3D Roadtrip!

Over recent weeks, I've enjoyed reading about the adventures of Bilal Ghalib and Alex Hornstein who's Pocket Factory project I first learned about on the Make blog; two makers who are taking 3D printing on the road, travelling around the US as they run their 3D printers in the back of their Prius, selling the wears that they create. 

For anyone not familiar with the 3D printing movement, it is about relatively inexpensive machines that print extruded plastics from computer-designed models. It essentially allows an individual to create plastic parts that, even a decade ago, could be made only on machines that cost tens of thousands of dollars. 3D printing enthusiasts tend to be very excited about the possibilities of this technology, but at the same time the community tends to be a bit insular. The Pocket Factory project takes the technology out to flea markets and public spaces, to people who often have no idea that such a technology is possible. Bilal and Alex started out not knowing exactly what the reception would be (it's been everywhere from wildy excited to apathetic to a little hostile), or what ideas and business models would actually allow them to make money. It's been fascinating to follow their blog and read about their adventures.

Road trips on film

Pop culture has had a impact on the concept of the roadtrip. Road trip movies are a genre unto themselves; not only do they share themes of travel, but many follow a common pattern: that originally, an end destination or goal is important, but through the course of the journey, discovers lessons or relationships more important than the original destination. This transformative narrative is arguably more important to the road trip movie than the presence of any roads. And often, the mode of transportation itself becomes a character in the story as well, its health and wellbeing is as important as that of any family-member. Any list of road movies is going to be incomplete, so rather than attempt any sort inclusive or 'best-of' list, I'll simply tell you some of my favorites: 

Hard Core Logo

If you're not a Canuck, you might not be familiar with the work of Bruce MacDonald, who made a trio of rock-and-roll road-trip movies in the 1990s: Roadkill, about a record-label employee dispatched into northern ontario to find a band that has gone missing on tour; Highway 61, about a naive blues enthusiast and pop-historian who gets conscripted (or seduced) by a roadie to transport a drug-stuffed corpse down to Louisiana; and Hard Core Logo. It's a dark and ruthless story of an aging punk band trying to hold together a reunion tour across the Canadian prairies.

Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

While it's almost entirely set at sea, it's uses every wonderful device of the road trip comedy. Zissou starts out as a modern-day Captain Ahab, a man who takes a crew on his own mission of revenge, but unlike Ahab, finds that the relationships with those who travel with him are more important than his own anger. The soundtrack of Seu Jorge's samba covers of Bowie classics are an unusual and brilliant fit with the film. While Owen Wilson and Bill Murray are front and center, the colourful supporting characters (Anjelica Huston, Willem Dafoe, and Jeff Goldblum) are the most memorable in the movie.

The Straight Story

This is the story of Alvin Straight—played by the incomparable Richard Farnsworth—who makes a journey to see his dying, estranged brother. Because Alvin's fading faculties have left in unable to obtain a driver's license, he makes the journey on his garden tractor. All of this is based on a true story, and David Lynch guides the film along with an unusually understated hand. On the surface it's similar to the more will known 'About Schmidt', as both are about a reflective journey toward the end of one's life, but there's a slow, beautiful pace to the journeys (both personal and physical) in The Straight Story that the best road films have.

Mad Mad Mad Mad World

Here's the other end of spectrum: a madcap story of manic, flawed characters all motivated only by greed, unleashed upon on America's highways like rats running through a crowded diner. The comedy is often little more than letting dozens of comic actors interact with one another, yet it captures another side of driving. It always seems like there's a tremendous number of jerks out there on the highway; in some ways, this movie is their story. When I'm tailgated or cut-off by someone who seems to have no regard for other drivers, I can be calmed a little by envisioning them as Ethel Merman, Buddy Hacket, Jonathan Winters, or one of the other incredibly self-centered personalities from this movie. 

O Brother Where Art Thou

I love this Coen brothers retelling of the Odyssey myth set in the depression-era Deep South. George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson form a trio of escaped convicts trying to get to buried treasure before the land is flooded. The bluegrass music of Ralph Stanley perfectly matches the landscape of this film: cornfields, dusty, deserted crossroads, beautiful slow rivers, and glorious old forests. 

Planes Trains and Automobiles

Its not the only 1980s movie that focuses on the madness of modern travel (see National Lampoon's Vacation), but the combination of Steve Martin, John Candy, and the direction of John Hughes make this an absolute classic with so many unforgettable scenes. It perfectly frames those classic roadtrip themes (of realizing that our rush for the end destination has caused us to lose sight of what's important) around the holiday season. 

So what are your favourites? Again, use the comments section to share with us and with other readers. 

Rights of passage

There are two types of roadtrips: the purposeful roadtrip, and the roadtrip for its own sake. The purposeful roadtrip has been around for as long as there have been roads. But the roadtrip for its own sake is a relatively recent phenomenon. Some link it to the idea of the Grand Tour—a renaissance idea that young men of wealth should, at a certain age, travel throughout the continent, absorbing all of the cultural offerings available. As transit opportunities diversified, class ceased to be such a barrier and touring the continent grew in popularity.

The North American roadtrip his a very different history, as the earliest travel was rarely about cultural enrichment but instead about industry. The development of Route 66 in 1926 combined with the rise of the automobile around the same time cemented the roadtrip as part of American culture. An Oklahoma businessman chose the route number, because he thought it would be easy to remember and had a pleasing sound to the number; the R&B standard—covered by musicians from Nat King Cole to Depeche Mode—has proved him right on that account. The anthem has become the unofficial anthem of the American roadtrip. In recent years, increasingly wide and busy freeways occupy a major role in American travel and transportation, but a true road-trip requires at least some time spent getting off the freeways and enjoying the smaller highways that connect one town to the next, and the song perfectly captures the spirit of this. 

The quintessential Canadian roadtrip is the Trans-Canada highway, which wasn't officially completed until 1971. In contrast to Route 66, the unofficial anthem of the Canadian roadtrip is the austere and haunting Northwest Passage by the late Stan Rogers. Rogers focuses on the wilderness and a link between modern travellers and the early explorers of the country; it's about the spaces between the towns, just as Route 66 is as much about the towns themselves, and it helped the relatively new highway become a source of national identity. 

Road trips

In Issue 12, we look at different types of creative adventure, including the roadtrip. Particularly, Hillary Webb of the Gold Fools tells us about their roadtrip from Halifax, Nova Scotia, across North America to exhibit at Renegade Craft Fairs. Today, we're going to look at the roadtrip in more detail. One of the great aspects of a roadtrip, for creative types, is that it provides both time with little to do but think, as well as constantly changing (or sometimes not so changing) backdrops. There may also be some adversity and some random encounters with people or creatures or roadside artifacts. 

When we drove from Calgary down to San Francisco two summers ago, one of my favorite memories is an early morning drive across the border from Nevada into California. We took a lonely little highway from Hawthorne, Nevada to the east side of Yosemite (#359 in Nevada, #167 in California); we didn't see another car along the entire stretch, infact the only other traffic we saw were the road crews who were just finishing resurfacing the Nevada stretch. The dark, virgin pavement and perfect yellow markings contrasted beautifully with the surprising green and purple and gold colours of this scrubland, and then we rounded a corner and the road turned suddenly straight, a wide basin opening before us and beyond that, Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada batholith towering up. While there were many more notable sights and events on that trip, that is the stretch of road that sticks in my mind the most.

photos by Janine Vangool

 

So what's your favourite roadtrip memory? Tell us in the comments.

The Genius of Pigeons

National Geographic’s Brilliant Beasts series has an excellent episode on Pigeon Genius. Watch it and you’ll be guaranteed to develop a new appreciation for these creatures, from slow motion footage of their impressive wing patterns (their wingtips actually touch at the top and bottom of their beats), to the still hotly-contested theories about how they maintain such remarkable homing navigation. 

One of the more fascinating elements is how their strong monogamous bonds play into their homing instincts. A racing pigeon will be removed from its nest and partner for a few days prior to the race, then reintroduced to its beloved just before being taken away to race. This, in theory, gives it the maximum motivation to get home in a hurry. 

Here's the first of four parts of the program; you can find all of them on Youtube. 

Pigeon and Peregrines

Pigeons have the misfortune of being prominent on more than one foodchain. They are plentiful, predictable, and relatively meaty, a fact that made them one of the earliest animals that humans bred for food, going back at least to the Roman Empire.

But a more interesting relationship that the pigeon has is with the Peregrine Falcon, a predator-prey relationship that has played out in some interesting ways. Pigeon communications reached their pinnacle during both world wars, with one heroic bird delivering crucial correspondence despite an injury, and becoming the only bird to be awarded a military honour. Less famous was the peregrine falcon’s role during the war: they were the perfect weapon for intercepting pigeon-posted correspondence. The predator/prey relationship was played out once again, but this time with a keen human interest in the outcome. 

The relationship between these two birds has taken another interesting turn in recent years. Peregrine falcons were especially hard-hit by DDT pesticides in the middle of the 20^th century, and in some parts of Europe and North America, the wild population completely vanished. But through an extensive captive breeding and reintroduction program, the falcon is making a comeback, and finding a new home in many urban environments. Skyscraper ledges approximate the cliffs where the falcons like to nest, and urban environments provide an endless supply of the falcon’s favorite meal, the pigeon. 

Unfortunately, this means that not even domesticated pigeons are safe, and when several falcons were shot in LA in the late 1980s, pigeon fanciers were among the chief suspects. Like I said: even pigeon-fancying has a dark side. 

Pigeon Fancying

Pigeon keeping has become an increasingly gentrified pursuit, and recently the most expensive pigeon ever was recently sold at auction for nearly $275,000 to a Chinese shipping magnate. The sale represents the rapidly-growing popularity of pigeon-racing in China; a fact that is underscored by accusations from Belgian pigeon breeders that the Chinese mafia is kidnapping pigeons, killing them, removing their identification bands, putting them on less-distinguished pigeons, and reselling them. Yes, even pigeon-fancying has a dark side!

Recent pigeon fanciers include celebrities from Queen Elizabeth II to Pablo Picasso to Mike Tyson, but one of the more curious men to befriend the creatures was enigmatic inventor Nikolai Tesla. Though not a fancier in the conventional sense, in his later years in New York, he spent a great deal of time feeding pigeons in central park with special birdseed, and occasionally brought an injured bird back to his room in the New Yorker hotel to nurse it back to health.

Tesla had one particular favorite, a white female pigeon with light-grey wingtips. Its death in 1922 greatly affected Tesla, and he said later that this was the moment he knew his life’s work was finished. 

Pigeon Cameras

Have a look at this pigeon camera footage from Michel Banabila. It captures not only a kaleidoscope of the landscape passing by beneath it, but also a sense how furiously the pigeon is beating its wings. While pigeons can glide, they typically don’t do so unless they’re intending to drop altitude.

If you are easily made nauseous by footage filmed on hand-held cameras, you’d best not watch this in full-screen mode.

A pigeon by any other name

The pigeon, overall, gets a bit of a bad rap in terms of its symbolism. For a long time, it’s been linked to disease and referred to as a rat with wings, an undeserved reputation. It also has a reputation of not-so-great intelligence.

Yet when one thinks of a dove, the connotations are completely different: purity, peace, and hope are the traditional values associated with the dove. In truth, pigeon and dove are almost interchangeable labels; all are members of the same Columbidae family, and while smaller species are often called doves and larger ones pigeons, there are no hard rules. The rock pigeon can be just as correctly called a rock dove, and would probably have a far better reputation were this its common label.

One can imagine a Mad Men-esque 1950s meeting where a new soap brand - Dove - is presented: some junior employee raises his hand and says "isn't that just another name for a pigeon?" The client frowns. The meeting is over. The junior employee is given the afternoon to clean out his desk. The scene ends on a shot of the young man exiting the building, few possessions in his hands, as pigeons -- both white and grey -- peck at crumbs in the foreground. 

One of our favorite uses of pigeons as symbols comes from the Calgary Cultural District and UPPERCASE favorite Byron Eggenschwiler. 

 

Pigeon Posts

Starting today, Thursdays here on the UPPERCASE blog will be about providing some context - often scientific or historical - about different topics covered in the magazine. Today, the subject is Issue 12's cover star, the pigeon. No doubt you've already seen Anne Smith's lovely cover with its pigeon-toting camera. But that's not all the pigeon content in the issue: Karen Horton also shares some lovely pigeon-themed stamps. 

Greetings from Edmonton

There's a bison herd just outside of Edmonton that has a particularly noble lineage: the Elk Island herd traces it's earliest documented origins back to Samuel Walking Coyote, a Pend d'Orielle native who started out with four bison yearlings in Montana. From Walking Coyote, they were sold to Charles Allard and Michael Pablo, two Metis who grew the herd to more than six hundred in Montana, before the loss of land forced them to sell their animals. When a deal couldn't be reached with the American government, the Canadian government stepped forward to purchase the herd for the newly-created Elk Island National Park, just east of Edmonton. The animals, however, were not cooperative to the relocation efforts, and it took over three years for the animals to be rounded up - usually one at a time - and loaded onto heavily-reinforced trains. In just 30 years at Elk Island, the herd had grown nearly tenfold. So the herd was once again relocated, this time to the sprawling Wood Buffalo National Park, where the creatures now roam with their arboreal brethren. The herd that remains in Elk Island decend from the roughly 35 animals that could not be rounded up. 

All of that history may have absolutely nothing to do with the Royal Bison craft & art fair. The Royal Bison was founded by Raymond Biesinger, a very talented illustrator (who contributed a piece to UPPERCASE Publishing's first book, The Shatner Show). The show features a collection of incredibly talented Edmonton artists and craftmakers. We're looking forward to meeting our fellow exhibitors and attendees, and sharing some of our discoveries here on the blog. If you're in Edmonton, stop by and say hello to us!