But I do know that I would like to make the choice when I’m 99 rather than having that choice progressively removed from me.

Why do you consider aging an illness? Isn’t it just part of a natural cycle?

People have this habit of somehow equating aging with death. But that makes no sense. Of course, death is the end product of aging. But it is also the end product of being hit by a truck. Aging is the accumulation of aging in the body, which the body is set up to tolerate to a certain amount. So the treatment of aging is obviously a medical problem.

Do you do any kind of social networking?

No, I am too busy talking to people like you.

1 Comment

Alphaville “Forever young, I want to be forever young.” www.alphaville.de

lukas gansterer

“I think it is crucial to give people a better opportunity to make the most out of life.”

18

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RUNNING FOR THOSE WHO CAN'T SIGN UP NOW! ONE DAY AT THE VERY SAME TIME ALL OVER THE WORLD

4TH MAY 2014 10:00 A.M. UTC

WINGSFORLIFEWORLDRUN.COM

Bullevard

10 years of facebook

BC One

Red Bull BC One

Body rocking The world’s best breakdancers faced off to crown the ultimate champion.

They can contort their bodies into poses like modern art sculptures and move muscles that the rest of us don’t know we have, far less know what we could do with them. They are the best breakdancers in the world and they went head-to-head in the Red Bull BC One grand finale in Seoul. It was local B-Boy Hong 10 who danced his way to victory with some incredible moves. There can only be one. One Red Bull BC One. We like!

Air Freeze shared a post 3 months ago facebook.com/redbullBCOne

20

Your friends might have long since become robots.

Or you could at least save yourself the bother of posting status updates because now there’s a website that does it automatically for you:

Romina Amato/Red Bull Content Pool, shutterstock

what-would-i-say.com

Bullevard

10 years of facebook

14 Alternatives

Up yours Is Facebook getting on your nerves? There are plenty of other ways of staying in touch with your friends.

Ning If ads annoy you.

There’s a charge, but then there are no more advertising banners that know more about your consumer habits than you do.

Friendica; Diaspora If you’re afraid of Big Brother.

Both are decentralized, which means that your personal details aren’t on a server; they’re stored on your own computer.

About.me If Facebook seems too much like hard work.

Your online business card. There’s no chat and there are no status updates or any other junk, but you do have a profile page.

App.net If you prefer to do it yourself.

It’s basically a simple short message service. Social media apps can be integrated, and there is developer access.

Part two of the fourth season of The Walking Dead starts this month. Facebook’s favorite zombie series by numbers:

51 episodes (to end of season 4) 7 main characters in the first season ...

3 ... of them are still alive 5.3 million people in the U.S. watched the pilot episode 16.1 million people in the U.S. watched the first episode

of the fourth season

10 gallons of artificial blood per episode

60 pairs of zombie contact lenses for the extras

121 issues of the comic on which it is based

126 countries broadcast it on TV 2 million+ followers on Twitter 21 million+ Facebook likes

“ If Facebook carries on like this, it will have disappeared in four years.”

Eric Jackson, the founder of Ironfire Capital, on the social network’s dwindling cool factor. Forbes.com, June 2013

Pheed If you want to earn some money for your updates.

Broadcast text, pictures, audio, and video live and receive money from users via subscription or pay-per-view.

Thumbs down

We don’t like everything

EyeEm If you’re too lazy even for Instagram.

The app recognizes your interests and suggests users’ photos you might like with different topics tagged. Couldn’t be easier.

Google + If you prefer to be alone.

The best social network out there … and nobody’s on it.

But at least you can get some real peace and quiet.

Between If you’re seriously in love.

Couples can send each other messages and pictures via their mobiles. A “love story” gradually takes shape. Sooo romantic!

Nextdoor If you like to stay local.

Share your data with your neighbors using your zip code and address. You could, of course, go out and talk to them instead.

PatientsLikeMe If you’re a hypochondriac, a doctor, or both.

Patients and medics can exchange opinions on ailments and illnesses and gather data for research purposes.

Gun Lovers Passions If you’re single and into guns.

A dating and social networking site for firearm enthusiasts.

A shot right in the heart. Sorry.

22

Stand: 11. 21. 2013

WhatsApp If you only use Facebook for chatting.

It looks like text messaging but uses your Internet connection to connect with people so it doesn’t show up on your phone bill.

Face off

Geoffrey berkshire

Snapchat If you don’t want your old photos to catch up with you.

Send pictures that automatically delete 10 seconds after they’re opened. Perfect for secret agents, sexters, and the paranoid.

The Walking Dead

A lot of stuff on Facebook is no good.

Let’s be frank.

The glut of invitations to events, pages or groups.

Sponsored links such as: “Do you want a hot girlfriend too?

Then consider this odd trick.”

No sooner have you got used to a new layout than Facebook comes up with another update.

Messages are marked as read as soon as you open them, which puts pressure on you to reply even if you don’t want to.

That there’s no dislike button. But according to Facebook, the like button will also soon be history, and we don’t like that at all.

1 Comment

The Red Bulletin “And what we don’t like is this constant complaining! If you don’t like it, you can quit—even if the button for it is hard to find.”

the red bulletin

Cinetext, Corbis (2), Universal Music, Getty Images, Getty Images

Instagram If you’re too lazy to type.

And prefer to post retro-filtered photos instead, of such vital things as what you had for dinner or your abs after a workout.

Rihanna

Like button legends

This diminutive woman is the world’s most liked person.

We’re cool with that.

For a long time Eminem and Rihanna changed places at the top, but now she’s surged ahead.

With more than 80 million likes, the singer is the most popular person on Facebook. She adds an average of 200,000 fans a week.

Chester French was the first band on Facebook.

The indie pop duo were students at Harvard in 2004 and were friends with Mark Zucker­berg, but they haven’t made the most of their social-media head start.

They’re currently at 60,000 likes.

Lil Wayne had a likable idea in 2011: He requested that, “Everyone, please ‘Like’ this post.” His fans obliged with 588,243 likes in 24 hours.

That’s nothing compared with Obama’s “Four more years,” which got over 4 million likes in a single day in 2012.

The most popular dead person on Facebook is Michael Jackson, who has 66 million likes. He was the first to reach the 10 million like mark, which he did in July 2009, a month after he died. Today there are even fan pages for Jacko’s favorite foods.

A Sea of Faces

No. 1.278.839.467 … and the number keeps increasing.

It’s a wonderful sight: As wonderful as all the universe, but a lot more colorful. One of those dabs of color is you—one of over 1.2 billion. That’s how many Facebook users there are now.

And you appeared on there, just as you appeared in this world, without you realizing.

Julian Broad/Farrell Music

thefacesoffacebook.com

24

This is you.

But you don’t know it.

10 years of facebook

Bullevard

This is Robbie Williams He turns 40 on February 13.

Happy Birthday! But maybe he’d rather mark the day alone.

His FB ID is #5,441,929,106, but he’s really No. 1, or has had nine No. 1 albums in the U.K., at least. (Still working on that whole U.S. thing.) His latest album, Swings Both Ways, is the thousandth No. 1 album in U.K. chart history.

Find out what number you are at: findmyfacebookid.com

Bullevard

Geoffrey berkshire

10 years of facebook

12 O’Clock Boys

“Show your strengths.”

American filmmaker Lofty Nathan financed his first work with the help of social media and crowdfunding.

Henry Rollins publicized 12 O’Clock Boys on Facebook.

12 O’Clock Boys will be available on video on demand starting Jan. 31.

There’s More Where That Came From

SEMAPHORE Napoleon was fond of this visual version of telegraphy.

A single letter could be sent over a distance of 175 miles in just two minutes.

100,000 years of social media

Every era believes itself to be the height of technical achievement and that nothing better will come after it. That is probably what people thought back in the Stone Age when they first daubed red paint onto the walls of their caves. A short history of communication: LANGUAGE “Lovely mammoth tusk!” Nobody knows when grunts evolved into full speech, but we’d definitely mastered language by the time we became Homo sapiens.

Noah Rabinowitz/Courtesy of 12 O‘CLOCK BOYS (2), shutterstock (4)

Social media isn’t just about status updates and posting selfies.

It can also make creative dreams a reality—take Lofty Nathan’s debut feature, 12 O’Clock Boys. The documentary follows Pug, a young guy from Baltimore who desperately wants to get in with an urban dirt-bike gang. Nathan collected money for the project via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter twice: $12,000 in 2010 and then another $30,000 three years later. After completing the film, he submitted it to the South By Southwest Film Festival, where it was heralded by critics and festivalgoers alike.

Musicians T-Pain, Jermaine Dupri, and Henry Rollins are just some of the stars who have publicized Nathan’s Kickstarter campaign on their own social media pages. Nathan’s advice to wannabe filmmakers also hoping for help from online funding?

“The most important thing is to have a trailer which shows your strengths.” There can be surprise benefits, too: “I met my girlfriend through Kickstarter.”

Pony Express The “horse mail” was discontinued within 18 months of opening. There were no upgrades, it was inflexible and just too slow.

Papyrus It’s light and easy to carry, advantages that meant the Vatican used it until the 11th century.

Cave painting Back in the Stone Age, coal drawings of buffalo were state of the art.

Now such attempts would be seen as vandalism.

The telephone “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Spoken by Alexander Graham Bell, this request was one of the first things anyone ever said on the phone.

April 3, 1860 – October 22, 1861 Pony Express

1793 – circa 1850 SEmaphore 150 BC – 1890 smoke signals

3,000 BC – 1100 Papyrus 4,000 BC – 100 AD INSCRIBED TABLETS 30,000 – 4,000 BC CAVE PAINTING 100,000

80,000

60,000

40,000

20,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4000

2000

100

200

300

400

BC

= 1,000 Years

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500

600

700

800

900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900

0–1900

= 100 Years the red bulletin

Fast Love

One of the fastest-growing apps for Facebook is Tinder; it’s a simple online dating tool that puts you in touch with people near you. You’re shown a picture of a potential match, use swipe actions to rate it hot or not, and then you hook up. Easy. gotinder.com

Facebook Facts

Numbers please!

Deutsches Museum, shutterstock (2), sony

dietmar kainrath

Facebook isn’t just ones and zeros. There are a ton of other figures powering the social network:

727,000,000 People actively using Facebook on a daily basis.

Kainrath

Am I in it?

People who visited Facemash, Facebook’s supposed forerunner. Mark Zucker­berg’s version of Hot or Not was shut down within days. But 22,000 votes had already been cast and he had to go before Harvard’s administrative board. The story is told in the 2009 movie The Social Network.

119 %

94025

Postal code for Menlo Park, Facebook’s home. The complex also just happens to be surrounded by a circular street called Hacker Way.

Percentage of the population of Monaco using Facebook; only 0.05 percent of China does.

That puts the principality in first place for number of Facebook users per population and China in last. There are way more Chinese people using Facebook (60 million) than there are people in Monaco (30,000; over 36,000 Facebook users are registered there).

500

Dollar value of prize awarded by Facebook if you can hack into the site.

Carrier pigeons Heroes of the air, up until the end of World War II, at least. A memorial in the French city of Lille honors over 20,000 fallen, cooing warriors.

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RGB color code of Facebook’s dark blue. Why is the website blue?

Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind.

Mobile phones Early models weighing 2.5 lbs.

(10 times heavier than an iPhone) could also be used as nutcrackers or dumbbells.

Tube mail It was conceived as a way of transmitting messages and is now experiencing a revival.

The system is popular in hospitals.

From June 2011 Google+ From November 2010 diaspora From March 2006 twitter From February 2004 facebook

TWITTER We became more succinct in 2006, getting our points across in 140 characters or less.

From July 2003 myspace From June 2003 second life From March 2002 friendster From 1973 Mobile telephone From 1964 XEROX FAX MACHINES From 1962 Paging From 1861 LANDLINES

SECOND LIFE More than 36 million avatars are on Second Life; about a million are still active.

1853 – 1965 TUBE MAIL 1847 – 2005 TELEGRAMS From 1837 MORSE TELEGRAPH From 1605 NEWSPAPERS 400 BC – 1980 Heliograph 2000 BC – 1945 CARRIER PIGEONS From 2400 BC letters

“Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”

HELIOGRAPH Communication using reflected sunlight. Last used by Rambo and the Afghans as they fought the Soviets.

From 100,000 BC human language 1900–1910

1910–1920

1920–1930

1930–1940

1940–1950

1950–1960

1960–1970

1970–1980

1980–1990

1990–2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

1900–2000

= 10 Years the red bulletin

2000 – the present day

= 1 Year

27

alaska surf city ?

During the long winter in Alaska—eight months of cold, 20 hours of dark every day—a Hearty group of surfers get their thrills by being chilled to the bone in homer . Photographer Scott Dickerson talks about surfing the shivering swell.

Words: Ann Donahue Photography: Scott Dickerson

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Because we live in a coastal town, it doesn’t really get super cold very often—I mean super cold by Alaska standards. We occasionally end up surfing when it is around zero degrees, and if it’s below zero, that’s a really cold day for us to be out on the water.

We never go surfing except for fun, so whenever it’s not fun anymore, we go home. It’s not something we do to prove it to ourselves, and it’s not some sort of macho challenge.

It’s something we enjoy doing.

The guy on the left is Kyle Kornelis and that’s in Homer, during a particularly cold winter. This shot, to me, is just really cool because of the ice on the beach, and he’s a burly lookin’ Alaskan dude. The tide changes on average about 15 or 16 feet— it goes up and down twice a day—so that ice extends way out into the water underneath. At low tide it’s all exposed and it freezes, and then the tide comes in and covers it up, so you have this big ice bank that goes out into the water.

Above is a trip I did with a heli-ski organization. They had a down day—they couldn’t be out skiing because of the snow conditions, so I showed up with a bunch of surf gear and we took a couple of the more adventurous ski customers out. We flew out, landed on the beach, and got a surf session in. They loved it.

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“The waves are generated 70 miles away from the beach, so it has to be blowing extremely hard out there for an extended period to actually get a good swell going.�

We take a lot of people out who travel the world surfing and they are always super, super stoked to be up here because of the wilderness experience. It does this sort of unexplainable thing where everything is so much more amazing when you’re in the water. It’s like you jump into the scenery.

It’s like surfing anywhere—sometimes we’ll surf as often as five days a week, and then we could go three or four weeks without a single surfable wave. It’s really unpredictable. We have our whole lives structured to where, if the surf’s up, we’ll stop whatever we’re doing and go surfing.

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the red bulletin

“I don’t know why I got so into surfing. I had never seen anybody surf in my life when I started playing around in the water.”

This is kind of a typical deal for us—the waves aren’t any good, but we’re out there anyway because it’s all we’ve got. That’s the thing of it—it’s so cool to be in such a beautiful place and then jump in the water.

The thing everybody mostly thinks is, you’re up in Alaska, it’s got to be so cold, but honestly, usually I’m warm. When I get out of the water I’m hot, and I’m like, ugh, get this wetsuit off.

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“I want to get in the water. I guess you’re just born to do something.”

The main thing about surfing in Alaska is that it is just so incredibly remote. There is nobody out. It’s just you and your buddy surfing. And that’s what the shock is when you go somewhere that surfing is popular—you go to the beach and there are 50 people in the water.

If you are cold after a session, you fill your suit with hot water from the tap and lay down—we call it the personal hot tub. It all floats around and covers your whole body in hot water. Once you are laying on the snow, though, it doesn’t last very long. After about 30 seconds you feel like, OK, I need more.

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“Ian Walsh got a few sessions in, And He loved it. He was really excited.”

Ian Walsh came up with John and Eric Jackson while filming Brothers on the Run, so we took those guys out on the MV Milo, the 58-foot boat that we use for surf trips. We go out and explore the coastline—it’s about pioneering, discovering waves, facing the elements, and surviving the storms.

“ T his was taken in homer in the middle of a snowstorm. A lot of times we surf where we can drive to the waves.”

The one sitting down is Kristi Wickstrom, and I believe that’s her dog. John Langham, standing, is in his early 50s, I think.

It’s funny that a bunch of old guys are up here surfing.

They’re tough old guys, for sure.

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It was too stormy in Homer, so we drove up the road 40 minutes into the Cook Inlet. The storm was so massive that the waves were about 10 feet high, and the beach was covered in huge chunks of ice 10 feet wide. That’s Mike McCune getting the gear out of the back of the truck.

Iceman lives right by the surf spot in Homer, and this is his house; he’s got a hot-water tap outside, so we can always run up to his place and fill our suits with hot water. twitter.com/ScottDickerson

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Blitz Kids

They Are Alright How do you top your best year ever as a band? For Blitz Kids, it means moving on to new music and cracking open a cold one (or three).

Words: Ruth Morgan Photography: Phil Sharp

After a year that included a headline tour, signing to Red Bull Records, and appearing at numerous festivals, British pop-rock four-piece Blitz Kids are keeping up the pace in 2014 with the release of their new album. But despite their success, they still find time for the important things in life: Bad anagrams, DIY body art, and 6 a.m. sightseeing. the red bulletin: Did you always know you’d make it big? joe james: We always wanted what we’re achieving now, but we didn’t realize it could actually happen until recently. We just did it for fun. Then we got to the point of deciding to get a real job or keep going. Me and Jono went out one night, and I was like, “That’s it, I’m not working for another day in my life in a job that isn’t music from this moment on.” So I quit my pub job, and that was three years ago. I’ve literally not worked a day in my life since that point. jono yates: He’s begged, borrowed, and stolen. He’s been a huge burden on society. jj: I am a taxpayer’s worst nightmare.

Why Blitz Kids? jj: We took the name from a little gang my granddad had when he was a kid in London. During the Blitz, he and his mates would sneak out and kick a ball around and spray graffiti when they were supposed to be in the shelter. It was a cool punk rock attitude, so we took it. It’s how we treat life, essentially, in a very reckless manner. jy: It’s also an anagram of [French soccer player] Zinedine Zidane. jj: No, it’s not.

You’ve played together since you were 15. How has your sound evolved? jj: We used to play heavier music. We were young and rebelling. jy: Now, musically, it’s popular rock.

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jj: We get called pop-punk a lot too, and it’s a weird term. jy: Yeah, pop-punk’s not a thing. It’s like saying, “I’ll have a vegan steak please.” jj: We get described in all sorts of ways, but essentially we just love pop music. We’re not a band you come to observe while standing still. Even if it’s everyone else that gets you moving. No one wants to stand still in a room while strangers rub up against them. nic montgomery: That’s a good Friday night for me.

What should people expect from your new album, The Good Youth? nm: In a word: better.

“It took us a while to realize you can get a job that you love.” jj: It’s very different to what’s come from us before. We never thought in terms of what we want to say as a band with an album, and my lyrics used to be very negative, hard for people to relate to. This is a positive album. I was trying to inspire people and make them happy because there’s a lot to be sad about, isn’t there?

The title is an underlying message, telling kids something we never heard, which is you can get a job you love. It took us a while to realize that, and I don’t want anybody else to waste that time.

Were there a lot of songs that didn’t make the cut? jy: We listened to a lot of radio when we were making the album, and songs were scrapped because they could have been written by One Direction. jj: There’s a song on the album called

“Pinnacle,” which is hugely influenced

by Take That, because we love those guys. They’re awesome.

Did you start getting tattoos before or after the band formed? jj: The band came before the tats, as we weren’t old enough to get them when we started. Then one of you gets one and the next thing you know it’s out of hand. jy: I’ve got “Never Die,” the title of our last EP, and “To The Lions,” the first track on the new album, which we recorded at Red Bull Studios. One of the biggest is my tattoo of Omar Little from The Wire. nm: I’ve got a Blitz Kids tattoo on my leg that Joe did. Terribly.

Do you have the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle to go with the ink? jj: We’re animals for beer. jy: Too much. jj: We’re referred to by friends as “the drunk band.” jy: We’ll aim to go and see a mate’s gig, then end up all walking around Westminster at 6 a.m. looking for Big Ben. nm: Me and Ice Man [Matt] are the kings of 9 a.m. matt freer: It’s always bad news when the rhythm section comes to town.

What’s the secret of long friendships? jy: Choose your band members wisely. nm: I’ve learned just to let it wash over me. I’m very Zen. jj: We’ve been friends so long that everyone has found their role, like the Spice Girls. I’m the bossy one. It just works—there’s no tiptoeing around. We get up and it’s “Morning, fancy a beer?” jy: The pulse of this band is alcohol! mf: It does hold us together … jy: [Laughing] … and tears us apart! nm: Who’s thirsty? redbullrecords.com the red bulletin

The lineup Joe James, vocals Jono Yates, guitar Nic Montgomery, bass Matt Freer, drums Discography The Good Youth (2014) Never Die (EP, 2012) Vagrants & Vagabonds (2011) Scavengers (EP, 2010) Decisions (EP, 2009) Name game The Blitz Kids was the original name of the New Romantics, a fact not lost on the band. “We found out after we’d chosen the name,” Yates says. “We announced it, then went on Google and were like,‘Wait, who are these lot?’

Hopefully it’s obvious there’s no connection.”

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the red bulletin

Magical Realist

Ian Ruhter takes photos with a truck. An old delivery truck, in fact. the work he produces is as singular as it is striking.

Words: Caroline Ryder Photography: Shaun Roberts

Ian Ruhter bought a delivery truck and made a camera out of it to produce his silver-tinged, wetplate collodion creations.

the red bulletin

In the early 1860s, photographer Carleton Watkins took huge 18” x 22” negatives of Yosemite Valley that convinced Abraham Lincoln and Congress to sign the 1864 bill that preserved the area for all time and paved the way for America’s National Park system. Ansel Adams came along 100 years later with his brooding images of Half Dome and elevated environmental photography into an art form. And today, in 2013, Ian Ruhter is back in Yosemite with what may be the most unusual camera these granite slopes have ever seen. His camera is as big as a truck. It is a truck, in fact. And its mechanism is the humans inside.

“I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest camera that’s ever been in Yosemite,” says a local man who goes by the name Yosemite Steve. It’s nighttime and we can hear the bear patrol circling—rangers making noise so as to scare away any wandering beasts. We’re sitting around a barely smoldering campfire, Ruhter’s pale-blue camera truck parked a few feet away, looking less like a camera and more like someplace to buy ice cream or tacos.

Yosemite Steve, also a photographer and a videographer, is a fan of Ruhter and his remarkable camera, which uses a lens the size of a beach ball to create images on huge aluminum wet plates, resulting in iridescent, finely detailed silver impressions of the world outside.

Ruhter’s camera is basically a 45

supersized version of Watkins’, using the same “wet-plate collodion” technique.

“Except Carleton made negatives and Ian is doing positives,” Yosemite Steve says.

“I want to make one-off things, like a painting,” Ruhter says. “Especially in this age where everything is mass produced, mass reproduced. I really like just one.

That’s all it takes.”

Ruhter speaks in cryptic Yoda-meetsthe-Cheshire-Cat riddles. When asked what time he plans to shoot tomorrow he replies, “between noon and noon fifteen. Or two to two thirty. Or five to six. Or you can show up whenever you want. I can’t guarantee I will be there.” There are giggles to his left, from Ruhter’s mellowed-out protégé, Will Eichelberger, a 23-year-old photographer and self-confessed “art nerd” from Casper, Wyoming. He met Ruhter two years ago, shortly after his father died. He sat in Ruhter’s truck, cried, and decided he was going to go on the road with Ruhter and join his “American Dream Project,” a sort of traveling oral and visual history of the nation, all images captured in the magic truck. Eichelberger even has the camera truck tattooed on his left arm.

Wandering around the camp is Lane Power, also in his 20s, also a photographer, and a filmmaker, and a welder. He helped Ruhter customize the truck, a former delivery vehicle that Ruhter bought in Los Angeles nearly two years ago. Power is the clearest communicator of the trio and is able to fill in some gaps in his mentor’s biography: Originally from South

Ian Ruther (2)

‘‘In this age where everything is mass produced and mass reproduced, I really like just one photograph.

That’s all it takes.’’

In the lineage of Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams, Ruhter creates photos of Yosemite National Park in California.

Lake Tahoe, Ruhter was a sponsored snowboarder who took up photography at age 26 after retiring from the sport. His aunt had given him an old 35mm Nikon SLR film camera and he studied darkroom photography at community college, getting a part-time job at a local casino so he could buy a better camera. He moved to L.A. and had a successful career as a commercial and magazine photographer but resented the pace of that life. He did not like having to shoot digital; he hated retouching and airbrushing. So he quit, left L.A. for Lake Tahoe, and poured his life savings into a big pale-blue truck. Now he’s happy.

“I had heard about this guy who was building a giant camera in Lake Tahoe,” says Power. “I am really into building and fabricating, so I just started showing up where he was working on it. To me, Ian had this Wizard of Oz magic about him, like the man behind the curtain. I kept asking to help until one day, he let me.”

At that point, Ruhter had yet to shoot a plate that he was happy with. Bear in mind, each plate costs around $500 to make. The first time Lane went out with Ruhter, to an abandoned silver quarry in Nevada, was the first time that Ruhter successfully captured an image. “I had never seen wet-plate before, and I was blown away by the silver highlights and the way it looked,” says Power. That was in September 2011. And what’s the end goal of all this? “To do what we want when we want to do it,” he shrugs.

After that Power, Ruhter, and Eichelberger started traveling, Power filming their trips for an online doc series that includes the remarkable Silver and Light, a short film that has helped elevate Ruhter from “that guy with the crazy camera” into a latter-day Thoreau, with a growing cult following around the U.S. The whole analog vs. digital argument is moot, though, as far as he’s concerned.

He Instagrams, he’s on Facebook, and has an iPhone. He sees himself as a contemporary photographer, building a bridge between past and future.

“Come here,” says Ruhter the next day, pulling back the black tarp on the back of the truck. Inside it is pitch dark except for a ghostly, upside-down moving image on a plate. It’s Yosemite Falls and Cook’s Meadow, waterfall flowing, in real time.

The image is black-and-white and unbelievably crisp, a hypnotic living scene that is somehow more beautiful than the real thing outside. How can that be?

“Because we are creating it,” he says.

For Ruhter, 39, who suffers from severe dyslexia, these photographs are the only way he knows to clearly and confidently express himself. “My photos are my voice,” he says. “This is how I show people how I think and feel, and this is how I see things. Upside down and wrong way round.”

Inside the truck, Ruhter shifts the plate back and forth, focusing the image.

“Right now, we are the camera,” says Ruhter. “We are the gears. Trippy, huh?”

When he is ready to make a photograph (he prefers the term “make” to “take”) he pours silver nitrate over the plate. It’s the silver that makes the plate light sensitive and gives it its eerie reflective quality.

Later, to celebrate, he poses on top of a rock overhang, grinning above a 3,000foot drop. He hands his iPhone to one of his team—“I just want a picture of me standing on this rock, you know?”—and then shares it on his Instagram. “Now that’s what’s up,” he says.

Follow @ianruhter on Twitter, and ian_ruhter on Instagram.

the red bulletin

47

LIKE A

THE MOST INSANE SPORT YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF INVOLVES BOMBING DOWN HILLS AT 70 MPH IN LITTLE MORE THAN RACING LEATHERS WITH A BOARD UNDERFOOT. WELCOME TO THE DOWNHILL LONGBOARD WORLD CUP, WHERE THE PAVEMENT IS UNEVEN AND AMBULANCES STAND AT THE READY.

BULLET

words: Fernando Gueiros photography: Marcelo Maragni and Thiago Diz

The stance is simple: One arm always back with your knee still, and your eyes on the pavement in front of you.

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T

he fastest hill in the world for skateboarding is a long, winding piece of pavement stretching a little over a mile, riven with bumps and cracks and bearing the unlikely name “Harmony’s Downhill.”

In three days of competition at the Downhill Longboarding World Cup, riders will speed down its uneven terrain. The hay bales and crowds on the sidelines will have to make way for ambulances four times during the three hours of qualifying sessions on day one alone.

“There’s only one way to go down here, and that’s the fastest possible,” says Brazilian Carlos Paixão, who hit 73.9 mph, a record, on the first day. “If you’re tough you keep the pressure on and don’t slow down. But the most important thing is to always keep your arm back and your knee still; keep your chest and your chin on your front knee and look straight down the way you’re going, not staring at the floor.”

The tutorial is helpful for the tiny percentage of people around the world insane enough to don leathers and a helmet and bomb down hills in the name of an adrenaline rush and glory in a nascent sport. As it happens, the best in the business (and a few bold amateurs) have gathered here from 15 countries near the quaint southern Brazilian town of Teutônia, which boasts the legendary hill and little else. This is only the second time in the 10-year history of the Downhill Longboarding World Cup that the event is being held here. Through this year, all you had to do to take part was bring approved security gear (leather clothing, helmet, gloves) and pay the entrance fee. But that will change in the future, presumably to save on medical bills. “From now on,” says Alexandre Maia, race director and member of the excellently named International Gravity Sports Association, “we’ll give priority to the ranked elite.”

After all, riders here reach speeds of more than 70 mph for a duration of 15 to 20 seconds. And all this over a stretch of track a third of a mile long.

“I used to ride at Pikes Peak, in Colorado,” says defending champion Kyle Wester, “and there I go as fast as 60 mph.

But here we ride between 71 and 74 mph for a long time. There’s nothing quite like this in the world.”

School buses ferry the downhill competitors, including Brazil’s Carlos Paixão, to the top of the 1.2 -mile track, the sport’s most feared.

“I talk towhile myself riding, trying to be relaxed.”

Competitors hit speeds of more than 70 mph on “Harmony’s Downhill,” and the race to the bottom favors the bold.

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the red bulletin

Credit:

From top: Most of the accidents occur on the first day, when the less experienced crowd the field; the riders’ passion is very real—and more than skin deep; how else to explain spending the night at a church on the top of the course?

nder a baking sun and temperatures of around 86 degrees, the riders wander around the top of the track, leathers open. Nearby is a small church and a rustic shed where meals are served and people camp during the threeday event, which, this year, will include 230 riders.

Day one is when most of the accidents happen. The track overflows with competitors dropping in. Marshals are there to space the riders every five minutes as they make their practice runs.

When the crowd—assembled along the side of the road on the grass—hears the whir and scrape of approaching riders, their expectation is audible.

“Ooohhh!!” they murmur as a skater shoots by, adjusting his path along the track.

From the riders’ perspective, it’s all about … well, perspective.

“I talk to myself while I’m riding, trying to be relaxed and make sure I’m having fun,” says Wester, whose time was good enough for third. “At the main corner, if you can hold the pressure at high speed, there’s a better chance at winning. Finding the right path on this road takes a lot of concentration.”

Four school buses ferry competitors back to the top, and organizers close the track on occasion to let cars, or ambulances, go through.

“it’s all about

cold blood and a clear head.”

German Matthias Ebel finishing his run, which was not fast enough to qualify. “You can’t slow down here,” he says.

“It’s like a scary roller coaster.”

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“finding the

right path takes a lot of concentration.”

Most longboard courses allow competitors to reach speeds of more than 55 mph, but Teutônia’s long finish features almost 2,000 feet of uninterrupted downhill. Brazil’s Carlos Paixão set a course record of 73.9 mph.

At high speeds and close quarters, crashes are inevitable. The track was closed four times during the three-hour qualifying session on the first day to allow ambulances access to fallen competitors.

One of their customers was 19-yearold Debora de Almeida, who lost her balance after the main corner and was thrown from her skateboard, crashing on the blacktop in a fall reminiscent of the worst MotoGP has to offer. “I wasn’t sure whether I was going to stay in the right or the left lane when I ran over a bump,” she says. “It was impossible to not fall down since I was going at top speed.”

She slid more than 25 yards on her stomach and suffered a twisted ankle and a dislocated shoulder and knee, not to mention the bruises. In order to ease the pain, a doctor on the scene took more than five minutes to remove her clothes before sending her to the hospital.

Was it worth it? “Yes, of course,” says de Almeida two days later, an ice bag on her ankle. “The will to drop is very intense. Teutônia is different from everything, it’s pressure all the way down, and there’s always a surprise.”

B

y the final day, the numbers of competitors have decreased as riders get eliminated, and the technique improves until there are only two remaining: record-holder Paixão and fellow countryman Max Ballesteros.

At the base of the hill, on the finish line, the speaker echoes announcing the main event while the crowd clusters closer to the track. It’s impossible to see the finish line from the top, where the race starts. You can only hear, far away, the sound system.

“when they get to teutonia they freak out. they ask:

is this real?”

The top is quiet, almost empty. A dozen locals drink beer and share the space between the shed and the starting line. At the race marshal’s words— “Riders, set ... Go!”—Ballesteros and Paixão push off and start down the hill, vanishing at the first bend. Paixão is first.

The speed ticks up—25 mph, 30 mph—through the portion of the track called “toboggan,” where the road has yet to drop, and a slight left is followed by a right turn.

Ballesteros remains close, looking for space, but when the speed reaches 55 mph, he spreads his arms to slow down at the beginning of the main curve. Paixão decides to go full throttle—his body leaning forward, the G forces punishing his muscles and dictating the precise movements of his hips, ankles, and knees.

This is the most important corner of the track, where the athletes enter the final and fastest stretch.

The speed increases while the wheels start to chatter over the rough and uneven paving. The surroundings—small properties and a cemetery on the side of the main corner—whiz past.

After 1 minute and 20 seconds, Paixão crosses the finish line first, to the cheers of the crowd, and etches his name into the history of the feared track, and the young sport celebrating it.

“I guess the most important isn’t the strength or technique, it is all about cold blood and a clear head,” he says. “Some people have a lot of technique, but when they get to Teutônia, they freak out and ask themselves if this is real. And there’s not much we can say, right? That’s what it is: This is Teutônia.” igsaworldcup.com

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HIGHER

scott serfas

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ng J e r e m y J o n es a lr e a dy c h a n g e d th e w o r ld o f b i g - m o u nta i n snowboarding.

N o w h e ’ s s e t ti n g o ut to c h a n g e th e w o r ld .

Words: Megan M ichelson

But when Jeremy Jones saw a photo of the peak—a sharp, angulated ridge flanked by an array of steep, snow-covered spines—he knew it was the one.

Last summer, Jones was looking for his next remote mission, a summit to climb under his own power for his new snowboarding film, Higher, which debuts this fall. In mid-July, one of his cinematographers, Chris Figenshau, texted Jones a photo of an unnamed peak in Nepal from a library book on Himalayan culture. All Jones could text in response was, “Holy crap. Will call tomorrow.”

Through extensive online research and speaking with climbers who’d spent time in the area, Jones and Figenshau pieced together the details. The peak, which lay in the shadows of the popular climbing route Ama Dablam, faced north and stood at an elevation of around 21,000 feet. Fall would be their best chance of getting decent snow on the face, which meant the crew had only two months to plan the trip.

In September, Jones and Figenshau, plus two other filmers, a photographer, and another snowboarder, flew to Kathmandu and took a small propeller plane to Lukla, the launching point for the trek to Everest base camp.

For 12 days they hiked by foot to reach the snowline. They set up base camp at 16,500 feet and began to orient themselves after getting their first inperson glimpse of their objective. “It was one of the most beautiful peaks I’ve ever seen,” Jones says.

They spent the next five weeks attempting to climb and snowboard the unnamed peak. The locals who heard their plan told them they were crazy and their goal was impossible.

But after more than a month, Jones finally stood on the summit ridge, overlooking the highest mountains in the world. Time seemed to stand still in that moment. The journey to this point, he thought to himself, has been the biggest reward.

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Then he stepped into his snowboard and dropped over the edge, descending into the unknown.

-----One week later, Jones is wearing a button-up shirt in a stuffy conference room in San Francisco.

He’s been invited to speak on a panel at an event called Mountain Meltdown, hosted by Climate One, a Bay Area publicaffairs forum that brings together innovators and leaders to discuss climate change and the planet’s future.

Jones, age 39, has the disheveled, shaggy-haired look of a guy who just crawled out of a tent. At the front of the room, he appears out of place alongside a clean-cut, New York–based writer and a respected scientist, both of whom are advocates for climate change.

Turns out, he’s not as out of place as he seems.

In recent years, Jones, a 10-time Snowboarder magazine Big Mountain Rider of the Year, has become his sport’s most outspoken—and unlikeliest— advocate for climate-change policy. To Jones, the logic was quite simple: To keep snowboarding for the rest of his life, he’s got to figure out a way to save winter first.

“Growing up in Cape Cod, I was studying the Pilgrims and their harsh winters, and I remember asking my teacher, ‘Why don’t we have harsh winters anymore?’ ” Jones says in front of the live audience. “I wanted to be able to snowboard in my backyard. I was way ahead of Al Gore on that one.”

In 2007, he founded a nonprofit organization called Protect Our Winters, with the goal of mobilizing the wintersports community to fight against climate change. “I realized the mountains were changing and I knew I needed to reach skiers and snowboarders around the world,” Jones says. “I felt like we needed to come together.”

So there sits Jones, a lone athlete alongside academics and activists, at the forefront of a controversial and critical fight to protect the one thing he loves to do the most. Because of snowboarding, he’s made four trips to Washington, D.C., to meet with lawmakers over climatechange policy and to talk about the economic impact of warming winters on the $12.2 billion U.S. winter tourism industry. Last spring, President Obama named Jones a Champion of Change for his environmental advocacy.

But like the mountains he scales, it’s an uphill battle. “I’d love to say we’re helping to try to pass climate legislation, but we’re

Jones views his political activism as a necessary byproduct of his first love: backcountry snowboarding. Below, a recently conquered peak in Nepal.

Todd Jones, Jeff Hawe

T h e m o u n ta i n h a d l i k e ly never been c l i m b e d, let alone snowboarded.

the red bulletin

Jones’ climatechange nonprofit, Protect Our Winters, has fought a lonely battle, only recently picking up more support from the snow industry.

IN A DECADE of s n o w b o a r din g , H e s aw d r a m at ica l ly s h r in k in g g l acie r s .

just trying to have that conversation and focus on the EPA’s rights to regulate emissions,” he says.

Surprisingly, the biggest fight Jones is waging is within his own industry: Many ski resorts are slow to acknowledge and adapt to warming winters, and, according to Jones, less than 2 percent of the ski and snowboard industry is involved in POW’s efforts.

But that is shifting. The CEOs of three major North American ski resorts— Whistler, Aspen, and Jackson Hole—are also present in San Francisco to talk about climate change and what their resorts are doing to combat it, ranging from political activism to building hydroelectric plants. “We want companies to use their power and their voice to say, ‘Climate change is real. So let’s do something about it,’ ” he says.

------

Dan Milner, Jeff Curley(2)

Jones transitioned from competitive snowboarding to backcountry adventures—and started filming a highly acclaimed trilogy of action sports films.

When snowboarding was born, Jones was ready and waiting.

At nine years old, he got his first snowboard at a general store in Vermont. That was the mid-1980s, and snowboarding wasn’t even allowed at ski resorts yet. So he’d climb uphill carrying his snowboard near his grandfather’s house in Stowe. Later, he became the first snowboarder to get registered, once Stowe permitted one-plankers to ride the lifts in 1987.

Most of his late teens and 20s were spent following the pro snowboard circuit around the West, sleeping on couches to chase contests. He followed his two older brothers, Todd and Steve, to Jackson, Wyoming, where, in 1996, they had started Teton Gravity Research, an action

sports film production company. There, Jones discovered the lure and adventure of big-mountain and backcountry terrain.

Eventually, he made his way to the Lake Tahoe area and gave up competing in order to dedicate himself to filming and exploring steep, snow-covered lines everywhere from Alaska to Greenland.

When he couldn’t find the perfect snowboard for climbing mountains, he launched his own company, Jones Snowboards, which makes some of the industry’s most respected splitboards and big-mountain snowboards.

In 2008, tired of the usual helicoptercentric shred flicks he’d been filming for years—at the cost of a heavy carbon footprint—he partnered with TGR and set out to make a trilogy of human-powered, backcountry snowboard films.

His first two films, Deeper and Further, debuted in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

When Deeper premiered at an amphitheater near his home in Truckee, California, Jones hoped that 200 people would show up to fill the seats. Instead, the place sold out all 1,700 tickets. The film went on to become a selection at the Banff Mountain Film Festival, and Jones won athlete of the year at the X-Dance Film Festival. Higher will be his third and final film in the series.

“Jer has always been pretty conscientious,” says his older brother and TGR co-founder Steve Jones. “There’s a great deal of thought that goes into everything he does. His idea for the trilogy was to inspire people to embrace adventure and wild places. Without saying so directly, it makes the environment an emotional part of someone’s DNA.” -----In Jones’ travels all over the world, he discovered places like Chamonix, France, where, in over a decade of snowboarding, he noticed drastically shrinking glaciers.

He visited low-elevation resorts in British Columbia that held snow 30 years ago but are now shuttered, deserted mounds of grass and dirt, even in February.

Soon, science started to back up his observations.

“Today, around 30 to 50 percent of ski areas are experiencing warmer-thannormal winters,” says Anne Nolin, a professor of geosciences and hydroclimatology at Oregon State University. “That number will get pushed up to 70 to 80 percent of ski areas in 50 to 100 years. We’ll see an increased frequency of warmer winters, a decline of 63

“I never intended to get into politics. b u t t h at ’s w h e r e real change h a p p ENS . ”

Greg Von Doersten, Jeff Curley(2)

annual snowfall, and our winter seasons will get shorter and shorter.”

Recent projections estimate that the global temperature is expected to rise by more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020 and double that by 2050. A study by the University of Waterloo found that by 2039, only half of the ski areas in America’s Northeast will be able to maintain 100-day-long ski seasons, a cutback that would ultimately result in a revenue loss of $3.2 billion for just the Northeast’s ski and snowboard industry.

If those temperature projections are accurate, obviously the planet will have much bigger issues than whether or not humans can still ski and snowboard. But

for Jones, he figures if he can rally skiers and snowboarders, then perhaps they can help save the planet. “It’s not this far-off deal,” he says. “And people now seem to be accepting that we have an issue. If we can reach that point as a country, then I think we can make changes.”

-----A few days after the San Francisco event, Jones is finally back home.

He’s perched at his kitchen counter out in Truckee, where he lives with his wife, Tiffany, and their two young children. He’s got his laptop open and he’s catching up on emails after weeks of

Jones is taken seriously both in corporate boardrooms and on the slopes—but he’s much more at ease in the great wide open. the red bulletin

being off the grid while in Nepal.

Ask him about snowboarding and his face lights up. He’ll ignore his emails and talk in one breathless stream about the aesthetic nature of a desolate mountain peak and the innate joy he gets from pushing into deeper, undiscovered terrain.

“I never intended to get into politics,” he admits. “If you’d told me when I started POW that I’d be going to Washington to meet with lawmakers, I would have said, ‘There’s no way this foundation is getting political.’ But that’s where real change needs to happen.” In October, the group sent 17 pro athletes, including snowboarders John Jackson and Gretchen Bleiler and skiers Angel Collinson, Chris Davenport, and others, to D.C. to talk to lawmakers about their support of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Carbon Pollution Standard.

And now, industry stalwarts like Burton, K2, and Black Diamond are joining forces with POW to get involved in a variety of programs, including one that sends pro athletes into schools to talk to students about climate change. In 2013, over 20 U.S. ski resorts signed the National Ski Areas Association’s Climate Challenge initiative, which helps resorts set goals for carbon reduction.

“POW started because of Jeremy’s drive to make a real difference,” says Chris Steinkamp, the organization’s executive director. “I think he’s an environmentalist because he knows exactly what there is to lose—he spends his life in the mountains, and this experience drives his need to protect it.”

But ask Jones if he even considers himself an environmentalist and he’ll just shrug.

“I’ve always been passionate about protecting the outdoors, but I kind of reluctantly became an environmentalist,” he says. “In the sense of this hardcore lobbying and public battling, that’s the part I would love to not be involved in.”

When Jones dropped into that line in Nepal, the snow was softer than he’d anticipated, a thin layer of powder covering a nearly vertical sheet of rock and ice.

With his mind focused on the highconsequence task at hand, he arced fast, fluid turns down the 1,500-vertical-foot pointed crest, which was shaped like the mountain’s backbone. At the bottom, he raised his fist in the air, relief, joy, and wonder filling his mind. It was the biggest spine he’d ever ridden. “To be honest, he says, reflecting, “I’d much rather be snowboarding.”

For more info: protectourwinters.org

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The Finål

Two Danes are working on their own private space program. Their homemade rockets keep going higher and faster—and straighter. But can they really go into orbit in five years’ time?

Words: Bernd Hauser Photography: Uffe Weng 66

Bo Tornvig

Frø nti er

Rocketmakers Peter Madsen (left) and Kristian von Bengtson in Copenhagen; the launch of their homemade HEAT 1X rocket on the Baltic coast: “We go supersonic.�

“I’m more afraid of dying alone in an old people’s home than on board a rocket I’ve built myself.”

Peter Madsen 68

p

eter Madsen sticks a photo of his wife, Sirid, onto the dashboard in front of him. An assistant shuts the hatch from outside. He waves one last time. His heart is racing.

Countdown—“Three, two, one, zero!”—and the four rocket engines roar into life.

He is wedged into his seat by 200,000 horsepower and a force of 4G. The words “This is my finest hour” race through his head as he flies into space aboard his homemade HEAT-1600 rocket.

Madsen plays this scene over and over in his head as he lies on a mattress under his desk at night. It’s a moment in his near future—hopefully.

After a couple of hours of sleep and a cup of instant coffee, it’s back to work at the HAB, the Horizontal Assembly Building, at Copenhagen Suborbitals, the company Madsen and his partner Kristian von Bengtson set up in 2008. When will the dream of spaceflight come true? Will it be in four years’ time? Five? Madsen will be 50 by then, but the constructor and entrepreneur is sure of one thing: That it will come true.

HAB, the Danish Space Center, is a plain corrugated iron shed on an abandoned shipyard on the outskirts of Copenhagen. This is where Madsen cuts, knocks, drills, and hammers away at his dream.

But why is he doing it here and not, say, at NASA? “NASA works with a lot of subcontractors who build the engines,” he says. “I’d be sent off to work with some company like Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, where I’d be a tiny cog in a big machine.

I wouldn’t like it. It’d be a disaster. At Copenhagen Suborbitals I’m the one making the decisions. I get to build a rocket from scratch, rather than just being responsible for one tiny part of it. I want to work on it, design it, and then actually build it. I love all that!”

Space architect Kristian von Bengtson used to work for NASA but resigned when all his design projects Madsen and von ended up canceled. He Bengtson founded designed the interiors of Copenhagen Suborbitals in 2008, spacecraft for the “to build a rocket from Constellation Program, which scratch.” Left: A aimed to send men back to the seating-design study moon and was cut by for the space capsule, President Obama in 2010. Just “a narrow space as von Bengtson had had rammed with technology.” enough of PowerPoint

presentations and theoretical designs, he read something about Madsen in a newspaper. Madsen had built the biggest private submarine in the world and now said he wanted “to send a rocket into space with himself as guinea pig.� Von Bengtson was intrigued and met Madsen at his home, on board Nautilus, his 34-ton submarine.

Submarines are like space capsules—narrow spaces rammed with technology, protective shells in an environment hostile to life. Meeting Madsen made 70

Throughout his life, Madsen has never had a problem with what so many people are afraid of: Looking ridiculous.

von Bengtson sure that if he was going to make his dream of actual space travel come true, then they would do it together. They spoke at length and made sketches; Madsen would take care of eventually getting the rocket 60 miles into the air and von Bengtson was to be responsible for Madsen surviving the flight.

Since then, they planned a suborbital, 15-minute parabolic trip into space.

Initial tasks were divided up clearly between the two men. Madsen took care of building the rocket, with von Bengtson in charge of the capsule and parachutes. The first thing the two of them did was head off to the hardware store to get sheets of metal and cork. “Cork is a fantastic material for a heat shield,” von Bengtson explains. “It can withstand temperatures of over 1,800°F.” In June 2010, Nautilus towed the first launch pad, called Sputnik, out from Copenhagen to the Baltic Sea. On it stood HEAT 1X, Copenhagen Suborbitals’ first rocket. It was 30 feet long, weighed two tons, and was built to reach an altitude of 10 miles.

A dummy pilot, Rescue Randy, peeked out through a Plexiglas dome at the top of the mini spaceship.

Rescue Randy was meant to return to the water safe and sound by parachute once the rocket burned out.

The rocket’s propulsion unit consisted of 132 gallons of liquid oxygen, which would be fed into a rubber block weighing 1,100 pounds, and then ignited.

Local and international press were waiting on boats, cameras at the ready. “Three, two, one, zero!”

Nothing happened. The rocket didn’t budge. The liquid oxygen, which had been cooled to -297°F, had caused a valve to freeze. A battery that was part of the system built to keep the valve open, which came from a $13 hair dryer bought in the supermarket, had run out.

Madsen tinkers away at his dream in a shed in a Copenhagen shipyard (right). He aims to go into space aboard his rocket in 2018. Until then, it’ll be Rescue Randy the dummy (below) manning the test flights.

T

he rocket men, however, still had their believers. Private individuals donated money. Companies donated steel, equipment, and fuel so that they were able to try again.

The support group soon had 300 members, each of them paying $17 a month. Madsen began to blog about his progress for Ingeniøren, a Danish weekly engineering magazine. Readers gave their advice. Specialists kept getting in touch with HAB, saying they wanted to help out for free.

The following summer, the launch pad, made by welding together railway tracks, was once again anchored in the Baltic Sea. HEAT 1X, take two.

25,000 Ingeniøren readers were following events on the homepage. The Danish TV channel TV2 sent a helicopter and was reporting live.

A first countdown led to nothing; during the second, the engine ignited. Onlookers could see the trail of fire by the time the countdown had reached one and the rocket roared upward into the sky. At a public viewing event at Copenhagen’s planetarium, the project’s supporters leaped out of their seats, fists raised in the air. “We go supersonic,” said Madsen, from the launch pad, after two seconds of flight.

But the rocket suddenly began to spin like a firework on the 4th of July. It only reached a height of 1.75 miles, less than 20 percent of the planned altitude. The rocket’s parachutes didn’t open properly and Rescue Randy came crashing back down into the water in his mini space capsule at high speed. When the team went to salvage the metal tube, they saw it was dented; a human being wouldn’t have survived the impact.

No one mocked Copenhagen Suborbitals that day.

The support group grew to 450 members. Why hadn’t the rocket worked on the first countdown?

“An electric connection had probably come loose,” said von Bengtson. And why did it work on the second countdown? “That’s the thing with loose connections. Sometimes the electricity still flows.”

In the summer of 2012, von Bengtson and Madsen began testing an ejector seat for a new space capsule

in the shape of a truncated cone. Then came a breakthrough; that the HEAT 1X spun alerted its makers to the fact that rockets need to be actively steered. So a new, 15-foot-long SAPPHIRE test rocket was built, with four copper rudders underneath the engine. A programmer from among the assistants wrote a piece of software that checked the rocket’s trajectory 500 times a second and could constantly correct it via the rudders.

T 72

submarines and wanted to display it, there was a crowd of technicians and engineers standing on the embankment.

One of them shouted out, “Have you done a welding course?” Madsen shouted back, “Yes!” The man continued: “Did you fail?” “He wanted to hurt me,” says Madsen. But he persevered, and has since carried out 1,000 submarine descents.

Madsen and von Bengtson have been living the dream for a lot of other people, too. Copenhagen Suborbitals currently has 40 assistants and 800 supporters, many of whom are technicians and engineers. Almost all of them have to make compromises in their day jobs. “But we do what we really want to be doing every day,” says von Bengtson. “I write technically when I blog about our project,” Madsen explains. It’s his way of stealing his way into his readers’ hearts. “What really excites them is the poetry of this absurd mission.”

Sometimes Madsen can’t bear the noise of all the work and the people in the HAB. At those times, he goes for a walk around the shipyard, where flowers sprout from torn-up asphalt and broken concrete, attracting bumblebees. They buzz like machines.

Bumblebees have a thick trunk and small wings. It is amazing that they can fly at all, and yet flying is what they do.

Top: Assistants heave parts of the SAPPHIRE rocket onto the launch device.

Above: Company founder Peter Madsen: “What excites our supporters is the poetry of this absurd mission.”

www.copenhagensuborbitals.com

Copenhagen Suborbital

he team went back on the Baltic in June 2013, now supported by Vostok, an old German rescue ship doubling as mission control vessel.

(Madsen had blogged that they had to have the ship. Donations for the purchase price of $55,000 came in within days.) The SAPPHIRE soared into the sky, perfectly vertical. If ever there was a suggestion of the rocket going off course, the rudders corrected things in a matter of milliseconds.

The rocket reached a height of 5.1 miles, with a high speed of 769 mph. Ingeniøren hailed it as “a huge success,” despite the parachutes failing again and SAPPHIRE sinking in the Baltic Sea. The team would work on a new release mechanism.

The next task is to integrate the active steering into the HEAT 2X, a rocket 29.5 feet long, a rough version of which is already sitting in the HAB, scheduled to be ready for launch in the summer of 2014, 200,000 hp engine and all. The HEAT 2X does not have the special rubber hybrid engine of its predecessor. It is a liquid rocket, fueled by alcohol and liquid oxygen. The rocket is a 1:3 scale model of the end goal, the HEAT 1600, which is very much in the vein of rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun’s V2.

That monster of a machine, which Madsen wants to take into space, should be ready for liftoff by summer 2015, initially with Rescue Randy on board. Madsen wants to be in the capsule himself in 2018.

Throughout his life, Madsen has never had a problem with what other people are afraid of: Looking ridiculous. All the chances he takes are calculated. “We don’t do anything that might be risky, be that economically or personally,” he says.

But he is going so far as to risk his life with this rocket project. “A lot of people realize at 40 that they have a boring job, a boring house, a boring wife. I try not to get bored. I’m much more afraid of dying alone and abandoned in an old people’s home than on board a rocket I’ve put together myself.”

Madsen’s personal belongings could fit into two plastic bags. He never finished his mechanical engineering degree or a number of other courses he started. Before he married and moved in with Sirid (and before she’d had a space capsule tattooed on her upper arm), he lived in workshops and submarines. He never wanted to have a career. He always wanted to build submarines and especially rockets, “because they are mythical and beautiful, with all that titanic power they have.”

When he had completed the first of his three

“We went to the hardware store at the end of our first meeting. Cork is a fantastic material for a heat shield.� Kristian von Bengtson

Preparing to launch the SAPPHIRE rocket from the Baltic Sea in June 2013.

last night a DJ saved my LIFE Words: Berenice Andrade Photography: Katie Orlinsky

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Hardpop: A nightclub in Ciudad Juรกrez, Mexico, where revelers use music as a means of escape from the violence of the city.

The Hardpop nightclub started as a neutral zone in the center of Mexico’s drug war and grew to be one of the best clubs in the world.

j ames Zabiela hops onstage with a wide smile and excitedly shakes his short blond hair. He looks like a tennis player stirring up the crowd on center court.

The Englishman greets the audience and prepares his tools of the trade: turntable, iPad, headphones, and all kinds of electronic gear, as the crowd dissolves into applause and piles up in front of the elongated stage.

Zabiela drops the first beat and the people go crazy, pushing against each other, taking his picture and holding their tickets to the show high in the air. The initial commotion from the encounter with the DJ-turned-rock-star passes, and the mass of people—some 600 in all— move together in spasms, heads bobbing, hips thrusting. They all dance.

It’s just another weekend at the Hardpop, a medium-sized club with sober décor that’s nestled in a shopping mall in Ciudad Juárez, the deserted, chaotic and deadly city that shares a border with El Paso, Texas.

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On this night, no one remembers the thousands upon thousands of dead the city has buried in cemeteries or clandestine pits. They don’t remember the brawls between drug dealers, the gunfights, the extortion, the torture, the brutal murder of women or all the other horrific headlines that have come to define Juárez and made it infamous for being one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

Instead, the frenzy of Hardpop’s patrons, their dancing, and their almost ridiculous devotion to the DJ have earned the club another distinction, one that’s far more superficial but a million times more encouraging: According to the U.K. publication DJ Mag, the club is one of the top nightspots in the world.

No other club in Mexico boasts Hardpop’s weekly roster of major DJs, including James Lavelle, Magda, Damian Lazarus, Deadmau5, Jesse Rose, and M.A.N.D.Y. This week in October is the

the red bulletin

Mean streets, good beats: Juárez is one of the world’s most violent cities, yet none of the trouble exists inside Hardpop, which celebrated its seventh anniversary last October.

club’s seventh anniversary, and Berlin DJ Acid Pauli and Zabiela are in charge of the party. “I’m convinced music helps people go against a state of violence, because music is safe,” Acid Pauli says.

The young crowd celebrates as if nothing violent had ever happened—or will ever happen again.

WORTH THE RISK In the early evening on the day after Halloween, Perla Chavez drives up to her friend Denisse Arias’s house to get ready for a night on the town. Perla is 20 and looks it, unlike Denisse, whose petite frame and sweet, winsome face make her look younger than her 18 years. “I’ve been going to Hardpop since I was 17.

I had a fake ID someone printed for me, and well, yes, Juárez was very dangerous, but I wasn’t afraid—although my parents always threatened to keep me

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“ Hardpop promotes a scene; it’s an island of reality in a sea of fakes.”

home, I always went out,” says Perla, reclining on a bed and straightening her hair while her friend applies fake eyelashes with surgical precision.

“My mom wouldn’t let me go out because it was too violent and she was afraid, but she had to trust me,” says Denisse. “I need to have fun and I need to go out. Nothing has ever happened, except one time they held me up outside my house. It was really sad, but, well, something had to happen. This is a scary city, something’s happened to everybody.”

It’s almost 9 p.m. and the girls are finally ready to go. Carlos, Perla’s brother, has been waiting with his buddies for them to finish their preparty ritual. They want to get to Hardpop early because, even though every week features a top DJ, the lights come up and the place shuts down at 2 a.m. sharp— sometimes before.

Outside the club there’s already a long line of people, but no one over 25 years old. They’re all wearing their shortest skirts and carefully ironed shirts, shivering in the cold as they wait to get into the club, located in the same mall that was the scene of murders and gunfire years before. There isn’t a single street corner or citizen of Juárez without a bloody story to tell. Perla and Carlos count four murdered relatives.

“About two or three years ago, they killed three cousins, and last year an uncle. Maybe they were involved [in drugs], but one of my cousins I know for sure wasn’t doing anything bad. I was afraid for my family. I knew I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but even if you do nothing, it touches you,” Perla says.

“My friends from El Paso said, ‘How can you live in Juárez?’ Well, we have to adapt to what we have,” Carlos says.

From 2007 to 2012, that meant an average of 5.8 murders a day; over 11,000 murders in all, according to statistics from the Chihuahua state attorney’s office.

They adapted to living unafraid at the possibility of being killed. But this night, inside the Hardpop, all they wait for is Zabiela’s beats.

AN UNLIKELY STORY The man behind Hardpop is Ricardo Tejada, a young Juárez entrepreneur who heads Pastilla Digital, an event promotion firm. Although both the company and its owner have impeccable credentials, Hardpop’s rise was really the result of a series of coincidences.

From the time he lived in London in the late 1990s, Tejada has organized DJ shows with the likes of Tiesto and Paul van Dyk.

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He had hoped to channel his technounderground leanings into profitable events, initially trying to open an electronica club in San Pedro Garza García, the wealthiest municipality in Mexico. But, stymied by permit issues, he ended up moving everything to a space in a shopping mall owned by his father.

The result was Hardpop, located in the very last place he could have imagined setting up a business. But it turns out that the city of 1.2 million offered a big niche for an alternative club that featured progressive DJs. Bill Weir, the club’s house engineer and Tejada’s friend for years, says the Hardpop has united the city. “Places like this prevent chaos. Cities that don’t have a strong identity have a fragmented scene. Hardpop promotes a scene. You won’t see these artists in any other place in Juárez or probably any other place in Mexico, because Hardpop is an island of truth in a sea of falsehood.”

That truth is borne out by the club’s eclectic crowd. Everybody in the city comes to party, from high-class girls dressed to the nines—hair, makeup, stiletto heels, designer handbags (mostly knockoffs but some real)—to your run-ofthe-mill young guys in T-shirts, soccer jerseys, Converse sneakers, and messy hair. The only filter is the ticket. “Here we have people of all social classes. They’re all welcome. You buy your ticket and you come in,” says Eduardo Espino, the club’s chief of security.

But even though it’s now on the 80

upswing, the oasis that Hardpop is for the youth of Juárez wasn’t always immune to the crude reality that invades the city.

Just a few years ago, Tejada was forced to shut the club down for 10 months after an extortion attempt. “We didn’t want to put ourselves or our artists at risk, because things started to get difficult,” says Edgar Cobos, the club’s PR director. “They began to ask other businesses for quotas, and kidnappings surged. We wanted things to cool down. But we never moved.

We’ve been one of the main businesses that never took our eye off the city, and we were always here.”

During that time, Tejada presented a

Denisse Arias and Perla Chavez (above left) enjoy top international DJs at Hardpop, such as German beatmaster Acid Pauli (right).

Back to life: Times are tough in Mexico, and the border-crossing lines (below) aren’t getting any shorter.

“ The club is the essence of the city’s healing process.”

few events in El Paso and little by little began to revive the Hardpop, discreetly organizing shows in the club once a month.

“It’s my third time here, although it should be my fourth,” Zabiela says. “The last time the gig was canceled over all that craziness in the city. The first time I came, I knew nothing about Juárez or Mexico, and I must say, it was a shock to be driving with armed soldiers in the back of the truck. I’d only seen that on television. It was surreal.”

THE IMPACT “Hardpop is the essence of the city’s healing process, because violence in Juárez is all about greed, selfishness, trampling over everybody to get what you want, and when you come here, honestly, the red bulletin

it’s all about peace, love, and respect,” says Weir. “There’s a huge line outside, and this is the city where people were gunned down in the streets.”

The city is changing­—slowly, cautiously, but persistently. In September 2013, César Duarte, governor of the state of Chihuahua, where Juárez is located, used statistics to tout to the press that Ciudad Juárez was quickly becoming a safer city: During 2012, “high-impact” murders were down by 84 percent; kidnappings dropped by 75 percent; carjackings dropped 82 percent; commercial robbery went down 64 percent and bank robberies 92 percent.

The fact that there were only 86 murders during the first three months of 2013 was a breath of fresh air compared with the hundreds registered in a single

month during past years. Even the city’s façade has a new shine: The houses with peeling paint, the dozens of businesses that closed to avoid extortionists, and the oppressive, ghost-town atmosphere have been replaced by new storefronts that are open for business and people out walking the streets.

Denisse, Perla, and their friends are enjoying Zabiela’s final set. They’re happy. The Hardpop came through once more. “We’re going to forget the trauma we’ve had with all the violence because this music has a beat that distracts you, it lets you go,” Denisse says. “The energy the artist receives from the audience is incredible,” Weir says. “You can’t have a bad night at the Hardpop because the audience won’t allow it.” www.hardpop.com

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ADRENALINE

Y THAT PHOTOGRAPH REATHLESS LEAVES YOU B

INGENIOUS

HO ARE THE PEOPLE W E WORLD CHANGING TH

EXTREME

HAT ADVENTURE T DARIES BREAKS BOUN

©Dom Daher

yo u r . t n e M o M OR D BEYOND THE

INARY

your MoMent.

Beyond the ordinary

FREE DOWNLOAD

Where to go and what to do

Going deep? Wear this, because time and tide wait for no man.

GET THE GEAR, page 84

ac t i o n !

T r a v e l / G e a r / T r a i n i n g / N i g h t l i f e / M U S I C / p a r t i e s / c i t i e s / c l u b s / E v e n ts Bite club: Join big fish fans off Isla Guadalupe.

Ernst Koschier

Behind bars

It is possible to view a great white shark up close without it being the last thing you see.

Just enter the cage and drop 30 Ft. into the ocean. travel, page 86

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Action!

EASy BREEZy

get the Gear

Three things to improve your windsurfing

Lightweight At 7.4 pounds, this is an ultralight Kevlarcoated sail suitable for all wave and wind conditions.

Mormaii Lycra shirt Indispensable if you’re on the water a lot, this quickdrying shirt protects against wind and sun. mormaii.com.br

superglue Used—carefully— to close cuts, and a couple of drops can also be rubbed over palms, creating a blister-preventing layer.

Wind power: Robby Naish squeezes every ounce of performance from his equipment.

Board level windsurfing Robby Naish, the don of the sport, is back in the game at age 50 with top-class gear.

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Wave-breaker The Naish Wave 85l, designed for ocean waves, is relatively long and narrow at almost 8 feet, but still easy to turn.

Rip Curl ultimate titanium oceansearch Keeps track of tidal movements and wind direction on over 500 beaches worldwide. ripcurl.com

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getty images

Power and speed are the two things that Robby Naish needs to excel on the waves.

Since the late 1970s, he’s been making his own equipment, with his father, Rick. Naish, now 50 and back competing in windsurfing’s top tier after returning to the PWA Tour last November, uses larger sails and longer boards compared with most of his peers. When picking your setup, he says to “factor in your own weight, ability and the prevailing wind and wave conditions. And never go for a board that’s too small.” naishsails.com

Action !

nightlife Roll with it: Cape Town rock band BEAST

Making moves south african musical talent on the move

Markus Wormstorm

Dark-noir electronica master who did the score for Four Corners, South Africa’s official Oscar entry. facebook.com/ fourcornersdrops

Night waves

Aces ’n’ S pades, Alan van Gysen, press handout (3), Sydelle Willow Smith, Hélène Flament

cape town Rock ’n’ roll meets surfing royalty in a darkly glamorous dive bar.

What surfer doesn’t want to own a rock ’n’ roll bar? Big-wave chaser Grant “Twiggy” Baker jumped at the chance when a boyhood friend, Reg Macdonald, returned to South Africa after running hot clubs in Hollywood, including the Nacional, Tokio, and the Ivar. The fruit of their collaboration is Aces’n’Spades, a self-titled “good bar where bad things happen,” and a magnet for the A-list of surf (John John Florence, Mick Fanning) and film (Orlando Bloom and Kevin Spacey). There’s a vast selection of whiskeys and around 10 different beers on tap from local breweries. Wednesday is live music night, on Tuesdays and Thursdays the inner-city suits drop by for pre-dinner drinks, and on weekends the place rocks out. “It was meant to be a quiet bar,” says Baker. “It was never really meant to be a place to dance, but between 12 and 2 a.m. pretty much the whole place is a raging dance floor.”

Aces ’n’ Spades 62 Hout Street Cape Town, South Africa acesnspades.com

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th i rsty wo r k

DJ Spoko

From a township outside Pretoria, his jive-funk take on Afro-house appeared on an album by Mandela actor Idris Elba. twitter.com/ ghostship8

How the surf stars kick back

Grant Baker

Favorite Drink?

Don Julio tequila on the rocks, with a splash of water. Drinking cheap tequila is like drinking cheap whiskey. It should never be done.

Favorite Song?

Add It Up by Violent Femmes

Jordy Smith

Red Bull Vodka Rockin’ in the Free World

by Neil Young

Pioneer Unit

Frank Solomon

Brewers & Union’s Beast of the Deep beer All Along the Watchtower

by Jimi Hendrix

Jordy Smith’s new surf film, Now Now, premiered at Aces.

Record label behind vernacularlanguage spazahop act Rattex now showcasing cutting-edge local hip-hop via multimedia. pioneerunit.com

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Action!

Travel

And anoth er thing when you (San Die)go

Swell town With 45 miles of Pacific coastline, San Diego is a surfing mecca (if you can bear to get back in the water without a cage). sandiego.org

S hark Diving A close encounter with a great white is no zoo trip. Out in the pacific ocean, deep in predator territory, you face the beast.

The best place on Earth to go shark diving is Isla Guadalupe, a remote Pacific island about 160 miles off the Mexican coast. “Nowhere else are there so many white sharks in such crystal-clear waters between August and November,” says underwater photographer Ernst Koschier. Despite the reassuring prospect of a sharkproof cage, it may still take a while for your brain to accept this as a leisure activity. “You still have to face your fear,” says Austrian journalist Andreas Wollinger, “but that disappears when you enter the cage. The large metal bars are reassuring, plus there’s the calm of the sea.” Lead weights worn around the hips keep you stable on the cage floor.

You breathe through a diving regulator supplied with air from the surface, so your movement isn’t limited by carrying air tanks. The cage, lowered like a lift, remains 30 feet under the surface for 45 minutes.

Attracted by a bag of fish scraps dangled in the water, the sharks quickly appear. “There were three or four, as big and heavy as cars, their A week aboard the teeth bared, circling the cage,” says Nautilus Explorer Wollinger. “But they’re a lot slower ship, leaving from than you think, with elegant San Diego, Calif., and economical movements. and including three They are relaxed, and thankfully diving days, starts not in the least bit interested at $3,000. nautilusexplorer.com in the people in the cage.”

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Face your fears: Up close to Jaws, minus the scary cello music.

Bunk down Dry-land adrenaline: Head out, in a military jeep, for a night in the Anza-Borrego desert, home to coyotes and mountain lions. california overland.com

Advice from the inside Stick to thick “The water is a pleasant 68°F, but you’re not moving around much, so that can soon get cold,” says Koschier.

“I’d recommend a wetsuit that is at least 6 mm thick, plus boots, gloves, and diving goggles—and definitely take a camera that clips on to you, so both hands are free.”

What, no cage?

Some scientists have permits to swim freely with the sharks. Mauricio Hoyos has one. “When diving, it’s important to understand a shark’s body language,” he says. “Never approach quickly or make sudden movements. That awakens a shark’s hunting instinct. And that usually turns out very badly.”

Roll out You could just leave the country: The San Diego trolley’s San Ysidro line ends right next to the delights of Tijuana, Mexico. sdmts.com

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ernst koschier (2), shutterstock (3)

Cage with a view

Action!

training

Reggie Bush has found his footing in the Detroit Lions offense this season.

Building a winner’s body football Without power below the belt, Reggie Bush doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

“Football has a 100 percent injury rate,” says Reggie Bush. “It’s not a matter of if you’re going to get injured, it’s a matter of when.” The Detroit Lions running back is one of the fittest in the NFL; his 4.3 seconds in the 40 yard-dash also makes him among the fastest. “The right training helps to limit the injury risk and to withstand the tackles. My workout routine includes muscle development in the weight room, motor skill training under stress, and training on the treadmill.”

t r e a d m i l l d r i l l : n f l s ta r s o n ly “Even under stress, your motor skills need to work properly,” says Bush. “On the treadmill, you learn to automate rolling over at high speed and train motor skills, which helps me play the game.”

1

Jeremy Deputat/Red Bull Content Pool, james westman

Heri Irawan

Leg work: Reggie Bush trains his moneymakers.

Run forward on a horizontal treadmill.

Dive and roll over the training ball.

Roll over, get up, keep running.

Repeat four times.

iron man wearing a 20 LB. weight vest

2

Leg Strength

Run backwards on an inclined treadmill with a ball in your hand.

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As you run, put the ball on an adjacent holder.

Run back to the top of the treadmill. Repeat four times.

“My legs are precious, but they are also my opponents’ target,” says Bush.

“Therefore, strong leg muscles are essential.

This weight vest is filled with sand and iron and speeds up legmuscle development.

I wear it when I do an overall workout, sprint sessions, knee bends, and jumping power training.”

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Action!

world run

See how you run

Fitness freak, reluctant runner, or middling middle-distancer?

Take our test to find out what kind of runner you are, then download the training plan that suits you best.

my training and I’ll have to make up for it as quickly as possible.

B Withdrawal symptoms.

I start getting fidgety.

C It’s the normal state of affairs.

1 I run because …

A I want to improve my performance.

B I want to feel good.

C I still need to find out why.

2 When I’m running, the main thing I focus on is …

A My heart rate and split times.

B The weather and the world around me.

C Chatting to my running partner.

4 My Body Mass Index (BMI) is …

A 18-25 B 25-40 C My Body huh?

5 I get overtaken when running in the park.

My reaction is ...

3 A few days of no running means ...

A That I’m behind with

A What is this “being overtaken” you speak of?

B I don’t react. I just carry on doing my laps.

C It pushes me on. I’ll get back past them!

D A friendly wave.

6 The most important thing for me while running is …

A A good time, good opponents, a good result.

B Good change of pace.

C Hmm. It’s not like there’s money on it.

of training, such as weights.

B Go cycling or swimming.

C Take a break!

8 After running, I immediately ...

A Start planning my next training run.

B Enjoy the endorphins.

C Think about the beer I’m going to have and the aches and pains I’ll have tomorrow.

7 I’ve been plagued with foot pain for days. So I …

A Do some other kind

How did you do?

Work out your final score by adding up your points per questions. For every answer A, you get 10 points; a B is worth 5 points; a C is worth 1 and for D, add zero to your total.

Your goal:

The Keep-Fit Enthusiast Your goal:

8–14 points

The Reluctant Runner Your goal:

Improved performance

Firm calves and the feel-good factor

Getting off the couch

You’re looking to test your limits on an almost daily basis. You like to outperform others on a competitive basis.

You train several times a week and invest time and effort in your health and quality of life.

You only run irregularly, and when you do, it’s only to remind yourself: “God, I used to be fitter than this.”

Your motto:

Your motto:

Your motto:

“Push myself to the limit every day”

“First work, then pleasure”

“Conquer your weaker self”

We recommend:

We recommend:

We recommend:

Training plan A

Training plan B

Training plan C

Get your training plan: redbulletin.com

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sascha bierl

The Would-Be Athlete

15-70 points

Sebastian Marko/Red Bull Content Pool

71-80 points

enter

n ow

an d get training

TIPS FROM A PRO RACE DIRECTOR COLIN JACKSON’S running CHECKLIST

FOOTWEAR “There’s got to be life left in your shoes.

But never ignore that moment when they’ve become loose and worn out, because you won’t be running economically.

Definitely get new ones at 600 miles!”

NUTRITION “On competition day, eat what you normally eat: That’s what your body is used to.

Different foods send your body’s whole energy system into disarray and you could end up worse off for it.”

LIQUIDS “Your body is smart. If you don’t drink enough, it will take more liquid from your food. Always drink enough to prevent yourself ever getting thirsty. It’s important to take in drinks containing sodium and potassium.”

MUSIC “Calm for when you’re in the flow; harder for tougher sections.

Personally, I prefer to run without music and listen to my body instead, and those who like to run as part of a group won’t need headphones.”

“By the time you’re thirsty, it’s too late.”

Colin Jackson, two-time 110m hurdle world champion

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Global gathering W ings For Life World Run A starter’s gun on six continents.

The first worldwide running race in sports history gets under way in May 2014. Anyone who wants to race against the rest of the world can take part. Here are the details: 1. THE WAY IT WORKS

4. THE RESULTS

In 35 countries, 37 races will all begin at 10 a.m. UTC (6 a.m. EST) on May 4, 2014. “Catcher cars” will depart 30 minutes later to chase the pack and start reeling in the participants. The last person in the world to be caught wins.

The last man and last woman running will be crowned global champions and win a round-theworld trip. Each country will also record its national winners. All runners will be able to check online to see how they did against the rest of the world’s runners.

2. THE CHASERS The “catcher cars” gradually increase their speed at predetermined intervals. Once a runner is caught or passed by a car, he or she must drop out of the race and the distance run at that point is automatically recorded.

5. THE PARTICIPANTS

3. THE COURSES

6. THE MISSION

They fall into five global categories: coastal runs, river runs, city runs, nature runs, and runs with a view.

The event’s homepage (wingsfor lifeworldrun.com) gives you the latest weather reports, detailed course info, and a distance-time calculator.

The official Wings For Life World Run motto is: Running For Those Who Can’t. All of the money earned will go to the Austria-based Wings For Life Foundation, which supports worldwide scientific research programs looking for a cure for spinal cord injuries. You can find more information at wingsforlife.com.

Beginners, hobby runners, top athletes, and stars, such as former F1 driver David Coulthard.

The aim is to cover as much of the course as you can in the name of research on spinal cord injuries.

Compete against the rest of the world in the Wings For Life World Run. You can register online until April 20, 2014, at wingsforlifeworldrun.com

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MY CITY

traße Nordbahns

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Anna Müller: Waltzing around Vienna

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The Vienna Climbing Hall offers bouldering and climbing spaces and a slackline course.

Climbing heaven for beginners and pros. kletterhallewien.at

3 St Josef Mondscheingasse 10 “Have lunch with a clear conscience: This place is healthy, organic, regional, and the people are incredibly nice. And it all tastes great. If you don’t like the lentil dhal, you’re beyond help.”

FUTURE WAR

When HVOB formed in early 2012, Anna Müller and Paul Wallner wanted to make electronic music that you could both listen and dance to: ooontze-ooontzeooontze with intelligence. With Müller composing and singing and Wallner doing production they got their wish. After uploading a couple of snippets to SoundCloud, things started to happen very quickly.

Performances at Europe’s biggest festivals, an invitation from designer Elie Saab to soundtrack his Paris Fashion Week video, an EP, an album, another EP and, not least, record sales. They will be playing live at the SXSW festival in March in Austin (they love playing live, for which a duo becomes a trio with the addition of a drummer). If you can’t make it to Texas, seek out Lion, HVOB’s new EP. If you can make it to Vienna, seek out Müller’s must-visits. hvob-music.com

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“I know no better shop in Vienna. Big, wide, open white spaces. Wonderful vintage items, especially the old clothes.”

4 Propaganda Stubenring 20

“There’s no excuse for a bad haircut when you’re in Vienna.

The city is home to Wolfgang ‘Jackson’ Steinbauer and his tiny salon with a huge picture of Marilyn Manson on the wall.”

2 zimmer 37 Am Karmelitermarkt 37–39

“This market is a bit boho, but that doesn’t matter. At Zimmer 37, a mother-anddaughter team make wonderful, wonderful food. It’s the best place to sit in the sun and eat or just have a coffee, anywhere in Vienna. Close by, you also have the Schöne Perle and Pizza Mari restaurants.”

laserfun-vienna.at

FLY AN AIRBUS 5 Pratersauna Waldsteingartenstrasse 135

“Vienna’s best club is loved all over Europe. It has the best bookings, the best garden, and the best pool. We’ve worked with the best and most dazzling VJs from the Pratersauna.”

Practice takeoffs and tell cabin crew to take seats for landing on a flight simulator.

Simulated engine failure is a heck of a thing. viennaflight.at

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albert Exergian, silvia druml

v ienna Electro princess Anna Müller on nightclub swimming and the (hair) do’s and don’ts of her hometown.

1 burggasse 24 Burggasse 24

shutterstock

Capital time

One of Europe’s finest laser tag arenas. Pursue your opponents in a misty maze and unleash Arnie one-liners in his home country.

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Š JÜrg Mitter

Li k e What you Li k e

Your MoMent.

Beyond the ordinary

Action!

AWARD WINNING INFO

MUSIC

Insider knowledge ahead of the 54th Grammys, on January 26

James Mercer is a busy man. The 42-year-old from Hawaii is lead singer of The Shins, whose playful, psychedelic indie songs have been conquering charts and critics’ hearts for a dozen years. Since 2009, he has also been involved in Broken Bells, with his friend Danger Mouse (one half of Gnarls Barkley, and producer of The Black Keys and Norah Jones). As a duo, they proclaim their love of obscure pop and understatedly odd dance music, which works splendidly: Broken Bells’ debut album sold 700,000 copies in the U.S. A second album, After the Disco, is out now.

Here, Mercer reveals what inspired him as he was working on it.

Playlist BROKEN BELLS SINGER JAMES MERCER AND the FIVE tracks on heavy rotation in his studio.

brokenbells.com

1 Throwing Muses 2 Smith Westerns Not Too Soon

Varsity

“To me this song sums up everything that the ’90s were about.

Throwing Muses were a girl band, which was a cool thing back then, and they were also one of the first bands I ever saw live back when I went to high school in England. Not Too Soon is a classic power-pop song. It may sound very 1991, but it’d still be successful in any era.”

“They are a young new indie band.

They have this song called Varsity, which is the title track of their current album.

I love it. It sounds like a classic ’80s radio song. It’s very easy to listen to. I love their lightheartedness. We were trying to get them to tour with Broken Bells three years ago, but unfortunately they were busy doing something else.”

4 Fruit Bats

5 Blur

“You’re Too Weird was written my buddy Eric Johnson from the band Fruit Bats. It’s a love song he wrote for his wife. Well, maybe not exclusively for her. But it’s beautiful and brilliantly written. I met Eric 15 years ago touring when he was playing in his former, highly underestimated band Califone, and we just became good friends.”

“Blur released their first new song since 2003 on their website as a free download on April 1 three years ago. Almost no one paid it any attention—at least not in the States. Which is insane!

I thought Fool’s Day was great: one of Blur’s best songs ever. I hoped at the time that the track would herald a new album, but I’m still waiting.”

You’re Too Weird

Fool’s Day

3

The Apples in Stereo The Golden Flower

“I learned a fair amount about how to write songs listening to this one. It’s a strange song with strange chords. It was a 7-inch that came for free when you bought the Tone Soul Evolution album on vinyl. It was this thing that would fall out when you opened the sleeve.

Really annoying, but what can you do?

It’s one of my favorite songs ever.”

Stevie Wonder In Nigeria on the night of the 1976 ceremony, he appeared via live satellite link-up.

Host Andy Williams asked, “Stevie, can you see us now?”

It was Williams’ last Grammy appearance.

M O U N TA I N G R O OV E M eta l to the p eda l?

SETTING THE RHYTHM Music to fill your leg muscles with lactic acid by: All tunesloving mountain bikers should have one of these Bluetooth speakers in their bottle holders. It has a 10-hour battery and rugged all-terrain performance. scosche.com

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The Hungarian conductor, who died in 1997, is the most-Grammyed, with 31 trophies to his name. He could be overtaken by bluegrass musician Alison Krauss, who, at 42, has 27 awards.

Sinead O’Connor The only person ever to refuse a Grammy is the Irish singer, protesting the increasing commercialization of the awards. Milli Vanilli had to return theirs because of a “fake vocals” controversy.

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florian obkircher

Overlooked anthems

Georg Solti

Getty Images (2), Corbis, universalmusic, press handout

Double-time: James Mercer is the singer and guitarist in The Shins and Broken Bells.

Action!

games

Criminal behavior: Stealing to survive and surviving to steal in Thief.

Make Millions Making Gam es Biggestearning titles on crowdfunding website Kickstarter

Torment: Tides Of Numenera $4.18 mIL More than 70,000 people chipped in for a sciencefiction RPG set about a billion years in the future.

It’s a steal Thief watch out! this game might run off with every minute of your spare time.

“Let me tell you about this city,” says one Thief character, of the world of the game. “If it were my mother, I would say I was adopted.” The scene is dark and dirty, and it’s the setting of an eagerly awaited installment in one of gaming’s most influential series.

The first Thief was one of three 1998 games that defined and popularized the sneak-’em-up—or firstperson stealth adventure, for modern gamers—along with the classic Metal Gear Solid and the ninja-rich Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Without them, there would be no Assassin’s Creed or Splinter Cell, and it’s with those two games in mind that gamers will approach the rebooted Thief, released worldwide in February.

They will find a vast game world, missions, objectives: the standard stealth setup. But the atmosphere, thick with steampunk urban stink and a genuine sense of grubby dread, makes Thief worth taking. Available for Xboxes One and 360, PlayStations 3 and 4, and PC.

paul wilson

thiefgame.com

Thief: Eyes on the prize.

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o u t n ow

Senseitional

We can’t stop playing Clumsy Ninja!

He looks like an escapee from Cartoon Network, but the ninja’s ultra-realistic movement makes training him— the game’s sole purpose—an addictive iPhone delight. He feels real and you feel his progress, and that’s what keeps you coming back. Level 77 next …

Project Eternity $3.97 mIL Another RPG, from the makers of Star Wars and Fallout games, with a Game of Thronesish setting.

naturalmotion.com

You will obey Hot game of Cold War intrigue

Many of us play games to escape from the daily grind of modern bureaucracy: Papers Please, uniquely, plunges you into exactly that.

As a border guard of a fictional Soviet state, you wield the power over those who would enter your country. Unsettlingly thrilling. For PC and Mac.

level5ia.com

Mighty No. 9 $3.85 mIL Japanese-style robot fun. Four fans paid $10K each to dine with maker Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man.

Find and fund new games on kickstarter.com

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Action!

buyer’s guide

2

1

3

Watch out whether it’s a deep dive, an early morning run, or cocktail hour, here are a few ideas to keep your wrists covered.

Tag heuer grand carrera calibre Designed with TAG Heuer’s race-car lineage, the Calibre’s titanium body, alligator leather strap, and Swiss Office of Chronometry– certified precision make you feel as if you’re strapping a tiny Porsche 911 to your wrist. $8,300 www.tagheuer.com 1

nixon baja In a world of wrist phones and GPS watches, the Baja opts for a simpler claim to fame: an LED flashlight on its face. Add the tough nylon strap, stopwatch, alarm, digital compass and thermometer and you’ve got yourself a wrist-mounted travel kit. $150 www.nixon.com 2

Editor’s choice SureFire 2211 luminox wristlight This collaboration between a tactical lighting company and a military-inspired watchmaker features a 300-lumen LED light on the side that faces the hand. The resulting beam aligns with a pistol in a two-handed grip. The USBrechargeable watch also has lower settings (60 and 15 lumens) for civilian use. www.surefire.com

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Seiko sportura snaf34 It’s not easy to ride the line between style and sport utility, but Seiko’s Sportura found a way. The black face with gold-painted detailing looks good with a suit, but the stopwatch timing and scratchproof crystal face give the Sportura its sports watch cred. Bonus: The chronograph can measure exactly how fast you ran that 40-yard sprint. $595 www.seikousa.com 3

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Telling time is no longer enough when picking the perfect watch.

4

5

SWATCH IRONY CHRONO SILVERISH The name sounds imprecise, but the Quartz movement is tuned to keep accurate time down to the split-second.

The bright stainless steel case and chainmail-looking Milanese-style strap add a touch of bling to your wrist.

Not too bad for less than two hundred bones. $185 www.swatch.com 4

freestyle precision 2.0 This dive watch sports both analog and digital displays for at-a-glance time checks, water resistance to 660 feet, and hydro pushers that allow the buttons to be used at 3 ATM. The Precision’s hard glass face and rubber wrist strap make it handy for land-lovers as well. $145 www.freestyleusa.com Billy brown

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dimitri newman

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Suunto Ambit2 Suunto’s GPS sport watch has a grip of outdoor features for whatever you’re into. Backpackers, hikers, and trail runners will dig the full-featured GPS suite, the waypoint navigation and the altimeter/barometer. $450 www.suunto.com 6

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Action!

save the date

The wheel deal.

AMA Supercross It’s the final chance to see Supercross in the heartland of the sport—the last Southern California stop of the AMA Supercross tour takes place at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego.

Last year the 450SX event was won by David Millsaps from nearby Murrieta, California, while Elia Tomac of Durango, Colorado, won the 250SX class. www.supercrossonline.com

February 16

February 10

NBA All-Star Game

Academy Award Nominees Luncheon

The league’s favorite pros— well, at least those who aren’t always injured, cough cough Kobe, cough cough Steve Nash—gather for an all-ingood-fun game in New Orleans.

The events around the main event are the most fun: The three-point contest shows why the pros are pros, and maybe someone will dunk over a tank this year in the dunk contest. www.nba.com

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It’s the last big event before the big, big event: The Nominees Luncheon, traditionally held at The Beverly Hilton Hotel, is the last chance for Academy Award nominees to play nice, look pretty—and impress voters and the press—before Oscar day.

Oscar.go.com

February 15-17

Coconut Grove Arts Festival This fest is a celebration of creativity in all of its forms—including music, food, and visual arts—held outdoors in balmy Florida. Check out the global food village for your better-thanaverage fried-Twinkie-on-a-stick fair food, and yes, they even have those giant floating hamster balls if you want to traumatize your child in the name of fun. www.cgaf.com

the red bulletin

Garth Milan/Red Bull Content Pool (2), Press Handout (3), corbis, reuters, getty images

February 8

time ta b le

February 1

Death Valley Marathon Don’t worry about high-altitude training—with this marathon you can run through a quick 26.2 miles entirely below sea level as you wind through Death Valley National Park in California. And don’t worry about broiling into a crispy critter—highs this time of year are in the low 70s. www.envirosports.com

more dates to save this month

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february

February 20 February 25

Noise Pop This San Francisco celebration of all that is indie will include performances by Dr. Dog, Real Estate, Sun Kil Moon’s Mark Kozelek, and Bob Mould.

Besides music, the festival includes an art gallery showcase, a “culture club” for discussing cutting-edge and avant garde art forms, and a film festival. www.noisepop.com

Red Bull Crashed Ice St. Paul The second stop of the Ice Cross Downhill World Championship takes place in downtown St. Paul, where combatants—uh, skaters—will twist, turn and check down hundreds of icy feet and the first to the bottom will be declared the winner.

Switzerland’s Derek Wedge won the title in 2013, but Canada’s Kyle Croxall and American Cameron Naasz were a blade’s width away from the title. www.redbullcrashedice.com January 30–February 9

Santa Barbara Film Festival Sure, the city of Santa Barbara turns the charming meter up to 11—but why go to a film festival there instead of Los Angeles, an hour to the south?

Because in the run-up to the Oscars, they get the most buzzed-about talent to show up. Cate Blanchett, Emma Thompson, Forest Whitaker, and Oprah—yes, that Oprah—will make an appearance.

More TV! Watching eight hours of football hoopla not enough? Fox comedies New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine get the plum post– Super Bowl spots. www.fox.com

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february

Art Restart George Clooney’s The Monuments Men got booted from Oscar season—but this story of Nazi looted art is timely and irresistible. www. monumentsmen. com

www.sbiff.org

February 2

Super Bowl XLVIII It’s February! In New Jersey! Sounds like a great place for a vacation! For the first time, the Super Bowl is going to be held in an open-air stadium in the middle of winter in a city that actually has a winter. What could possibly be awful about that? Lucky for them, it appears as though most of the warm-weather teams have already washed out of contention—sorry San Diego, Houston, Jacksonville—and it’s going to wind up being a team from northern climes that gets filleted

by Peyton Manning or Russell Wilson. www.superbowl.com

the red bulletin

19 february

Valentine’s Hint No idea what to get your ladyfriend for the big mid-February Hallmark corporate-shill holiday? Hint: Justin Timberlake at Madison Square Garden. www.thegarden. com

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magic moment

November 24, 2013 What Mark Webber did on the slowdown lap after his 217th and last Formula One Grand Prix carries a penalty: He took off his helmet. The Australian, who will race a Porsche in the World Endurance Championship this year, escaped punishment and was also able to blame the airflow for his farewell tears.

“I spent half a lap trying to get it off ... it’s bloody noisy with no helmet on, I know that much.”

Getty Images

Mark Webber

The next issue of the Red Bulletin is out on FebRUARY 11 98

the red bulletin

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