• • • an aural noise • • •
word salad: Mystic Sound Records is happy to welcome you in the world of Ethneomystica – a very special compilation carefully crafted by label owner, Maiia!
As always, we celebrate the diversity of ethnic and mystic neoworlds. Smooth and enigmatical guitars weaving to the spacious lullaby for birds. Bobbling dub alternating to the wobbling cartoons with the saxophone around. Free falling breaks, cosmic rides, and many more.
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
How Did Madagascar Become the World’s Biggest Producer of Vanilla?
A tale of a botanical mystery, colonialism, and savvy marketing.
A Malagasy woman selling vanilla. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
IT’S PRETTY LIKELY THAT THERE is exactly one product from Madagascar in your home right now—no more, no less. That product is vanilla, and Madagascar is at the moment the world’s leading producer of this ubiquitous natural flavor—despite the fact that Madagascar is a very strange country to be the world’s leading producer of vanilla.
Vanilla, at least the vanilla we eat, is not native to Madagascar; it originated some 10,000 miles away. Madagascar is also a chaotic place to do business, as an article in The Economist’s 1843 Magazine showed in 2019. The modern vanilla industry in Madagascar involves crushing poverty, splurge-producing wealth, theft, murder, and money laundering—in addition to natural disasters and the leveling of pristine forests.
Vanilla is inexorably intertwined with food trends, colonialism, slavery, and capitalism at its most rank. Vanilla is the second-most-expensive spice in the world—saffron maintains that crown—and there’s nothing boring about it.
THE VANILLA FAMILY IS MADE up of around 110 different species of orchid, found worldwide under the right conditions. Those conditions are basically hot and wet, so vanilla orchids thrive around the equator, from tropical Latin America to Southeast Asia to West Africa. They produce a range of fruits, generally sort of elongated, bean- or banana-like in shape, and usually green in color. Of all the orchid species, which number in the tens of thousands, vanilla is the only one that has a fruit that’s considered edible, or at least that’s regularly eaten. …
An Oral History Of The Four Seasons Total Landscaping Press Conference
As news networks shifted their focus to the Biden presidency, Americans were denied insights into the most intriguing moment of the 2020 presidential election: Rudy Giuliani’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference. Americans have asked, wait what? Where? Really? How? Why? But really, why? Several key insiders have sat down with us to offer their accounts of this historic event.
Rudolph W. Giuliani (Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump): People think I’m some kind of idiot for holding a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Like I don’t know the difference between a landscaper and a frankly mediocre hotel. They’re the idiots! I knew what I was doing all along. No one calls Rudy an idiot! No one!
Marta Silva (Assistant Front Desk Manager, Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia): Mr. Giuliani is an idiot. I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to put it. He showed up Saturday morning without calling ahead to do a press conference. I explained that we’d need at least half a day’s notice to be prepared. He shouted, “Well I didn’t come up with this half a day ago, I came up with it on the cab ride over!” He demanded a copy of the Yellow Pages. Eventually we found a Yellow Pages directory from 2011. We had been using it to prop up a table in the staff break room. He ripped a page out and stormed off in a huff.
Rick Dickson (Owner/Operator, Four Seasons Total Landscaping, not affiliated with the Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia): I got a call Saturday morning from some Rudy guy. This Rudy, he sounds frantic and out of breath. He asks me if this is the other Four Seasons. I say, “Are you looking for a hotel or competitively priced landscaping?” He says he needs to do a press conference so he can save the election from this big ol’ fraud by Biden. So I say, “Well shit, I’m a patriot. You sure as hell can come do your press conference in my parking lot.” And my nephew is a karaoke DJ, so I told him I could have a professional sound system for him. Can I give him a shout out? Kyle’s Kwality Karaoke — all Ks. He’s the best karaoke DJ this side of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge.
Silva: Mr. Giuliani was sitting in the lobby making a loud phone call. When he finished, he shouted, “I’m taking my business to the Four Seasons across town. Take that, you jerks!” …
These Trees Are Not What They Seem
How the Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group, became a dealer of meaningless carbon offsets.
Hawk Mountain Sanctuary near Kempton, Pennsylvania. Embiggenable. Explore at home.
At first glance, big corporations appear to be protecting great swaths of U.S. forests in the fight against climate change.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has paid almost $1 million to preserve forestland in eastern Pennsylvania.
Forty miles away, Walt Disney Co. has spent hundreds of thousands to keep the city of Bethlehem, Pa., from aggressively harvesting a forest that surrounds its reservoirs.
Across the state line in New York, investment giant BlackRock Inc. has paid thousands to the city of Albany to refrain from cutting trees around its reservoirs.
JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock tout these projects as an important mechanism for slashing their own large carbon footprints. By funding the preservation of carbon-absorbing forests, the companies say, they’re offsetting the carbon-producing impact of their global operations. But in all of those cases, the land was never threatened; the trees were already part of well-preserved forests.
Rather than dramatically change their operations—JPMorgan executives continue to jet around the globe, Disney’s cruise ships still burn oil, and BlackRock’s office buildings gobble up electricity—the corporations are working with the Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest environmental group, to employ far-fetched logic to help absolve them of their climate sins. By taking credit for saving well-protected land, these companies are reducing nowhere near the pollution that they claim. …
Medieval Divorce Duels Were A Wild (But Fair) Brawl
As we’ve mentioned previously, getting a divorce in the Middle Ages was a hard process — literally. The only way a man could stop his wife from leaving him was to get a full-blown erection in the middle of a cold, calculating courtroom proving he was up to the task to perform his sacred husbandly duties. But if they wanted to avoid the ignominy of pushing rope in front of a judge, there was one way to dig themselves out of that hole. All they needed to do was to invoke the ancient rite of trial by combat. And then crawl back into the hole.
Medieval trial by combat typically adhered to ethical hitman rules: no women, no children, no lepers. These were at the mercy of their champions, men willing to fight in their stead. But there was one exception: marital disputes. Since a wife would have a hard time talking her husband into picking a fight with himself (and if she could, why get divorced at all), European courts allowed her the rare privilege of picking up arms herself.
This practice was commonplace and weird enough to warrant an entire chapter in the dueling manual written by legendary fencing instructor Hans Talhoffer. In his 1467 book, Talhoffer showcases the insane lengths judges went to make the husband-and-wife duel a fair fight. As opposed to regular duels, the defendant wasn’t allowed to pick their weapon of choice. Women, unaccustomed to the tools of war, were given the Medieval equivalent of a prison tube sock filled with used batteries — a rock wrapped in a piece of cloth.
Men, on the other hand, got to fight with a wooden club of equal length. If that doesn’t seem fair at all — the judges agreed. That’s why they had to do it with one hand tied behind their back while standing chest-deep in a three-foot-wide hole.
But as the wife was gearing up to play some Whack-a-Mole, the duel was more like a game of Operation for the husband. …
RELATED: Why Does Your Aunt Own Dumb Healing Crystals? (The Answer: Uh, Libido-Enhancing Cubicles)
You probably have someone in your life who swears by the health benefits of crystals, or who takes their horoscope as seriously as their doctor. 50 years from now people will think these trends were ridiculous, because to their advanced rational minds it will obviously be canine pubic hair that has the health benefits and the scrying of antique Pogs that can foresee the future. One generation’s health trend is the next generation’s forgotten madness, and today that brings us to the Himalayan salt lamps of the ’40s and ’50s, orgone accumulators.
Orgone sprung from the mind of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (paywall), whose life was so fascinating we once interviewed his son about it. Reich was Freud’s wunderkind disciple, a bold therapist who resisted fascism, and orgone was his most popular, mocked, and misunderstood idea. In short, omnipresent but weightless orgone energy supposedly fuels the formation of everything from our cells to entire galaxies. Vesicles dubbed bions, which Reich claimed to spot while observing rotting grass under a microscope, attract orgone energy and serve as a bridge between creation and decay.
It gets much, much more complicated, but orgone, in serving as the building block of the universe, defied everything we know about entropy, which is always a tricky sell. But to Reich, flaws or deficiencies with a body’s bions could create health problems, be they physical, mental or (cue outraged 1940s gasps) sexual. To fight back Reich built orgone accumulators, which were boxes patients would sit in. Made with layers of metal (which repelled orgone) and non-metals like wool and cotton (which attracted orgone), the orgone would supposedly oscillate, accumulate, and heal the occupant.
Reich was aware that he was hardly the first to suggest the existence of some omnipresent life energy (see also Odic, vital impetus, and the Force), but he thought he could channel it for the greater good. But extraordinary claims about the very foundations of reality require extraordinary evidence, and Reich was always lacking in that department. Like most pseudoscientific fads, a lack of evidence was not an obstacle to the curious, not when Reich’s celebrity was so much more compelling. Who put concerns about proof aside? Just some rubes like J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Orson Bean, and Sean Connery, to name a few. …
From Bob Dylan to Blondie — why investors are buying up hit songs
Songwriters deprived of touring revenue are cashing in their back catalogues but will it pay off?
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As a child, Jason Boyd used to sneak downstairs to listen to Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” on the radio. Boyd was raised in a strict Christian household and knew he would get in big trouble if he was caught listening to such a frivolous song. But later it became one of the reasons he was inspired to forge a career in music. “I wanted to make people feel the way that song made me feel,” he explains.
Boyd succeeded and, under his stage name Poo Bear, became a collaborator with some of music’s biggest names. He has penned enormous hits — such as Justin Bieber’s “Despacito (Remix)” and for country singer Zac Brown — racking up 500 million sales and, over the past two decades, building himself one of the most lucrative song catalogues in the business.
The rights to the hits Boyd has written generate steady payments every time one is streamed, sold on CD or vinyl, played on the radio, performed live, covered by another artist or used in a television show, advertisement or video game. For artists, these are like a potentially valuable pension. Indeed, says Boyd from his home in Atlanta, Georgia, “I was taught to never sell your catalogue. It is your main income for an artist, apart from touring and recording.”
Yet two years ago, Boyd did just that, becoming one of the first musicians to sell his songbook to Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a UK fund that has raised £1.2bn from investors and is scooping up the rights to old hits that have been given new life in the streaming age. This year, artists as diverse as Barry Manilow, Blondie, Chrissie Hynde, Mötley Crüe’s Nikki Sixx and Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA have all sold to Hipgnosis. Among its 58,000 song rights, it has acquired shares in nearly 3,000 number ones and a third of the 30 most played songs to date on Spotify. …
Super cubes: inside the (surprisingly) big business of packaged ice
Britain’s leading ice company makes five billion cubes a year, filling everything from cocktail glasses to ice baths. Now it faces its toughest challenge – for what is ice without a party season?
The ice in your drink comes from one of two places: your freezer, or someone else’s. For homemade ice, the supply chain is reassuringly familiar: water goes into the freezer, and a bit later, ice comes out. But what about the ice cubes that you bought from a supermarket, or extracted, by the handful, from a plastic bag at a drinks party? They were frozen when you took possession of them; they are long gone now. Where did they start out, back when they were water?
Follow their journey all the way back from the point of sale – through warehouses and depots and cold storage facilities and innumerable temperature-controlled lorries – and there’s a decent chance that most of them came from the same place: an industrial estate just outside South Kirkby in West Yorkshire. The company that made them is called The Ice Co, and if you haven’t heard of it, you have almost certainly used its products.
If you have grabbed a bag of ice from the freezer of a corner shop on a hot day, The Ice Co probably supplied it. If you have bought ice from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Morrisons or Ocado, The Ice Co thanks you for your business. If you have ever plonked a bottle of prosecco into a house party ice bucket filled with cylindrical cubes, or pulled a cold can of Coke from the chilling bins at Glastonbury, or – indeed – endured the Arctic Enema ice bath obstacle at a Tough Mudder endurance course, it is highly likely that the ice originated in The Ice Co’s ice factory, a long, flat building nestled in the countryside between Doncaster and Leeds.
Like central heating and hot water, ice is one of those minor luxuries we scarcely think to notice. And yet The Ice Co has turned frozen water into a £38m brand – at a retail price of roughly £1 a bag, that equates to plenty of people indulging every year. …
PREPARE TO SPEND A WHILE; it’s The LOng Read.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Thousands of people in the UK received the first COVID-19 vaccine in the Western world — but there’s still a long way to go.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
What the hell happened this week? Rudy Giuliani gets COVID and farts on camera, SCOTUS rejects Trump’s election lawsuit, and Trump gives out pardons like Christmas cards.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
New Zealand, a country with fewer coronavirus cases than a White House Christmas party, is near and dear to our host’s heart. Join Stephen as he revisits his epic trek across the beautiful island nation and reveals never-before-seen footage of his antics among the locals, including a play by play look at his death-defying bungee jump.
FINALLY . . .
The Social Life of Forests
Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?
Embiggenable.
AS A CHILD, SUZANNE SIMARD OFTEN roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her grandfather and uncles, meanwhile, worked nearby as horse loggers, using low-impact methods to selectively harvest cedar, Douglas fir and white pine. They took so few trees that Simard never noticed much of a difference. The forest seemed ageless and infinite, pillared with conifers, jeweled with raindrops and brimming with ferns and fairy bells. She experienced it as “nature in the raw” — a mythic realm, perfect as it was. When she began attending the University of British Columbia, she was elated to discover forestry: an entire field of science devoted to her beloved domain. It seemed like the natural choice.
By the time she was in grad school at Oregon State University, however, Simard understood that commercial clearcutting had largely superseded the sustainable logging practices of the past. Loggers were replacing diverse forests with homogeneous plantations, evenly spaced in upturned soil stripped of most underbrush. Without any competitors, the thinking went, the newly planted trees would thrive. Instead, they were frequently more vulnerable to disease and climatic stress than trees in old-growth forests. In particular, Simard noticed that up to 10 percent of newly planted Douglas fir were likely to get sick and die whenever nearby aspen, paper birch and cottonwood were removed. The reasons were unclear. The planted saplings had plenty of space, and they received more light and water than trees in old, dense forests. So why were they so frail?
Simard suspected that the answer was buried in the soil. Underground, trees and fungi form partnerships known as mycorrhizas: Threadlike fungi envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for some of the carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis. Research had demonstrated that mycorrhizas also connected plants to one another and that these associations might be ecologically important, but most scientists had studied them in greenhouses and laboratories, not in the wild. For her doctoral thesis, Simard decided to investigate fungal links between Douglas fir and paper birch in the forests of British Columbia. Apart from her supervisor, she didn’t receive much encouragement from her mostly male peers. “The old foresters were like, Why don’t you just study growth and yield?” Simard told me. “I was more interested in how these plants interact. They thought it was all very girlie.”
Now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Simard, who is 60, has studied webs of root and fungi in the Arctic, temperate and coastal forests of North America for nearly three decades. Her initial inklings about the importance of mycorrhizal networks were prescient, inspiring whole new lines of research that ultimately overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems. By analyzing the DNA in root tips and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors. …
BONUS READING: The Trees of Twin Peaks
Welcome to Twin Peaks.
TWIN PEAKS MADE ITS TRIUMPHANT return last night and I, for one, could not be happier.
Although I missed it on its initial 1991-92 run, after seeing Laura Palmer wash up on the shore, wrapped in plastic, I was hooked; season one flew by in one all-night sitting. Season two, however, took me a bit longer due to its double episode length and its more arduous plots, the price of director/writer David Lynch’s departure, an experience I’ve found is not uncommon with other fans. Season three blew my expectations out of the water—Lynch at his Lynchiest.
On some level, I do not want to talk about Twin Peaks because not only has it all most likely been said before, but because the beauty of Lynch’s creations beckon immersion, not reflection. His style is a projection of dreamlike, ethereal, saturated with imagery of the unconscious and the transcendental ‘big fish‘ that lie in the darkness just under the surface. The son of a research scientist for the Department of Agriculture, Lynch was raised in the trees and grew up believing in the mystery of the northwestern forest, misty, dark, impenetrable. So no, I do not want to talk about Twin Peaks — surely by now everyone has something to say about the premiere last night. No: I want to talk about the trees.
Washington is a temperate coniferous climate. The forests are broadleafed and dense, a canopy of green above and thick trees below; Douglas firs, redwoods, Sitka spruce. The air is almost always damp, logged with water. When you cannot see the sky and the air is full of the smell of damp soil, there is an innate connection with the earth around you, which is the only environment you can immediately experience. The scenery begs for mystery, enclosed and ensconcing whatever happens with it. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
ONE MORE THING:
‘The Onion’ Salutes The Courageous Legislators Determined To Overturn The Will Of Voters #SCOTUS https://t.co/vpcCiO0FvP pic.twitter.com/5ylpBd4vV1
— The Onion (@TheOnion) December 12, 2020
The Trump Presidential Library will be a deleted Twitter account.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) November 7, 2020
