Museum: Grounds for Sculpture (NJ)

New Jersey’s Grounds for Sculpture truly has something for everyone—even people you wouldn’t like at all. As such it’s a wonderfully provocative stroll through eclectic aesthetics, certain to swing you from rapture to riposte with only a bit of manicured nature as a buffer between. Bring someone who makes you laugh as there will be quip-bait behind every shrubbery.

Founded by J. Seward Johnson of Johnson & Johnson fame, its original purpose was to showcase his schmaltzy, derivative works, like Impressionist paintings rendered in 3D and poker-players around a table with a chair empty for a visitor to mug in. Here he prefigured participatory art and its invitation to the selfie. Not far from this stand-in, or sit-in, is my favorite work on the grounds: Peter Lundberg’s splendid “Where is Geometry?”, two hulking interleaved gyres in concrete and stainless sheet. It spins such playfulness from weighty and unyielding materials that it deserves a careful 360º survey, ideally with the sun at different points along its arc. (Though I struggled to photograph this properly, for once I may have done better than the museum’s site.)

Peter Lundberg: Where is Geometry?

Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas’ hollow fabricated aluminum spaces were another high point, but they don’t give much sense of her stylistic breadth. The plaques label her work without her first name, a curious decision in a male-dominated venue and field.

Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas: Two Face Telescope

There are a few kinetic pieces like a swinging totemic bell that rings somewhat reluctantly and some steel plates mounted on a vertical rack that you can clang vigorously (and have a weird headache for hours after…I’d have called it “Headplate”), but the predominant presence is that of Johnson and his protégées, like the coyly-named India Blake who it turns out is his daughter. Sneak around them to find Christoph Spath’s “Fluxus” in serpentine, concrete, plexi and LED illumination and Jay Wholley’s “La Casa de Bernarda Alba”, which bronze with its black patina references the black worn by the all-female cast of Lorca’s play of the same name. It’s clearly a lost-foam casting, making much of the torn-away Styrofoam corner where the beading of the raw material is unmistakable.

Jay Wholley: La Casa de Bernarda Alba

Zero Higashida’s “Sinjin” is a painful-looking angular node of sputtery-welded stainless plates with hammered contours. Having worked stainless with a hammer, I can only hope he used a pneumatic planishing hammer, even if he has very good health insurance. Though thinking about the workmanship hurts, the gnarled texture is fascinating.

Zero Higashida: Sinjin

Labeling was an issue at Grounds, with some of the pieces’ plaques missing and the maps difficult to read, with certain landscape features missing even where the sculptures were numbered. Numbering was not sequential, so you couldn’t find plaques by area; “187” could be by “7” or “291”. Some visitors cussed their maps and I finally gave up. A great mobile app would provide GPS-based directions on which pieces you were near and how to get to those you want to see. Because of the labeling issues, I never found out who made what we called “Virginia Woolf, by Ayn Rand.”

There were quite a few fun pieces of riverstone played against steel stock, like John Van Alstine’s “Stone Pile”, Kevin Lyles’ “Passage”, and a huge steel-stock “S” filled with riverstones and Tesla coil-like structures, seemingly secured by ropes and belted by an incongruous fiberglass donut painted to seem skylike. I found a few stone works, of which Ernest Shaw’s “Sumo” was my favorite, but I think I missed several and saw others but in the distance.

John Van Alstine: Stone Pile

Ernest Shaw: Sumo

Kevin Lyles: Passage

Ekaterina Harrison: Mirage

I may snoot at the Johnson & Co. works, but their creator set up a strong foundation for sculptural arts, and the work does appeal to people who like figurative sculpture they can recognize. Since sculpture, so often outdoor and public, should be for everyone, it would be a slight to the commons to exclude such pieces. Themes aside, anyone who objects to the painterly coloring of the sculptures would do well to remember that the canonical Greek sculptures of antiquity were themselves brightly painted, originally more germane to a state fair than a museum.

Refusion Cuisine—Hummus

Balanced hummus accompaniments L to R: Turkish simit (sesame pastry), fresh celery, pickled peppers, cornichons, Madras curry sauerkraut. Baby carrots offstage.

Hummus has reportedly been around since Biblical times. Much like pizza, which has possible origins but no certain genesis, hummus is a pre-state, nearly pre-historical food. As such it admits of great variation—or it ought to.

Pizza has been interpreted in so many ways as to be nearly unrecognizable in some expressions. (Smh at you, Germanophones. Gefroren “Mickey Mouse Pizza Salami”?) But hummus suffers a staid orthodoxy: chickpea-based, maybe some pine nuts or roasted red peppers. The variations are few and obvious. It needn’t be this way, but it will be up to us to redeem it.

I’ve been making hummus since I was in college. Early ’90s veganism made homemade hummus indispensable. My Iraqi professor told me to add soy sauce and olive oil to it while blending. I made it with these and conventional ingredients for years before seeing white bean and basil hummus on a Soho (NYC) menu. I never tried that, but the idea of changing everything about the formula stuck. The only constants should be beans and nut butter, the axes of vegan protein intake.

I have to insist on a couple of things, though, if you want optimal results. You must use a Cuisinart. No blenders, janky French mills, weird juicers or second-rate food processors. I read in some long-lost book about making sprouted wheat bread that a Cuisinart must be used for blending the dough, because it had the best blade-to-bowl size impact ratio. (?!) Regardless, anything else I’ve tried does not yield a creamy hummus. And don’t moan about the price. You’ll have a Cuisinart for at least 2 decades and if you have a smartphone, it’s silly to complain about a $179 tool you’ll use for half your life while holding something that costs three times as much and barely outlives an inchworm.

You should almost certainly use a pressure cooker—it’s not necessary, but is vastly more efficient than boiling beans at atmospheric pressure. And whichever beans you use, they must be dried. (Fresh is probably even better but I’ve never tried that…note to self.)

I have thrown practically everything in hummus and usually it works great. You can also pair it with different foods so that it never gets boring. If you’d rather make it in bulk, it freezes just fine. As I write this, I’m eating it with Korean seasoned bonnet bellflowers. Here are some of my standard variations, but I encourage you to experiment.

Standard topping

Ground sumac berries and caramelized onions—I used to drizzle extra virgin olive oil and some smoked paprika on the top after stippling it into overlapping micro-wells with a spoon, but you really can’t beat ground sumac berries and caramelized onions. The berries are tart, lemony, astringent with an interesting granular texture, and the onions are smoky, chewy, a little plasticky – plus they trap all the oil so you don’t have to bring that along too. These toppings are best applied right before eating, as the berries become sodden and insipid and the onions soggy after a few hours on the wet hummus.

Caramelize onions by sautéing them in olive oil—as soon as the pan hits the flame, add salt. You’ll need a lot, about a tablespoon for 5 medium yellow onions. The salt leaches the moisture from the onions and speeds evaporation. Give it 45 minutes, stirring occasionally for even browning. If you do it right you can keep them at room temperature, but leave in any moisture and they’ll mold in a few days.

If it’s around, I sprinkle some nutritional yeast on too. This treehugger at Treehugger was just recommending nutritional yeast with garbanzo beans among 10 other things, so you know it’s good…for nutrition (esp. B12) and taste.

Beverage pairing

If you tipple, I suggest a stout with hummus. You won’t believe what happens when the caramelized onions and sumac hit the bitter chocolate smokiness of a Guinness. I think other beers might get lost; a porter, brown ale, Canadian or Belgian ale might soldier through tho.

Now the production:

3 c. cooked beans
Adzuki, Baby Lima, Black, Navy, Northern, Garbanzo all work great. Baby Lima has lower yields but is mad creamy.

1/4 c. nut butter
I think tahini is best, for both consistency and flavor. I don’t think sunflower seed butter worked. Other nut butters are either prohibitively expensive, less nutritious, or both.

Juice of one tart citrus
Lemon, lime, calamansi, etc. Flavors and preserves

1/2 oz med/light vinegar
Apple Cider is best, white balsamic also OK. Palm, rice wine and herb vinegars less desirable. Darker vinegars have overwhelming flavors

4 tbsp red miso
White hasn’t enough flavor. Miso has a great harmonizing and preservative effect on hummus; hummus will ferment before it goes bad—a different kind of tasty, more zippy & tangy. I ate 3c at once, quite safe.

EVOO
Extra virgin olive oil is healthier & tastier than virgin for non-heated food applications.

2-3 cloves garlic (by size)
Too much garlic, while nice, overpowers other flavors. The miso is capable of integrating it nonetheless given 2-3 days’ time.

1-2 tbsp cayenne pepper
Cayenne is not only a preservative, but very health-promoting. Its spiciness helps distinguish the flavor of other ingredients, or give them some definition. A small amount (at the least) of it in everything you cook improves it.

1 tbsp black pepper

Fermented fish sauce or anchovy paste
These add an indescribable umami, but are Dead Sea salty, so use w/ care. The miso & caramelized onions are already salting it up hard.

These are the base ingredients and their variations, but the real magic is in the spices and condiments. Below is a table of combinations that worked, which I plan to update as I find new formulae. The best way to season hummus is to add things while blending it; give a good 30 seconds of blending to each batch of ingredients to be sure they meld thoroughly.

Baby Lima Bean + horseradish (2 tbsp) (fresh grated or jarred in vinegar) + fresh dill (one handful chopped)

Black Bean + cumin (1 tsp) +  fresh parsley (handful chopped) + black pepper + lime (not lemon) + beer (bitter, e.g. Czech pilsner, 3 oz.) + a couple drops of hickory smoke flavoring

Garbanzo bean + Worcestershire sauce + cumin (1 tsp)

Soak 3 cups beans in fresh-boiled water for 12 hours. Change water once, rinse, repeat for a total of 24 hours. This is key to leaching of, or degrading indigestible compounds from, all beans and grains.

Cooking & blending
Cook beans in pressure cooker for 10-15 minutes with 3 medium-size bay leaves (bay leaves help extract the remaining aluminum salts and oligosaccharides from beans, and impart a nice flavor). Let cool or rinse, I’m not sure which is best, but I never put hot beans in the bowl. (If there’s BPA in the bowl’s plastic, that’s a cancer bonus.) Add to Cuisinart bowl with the primary ingredients and blend while you assemble the secondary ones.

Then have fun adding them to taste! Salud!

Refusion Cuisine

Is the above just a cheap, obvious pun? Not entirely.

Much of what working folk eat in the U.S. today, particularly in cities and their suburban nodes, is preposterously easy and cheap to produce. See restaurants like Applebee’s, Ruby Tuesday, and California Pizza Kitchen, where pre-chopped ingredients are thrown on a frozen thing and heated, or units of factory hacked and extruded food are nuked and served in a “family dining” environment.

Consider also city food depots like Pret a Manger, which take perfectly ordinary highly-perishable ingredients, trawl them through the Dead Sea (most sandwiches contain 1000-1500 mg sodium), and serve them in sandwiches or soups in Manhattan financial centers. Or Melt Shop, which makes every type of grilled cheese with amendments like caramelized onions, prosciutto, or pickles, and little else (n.b.: I love their “Dirty” sandwich).  Or any of these buffet dumps in Manhattan that get various casseroles, salads, steamed vegetables, unctuous goos with objects, etc. from regional processing centers. The food is dismayingly similar from one such establishment to the next, varying largely in the patina that distinguishes how many times it has been re-served.

Even more grim is the booming speedfeed biz which undercuts the above by just a few dollars: “organic” dumplings (totally uncertified) locally produced and clamshelled in a grocery deli section, TV dinners, that appalling sushi you can get at convenience stores, gas stations, and any other place with refrigeration including morgues.

The most unworthy speedfeed is hummus. Cheap ingredients, easy preparation and long shelf life made it an obvious choice in which for industry could bury us. But its elemental simplicity and potential variations (different nut butters/beans/condiments/spices/accompaniments) make it an ideal template for experimentation, particularly if you haven’t cooked much—and those qualities only enhance the ones industry prefers. I think a whole cookbook could be dedicated to it!

I made hummus dogmatically for 20 years: garbanzo beans (dried), tahini, lemon, olive oil, soy sauce (a suggestion from an Iraqi friend), too much raw garlic. Maybe some cumin. Then I had too many dried beans around and started fooling with all the parameters: sprouted black beans with lime? sunflower butter? horseradish? Dijon mustard? beer?  And this is not even considering what you can layer on top of hummus: caramelized onions, sumac, smoked paprika. It was the greatest fun because the results were never inedible, and always somewhere on the spectrum of tasty.

They did terrible violence to hummus orthodoxy, however. This is not the fusion cuisine of wasabi on a hamburger or Asiago teriyaki buffalo wings in a burrito. This is refusion cuisine, refusing to eat the dreck in our trough but always striving to embody a) ease, b) shelf life, c) affordability, d) versatility, e) transportability, f) internationality (leave “cosmopolitan” to chefs with cable shows). That’s a high bar, but after a lot of food poisoning, wasted money and diabetogenic levels of sodium, I am making more of my own food than ever—and never getting bored of it.

One could even argue that refusion cuisine is a form of engaged art: a creative effort invested into something to nourish and inspire, a thing best shared—but that also returns and redounds to its creator.

Is the Worker an Artist?

The above is a perennial question for those who romanticize the working class and imagine it as the engine of revolutionary change. In my self-taught demi-ignorance I haven’t seen much to convince me the worker is an artist, but I deal with a very prosaic stratum of workers: metal personnel.

Scrapyards only deal with me because I tickle their whimsy. I have to tell them what I’m doing with some weird thing I dragged from a heap under the eye of their security cameras, and if it makes the scaleman laugh, I might get to take it home. Sometimes they see the sagacity of a design and there’s a glimmer of respect or curiosity. Twice I’ve met or heard of “people like me” in the yard—once it was a guy who ran his boxy 80s Benz on biodiesel and had an operation trucking waste oil upstate, where he got free fuel from a friend who refined it.

You’d think this kind of ingenuity would be more common, but in my experience it’s not. The best a person who bridges art and the structural can hope for is nonplus. “What are you gonna do with that?” has become a greeting. So when I read the below poem, written moreover by a woman (in a decade+ of metalwork,  I haven’t seen a woman in a weldshop, much less a scrapyard…unless she was clerking in the weldshop), I was thrilled. The only woman I’ve welded with was one of the best, and she attributed that to women being more patient, FWIW.

The reaction of the gentlemen in the forum where I found the poem I reproduce here typifies the above. This post is not to disparage such a perspective, but to tease the sophists who think that every toiler is a John Chamberlain, Richard Serra or Maxim Gorky.

The Weldor’s Weld
by Sonia Balcer 8/21/82

Wherefore must I wear a mask when
I hold in my hand, the pen
wherewith I write poetry with fire?

How I long to discover the secrets that are hidden
in the theater before me;
to behold the movement of tiny, metal
particles, as they waltz and interlock
in a world within a world;
as they pirouette between the boundaries set
by the fire which frees them to move.

Oh, Lord in heaven! Why are not human eyes made
to see this wonder directly?
Must I always hold this dark glass before me?

Hark! He causes my heart, to see the mystery!
The metals are assaulted, by electric energy,
carried by heaving, heavy wires. In a molten flash,
I see the crystals breaking, and sighing;
the silent order of the solid surface, giving way
to rushing, hotly-radiant tides
that crash together like waves at a beach.

It swirls before me, an intricate dance
which I cannot see, but yet feel inside.

I delight to caress the molten piece
in my heart.
It is inside of me, and I am inside of it.
I slowly feel over and underneath
the hot liquid surfaces.
I move into its every contour, and through
the whole of it.

Bodies of metal, which once were separate;
the boundaries are fading.
It swirls and whirlpools within me-
It is all blurred now, caught
Into a quickly-freezing body of what once
was separate, but now is together,

a single piece.

Laibach — “Spectre” (2014)

Oh look! “Political art”!

AMERICANA

MILAN FRAS:
If you want to change the world you better do it with a freedom
Because if you don’t no one else will
Do it with a feeling
You’ve got to do it with a feeling

If you’re going to beat  the power you’d better do it right
Because if you don’t you’re going to lose the sight
Do it with a feeling
You’ve got to do it with a feeling

If you wanna change the system you’ve gotta tell the street
Because if you don’t you’ll hear a different beat
Do it with a feeling
You’ve got to do it with a feeling

Do it with a feeling
You’ve got to do it with a feeling
Do it with a feeling
You’ve got to do it with a feeling

KORAN [No Youtube Video yet]

NICE LADY:
I believe in a better world
I believe in a better place
I believe in brotherhood, equality and freedom
I believe in happiness for all

And the light is leaning out
Through the darkness of the night
There are questions I will follow
When the light is leaning out
There are all these questions on my mind

MILAN FRAS:
Words on ice
Words are memories of pain
The future is invisible
Words are something that remain
Words are substance of tomorrow
They are weapons of the mind
Words can take us far away
They will leave us all behind

NICE LADY:
You believe in a better world
You believe in a better place
You believe in brotherhood, equality and freedom
You believe in happiness for all

And the light is leaning out
Through the darkness of the night
There are questions we will follow
When the sun goes down again
And the moon is shining bright
There are all these questions on my mind

The antinomy of art and politics

A repost originally written by Chris Mansour of Platypus, though The Charnel-House overall is quite a work.

Jaywalking as character study

This is the kind of problem-solving that drew me to social psychology long ago:

While navigating my scooter through Manhattan traffic today, I wondered whether pedestrians, and by extension people, fall into three broad categories. I must judge these quickly every day because my life may depend on it.

The crosswalk is possibly the most unpredictable place on a street because of certain crowd dynamics. I’ve been doing this for over a decade and think I now identify agents in femtoseconds.

The first people into the breach always make their own decisions, even if they’re wrong. Type A (as it were) never get out of your way because they’ve never been hit by anything harder than their sense of self.  A couple of these people jaywalking are all it takes to catalyze the motion of the second type.

These would never strike out alone, but are quicker to follow distinct leaders than the third type. They seem more reflective than Type A and are more risk-averse, or perhaps less driven; they seem to watch the actions of As and crossing circumstances equally. In this they may be happy to let someone else blaze the trail, take the largest risk and do the most thinking—but at least the movement of Types B is circumspect once begun.

The carelessness of the third type in groups may be responsible for much of bulk human woe. Galvanized by Types A and B, Type C surges with neither the reflection of B nor the initiative and speed of A. Once a critical mass of Types A & B is reached there is a general outpouring of Cs as if a dam has broken.  Dull and herdlike, they are least likely to consider the conditions that informed the decisions of A and B. They usually look only ahead and their response time is inversely proportional to the number of people immediately in front of them. Because of this, if you suddenly find yourself approaching a jaywalker-colonized crosswalk and unable to stop, you should aim for the Type A at front. The risk of impact is least between this person(s) and the flanking Types B. The slowest and most oblivious Cs will be clustered towards the rear, texting with headphones in and only bobbing on the meatriver to the other side’s concrete.

Most hazardous is that each successive type is worse at instantaneous decision than the one preceding. If your timing through an intersection brings you towards the end of a surge, all your bell-ringing and screaming will not save you from collision. On the offchance a Type C sees you, he will likely deer up and let you decide whether to hit him or one of his cohorts immediately adjacent. Of course at that point the population density obviates all choice…not unlike life.

The Green Movement

The best political art only appears as such when you’ve already enjoyed its aesthetic merits, and continues to reward appreciation outside of (and sometimes despite) its ideological content. Most enjoyable is the discovery of something half-understood that’s only obliquely expressed in two unrelated works.

When these two works are decades apart only heightens the synchronicity. Canada’s Sunparlour Players, considered an “alt-country” band, plays a rollicking tune called “Green Thumb.” It strikes the listener as being about a garden, but this garden is just a metaphor.

Band member Andrew Penner’s grandparents are from Ukraine, and another of their songs, “Wall Sisters,” is anecdote set in his grandmother’s village. Knowing this, I was listening to the lyrics of “Green Thumb” when they struck me as referring to the Russian Revolution’s incursion into the Ukraine:

Your grandfather was a cool cool man
He died years before I was born
He was the mayor of a town in ‘18
Just before the Red Storm.

Robbers worked the streets of his town
they worked the parks and they took our food
So your grandfather built a garden so big
he made all his neighbors drool.

Vladimir Brovkin writes that the Green Movement was a Ukrainian peasant resistance to the Bolsheviks, particularly in the brutal food requisitions. In 1917 and ’18, peasants celebrated the fall of the Tsarist state. By the summer of ’18 the peasants had redivided their land and settled down to the new order. The Bolsheviks were still well-regarded as the enablers of landlord expropriation. But that didn’t last: no sooner had life in Ukraine calmed than the grain requisition started, followed by establishment of the Committees of the Poor, then in 1919 the introduction of collective farms and agricultural communes.

Brovkin adds that the peasants were nonplussed by the distinction between Bolsheviks and Communists; some thought the two groups were different, or even at war. The upshot was the same as under the Tsar: tribute forced from their villages in food and conscription for the (Red) Army. They quickly turned on both institutions and waged an all out guerrilla war against their representatives in Ukraine from 1919 to 1922.

This open conflict is the scene into which Vladimir Pavlovich stumbles in the nonpareil late Soviet film “Shine, Shine My Star” (Гори, гори, моя звезда). The name itself is a reference to a romantic song banned by the Soviets. The song appears across a scene transition, and the cinematography suggests the subject of the song is not a love interest, but art, which must be loved unto death. In fact after the transition characters singing the song are interrupted by White Army (anti-Bolshevik, often pro-Tsarist, broadly reactionary) soldiers. Overall the movie is a fine presentation of the tensions between art and politics, illustrated through the Russian Revolution but giving a nod to Ukrainian resistance.

“Why are you harping on the same string, Reds, Whites. There are other colors too,” says Green guerrilla Ohrim, who is still incognito when opining thus. Protagonist Vladimir, who leans more Communist, responds, “the Greens are bandits, their power will be a bandits’ rule, and their art a bandits’ art.”

Even the late Soviet Union is not going to present the Greens as heroic—Shine, Shine was made years before perestroika and glasnost even. But this movie was a surprising introduction to a thread of history often forgotten, especially in the tendency to historically reduce revolutions to only the largest winner and the largest loser…and art is denigrated to a handmaiden or footnote at best. Both Shine and Green Thumb tell a nuanced story of revolution that places the artistic expression at its center.

Swifty scooter deview

Thanks to Rishio for the headsup in the comments of “Xootr vs. KickPed: Folding Scooter Throwdown”! I hadn’t heard of the Swifty. They look keen. Here are a few thoughts from looking at the pictures:

1)      Tires: huge, and inflatable. The urethane or rubber tires of the Xootr and KickPed absorb less shock, but require no service and last forever. Moreover, the larger tires of the Swifty mean portability issues and a larger turning radius—the latter is important because kickscooters lack the speed of bikes, which often try to crowd us out of bikelanes.  Zombie pedestrians with ears and eyes wired to glowing rectangles (see: “walker, urban”) also appear from behind stopped/parked vehicles suddenly, requiring sharp movements in confined areas. It’s key to be able to get out of their way, and big lumpy tires on a craft that moves at ~6mph less than a bike is asking to get mashup. However Swifty’s website promo photos suggest the scooter is at home in southern California, where it will be thrown in the trunk when you’re done, not walked through a meatpacked train station or sidewalk. In L.A. its storage would also be less of a problem, where apartments are larger and, in my experience, people aren’t living five deep

2)      Weight: even weighing less than 10 lbs., the Xootr and Kickped can become burdensome. The Swifty’s weakest point is its preposterous weight: just over 17 pounds! That kind of mass requires a car to carry it at rest, obviating the green ownsteam (self-transport) virtue. If you’re going to have something so bulky and heavy, just get a folding bike (the Birdy is 25 lbs), a much more effective mode of transport than a scooter will ever be.

3)      Folding configuration: The Swifty folds at two points? BAD. The Xootr folds at one and collapses at another, and both are subject to seizing when corroded. (The collapsing handlebar stem also wanders in its shaft, which can be deadly.)  Even with inflatable tires to buffer shock, those two points are going to get beat on U.S. roads, and when they get some road grit or salt in them to boot forget it. The KickPed is the clear winner: its springloaded stem+shaft are simple, sturdy and have forgiving tolerances that preclude corrosion or jamming. Maybe tolerances are too loose as mine is getting wobbly and I can’t figure out how to shim it up.

4)      Price: “handmade in England” or no, at ~USD $750, the only people who can afford the Swifty in austerity times are celebrities. Maybe Huge Grunt Hugh Grant will ride one around Notting Hill. The Xootr and KickPed come in at a more real pricepoint, below ~USD $300, which in my experience is about as much as most regular schmos will pay for “a grownup’s Razor”. Moreover, both companies manage to produce a premium product in the USA, albeit in KickPed’s case using some Taiwanese components AFAIK. Must be labor costs of English unions; would that Maggie had finished them off.

5)     Handlebar stem (Honorable Mention): note from the below illustration that Swifty has milled a groove into its handlebar stem, which meets a tooth in the tube collar that will keep it from working loose while riding. Xootr, take note: the stem on my Xootr has so much play now that it can twist as much as two or three degrees without warning. In rain, this could mean a sudden absence of traction and change in angle, with instantaneous horizontality resulting in loss of life.

English design of portacraft has yet to impress me. Even my folding bike is a German Birdy, not an English Brompton—to be fair, the Birdy is made in Taiwan.

These criticisms are, of course, subject to trying a Swifty and examining it in person. The many readers of these scooter posts prove that deciding based on web photos is very difficult. Though I doubt NYCeWheels will ever stock the massive Swifty unless they buy out the other stores on their block (their available space is compromised by very expensive electric bikes), if I see one on NYC’s streets I will hail its owner for a closer inspection—that is, if I can catch them on a KickPed.

“Countries” —B.J. Vorster vs. Polska

“Already we can see how easy it is to create and instill wrong impressions about peoples and countries by slanted news and pictures and unbalanced presentation of facts.” —South African Prime Minister, BJ Vorster, 5th January 1976

Occasionally political messages sneak into art in the weirdest places. Polska, an Irish drum & bass producer, made this (and many other) stunning drumwork & atmospherics tunes years ago. Around 2008 I thought to look up the source of the sampled quote because I couldn’t recognize the accent.

The tone of tune seems sympathetic or thoughtful to me, but the statement was made by B.J. Vorster, Prime Minister of South Africa in 1976. A similar version of it is quoted on Google Books, but years ago, I found the entire quote attributed to him on a single weblink,  now gone. I reproduce it here for posterity as I copied it back then, along with the work that samples it so pensively. If you listen, do so with headphones: