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| Saturday, December 7, 2019 |
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| 11 min. reading |
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Suggestions for your senses,
every Saturday at 9 a.m. |
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Good morning.
This week, we pore over our co-founder Andrew Zuckerman’s first-ever web store, put our stamp of approval on a new Harriet Tubman rubber stamp, talk beans with food artist Laila Gohar, explore the emerging genre of “scam rap” with Kolby Turnher, and “visit” Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana through a new collection of Yellowstone fragrances.
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 On Ep. 29 of our Time Sensitive podcast, Spencer talks with Dutch-born, Paris-based trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort. |
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Capturing the exquisite beauty of the natural world—flora and fauna, various walks of humankind, animals (or, more correctly, creatures), the cosmos, much of it photographed in arresting and hyperreal detail—is a signature of the photography work of The Slowdown co-founder Andrew Zuckerman, who’s just launched a new online store of limited-edition prints and works. Though his subjects may come directly from a natural order, his strikingly rigorous compositions are the result of a set of complex technical feats only afforded by modern technology. Minimalist in form and largely presented against a stark backdrop, Andrew’s works ponder and celebrate through a clear-eyed lens the enormity and diversity, not to mention fragility, of life on Earth—and beyond, in the case of his Apollo series of pictures.
Long wishing to democratize his work and make it more accessible, Andrew has at last produced a newly editioned selection of his photography as a series of 16-by-20- and 20-by-20-inch multiples, with an easy-to-ship framed option. In addition, the store features a variety of giftable objects and products, including kids’ games, skateboards, a one-of-a-kind Globetrotter suitcase, a special-edition guitar pick, and packs of tomato seeds that were sent to space by NASA aboard the 1984 Challenger.
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| Stamping Out the Patriarchy |
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Next year would have marked a momentous change to the U.S. $20 bill, in step with a nationwide plan—first announced in April 2016—to begin circulating a redesign featuring abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman on its front side, in place of former president Andrew Jackson, whose mug would be relegated to its back. That historic decision has since been delayed by the Trump administration, a disappointment that caused New York City–based industrial designer Dano Wall to take matters into his own hands with the Tubman Stamp, a simple solution for retrofitting your own bills as you please. On sale at Etsy for, why yes, $20, the stamp comes with a circular notch that flushes with the federal reserve seal, a useful detail to ensure the perfect alignment of Tubman’s face upon Jackson’s.
For the tech-forward or frugal, the designer has also open-sourced files that can be used to 3D-print your own stamp for free. “To love this country is to criticize it perpetually,” Wall wrote in a recent Instagram post. As a practical matter, he recommends Tubman stampers use this Ranger Archival Ink in Peat Moss as an optimal match for the money-green used on bills—“undetectable by every digital scanner I’ve found.”
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| (Photo: Adrianna Glaviano) |
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Part edible sculptures, part performance pieces, food artist Laila Gohar’s multilayered creations are more than a meal—they’re an experience. Here, she tells us about one of her favorite ingredients to cook and eat: the humble bean.
I hear beans are your favorite food. What kinds do you like to cook?
I wouldn’t say I have a favorite food, per se, but I really like humble things that can be transformed with a few ingredients, like beans or potatoes—inexpensive things that are very versatile and act as vehicles of flavor.
I usually get my beans from this amazing place called Rancho Gordo. You can get them online, but you can also find them in stores. They’re different varieties of heirloom beans. This wonderful man, Steve Sando, works with farms in Mexico, California, and several other places to produce them. It’s amazing, the work that he does. Because of the lack of agro-biodiversity today, a lot of these heirloom varieties are dying off with the dominance of genetically modified crops. We depend very heavily on just a few crops: I recently learned that seventy-five percent of what we eat comes from just twelve different plant varieties and five different animals. It’s completely mind-blowing, and it’s really damaging our ecosystem to rely so heavily on just a handful of different crops.
There are so many foods I only learned to enjoy as an adult‚ including beans, maybe for that reason, or because they were usually undercooked, or canned.
Kids also don’t like brussels sprouts because adults boil the hell out of them, and make them just mushy and farty and gross. I’m actually writing a kid’s cookbook right now—Apartamento is going to be publishing it—about this very concept: that a lot of things children think that they don’t like, they don’t like because adults don’t prepare them properly. The recipes are all just for simple things, organized by ingredients. It’s just one recipe per ingredient, and they’re the same ingredients that I enjoy and eat regularly. There’s potato, fish, milk, chicken, egg, tomato—all basic things.
Where I come from, there’s no such thing as a kid’s menu; you eat whatever the adults eat. There’s no designated “kid food” or “special meal.” Children respond to flavors. They like things that are balanced, they like things that are acidic, they like salt and all the things we appreciate as adults.
How do you like to make your beans?
Soaking the them first really improves them, because then they don’t fall apart when you cook them. You have to plan a little bit in advance, but it’s not a huge deal. Just soak them in a bowl of water, overnight in the fridge, or on the countertop is fine, too. When I cook them the next day, I just put them in a pot with a few inches of water, and add whatever aromatics I have on hand. I really like to add bay leaf. I’ll also add half an onion, garlic, and some herbs, like parsley and cilantro. Sometimes I’ll add the stems of herbs that I’ve saved, from when I’ve used the plant for something else. I like to add the herbs at different points, so some get really cooked through, while others, like oregano or marjoram (which is a little more mild), I’ll add right at the end. It just depends on what I have.
Also, it’s really important to add a healthy amount of fat—some good olive oil, or maybe some leftover fat from another dish, like duck fat or drippings. I’ve heard people say that you shouldn’t salt your beans at the beginning, but I don’t really think that’s true: You’ve got to season things properly, from the inside out. Meaning, you season them throughout the whole cooking process. So I salt them in the beginning, and then I taste them toward the end and salt them again. The broth has to be kind of salty; that’s where you get the flavor from. Salt and fat really make everything come together, but specifically with beans, it’s essential.
Do you think your love for simple food stems from the fact that in your work, food is made playful, often quite experimental, and complex? It’s almost like a way of finding a work-life balance.
Yes, definitely, it’s very reactive. It’s like an inverse release, because I obsess over every detail when I’m working. There are layers to it. It’s a bit whimsical, for lack of a better word, and my reaction to that is to eat really simply at home. I don’t like fancy ingredients or over-the-top dishes, just simple things cooked really well.
This is going to sound a bit weird, but sometimes I crave foods that taste like nothing, that aren’t intense in any way. Like, there’s this one brand of rye cracker that’s really ordinary and maybe feels a bit like eating cardboard. I think most people find it repulsive, but I find I really like to not be overstimulated in that way. There are few things I’ll cook just for myself, and one of them is a flatbread that’s literally just salt, flour, water, and maybe a little bit of yogurt. It tastes like air.
I don’t have a hard time going to restaurants, I appreciate all kinds of food, and will make something nice if I’m cooking for other people or have people over—I mean, I wouldn’t make my friends eat cardboard. But eating, for me, is just a way to sustain myself in a very simple or elemental kind of way. |
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| (Courtesy theblacktongue c/o the 64th Floor) |
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From infamous grifters like Anna Delvey to the explosive Fyre Fest debacle, to election and identity fraud, we’re living in an age of scam—and for every age, there’s an art movement. Creative director, A&R rep, and industry pro Kolby Turnher tells us about the rise and appeal of the “scam rap” genre, and shares a playlist of 40 tracks that epitomize it, with songs by Cash Kidd, Coco Vango, Desiigner, and more.
“Scam rap started within Detroit a few years ago, with artists and groups like the BandGang, City Girls, ShittyBoyz, people like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti… a lot of the, you know, ‘SoundCloud artists’ got their initial careers started based off of money they made scamming or with scammers, running scam plays with their little crew. A lot of them went to jail for scamming, and a lot of them are known for having scam bars and popularizing them in their raps.
They’re talking about identity theft, different bank scams, money scams, online scams, stuff like that; they have so many different methods, which is what makes the music so interesting. If they’re even rapping about it in-depth and in detail, nine times out of ten, the methods they mention are already burnt out and don’t really work anymore, or if they do still work, it’s for petty money. The kids who are really getting knocked down for scamming and getting arrested, it’s usually for really obnoxious amounts of money.
It’s not necessarily glorifying it so much as telling you the paranoia behind it, the comedy behind it—and sometimes about mainstream perceptions of the underground society they live in. Like, for instance, Teejayx6 referenced how he got lost on the dark web, landed in a red room, and saw a girl kill herself. That’s really dark comedy. The average music listener isn’t going to get it, but a millennial, or someone who is a little more meta, a little more internet-weird, will. Although it’s dark, it’s gonna make them laugh.
Once you get deeper to the root of the genre, there is a specific sound, but I would definitely say scam rap is more characterized by the lifestyle and the lyrics, because that’s how a lot of these kids are making money now in urban communities (and even suburban communities), as opposed to the ’90s or early 2000s, where everything was robberies and drug money, and so on and so forth. Now, it’s almost like, the more nerdy you are, the more people are going to want to be cool with you, because they’re gonna think you know how to scam. It’s a sign of the times, I guess. It’s where we are in culture right now.”
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Common household soaps and detergents claiming to have the scent of “mountain air” or “fresh pine” might seem a far-flung marketing ploy, though they don’t need to be. Teaming with Yellowstone Forever, the official nonprofit partner of Yellowstone National Park, the beauty and fragrance makers Caswell-Massey have produced a collection of oils and tonics that are directly and scientifically sampled at the source. Launched this year, with more to come in 2020, the special releases were developed over the course of five years with fragrance scientists at IFF, who were granted a scientific research permit to work with Yellowstone’s botanists to carefully study and preserve rare and living flora that are unique to the park.
Each of the five debut scents is named after a landmark Yellowstone region: Lake, Canyon, Mammoth, and Tower Fall feature a variety of plant-based notes—such as lavender, amber, juniper, sage, and moss—that were molecularly recreated to be identical to those found in nature, using a technique referred to as “headspace technology.” Old Faithful, the most distinctive scent of the collection, thankfully forgoes its infamous sulphury smell and is instead made from rare botanicals found near the park’s most active thermal feature, including notes of sagebrush and smoky wood. More than a souvenir or a static postcard, this series is a portrait of Yellowstone in a bottle, offering a whole new level of armchair travel.
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Until next week...
Today’s email was written by Aileen Kwun.
Editor: Spencer Bailey
Creative Director: Andrew Zuckerman
Producer: Emily Queen
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