Infants learn the rhythm and tone of their native language before they’re born. In fact, newborns from different countries have different cries. My mom brought me home in a 1970 Austin America. I can’t consciously remember it, but it burned an obsession with tiny, quirky hatchbacks into the synapses of my brain.
The Delta Wing Racer Indy car concept soared into the Chicago Auto Show this week riding currents of outrage rising off Indy Car racing fans. It’s been called heretical, toy-like, Batmobile, and just plain ugly. But I think it’s amazing. Here’s why:
1. It looks like a spaceship.
I’ve been waiting for a chance to fly a Wipeout-style antigravity racer since the ’90s and the Delta Wing is probably as close as I’m gonna get. And those spectacular spaceship looks serve a purpose. The thing is designed like an aircraft for extremely low drag and tons of downforce just where you need it. See how the back end is shaped like the space shuttle? That puts maximum downforce on the middle of the car, providing supreme stability at speed. The shape is so slippery and stable it can conceivably hit 236 miles per hour at Indianapolis Speedway.
I play a little game during night drives. I try to identify the make, model, and year of cars by the shape of their taillights or headlights alone. I’m pretty good. See, I have an Asperger’s-like obsession with cars and I’m rarely stumped. So when most of the cars at an auto museum absolutely confound me, I know it’s good. And thus, the Blackhawk Museum in Danville, Ca., is good.
The Blackhawk Museum is tucked in the foothills of Mt. Diablo, technically in Danville, just south of the upscale community of Blackhawk. It was built in ‘88 and has 70,000-square-feet of gallery space. The place may be small, but it’s crammed with a stunning, bizarro collection of contraptions. On average, it houses about 90 cars, most on loan to the museum from private collectors.
And it’s quite a collection, spanning automotive history from the early teens right up through the Malaise. But enough talk, let’s take a look at some of these rides.
One of my Bento User Profiles:
It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re buying your first home. There are dozens of factors to consider: Neighborhood, price, square footage, year built, lot size, repair issues, landscaping—the list goes on and on. That’s why first-time homebuyer Jessica Fonseca turned to Bento for iPhone to organize it all. “There are just so many things to keep track of when you’re looking at homes,” she says. “With Bento for iPhone, I can have all the information in one place. When my husband or Realtor talks to me about a house we’ve looked at, all the information is right there on my iPhone. It makes the whole process a lot easier to deal with and it was extremely simple to set up.”
A series of profiles for OIART, The Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology:
For Dan Brodbeck, there’s nothing like the thrill of making a great album. Unless it’s the thrill of teaching someone else how to make a great album. “That’s what surprised me when I started teaching,” he says. “I got the same result and gratification from teaching as I did from making a record. I get the same feeling when I see students start applying what they learn using the techniques we’ve taught them. It’s pretty amazing.”
I wrote this comprehensive lighting gear guide for B+H Photo a while back. It’s available in their stores in print form, and here as a PDF:
How do you market to a vampire? That’s the challenge interactive agency Digital Kitchen faced as they created a series of fang-in-cheek ads to promote HBO’s smash show True Blood. Using applications such as Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite, the all-Mac shop produced billboards and print ads for brands like MINI and Gillette, and a collection of darkly humorous online viral videos revealing that, after all, vampires are people too.
When Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) in St. Paul, Minnesota partnered with O’Reilly Media and Geek Squad to create a public television series based on MAKE magazine, it was a perfect fit. The Mac-based production team is full of born “makers”—people compelled to craft, create, and tinker. “I’m a woodworker, and almost everyone on staff for this project is a maker of some sort,” says Ted Hinck, managing producer at TPT, “so it was easy to feel a connection.”
Erykah Badu is awash in creative energy. She conjures the stuff from thin air, whipping up hooks and melodies with little more than a basic backing track. Think soulful freestyle riffs and lyrics punctuated by the boom and clack of a jazzy drum kit. Yet even a steady stream of creativity like Badu’s can be diverted—for days, weeks, months, or years. In fact, five years passed without a new Badu album. Some said she had writer’s block. Some said she had lost her groove. Turns out the vibe was alive the whole time—it simply needed a new channel to flow into.
Greg Laswell’s soulful acoustic sound is laced with bright guitar riffs and stirring, natural vocals. It’s easy to picture Laswell perched on a worn chair with an old Martin guitar, scrawling verses, chord progressions, and solos onto a yellow legal pad. But you’re more likely to find Laswell hunched over his MacBook, strumming and singing into GarageBand, which the musician uses to scribble aural ideas, flesh out full songs, and even record demos for record label execs.
Few DJs can electrify a crowd like Paul van Dyk. That connection was originally analog—all of his grooves were etched into a few tons of vinyl. But for about three years now van Dyk has been strictly digital. Today he conjures his sets on a pair of MacBook Pros using Logic Studio and Ableton Live. In fact, it probably isn’t accurate to call him a “DJ” anymore. Van Dyk weaves his own music real-time, like any live musician. He uses his dance-floor sixth sense and his skills as a renowned producer to create new tracks during every performance.
You’d expect an international super band like Fall Out Boy to write all its music in a massive audio laboratory, a studio crammed with enough gadgetry to make the guys at NASA jealous. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Fall Out Boy cooks up multi-platinum hits with GarageBand and a few MacBook Pros. The band’s lead singer and rhythm guitarist, Fall Out Boy, composes and records his demos almost exclusively with GarageBand. In fact, most of the band’s chart-smashing hits were written on his MacBook Pro using a combination of GarageBand software instruments and live recordings. And if that wasn’t enough, Stump also uses GarageBand to compose for other groups, including Cobra Starship and Gym Class Heroes. In every case, his tracks only hit pro studios for finishing touches and polishing. GarageBand is Stump’s main means for making music.
Whether he’s throwing out a staccato stream of rhymes or sounding out some smooth vocals, T-Pain’s style is unmistakable. The title of his debut album “Rappa Ternt Sanga” sums it up. T-Pain strives to bring hip-hop and R&B together without compromise. And it works — Five Grammy nominations and a run of solid-gold albums testify to the fact.
It all becomes clear at 200 miles an hour. That’s when the serene scream of precision-tuned MotoGP bikes resonates with race fans across the globe, summoning a visceral need for speed that can only be satisfied by breathtaking footage, exhilarating audio and complete coverage. The team at Dorna Sports delivers, serving up a medley of sensational media to satisfy the most serious speed junkies. For all intents and purposes, Dorna is MotoGP. The Madrid and Barcelona-based media company covers the races worldwide, from Spain to Qatar to California. It has more than 120 full-time staff members. Its camera operators cover every curve of the track. Its timekeepers track race progress. Its engineers have designed on-bike cameras to give spectators a behind-the-bars view of every race. Its editing team cuts live footage for more than 40 networks across the globe. And after every event, its editors stitch the best footage together for network TV spots and a DVD using Final Cut Studio.
Björk is the undisputed mistress of mechanized mischief. Her shows feature signature impish vocals and fine melodies backed by howling live instrumentals, electronic percussion, and edgy digital instrumentation. But in generating this complex sound, Björk isn’t alone. She’s backed by a brain trust of musicians, composers and technical experts. When she’s on tour, they help her visions become reality.
To a serious cyclist, a bike isn’t just a set of wheels. It’s an extension of bone and muscle, a projection of personality in motion. It’s not merely a machine, it’s personal. That’s why the design team at Trek built Project One, an online workshop where cyclists can fully customize their bikes — from parts to paint schemes — with a click of a mouse. “My personal bike is pink and black with white decals,” says Eric Lynn, designer and avid cyclist at Trek. “To me it says, ‘This is a fun ride, let’s take it easy and have a great time.’ Other people might want a stealthy monotone bike that says they’re in it for going fast. With Project One, everybody can figure out their own message.”
It doesn’t get much more serious than South Park. Not that the show is dull or somber. It simply has the most manic production schedule of any animated series on television — probably ever. “We work between 100 and 120 hours in a seven-day week to deliver the episodes,” says Frank Agnone, supervising producer at South Park Studios in Los Angeles. “We’re moving unbelievably fast right out of the gate.”
Few photographers can truly capture the drama, joy, and sheer intensity that every player experiences on the field. Michael Zagaris is one of the few, a pro photographer who has built his career on an almost psychic ability to empathize with players. His photographs reflect locker-room life and expose the emotion that’s usually hidden behind helmets. Zagaris is a behind-the-scenes sports photographer, a true biographer of the game.
Brian Eno paints with light. And his paintings, like the medium, shift and dance like free-flowing jazz solos or elaborate ragas. In fact, they have more in common with live music than they do with traditional artwork. “When I started working on visual work again, I actually wanted to make paintings that were more like music,” he says. “That meant making visual work that nonetheless changed very slowly.” Eno has been sculpting and bending light into living paintings for about 25 years, rigging galleries across the globe with modified televisions, programmed projectors, and three-dimensional light sculptures.
To BT, it’s all ones and zeros. “Music is just applied mathematics,” he says. “And so is visual art — it’s all related. You’re just dealing with color instead of the audible spectrum.” For this musician-composer-sound artist, the universe is, simply put, binary. And his latest project is a pure expression of that philosophy, an artistic fusion of digital music and motion, wrought in surround sound and digital video. “This Binary Universe” isn’t exactly an album and it isn’t exactly a motion picture. It’s a new form of digital art.
Published in Solano Magazine
The night air is thick with heat and the sweet smell of fried beaver tails, a Quebecois confection of fried dough known as queue de castor. The St. Laurent River is alive with light, its waters reflecting the nonstop nightlife of Old Montreal. The narrow cobblestone streets teem with people-street performers, musicians belting out jazz, and locals drinking at sidewalk cafés. There are children, college students, clowns, old men with accordions, jugglers, sketch artists and street vendors. Smiles, snickers and laughter are everywhere. This is summer in a city that’s buried under snow for half the year. This is a celebration that will last until autumn, a kind of subdued, down-home revelry that only the Quebecois can pull off. read more »
On stage, Jamie Lidell possesses an almost nuclear energy. His fingers dart at the myriad buttons on his MIDI gear. His eyes bulge. He wails. He shouts. He looks — to all appearances — ready to explode. In person, however, he is shy, soft-voiced, and just a little awkward.
Few would willingly take the name “Junkie,” but after spending more than 18 hours a day in an Amsterdam basement mainlining MIDI and sucking down samples in a binge of creativity, Tom Holkenborg decided to embrace it. He became Junkie XL, one of the world’s foremost electronic music producers and remixers, a powerhouse who churns out tracks for the dance floor, movies, television, and video games. He’s the only artist who’s been trusted to remix an Elvis song and the only producer to be given the chance to remix the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” He has also released four albums and his music has conquered the pop charts in 24 countries.
Exploring the vast darkness of the Borneo rain forest is rough, dirty and dangerous work. Just ask wildlife photographer Mattias Klum. “Most people say that it would be great to be in the rain forest,” he says. “But when you explain what it means to spend 14 months in a tent in a moldy forest full of mosquitoes and leeches and termites, trying not to catch malaria, it’s sometimes easier said than done.
Published in Solano Magazine
Dating is difficult. Sure, you can peruse the magazine rack at Borders, hoping to strike up a conversation about the latest issue of “GQ” or “Nintendo Power.” Or maybe mill about in the produce department squeezing fruit until an attractive person asks you about tangelo ripeness. You could do those things, but they’re not likely to land you a date. You’ve got to be proactive. You’ve got to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and dating services. Or at least you had to—until now. Today I’ve done it for you, endured three types of assisted courtship: speed dating, professional matchmaking and online dating. Admittedly, I haven’t conducted an exhaustive study of each, but I’ve done enough to help you decide which service is for you. read more »
The water is the color and consistency of chocolate milk, but they dip the jugs in anyway. Guapo takes one of them, sniffs the water inside, then takes a sip. He squints into the desert, nods and hands the jug to Tigre. “It’s good — you can’t taste the dirt or anything,” he says.
Published in Solano Magazine
It is dizzyingly hot. The sharp smell of new clothes, perfumes, rubber and strange food marry to form an intoxicating fume that hangs in the air like fog. Bangkok’s Chatuchuk weekend market is a vast labyrinth of more than 15,000 cell-like stalls. It buzzes with the combined voices of more than 200,000 shoppers. Their eyes scour the endless shops for bargains. Their hands tear through mountains of T-shirts, racks of knock-off jeans, piles of watches, lacquered dishes, rice-paper lamps, cell phones, compact disk players, everything imaginable. Merchants scream at the crowds through megaphones at a speed and pitch that makes me wonder if even the Thais can understand them. Food vendors deep fry, sauté, boil, peel and serve everything from cocoanuts to noodles to grasshoppers. The insanity sprawls across 35 acres of land. More than $750,000 will change hands in just under two days of operation. The Chatuchuk Market is the largest of its kind in the world, humanity’s best impression of a beehive. read more »
A small black plate is riveted to the cockpit’s interior next to my head. It reads, “No acrobatic maneuvers, including spins, approved.”
Right. I’ll keep that in mind. From where I’m sitting, it’s nothing but gauges. There must be hundreds of them, needles twitching, numbers recording countless vital statistics. This is my first flight lesson and I’ve known them for maybe 10 minutes. If that one tilts past 30, you’re in trouble. If that one is below 60, you’re in trouble. I don’t know what those two mean, but the instructor tells me they’re not important right now. Above all of them, the windscreen is nothing but gray-blue, the sky shining through the blur of the propeller. The runway is somewhere out there, just barely visible below the plane’s nose. My headset pops. It’s the instructor, sitting in the seat next to mine, a million miles away. “Go ahead and give it full throttle.” read more »
Published in Solano Magazine
At 6:30 p.m. on April 27 at least 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel leaked into the Suisun Marsh. The fuel was bound for Sacramento and Reno via a 14-inch Kinder Morgan pipeline when it pushed its way through a crack and settled over 20 acres of marsh. Operators at Kinder Morgan noticed a drop in pressure soon after the pipe burst. They shut down the line and sent men to look for the leak the following morning. It did not take long to find it. There was enough fuel in the marsh to fill two backyard swimming pools; enough to drive one dozen fully loaded rigs from San Francisco to Los Angeles 43 times. read more »