9 minute read
Notes From All Over
dispatches NOTES FROM ALL OVER
LAJAMANU, AUSTRALIA
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Cloudy with a THE RED DIRT ROAD that leads into Lajamanu is Chance of Fish usually traveled by Warlpiri Aboriginal villagers and the wild horses that roam the nearby grasslands. SPRING STORMS RAIN PERCH Located on the edge of the Tanami Desert in ON THE DUSTY OUTBACK. Australia’s Northern Territory, this arid outback ILLUSTRATIONS BY GRAHAM ROUMIEU town is more than 500 miles from the coast. Which made it all the more bewildering one afternoon in late February, when a heavy rainstorm opened up over Lajamanu and amid the raindrops came...thousands of tiny fi sh. Mostly young speckled perch—some frozen solid, others, remarkably, wriggling—they landed like heavy hail on porches and playing fi elds in bursts for two straight days. For weeks afterward, residents raked fi sh into garbage bags. “It’s unusual, but it’s not the fi rst time we’ve seen it rain fi sh,” says Mark Kersemakers, senior meteorologist at the Darwin Regional Forecasting Center. “We think that a waterspout or weak tornado sucks the fi sh up into the atmosphere and carries them into the tops of the clouds, basically freezing them in the process. The clouds drift south and dump the fi sh a long way from where the weather system originated.” Instances of fi sh rain have been reported over the years throughout northern Australia and also in Japan, Singapore and Rhode Island. Lajamanu alone has seen it happen three times in the past 30 years. According to Kersemakers, fi sh aren’t the half of it. “We’ve also had reports of little frogs being rained out during storms, which is even more strange,” he says. But the most bizarre incident of creatures raining from the heavens is a tossup: either an 1871 hailstorm in Bath, England, that brought a downpour of jellyfi sh or another in Jennings, Louisiana, in 2007, that rained tangles of worms. All of which might lead the 650 or so residents of Lajumanu to count their blessings: At least it’s not raining sharks.
dispatches
AURONZO DI CADORE, ITALY
SUGAR HIGH If there is a mecca for extreme chocolate, on this serene day in March it’s the tiny Italian town of Auronzo di Cadore. That’s because practically overnight, a 26-foot tower made entirely of chocolate has appeared near the town ice rink, as if the Oompa Loompas had staged an invasion.
Ice skaters gaze at it as they arrive for their morning spin in the cold mountain air. Tourists gawk and snap pictures of the tower’s intricately carved exterior. The representative of the Guinness Book of World Records has come and gone, leaving a certifi cate confi rming this is offi cially the highest freestanding structure made entirely of chocolate. Ever.
The sugar castle was built by Mirco Della Vecchia, a master chocolatier famous for his world records in cacao. “I started working as a confectioner at thirteen,” says the mustachioed chocolate mastermind. “I knew immediately this would be my future.”
For this eff ort, Della Vecchia took as his inspiration the famous St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice, which he wanted to duplicate in miniature. He then transported 10 tons of pure white chocolate all the way from Ecuador. The liquid was poured into a specially built mold 26 feet high and allowed to chill until it was solid. Then Della Vecchia and his team went to work, carving struts and windows to match the original, as shavings drifted to the ground. (Sadly for some, after the exposition, and lengthy exposure to the elements, it won’t be very appetizing.)
Della Vecchia has struck here before. If you stroll over to city hall, you’ll fi nd his replica of the famous “Three Peaks” of the local Dolomite Mountains, the tops dusted with what appears to be sugar.
It’s offi cially the heaviest cocoa-based sculpture ever created. And it’s kept locked behind thick glass.
—STEPHAN TALTY
YOKOHAMA, JAPAN
East Meets Inside an arena in Yokohama, Vest the fashionistas are screaming for Nozomi Sasaki. A spotlight has just fallen on the doe-eyed Japanese model, who appears in a loose crochet shirt and cutoff denim shorts. Sasaki walks the runway, waving as techno music throbs. “Kawaii!” (“Cute!”) squeals 23-year-old Sae Hosaka, who is standing with a friend near the raised platform.
The Tokyo Girls Collection, a biannual fashion show now in its fi fth year, has attracted 25,500 spectators, most of them teens and young women. Some have traveled for hours by train or overnight bus, despite the fact that there isn’t a single big-name designer represented. The outfi ts on display can generally be purchased for less than $250, and fun trumps pretense. As Cole Porter blares from the loudspeakers, the models blow kisses, dance and toss stuffed animals from the runway—a far cry from haute couture. Tickets for the eight-hour extravaganza, ranging from $55 to $80, sold out in hours. Recently, the Tokyo Girls Collection went on the road to Beijing and Paris. “But it’s the opposite of the Paris runway show,” says Fumitaro Ohama, head of the organizing committee, who also runs the fashion site Girlswalker.com.
Around the venue, staffers carry gadgets that can transfer web links to a cell phone just by touching it, enabling attendees to purchase the items they’re viewing before the models have even left the stage. Within a day of the show last September, online sales of clothes and other items topped $600,000.
But Ohama sees the event less as a fashion show than as a festival. The crowd screams when Japanese pop stars Miliyah Kato and Kumi Koda appear, and whoop for a model in a skimpy version of a fl ight attendant’s uniform, actually a paid ad for a travel agency. At booths near the entrance, reps hand out samples of gum, perfume and mascara, as well as cellphone straps with pink teddy bears covered in crystals. “The economy is still hurting,” says Ohama, “so why not try to brighten things up with a little fun?” —KENJI HALL
dispatches
CHICAGO
FUTURE FOODS Homaro Cantu takes careful aim and fi res, hitting his target squarely. Then Ben Roche follows up with a fl amethrower. Finally, they administer the coup de grace—with a knife and fork. For Cantu and Roche, the chefs behind Chicago’s molecular gastronomy restaurant Moto fi ring a red pepper oil–fi lled paintball into a few innocent bratwursts and cooking them with a blowtorch is all in a day’s work.
Challenging culinary preconceptions is what Cantu does best. Part cook, part mad scientist, he fuses haute cuisine with the principals of biochemistry to produce foods like carbonated fruit, laser-baked bread (with crusty insides and doughy outsides) and mayonnaise created using high-pitched sound vibrations. Armed with class IV surgical laser, centrifuge, freeze dryer, lab-grade sonifi er and a Star Trek-like food replicator that prints snacks onto edible paper, he has an undisclosed number of patents under review. Now he’s focusing on an even bigger project: a new television series on Planet Green that will demonstrate how the foods of tomorrow, such as edible packaging peanuts and the so-called “miracle fruit,” a berry that prevents the taste buds from detecting sour or bitter notes, can solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental, hunger and nutrition issues.
Of course, whether items like faux seafood truly can be more appealing than its traditional counterpart remains to be seen. And tasted.
—CHRISTINA COUCH
LOS ANGELES The ride on Angels Flight, “the shortest railway in the world,” is so brief (it clocks in at Fallen Angel under a minute) that someone stumbling across the crowd that forms early one spring morning at the bottom of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles might rightly wonder what the big deal is. But these are train buffs, most of them, and they’re here to bear witness to the return of a beloved miniature rail line after nearly a decade-long absence. “It’s as beautiful as I remember it,” says native Angeleno John Wyatt, as he steps inside Olivet, one of two distinctive orange trams (the other is named Sinai). A bell sounds, and electric motors whir. Olivet climbs the 33-degree slope to the top of the hill. Applause erupts.
Angels Flight fi rst opened in 1901, and though the distance covered is only 315 feet, in the line’s fi rst 50 years of operations the trams were said to have carried more passengers per mile than any other railway in the world—more than 100,000,000. The original version closed in 1969, when the neighborhood was demolished as part of a citywide replanning. It reopened to grateful passengers in 1996.
“There was a crowd of us waiting then, too,” Wyatt adds.
The most recent hiatus came after an accident in 2001, after which a group of dedicated preservationists raised $3.5 million for the renovation.
Angels Flight has been featured in novels by John Fante and Raymond Chandler and was the inspiration for Michael Connelly’s 1999 mystery Angels Flight. It’s also (naturally) been a regular onscreen, from the 1920 silent fi lm All Jazzed Up and Dragnet to the video game Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland.
“The only part of Bunker Hill that remains now is Angels Flight,” says John Welborne, president of the Angels Flight Railway Foundation. Best of all? It costs only 25 cents. —JAMES BARLETT
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