Table of contents for Summer 2019 in Smith Journal

So sang Jim Morrison. About what, I’m not sure – The Doors are bad and I refuse to google their lyrics – but those 10 words nevertheless came to mind while I was putting the final touches on this here magazine. Why? Well this, beautiful friend, is the end of Smith Journal.* That’s right: after eight years, a small forest’s worth of paper and 792 (I counted) articles about people doing things “the old way”, we’re hanging up our leather aprons. Resheathing our lumberjacks’ axes. Disassembling our typewriters and hurling them into the Mariana Trench. What I mean to say is, we’re not making any more Smith Journals. The inkwells have run dry. The nibs have fallen off our fountain pens. The printing presses have, figuratively and literally, ground to…

KIDS CAN MAKE YOU MORE PRODUCTIVE I had a slightly neurotic work ethic as a younger man, and I don’t think it was completely healthy. I didn’t really know when to switch off, but I wasn’t necessarily productive either. Often I was just working for the sake of working, to alleviate the guilt or the anxiety that went with not working. As I got older, having the ballast of a family life has meant that when I’m working, I’m genuinely working. It’s made me more focused, and more aware of the idea of just being ‘on the job’ without faffing around. LEAVE IT UNTIL TOMORROW I don’t really have morning habits or rituals – getting the work done has always been instinctive. And I’ve never been one of those people…

IT’S MONDAY MORNING AND THE LOS ANGELES FREEWAYS ARE AS SNARLED AS EVER. Adam Baz is driving a truckful of feathered co-workers across town to the Burbank headquarters of Warner Bros Music. Then he’ll take the team up to the roof, where they’ll get on with the task at hand: scaring the bejesus out of pigeons. Baz’s falconry business, Hawk on Hand, grew out of his work in wildlife conservation. As a qualified avian biologist, he’d always had a fascination with raptors, but it wasn’t until he heard a radio interview with another falconer that he realised the possibilities of using a small team of predators to solve urban pest problems. Or, as he puts it, “using larger birds to scare smaller birds.” Though he uses the training and techniques…

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE? FOR MOST OF US, IT LOOKS LIKE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE TOLD US IT LOOKS LIKE – WHAT WE’VE SEEN ON CINEMA SCREENS OR ON THE COVERS OF SCIENCE FICTION PAPERBACKS. AND FOR A GROWING NUMBER OF US, THAT MEANS THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE WHAT U.K.-BASED ILLUSTRATOR ALEX BRADY IMAGINES IT LOOKS LIKE. Brady is what’s known as a concept artist: someone filmmakers and game developers call when they want a vision of what lies ahead. She’s had a lot of practice. The 37-year-old grew up listening to her mother and father read H.G. Wells, John Wyndham and Arthur C. Clarke around the dinner table. She enjoyed the books’ fantastical plotlines, but found herself equally captivated by the spaceships and cities that popped into…

PICTURE A FIELD OF YELLOW FLOWERS, SOMEWHERE IN IRAQ, AND A TABLE SURROUNDED BY SEVEN EMPTY CHAIRS. It’s one of many striking images in Sonja Hamad’s photo series Jin – Jiyan – Azadi (Women, Life, Freedom). “Before they go into battle, the women sit down at this table to share a meal,” says Hamad’s curator, Min-young Jeon. “They won’t know until after the fight if it was their last one. Often, some of the chairs remain empty following their return.” Hamad’s project documents the lives of Kurdistan’s female freedom fighters – guerrilla groups of women fighting in northern Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan, a Switzerland-sized province on Iraq’s mountainous northern border. According to recent figures, more than 10,000 Kurdish women are fighting somewhere across the region. They make up one-third of…

AN OLD MAN WITH A TRIMMED BEARD AND THINNING HAIR STARES DOWN THE CAMERA. “The first time I heard The Beatles, it was in the early ’70s,” he says. “I was about 12. They were at my house in the West End of Manchester, playing some of the stuff they had done on Beatlemania. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr and George Harrison would dance all around me, even though I had been told Ringo Starr had broken his knees.” This, if it’s not already apparent, is a lie. And it’s not just the anecdote that’s made up: the old man doesn’t exist, either. His face was built from scratch by an algorithm, and that heartwarming slice of nostalgia was written by something called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). In fact,…

WHEN BOB BERG GEARS UP FOR A BOAR HUNT, HE DOESN’T REACH FOR A GUN, OR A KNIFE, OR EVEN A BOW, AS HIS FELLOW HUNTERS IN NEW YORK STATE OCCASIONALLY DO. INSTEAD, HE PREFERS SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE OLD SCHOOL: A 17,000-YEAR-OLD WEAPON KNOWN AS AN ATLATL. An atlatl is an ancient dart-thrower, remarkable for both its simplicity and raw power. With just a short strip of wood, Berg can launch a two-metre dart about 90 metres, at speeds up to 160 kilometres an hour. The force is enough to pierce leather armour and bring down fully grown deer. It’s a weapon for sportsmanlike hunters who believe .300-calibre rifles with 40mm Leupold scopes and howitzer-sized bullets make the whole predator-prey relationship slightly one-sided. But for dedicated atlatlists, the appeal…

WHEN ALBERT EINSTEIN AND HIS WIFE ELSA VISITED SHANGHAI IN 1922, THEY CAME ACROSS A PECULIAR CHINESE TOY CALLED THE ‘INSATIABLE BIRDIE’. Einstein had already discovered general relativity and changed mankind’s understanding of the universe, but try as he might he couldn’t figure out how this daffy-looking toy worked. And he really did try. Without taking it apart (that would have been cheating), the Nobel Prize-winning scientist analysed the Insatiable Birdie for three months straight. Eventually he just gave up. Einstein should take some solace: the toy, sometimes referred to as ‘Duncan’, has baffled children and middle managers for over 70 years. Don’t let the vacant stare and tiny top hat fool you – this is a finely calibrated piece of scientific wizardry. President Herbert Hoover was supposedly a big…

IN BEYOND DRIFTING: IMPERFECTLY KNOWN ANIMALS, ARTIST MANDY BARKER TAKES A LOOK AT MICROPLASTICS: TINY PARTICLES OF INDESTRUCTIBLE RUBBISH CLOGGING UP THE OCEAN FOOD CHAIN. What’s the story behind this project? It started with a book from 19th -century naturalist John Vaughan Thompson. He’s kind of an unsung hero here in Ireland. He invented the plankton nets for Charles Darwin and took specimen photos of marine plankton. I travelled to where Thompson collected his samples in the 1800s, near Cork Harbour, but of course now it’s not full of plankton – it’s full of plastic. So these are really just photos of rubbish? Yep. For about a month I wandered the beaches of Cobh, near Cork, picking up bits of plastic. It was particularly bad near the harbour. We’re talking…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, THE UNITED STATES’ FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION ISSUED A BULLETIN WARNING AGAINST DRINKING BLEACH. The FDA’s press release noted a persistent market for various chlorine dioxide products touted on social media as remedies for autism, cancer, hepatitis, flu, HIV, or whatever you’re having yourself. “The FDA,” the FDA stated with a sigh audible between the lines, “recently received new reports of people experiencing severe vomiting, severe diarrhoea, life-threatening low blood pressure caused by dehydration and acute liver failure after drinking these products.” It is worth pausing to reflect on this. This is the United States of America, in the year 2019. It is one of the richest, mightiest nations ever forged. Its scientific and cultural accomplishments are colossal. It has known for half a century how to…

ON JANUARY 5, 2012, USERS ON 4CHAN’S /X/ BOARD WERE GREETED WITH A STRANGE AND ANONYMOUS JPEG MESSAGE. THIS IS WHAT IT SAID: Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck. 3301 That was it. There was no obvious clue as to the authors’ identities, the purpose of the message or what these “highly intelligent individuals” would be doing. Intrigued, a few canny users opened the JPEG as a text file, revealing a string of letters and numbers: TIBERIVS CLAUDIVS CAESAR says “lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q =…

THE TALE OF HEDY LAMARR READS LIKE A HOLLYWOOD SCRIPT: BEAUTIFUL INGÉNUE ARRIVES IN LONDON AND CATCHES THE EYE OF STUDIO BOSS LOUIS B. MAYER. SHE STARS IN A FEW FILMS, RUBS SHOULDERS WITH KENNEDYS, BECOMES AMERICA’S DARLING. LIGHTS, CAMERA AND SO ON. But as the years pass, box office sales begin to dwindle. Marriages come and go, splashed across the tabloids. The money dries up. There’s an ill-fated comeback. Finally, Hollywood chews her up and spits her down to Florida, where she dies, alone and largely forgotten, surrounded by cigarette smoke and memories. That was the Hollywood tragedy of Hedy Lamarr. But it wasn’t the whole story. In 1990 a Forbes journalist did a little digging and discovered that Lamarr wasn’t just a Golden Age megastar. She was also…

NOT TO SOUND RUDE, BUT YOU DO NOT HAVE THE IMAGINATION REQUIRED TO PICTURE ALL THE TYPES OF THINGS THAT ARE ON YOUTUBE. No one does. Around 80 years’ worth of video is uploaded to the site every day, and while the bulk of that is the usual YouTube fare (Russian dash-cam compilations and racist teenagers playing Call of Duty), a large chunk of it is made up of things you could never even begin to guess at. Peppered throughout the music clips and vape-pen unboxing videos is a near-infinite library of unwatched content that includes everything from footage of birds shot on a digital camera in 2005 to blurry eight-second snippets of someone’s ride to work titled ‘MOV_138256.mov’. Yes, most people on YouTube are there to monetise their ability…

ONE AFTERNOON THIS SPRING, I VISITED THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF VICTORIA (NGV) TO SEE ONE OF PICASSO’S FAMOUS WEEPING WOMEN. He painted around half a dozen of them in 1937. The last time I saw one was in Madrid. She was in the left-hand corner of Guernica, fleeing German explosions with a dead baby in her arms. Her face was literally warped with fear. I remember standing among the crowds at the Reina Sofía Museum and thinking, “How long are you supposed to look at a masterpiece before you’ve really seen it?” This isn’t a particularly original thought – in a way, the NGV has been priming me for this kind of thinking from an early age. The building itself is a big stone monolith, but the front entrance is…

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We’ve prepared a very special menu for you tonight– a symphony of epicurean fireworks. First, to amuse the palate, some salami cooked in coffee and cologne. For the main course, a roast chicken stuffed with steel ball bearings. And to finish, our chef’s speciality: ‘Simultaneous Ice Cream’ – vanilla-bean ice cream frozen with small cubes of raw brown onion. Welcome to the weird and wonderful recipes of Italian poet and Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the highly obscure (and widely un-acclaimed) Futurist Cookbook. First published in 1932, Marinetti’s Cookbook is one of the strangest culinary collections ever devised – one part dinner-party companion, one part manifesto, one part artistic prank. “The Futurist culinary revolution has the lofty aim of changing radically the eating habits…

1. Comedy writers aren’t necessarily ‘funny’ When I tell people I write for TV comedies, they get a weird look in their eye and are usually able to just stop themselves before blurting out, “Really? You?” I guess ‘funny’ isn’t the first thing people think when meeting me; it’s more likely something along the lines of “Hmm, that girl with poor posture seems really invested in standing near the snack table.” But you actually don’t have to be a hilarious performer to write comedy. You could just as easily be a quiet language nerd who can find the perfect synonym for ‘chicken’ when a joke is about chicken but the characters have already said ‘chicken’ so many times that one more would wreck the timing of the joke. (Suggestion: ‘poultry’.)…

IN JULY THIS YEAR, SOME CURIOUS NEWS FILTERED THROUGH FROM FRANCE: THE COUNTRY’S DEFENCE INNOVATION AGENCY ANNOUNCED IT WAS HIRING A GROUP OF SCIENCE FICTION AUTHORS TO JOIN ITS GOVERNMENT-FUNDED RANKS. Known as the ‘Red Team’, these writers will be paid to imagine the battles of the future, using their storytelling powers to help the military anticipate advanced technologies and how they might play out in international conflicts over the next few decades. They will, in other words, write science fiction for the government. The initiative no doubt raised a few eyebrows at the French military’s annual budget meeting. But the Red Team, when it is finally assembled, will be far from the first group of sci-fi authors to operate at this strange intersection of creative fiction and real-world military…

If there’s a folder in people’s heads labelled ‘Cuban graphic design’, it’s probably overflowing with images of Che Guevara – Marxist saint of university students everywhere and the biggest thing to ever happen to the novelty t-shirt industry. But a new exhibition is shining light on Cuba’s so-called ‘Golden Age of Design’: three decades’ worth of artistic propaganda commissioned by OSPAAAL (Cuba’s Organisation of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America) and featuring some of the most talented Cuban artists of the late 20th century. The exhibition, called Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics, is currently showing at London’s House of Illustration. We sat down with curator Olivia Ahmad to understand where Cuba’s political art came from, what it meant for global socialism, and where these masterpieces…