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Joel Meyerowitz, Gabriel and Sam , 1981, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Joel Meyerowitz , Renee, 1981, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Soft summer light drifts over the subjects in Joel Meyerowitz’s Provincetown portraits. It smooths over dunes, waves, ocean-kissed curls, and downy bodies, creating a dreamy allure. In Meyorowitz’s scenes, mostly taken throughout the 1980s, residents and travelers stand on the boardwalk or recline in the sand. Behind them, the clapboard homes and wooden fences typical of New England architecture serve as quaint backdrops.

Altogether, Meyorowitz’s pictures, which Aperture has presented together for the first time in the volume Provincetown (2019), suggest a blissful bygone era. The portraits are a far cry from the photos that initially made Meyerowitz famous—candid, unposed 1960s street photographs, shot on 35 millimeter film—but they’re a natural next step following his 1970s landscape shots of Cape Cod. In this series, Meyerowitz merged his interests in portraiture and the coastal environment, making pictures that reveal his subjects’ simultaneous repose and self-determination in an ultra-progressive and beautiful seaside town.

Joel Meyerowitz , Wendy, 1976, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Meyerowitz has laid out a selection of these pictures in subtle chapters within the book, separated by small landscape shots. One section focuses on women reclining like odalisques, another on close-up portraits, and others on romantic couples—both queer and straight—and mother-daughter pairings.

The project began in 2017, when Aperture’s team reached out to Meyerowitz to see his archive for a magazine issue, which centered on style and identity with an eye towards issues of gender and sexuality. His archivist at the time, Jenny Goldberg, sent the foundation hundreds of photographs that he had made at the beach, many of which had never been shown.

Joel Meyerowitz , Stephen, Lynette, and Jack, 1981, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Joel Meyerowitz , Norman and his son John Buffalo, 1982, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

The pictures capture an era when the gay community was beginning to enter the mix of the summer season crowd, which previously, as Meyerowitz recalled, comprised “artists, and Portuguese fishing families, and day trippers, and just all over Americana.” The region was an ideal place to express yourself, with “a sense of freedom in being away from the culture of condemnation.”

The series began when Meyerowitz put out an open call for subjects in the local newspaper Provincetown Advocate, requesting “remarkable” volunteers. He used an old-school 8x10 view camera, which required him to stand nearby while his subjects gazed into his machine. “They had to look in the mirror in a way,” he recalled, “like they do when they’re in their own intimate space.”

Joel Meyerowitz , Steven , 1981, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Joel Meyerowitz , Denise, 1985, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

In his work, Meyerowitz reconsidered what makes for a “remarkable” subject, teasing visual intrigue from each beachgoer and Provincetown resident who showed up at his door. All believed themselves to fit his description for different reasons. One woman, whom Meyerowitz described as a classic American beauty with a New England look, revealed that she’d been in a terrible car crash, and had her face reconstructed. “I realized I was looking at a miracle,” Meyerowitz recalled. Taking picture after picture, he realized “that really all of us are remarkable.”

Yet Meyerowitz’s project quickly expanded beyond “remarkable” strangers as he began shooting his friends and acquaintances on the Cape. One frame, The Packard Family (1981), features a woman, Ann, in a white bucket hat and paint-splattered pants, her arms around her three daughters: one topless, one in a black bikini, and one in a metallic blue suit. Ann, an artist and a friend of Meyerowitz’s, raised five children on her own with little income. Now, both she and her daughter Cynthia are well-regarded artists on the Cape. Meyerowitz’s picture has become a time capsule of a younger, fallow time, with a sense of hope embedded in the beachy light.

Joel Meyerowitz , The Packard Family, 1981, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Joel Meyerowitz , Steve, Debbie, Guy, and Mark, 1985, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Another picture, Gabriel and Sam (1981), features a curly-haired woman, Sam, on the boardwalk with her girlfriend, Gabriel, a green parrot perched on Sam’s shoulder. The ocean breeze tousles their hair as Gabriel hugs her partner’s leg, while light shines off their shoulders and the sea behind them. Gabriel ran a small boutique hotel in Provincetown for gay women, which still stands today. She invited Meyerowitz to the hotel to take pictures of her lodgers canoodling. “That’s a pretty demanding thing to do, to be in a space with people when they’re being intimate with each other, and not change the texture of the moment,” Meyerowitz said.

In accordance with Aperture’s original request, style remains a central concern throughout the finished book. Jan (1985) wears a single cross earring dangling from her right ear, socks with sandals, and a bright red crop of hair.Kacie (1980) dons a green band around her forehead and an inside-out yellow t-shirt, chopped at the sleeves. The fashions and hairdos in the photographs conjure a group of films of the era, from St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) to The Breakfast Club (1985), and nostalgic visions of feathered hairstyles and athletic shorts.

Joel Meyerowitz, Darrell , 1983, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

Joel Meyerowitz , Caroline and Margaret, 1983, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

One of the best outfits belongs to Darrell (1983), whose photo adorns the cover of the monograph. He crouches on a wooden dock in front of the ocean, wearing a black-and-white striped one-piece leotard, tied at the middle. Darrell was a dancer and a self-titled “house boy” at a gay men’s hotel, according to the photographer. Meyerowitz was walking home one day when he spotted Darrell practicing ballet. “I just watched him for a couple of minutes and he was so beautiful,” Meyerowitz said. “He had no hips, and he was physically just radiant.”

Joel Meyerowitz, Rick , 1984, from “Joel Meyerowitz: Provincetown.” © Joel Meyerowitz. Courtesy of Aperture.

An element of chance is similarly responsible for Rick (1984), a man in a suit jacket and no pants, submerged in water to his waist. Rick was Meyerowitz’s friend, a businessman from Boston. He’d just driven out from the city to his cabin the Wellfleet woods, where he planned to celebrate his birthday with a dinner party. Meyerowitz had never seen him in a suit before. “We always swam long-distance together,” Meyerowitz recalled. “So I felt good with him in the water.”

In such ways, the Provincetown series becomes a record of the photographer’s own years in the Cape—with friends or on his own, always meeting new people and never without his camera. Some of Meyerowitz’s subjects were townies, and others only seasonal visitors. But in his pictures, summer never ends.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Aperture's team reached out to Meyerowitz to create a book on 1980s style. Their initial conversation was based on work for an Aperture magazine issue. The text has since been updated to reflect the change.

It’s a familiar scene. Clad in a black bodysuit and stocking cap, a stealthy figure slinks into the cavernous museum, leaps through a matrix of laser-beam security censors, slinks down the echoing halls of a museum, and makes off with a priceless masterpiece—all without tripping the alarm. While most real thieves aren’t quite so nimble, some of their exploits read like Hollywood scripts—from rappelling into empty galleries, playing cat-and-mouse games with police, and using inside-men to gain access.

You don’t have to be well versed in the art world to know about the infamous St. Patricks Day heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum—which remains the priciest art robbery ever in the US, and is still unsolved—while the subject of art heists is constantly being mined for TV and movie stars to live out their Thomas Crown Affair fantasies. To celebrate the premiere of Oceans 8, with its rollicking robbery staged at the Met Gala, here are some historical art heists that actually happened.

1. The Patriotic Pillager

When: August 21, 1911

Where: The Louvre, Paris

What: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa

How: Three Italian men shuttered themselves in a supply closet overnight, and when the museum staff vacated the museum, the thieves executed their pillage. The ringleader of the job was Vincenzo Perugia, who had been hired to install the protective glass intended to shield the famous portrait. His role in the heist eluded police for years—until he tried to sell Mona Lisa and was promptly arrested.

In his defense, Perugia pled guilty only to being a true Italian patriot; he was under the mistaken impression that the painting had been stolen by Napoleon, and only wanted to do right by his heritage.

2. Kidnapping St. Bartholomew

When: May 17, 1972

Where: Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts

What: Rembrandt’s St. Bartholomew, Picasso’s Mother and Child, and two works by Paul Gaugin, Brooding Woman and Mademoiselle Manthey.

How: Florian (Al) Monday, a career criminal, dispatched two of his small-time crook cronies into the Worcester Art Museum with instructions to “snatch-and-grab” the institution’s crown jewel, Rembrandt’s St. Bartholomew, and a few other works within grabbing-distance. The catch? Monday had supplied his accomplices with a gun, loaded with a single bullet. The gun was only meant to be a showy accessory, until a suspicious security guard got in the way, and suffered a gunshot wound—making the crime the first armed art robbery in history.

Later, Monday absconded to a pig farm in Rhode Island, stashing his bounty in a hayloft when he realized no one would purchase the stolen goods. In another surprising twist, all of the stolen paintings were recovered—something that (sadly) rarely happens in the real world.

3. A Crook Who Think’s He’s a Scream

When: February 12, 1994

Where: The National Museum, Oslo

What: Edvard Munch’s The Scream

How: In 1994 Norway was hosting the Winter Olympics, and as the country was gearing up to watch the opening ceremony, a troupe of masked robbers broke into the museum, making a beeline for Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The men easily overwhelmed the solitary security guard, and in 50 seconds flat the bandits were gone—but not before leaving a note that simply read, “Thousand thanks for the poor security.”

The ringleader was an ex-soccer player with a penchant for Munch; Paal Enger had been arrested in 1988 for stealing the artist’s painting The Vampire. Shortly after carrying out the 1994 robbery, Enger took out a classified ad announcing the birth of his son “with a scream,” unable to resist taunting the authorities further—the painting was recovered three months later after an international sting operation.

4. The Swindle in Sweden

When: December 22, 2000

Where: National Gallery Stockholm, Sweden

What: Two paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a self-portrait painted by Rembrandt van Rijn. At the time, the estimated value of the three works was $47 million.

How: This heist has all the makings of a cinematic blockbuster. Just before it closed, thieves rushed into the waterfront museum toting submachine guns and sporting balaclavas. Within a matter of moments, they snatched three paintings, and fled to a motorboat that had been stashed outside, ready for their escape. The thieves had set up remote-detonated car bombs across the city to distract police while they made their move.

All of the works were eventually recovered, first when Swedish police recovered Renoir’s The Conversation in 2001, and later in 2005, when undercover agents posed as collectors, and nabbed the criminals in a sting operation.

5. Goldfinger Poaches Picasso

When: February 27, 2007

Where: Private Residence, Paris

What: Pablo Picasso’s Maya a la poupee (Maya with doll) and Portrait de femme, Jacqueline

How: In the middle of the night, thieves broke into the apartment of Picasso’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, and made off with more than $66 million worth of her grandfather’s artwork, including two paintings. Bizarrely, the thief turned out to be a man named Abdelatif Redjil, aka “Goldfinger,” who had held Princess Diana’s hand following the car crash that killed her ten years prior.

6. Spiderman Ensnares Paris

When: May 19, 2010

Where: Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris

What: Five paintings: Picasso’s Le Pigeon aux Petits-Pois, Fernand Léger’s Still Life With Candlestick, Matisse’s La Pastorale, Amadeo Modigliani’s Woman with a Fan, and George Braque’s Olive Tree near Estaque. 

How: The French thief Vjeran Tomic, known as “Spiderman” was responsible for what then deputy culture minister Christophe Girard called “a serious attack on the heritage of humanity,” when he lifted five paintings, worth more than $116 million from the Paris museum. The acrobatic burglar got his pseudonym for scaling the sides of buildings around Paris, pilfering jewels and other valuable objects, but wasn’t caught until an anonymous tip regarding the 2010 heist.

The paintings were destroyed by an accomplice. Tomic was sentenced to eight years in jail.

The post In Honor of the ‘Oceans 8,’ Here Are 6 Improbable Art Heists That Actually Happened appeared first on artnet News.

Bas-Relief is a technique as old as humankind’s very first artistic endeavors, a way of sculpting figures that are slightly raised from a flat surface. Bas-Relief sculptures could be found on the walls of all kinds of buildings and temples from ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, and now it’s making a comeback.

Russian artist Goga Tandashvili is a master of the art, bringing scenes inspired by the natural world. Think long-tailed birds, flowers and luxurious fronds of fern. The scenes blend in perfectly with their surroundings, meaning that your home décor actually becomes a beautiful piece of impressionist art. Goga is also a painter, and this comes across in his sculptures. He draws on the wall, and then adds material on top of the lines to create the 3D effect, bringing interiors to life with vivid textures and contours.

But how does he do it? “I use a different tool depending on the artistic problem: knives, cutters, chisels, palette knives, he told Bored Panda. “The choice of the material is also determined by the task, for the interior I work with gypsum mixtures, this is the old material that has proved itself for centuries. If there is a need to do work from bronze, granite, marble, steel and so on, then I could also do that.”

“I am primarily interested in the artistic image, and the material is secondary, although it adds character to the work. I also paint, this is my first love. I came to sculpture from painting and I’m very happy to be able to translate it into bas-reliefs.”

Scroll down below to check out Goga’s amazing art for yourself, and let us know what you think in the comments!

More info: Facebook

This is Goga Tandashvili

He makes ordinary walls extraordinary by adding an artistic touch

Goga Uses An Ancient Bas-Relief Technique

His works are inspired by his drawing style

The scenes blend in perfectly with their surroundings, meaning that your home décor actually becomes a beautiful piece of impressionist art

I suppose an end-of-2017 review should come at the end of 2017, but it’s better late than never. Much has already been written about fashion’s obsession with obnoxiously ugly clothing as of late. Moreso than ever, the last year of fashion has been about playing up notions of bad taste. Velour track pants with a stripes running down the outseams; Gucci jackets that look like a teenager’s Lisa Frank notebook; oversized suits previously favored by ‘90s R&B singers; fanny packs that look like they come with a package of Werther’s hard candies; and defiantly ugly sneakers that make even Sketchers look good. 

To be sure, this isn’t the first time fashion has been obsessed with ugliness. “Traditional” forms of beauty haven’t been popular in over fifty years, since couturiers and tailors dressed elites in custom gowns and suits. And just as recently as five years ago, menswear was obsessed with gauche and tacky clothing labeled as preppy or Italian. The difference is the source of inspiration. Whereas menswear used to be about aristocratic takes on vulgarity, 2017 was more low-brow. The only thing that separates FU critter pants from velour sweats is economic class.

The question is obviously why – why would anyone want to wear ugly clothes? Why would anyone want to look “low class?” Fashion is ostensibly about making yourself look better than your actual station. Why, then, would anyone choose to look tacky, cheap, and ugly, while also paying thousands for the privilege? Unlike the early aughts, tackiness today isn’t about being ironic. There’s no tongue-in-cheek reference to authenticity or a wink-wink about how the wearer actually hates the item. Some things are so ugly, they’re simply now thought to be good. 

Part of this has been the ‘90s revival; the other part is just about fashion – people wear things simply because they’re trendy. The other more important part, particularly as it pertains to menswear, is about a shift in attitudes. Even among men who used to wear Alden brogues and classic Barbours, ugly clothes have become popular for a simple reason: they’re tremendously fun to wear if you have a sense of humor about yourself. And there’s really nothing more to it. The emphasis is less on looking good and more on having a good time.

This shift in attitudes can’t be overstated. Ten years ago, men’s fashion was obsessed with “the right way” of doing things. People would ask, is this trad? Is this classic? Is this well made? Is this Goodyear welted? Is this real cashmere? Is this handsewn? Is this fully canvassed? Is this something I can use for the rest of my life? Am I wearing clothes correctly? Does this look sufficiently and naturally nonchalant? 

Altogether, it’s an incredible amount of fretting for guys who rarely even leave their offices. The Onion had a great headline last month: Patagonia Introduces New High-Performance Jacket Specially Designed To Protect Wearer On Walk Between Front Door And Car. “With two layers of insulating synthetic down, this jacket will shield you from whatever Mother Nature throws your way during quick trips to the mailbox or while running the trash to the curb,” they wrote. 

This sort of rule-based approach to style – the idea that shopping for clothes is like shopping for electronics, and there are certain truths that govern aesthetics like physics – sucks all the joy out of clothing. And it causes an undue amount of anxiety for what’s an inherently trivial subject. It almost felt like people wanted investigative journalists to uncover the secret rules to being stylish, with Consumer Report ratings on whether a brand is worth buying. In that sense, even if I don’t care for Demna Gvasalia’s version of Balenciaga, I think it’s great that fashion has become less serious and more emotive. Fashion, at its best, is about having fun. Clothes should empower and make you feel good. I scratch my head at people who wake up in the morning every day and decide to post angry messages online about something as stupid as pants.

Emotive fashion can be great even for guys who have a more classic sense of style. In fact, I’d argue that most stylish men dress from the heart. This is, after all, what used to be called having a sense of taste. In his often-cited essay on aesthetics, "Of the Standard of Taste,” David Hume claimed some people are in a better position to understand beauty based on their experiences. 

As an empiricist, Hume sought to reconcile the difference between subjective and objective judgments. Subjective judgments (what Hume called sentiments) are always right because they never reference anything beyond themselves. Objective judgments (what Hume called determinations), however, reference an outside quality, so they can be verified or falsified. Beauty is not an inherent quality in something, so judgments on beauty are sentiments, not determinations, for they only exist in the mind. At the same time, Hume wanted to recognize that some judgments are objectively better than others. In Hume’s essay, he famously claimed that no one with a right mind would think there’s an equal level of genius between the works of John Ogilby and John Milton, or John Bunyan and Joseph Addison. Granted, our judgments are affected by time and cultural conventions, and thus subject to change, but our senses are sharpened through experiences. A true judge, Hume wrote, has a “strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice.”

Think of it like this: you can explain all the rules to someone who just became interested in tailoring, but an eye sharpened by experience will notice nuances in the fit, silhouette, and style that a novice will likely miss. And thus, that eye is a better judge of what looks “good.” Often, those judgments about beauty are emotional – they excite the heart and mind – and can’t be taught through scripts and rules alone. I imagine that’s partly why some guys always look great, despite breaking the rules, while others look like hell despite being following them slavishly. 

Last year, I interviewed Brain Davis of Wooden Sleepers for a post at Put This On. Towards the end of our conversation, he said: “We’ve spent so much time talking about effortless style, but sometimes guys get too worked up over details. Just put on the jacket and wear it. A lot of this is much simpler than sometimes it’s presented online. It goes back to the first day of school and wearing a jacket that makes you excited, a jacket that makes you feel cool. It can be about a feeling.” I couldn’t agree more. 

To that end, here are some photos I think are tremendously stylish. They don’t teach you any rules, and many of the clothes will look stupid on other people, but they give you an oh-so-great feeling, which I think can help guide you to better clothing choices. May 2018 be about dressing from emotion and having a good time.

Art history is full of animal paintings everyone needs to know, from ancient representations to the modern images of the wild.

Stranger Things has quickly become a pop-culture phenomenon after being released on Netflix about a month and a half ago. Since then the internet has been full of theories about The Upside Down, its monstrous inhabitant known as the Demogorgon, the telekinetic girl known as Eleven, and the experiments conducted by the company under the guise of the United States Department of Energy. The show is pure sci-fi, drawing inspiration from plenty of films from the same decade in which the story takes place, but the concept of the show is actually based on a very creepy, supposedly real-life experiment conducted by the government called The Montauk Project.

How was Stranger Things inspired by The Montauk Project? Find out after the jump.

The Montauk Project is known as a series of secret government projects and experiments that were reportedly conducted at Camp Hero or Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island. Much of the details on this project that began circulating in the 1980s come from a man named Preston Nichols, who claimed to have remembered repressed memories of his involvement with the project.

The name of this project alone shows that this conspiracy was the inspiration for The Duffer Brothers’ Netflix show. You might not remember this, but back in April of 2015, Netflix picked up a show called Montauk:

Described as a love letter to the ’80s classics that captivated a generation, the series is set in 1980 Montauk, Long Island, where a young boy vanishes into thin air. As friends, family and local police search for answers, they are drawn into an extraordinary mystery involving top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces and one very strange little girl.

Yes, that series went on to become Stranger Things, and it’s clear that the original title of the show was lifted straight from the experiments that inspired it. And when you hear what those experiments entailed thanks to some deep digging by Thrillist, the relationship between the show and the conspiracy becomes even clearer.

In a series of books, Nichols discussed experiments that included researching topics such as time travel, teleportation, mind control, alien species and even faking the Apollo moon landings. All this has ties to another project called The Philadelphia Experiment in 1943, which supposedly created a wormhole that transported two sailors named Duncan and Edward Cameron into Montauk in 1983. It was the sudden recollection of one of these sailors that sparked memories in Preston Nichols that led to the revelation of other experiments.

Outside of portals, tests included something called The Montauk Chair, which allowed one of the supposedly transported sailors to do something that sounds very similar to an experiment conducted with Eleven in Stranger Things:

The first experiment was called “The Seeing Eye.” With a lock of person’s hair or other appropriate object in his hand, Duncan could concentrate on the person and be able to see as if he was seeing through their eyes, hearing through their ears, and feeling through their body. He could actually see through other people anywhere on the planet.

That’s pretty much how the secret government installation in Stranger Things came to stumble upon The Upside Down in the flashbacks scattered throughout the first season. This is even something that Eleven appears to be able to do in other ways as she was able to use her powers to allow a radio to pick up sound from The Upside Down to show to Mike, Dustin, and Lucas that their missing friend Will is still alive.

Some other key details of this project include kids being abducted to take part in some of these experiments, just like Eleven. Even more intriguing is a story involving the consciousness of Duncan from 1983 somehow being transported into the mind of a sibling born in 1963. It’s all rather confusing, but could that provide some hints as to why Eleven is being experimented on in Stranger Things? Could she have the consciousness of another person lying inside her, giving her these powers?

Also, there’s this frightening portion from The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time:

“We finally decided we’d had enough of the whole experiment. The contingency program was activated by someone approaching Duncan while he was in the chair and simply whispering “The time is now.” At this moment, he let loose a monster from his subconscious. And the transmitter actually portrayed a hairy monster. It was big, hairy, hungry and nasty. But it didn’t appear underground in the null point. It showed up somewhere on the base. It would eat anything it could find. And it smashed everything in sight. Several different people saw it, but almost everyone described a different beast.”

The unleashing of a beast from the subconscious sounds an awful lot like the arrival of the Demogorgon. In fact, a recent theory proposes that the Demogorgon is actually a manifestation of the anger that lies within Eleven, which is why they both raise their hands at each other in a climactic scene in the classroom that sees them both disintegrate into dust.

Clearly, Stranger Things isn’t following the story of The Montauk Project exactly as it reportedly happened, but just as they use pieces of the 1980s movies that inspire the style of the show, they’re lifting elements of the experiments for their own purposes in the narrative. It’s not unlike how The Mothman Prophecies borrowed several different accounts of strange occurrences surrounding the supernatural phenomenon known as the Mothman and turned it into a movie.

If you go reading about The Montauk Project more in-depth (Thrillist has a great and even more extensive article that provided much of the “factual” information in this article), then it might just add fuel to some of the theories out there for the future of Stranger Things. Plus, if you’re looking for more entertainment with ties to this mysterious government conspiracy, check out the found footage short film called Montauk that we featured back in December of 2012. Plus, we have some predictions of our own as to what we can expect in Stranger Things season two based on the episode titles revealed recently.

The post ‘Stranger Things’ Was Inspired By a Creepy, Supposedly Real Experiment Called The Montauk Project appeared first on /Film.

With the world’s tallest building, massive artificial islands, and indoor ski slopes, Dubai never ceases to amaze. Coming to Dubai in 2018 is Rosemont Five Star Hotel & Residences – the world’s first hotel with a man-made rainforest in it.

Featuring an artificial beach, a stunning sky pool, and even trees that spray mist – the hotel will be jaw-dropping. It’s designed by ZAS Architecture and will be managed by Hilton Worldwide. With a reported build cost of $300 million, the two 47-story towers will also have the usual 5-star luxuries including a SPA, health club, meeting rooms, fine dining restaurants, luxury cinema on the top floor, bowling alley, sky lobby, trampoline park and more. Okay, maybe they’re not all so “usual”. I guess we should start saving up now?

More info: ZAS (h/t: dailymail)

Dubai is opening the world’s first hotel with a rainforest inside in 2018

Designed by ZAS Architecture, it’ll have some amazing stuff like an infinity sky pool

And a man-made rainforest with trees

But that’s not all…

The two 47-story buildings will also feature

A beautiful sky lobby on the 26th floor

A spot to park luxury cars under a huge screen, displaying vegetation or marine life

And other luxuries, including a bowling alley, trampoline park, SPA, luxury cinema on the top floor, artificial beach, and more

I guess we should start saving up now?

I like to think I spend a good amount of time celebrating my inner child, and anyone else who does so too is automatically going to be my favourite person in the room. Su Blackwell, creator of these whimsical paper sculptures, is one of those people.

Firstly, I think we had the same childhood:

As a child, I spent a lot of time playing in the woods near to my home, in my own make-believe world. I gave the tree’s names, and believed they would protect me. I made dens, with curtains and carpets that I scavenged from home. I didn’t like school much, except for my English lessons, where I liked writing stories, letting my imagination run free. I enjoyed art at school, but I didn’t like the way it was taught. It was too didactic. I left school, not really knowing what to do next.

Su did end up happening upon a textiles course run at the local college and she later worked as an artist-in-residence in Scotland at which point her work began to get noticed and she was invited to do her own shows in London. Today she has relocated her studio to the English seaside.

 

Speaking of Su’s work, an antiquarian bookseller points out: “I can see the influence of her textiles training, too – there are multiple repeats and each letter is like a stitch. It’s as if she’s weaving with words”.

Find Su Blackwell’s website here. Her blog is pretty nice to browse too. 

Image via Flickr user Victoria Pickering

Zoe suffers bipolar disorder and smokes pot to alleviate the symptoms. Last week the 37-year-old was on a train with a friend heading toward Redfern station, in Sydney, Australia. She'd just scored some weed prior to arriving, so she checked the Sniff Off Facebook page to see if any drug-detecting dogs were around. "Luckily we checked and found they were waiting. It was posted ten minutes before," Zoe said. "So we went through to Wynyard station and got off there."

Established in October last year, the Sniff Off campaign is a New South Wales Greens initiative to end the use of drug detection dogs without a warrant in public places. The Facebook page provides a platform for members of the community to alert one another to the whereabouts of sniffer dogs, either posting directly onto the page or sending a message to admin.

The Sniff Off campaign is run out of NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge's office. He said the dogs are "a serious affront to people's civil liberties." And went on to say "they tend to be targeted, particularly against young people, Aboriginal people, and the homeless." A case in point is Redfern station, where a passenger is six and a half times more likely to be searched than at Central, another station known for regular sniffer-dog deployments. Redfern has a large Aboriginal population and many students live in the area as well.

David Shoebridge talking about the Sniff Off campaign. Image via

Shoebridge points out that the operation isn't aimed at drug supply, but rather targets personal use."There's no evidence that drug dealers routinely use Sydney's public transport network," he explained.

Figures recently obtained from the NSW police minister show that in 2014 of the 14,593 searches undertaken by NSW Police following a positive sniffer dog indication, 10,763 found no illicit drugs. That's a 74 percent false positive rate. Shoebridge highlighted the statistics for NSW Police Transport Command, saying that of the 3,592 searches carried out, 2,871 found no drugs. "We're talking hundreds and hundreds of people being routinely humiliated, when the police know they're going to be wrong 80 percent of the time," he said.

Tom is a 28-year-old electrician who experienced one such false indication at Ashfield station. "I walked past the dog, then the cop grabbed me and asked me to come back," he said. "The dog wasn't really that interested, but then the cop was like, 'The dog's detected drugs on you.'"

Tom was taken into a public toilet cubicle. After the police patted him down, he was asked to remove his clothes. "Having to get naked in a small space with a pair of large men with guns strapped to their hips was humiliating." He believes the police were profiling, as he spoke to another man who'd also been searched. He "was almost a dead ringer" for Tom and didn't have any drugs on him either.

Situations like these are why Sniff Off volunteers such as Zevic Mishor set up the site. As he explained, the campaign has two aims. The first is to bring about legislative change that will revoke NSW Police powers to carry out drug-dog searches in places like train stations and music festivals. On May 28 this year, NSW Greens MP Jenny Leong introduced the Amendment (Sniffer Dogs—Repeal of Powers) Bill 2015 that if passed will have this effect.

The second is to build up grassroots support and that's where the posts come in. Not only do they warn people about the presence of dogs, they also draw public attention to how often the police are out there using them. "We don't want to live in a society where there are uniformed officers with dogs at train stations," Mishor said.

Related: Watch our documentary on the law and weed in Alaska, 'Weediquette: Baked Alaska'

Despite the outcry from the Greens, NSW Police maintain that drug detection dogs are very effective. "Seventy percent of indications by the dogs result in either drugs being located or the person admitting recent contact with illegal drugs," a spokesperson told VICE, emphasizing that dogs have a strong deterrent effect, as "individuals regularly dump these drugs upon seeing" them. The drugs aren't consumed, "the significant risk of harm" is avoided, and deaths are prevented.

Will Tregoning, a director of drug-reform group Unharm, disagrees. He argues the presence of sniffer dogs incentivizes behavior that can cause overdoses and especially at music festivals. These include "hiding drugs in internal body cavities" in packaging such as condoms. He said dogs encourage people to take "all of the drugs they have in their possession at once," as well as the practice of preloading—the consumption of all drugs prior to arriving at a venue.

As a harm reduction measure, Tregoning advocates drug checking. This is a service where people can test the contents and purity of the illicit drugs they've purchased. "It's a form of quasi-market regulation," he said, explaining that in the Netherlands, "it's eliminated or reduced the prevalence of some of the more risky substances."

Those making use of Sniff Off are not the only people working to avoid drug-detecting dogs. Innerwest trans activist Stephanie McCarthy has been searched six times over the last year, although she's never had any drugs on her. She recently had an eye-opening experience while on board a train stopped at a station. "The driver said, 'There's a police operation at Newtown involving sniffer dogs. They'll be entering the train,'" McCarthy said. "He basically warned everyone. When you have a train driver doing that, it kind of says it's not really a fair policy."

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Miniature museums are often packaged as toy museums or assumed to be a very twee exhibit for doll house enthusiasts, but today I virtually stumbled upon an incredible museum located in the French city of Lyon, where the world of miniatures becomes a whole new dimension…

Founded by Dan Ohlmann (pictured above playing giant), a renowned miniature artist himself, the Musée Miniature & Cinema is split into two parts: one part miniature museum, with hundreds of incredible scaled scenes by renowned artists from around the world, and another part cinematic museum of special effects, which often links back to the miniature world– because of course the film industry has a long history of using miniature film sets before computer-generated effects became the norm.

These are creations that required hundreds of photographs and measurements from real locations. Research is a major part of the process and they can take many months to complete, each element being reproduced at the exact scale using a mix of technical know-how and precision.

These are just a few examples from the collection that this five-story museum holds…

A replica of the famous Parisian restaurant, Maxim’s

And here’s what they get up to on the cinema side of things at the museum…

The scaled set from Martin Scorcese’s film Hugo, at a recent exhibition at the Musée Miniature & Cinéma.

Their latest temporary exhibition sees the museum welcoming the head of the famous Triceratop from Jurassic Park.

So if you’re ever swinging by Lyon, pay a visit to the fantastic Musée Miniature & Cinéma (all display information is in English and French), or just add it to your museum bucket list. 

Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, Dr. No, 1962.

Police drive up pressure against students demonstrating against an education reform bill

An ACLU Freedom of Information request reveals that the NSA considers Reagan's "Executive Order 12333" (previously) its "primary source" of spying authority -- and so it conducts this surveillance without reporting to Congress on it. Read the rest

The congressman told a group of Republicans recently that U.S. officials should not lower American flags as a measure of respect for Nelson Mandela, despite an executive order to do so.