Table of contents for Summer 2018 - v.25 in Smith Journal

Take a bus from whichever glamorous side of town the celebrity tours have swept you, and head to a little-visited street in Culver City, well off the tourist drag. There, wedged between a panel beater and an abandoned real estate office, you will find a nondescript and infrequently open building known, by the few who know about it, as the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Inside you will encounter exhibitions on a range of strange and wonderful topics. There’s a section devoted to the Cameroonian stink ant, which spouts fungal horns from its heads, and is so large its cries can be heard by the human ear. Next is a display on a South American bat known as the “piercing devil”, which can supposedly fly through solid objects. These are followed…

ACCORDING TO BOOTMAKING LORE, IN 1813 A CORDWAINER NAMED GEORGE HOBY WAS OUTFITTING THE DUKE OF KENT WITH SOME NEW KICKS WHEN WORD FILTERED THROUGH OF NAPOLEON’S DEFEAT AT VITTORIA, SPAIN. Hoby, the shoemaker of choice for the battle’s victor, evidently thought some of the credit belonged to him. “If Lord Wellington had had any other bootmaker than myself,” he’s said to have informed the Duke, “he never would have had his great and constant successes; for my boots and prayers bring his lordship out of all his difficulties.” A grandiose statement, perhaps, but Hoby’s brag might not actually have been all that overblown. After all, Hoby had designed a new kind of boot for Wellington’s cavalry, and their hardiness made them perfect for wearing into battle. Before their invention,…

IN 2014 I MOVED TO IDAHO, AND I BEGAN EXPLORING THE AREA’S SAGEBRUSH-COVERED DESERT, WHICH IS OPEN FOR PUBLIC USE. I quickly discovered it was popular with gun owners, who used it for practice shooting. Many of the targets they used were ordinary consumer products, which were often left behind. The Bureau of Land Management describes these items as “trigger trash”. I began collecting trigger trash, partly to help with the cleanup effort, but mostly because it looked interesting. I realised the items could be classified as cultural artefacts, and decided to photograph them in an archaeological style. The background colours were sampled from the desert where the items were found, and represent the geography and its flora. I collected about 150 items all up. I threw most away, but…

AHUIZOTL The Aztec emperor Ahuizotl was arguably pre-Columbian Mesoamerica’s scariest badass. Between 1486 and 1502, he conquered 45 neighbouring territories, doubling his empire’s size. He also coldly ordered 20,000 people to be sacrificed during renovations to the capital city, Tenochtitlán. So of course this guy would name himself after Aztec mythology’s squickiest monster. With a name meaning ‘thorny aquatic one’, the ahuizotl looks like a small dog with rubbery black fur that stands up in clumpy spikes, and grabby little hands like those of a monkey or raccoon. According to folklore, it lures you to the water’s edge by imitating a crying baby, then uses the extra hand on its flexible tail to drag you to its underwater cave home. There, the ahuizotl feasts on your teeth, eyes and fingernails.…

WHEN I FIRST HEARD ‘CALL YOUR GIRLFRIEND’, IN 2012, AT NEW YORK’S GREAT BASEMENT GAY BAR, NOWHERE, THE ODDLY ACCENTED, ANDROGYNOUS VOICE SOARING OVER PERCOLATING SYNTHS MADE ME SURE THIS MUST BE SOME EARLY ’80S, EURO-FUTURIST CLASSIC THAT HAD SOMEHOW ESCAPED MY NOTICE. But no! It was a new record by Swedish retro-electropop dance diva Robyn, of ‘Dancing On My Own’ fame, taking her lyrical sophistication up a notch to bring us a nonstop ecstatic dance track that can actually make a grown man cry. (At least a certain gay man, under the right conditions.) The unusual lyric situation of ‘Call Your Girlfriend’ is that the narrator exhorts her new lover (you) to telephone your current lover and dump her, explaining that you just met the narrator, and it’s not…

IF WE DETECT AN ALIEN SIGNAL, WE WOULD LEARN SOMETHING INCREDIBLE: THAT IT’S POSSIBLE FOR US TO HAVE A LONG FUTURE. PUT YOUR FOOT DOWN Growing up, my dad was my entire universe. He was an outdoorsman, so I grew up hunting, fishing and camping. Then when I was about eight, my mother had a conversation with him and he subsequently told me I needed to learn how to do ‘girl things’. He couldn’t have said anything that would have made me angrier. After I pulled out the tears he finally said, “Look, if you’re willing to work hard, you can do whatever you want.” So I stamped my foot down and said, “I’m going to be an engineer.” I didn’t even know what an engineer was; I just knew…

I’ve always had a preoccupation with gender and masculinity, partly because I found all those rules about how you’re supposed to be a boy a bit of a tight fit. You’re supposed to love football and climbing trees and science. You’re supposed to be cheeky and boisterous. But I was almost completely mute and couldn’t do any of that stuff. I remember acutely the time that, through no fault of my own, I had to do sports day in girls’ socks. The trauma has stayed with me to adulthood. There’s a lot of behavioural repression that goes into making a boy a man, but much more concerning is the emotional repression we foist on boys. When you’re told to “be a man” and “man up”, what you’re actually hearing is,…

IF YOU ARE LIKE MOST PEOPLE, THE LAST TIME YOU THOUGHT SERIOUSLY ABOUT ORIGAMI WAS IN PRIMARY SCHOOL. In those days, origami was code for a collection of roughly folded cranes, frogs and boats that seemed to exhaust the limit of the form somewhere around the 10th crease. It was literal child’s play: an antiquated pastime, useful to fill an afternoon, but little more. Robert J. Lang is not like most people. A one-time laser physicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the branch of NASA dedicated to interplanetary exploration, Lang found in origami a lifelong obsession, a quest to find the outer limits of what was possible with nothing except a sheet of paper, your ingenuity and the basic laws of physics. Now he uses those same techniques to solve…

IN A DESERT CAMP 330 KILOMETRES WEST OF TIMBUKTU, A SMALL BAND OF MEN ARE TINKERING WITH WIRES, JERRY CANS, RADIO TRANSISTORS AND MOTORBIKE BATTERIES. Kaftans shroud their movements and turbans cloak their faces. The dialect they’re conversing in is a medley of Arabic and Tamasheq; the ideals they’ve converged to exalt: faith, courage, revolution, sacrifice. A few have come bearing axes. “One of the challenges of making music in the desert is that instruments rarely work properly,” says Jean-Marc Caimi, a French musician and photographer who visited the Mauritanian camp after hearing about the music scene developing there. “The heat melts wires so they make a constant buzzing sound. Things come unstuck and unglued. It makes the music unstable.” If it sounds like Caimi is begrudging the rumpty…

THE SAYDNAYA MILITARY PRISON IN SYRIA IS A LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE BLACK SPOT. An assembly line of torture where thousands have died since 2011, it has been called, by the few who have made it out, the worst place on earth. Initially, escapees didn’t have many more words to describe it: they spent most of their time inside blindfolded. This detail may seem trivial compared to the other abuses they endured. But so long as the prison couldn’t be described, it remained out of view not just of the prisoners, but also of human rights groups, journalists and others who might have the power to intervene. At least it did, until Eyal Weizman and his team came along. Weizman, 47, is a brusque-talking professor at the University of London, where…

The Take Me Seriously, Pls Eric Wareheim, actor and one half of comedy duo Tim & Eric In Roman times, Christians greeted each other by drawing fish symbols in the sand with their feet. It was a surreptitious way of announcing who you were on the inside. Comedian Eric Wareheim feels the need for something similar. “I love me a quality restaurant and some beautiful wine. But because of my casual dress code, I often get overlooked as a serious wine drinker.” Wareheim admits the ‘Take Me Seriously, Pls’, a contorted take on the rock‘n’roll ‘devil’s horns’, is needlessly complicated. But the results would be worth the effort. “In an ideal world, if you throw this down as the waiter comes and greets you, they’ll know it means, ‘I am…

For much of my early life, I preferred reading to almost anything else, so in high school I applied to be a messenger clerk, the lowest possible class of library worker. They handed me a mop and told me to clean up the child’s pee that had accumulated in a corner of the fairytale section. I figured it could only get better, right? I had no idea. When I was older, I married a black woman who worked at the UCLA research library. She was anxious to get out of Los Angeles, and Africa seemed like a nice place for travel and enlightenment. That’s how we got to Zambia. I started working at a university library, and I discovered they were assigning subject headings like ‘Kafir’ – which means ‘infidel’…

THE LOCKS ON AARON SMITH’S MELBOURNE HOME ARE NOTHING SPECIAL. “THEY’RE JUST NORMAL MODERN LOCKS,” HE SAYS. “THEY LOOK STURDY AND ROBUST, AND ARE PROBABLY GOING TO DETER 99.9 PER CENT OF PEOPLE.” But in the small workshop out the back, Smith finds himself surrounded by ancient locks and keys. A locksmith specialising in traditional techniques, Smith calls himself the Keyhole Surgeon. Among his more interesting jobs, he has worked on locks from Pentridge Prison and the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection of antique furniture. He’s also made a key for an antique Indonesian safe and dealt with a pair of tiny handcuffs from “bushranger territory, used to secure juvenile offenders.” To do his work, he uses a bunch of 1800s-style hand tools. “The best way to look after these…

IT TURNS OUT DOING NOTHING IS HARD WORK, AND ACKNOWLEDGING THE PARADOX DOESN’T ALLEVIATE THE SYMPTOMS. THE YOUNG MAN SWUNG THE AXE AND BIT DEEP INTO THE TRUNK OF A WHITE PINE. IT WAS MARCH IN MASSACHUSETTS, 1845, AND WINTER HADN’T QUITE LEFT THE FOREST. On a fine day the mercury might climb to nine degrees, but below freezing wasn’t uncommon either. A little way off, the ice on Walden Pond was beginning to thaw, and in the hickories all around you could hear the larks and pewees, happy to see some spring sunshine at last. The man was Henry David Thoreau, a teacher, essayist and sometime poet, and he was felling timber for his house. It was going to be a simple, one-room cottage with a stone chimney, two…

ALEXEY ILDUTOV’S EYES WERE ALWAYS DRAWN TOWARDS THE SKY. As a child he spent hours watching the Tupolev airliners that soared above the skies of Tolyatti, the industrial Russian city he called home, and passed the time imitating their distinct whistle and roar. When the planes weren’t around, he’d watch birds instead. When he was finally old enough to earn some pocket money, Ildutov saved up all his rubles and bought himself a remote-controlled plane, the kind you had to spend hours assembling yourself. “From a distance, it looked like a soaring eagle,” he recalls now. “Then I would bring it in closer and you could see it was my plane. I was high on life when I was flying.” It could have been the beginning of a beautiful career.…

“A LOT OF THESE TRADITIONS – SOME OF WHICH CAN BE TRACED BACK THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF YEARS – ARE DYING.” WHEN IT COMES TO FERMENTATION, THE WORD ‘ANCIENT’ BARELY BEGINS TO COVER IT. A benign, controlled form of rot, the practice pre-dates writing and may have given agriculture a run for its money too. You can find its roots in the very beginnings of civilisation, when early humans discovered an alchemy that allowed them to store food over the winter, giving humanity a competitive advantage it never looked back from. Almost every culture on Earth practises fermentation in some way, whether it’s making beer and wine – the first deliberately fermented products – or bread, cheese, yoghurt, chocolate, vinegar, soy sauce, tofu, tempeh, kimchi… well, you get the idea.…

BORN: December 15, 1900, Eure-et-Loir, France DIED: October 1, 1984, Nice, France THE FLOWERS ON THE CAR WERE THE SOLE INDICATION THAT A WOMAN WAS DRIVING. It was May 1903, and only one female driver was brave enough to get behind the wheel for the 1400-kilometre car race from Paris to Madrid. Known for wearing conspicuous goggles and heavy gloves to protect her in the open-air vehicle, she had begrudgingly allowed the hood of her de Dietrich to be decorated with garlands that signalled to spectators that one of the 200-odd drivers in the race was a woman. The driver was Camille du Gast, and one of those spectators was a three-year-old Hellé Nice. Born Mariette Hélène Delangle in 1900 (although, as biographer Miranda Seymour notes in her 2004 book…

DESPITE WHAT THEY MAY CLAIM – OR EVEN BELIEVE – THE AVERAGE CONSPIRACY THEORIST DOES NOT FEAR THAT THE WORLD IS BEING MANIPULATED BY A SECRETIVE CONFEDERACY OF NEFARIOUS AND UNACCOUNTABLE PLOTTERS. Rather, the average conspiracy theorist fears that it is not. Conspiracy theories flourish, like religions, in that portion of the human mind unable to cope with the idea that our existence is a fluke, that our lives are ultimately trivial, and that our world is a circus of chaos in which no end of unfair, unfortunate or downright weird stuff just happens – and could, therefore, happen to us. Religious believers tend to place their faith in extraterrestrial apparitions: omniscient gods pulling the levers of fate. By contrast, the conspiracy theorist insists that human affairs are orchestrated by…

ONE OF THE MANY QUIRKS ABOUT VISITING ABKHAZIA, A SEPARATIST TERRITORY ON THE BLACK SEA CLAIMED BY GEORGIA, IS THE PROCESS OF OBTAINING A VISA. Prospective travellers do not attend grand embassies with officious consular staff, nor waste hours in visa-on-arrival lines at overcrowded airports. To get permission to visit this picturesque breakaway state in the Caucasus, intrepid tourists email Professor George Hewitt. An affable 68-year-old with greying hair and a scholarly manner, Hewitt serves as Abkhazia’s honorary consul to the U.K. He is, essentially, an unofficial ambassador for an unofficial state. In addition to issuing colourful visas and providing travel advice, the recently retired academic advocates for the Abkhazian cause. This is no small task. More than two decades after seceding from Georgia in an ethnically charged conflict, Abkhazia…

IT REMAINS TO BE SEEN WHETHER THE “ODOROUS SLIME” WILL HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY IN THE COMING WAR ON SUPERBUGS, BUT IT’S CLEAR THAT ANCIENT TEXTS ARE AN UNTAPPED RESOURCE. AT FIRST GLANCE, CHRISTINA LEE MAY SEEM AN UNLIKELY ACTOR IN THE LIFE-AND-DEATH BATTLE TO SAVE HUMANITY. An associate professor in Viking studies at the University of Nottingham, Lee has written books on such pressing matters as Anglo-Saxon funerary rites, and teaches classes on Old English and Old Norse literature. Recently, though, the School of English academic has been spending her time investigating things crucial to more than just our understanding of axe-wielding Europeans. And her research may just help solve one of the most pressing medical crises we face today. As a rule, universities tend to keep their…

Tell us a bit about yourself. I’m an Austrian artist and illustrator currently based in San Francisco, though I travel all around the world. I mainly do big murals out on the street or ink drawings, but I paint on canvas too. How do you describe your art? I say I use anatomy to investigate the stuff we usually look away from, whether it’s body parts or certain thoughts. My illustrations aren’t just about organs and bones, even if those are the first things most people see when they look at my work. Are your artworks anatomically accurate? I don’t have any formal education in anatomy. But I grew up in a family of hunters, so as a child I was exposed to the insides of all kinds of animals…

THE YEAR 1669 MUST HAVE BEEN A STRANGE ONE FOR HENNIG BRAND. Over the course of several months, the Hamburg alchemist had collected 5,500 litres of urine, left his spoils to stand until they were putrid, boiled the resulting matter down to a paste, mixed it with sand, cooked it some more, and passed the emanating vapours through water. The small glob of waxy material he was left with glowed in the dark. For someone trying to create gold, the luminous substance must have seemed like a promising start. But once he examined it closely, Brand was forced to admit that, by distilling wee, he hadn’t become the first person to uncover the Philosopher’s Stone. What he had become, rather, was the first person to have actively discovered a new…