When men were men, and dope was speed
An illiterate child from a small town in India falls asleep on a train and ends up lost in Calcutta, unable to find his way back home. Twenty-five years later, while living with his adoptive family in Australia, he locates his lost hometown using memories and Google Earth:
This was it, the name of the station where he was separated from his brother that day, a couple hours from his home. Saroo scrolled up the train track looking for the next station. He flew over trees and rooftops, buildings and fields, until he came to the next depot, and his eyes fell on a river beside it—a river that flowed over a dam like a waterfall.
Saroo felt dizzy, but he wasn’t finished yet. He needed to prove to himself that this was really it, that he had found his home. So, he put himself back into the body of the barefoot five-year-old boy under the waterfall: ‘I said to myself, Well, if you think this is the place, then I want you to prove to yourself that you can make your way back from where the dam is to the city center.’
Saroo moved his cursor over the streets on-screen: a left here, a right there, until he arrived at the heart of the town—and the satellite image of a fountain, the same fountain where he had scarred his leg climbing over the fence 25 years before.
“A Home at the End of Google Earth.” — David Kushner, Vanity Fair
Source: http://lgrd.co/VVAnOG
Long live the Cutters!
Red Hook Crit Milano 2012
Old school/New school. The always inspiring Tom Ritchey
Singular Beauty: Photographing Cosmetic Surgery Clinics
As the adage goes, document what you know. Cara Phillips has never gone under the knife of a plastic surgeon, but she has photographed dozens of plastic surgery rooms around the country — all under the glare of florescent surgery lights. A former child model, Phillips chose photography as a way to turn her own lens on an industry she felt objectified women — and to battle her own body image demons. The result is Singular Beauty, a book of haunting portraits of the insides of cosmetic surgery offices and their promise of a better you.
What drew you to document the beauty industry?
Before I became a photographer, I spent most of my life in the beauty business, first as a child model and later as makeup artist. From a very early age, I learned that being beautiful was both valuable and required of women. These experiences left me with some serious body-image issues. So the decision to focus my camera on beauty started off as a personal exploration, but as the project progressed, my focus shifted to the larger cultural issues of aging, desire, and physical perfection. The cosmetic surgery industry is the ultimate expression of the relentless American pursuit of youth and beauty.
So cold, but beautiful too.
Motherfuckin Duchamp!
Marcel Duchamp - Rotoreliefs
Duchamp recognized that by spinning designs composed as sets of eccentric but concentric circles, a viewer would see the resulting pattern as a three dimensional form even through one eye alone, without the supposedly necessary benefit of stereoscopy! By the 1930s, Duchamp had constructed from his experiments a wonderfully whimsical set of 12 spinning images—from a goldfish in a bowl, to the eclipsed sun seen through a tube, to a cocktail glass, to a light bulb—in order to emphasize his discovery of these three-dimensional effects. Ironically, as another example of harmful separation between truly unified aspects of art and science, art museums almost invariably exhibit these discs as framed, static objects on a wall—whereas they have no meaning, either artistic or scientific, unless they spin.
Vintage science pulp fiction illustrations from the 1920s by Austrian-born American illustrator Frank R. Paul imagine our Solar System’s fellow inhabitants.
These are SO GOOD!
Wabi sabi
antique trainer
City Bakery, Chelsea
The Houseflies
I sat around my new apartment, in my new city, sick and out of work. Killing flies was the only thing that gave me a modicum of satisfaction. My girlfriend was in Manhattan working. My roommates were too. My laptop sat at a jaunty angle on the couch, its screen in a dim power save mode, betrayed a cheesy career aptitude test website. Then I caught a fly with my bare hands-crippled it, but not killed. A light flicked on in my NyQuil soaked brain-feed this fly to the turtles!
Our place had been plagued by these fucking flies for the past 4 days- at exactly the time I quit my shitty bike shop job and got this shitty cold. My spirits weren’t too low though, all things considered. I had only just impulsively uprooted my little life in California, driven 3000 miles in an undead zombie pickup truck, spent a week on a friend’s couch and gotten a job at a “high profile” bicycle shop. This really proved to be the first quality time I ‘d had to sit around and take stock of it all, in my own place, with the houseflies, of course.
I had spent the last couple of sick days reading up on various remedies for this problem. People suggested everything from homemade flypaper which I tried to make before realizing that we only had light corn syrup- which actually contained no high fructose corn syrup at all and therefore didn’t catch shit- to essential oils that were purported to make the flies so uncomfortable that they would decide to leave our apartment. In the end, a trip to the hardware store yielding one bright green fly swatter, and a dude with nothing better to do proved a lethal combination for the flies.
My roommate Mindy bought these two turtles impulsively in Chinatown about a month ago. According to Mindy, the old lady hawking them intimated, through cruel gestures, and aggravated English, that if they weren’t purchased as pets, they’d end up in someone’s soup. At first I thought having turtles around would be great. We could name them Leonardo and Donatello and they’d be rad, but then she named them Walter and Bosco or something like that—cute, boring and I started to lose interest. I remembered something from youth: My mom issuing a stringent warning about playing with Tony Lopez’s turtles.
"Turtles carry salmonella, you cannot, under any circumstances, touch them and forget to wash your hands"
Why not mom? What’ll happen if I forget?
"You’ll get salmonella poisoning."
What’s that do?
"If you’re old, it can kill you…remember what happened to your abuelita?"
My grandmother had once handled some bad chicken and not washed her hands properly. She nearly died.
My mom was very good at tactically using vagaries of speech with just enough of a scientific sprinkling to turn my brothers and I into germaphobes for life. Anyway, I scooped the immobilized fly up with a napkin, and carefully dropped it into the tank and waited to see what would happen.
When we first got the turtles, Fofa, my other roommate, Rachelle’s mentally unstable dog must have somehow dragged a slug into the house. Rachelle immediately saw to the turtles’ needs and dropped said slug into the tank, placing it on a patch of dry land. The slug passively explored its new surroundings and slid mindlessly into the water. What we witnessed next astounded both of us. As the slug sank slowly, almost gracefully down through the cool water, these two little turtles-some breed of Slider, no bigger than a silver dollar at the time and scared to death of the massive faces peering at them through the aquarium glass, turned into savage carnivores. We watched, mouths agape, as the turtles took pass after pass at the hapless slug, now sunk to the bottom of the tank and oozing a viscous white material. Within minutes there was no evidence of the slug’s existence.
So I dropped the fly into the tank and and eagerly waited for the bloodsport to begin. One of the turtles, the braver of the two, Walter, I think, poked his head above the water to get a better look at the wriggling spectacle on the surface. He almost bumped the fly with his deadly beak as he came to the surface. I could hardly contain my excitement. But something was different this time. Walter showed no interest. The fly floated haplessly on the current and the other turtle just did what he always did when a human approached the tank; paddled frantically and futilely against the rear glass of the aquarium. I was very disappointed. Maybe the turtles weren’t hungry, or maybe their palates had become too refined for the common Brooklyn house fly. Either way, my great entertainment for the afternoon was a bust.
on rainy San Francisco day…
Edgar Allan Poe, Blood Bags, and the Greatest Race on Earth
It’s so much more than a mud flinging, revenge-driven tell-all. Tyler Hamilton educates us all on the rigors and extremes of competing in world class cycling. The utter ghoulishness of it all may be striking to the less informed—extracting one’s blood, storing it amongst a dozen other riders’ blood, only to re-inject it later. Hamilton relays an incident in which their “doctor’s” courier gets stopped by police on the road, ditches the blood bags for a time, only to retrieve them later and distribute the sun-warmed blood to the riders, which left Hamilton feverish and full of dead blood cells. For me, it was the methodical, systematic nature of the ghoulish practices that made the deepest impression. As a former racer I can certainly recall taking too big of a piece of pie, spitting it out surreptitiously into a napkin, and feeling awkward about it the first time, then how later it would become less strange, until it felt like nothing out of the norm.
On the subject of Lance, there is no more condemnation regarding the Texan’s use of “Edgar” (as in Edgar Allen Poe: EPO) than anyone else’s. But when it comes to his character and motives, Hamilton does focus the lens more sharply, removing the Gaussian blur most Americans have viewed Lance through and revealing a win-at-all-costs megalomaniac. I have to be honest; I’ve always respected Lance—not just his achievements, but Lance, as I knew him through interviews and tweets. I even appreciated his cockiness. I saw it as necessary—something that came with the territory. And I was never blind to the fact that the man doped. But I believed that there was an underlying honor in it all and Hamilton’s recounting of history goes a long way in eroding that belief.
The Secret Race also paints a fair and unabashed portrait of the racer, husband, son, and doting father to Tugboat, the golden retriever. Hamilton does not seek to spare himself as a simple foot soldier who followed team orders in a system where doping was the norm. He describes how he was introduced to it as a domestique, and how he later brought it with him as a team leader. He lets us in on the moral gymnastics it took to lie to the media, his parents, his fans. But he also explains the freedom “getting popped” afforded him—how good it felt drop the act. Hamilton describes towards the end of his tale, a pair of spandex clad riders on race bikes who pass him while on his town bike in Boulder, one of them is wearing a jersey that advertises: DOPERS SUCK, prompting Hamilton to pursue, mashing away on his 30 lb. fat-tired bike, and catching them down the road.
Hamilton to rider:
Yeah, I’m an ex-doper, but I don’t suck.
And it’s very evident, upon finishing this book that Tyler Hamilton does not, and did not ever suck. Nor did Pantani, Floyd, Ulrich, Basso, or Valverde or any of the others we spectators so easily pass judgment upon. Ok Ricco sucked, and still does, but the cast of characters who played the game in the late nineties was as tough and daring as any. They were simply caught up in an arms race—one that proliferated because the governing bodies of the time were inclined to look the other way. Because the science and technology available to these racers so greatly eclipsed the dope their directors were privy to, and because on paper, records were being smashed everywhere. The Secret Race gives us deep insight into the secretive, turbulent, and arguably most important era in professional cycling’s history.
In Cold Mud
What is Cyclocross without the mud?
Like a good peaty scotch, autumn, is an acquired taste for me. Maybe it was autumn’s historical association with back-to-school anxiety that soiled its reputation. Maybe it was just the end of summer fun. Either way, cyclocross racing helped me find a new a appreciation for the fall many years ago in Chicago, IL. Living in California for the past six years, deprived me of this most dramatic of seasons. The smells weren’t there, the leaves were all still largely on their trees, and the chill was quite chilly enough. Thankfully though, the competition was stiff, and the enthusiasm was hearty and genuine.
I’m back from the west now, and looking forward to a proper East Coast Autumn. The smell of dead leaves in cold mud, huddling over vats of chilli, racing not always to win, but sometimes just to stay warm- ok racing to win and stay warm.
One of my favorite things about cyclocross racing often occurs during those first two races of the season; the scalded lung sensation after the sixty minutes of sweet torture has elapsed. There’s little you can do to prepare for the white hot intensity of a well-contended cross race and even less you can do to avoid the sizzle. You just gotta jump in-tear the bandage off straightaway and embrace the pain.