May/June Issue
Are our ship lanes safe?
Our Future is Bleak
Is Delicious
Philanthropic Shoes
Features
Vitality
Attack Here p.39 Our Ship Lanes are ripe for destruction. Are they in any way safe?
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Parkour p.47
Kate Upton p.23
Zombies p.33
Star Wars p.29
These refugees rise above, Literally.
Is there such a thing as too much exposure?
A movie and tv trend on the downslide
Is J.J. Abrams up for the task at hand?
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Vitamins Vitality
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Looper p.9
Louie Gong p.17
Colt 1911 p.21
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Vitality
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The future is bleak, but oh so entertaining!
By Nick Slater
V
iolence in movies, whether or not you approve of such a thing it’s there. If you vehemently oppose it, then Looper isn’t for you, doubly so if you don’t want Looper director Rian Johnson openning up your chest and brain and fuckin’ shit up. Looper is one of the greatest time travel movies of all time, which is really saying something. Time travel is used as a plot device in almost every movie. Some more than others, usually it’s just a flashback, showing the past, or, it’s more plot-centric, like The Matrix. In our minds it’s the late 90’s but really, shit is fucked. Then there are straight up time travel movies, time travel is the bread and butter, the meat and potatos, no time, no travel. The obvious example is Back to the Future, an 80’s time
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travel trilogy of epic pop culture proportions. And now, here to stay, there’s Looper. “What makes Looper a cut above the rest?” You are most likely asking, as you read this on the toilet, eating a burrito. What makes Looper so good, is it’s simplicity. In the future time travel has been invented then instantly made illeagal. Also, murder has become inpossible to commit so mob types in the future combine these future facts together for their benifit. Nobody knows they have time travel, nobody knows that a bunch of ass holes what needed killing disapeared to the future to meet their demise. Meanwhile 30 years in the past their victims appear, are killed, then incinerated by future victim recieving hitmen called Loopers.
But it’s not all fun times, the streets are rampant with the homeless, and in the future a mystery man called The Rainman is closing all the loops. This means he is finding and sending back all the Loopers future selves to be killed by their past selves. But this has many issues, You could maybe remember what you were like all those years ago and talk yourself into letting you go. Though, as Joe (our protagonist) finds out, this is not wise. When his future self appears late, and unbound, he hesitates, and gets coldcocked, and Joe hasn’t seen what we’ve seen. One of the most terrifying movie sequences I’ve ever seen. One of Joe’s Looper friends, Seth (Paul Dano) is talked into letting his old self go, setting into motion a series of terrible events. With Old
Bruce Willis (pictured abouve) sent back to die, but he’s not going to go down with a fight! Joseph Gordon Levitt (Pictured Left) gets pwned by himself, even though he had the upper hand of waiting, with a gun.
Seth runnig rampant through the city changing the future, present seth is captured and has a message carved into his arm, to “be at 75 Wire Street in 15 minutes”, Old Seth ignores it but as he is climbing a fence he notices his are fingers disapearing, then his nose. He desperatly gets in a car and starts driving, losing his tounge and getting long scars on his face, he spots the address above a door but when he goes to slam on the breaks, his foot disapears. He crashes the car and starts hobbling towards the door yelling, loosing the other foot then the legs, then the arms. He reaches the door and knocks on it with his stumps and the door opens to blackness, a gun appears and shoots. Old Seth is grabbed and pulled in, a bloody mess covered with plastic
is seen on an operating table, the beep of hospital machinary is heard, the door closes. WHAT THE FUCK!? RIGHT!? It’s just a good thing that Joe’s older self is a badass Bruce Willis or else Joe would be in pieces like poor Paul Dano. Well, sort of, Old Joe is on a mission, to save his future wife by
So see this movie, watch it, then feel the hole deep down inside you black heart be filled!
Rated R for strong violence, language, some sexuality/nudity and drug content I give Looper five out of... three, fingers. (Sorry Old Seth)
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stopping The Rainman. But since Old Joe is
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from 30 years in the future this involves killing 6 year old boys. Young Joe decides to camp out at one of the potential Rainman-boy’s farm. He
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meets the boy’s mother and they join forces in the defense of her son Cid. Shit pretty much gets even better then,
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shootings and hidings and runnings and future shit, all leading up to a mindbending “I can’t believe he did it” conclusion.
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Features
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Vindictive Vitamins? Vitamins increase the chance of prostate cancer by 17 percent!? By Sharon Begley
S
hould vitamins and supplements carry warning labels like cigarettes do? If so, then vitamin E should get slapped with a surgeon general’s warning. When a huge study examining whether vitamin E supplements can reduce the risk of prostate cancer had to be halted prematurely in 2008, it was because the men taking vitamin E seemed to be getting no benefit from it. In fact, not only did they not benefit, they exhibited a higher risk of prostate cancer than the men taking a placebo. At the time, the 13 percent increased risk was deemed “statistically nonsignificant,” the extra cancers might have occurred by chance. Now, further analysis of that study, called the Selenium and Vitamin E Cancer Prevention Trial (SELECT), dashes that hope: The risk is all too real, the SELECT team reports today in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Specifically, men who took 400 international units
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(I.U.) of vitamin E daily—the dosage you can find in bottles sold in every health store and online— were 17 percent more likely to develop prostate cancer over the seven years they were followed. “People think of vitamins and other supplements as innocuous, even beneficial,” says urologist Eric Klein of the Cleveland Clinic, who co-chaired SELECT. “But they’re not; they can cause harm. There is no reason for men in the general population to take vitamin E supplements.” “There is no reason for men in the general population to take vitamin E supplements.” While no one should change their behavior based a single study, in this case SELECT is only one of many studies showing that vitamin E has no benefit when it comes to preventing or slowing prostate cancer. This one, published earlier this year in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, failed to show that a combination of vitamin E, selenium, and soy prevents progression from precancerous lesions in the prostate to invasive
prostate cancer, as tests on lab sad little animals had suggested. In 2010, many great scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle found that a whole menu of dietary supplements “often suggested for prostate cancer prevention,” including vitamins E and D as well as lycopene (the compound in tomatoes) did no such thing. Even more studies have shown that common doses of vitamin supplements can be harmful. They range from this 2005 study, which found higher levels of mortality among people who take dietary supplements, to the Alpha-Tocophenol, Beta-Carotene Cancer Prevention Trial (ATBC), which in 1998 reported that male smokers who took beta-carotene had an 18 percent increased incidence of lung cancers and an 8 percent increased overall mortality. A 2005 analysis of 19 separate clinical trials concluded that daily intake of vitamin E supplements of 400 units (the standard dose in pills) or more may increase mortality “and should be avoided.” And in just the last three years, large studies have found that “vitamin C may do more harm than good as it may protect cancer cells,” and “intake of vitamins E and C by 15,000 male physicians for 10 years had no health benefits,” as a 2010 paper summarized. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. SELECT was launched in 2001 because earlier research had suggested that selenium or vitamin E might reduce the risk of prostate cancer. In particular, ATBC found that men taking 50 I.U. of vitamin E daily had 32 percent fewer cases of prostate cancer than men in the placebo group. By 2008, however, the SELECT scientists could see that the trial would never find the 25 percent reduction in prostate cancer they hoped for; that, plus the suspicion of an increased risk of prostate cancer among men taking vitamin E, is what brought SELECT to a screeching halt three years ago. The scientists kept track of most of the 35,533 men in the study, however, and have now seen that the increased risk of prostate cancer is no statistical quirk. Of 8,737 men taking 400 units of vitamin E daily, 620 have now developed prostate cancer—that’s 10.9 prostate cancers per 1,000 person-years. Of 8,696 men taking a placebo (the comparison group), 529 (9.3 cancers per 1,000 person-years) developed the disease Taking vitamin E supplements increased the risk of prostate cancer 17 percent. The increased risk
was first apparent during the third year of taking vitamin E, rose every subsequent year—and continued even after the men stopped taking vitamin E, says Klein: “The risk is still there.” Overall, American men have a 16 percent lifetime risk of prostate cancer; a projected 240,890 new cases will be diagnosed this year, and the disease will kill 33,720. There were two glimmers of good news. One was that among men taking both selenium and vitamin E, there was no increased risk of prostate cancer (though no reduced risk, either.) The other was that the prostate cancers in men taking vitamin E were not especially aggressive, says Klein. And why might earlier studies, especially ATBC, have found a decrease in the risk of prostate cancer in men taking 50 I.U. of vitamin E? For one thing, says Klein, those men took 50 I.U. doses, not 400—adding to the evidence that the more of a vitamin you ingest, the more harmful it may be. In addition, the men in that earlier study were all longtime smokers. “That creates a large oxidative stress,” he says, “so we thought we would expect an antioxidant [like vitamin E] to be more helpful.” How many men are putting themselves at risk? More than 50 percent of Americans 60 or older are taking supplements containing vitamin E, the
“There is no reason for men in the general population to take vitamin E supplements.”
The American Cancer Society’s estimates for prostate cancer in the United States for 2013: About 238,590 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed About 29,720 men will die of prostate cancer Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men, behind lung cancer. About 1 man in 36 will die of prostate cancer. Most men diagnosed with prostate cancer do not die from it. More than 2.5 million men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point are still alive today. About 1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in his lifetime
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Louie Gong Get famous, support what ever causes you want, quite your day job. All by drawing on shoes? Why didn’t I think of that!? By Reggie Hammond
L
ouie Gong draws on shoes. That is an extremely simple way of putting it but there it is. Drawing on shoes and skate boards is the catalist for him quiting his job as a child/ family phsychologist so that he could enter the world of art.
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By simply drawing on shoes he makes a living and supports the causes he loves. but that isn’t all. By properly using social media he has become famous enough to meet the Vans cofounder Steve Van Doren and even go onto the Vans van! Pretty exciting eh?
It all started in Washington state, Louie Gong was raised by his grandparents in a Nooksak coast Salish tribal community where he was influenced by the art and the culture. Nooksack, Chinese, French and Scottish, and a Canadian living in the US, Gong is actually a cultural-
identity activist first. He stumbled into a budding career as an artist when he used a new pair of Vans as a canvas. “Vans were things other people had when I was growing up,” he explained. “As an adult, with my own resources, I thought now I can have Vans. But none
of the existing designs like the checkerboard spoke to me or were representative of me, so I bought plain grey.” The plain Vans just sat in Gong’s living room for a couple of weeks until one night, while he was watching “The Family Guy,” he picked up a shoe and a Sharpie and started to doodle. “My cultural influences just came out.” He wore them to work and kickstarted a demand. Co-workers wanted Vans like his too. And when he posted a photo of his shoes on his personal Facebook page, the 30 or 40 comments the image got in the first hour told him he was onto something. Now he has more than 60,000 people interested in him and his shoes. So many people liked and wanted pairs that he started to charge for pairs, and it isn’t hard to see why. He really has a sense of graphic style, a real illustrative eye. He now sells these shoes for quite a bit of money, and to get a pair you have to get on fairly long waiting list. Louie also collaborated with Manatoba Mukluks to sell a line of coastal tribe inspired mukluks and mocasins. He has created designs for phone covers, women’s shoes, a museum wall art exhibit, snowboards, skateboards, drums, etc. And when buying blank Vans for children in his shoe art workshop became to expensive he created a pretty cool art toy. Called ‘Mockups’ you get a little pair of all white Vans style shoes that you can draw or paint on and then wash them and start over. He uses these in workshops where he teaches children to explore there own cultural identity through the medium of art. Students will
interview a partner and then, as a class, explore similarities and differences among the class. After exploring how symbols can be used in design to tell a story, students will work to create symbols that reflect things about themselves. Using their personal symbols, they will come up with ideas for a shoe design that conveys who they are. Students will evaluate their own design solutions and choose their favorite to transfer to a pair of Mockups shoes. They will share their design and
reasoning behind their choice of symbols with the class. anatoba Mukluks to sell a line of coastal tribe inspired mukluks and mocasins. He has created designs for phone covers, women’s shoes, a museum wall art exhibit, snowboards, skateboards, drums, etc. And when buying blank Vans for children in his shoe art workshop became to expensive he created a pretty cool art toy. Called ‘Mockups’ you get a little pair of all white Vans style shoes that you can draw
or paint on and then wash them and start over. He uses these in workshops where he teaches children to explore there own cultural identity through the medium of art. Students will interview a partner and then, as a class, explore similarities and differences among the class. After exploring how symbols can be used in design to tell a story, students will work to create symbols that reflect things about themselves. Using their personal symbols, they will come up with shoe designs.
A Brief History On March 16, 1966, at 704 E. Broadway, Anaheim, California, brothers Paul Van Doren, James Van Doren and three partners opened up the first Vans store.
Skateboarders who liked Vans’ rugged make-up and sticky sole were seen wearing Vans all over Southern California in the early 1970s.
In 1976, Vans introduced the “#44” shoe, and with the help of skateboarders and BMX riders the Vans “Slip-On” became all the rage in Southern California.
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Along the fifty-mile Houston Ship Channel, there are more explosive materials, toxic Gases, and deadly petrochemicals than anywhere else in the country—which is why most security experts agree that it’s one of America’s top Targets. So what’s the worst that could happen if terrorists were to strike? by S. C. Gwynne
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T
he attack begıns in the Houston Ship Channel, in the cargo hold of the Belizeflagged, Singapore-owned container ship Ocean Princess. The vessel is eight hundred feet long. It is stacked from stem to stern with fortyfoot-long steel boxes and looks oddly top-heavy. On international manifests its cargo is listed as “toys and electrical components.” But that’s not all it is carrying. Inside one of the containers, each of which can hold thirty tons of cargo, is a stockpile of terrorist-planted explosives that makes Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bomb look like a fucking firecracker. As the ship steams north and west toward the heart of Houston, there are no signs that anything is wrong. The
America’s Fuel Supply Safe?
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U.S. Coast Guard boards the ship and performs a routine inspection, interviewing the captain and crew but opening no containers. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which uses an x-ray machine to inspect some 10 to 12 percent of containers entering the port, sees nothing suspicious in this shipment and elects not to screen it for shit. But as the ship approaches the giant Shell Oil refinery in Deer Park, the Coast Guard’s port commander receives a panicked call from the Department of Justice’s Counterterrorism Section in Washington. It’s bad news: The Ocean Princess is probably carrying a bomb. The Coast Guard scrambles into action, but it is already too late. Before the cutters can reach
the vessel, an immense blast rocks the channel and surrounding areas. As Homeland Security officials will later discover, the bomb consists mostly of Soviet-era anti-ship mines, originally loaded onto the Ocean Princess in Trieste, Italy, by an obscure but well-organized group of Algerian and Moroccan terrorists. The explosives are triggered by a device known as a GPS detonator, which sets them off when a certain longitude-latitude coordinate is reached. In this case, the coordinates were for Shell’s refinery. Today the terrorists are lucky: The bomb goes off just as the container ship is also passing a sevenhundred-foot liquefied petroleum
gas (LPG) tanker. The blast rips into the side of the tanker, causing yet another large explosion, which in turn both ignites gasoline and crude-oil storage tanks at Shell and causes the tanks’ walls to rupture, sending a river of fire out into the refinery and reaching the far more dangerous pressurized pentane storage tanks. A little more than 11 million gallons of pentane are released, some of which burns and some of which evaporates and forms a vapor cloud, which then explodes with enormous force, leveling buildings and structures in the immediate vicinity. By the time another compartment on the LPG tanker
is breached, sending a new fireball into the sky, more than two hundred people are dead. The container ship is half-submerged, still burning and resting on the bottom of the fifty-footdeep channel. But all this, as all Houstonians and the rest of the world will soon learn, is merely prelude. What happens next is scarcely even imaginable. Charles Dickens once described Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as “hell with the lid off.” His reference was to that city’s vast landscape of smokebelching steel mills, but the metaphor also works for something much closer to home: the grotesquely magnificent stretch of
refineries, petrochemical and other plants, mills, docks, silos, wharves, and warehouses that rise along the banks of the malodorous waterway known as the Houston Ship Channel. Over its full fifty-mile track—from near downtown Houston to Bolivar Roads, on the Gulf of Mexico— the channel houses three hundred plants and is one of the largest concentrations of heavy industry on earth, producing nearly half of the nation’s supply of gasoline and half of its petrochemicals. It comprises the largest refinery in the world (Exxon Mobil, in Baytown) and the sixthlargest seaport. Viewed from the tollway bridge on Houston’s east side, the upper channel can seem
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The idea was to confine all of these poison-laden refineries and chemical plants and ships filled with anhydrous ammonia to their own noxious neighborhoods, generally away from homes and schools and offices.
Sensitivity:
refers to the ease with which an explosive can be ignited or detonated, i.e., the amount and intensity of shock, friction, or heat that is required. Some of the test methods used to determine sensitivity relate to:
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Impact — Sensitivity is expressed in terms of the distance through which a standard weight must be dropped onto the material to cause it to explode.
Friction — Sensitivity is expressed in terms of what occurs when a weighted pendulum scrapes across the material (it may snap, crackle, ignite, and/or explode).
Heat — Sensitivity is expressed in terms of the temperature at which flashing or explosion of the material occurs.
both frightening and, in its own dark, industrial Gothic way, weirdly beautiful. On certain days the whole brutish apparatus seems to hiss into action, spewing fire and emitting long, gorgeously looping plumes of cottony white steam that coil around its steel tanks and spires and rise hundreds of feet into the sky. Dickens, who chronicled England’s industrial revolution, would have felt right at home. But as the above hypothetical attack
suggests, the channel is more than just a spectacular industrial engine. It is also a prime terrorist target. That’s because it is both ground zero for the nation’s petrochemical industry and home to unfathomably large quantities of the deadliest, most combustible, diseasecausing, lung-exploding, chromosome-annihilating, and metal-dissolving substances known to man. The sheer toxicity of it all, in fact, is one of the main reasons the channel zone
evolved as it did: Part of the idea was to confine all of these poison-laden refineries and chemical plants and ships filled with anhydrous ammonia to their own noxious neighborhoods, generally away from homes and schools and offices. You don’t want to put storage tanks next to nursery schools if they have the potential for igniting and leveling every building within a half-mile radius. Chemical plants can kill
people at long range, but it is still a bad idea to put them next to residential subdivisions. Back in the twenties and thirties, when industries began to locate along the channel en masse, this must have seemed like a sound idea. In the year 2004, when terrorist attacks are daily events and people fly planes into the World Trade Center to make a political statement, this sort of unarmored industrial concentration is like having
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a giant target painted on us with a sign, in Arabic, that reads “Attack here.” As most Houston residents can tell you, the Ship Channel has long been considered one of the top strategic targets in the United States. Russian missiles were (and perhaps are) aimed at it. A single well-placed strike would cripple a significant portion of our national economy. Along with the rest of the city, the channel was put on a Code Orange terrorist alert during Super Bowl week in January. Two months later the FBI announced another alert—again Code Orange—specifically for the
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Ship Channel. It is unclear what the feds thought was going to happen. Beyond their disconcertingly vague warnings, they plainly aren’t ever going to share their real concerns with us. Which more or less leaves it to us to imagine what the effects of a terrorist attack might be. The notion that the Ship Channel is an enormous bomb waiting to be detonated is an oft-repeated truism. Everyone agrees that it is, but that tells you nothing about what happens when the bomb actually goes off. As we roll on and off of the now-familiar Code Orange alerts—only one
notch back from Code Red, which means, presumably, that cargo planes loaded with TNT are already winging toward Disney World—it might be helpful to know exactly what it is that we are supposed to be afraid of. By that I do not mean minor bits of terrorism such as strapping one hundred pounds of C-4 explosives to a petroleum barge and sinking it in the channel or running a truck packed with Semtex explosives into a tank farm. Those are mere annoyances. I mean a full-scale, worstcase scenario of the sort the Homeland Security folks are modeling and simulating
and staying up late worrying about, an attack that would have as deep and abiding an effect on the public as the horrors of 9/11. If we are supposed to believe these alerts, it seems only fair to ask: How would it happen in the Houston Ship Channel? To understand how a terrorist strike might affect this vast tangle of smoke and steel, it helps to look at the horrific industrial accidents that already happen there with surprising regularity. Things are always blowing up or burning out of control or leaking in the channel— much as they would be likely to in a terrorist attack.
(Since 1955 the place has even had its own private fire brigade, with two hundred pieces of heavy equipment—Channel Industries Mutual Aid, or CIMA—that does nothing but put out the fires and fix the accidents.) The worst of all the channel disasters was the 1947 explosion of the French freighter S.S.Grandcamp at a dock in Texas City. The ship was loaded with ammonium nitrate, the same stuff McVeigh used to craft his truck bomb in Oklahoma City 48 years later. A fire on the ship caused a blast that leveled docks, warehouses, and a chemical plant;
damaged or destroyed one thousand residences or buildings; and killed 578 people. It remains the worst industrial accident in American history and led to sweeping changes in chemical manufacturing and storage. Still, major accidents continue to happen. In 1979 the tanker Chevron Hawaii exploded at the docks of Shell Oil’s Deer Park refinery, killing 3 people and touching off a cascade of explosions and fires in storage tanks that engulfed Shell’s docks and the nearby channel. The blast tore the ship in half, caused two nearby
gasoline and crude-oil barges to explode, and filled the channel with a twenty-foot wall of burning crude oil. In 1987 a crane operator at Marathon Oil’s Texas City refinery dropped an industrial heater on a storage tank, causing the leak of 30,000 pounds of deadly hydrogen fluoride, which formed a gas cloud. Thousands were evacuated from Texas City, and 800 people were treated for breathing disorders and skin problems. The worst of the recent accidents took place in 1989, when an explosion ripped through a petrochemical plant in Pasadena owned
by the Phillips Petroleum Company. The blast— equivalent to igniting 20,000 pounds of TNT— started in an ethylene reactor and created an orange fireball that was described by one witness as looking like the detonation of an atomic bomb. The explosion was heard 25 miles away, broke windows 3 miles away, leveled most structures on four hundred acres of property, and tossed debris for miles. It killed 23 people, wounded 130, and left a grim wreckage of twisted steel and concrete. To see just how hazardous the products of the
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Jumpin’ off shit an’ shit. These Palestinian refugees found a way to rise above their situations, Literally and figuratively By Mariam Shahin
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In the narrow sandy alleys of the Khan Younis refugee camp Mohammed al-Jakhbeer and Abdallah Enshsi, both 22, navigate their path out of the camp and into the many corners and open spaces of the tiny strip of land which is famous for being the one of the most densely populated places in the world. Abdallah and Mohammed perform mainly at neighbourhood parties. They introduce people to parkour as a new art form. Abdallah is a high school drop-out whose passion as a youth was acrobatics. When he discovered parkour while watching the film Jump London on television, he knew he had found his calling. Five years ago he approached Mohammed, a neighbourhood basketball star and film editing student, to join him and build a team to represent their refugee camp at local competitions and Parkour events. The camps of Gaza are rich in hip hop, rap and other performance arts often associated
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with the underprivileged. The young boys and men of the camp have formed a community of performers that are foremost rich in a ferocious talent, passion and spirit despite the lack of real income generating possibilities. The people of the Khan Younis camp, like most Palestinian refugee camps, many of which have existed for 60 years, are very welcoming. A film crew of four, we were afforded a lot of hospitality during the ten days we filmed with Abdallah and Mohammed. Coffee, tea and juice were always at hand and on one occasion, a wonderful meal of vegetables stuffed with rice was presented to us as a fait acompli. We could not refuse. With a whisper Abdallah’s grandmother, the camp’s bone setter and natural/herbal healer, apologised that the meal did not contain meat. “Times are hard,” she said in a reminder that almost 50 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s population is unemployed. Both Abdallah and Mohammed are unemployed as well, although
they take whatever odd jobs they can: as painters, construction helpers, and even street sweepers. Filming Mohammed and Abdallah performing parkour and free running was an unprecedented challenge for us. When George Azar and I first met the two in October 2010, we were fascinated and filmed with them for two straight grueling days. One of the scenes was in the sand dunes of one of the settlements that Israel had withdrawn from in 2005. In these sand dunes Abdallah and Mohammed had found the perfect place to train young would-be dare devil parkour performers. At the time George found it very difficult to capture all their moves on film and he decided that if we would make a film about them, it would have to be a two camera shoot. It took us six months to get a permit from the Israelis to return to Gaza and we returned with our editor, Eyad Hamam, who operated a second camera. In a few cases, I used a G12 to
capture scenes from yet a third angle. George mounted a GoPro camera on the TukTuk (the vehicle that Mohammed and Abdallah drove in) and thus we were able to capture their journey through Gaza from yet another angle. One of the main logistic challenges we faced while filming inside the refugee camp, was crowd control. Everywhere we went dozens and sometimes hundreds of children followed Mohammed and Abdallah and our cameras. There was never an incident, which interrupted our filming, but we did have to keep the kids organised in one corner or another, a very daunting task. Our veteran colleague, Raed Athamneh (the subject of the films Gaza Fixer and Gaza Fixer II), was instrumental in enabling us to film with ease inside the camps, often soliciting the help of camp residents to keep order while we worked. Towards the end of the filming period, Abdallah and Mohammed had become part of our daily lives, and we a part of theirs. We
invited them for a goodbye meal at our hotel by the sea and we saw how nervous they were to walk onto the hotel patio. They had never been inside a hotel, not to mention a restaurant. On that last evening together we got a further insight into the private lives of these very brave and courageous free runners of Gaza. They were shy to speak to girls, since almost any contact with the opposite sex is prohibited by the customs of their society until marriage. They were eager to learn what the world looks like “on the outside”, if people all live like them or if there is “something else” out there. They wanted the freedom to choose to travel and discover for themselves. Parkour was their way to escape the fate that Israel’s cotinuing blockade of air, sea and land that had so unfairly been imposed on them. A budding physical discipline called parkour is attracting several youth in Gaza, aged between 12 and 23 years old to pass their time training in cemeteries,
former Israeli settlements and in abandoned or run-down buildings. Parkour originated in the suburbs of Paris and originates from the French word “parcours,” meaning route or journey. In a very literal sense the sport is about overcoming obstacles, using your imagination and tackling the restraints of physical barriers to “run through” a journey. It inspires a philosophical outlook on life that reflects this in this hard acrobatic discipline. Mohammed al-Jakhbeer and Abdallah Enshsi started this discipline several years ago and they have been providing entertainment and inspiration for several young refugees who are now learning the art of parkour through observation and replication. Mohammed and Abdallah have decided to form a team called Gaza Parkour, they are taking it upon themselves to train the next generation of parkour athletes to ensure youths can experience this liberating hangnail inducing madness and tough physical discipline. According to Mohammed, parkour
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helps untangle the “anger and depression” that comes with living in the narrow, militarily confined Gaza Strip, home to a population of 1.7 million Palestinians. They believe that, one day, their ticket out of Gaza will be through parkour even though, they joke, “Gaza International airport used to be our only way out and now it’s in ruins.” Neither does there seem to be a future in much of anything else in Gaza. According to United Nations data, 70 percent of the population is under 30, and half of them are, sadly, unemployed. But the raceurs from Khan Yunis refuse to give up. They are all for spreading the word among youth of the sport that, Enshasy says, “helps handle the depressing life in Gaza.” In the narrow sandy alleys of the Khan Younis refugee camp Mohammed al-Jakhbeer and Abdallah Enshsi, both 22, navigate their path out of the camp and into the many corners and open spaces of the tiny strip of land which is
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famous for being the most densely populated camps of pain in the world. Abdallah and Mohammed perform mainly at neighbourhood parties. They introduce people to parkour as a new art form. Abdallah is a high school drop-out whose passion as a youth was acrobatics. When he discovered parkour while watching the film Jump London on television, he knew he had found his calling. Five years ago he approached Mohammed, a neighbourhood basketball star and film editing student, to join him and build a team to represent their refugee camp at local competitions and events. The camps of Gaza are rich in hip hop, rap and other performance arts often associated with the underprivileged. The young boys and men of the camp have formed a community of performers that are foremost rich in talent, passion and spirit despite the lack of real income generating possibilities.
The people of the Khan Younis camp, like most Palestinian refugee camps, many of which have existed for 60 years, are very welcoming. A film crew of four, we were afforded a lot of tasty delicious hospitality during the ten days we filmed film with 30 and 44 mm film with Abdallah and Mohammed. Coffee, tea and juice were always at hand and on one occasion, a wonderful meal of vegetables stuffed with rice was presented to us as a fait acompli. We could, of course, not refuse. With a whisper Abdallah’s grandmother, the camp’s bone setter and natural/herbal healer, apologised that the meal did not contain meat. “Times are hard,” she said in a reminder that almost 50
per cent of the Gaza Strip’s population is, sadly, all the way un-unemployed. Both Abdallah and Mohammed are unemployed as well, although they take whatever odd jobs they can - as painters, construction helpers, and even street sweepers. In one scene in the film, we show Mohammed sweeping the local vegetable market after it closed down. Filming Mohammed and Abdallah performing parkour and free running was an unprecedented challenge for us. When George Azar and I first met the two in October 2010, we were fascinated and filmed with them for two, dusty, straight days. One of the scenes was in the sand dunes of one of the settlements that Israel had withdrawn from in 2005. In these sand dunes Abdallah and Mohammed had found the perfect place to train young amazing gravity defying pant wearing parkour performers.
At the time George found it very difficult to capture all their moves on film and he decided that if we would make a film about them, it would have to be a two camera shoot. It took us six months to get a permit from the Israelis to return to Gaza and we returned with our editor, Eyad Hamam, who operated a second camera. In a few cases, I used a G12 to capture scenes from yet a third angle. George mounted a GoPro camera on the TukTuk (the vehicle that Mohammed and Abdallah drove in) and thus we were able to capture their journey through Gaza from yet another angle. One of the main logistic challenges we faced while filming inside the refugee camp, was crowd control. Everywhere we went dozens and sometimes hundreds of children followed Mohammed and Abdallah and our cameras. There was never an incident, which interrupted our filming, but we did have to keep the kids organised in one corner or
another, a very daunting task. Our veteran colleague, Raed Athamneh (the subject of the films Gaza Fixer and Gaza Fixer II), was instrumental in enabling us to film with ease inside the camps, often soliciting the help of camp residents to keep order while we worked. Towards the end of the filming period, Abdallah and Mohammed had become part of our daily lives, and we a part of theirs. We invited them for a goodbye meal at our hotel by the sea and we saw how nervous they were to walk onto the hotel patio. They had never been inside a hotel, not to mention a restaurant. On that last evening together we got a further insight into the private lives of these very brave and courageous free runners of Gaza. They were shy to speak to girls, since almost any contact with the opposite sex is prohibited by the customs of their society until marriage. They were eager to learn what the world looks like “on the outside�, if people all live.
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A Vagabond’s guide to Beer Zythology: The Study of Beer and Beer making, including the role particular ingredients play in the brewing process
Water
Wheat
Hops
Yeast
BEER
There are over 400 different types of Beer Belgium has the most individual beer brands in the world, When special one-o beers are included, the total number of Belgian beer brands is approximately 8,700
Healthy Beer Beer contains almost all of the minerals we need to survive. It was a staple of many diets during the Middle Ages, when nutrition was rare. Drinking wasn’t just for adults, children also consumed beer as a source of nutrients.
Alcohol Percentage cap in Utah, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Kansas, and Colorado
or more
3.2 4
No Percentage Cap in the other 45 States
Cenosillicaphobia: The fear of an empty glass - manifests itself in a number of circumstances and the symptoms can be uncomfortable at best, downright terrifying at worst.
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Beer Bones
Oh the places Beer goes...
According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, beer “Protects bone-mineral density because of it’s high levels of silicon. This allows the deposit of calcium andother minerals into bone tissue.
Milk is for babies. When you grow up you have to drink beer. -Arnold Schwarzenegger
“Beer is proof god loves us” -Ben Franklin
Required Beer Babylonian King Hummurabi decreed that each person was to have a daily ration of beer, determined by their social status. He went on to say that women would be drowned if they served bad beer.
21
The Legal Drinking age for
AMERICA
And Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, United Arab Emirates, American Samoa, Guam, Micronesia, Mariana, Palau, and the Solomon Islands. The rest of the World is 18 years of age or below.