Eric Smillie is a freelance journalist covering art, travel, food, and culture for GOOD, Make, VIA, Wired, and other publications.
eric at ericsmillie.com
My homemade, unpasteurized sauerkraut (and photos of it) will be on display and up for trade at the exhibition Non*Mart at Y2Y Gallery in San Francisco from November 6 till January 15, 2010. See more details about eating some at the opening at my post about it on awesomepickle.com or at the show and gallery links. Click the pic for a bigger flyer.
Friends, I have another website on this fine internet of ours. It’s called awesomepickle.com and it’s dedicated to the awesome world of fermented food and drink. The contents are mostly recipes for pickling food at home with the help of live microorganisms Food prepared this way is very healthy. It also tastes delicious and never fails to impress friends and strangers alike. I recommend you go to the wbsite immediately, make some sour dills or sauerkraut, brew some beer, and then enjoy the fruit of your labors with a grilled cheese sandwich.
Although I haven’t had much to put up here for the past few weeks, I swear I’ve been working. Editing doesn’t deliver the bylines the way writing does. There are some articles are in the works, though.
Even in these times of layoffs, shrinking page numbers, and general gnashing of teeth, new magazines are born. Here to the right is the cover of the first issue of Afar, a new international travel publication. What’s the story? This magazine caters to travelers who search for the local character of the countries they visit. If you like to climb the walls of the resort, sneak off the bus tour, meet local people, and get yourself invited to dinner then this publication might be worth picking up. In fact, you can order a free copy of the first issue and see for yourself if you like it.
My own contribution to the magazine is an article on the Czech word pohoda. One of those words that doesn’t translate easily into English, pohoda once meant pleasant weather and in recent years has come to describe those especially blissful moments in life when all is well. It’s the sort of feeling we have all had the joy to experience, most likely on a Saturday or while on vacation, when we are totally relaxed and unworried. In other words, pohoda is when you don’t have a care in the world.
It’s a popular word with Slovaks, too. So popular that it’s used as the name of the country’s largest and most beloved summer music festival where, as a newbie journalist, I managed to score an interview with the stupendously soulful Detroit techno producer and DJ Carl Craig. Listen to something nice by him here. I took this photo of him, too, and just couldn’t understand why the design department of The Slovak Spectator didn’t want to publish it. That clip helped me land my first freelance story outside of Slovakia, for a music magazine. Definitely a moment of pohoda!
Come to think of it, a lot of my life in Slovakia was pohodlny (that’s pohoda as an adjective). I had a fun job, no real responsibilities, and almost every Slovak I encountered was psyched to meet me. The scenery helped too. It’s pretty darn peaceful over there:
Click photo for larger version. Image courtesy of Kennecott Utah Copper.
The Colorado River spent 6 million years carving the Grand Canyon. It’s taken Utahans only a century to dig Kennecott’s Bingham Canyon Mine. Ok, so the Grand Canyon gets as deep as 6,000 feet and Bingham only reaches a bit past three-quarters of a mile. But consider this: The pit you see here used to be a mountain, which tacks on at least an extra 1,000 feet. We’re gaining on nature, and quickly.
In the latest issue of VIA magazine I’ve got a story on the open pit copper mine, which is the largest man-made excavation on Earth. Everything is oversize here, from the fleet of 80 haulage trucks taller than two-story houses and costing $2.8 million a piece to the 82 million gallons of water sprayed annually for dust control. And the mine runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Sound like a monumental waste? Take a look around you before you wish it closed—everything from fridge to phone works thanks to copper. Come to think of it, the story of copper mining, accelerating from the first urban electrification projects to today’s massive resource extractions, is the story of modern America. Perhaps that’s why this hole is a National Historic Landmark.
For more crazy details on just how big this operation is and to learn how it is we can turn a ton of rock into 13 pounds of copper sheeting, watch this video. Spoiler alert: it involves a five-mile conveyor belt.
I’m spending most of my time working as a contract editor at VIA these days, so my freelance writing has slowed down a bit and I haven’t had as much to report here. I’m enjoying seeing the other side of the writing game, though, and it’s giving me the opportunity to go after breathtaking travel destinations like this one.
I mentioned in my last post that I was rebuilding a bike in the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, and here it is, about a month after I finished it. A Raleigh Record from the ’80s that I got at a garage sale around the corner. It’s got 14 speeds now, and new wheels, derailers, and chain. I cleaned and greased everything else, starting with the bottom bracket. Not exactly a restoration that’s true to the 10-speed tradition, but those extra gears should come in handy on the hills of the bay area. Not that I’ll be riding it; it’s too big for me. But now that it’s out of the basement I have room for a project that’s my size.
Photo by Phil Yip.
In the three weeks it’s been online, my latest story for GOOD magazine, a primer on the best burgeoning bike scenes in North America, has earned a lot of comments. Many readers wrote in other cities as candidates and it would have been nice to include them all. While reporting the story I learned, as at least one commenter noted, that you can go to any city in the U.S. and find a burgeoning bike scene. That’s a wonderful thing.
Everywhere I looked I found community repair shops where people could build and fix bikes at little cost. Every town has formal and informal clubs that organize fun rides and races. And, thanks to rider activism, many cities are planning to expand their networks of bike paths and are considering bike-rental systems like the Velib program in Paris. Or at least they were at the end of last year, before the economy pooped out on us.
I’d guess that the strong showing from these communities is the result of the fairly small number of bikers relative to drivers on the road. When you’re part of just a tiny percentage of all commuters, you feel a sense of camaraderie with your fellow cyclists. At least I always do.
One last thing to say: All that thinking and talking about bikes inspired me to haul one of my old, broken-down bikes out of the basement and into the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, which is full of friendly geniuses who have helped me fix it up from the bottom up.
Sometimes when I interview someone they give me too many good quotes. That’s what happened with artist Susan Danis, when I talked to her for an article in issue 10 of Craft magazine. Here are two that I didn’t manage to use where her enthusiasm and curiosity come through:
“I was going for a walk with my husband the other night and it wasn’t quite dark yet. And I was so happy because I found some dried worms on the sidewalk that I could use.”
“I was hoarding animal horns. Those you have to keep in the freezer for three months in case there are any bugs. My freezer is still filled with horns.”
I also focused on one of her works at the expense of others, such as Lingam, in the photo above. It’s so buried in bells and flowers it’s a wonder it can even stand up. I also couldn’t get into her future projects, which is a shame since I had to leave this quote behind:
“I want to build a crib with a big hairy turd slumped into it. So I’m going do that. I’m not going to try to explain it, but I am going to build it. That’s how it works, that’s the process.”
Enough said.
Sadly, this was also Craft’s last issue in print. But it seems that the crew will continue to run their very active website.
See the red stuff on that rock? That’s a swarm of ladybugs. A few weekends ago some friends and I paid a visit to their winter home on Mount Diablo, near Clayton, California. It was almost scary how many there were. Here’s a closeup.
It seems they live down by the coast in the warm months, then move inland into the mountains when it gets cold. They can’t fly unless it’s warmer than 55 degrees! They also have a life cycle of only four to six weeks, so how do they know to go back to the same place every year? We found them along the Falls Trail loop and it looks like they go to Redwood Regional Park too. One more fun fact: It takes 24 hours for an adult to get its spots.
And for the land-use lovers out there:
A nice shot of the Clayton Quarry, a source of diabase, a hard rock destined by law for local construction uses that have included the rail beds of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system and Interstates 580 and 680. Here’s more info on its use and history.
I like to collect crap, and the best crap is free. Especially when it comes to you by chance and bears the marks of age and use. It’s this extra character that makes the objects heaped up at flea markets and on garbage days so intriguing. Assemblage artist Susan Danis told me that the local junkyard was one of her favorite places on Earth. I can see where she’s coming from. Over my desk I keep the scrap of fabric in this photo, which I cut from a broken lawn chair in the trash outside my building when I lived in Slovakia. Sentimental? Perhaps, but I also like to look at it and wonder what it’s been through. How many bottoms did it endure, and how many spilled bottles of kofola?
The beach is at the top of the list of places to make strange discoveries, and I had the fun of writing a mini-guide to great beachcombing spots on the northern Pacific coast for VIA magazine. It ran with Michael McRae’s story on turning up everything from 17th-century Spanish beeswax to thousands of lost Nike sneakers on the shores of Oregon.
State and national parks tend to have the nicest and most accessible beaches, but you can’t take home much of what you find on them since shells, rocks, and wood are all protected. I think the man-made objects are more interesting anyways: busted fishing tackle, random bottles, stray pieces of scuba gear. On the north coast, it’s popular to look for the glass floats that break free from Japanese fishing nets. They’re tough to snag in Oregon, but from this video it looks like they’re all over Alaska, if you have a plane to get out to remote spots.
The video is slow moving but beautiful. Eagles hang out on the beach, bear prints appear, a dog chases a seal and a fox, and a redhead blushes.
Kinetic artist Matt Jones, who I profiled in Make Vol. 8, turned up this, um, remix of my article on him. I can only assume the authors of this transformation used a program that replaces words with their synonyms to create a copy that is like, and completely unlike, the original. The title of the story that I wrote is the The Secret Life of Death Clouds. The new version calls itself The Abstruse Activity of Afterlife Clouds.
Here’s the first paragraph of the new article:
Matt Jones contemplates activity by architecture affective sculptures that abort to carbon it. A alum apprentice in art at Stanford University, his investigations accept led him, a part of added things, to use an air compressor to breathing a respiratory arrangement ancient from old bike close tubes, and to motorize a carpeting of zip ties abstemious with LEDs to almost a pulsing, acclaim respiring, bristling hide. His goal: to aggravate out the basic aspect that makes the active live.
Debate over which version’s writing is of higher quality will undoubtedly have the comments section hopping for months, so I’ll keep my own judgments to myself. I’ll bet, though, that the magniloquent program behind this recreation would interest Italo Calvino, who stuck a word-counting, genre-analyzing computer into his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It’s probably child’s play for Philip Parker, who has turned automated internet searches into hundreds of thousands of books for sale on Amazon, and claims he’s working on software that will generate romance novels.
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