Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2015 en Smith Journal

Washing dishes puts me into a trance. I find vacuuming hypnotic. And if a book case doesn’t look right, I’ll happily spend an afternoon organising it by colour. The thing that really plays with my mind, though, is shaving. I first realised this on a Saturday morning a few years ago. At the time, I had nowhere to be, so I thought I’d treat myself to a few extra bathroom minutes. As I cycled through the contents of the medicine cabinet – toothbrush, floss, deodorant – the world around me began to shrink. And by the time I got to my electric razor, I was in a profound state of zen. I looked at the reflection of my chin, and hit the on button. Like a droning sitar, the sound…

WRITE WHAT YOU WANT TO READ When I was in my early thirties I bought a house in an isolated area. There was no television reception, no radio, no cable and no internet. The only things I had at that point were either taped movies or books, and I just found there were no books I wanted to read. So the next step was to try to write the kind of thing I would like to read. First and foremost, I was dealing with my own shit and entertaining myself. I don’t want it to sound like I was doing anything noble or altruistic. WRITING ABOUT A PROBLEM CAN MAKE IT DISAPPEAR My life has had so many tragedies in it that I’ve kind of evolved an absurdist way of…

IT’S THE END OF A LONG HOT DAY IN THE FIELD, AND ALL GAVIN MUNRO WANTS IS A COLD BEER. He’s just reached the top of a hill to find enough phone reception to speak to me. It’s a beautiful view; the surrounding fields are full of sheep and cows, comfortably at home in the English heartland of rural Derbyshire. Working the land is deeply ingrained in this part of the country, and Munro is involved with preserving the tradition. But unlike his neighbours, his farm isn’t for raising crops or livestock; it’s for growing furniture. For the past 10 years, the British artist and designer has been realising his vision to grow wood chairs and lamps directly from tree branches, coaxing them into strange and twisting forms that are…

IMAGINE THAT THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT ENDS TOMORROW. There’s some sort of globally catastrophic doomsday event – an asteroid strike, a pandemic virus, a nuclear war – whatever, it doesn’t really matter. Our modern civilisation collapses and the vast majority of humanity dies. Now what? What could you do, as part of a community of post-apocalyptic survivors, to not only ensure your survival in the immediate aftermath, but to thrive in the long term? How would you try to reconstruct society, and what scientific knowledge and technology would you need to preserve to do it? And – with the benefit of hindsight from our own history – could you maybe even accelerate the rebooting process? Now of course, I don’t actually believe the world is about to end.…

IF YOU TYPE “THE WORST RECIPE OF ALL TIME” INTO A SEARCH ENGINE, THERE’S ONE CONTENDER THAT POPS UP ON NEARLY EVERY LIST. It comes straight from the pages of the 1953 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook: Take 450g of liverwurst; mix it together with mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice; shape it around a jelly mould, and set with gelatine. Cover in tropical-flavoured icing, stud it with stuffed olives, and spike it with the top of a pineapple. Hey presto – Liver Sausage Pineapple. It’s an abomination of epic proportions. But on another level it also represents something kind of sweet: a gallant attempt to celebrate one of history’s most revered and beguiling fruits – the pineapple. Native to South America, the pineapple was originally…

DANIEL HOUGHTON RECKONS HE’S COME “AS CLOSE TO MASTERING JET LAG AS ANYONE CAN”. HIS SECRET: NEVER EAT ON AN AIRPLANE, AND DRINK SO MUCH WATER “YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO THROW UP”. The 27-year-old has definitely had plenty of opportunity to hone this approach. As the CEO of the world’s largest guidebook publisher, Lonely Planet, he spends between 150 to 200 days per year travelling. Houghton came to the job in April 2013, and knew from the outset that he was joining a company with a storied past. Lonely Planet was founded in 1972 by Melbourne couple Tony and Maureen Wheeler (themselves just twenty-somethings at the time). Their first release was a hand-stapled guide called Across Asia on the Cheap, which retailed for around two bucks apiece. Over the…

NORSE MYTHOLOGY MAKES GAME OF THRONES LOOK LIKE A KIDS’ SHOW. It’s full of red-blooded, hard-living deities, with a soft spot for sex and violence. At the top of the family tree is Ymir, an enormous giant who was born into a featureless abyss called Ginnungagap. His body was created from drops of water that fell when Niflheim, the land of ice, came in contact with Muspelheim, the land of fire. He was an evil being with extraordinary reproductive capabilities, and somehow managed to give birth to two children from his left armpit. (There isn’t any literature explaining the exact mechanics, but apparently they turned out fine.) At first, Ymir was sustained by the milk of a cow (also formed from water). He’d often suckle straight from the beast’s udder…

I TRAINED AS A CLASSICAL PIANIST. I PLAYED MY WHOLE LIFE. WHEN MY WIFE AND I HAD OUR FIRST CHILD, SHE WAS A PROFESSIONAL BALLET DANCER, AND THERE WAS A POINT WHEN WE LOOKED AT EACH OTHER ACROSS THE KITCHEN AND SAID: “WE NEED TO FIGURE THIS OUT; CLASSICAL MUSIC AND DANCE JUST AREN’T GOING TO PUT US OVER THE TOP FINANCIALLY.” I started designing book covers, and it just felt like what I should be doing. It didn’t feel like an uphill battle. It only took me 30 or whatever years of struggling and playing music to figure it out. It’s really a story of unbelievable luck more than anything. When you’re designing covers, you have to make a visual interpretation of the fictional world. The process starts with…

BORN: August 25, 1530, Kolomenskoye, Russia DIED: March 18, 1584, Moscow THE FIRST CZAR OF RUSSIA HAD A NICKNAME: IVAN GROZNY. There’s a bit of disagreement about the exact English translation; some believe it was a term of endearment, meaning ‘Ivan the Formidable’ or ‘Ivan the Awesome’. The majority of historians, however, aren’t so flattering. They prefer ‘Ivan the Terrible’, and if you look at some of the utterly abominable stuff the man did during his rule, it’s not hard to see why. A lot of Ivan Vasilyevich’s cruel behaviour can probably be attributed to his unusual childhood. When he was three, his father, the Grand Prince of Moscow, died, and the little boy was named as his successor. Ivan was apparently quite a brainy little guy, but not smart…

FEMALE TROUBLE, 1974 John Waters was a huge influence on me when I was a kid. His book Shock Value got me through high school, but it was a while before I got to see this movie. Once I did, it was better than I could have imagined. The thing I remember thinking when I first saw it was that weirdos can win. It’s also a good example of a film being committed to a character. DEVO: THE MEN WHO MAKE THE MUSIC, 1981 This is a really weird documentary made by the band Devo. It wasn’t about rocking out, like a lot of musical documentaries; it was about a band trying to destroy everything. They were saying, “Look how humanity has begun to devolve. We’re a band, and we’re…

ELVIS LEFT THE BUILDING FOR THE LAST TIME ON AUGUST 16, 1977. A Memphis ambulance drove him away from 3734 Elvis Presley Boulevard – better known as Graceland – at 2.48 that afternoon. It had taken five men to lift his bloated body from the floor of his bathroom onto the stretcher. He was 42 years old, beyond question the most famous entertainer who had ever lived – and about to become even more so. The title of Presley’s 1959 greatest hits album had boasted that “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong”. In truth, it was a gross underestimation of the King’s popularity. The fact and the manner of Presley’s early, wretched death left a worldwide legion of adherents bereft, bewildered and vulnerable. For some, it was simply too hard…

HIDDEN WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY’S SPRAWLING SANDSTONE CAMPUS IS A SMALL MUSEUM THAT ISN’T IN MANY GUIDEBOOKS. It’s in an unassuming spot – down an alleyway, through a plain-looking door and up three flights of stairs. But those who make the journey are rewarded with a rare sight: a Noah’s Ark of unique, though long-since dead, zoological specimens. There’s a fully preserved Tasmanian tiger pelt, a set of fossilised dodo bones, and a flea once plucked from an armadillo by Charles Darwin himself. The contents kept in the Macleay Museum’s exhibition halls, however, are just the beginning. To see the best stuff you have to walk down the street to another nondescript building. There, mounted on cork-lined boards in a temperature-controlled storage room, is the museum’s vast collection of…

WHEN I WAS 11 YEARS OLD I SET MYSELF A GOAL TO BECOME AN ASTROPHYSICIST. I WANTED TO GET A PHD IN THE SUBJECT. ANYTHING BEYOND THAT, I THOUGHT, WOULD JUST BE GRAVY. The moment I got my PhD was singular. I was ready, not just for the world, but for the universe. I’d achieved what I had set out for, but once I became a certified astrophysicist, I started working towards another aim: to grasp the universe as deeply as I possibly could at all times. That’s a never-ending goal, and maybe they’re the best kind you can have: the ones that continue beyond any point you ever thought you would achieve. You should never be happy achieving a goal when you have more life coursing through your veins.…

AGAINST THE JAW-DROPPING BLUSTER AND SPECTACLE OF MOST CIRCUS ARTS, THE HIGH WIRE HAS ALWAYS RETAINED A SOLEMN DIGNITY. The traits cultivated by all acrobats – control, focus, discipline – reach their apex in the measured grace required to stride across a cable slung high above the earth. Phillipe Petit, the Frenchman who found fame by walking between the Twin Towers, once described the art thus: “The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky; movements so still they leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.” Of the list of people who’ve spent their lives on this ‘long path’, few are held in higher regard than Con Colleano. An almost entirely self-taught master from the furthest reaches of…

IN 1932, THE COMMANDER OF THE ROYAL AUSTRALIAN ARTILLERY’S SEVENTH HEAVY BATTERY RECEIVED AN UNUSUAL ORDER. Had it come from anyone else he might have disregarded it as a joke, so outlandish was the premise. But the communication bore the signature of Sir George Pearce, the Minister of Defence, and therefore Major G. P. W. Meredith had no choice but to accept. The order went as follows: Meredith was to select two of his finest gunmen, arm them with machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and set off for a remote plain in Western Australia. The region, he was told, was under attack, and Meredith was to lead the first counter strike. The enemy? A flock of 20,000 emus with an appetite for destruction. It was supposed to be…

IT WAS DURING A VISIT TO HIS GRANDFATHER’S JEWELLERY STORE IN UPSTATE NEW YORK THAT DAN SPITZ’S OBSESSION BEGAN. He was eight years old at the time, and on summer vacation. “I would go to my pop-pop’s store on the weekends,” he remembers. “I’d go through the iron gate in the back, and he would open his big safe. One day he sat me down at his bench and put in front of me a Patek Philippe watch. I was scared to touch it.” The reaction was understandable – some Pateks, even in the ’70s, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But that didn’t deter his grandfather’s next instruction: “Go at it!” It was at that moment, when he was handed some tools and encouraged to disassemble the high-priced mechanism,…

NEARLY EVERYTHING TO DO WITH SPACE TRAVEL IS A TEAM EFFORT. Take the Gemini 5 mission in 1965; the rocket that took Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad into space was the result of hundreds of engineers, thousands of hours of work and millions of dollars. The spacesuits they wore were designed by hoards of scientists and stitched together by a small army of expert seamsters. However, there was one part of the mission that was done by a decidedly smaller committee: the official embroidered patch. It was designed by Cooper and Conrad themselves. At the time, the only decorations allowed on NASA spacesuits were the U.S. flag and the NASA logo (nicknamed ‘the meatball’). As former-military men, Cooper and Conrad were used to adorning their uniforms with colourful sigils to…

WHEN ADAM FORRESTER WAS A KID, HIS GRANDFATHER TOLD HIM ABOUT AN OLD TRADITION THAT HAPPENS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH: EATING DIRT. HE ASSUMED THE OLD MAN WAS MAKING STUFF UP. But that changed after Forrester enrolled at a university in Georgia in 2002. At the time, he’d just taken up a job to help pay for his degree. It involved driving around in an old Volvo and delivering newspapers to convenience stores in the city of Columbus. One day, while he was unloading some of his inventory at a place called Mr B’s Stop-N-Shop, he noticed something behind the counter. It was a box of zip-lock bags filled with chunks of kaolin, a white clay that’s commonly used in the manufacturing process of paint, cosmetics and fine china. They…

I FIRST HEARD “FAITH” ON MTV. That was the way we found new music back then. Being a five-year-old boy in America’s south, I wasn’t quite ready for the sight of George Michael shaking his ass in my face. I hated it – I hated him, the song and especially the video. It wasn’t until 10 years later, around the time I started writing music myself, that I came across it again and realised how goddamn amazing the track actually is. I remember the first thing that grabbed me was just the sound of that acoustic guitar. I was completely blown away by the power and crispness of that “ka-jank ka-jank ka-jank ka-jank-jank”. The actual sound that they captured was probably the best recording of an acoustic guitar since the…

AT THE TOP OF THE BRAIN IS A TINY ROOM WITH THREE MEN IN IT. They sit around a table, talking, twiddling knobs and reading books. Their job is an important one: making sure all decisions are motivated by reason. Below is a smaller room. It too is occupied, but by just one man. He sits at a giant switchboard, plugging wires between sockets. He’s running the muscles. His signals are sent all around the body, including to a lonely man in overalls down by the stomach. That poor guy deals with a dirtier – but still altogether vital – task: pushing freshly digested food onwards to the intestinal tract. This is the scene depicted in Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), an educational illustration by physician, artist…

STEVEN CRESWELL AND TIM KLIENDIENST, SYDNEY SC: When I first came across Tim he was a crazy 16-year-old record collector from Armidale. I responded to an ad he put in a music zine looking for rare U2 seven-inch singles; all of which I didn’t have, but for some reason I wrote to him anyway. Our first years of friendship were centred around swapping mixtapes, scrounging around for anything cool that we thought the other person might not have heard, complete with meticulously hand-drawn cover art. We wrote lots of funny letters to accompany the mixtapes – the new track you should listen to, and two or three lines about why you should care. That tradition of swapping music continued on when we lived together in our twenties; we just had…

SHAPEABLE HOUSES Transformable space. That’s the ticket. Why? My husband and I work from our home. We also live in Canada, where the climate keeps us indoors for a considerable part of the year. There are tricks one plays in a regular building to keep life fresh. We have movable desks, for one, so the term ‘office’ is rather pliable. Still, the kitchen stays where it is, and the windows, and the bedrooms… etcetera. Unless they didn’t. I’d love a building that transforms its interior space at my need or whim. Overnight guests? Flip the switch for an extra bedroom with ensuite. Need to frame a large work of art? Lose the kitchen and hallways in favour of an open workspace with skylights. Not to mention how what we need…

FINDING THE LOCATION OF CARLTON GLASS CAN BE A LITTLE CHALLENGING. There’s no address on the business’s website – only a PO box on the Sunshine Coast. And the directions that its staff email out to clients and visitors rely mostly on local landmarks. The aura of secrecy is not altogether accidental. Carlton Glass has a long history with unsavoury characters trying to force entry into its premises. More often than not, they’re after the hard-to-find products that the company makes: custom laboratory glassware. It’s the kind of stuff that’s useful for advanced scientific research, alcohol distillation – or, in the wrong hands, a backyard drug lab. The robberies were particularly bad before the company moved 18 months ago. “Something was up if we weren’t getting broken into once a…

THE RAID ON THE SLUM IS SWIFT AND DECISIVE – SO URGENT THE DOORS OF THE POLÍCIA MILITAR CAR ARE STILL FLUNG WIDE OPEN. A number of the colourful illegal objects – one is white with purple spots – are lined up in rows on the grass. Burly cops with pistols on their hips are rolling up the evidence like oversized sleeping bags before hoisting them on their shoulders and dragging them off. It’s a decent haul of paper hot air balloons, and all in a day’s work for the Brazilian military police. In a country that ranks in the top 20 internationally for its homicide rates and population of crack cocaine users, it seems curious that authorities would be bothered with something as seemingly innocuous as balãos (homemade balloons).…