José Bruno Barbaroxa

Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman’s Voluptate Mors

Rick Genest, aka Zombie Boy, has become a muse  to many including famous fashion director, Nicola Formichetti, British sculptor, Marc Quinn, Lady Gaga, and more recently photographer Joey L. for Rebel Ink Magazine. We’ve posted Zombie Boy multiple times here on Street Anatomy, but for those of you who don’t know, he has become famous for his head-to-toe morbidly themed skeletal tattoos.

The cover image, inspired by Salvador Dali and Philippe Halsman’s Voluptate Mors, features Zombie Boy surrounded by tattooed women posing to form the shape of a skull. It’s a truly modern take on such an iconic and sensual image created back in 1951.

Credits:
Publication: Rebel Ink Magazine
Photographer: Joey L.
Creative Direction: Paul Gambino at Enoble Media
Models: Zombie Boy / Rick Genest, Adrian Louise, Kat Kalashnikov, Sailor Mary, Lindsay Hibbard, Kleio Valentien, Erica Savage

[spotted by our buddy Eric Pernod via BAReps]

We should have skied on snow.

The NRA had a busy month. On April 17, the American Senate voted down legislation to regulate the purchase of guns. It was seen as a victory for the National Rifle Association (NRA), which lobbied against the bill. 

On March 23rd of this year, the NRA also successfully lobbied the US Senate to defy an arms control treaty that the General Assembly of the United Nations (including the US representative) was passing. This treaty, the Arms Trade Treaty, is the first attempt to regulate the international sale of tanks, combat helicopters, and assault rifles that fuel wars around the world. Only Syria, Iran, and North Korea voted against it. 

The US Senate signaled their opposition to the treaty by a vote of 53 to 46 to pass a counter-measure with the official purpose: “To uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty”. Senater James Inhofe of Oklahoma remarked:

“It’s time the Obama administration recognizes it is already a non-starter, and Americans will not stand for internationalists limiting and infringing upon their Constitutional rights.”

We’re beginning to get the idea that the NRA has some considerable sway over the United States Senate.

If guns sales in America is a big business, then the international arms trade is an enormous business. Approximately $11.7 billion worth of guns are sold in the United States and there are 30,000+ deaths in America each year tied to gun violence. The global arms trade, on the other hand, generates $85 billion in sales each year and can be tied to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people every year.

There is profitable business to be had making weapons, shipping them off to other countries, and letting people kill each other with them. In this business of the international arms trade, the United States is the dominant player, with a market share of between 30% to 50% or more depending on how you calculate the figure.

The international arms trade is a very big deal that doesn’t get very much attention. Moreover, it doesn’t seem as if shipping weapons to other countries really furthers our own national security in any direct way. The United States may be more safe when we have tanks, but is the United States more safe when the Sudanese have tanks?

So, we thought we’d take a look. What is the international arms trade and who are the major players that profit from the business of blowing people up?

The Flow of Arms

There is no standard definition for the arms trade. It can include weapons from assault rifles to F-15 jet fighters, ammunition, and non-lethal equipment like Humvees and radar systems. The Arms Trade Treaty, however, limits itself to weaponry and ammunition. The players in the arms trade include governments, private companies, gunrunners, rebel movements, and terrorists.

Source: SIPRI

The international arms trade predominantly consists of developed countries selling to developing states. Since the Cold War, the five biggest suppliers have been the United States, Russia, Germany, France, and the UK. China, which overtook the UK as the number five supplier of arms in 2013, is the lone exception. The United States and Russia have the largest market share at 30% and 26% respectively for 2008-2012. 

Source: SIPRI

These clear national distinctions, however, camouflage that the arms trade is very globalized. In 1994, The Economist noted that America “cannot put a single missile or aircraft up in the sky without the help of three Japanese companies.” Although security requirements tie producers of arms more tightly to their national governments, they source materials and parts from across the globe and set up subsidiaries abroad. The transport of arms is also fully outsourced to private companies. 

Among the 10 largest companies in arms production, 7 of the 10 are American. Lockheed Martin, the largest, employs 123,000 people and makes $36.27 billion in arms sales. The majority of those sales are from the American government, but Lockheed’s CFO estimated that 15% of its arms sales are foreign.

In 2012, India, China, Pakistan, Singapore, and South Korea accounted for 32% of arms imports. But the biggest importers are not a consistent group from year to year.

Nearly every country in the world imports arms - all but four in 2011. Even Vatican City imports submachine guns from Italy. But developing countries make up the majority of arms imports. From 2004 to 2011, arms transfers agreements to the developing world made up 68.6% of all agreements. It was 79.2% from 2008 to 2011.

With the exception of booming economies such as China, South Korea, and South Africa, very few developed countries can produce military technologies. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute:

“Attempts by countries outside the traditional major producers to develop their own modern arms industries have typically had limited success. This is in large part due to the high technological barriers to producing modern major weapons systems and, in many cases, an inadequate civilian industrial base.”

Military technology has extremely high barriers to entry. China now has the world’s second highest military budget after the United States. Nevertheless, its first aircraft carrier, unveiled in 2011, is actually an old Soviet warship purchased from Ukraine with a ski-jump added to help planes take off. 

The developing world relies on exporters for basic arms and supplies. Sudan’s Military Industrial Corporation, for example, is Sub Saharan Africa’s most advanced arms industry outside South Africa. It advertises its work selling ammunition, upgrading T-55 tanks, and producing machine guns. But all of its projects rely on foreign imports, designs, and assistance. The Corporation assembles light aircraft with Chinese and Russian assistance, the components of the machine guns likely come come from Iran, China, or Pakistan, and the tank upgrades were probably imported from China.

In sum, the global arms trade is a consistent flow of arms from a handful of developed countries to nearly every developing country in the world - countries who, in isolation, can produce very few arms. If the purpose of the United States Military and it’s weapons providers is to keep America safe, it’s unclear how shipping these weapons to other countries helps achieve that. 

Legal Controls

A number of bilateral and international treaties do exist to control the spread and sale of weapons. The START treaties (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties) call for Russia and the United States to reduce their nuclear stockpiles, the Convention on Cluster Munitions bans the use of cluster bombs worldwide, and the Ottawa Treaty bans the use of landmines. 

But beside these exceptions, the only international regulation on the sale of arms is the application of an arms embargo by the United Nations. This is an extremely high bar. Embargoes are decided by the UN Security Council, and can be vetoed by any of the council’s 5 permanent members - China, Russia, the US, the UK, or France.

As a result, embargoes are rarely applied. From 2006-2010, 22 of Sub Saharan Africa’s 48 countries experienced armed conflict, but only 8 had arms embargoes in effect.

Even then, arms embargoes rarely succeed in slowing the transfer of weapons to conflict zones. One quantitative study found that only 40% of countries saw a reduction in arms imports during an embargo. Another report found little effect, other than that arms and ammunition “reached the embargoed targets only after travelling circuitous routes.” They cite a lack of political will on the part of members of the UN to enforce the embargo as a common cause of failure.

As a result, the continued supply of arms to embargoed war zones is common. A 2005 arms embargo on the purchase and use of arms in the Darfur region of Sudan, for example, was broken despite the world labeling the government’s actions in Darfur a genocide. Belarus, China, Russia, and Ukraine exported arms to Sudan for the conflict and Chad provided the separatist movements in Darfur with small arms.    

National regulations of arms transfers seem more robust, but suffer from loopholes and inconsistent application. 

In the United States the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act regulate the sale of American arms. Private companies must apply for licenses as arms brokers and clear deals with the government. All deals must meet criteria such as furthering the security interests of the United States and “promot[ing] world peace.” The acts seek to prevent the proliferation of arms to undesirable third parties; the US is the lone state to attempt “end-use monitoring” to ensure the arms go to their intended recipient. Congress can block deals if it has the votes to override a presidential veto. 

The United States is one of only 40 or so countries to legislate arms transfers. Nevertheless, Amnesty International finds that American regulation of arms transfers, although “generally considered a model for regulating arms brokering, includes exemptions that, in the real world, severely narrow its scope.” Namely, while the US focused intently after September 11 on monitoring the end use of arms to keep them from terrorists, it is still not very discriminate in providing weapons to autocratic leaders.

For government deals, this exemption is for programs deemed “vital to national security.” All these safeguards can be waived if the president or secretary of state decide that the deal is essential to national security. The clause was most recently invoked by Hillary Clinton to bypass legislative action from Congress to withhold $1.3 billion in military aid until Egypt completes democratic reforms.

In private deals by arms brokers, the most fatal exemption is to require no monitoring of the use of delivered weapons beyond an “end-use certificate.” With so few states verifying the use of purchased arms, all brokers need to circumvent an arms embargo is one corrupt military official willing to sign a document certifying his reception of the weapons as they are moved to another plane and flown off to blacklisted rebel groups or governments. 

The Motives of Arms Suppliers 

During the Cold War, the primary motivation of arms transfers was to gain political influence. The Soviets armed Communist governments and rebel groups, America armed the other side, and both plied non-aligned countries with military aid to court them.

After the Cold War, global leaders expressed optimism that the world could spend less on military budgets and reinvest that money in people. Military budgets did decrease. Expenditures in 1999 stood at only 55% of their 1989 Cold War level.

At the same time, however, arms transfers to developed countries exploded:

“Between 1989 and 1999, the major arms producers and suppliers exported and delivered worldwide no less than 16,000 main battle tanks; 43,000 artillery units; 30,000 armoured vehicles; 1,600 military ships and submarines; 5,200 combat aircrafts; 5,100 military planes; 3,200 helicopters; 47,700 surface-to-air missiles; 3,300 surface-to-surface missiles; and 3,200 anti-ship missiles.”

In the decade after the Cold War, developing countries accounted for 54% of military imports. That number jumped further to 68.5% in the decade since. So what happened?

The desire to achieve political influence and achieve national security goals does motivate a number of arms transfers. American military aid to Egypt began as a way to cement the 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Perceived allies in the War on Terror, such as Yemen, have received arms and military aid. 

Pure profit is also a motive. Cash-strapped Ukraine, for example, earned $956.7 million selling small arms stockpiled during the Cold War to African countries. Countries can also use military aid to negotiate access to natural resources. This charge is mostly pointed at China’s arms transfers in Sub Saharan Africa. Although debated in the field, a Chinese arms exporter has “cited the ‘spillover effect’ of military trade in its efforts to get contracts for its subsidiary Zhenhua Oil Co. in several countries worldwide including Angola.” 

The primary reason that arms transfers exploded to developing countries after the Cold War, however, is that it allowed arms industries to survive once the logic and funding of the Arms Race disappeared. The arms industry aggressively courted customers in the developing world. Their governments assisted them, as every arms deal reduced the unit cost of arms, and kept alive the manufacturing jobs that politicians loved to promise constituents. 

The pace of deals was accelerated by the ease with which corruption greased deals. Amnesty International has noted that the arms trade is essentially a perfect storm for corruption - it involves large contracts, high barriers to entry, and confidentiality. Whether in the form of actual bribes, campaign contributions, a “revolving door” policy of government officials moving onto plush jobs in the private arms industry in return for favorable treatment, both exporter and importer government officials had incentives to green-light deals. 

Much attention was paid to the awarding of lucrative, no-bid contracts to Vice-President Dick Cheney’s company Halliburton during the Iraq War. But two books, The Arms Bazaar and The Shadow World, are filled with enough examples of how corruption in the arms trade is systemic to make the most idealistic believer in government tear up their Hope and Change posters.

The incentives to push arms deals are so strong, agreements are often inked for unnecessary deals. In the words of Oscar Arias Sanchez, former president of Costa Rica:

“In 2006, the [Latin America’s] military spending was over US$32 billion, while 194 million people languished in poverty. Latin America has begun a new arms race, regardless of the fact that the region has never been more democratic; regardless of the fact that in the last century it has rarely seen military conflicts between nations; regardless of the fact that a host of dire needs in the fields of education and public health demand attention.” 

The reluctance to turn down arms deals also means that exporters will sell arms to autocratic states right up to the point that the UN calls for an arms embargo. In 2010, the top two recipients of American arms were the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Bahrain and Egypt continue to receive military aid despite documented human rights abuses against protesters.

Small Arms and Gun Runners 

While America’s sales and transfers of military products like the multimillion dollar F-15 make it the dominant player in the arms trade, the fact that many of today’s conflicts are fought by belligerents without advanced weaponry means that the most impactful arms purchases often are relative blips in the arms trade.

The situation in Sub Saharan Africa demonstrates this point. It accounts for only 1.5% of major arms imports. Small arms like AK-47s constitutes the majority of purchases. 

Although the simplest of arms, small arms are the most lethal. They are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (60%-90% of all conflict deaths) and millions of injuries. The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is fought with small arms. But that has not kept it from being the most deadly war since World War II with over 5 million fatalities.

When more advanced weapons are sold, a very small order can have a major impact. The sale of two second-hand Mi-24 combat helicopters from Bulgaria to Mali in 2007 is a rounding error compared to deals between Saudi Arabia and the United States. But they had a devastating impact. The two helicopters, Mali’s first, killed dozens of Malian rebels during their first use in April 2008, likely leading to the rebels seeking a ceasefire agreement.

Given the importance but small footprint of light arms, monitoring and regulating their transfer, whether licit or illicit, is nearly impossible. In 2001, for example, a dhow - a wooden-hulled ship with a triangular sail - delivered 500 rifles, grenade launchers, and machine guns to a Somali warlord, despite an international embargo. Malian smugglers attach arms in waterproof sacks to the bottom of boats and float them up the Niger River. Former Liberian president and war criminal Charles Taylor trafficked arms by having soldiers and refugees walk them across the border one at a time.

This is also the environment in which gunrunners thrive. Victor Bout, the famed Russian smuggler who provided inspiration for Nicolas Cage’s character in the film “Lord of War,” was an entrepreneurial owner of an air-freight company delivering televisions and textiles to third-world capitals when his customers asked him to deliver weapons as well. 

He began by delivering arms to the Afghan government to fight the Taliban - a legal act. In 1998, he began smuggling weapons (along with cooking oil and whiskey) to a rebel movement in Angola in direct violation of a UN arms embargo. From Bulgaria, Bout flew “crates of rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, and mortars, along with armored personnel carriers” to the rebel group. One deal was worth a hundred million dollars. At the same time, Bout delivered weapons to the Angolan government. Confronted about his double dealing by a reporter, Bout responded, “If I didn’t do it, someone else would.”

Victor Bout was arrested in a sting operation in 2010

As Victor Bout showed, even when gunrunners smuggle across continents and through European airports, they can obfuscate their intent by mixing their weapon deliveries with legitimate goods. They also set up networks of front businesses and forge end-user certificates to avoid detection. Most perniciously, gunrunners like Bout have trafficked arms into conflict zones under arms embargoes without breaking the law. Syrian trafficker Monzer al-Kassem lived openly while defying arms embargoes by structuring his deals so that he never broke a law:

“Moreover, a weapons shipment can represent a violation of international law but still be perfectly legal in many nations. In setting up transactions, Kassar often acted as what is known as a “third-party broker.” From his home in Spain, he could negotiate between a supplier in a second country and a buyer in a third. The weapons could then be shipped directly from the second country to the third, while his commission was wired to a bank in a fourth. Kassar never set foot in the countries where the crime transpired—and in Spain he had committed no crime.”

Any attempt to inject a dose of ethics into the arms trade will have to deal with the fact that the arms responsible for most of the world’s deaths in violent conflict are so minor and easily smuggled.

Conclusion

The gun industry in America is a large and dangerous business. The global weapons industry is an even larger and more dangerous business. If the Arms Trade Treaty eventually passes, would the world become a safer and better place? Perhaps not, but it’s unlikely it would make the world a more dangerous place.

As the current difficulties of passing an arms embargo on Syria show, achieving international consensus on who should and should not be allowed to import arms is a difficult task - especially in a world where countries want to arm their geopolitical allies. The size of the arms industry and its potential for corruption also make attempts to regulate it especially vulnerable to special interests. Further, small arms, which are used in the majority of fatalities, are easy to smuggle. Proponents of the Arms Trade Treaty can make a strong case that current legal controls on international arms transfers are insufficient.

Opponents of arms control may argue for “peace through strength” or that not every ally will have a perfect human rights record in an imperfect world. However, the arms trade isn’t really about directly protecting national security. The arms trade is about the transfer of arms from the US, Europe, and Russia to the developing world in exchange for cash, in a process that can empower dictators, fuel wars, and facilitate human rights abuses.

Guns kill people. So too do tanks and bombs.

This post was written by Alex Mayyasi. Follow him on Twitter here or Google Plus.

You may already know about Why The Lucky Stiff. A beloved writer / cartoonist / programmer who disappeared in 2009 when he shut down all his online identities. If not, some background here that you can come back to if you need it.

In January of this year, his site came back online.

On April 18, it started putting up printer SPOOL commands which spit out paper or PDFs like this.

I’m getting most of my information from @steveklabnik (whose Twitter feed is currently a reverse order read of magical discovery) and from scanning through the IRC channel #_why on Freenode, which is bent on working out what’s going on. Transcript here.

Some of the pages and some other things are archived one by one here.

I recommend reading the disclaimer to get a flavour for this. Should you want to read the whole thing, someone has made a PDF book out of it and put it on Scribd. I downloaded that because fuck scribd and have left a copy of the (currently) complete _why text here.

I recommend reading it. I really, really recommend reading it.

Now he’s gone again and his site http://whytheluckystiff.net/ is offline.

As I walked the green miles of the Undercliff where the French Lieutenant’s Woman met her lover, there came a change of air. The dense undergrowth was obscenely verdant — bees worrying at pink rhododendron, peacock butterflies crossing my path — and now and then I’d burst out and find I stood at the cliff’s [...]

The post A sublime contagion appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Drawing on index card by koalazymonkey (cc by)

In a thread seeking advice/gifts to impart on a 9 year-old receiving his first wallet, MetaFilter member decathecting describes the ultimate reference card for young people:

Make a card that is twice the size you actually need. Fold it in half, and then write on both sides of what is now the outside. Tell the young man that this is his emergency card. Include on the card a telephone number that you promise to answer, day or night, if he is in trouble and needs an adult, no questions asked. Advice about stuff he can't talk to his parents about, help getting a ride home from someplace he's not supposed to be, bail money, whatever. Before you laminate it, slip a $50 bill between the two halves, inside the fold. Tell him it's there, and that it's his emergency money, and that it will always be there if he needs it, but that the money is a one-time offer, so he really needs to save it for a situation he can't get out of on his own.

Hey friends, there’s only about 3 days left on my Werewolf project, and I’m posting some cool updates:

One of the biggest decisions you’ll have to make about moderating a game of Werewolf is what to do about sounds during the night. Some people ask players to tap on their knees or clap to block out any noise; other players like the mind game of analyzing all of the accidental rustling during the night.

I prefer another option - playing some creepy, atmospheric music to block most (but not all) noise and help set the mood. I commissioned my friend Robin Arnott (Deep Sea, Antichamber, SoundSelf) to make a ten minute piece of music for the night portion of Werewolf, and he made something really incredible. Today we’ve released it for you to use in your games under a BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license.

You can download “Night” by Robin Arnott, Brian Frank and Eduardo Ortiz here.

There’s more information about Werewolf here, or you can check out my Kickstarter here.

I love dogs; they are the best. I find that they are suitable not only as companions, but as friends and confidants. That said, as much as I might anthropomorphize them, I do genuinely wish I could see the world in their eyes. Now, with Wolfram|Alpha, I can—and so can you.

That’s Agatha with her puppies. She is my friend. Agatha has a propensity to play in the garden, and one of her favorite things—seriously, it is so cute—is to wrestle a ladybug off a plant and onto her nose. What does a ladybug look like to Agatha?

It’s like a more blurry, less distinguished version of what we see. It’s a good thing that dogs have noses that are far more sensitive than humans’, huh?

I’ve always wanted to go to Ecuador with Agatha, in part because I understand the country itself is beautiful, but really it’s because I have a fascination with mountain tapirs. They are the sort of animal that isn’t really a dog, goat, or elephant, but sort of wishes it was all of them at the same time. How would Agatha see a mountain tapir compared to how I do?

Fascinating stuff, right?

Outside of dreaming of worldly adventures, I force Agatha to listen to a lot of Lady Gaga. My fondness of her is not necessarily a reflection of Wolfram|Alpha as a company, although certainly it appears to be a mainstream view that Lady Gaga has a comical edge about her—the edge of glory. So this is what she would look like if she were in a comic book:

Speaking of Lady Gaga listeners, my friend and coworker Keith suffers from red-green color blindness. I literally have no idea what that must be like. So let’s find out what it’s like, using an image of a traffic light for comparison.

Using Wolfram|Alpha, you can analyze images (including those from a URL) to see how dogs see the world, what it’s like to be red-green color blind, how something would look in a comic strip, and more. Importantly, you can even see how a dog might see the world of mathematics:

Over the past four years, the rock band Phish has generated over $120 million in ticket sales, handily surpassing more well known artists like Radiohead, The Black Keys, and One Direction. Since their start 30 years ago, Phish has consistently been one of the most popular and lucrative touring acts in America, generating well over a quarter billion dollars in ticket sales.

Yet, by other measures, the band isn’t popular at all. Only one of their original albums has ever made the Billboard top 10 rankings. None of their 883 songs has ever become a popular hit on the radio. They’ve made only one music video to promote a song, and it was mocked mercilessly by Beavis and Butthead on MTV. 

If the traditional band business model is to generate hype through the media and radio airplay, and then monetize that hype through album sales and tours, Phish doesn’t fit the model at all. For a band of their stature, their album sales are miniscule and radio airplay non-existent. And so when the “music business” cratered in the 1990s because of file-sharing and radio’s importance declined because of the internet, Phish remained unaffected and profitable as ever.

Phish doesn’t make money by selling music. They make money by selling live music, and that, it turns out, is a more durable business model. This wasn’t some brilliant pre-calculated strategy by the band or its managers; it’s the business model that sprung forth from the kind of music the band makes. The band developed the kernel of this musical style during their first five years when they played almost exclusively in bars in Burlington, Vermont, and slowly, but organically, grew their audience.

During this period they maniacally focused on improving the quality of their music through intense practice and frequent gigs at bars. And while at first these gigs were relatively unsuccessful, over time their audiences grew, the band started to make money, and then, after five years of obscurity, they were profitable before anyone in the music industry knew who the hell they were. And with profitability came the freedom to make music on their terms. 

In the parlance of startup language, Phish bootstrapped their business rather than seeking support from institutional players like record labels, talent agencies, and concert promoters. And that’s made all the difference.

10,000 Hours of Jamming

The band Phish got its start in 1983 at the University of Vermont (UVM) where Trey Anastasio, Jon Fishman, and Mike Gordon were all students. Page McConnell, a student at nearby Goddard College, joined the band two years later. Since then, that’s been the core band - Anastasio on lead vocals and guitar, Gordon on bass guitar, Fishman on the drums, and McConnell on keyboard / piano. 

A popular theory these days for explaining “genius” is Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of 10,000 hours. In his book Outliers, Gladwell posits that natural talent is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for achieving greatness in a given field. What is also required is putting in thousands of hours of “deliberate practice” to achieve virtuoso status in fields ranging from software development (Bill Gates) to physics (Robert Oppenheimer).

The band Phish appears to be another case in support of Gladwell’s theory that deliberate practice at an early age leads to “outlier” performance. Anastasio, the band’s frontman, started playing the guitar at the age of seven and was in serious bands by middle school. Fishman, the drummer, started playing at the age of five. McConnell started playing the piano at the age of four. By the time they entered college, not only were they accomplished musicians, but what united them was their preference for practicing music over attending class. 

From the band’s early days until the late 1990s, they showed a near fanatical obsession with practice. Fishman, the drummer, remembers college:

“Basically I locked myself in a room for three years and played drums and went to band practice.” 

The same level of intensity was brought to band practice. Gordon, the bassist, relates an eight-hour, chemically-assisted, practice session that was not atypical:

“Trey used to take fresh chocolate and vanilla and maple syrup and all these natural ingredients and make four small cups of hot chocolate that had a half-ounce of pot in them. … [So] we started this jam session and it ended up going for eight hours.”

Even as the band became popular a decade later, they practiced together using highly analytical listening exercises. Phish biographer Parke Puterbaugh explains one of these exercises:

The best known was called “Including Your Own Hey.” These exercises, which formed a large part of their practice regimen from 1990 through 1995, are not so easy to explain but important for understanding how Phish could maintain a seemingly telepathic chemistry in concert.

“‘Hey’ means we’re locked in,” explained Anastasio. “The idea is don’t play anything complicated; just pick a hole and fill it.” They explored different elements of music—tempo, timbre, dynamics, harmonics—within the “hey” regimen.

While today Phish is well known as a “jam band” that improvises on stage, it wasn’t until 1993, 10 years after their formation, that the band really unveiled this skill according to the band archivist Kevin Shapiro:

“Before 1993, it had seemed to be a very practiced, concise show that flowed real fast and didn’t necessarily have any huge improvisational moments. All of a sudden there were huge improvisational moments everywhere.”

Before Phish achieved any success, they worked hard at their craft. At the peak of their success, they practiced just as hard, if not harder. Later, they would abandon these regular practice sessions, which could either be seen as a cause or a symptom of the problems that lead to the band’s breakup in 2004.

The Slow, Linear Rise of Phish

“Burlington is an excellent womb for a band. It’s relatively easy to get a gig, you get paid decently, and it’s not a cut-throat situation at all.”

- Jon Fishman, Drummer

Phish’s first gig was playing an ROTC Ball in late 1983 before they had even settled on their eventual band name. If you’ve ever heard them play, you already know that their music probably wasn’t the best choice for future army officers and their dates to boogie to. Eventually, the band was drowned out when someone put on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and the evening was resurrected - from the ball attendees’ perspective at least.

After a brief detour when Anastasio was suspended from the UVM for sending a human heart and hand through the US Postal Service as a prank, most of the band transferred to Goddard College where they could pursue a self-directed study of music. During this period, they started to regularly play gigs at local bars.

Phish’s first regular bar gig was weekdays at 5 PM. The few people who came were their friends. After the ROTC dance debacle, they couldn’t even get booked for campus gigs, let alone real music venues. But they stuck with playing bars at off-peak hours and eventually the audience swelled modestly from their friends to their friends and friends of friends. 

Phish biographer Parke Puterbaugh comments:

This all worked to Phish’s advantage, as they weren’t swamped by success but experienced a slow, steady climb, during which they nurtured their craft in an environment where they gained a following one fan at a time. They gradually cultivated a varied audience of college students and hipsters from Burlington and environs.

At this time, Phish started to display the organic growth in their fanbase that would characterize the rest of their careers - they would win over fans one at a time through their live performances and those fans would recruit their friends to come to the next show.

Eventually, Phish was invited to play at a more popular local bar called Nectars. At Nectars they moved from the the upstairs stage to the main stage. Band frontman Anastasio remembers:

“Usually there wouldn’t be that many people at the beginning of the night. People would come and go, and it would just kind of swell. Eventually, it started getting really packed, which is why we had to stop playing there. But for a long time, it wasn’t.”

Eventually they started to get a lot of stage time at the more popular bars in Vermont. During this time, they honed what would become their signature talent - keeping a live audience enthralled, dancing, and having fun all night. Drummer Fishman describes the freedom to experiment they had during this time:

“For five years we had Nectar’s and other places around town to play from nine until two in the morning,” recalled Fishman. “We’d get three-night stands, so we didn’t even have to move our equipment. Basically, the crowd was our guinea pig. We’d have up to five hours to do whatever the hell we wanted.” 

A fan reminisces what it was like to hear Phish in those days:

“They sort of sucked when we first started seeing them,” admitted Tom Baggott, a Phish fan and acquaintance. “They were getting it together. They were sort of sloppy, you know, but that was the fun of it. That was the magic of it. It was like there was a big joke going on and all the early Phish fans knew the punch line—which was that this was gonna be something big.”

These insanely loyal fans not only dragged their friends to shows, but also started taping the shows and passing out the tapes to friends. Rather than squelch this “piracy,” the band encouraged it. Not only did it provide great marketing that lead to larger show attendance, but it helped develop an obsessive fanbase that would later desire to collect everything about the Phish experience: rare tapes, concert experiences, official albums, and merchandise. 

After years of honing their craft on their homecourt of Burlington, Vermont, they got their big break in 1989. Or rather, they manufactured their big break. The Paradise Night Club, a 650 seat venue in Boston that was a proving ground for rock bands, refused to book the band. By this time, Phish had two buddies serving as their business managers who were responsible for booking gigs. The managers took a gamble and decided to rent out The Paradise and take the risk of selling the tickets themselves.

With the help of their now diehard fans, Phish sold out all 650 seats. Many of their fans trekked down from Burlington. One fan organized two buses from Burlington that brought almost a hundred fans. The rabid fan base that Phish had cultivated from its 5 years of gigging in Burlington paid off big time.

After Phish sold out The Paradise, doors were open to them. Phish biographer Parke Puterbaugh relates the scene in the Boston music industry:

Beth Montuori Rowles recalled the reaction at Don Law’s office the next day: “Jody Goodman, who was the club booker at the time, was like, ‘Does anybody know who this band Phish is? They sold out The Paradise last night. How did that happen? I’ve never even heard of them before. They’re from Vermont. What is this? They sold the place out!’

“All of a sudden it was like the radar’s on them. The next time Phish played in Boston, the Don Law Company promoted it. They wanted a piece of it. End of story.”

Phish started touring in progressively larger venues. Still, the growth was never exponential or Bieber-esque. In an interview with High Times, Anastasio reflects:

“If you look at the whole 17 years of Phish, it was an exact, angular rise. It was at the point where our manager used to be able to predict how many tickets we were going to sell in a given town based on how many times we had played there previously. Every time we played, it got a little bit bigger, and it kept getting a little bit bigger.”

Shortly after selling out The Paradise, despite not a single music label or management company knowing their name, the band was profitable. Rather than rushing to put out a Top 40 hit, the band could focus on doing more of what was already earning them money, making music and touring.

From here on out, the band rapidly accelerated the number of shows, performing well over a hundred times a year all over the country. By the end of 1994, they sold out the Boston Garden for a New Years Eve show.  They were cemented as a big time band that could sell out arenas, bring tens of thousands of fans to remote weekend festivals, and generate tens of millions of dollars in ticket sales per year. They were bona fide rock stars.

Why Do People Like Phish?

So what exactly is this form of music that Phish learned how to play in Burlington, Vermont, that has inspired such a loyal following?

Among people that don’t frequently listen to Phish, it can be hard to ascertain why the band is so popular. But if you spend any time sampling the YouTube videos of the band’s live performances, you’ll see ample evidence that people love Phish. 

In this relatively early video, you can get a sense of the effect the band has on its audience. Even as the band plays a slow melody, the audience raucously bounces around, captivated by every note.

So, why do people love Phish? Partly because the band is comprised of immensely skilled musicians. Their years of intense practice means that not only are their individual skills strong, but as a collective entity, they know how to play with each other. They are skilled musicians, but listeners disdain virtuoso musicians every day. The band’s technical skill cannot completely explain their rampant popularity.

The first part of the answer is that Phish’s live performances are built around an interaction between the band and the audience. That’s the product that Phish sells, the interplay between the band and audience. The audience is an integral part of the show. 

When the audience hears the right cue from the guitar, the fans know to chant “Wilson,” and they know that Wilson is the antagonist from Anastasio’s senior thesis, an epic musical composition. When the song “You Enjoy Myself” comes on, the audience roars with delight when the guitarists jam while jumping on trampolines, even though they know it’s coming. As you listen to live recordings of Phish, you notice that for every note the band plays, the audience provides a response that guides the band. It’s the back and forth between the audience and the band that creates the live musical production.

Remember, it took a decade of practice before Phish really started improvising on stage at a grand scale. If going to a U2 concert is like purchasing a mass produced print, a Phish show is like buying a unique painting. The band has never played the same set list twice and you never know when a ten minute song could morph into a thirty minute improvised jam.

Next,  Phish is an immersive world that fans can get lost in, not unlike Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. There is a mythology about the band and its shows and history. Just as a fan of Lord of the Rings may have memorized Frodo’s family tree, a Phish fan knows what Gamehendge and Rhombus are.

Fans don’t merely go see Phish, they collect Phish experiences. They track the number of concerts they’ve gone to, which songs from the band’s catalogue they’ve heard, and which venues they still need to see Phish perform at. Due to the bands improvised and varied sets, Phish fans constantly collect new experiences. Popular shows like Gamehoist, Big Cypress, Clifford  Ball, and Salt Lake City 1998 have taken on near mythological proportions. 

Finally, it seems that Phish puts on a show. The band might be flying through an arena playing on a giant hot dog, playing an eight hour set till sunrise, or pretending that Tom Hanks is on stage with them. There is a whimsy and unpredictability to their shows. The drummer occasionally plays a vacuum cleaner on stage, and almost always wears a woman’s dress while performing (except when he performs naked). At any Phish show, something strange, amazing, or unique could happen. For the diehard fan, the fear of missing out on one of these shows drives them to try to attend every one.

It’s worth noting that all of these reasons why people do like Phish also completely explain why other people don’t like Phish.

Almost none of the experience of watching Phish live translates over to their recorded music. Their studio recorded albums, without the excitement and energy of the audience, sound comparatively sad and lonely; almost like the difference between eating a great meal with a group of friends versus all by yourself. Same food, different experience. And while the music may demonstrate technical prowess, the complicated, layered 30-minute jams performed by the band don’t translate well to the radio.

Some people in this world love Phish more than you can possibly understand. This author’s wife is one of those people. As a compromise, one Phish song was selected to be performed during the dancing portion of this author’s wedding reception. When that song came on, half the dance floor cleared out. They stood to the side and stared with befuddlement as the other half of the attendees danced to a slow, strange, and seemingly undanceable song. The Phish fans were in rapture because their favorite band was blasting through the speakers and they knew that if Tweezer was performed now, that Tweezer Reprise would make an appearance at the after party. 

The Business Model

From 1989 onward, before the band had even been signed to a record label, Phish was profitable from live touring. Keep in mind, they had been at it for 5 years, scraping by on gigs in Burlington’s bars. During that time, they developed their most valuable asset, the ability to enthrall fans through live music. 

Because Phish achieved financial independence before the music industry even recognized them, they more or less could do whatever they wanted. The took their early profits and started their own management company, Dionysian Productions. They hired a staff of 40+ people that handled their elaborate stage productions and back office operations. They built their own merchandise company so that their shirts and other paraphernalia reflected the band’s artistic sensibilities. They even started a mail order ticket company so that fans could send them money orders and buy tickets directly from the band.

In 1991, they signed with a major record label, Elektra (owned by Warner). As they had the leverage in the relationship, Phish never really had a lot of conflict with their label about artistic control. They didn’t need money from album sales because they made money from live shows, so they never had to dilute their artistic vision to get radio airplay and sell albums. Of course, the result of this artistic freedom was that they never sold albums at a rate commensurate with their popularity.

Perhaps more so than any major musical artist today, the Phish business model is derived from having hard core fans of its live music. When Madonna sells out arenas across the country, she’s selling tickets to her various fans that live everywhere. When Phish sells out arenas or festivals across the country, it’s because the same die-hard fans fly across the country to see the band. In the rare instances where fans don’t make the trek and the shows don’t sell out, the band punishes the no-shows by performing a particularly epic set. In a forum where ardent Phish fans compare how much money they had spent on going to see the band, the answers were in the tens of thousands of dollars.

So while Phish undoubtedly has fewer fans than Madonna, the ticket revenue per fan is way higher because fans loyally attend multiple shows. Not since the Grateful Dead has a band built a following as loyal as Phish. And like the Grateful Dead, Phish merchandising is a big business as fans gobble up Phish t-shirts, baby-onesies, and hats.

When file sharing and piracy ravaged the music industry, Phish was insulated because their primary business was selling access to live music, not recorded music. In fact, the band was able to take advantage of the trends of digital downloads and streaming. They bundled digital downloads of live performances with ticket sales so that everyone who attended a show could download its broadcast the next day. And those that can’t attend shows live can pay to stream the performance from Phish’s website. While technological advancements made it harder for some artists to profit from their work, if anything, it made it easier for Phish to do so.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Phish

In 2004, Phish broke up. There are a lot of reasons given: rampant drug use by the band, the financial pressure of having over 40 people on payroll that needed to be paid whether the band was touring or not, or that after 20+ years of a grueling tour schedule, the band had simply run its course. 

In an interview with Charlie Rose right after the breakup, frontman Anastasio gave a compelling reason for the breakup - the passion for making great music together was no longer there. Anastasio tells Rose, how once felt about the music:

“You know, it was like — the only thought was about the show. I mean, I used to lock myself in my hotel room, as soon as the concert was over. For years, I would run back to my hotel room and start working on the set for the next night. And even though there wasn`t really a set list, there kind of was. Like I knew what was going on. And I was working and working and working, you know, oh my God, for hours, ripping pieces of papers up, books, you know, and I`d like you to practice them, come on, guys, everybody in the practice room. And then hours before the show, songs we hadn`t played in a while — I mean, it was just like a heavy work ethic until we got on stage. And then it was just a celebration.”

The band that practiced so diligently for most of its tenure stopped practicing together in 1998. By 2004, fans began commenting that the musical quality of the band was declining. What could have been a triumphant final show in Coventry, Vermont, was a disaster. Not only did rain and mud wreak havoc on the weekend, but the band’s music performance was universally panned. The musical geniuses of Phish went out with a whimper.

Phish Inc started to become a more bloated, drug-polluted entity precisely when their desire to make great music together was waning.  And so, it was time to call it quits.

Until, that is, it was time to call it unquits. The band reunited in 2009 for a three-night show in Hampton, Virginia.  The announcement sent a shockwave through the Phish community and an even greater shock wave through the Ticketmaster ordering system. The heavy traffic crashed the site. In the five years they were broken up, the band cleaned up, streamlined their staff, and gradually rebuilt the personal relationships between the band members. And so, in a testament to the strength of the following they built, they reunited and have generated over $120 million in the four subsequent years.

Conclusion

The members of Phish knew they wanted to make music since they were little kids. And they worked at it harder than anyone else. They have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in concert sales, but their roots were humble and their growth was slow. They spent five years in the relative obscurity of Burlington, Vermont, perfecting their craft. And through that process, they learned how to entertain a live audience. That turned out to make all the difference.

Every time Phish played, their audience grew only slightly. But devoted fans evangelized their music and the word spread. Growth was slow, but it compounded until suddenly the band could sell out 650 seat clubs. And then one day they could sell out Madison Square Garden four nights in a row. And some of those fans attended the show all four nights and the the ones who didn’t wished they had.

Phish worked long and hard to become great musicians and performers. This has lead to a durable business model built around live concerts. Could another band replicate their success? Maybe. But how many of them would quit before realizing how good they could be? Or would the band be discovered by the music industry too early and release a major label record that flops?

At a Phish show in 2003, the crowd was greeted by a giant banner proclaiming, “Our Intent Is All for Your Delight.” It’s Phish’s pure devotion to music that makes them beloved of their fans. It’s also what ended up making them gob fulls of money, so that worked out nicely.

This post was written by Rohin Dhar. Follow him on Twitter here or Google. After researching this story and finding out how hard Phish works at their craft, he’s finally agreed to attend one of their shows with his wife this summer. If you want to read more about Phish, this biography is excellent.

por Maria Shirts

‘Vou apanhar demais’, afirmou Moura sobre sua reação quando a polícia militar ingressou no Pavilhão 9 da Casa de Detenção. Ele disse que, após levar um tiro no pé, fingiu-se de morto em sua cela. Arrastando-se, dirigiu-se à escada, onde um policial estava matando a marretadas. ‘Ele contava 1, 2 e no 3 dava uma marretada. Esse cara matou muita gente no poço do elevador. Eles também faziam os cachorros morderem a gente.’ ”

O depoimento, retirado do site do Estadão é da segunda testemunha ouvida no julgamento do Massacre no Carandiru. O episódio, pra quem não sabe, aconteceu  em 2 de outubro de 1992, quando a PM entrou no Pavilhão 9 da Casa de Detenção de São Paulo (nome oficial do Carandiru) para conter uma rebelião. O resultado foi a morte de 111 detentos (segundo os dados oficiais), crime que está sendo julgado nesta semana de abril, 21 anos depois.

Não tinha idade para entender nada à época dessa chacina. Vim saber o que isso (mais ou menos) significava depois do filme Estação Carandiru, de Hector Babenco, inspirado no livro do médico Drauzio Varella. Mas essa história me chamou a atenção mesmo essa semana, por causa do julgamento e também da polêmica em voga que envolve a diminuição da maioridade penal. Lembrei com apreço das minhas aulas de sociologia e da tese de Foucault em Vigiar e Punir. Resolvi, por isso, ler o livro Carcereiros, também do Drauzio.

Nele, o médico conta a história dos agentes penitenciários que trabalharam por muito tempo no Carandiru. O primeiro capítulo já prende (com o perdão do trocadilho) o leitor. Fala do seu Araújo, carcereiro que salvou a vida de todos os detentos do pavilhão 8: “Rodeado por facas, algumas das quais perigosamente próximas, seu Araújo insistia que podiam confiar, ele e os colegas já tinha passado o cadeado no portão de acesso ao Nove, e ali montariam guarda permanente, decididos a barrar a entrada da PM. (…) Mal havia terminado o trabalho, ouviram-se os primeiros tiros no pavilhão vizinho. A noite começava a cair.”.

No livro, Drauzio explica como o Massacre mudou a lógica dos presídios e dos presos, em São Paulo, que passaram a se organizar a fim, também, de combater a opressão nas cadeias; os carcereiros, “Homens maduros, com muitos anos de profissão, falam com tristeza da decadência do Sistema Penitenciário instalada por ocasião do massacre do Pavilhão Nove, marco histórico a partir do qual as facções criminosas adquiriram um poder de mando que eles jamais teriam admitido no tempo em que comandavam os presídios”.

Isso foi o que mais me chamou atenção no livro. Poxa, quer dizer então que o crime organizado surge a partir de uma reação contra os maus tratos, a infração dos direitos, a tortura, a morte, a chacina, na cadeia, por parte do Estado? No mínimo irônico.

Enquanto isso, o leitor das grandes mídias enche a boca pra falar que bandido bom é bandido morto, e não percebe que está incitando aquilo mais teme: a reação do bandido em caráter de organização (a famosa lógica do “unido jamais será vencido”). Agora, a organização ganhou dimensões tamanhas que envolve também setores do poder público como bem percebeu o espectador de Tropa de Elite 2 (que, apesar de tratar do exemplo carioca, creio que se aplique ao caso paulista).

E a reação do Estado para o aumento da criminalidade é: “prenda o menor, prenda mais gente, superlote as cadeias, temos que deixá-los apodrecer nesses lugares, vamos esquecê-los ali! Vamos unir os que ainda não fazem parte do crime organizado com os mandantes do mesmo”. Porque, afinal, é tudo farinha do mesmo saco.

A haiku from the article: The New Exploratorium Opens in San Francisco

A haiku from the article: Beyond Profit: A Talk With Muhammad Yunus

I ran into this on Pinterest the other day and have given up trying to source the original image; a couple of sites point to Marie’s Manor as the creator, but since most of the stuff there appears to be from someplace else, I doubt they’re the originator either. I did manage to track down the graveyard background, though; it’s a silhouette standup by ShinDigz.

It’s also made of cardboard and costs nearly a hundred bucks, which is just ludicrous. (The price seemed bad enough when I thought it was a vinyl wall decal. But cardboard?)

The shapes are all simple enough that you could cut your own out of cardboard sheets, but an idea that I like far better is to actually stencil them on the walls for a permanent room makeover.

The silhouettes shown here are all very simple, with no fiddly details, so they should be do-able for even a stenciling novice (obviously, you can make them much more intricate if you have the skill and patience). There are tutorials all over the Web for stenciling walls, and googling “how to make wall stencils” will turn up a wealth of information: This, this, and this should be enough to get you started.

The actual decoration would involve painting the top part of the walls whatever color you want your “sky” to be: The burnt orange in the example is striking, but you could use purple, grey, or even scarlet if you’re feeling particularly gothy; you could also paint them plain white for a low-key, monochrome look. Apply your stencils in a darker contrasting color, then paint the lower part of the wall the same shade. Bingo! Insta-graveyard.

If you’re feeling ambitious you could use more than two colors and add extra details: A full moon, a few bats flitting around, a big spooky tree with bare branches, or even an errant ghost or two emerging from their crypts. Taking care with your stencils will make your results look like the work of a pro for little more than the cost of a bit of housepaint.

Who’s ready for a lesson on “Eggsalentlalism?” How about “Exatentalum?” Sound like fun? Great! Pull up a tiny chair, grab a toy, and get ready to have Nietzsche explained like you’re five with “Explain Like I’m Five: Existentialism and Friederich Nietzsche.” A web series inspired by a subreddit, “Explain Like I’m Five” has explained other complicated subjects to five year-olds, including the crisis in Syria and the volatility of the stock market. In this episode, our two presenters prime their students for a discussion on slave morality with the question “who here thinks they’re a good boy or a good girl?”

All the kids eagerly raise their hands, and after some Socratic dialogue are told that Existentialism means “there is no universal morality that governs all of us.” I’ll leave it to the philosophers out there to assess this definition. The kids don’t respond well. They hate Nietzsche. One vociferous young critic proposes tossing him on the street and stepping on him. Like good 19th century German burghers, they can’t imagine a world without rules. I imagine these kids’ parents would also like to toss Nietzsche in the street when their angels come home paraphrasing Beyond Good and Evil.

Some of the popular responses to Nietzsche among adults can also be overly emotional. First there is fear: of the supposed nihilist who proclaimed the death of God and who—thanks to the machinations of his unscrupulous and anti-Semitic sister—became erroneously associated with Nazi ideology after his death. Then there’s the enthusiastic embrace of Nietzsche’s work by unsophisticated readers who see him only as an antiestablishment romantic rebel, hellbent on undermining all authority. Some of these impressions are valid as far as they go, but they tend to stop with the style and leave out the substance.

What people tend to miss are Nietzsche’s sustained defense of a pragmatic naturalism and his tragic embrace of individual human freedom, which is not won without great personal cost. The unusual thing about Existentialism is that it’s a philosophy so broad, or so generous, it can include the anti-Christian Nietzsche, radically Christian Kierkegaard, and the Marxist Sartre. A more serious treatment of the subject—1999 three-part BBC documentary series “Human All Too Human”—also includes Martin Heidegger, who actually did truck with Nazi ideology. The series, which profiles Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, begins with the Nietzsche doc below (this one with Portuguese subtitles).

If you’re new to Nietzsche, and not actually a five-year-old, it’s worth an hour of your time. Then maybe head on over to our collection of venerable Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann’s lectures on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Sartre. For additional serious resources, Dr. Gregory B. Sadler has an extensive YouTube lecture series on Nietzsche, Existentialism, and other philosophical topics. And if all you want is another good chuckle at Nietzsche’s expense, check out Ricky Gervais’ take on the woefully misunderstood philosopher.

Related Content:

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Find Many Classic Works by Nietzsche in our Free eBooks Collection

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Friedrich Nietzsche & Existentialism Explained to Five-Year-Olds (in Comical Video by Reddit) is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Opinions may be like that other thing everyone has, but nobody’s got opinions like John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols and Public Image Limited. The punk tastemaker never holds back, and that’s why he’s so much fun in interviews. Take the clip above, from an appearance on the UK’s Absolute Radio. Lydon offers his take on a few artists, some contemporary, some aging pop stars. With no evidence of irony, he calls Lady Gaga “fantastic… witty, clever,” and says her songwriting is “bang up there.” Each to his own, I guess. Of Paul McCartney (who Lydon calls “McCarthy”), he says the former Beatle recently sang “like an old donkey.” He opines that “Blondie” (does he mean Debbie Harry? Or are we back to Gaga?) “really is a dobbin,” and Madonna is “kind of humorless.”

It’s all off-the-cuff good fun, nothing formal, unlike the review above, where Lydon employs his considerable critical acumen in a serious review of a very serious film: Katy Perry’s Part of Me. Although “not generally a film critic,” Lydon lets his gift for sarcastic understatement loose on a few clips from the movie. His review mostly focuses on Perry’s image, which seems appropriate. He’s pleased she shaves her armpits, but not with her various dye jobs. He reaches out to Perry in a very heartfelt way after seeing her father, who is, he says, a “nutter.” And oh, there’s so much more, but you should watch it for yourself.

Public commentary is not something Lydon has only taken up in his old age, though he has made a second career of it lately. Last year, Dangerous Minds dug up a recording of a 20-year-old Johnny Rotten spinning his records for Capital Radio in 1977 (below). He plays some Bowie (but he’s not a fan), Can, Captain Beefheart, John Cale, and plenty of dub reggae, introducing each track with his characteristic wit. Apparently, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren didn’t want him to do it and hated the interview and record selections, but Johnny Rotten has never been one to do what he’s told. Good for him—it’s an excellent listen. You can find a full transcript and tracklist of the session here.

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2009 Kate Bush Documentary Dubs Her “Queen of British Pop”

Malcolm McLaren: The Quest for Authentic Creativity

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness

Sex Pistols Frontman Johnny Rotten Weighs In On Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney, Madonna & Katy Perry is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

R_82

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is John Battaglia and I roast coffee.

What hardware do you use?

I roast on a Probat UG22. The “22” indicates its capacity in kilos. It’s a vintage, restored German-manufactured coffee roaster, frequently sought after for its cast iron construction. There is a nearly ideal ratio of convective to conductive heating that can exist when working with a cast iron roaster. Another advantage is the slightly forgiving and consistently predictable rate at which heat is transferred from the outside to the inside of the drum. When filled with coffee and heated from below with atmospheric burners, this horizontally-positioned drum roaster rotates at rates typically ranging between 45-60rpm. Our UG22 is tricked out with separate controls for airflow, drum speed, and cooling air. These independent controls can open up a new and exciting world of variables and manipulation, when executed properly.

I also use a ColorTrack, which is a roast color analyzer. It shoots lasers at a coffee sample at a rate of 10,000/second and produces a numeric representation of the degree of roast. Lasers!

And what software?

The software I use is called Cropster, which is data-logging/inventory management software that basically uses a graph to represent the progress of each batch with time and temperature on adjacent axes as well as degrees-per-minute. The resulting curve is a very basic, but extremely useful visual representation of a roast. This roast curve, in tandem with degrees/minute, can help visualize factors which greatly affect coffee that are not as easily determined when using a more traditional approach.

A roast curve is logged for each batch, along with other information relevant to that particular batch, and is later referenced as one of several data points we utilize to more accurately correlate what we’re doing in the roaster to what we’re tasting in the cup.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup would be what I’m currently working on, but outdoors with fresh air.

Orchid, Chalermphol Harnchakkham

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Follow Chalermphol Harnchakkham on Tumblr HERE!

A funny thing happens when you take the imaginary unit \(i\), and raise it to the power of \(i\); it becomes real. Again, \(i^i \in \mathbb{R}\).

To start off, we take Euler’s Formula:

\[ e^{ix} = \cos x + i \sin x \]

We make the RHS of the above \(i\) by setting \(x=\pi/2\):

\[ e^{i \pi/2} = \cos (\pi/2) + i \sin (\pi/2) = i \]

Raising the above to \(i\), we get:

\[ e^{- \pi/2} = i^i \]

Since the LHS is real, the RHS must be too. So, \(i^i\) is real.

Funnily enough, that isn’t the only real value for \(i^i\). We plugged \(x=\pi/2\) into Euler’s Formula, but \(x=2k\pi + \pi/2\) would have worked just as well. So:

\[ e^{-(2k\pi + \pi/2)} = i^i, k \in \mathbb{Z} \]

To summarise, \(i\) is an imaginary number, but \(i^i\) is real, and if that you’re not satisfied with just one real value for it, there are infinitely more to choose from.