Here's a strange one for you. The Nashville Tourism Board partnered with NYC's Showfields to create a highly curated pop-up shop of Nashville-centric goods that features a bunch of vinyl records provided by Nashville record shop Grimey's.
It's an odd pairing because Showfields is "a revolutionary retail concept built to engage and inspire your sense of discovery" - which sounds like some fancy words for "nice mall". I've not been there but it feels a bit pretentious, and Nashville is generally cast as being a somewhat humble place (there's a lot to unpack there, it's not humble but it appears that way). Grimey's is a very respectable institution and I've no doubt that the selections there are wonderful.
Looking at photos from the space, it looks great! They did an excellent job. I have my hesitations about the revolutionary shopping concepts but it's good to see a bunch of Nashville represented in this way. Dare I say, go check it out?
The second single, and first official video, from Jill Townsend's Fetching Pails undertaking is now available for your enjoyment. "Shearer" is one of my personal favorites on the album and I rather enjoy how the video seems to be an innocent romp through a small town with little hints of something otherworldly under the surface; a visit to an empty church, a graveyard tour, a mysterious note about the afterlife. I can't say for certain if it was intentional or not but it gives the vibe that Anywhere, USA has something gurgling under the surface.
The album, Telekinesis for Beginners, will be available on Nov 2nd, with a release show here in Nashville on Nov 8th. In the meantime, you can pre-order the record and even bundle it with a t-shirt!
The Dead Center stars Shane Caruth, Poorna Jagannathan and Jeremy Childs. It's a film that slots itself into the Horror genre but it's more of a psychological thriller type situation. It was shot here in Nashville the trailer looks great!
I'm fortunate enough to know several of the individuals involved with directing, shooting and editing of it and can confidently say it's an enjoyably tense viewing. There's a whole mythology to the story of Jeremy Childs character that is only lightly touched on in the trailer, a nice tease for the full release. Good timing for Halloween.
The New Yorker recently ran a great profile on Impossible Foods entitled Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?. The piece talks about the mysterious heme ingredient that makes their Impossible Burger have a texture that's more like real meat but it largely focuses on the companies desire to transition to plant-based alternatives as a means of solving climate change (as you'd guess from the title). There's a passage early in the article that I can't stop thinking about:
Meat is essentially a huge check written against the depleted funds of our environment. Agriculture consumes more freshwater than any other human activity, and nearly a third of that water is devoted to raising livestock. One-third of the world’s arable land is used to grow feed for livestock, which are responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Razing forests to graze cattle—an area larger than South America has been cleared in the past quarter century—turns a carbon sink into a carbon spigot.
...
When the world’s one and a half billion beef and dairy cows ruminate, the microbes in their bathtub-size stomachs generate methane as a by-product. Because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, some twenty-five times more heat-trapping than carbon dioxide, cattle are responsible for two-thirds of the livestock sector’s G.H.G. emissions. (In the popular imagination, the culprit is cow farts, but it’s mostly cow burps.) Steven Chu, a former Secretary of Energy who often gives talks on climate change, tells audiences that if cows were a country their emissions “would be greater than all of the E.U., and behind only China and America.” Every four pounds of beef you eat contributes to as much global warming as flying from New York to London - and the average American eats that much each month.
The TLDR of it all is that American's consume a ton of meat and raising livestock is a massive burden on the environment in a lot of different arenas. This is the impetus behind founder Pat Brown's mission to get Impossible Foods everywhere.
I've only been a vegetarian for a few years myself, so I'm certainly not casting any stones; I understand the transition could be hard. However, I can't shake the notion that if you're a "woke" individual that is concerned about climate change and saving the planet's environment, you just shouldn't eat meat. There doesn't seem to be a rationale for doing so aside from personal indulgence.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think saving the environmental is based on a single factor. Corporations are obnoxiously irresponsible and our government is beyond complacent in holding them to standards. There are lots of things that need to be fixed but, just like buying an electric or hybrid car, this seems like one of those things that can be directly acted upon by individuals. Why are people so averse to doing so?
The article does a good job of covering the history of the company, the arguments around locally raised cattle (honestly, not better), the "productizing" of cattle and all of the nuances you'd hope would be covered. It's a New Yorker piece, it's long. Internet time doesn't really allow for immersing in long profiles like this but I highly recommend it. It's an educational read and one worth further contemplation.
I try to be grateful, but it's hard not to imagine my life would be immeasurably improved by the ability to ensnare my enemies inside a haunted painting for eternity.
Hey web folks, random thought: In an effort to declutter the ever-cluttered web, what if a site's GDPR messaging exactly matched the browser's design?
1. Would more or less people click it?
2. Is this a dark pattern? https://t.co/iu0CcnqzrA
