Ontario Building About 500 Electric Vehicle EV Charging Stations- Here’s Where

July 13, 2016 The Silo 2 Comments

Ontario is building almost 500 electric vehicle EV charging stations at over 250 convenient locations across the province to help reduce greenhouse gas pollution and fight climate change.

The province is working with 24 public- and private-sector partners to create an unprecedented network of public charging electric vehicle stations in cities, along highways, at workplaces and at various public places across Ontario. This includes over 200 Level 3 and nearly 300 Level 2 charging stations. The entire network will be in service by March 31, 2017.

The province’s $20-million investment under Ontario’s Green Investment Fund will expand charging infrastructure across the province and will help address “range anxiety,” a common concern of consumers regarding the distance electric vehicles can travel compared to traditional vehicles. Building a more robust network of public chargers across Ontario allows electric vehicle owners to plan longer trips knowing that charging stations are as readily available as gas stations. With the new network of stations, electric vehicle drivers will be able to travel confidently from Windsor to Ottawa or from Toronto to North Bay and within and around major urban centres.

The $325-million Green Investment Fund, an initial investment in Ontario’s new five-year Climate Change Action Plan, is already strengthening the economy, creating good jobs and driving innovation while fighting climate change — a strong signal of what Ontarians can expect from the plan and proceeds from the province’s cap and trade program. These investments will help secure a healthy, clean and prosperous low-carbon future and transform the way we live, move, work and adapt to our environment while ensuring strong, sustainable communities.

Investing in climate action is part of the government’s economic plan to build Ontario up and deliver on its number-one priority to grow the economy and create jobs. The four-part plan includes helping more people get and create the jobs of the future by expanding access to high-quality college and university education. The plan is making the largest infrastructure investment in hospitals, schools, roads, bridges and transit in Ontario’s history and is investing in a low-carbon economy driven by innovative, high-growth, export-oriented businesses. The plan is also helping working Ontarians achieve a more secure retirement.

QUOTES

“By investing in charging infrastructure that is fast, reliable and affordable, we are encouraging more Ontarians to purchase electric vehicles, reducing greenhouse gas pollution and keeping our air clean.”

— Steven Del Duca, Minister of Transportation

“Transportation is one of the single biggest contributors to climate change. Supporting more charging stations across the province will help to reduce greenhouse gas pollution by making it more convenient for drivers of electric vehicles to get around.”

— Glen Murray, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change

QUICK FACTS

An interactive map of the EVCO network of stations will be easily accessible on

Ontario 511. Station location data will also be posted on Ontario’s Open Data Catalogue to allow software developers and other interested parties to use the data in their mobile application or digital product development.

Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan is providing people and businesses with tools and incentives to accelerate the use of clean technology that exists today.
A shift to low- and zero-emission vehicles is vital to the fight against climate change and achieving Ontario’s greenhouse gas pollution reduction target of 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
Green Investment Fund projects include: more electric vehicle charging stations; energy retrofits for single-family homes and affordable housing; support for Indigenous communities, industry and small and medium-sized businesses, and helping local organizations fight climate change.
Greenhouse gases from cars account for more emissions than those from industries such as iron, steel, cement, and chemicals combined.
There are nearly 7,000 electric vehicles currently on the road in Ontario.
Over 200 applications to the Electric Vehicle Charger Ontario program were received between Dec. 21, 2015 and Feb. 12, 2016, totalling more than $165 million in grant requests.

LEARN MORE

Ontario’s Electric Vehicle Incentive Program

Ontario 511 Climate Change Action Plan

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

	*BACKGROUNDER*
Ministry of Transportation

Electric Vehicle Charging Stations

July 13, 2016

The province is investing nearly $20 million from Ontario’s Green Investment Fund to build almost 500 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at over 250 locations in Ontario by March 31, 2017.

City/Town	Number of Chargers	Location of Chargers
Central Region	Level 2: 223 Level 3: 84
Barrie	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 446 Bayfield St.
Beamsville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 5005 Ontario St.
Beaverton	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 84 Beaverton Ave.
Bolton	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Albion Bolton Community Centre – 150 Queen St. South
Bradford	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 440 Holland St. West
Brampton	Level 2: 6 Level 3: 0	Soccer Centre Recreation Facility – 1495 Sandalwood Pkwy. East Heart Lake Conservation Area – 10818 Heart Lake Rd. Claireville Conservation Area – 8180 Hwy 50
Burlington	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 2	IKEA – 1065 Plains Rd. East Appleby Crossing – 2435 Appleby Line
Caledon	Level 2: 3 Level 3: 1	Albion Hills Conservation Area Chalet – 16500 Regional Rd. Albion Hills Conservation Area Beach Parking – 16500 Regional Rd. Glen Haffy Conservation Area – 19245 Airport Rd. Margaret Dunn Library – 20 Snelcrest Dr.
Collingwood	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 285 First St. Tim Horton’s – 4 High St.
Elmvale	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 68 Yonge St. South
Fort Erie	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 325 Garrison Rd. Tim Horton’s – 1167 Garrison Rd.
Goodwood	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 0	Claremont Field Centre – 4290 Westney Rd. North
Hamilton	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 2	Centre on Barton – 1275 Barton St. East Tim Horton’s – 1470 ON-6 Tim Horton’s – 473 Concession St.
Keswick	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Glenwoods Centre – 443 The Queensway South
Markham	Level 2: 10 Level 3: 2	123 Commerce Valley Dr. West 125 Commerce Valley Dr. West 50 Minthorn Blvd. 140 Allstate Pkwy. Armadale Crossing – 7690-7770 Markham Rd. 80 Allstate Parkway
Midhurst	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Simcoe County Museum – 1151 Highway 26
Midland	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 16815 ON-12
Milton	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Campbellville Country Court Plaza – 35 Crawford Cres.
Mississauga	Level 2: 58 Level 3: 20	80 Courtneypark Dr. 5800 Explorer Dr. Meadowvale Corporate Centre – 6880 Financial Dr. 5750 Explorer Dr. 2085 Hurontario St. 4701/4715 Tahoe Blvd. Indian Line Campground – 7625 Finch Ave. West Pearson International Airport – 6301 Silver Dart Dr. Pearson International Airport – 8 Network Rd. Pearson International Airport – 3111 Convair Dr. Hilton Mississauga – 6750 Mississusauga Rd. 2630 Skymark Ave. Novo-nordisk – 2680 Skymark Ave. Airway Centre – 5935 Airport Rd. 30 Eglinton Ave. West
Newmarket	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 1100 Davic Dr.
Niagara Falls	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 8089 Portage Rd.
Oakville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	Tim Horton’s – 228 Wyecroft Rd.
Orangeville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 23 Broadway Ave.
Orillia	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 320 Memorial Ave. Tim Horton’s – 25 Colborne St. East
Oshawa	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	Best Western Oshawa – 559 Bloor St. West
Pickering	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Petticoat Creek Conservation Area – 1100 Whites Rd.
Richmond Hill	Level 2: 9 Level 3: 0	30 Leek Cres. 38 Leek Cres. 95 Mural St. 1725 16th Ave. Swan Lake Centre – 1229 Bethesda Sideroad
St Catharines	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 170 4th Ave. South
Stayner	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Clearview Joint Emergency Services Operations Centre – 6993 ON-26
Stouffville	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 0	Bruce’s Mill Conservation Area – 3291 Stouffville Rd.
Toronto	Level 2: 121 Level 3: 25	IKEA Etobicoke – 1475 The Queensway IKEA North York – 15 Provost Dr. St. Joseph’s Health Centre – 30 The Queensway Royal Bank Plaza – 200 Bay St. University Centre – 383 University Ave. 5775 Yonge St. Lucliff Place – 700 Bay St. York Mills Centre – 4325 Yonge St. MaRS Centre – 661 University Ave. Yorkville Village – 87 Avenue Rd. Madison Centre – 4950 Yonge St. Citibank – 123 Front St. 110 Yonge St. 525 University Ave. 175 Bloor St. Metro Centre – 200 Wellington St. Airport Marriott – 901 Dixon Rd. Maple Leaf Square – 15 York St. Air Canada Centre – 50 Bay St. Air Miles Tower – 438 University Ave. 720 Bay St. 655 Bay St. 5001 Yonge St. Adelaide Place – 181 University Ave. 2075 Kennedy Rd. Dynamic Funds Tower – 1 Adelaide St. East Atria – 2235 Sheppard Ave. East 30 Adelaide St. East Commerce West – 401 and 405 The West Mall SNC-Lavalin – 304 The East Mall Burnhamthorpe Square – 10-20 Four Seasons Place Morneau Shepall – 895 Don Mills Rd. 145 King St. West 150 King St. West Sun Life Centre – 200 King St. West Manulife Centre – 55 Bloor St. West Bloor Islington Place – 3250 Bloor St. West 33 Bloor St. West Scotiabank Plaza – 40 King St. West 115 Gordon Baker Rd. Foresters – 789 Don Mills Rd. 277 Wellington St. West Glen Rouge Conservation Area – 7450 Kingston Rd. Milliken Crossing – 5631 – 5671 Steeles Ave. East Black Creek Pioneer Village – 1000 Murray Ross Parkway Humber River Hospital – 1235 Wilson Ave.
Tottenham	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Tottenham Mall – 55 Queen St. South
Vaughan	Level 2: 4 Level 3: 3	TRCA Head Office – 101 Exchange Ave. Joint Operations Centre – 2800 Rutherford Rd. IKEA – 200 Interchange Way
Vineland Station	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 3335 North Service Rd.
Washago	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Washago Carpool Lot – HWY 11/169
Whitby	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 0	Taunton Gardens – 320 Taunton Rd. East
Woodbridge	Level 2: 3 Level 3: 0	Boyd Conservation Area – 8739 Islington Ave. Kortright Centre – 9550 Pine Valley Dr.
East Region	Level 2: 17 Level 3: 49
Arnprior	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 3	Tim Horton’s – 201 Madawaska Blvd. Metro/Food Basics – 375 Daniel St. South McDonald’s – 16 Baskin Dr. West
Bancroft	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 234 Hastings St. North
Barrhaven	Level 2: 2 Level 3: 0	Ottawa Park and Ride – 3347 Fallowfield Rd.
Belleville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 218 Bell Blvd.
Brockville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 2454 Parkdale Ave. Tim Horton’s – 77 William St.
Campbellford	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 148 Grand Rd.
Carleton Place	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 144 Franktown Rd.
Casselman	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Metro/Food Basics – 21 Richer Close
Cornwall	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 3	Tim Horton’s – 81 Tollgate Rd. West McDonald’s – 1301 Brookdale Ave. St. Hubert – 705 Brookdale Ave.
Deep River	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 33235 Hwy 17
Embrun	Level 2: 2 Level 3: 0	Embrun Arena – 8 Blais St.
Fenelon Falls	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 23 Lindsay St.
Gloucester	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	St. Hubert – 2484 Boulevard St. Joseph
Hawkesbury	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	St. Hubert – 456 County Rd. 17 Tim Horton’s – 418 Main St. East
Johnstown	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Gas Bar – 2618 CR-2
Kanata	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Ottawa Park and Ride – 130 Earl Grey Dr.
Kemptville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	TSC Stores – 2966 County Rd. 43
Kingston	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 681 Princess St.
Lindsay	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	Lindsay Recreation Complex – 133 Adelaide St. South Tim Horton’s – 85 Mt Hope St.
Madoc	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 14118 Hwy 62 Tim Horton’s – 14121 ON-7
Manotick	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 989 River Rd.
Napanee	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 478 Centre St. North
Nepean	Level 2: 2 Level 3: 0	Ben Franklin Place – 101 Centrepointe Dr.
Newcastle	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 361 King Ave. East
Ottawa	Level 2: 3 Level 3: 8	McDonald’s – 670 Bronson Ave. City of Ottawa Fire Administration Building – 1445 Carling Ave. St. Hubert – 4010 Riverside Dr. Ottawa Public Parking Lot – 687 Somerset IKEA – 2685 Iris St.
Pembroke	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 805 Pembroke St. East Tim Horton’s – 11 Robinson Ln.
Perth	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 35 Dufferin St.
Peterborough	Level 2: 7 Level 3: 4	Tim Horton’s – 1527 Water St. Lansdowne Place Mall – 645 Lansdowne St. Norwood Town Hall – 2357 County Rd. 45 King Street Parking Garage – 200 King St. Memorial Centre Arena – 151 Lansdowne St. West Riverview Park Zoo – 1230 Water St. Downtown Lakefield Public Parking – 39 Queen St.
Picton	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Downtown Picton Public Parking – 55 King St.
Port Hope	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 175 Rose Glen Rd. North
Port Perry	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 14500 Simcoe St.
Rockland	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	Metro/Food Basics – 9071 County Rd. 17 Tim Horton’s – 2875 Laporte St.
Northeast Region	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 24
Azilda	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 514 Notre Dame St. East
Burk’s Falls	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 27 Commercial Dr.
Elliot Lake	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 269 King’s Hwy 108 Tim Horton’s – 261 ON-108
Espanola	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 701 Centre St.
Gravenhurst	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 1105 Bethuine Dr. Tim Horton’s – 150 Talisman Dr.
Huntsville	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 44 ON-60
Kapuskasing	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 240 Government Rd. Tim Horton’s – 8 Government Rd. East
Kirkland Lake	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 155 Government Rd. West Tim Horton’s – 175 Government Rd. West
New Liskeard	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 883350 Hwy 65 West Tim Horton’s – 883307 ON-65
North Bay	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 999 McKeown Ave. Tim Horton’s – 114 Drury St.
Parry Sound	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 118 Bowes St.
Port Severn	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Jag’s Petro Canada – 41 Lone Pine Rd.
Sault Ste. Marie	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 673 Trunk Rd. Tim Horton’s – 223 Second Line West
Sudbury	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 914 Newgate Ave.
South Porcupine	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 4556 ON-101
Timmins	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 520-522 Algonquin Blvd. East
Wawa	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 92 Mission Rd.
Northwest Region	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 7
Dryden	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 520 Government St. Tim Horton’s – 655 Government St.
Fort Frances	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 831 Kings Highway Tim Horton’s – 525 Hwy 11 West
Kenora	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 900 Highway 17 East
Thunder Bay	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 770 Memorial Ave. Tim Horton’s – 121 East Ave.
West Region	Level 2: 33 Level 3: 47
Amherstburg	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	The Libro Centre – 3295 Meloche Rd.
Arthur	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 2	Arthur Library and Medical Centre – 110 Charles St. East Arthur Sports Complex – 158 Domville St.
Brantford	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 73 King George Rd. Tim Horton’s – 1290 Colborne St. East
Cambridge	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 416 Hespeler Rd.
Cayuga	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 51 Talbot St.
Chatham	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 710 Richmond St. Tim Horton’s – 33 3rd St.
Clifford	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Clifford Community Complex – 2 Brown St. South
Clinton	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 300 Ontario St.
Drumbo	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Mister Steak Highway Travel Plaza – 80667 Oxford Rd. 29
Essex	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 4	Essex Centre Sports Complex – 60 Fairview Ave. West Colechester Harbour – 100 Jackson St.
Exeter	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	153 Main St. North
Goderich	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 354 Bayfield Rd.
Guelph	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 3	Social Services Building – 138 Wyndham St. North Puslinch Library – 29 Brock Rd. South N Hanlon Park Mall – 218 Silvercreek Pkwy.
Hanover	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	McDonald’s – 800 10th St. Tim Horton’s – 639 10th St.
Harriston	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 182 Elora St.
Ingersoll	Level 2: 2 Level 3: 1	Downtown Ingersoll Public Parking – 16 King St.
Innisfil	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 940 Innisfil Beach Rd.
Kitchener	Level 2: 8 Level 3: 0	50 Queen St. North 55 King St. West
Leamington	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 214 Talbot St.
London	Level 2: 6 Level 3: 1	Wellington Commons – 1210 Wellington Rd. South Tim Horton’s – 146 Clarke Rd. City Centre – 380 Wellington St.
Meaford	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 291 Sykes St. South
Mount Forest	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Mount Forest Sports Complex – 850 Princess St.
Owen Sound	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 1015 10th St. West
Port Colborne	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 429 Main St. West
Port Dover	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 1 St Andrew St.
Port Elgin	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 278 Goderich St.
Sarnia	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 1399 Colborne Rd.
Simcoe	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 77 Queensway East
Southampton	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 0	Saugeen First Nation Gas Bar – 43 Cameron Dr.
Stratford	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 1040 Ontario St.
Strathroy	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 269 Caradoc St. South
Tillsonburg	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 2	Tim Horton’s – 401 Simcoe St.
Wallaceburg	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 848 Dufferin Ave.
Wasaga Beach	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	McDonald’s – 1275 Mosley St.
Waterloo	Level 2: 7 Level 3: 0	Northland Business Centre – 60 Northland Rd. Waterloo Corporate Campus – 180 Northfield Dr. West / 595 Parkside Dr.
Welland	Level 2: 1 Level 3: 1	Fitch Street Plaza – 200 Fitch St
Wiarton	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 445 Berford St.
Windsor	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 80 Park St. East
Wingham	Level 2: 0 Level 3: 1	Tim Horton’s – 33 Josephine St.
Woodstock	Level 2: 2 Level 3: 1	Quality Inn – 580 Bruin Blvd.

Some of the above noted locations may be subject to change prior to March 31, 2017.

Level 2 charging stations use a 240 volt system (similar to a clothes dryer plug) and can fully charge a vehicle from zero per cent charge in about four to six hours.

Level 3 charging stations (also known as Direct Current Fast Chargers or DCFC) use a 480 volt system and can charge a vehicle to 80 per cent in about 30 minutes. These stations allow EV drivers to charge their vehicles about eight times faster than Level 2 charging stations, and permit them to travel further than ever before.

Culture

Albuquerque’s Joy Junction Homeless Shelter Is Turning 30

July 11, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Joy Junction is three decades old. It is hard to believe the shelter I founded is 30 this year, and that I’ve spent more than half my life at what has obviously now become a lifetime calling. Looking back, it seems just like a short time ago that I came up the driveway of our 52-acre property wanting to reach out to homeless families with food, shelter and the love of Jesus Christ.

We’re currently sheltering as many as 300 people nightly, and providing more than 16,000 meals each month from a fully licensed kitchen. Born in England, I emigrated to the U.S. in 1978 with $50.00 in my pocket and a one way ticket. I ended up homeless in mid 1981 and early 1982, and in that same year “landed” in Santa Fe. It was there where God brought some amazing people into my life, who encouraged me and helped me begin my first ministry. My calling to work with the homeless began to emerge. In 1986, I left Santa Fe, took a few months off and moved to Albuquerque. There I ended up starting Joy Junction, never envisioning the scope of what it would become.

The vision I had was for a refuge where the entire family unit could stay together at one of the most difficult times in their lives. I wanted to ensure that husbands and wives had the support of each other, and could provide more support for each other and their kids than they might otherwise be able to if split up. I had no idea what adventures, struggles and trials would lie ahead.

Jeremy Reynalds, Ph.D. Founder and CEO Joy Junction Inc.

The full story is told in my book “From Destitute to Ph.D.,” but here are some of the highlights. The shelter grew quickly in the following four years, but quite often, unmanaged and fast growth can be the downfall of an organization of any kind, whether a ministry or not. Our bills were exceeding our income and we nearly folded. Due to God’s grace we stayed afloat. During those first years, I also worked a part time job to put food on my own family’s table, taught a regular Bible study at the shelter and tried to get the word about what we were trying to do. In 1991, I felt it was time I went back to school. I tried a couple of summer classes at the University of New Mexico, and earned a bachelor’s degree with a focus on journalism in 1996 and a master’s degree in communication in 1998. Along the way I also enjoyed a number of internships at various media in Albuquerque, as well as hosting a couple of radio shows.

Looking back, I can see how all these media experiences helped me better promote Joy Junction and the plight of the homeless. I have a deep appreciation for our local media. It is sad that reporters are routinely vilified and criticized but rarely praised. In 1999, I was accepted to do a Ph.D. intercultural education at Biola University in Los Angeles. I graduated in 2006, and my doctoral dissertation dealt with the way the media portray America’s homeless culture. In ( about) 1999, I also met a fellow Brit by the name of Dan Wooding, the founder of a very unique news service dealing with the plight of persecuted Christians as well as aspects of popular culture. I have written for the ASSIST News Service ever since then, and have traveled to a number of countries internationally reporting for them.

In my post Ph.D. years, the shelter continued to grow in budget and services offered. In 2009, due to the generosity of a local businessman, we added a mobile feeding unit we dubbed the Lifeline of Hope. It operates seven days a week 365 days a year, providing food, water and toiletries to people who can afford either a meal or a place to stay-but not both In late 2006 I went through a divorce and was single for a number of years. In March 2015, I got married to my wife Elma. She is the love of my life, and shares the same passion as me for helping feed the hungry and house the homeless. Elma has quickly become an integral part of Joy Junction and is loved by guests and staff alike.

The future for Joy Junction is looking bright, with numerous renovations in 2015 occurring at our aging property. For the comfort of our guests we upgraded the air conditioning at our main building, replaced windows, and put in a new driveway to help make visiting our facility a much less “bumpy” experience. In addition, we have demolished an old and unused chapel on our property to prepare the way for much needed new construction. With the Lord as my guide and my wife at my side, I look forward to the next three decades helping the disenfranchised, marginalized, homeless and hungry. I hope you will consider joining us. For the Silo, Jeremy Reynalds and Joy Junction. (www.joyjunction.org)

Gaming

Newegg Widens Selection of Gaming Headsets- Affordable and Multi-purpose

July 7, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Newegg, the leading tech-focused e-retailer in North America, today announced that gamers can now get the full gaming audio experience with its new selection of affordable headsets from Badasheng. Built to offer the best mix of price, audio performance, and comfort, the Badasheng headsets feature multi-platform compatibility with most gaming systems and smart devices, enabling full chat capability via a detachable and adjustable microphone.

The Badasheng gaming headsets include 40-mm Neodymium-32 (NdFeB) magnet speakers that deliver amazing depth, audio clarity, and strong bass to elevate the gaming experience. Four new models are now available on Newegg’s e-commerce site from the BDS-363 and BDS-939G series. Each model has different features such as up to 7-in-1 or multiplatform compatibility with a fully adjustable headband and ear cup. The HUHD HW-398 series are 2.4-GHz optical wireless headsets with noise cancellation. Most models are available in a variety of color options and all models feature an intuitive detachable and adjustable microphone. All models include system cable connectors such as micro USB as well as a detachable in-line controller for maximum flexibility with up to 12 hours of uninterrupted gaming on a single charge.

Featuring simple, plug-and-play connection to PlayStation^® 4 and Xbox One gaming consoles (with Microsoft adapter), PC and Mac^® computers, and even tablets and smartphones via a 3.5-mm jack (wired models), the headsets’ quality sound production means gamers can enjoy both high-quality background sound and clear chatting when battling it out with friends. With a high sensitivity (-67 db) microphone, the headphones solve the problem of low chat voice, keeping gamers fully immersed in the action. The lightweight design, soft ear cushion and padding, and adjustable headband keep gamers comfortable even after long hours of wear. The in-line audio controller allows gamers to effortlessly adjust volume levels without any interruption to the game, as well as play and pause music and answer and end calls when connected to smart phones and tablets.

“We want to provide our gaming customers with a range of options to fit their budgets and needs,” said Jackie Wen, senior product manager at Badasheng. “With the Badasheng headsets, casual gamers now have another affordable headset selection that can bring them an enjoyable audio experience.”

Pricing & Availability:
The headsets, which are now available for purchase at exclusive Newegg pricing, are backed by a 12-month warranty and Newegg’s highly rated customer service and fulfillment. A 15 percent discount with promotion code “MKPL5BH” can be applied when purchased; the promotion ends July 25 this year.

The price range is from $23.99 USD to $69.99 USD, depending upon the features and the models. (Check out avail. deals at Amazon USA : http://amzn.to/1Yb27h4) For the Silo, Peter Schuyler.

About Shenzen Bada Sheng Electronic Co. Ltd.
Shenzhen Bada Sheng Electronic Co.,Ltd is a leading manufacturer in professional headphones, established in 2005, with factory size at 86,000 square feet with more than 300 employees including over 30 production technicians, 15 R&D and production, and QA/QC departments. All products have gained the CE, FCC, CA, RoHS Reach, sound pressure certificates, and ISO9001:2008 quality management system certification. Bada Sheng Electronic is devoted to offering high quality sound products with great pre-sales/post-sales service to customers.

About Newegg Inc.
Newegg Inc. is the leading electronics-focused e-retailer in the United States. It owns and operates Newegg.com (www.newegg.com) which was founded in 2001 and regularly earns industry-leading customer service ratings. The award-winning website has more than 30 million registered users and offers customers a comprehensive selection of the latest consumer electronics products, detailed product descriptions and images, as well as how-to information and customer reviews. Using the site’s online tech community, customers have the opportunity to interact with other computer, gaming and consumer electronics enthusiasts. Newegg Inc. is headquartered in City of Industry, California. The Newegg Hybrid Center is located at 18045 Rowland St., City of Industry, CA 91748.

Fashion

Absolutely Fabulous Infographic Celebrates Release Of Movie

July 5, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

The release of the new Absolutely Fabulous movie is set for this month, and here from our friends at The Rug Seller we’re really looking forward to it. Like Edina and Patsy, we appreciate the finer things in life – one of our newest collections for 2016 is the Christian Lacroix range, one of Eddy’s favourite fashion designers. This infographic takes a look at the most outrageous outfits from the famous series, the characters’ favourite designers as well as some of the funniest quotes from the series – Saffron can always be relied on to come up with some memorable insults. There’s also some facts that you may not have known about Ab Fab. For the Silo, Georgia Davies.

Don’t be fooled- this might seem like a commercial but it’s a trailer 😉

Watch the latest movie trailers via our friends at Tribute.ca

Vintage

Chinese Newspaper Baskets

June 29, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

2chinese_paper_baskets1 — Surprisingly sturdy and functional wastebaskets

Okay I admit it, newspapers are dead. But maybe in China they aren’t. Or are. Because in a local bargain shop I discovered a cache of wastebaskets in three different sizes made entirely out of newspapers: Chinese newspapers to be exact. And that started me thinking.

It seems probable that in China, or somewhere near there, an active recycling program is taking place. Instead of shredding or burning them for landfill, some sort of manufacturing facility is turning clean, bright and seemingly unread newspapers into functional everyday objects. Does this mean that the newspaper industry is suffering in China? Is there a surplus of printed newspapers? Are more Chinese people getting their news from digital media than print? Who can say. My phone calls to the Chinese embassy consulate in Toronto about these pressing issues were not returned.

The irony of wastebaskets made out of, well, waste, is not (ahem) wasted on me.

These products are powerful “green” metaphors produced in one of the most polluting nations on the planet. The industrialization of China is full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. Consumer goods? They want everything we have, so it’s hard to claim any moral high ground. Anyway, there is an environmental statement here, intended or not. I’m just not sure what it is.

On the other hand, they are just really fun and handy wastebaskets that feel great when you pick them up by their long, soft handles. I kind of want one.

Supplemental:

In Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufacturing Landscapes, about Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, we learn there are whole towns in China dedicated to breaking down and “smelting” the useable metals out of discarded electronics. When you choose to buy a new DVD player because it’s cheaper than repairing your old one, this is likely where your old one goes. Apparently you can smell these towns a mile off. The Chinese government sure knows a thing or two about recycling. But what would it cost to do this kind of metal recovery safely? What would it cost to make baskets out of the millions of unread, discarded and obsolete print newspapers in Canada?

Culture

Still Think UFO ‘s Are Fringe?

June 27, 2016 The Silo 1 Comment

How do you take in and digest a weekend of UFO lectures when multiple talks happen simultaneously in multiple locations? That was the challenge I faced at the well attended Brant Cosmic UFO Expo. You see, the programming ran deep [click here to learn more] and I felt a certain allegiance to those speakers best representing an open-minded but scientific and factual approach to the UFO phenomena. For the record, UFO’s are becoming less and less a fringe new age topic. Recently, Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has made several interesting comments about her position on UFO’s (or using the modern term: UAP’s- unidentified aerial phenomena). Should she be elected she has stated that #disclosure will be forthcoming and if UAP’s are indeed real and do not hold a national security threat all information will be publicly revealed. Still think UFO’s are fringe? I didn’t think so. For the Silo, Jarrod Barker.

Some of the highlights for me included:

Sitting this close to UFO legend Travis Dalton
Friday night screening of Travis’ retrospective “what happened” film

Good times- meeting and talking with other UFO enthusiasts
Fantastic group meal catered by the Best Western Brant Park Inn and delicious pie for dessert

World renowned Speaker and sometime AM Coast to Coast guest host Richard Dolan emphasized the threat that UFO technology poses to the Oil Economy

Outside the various lecture locations there were interesting vendors and organizations such as FIGU Landesgruppe Canada who displayed a sick compendium of Ancient Symbols from all over the world

Nick Pope travelled from Britain to explain the recent massive UFO document release by the British Department of Defense
The Calvine UFO photo! (Well not the actual photo- but a reconstruction that Nick helped create based on the original photo that used to be on his office wall)

Speaking with the lovely Elizabeth April about Past Life Exploration and her process of painting “inter-dimensional self-portraits

Culture

Ontario Basic Income Pilot Begins- Special Advisor Hugh Segal Appointed

June 24, 2016 The Silo 3 Comments

The province has appointed the Honourable Hugh Segal to provide advice on the design and implementation of a Basic Income Pilot in Ontario, as announced in the 2016 Budget.

Basic income, or guaranteed annual income, is a payment to eligible families or individuals that ensures a minimum level of income. Ontario will design and implement a pilot program to test the growing view that a basic income could help deliver income support more efficiently, while improving health, employment and housing outcomes for Ontarians.

As Special Advisor on Basic Income, Mr. Segal will draw on his expertise in Canadian and international models of basic income and consult with thought leaders to help Ontario design a pilot.

Mr. Segal will deliver a discussion paper to the province by the fall to help inform the design and implementation of the pilot, on a pro bono basis. The discussion paper will include advice about potential criteria for selecting target populations and/or locations, delivery models and advice about how the province could evaluate the results of the Basic Income Pilot. Ontario will undertake further engagement with experts, communities and other stakeholders as it moves towards design and implementation.

Supporting Ontarians through a Basic Income Pilot is part of the government’s economic plan to build Ontario up and deliver on its number-one priority to grow the economy and create jobs. The four-part plan includes investing in talent and skills, including helping more people get and create the jobs of the future by expanding access to high-quality college and university education. The plan is making the largest investment in public infrastructure in Ontario’s history and investing in a low-carbon economy driven by innovative, high-growth, export-oriented businesses. The plan is also helping working Ontarians achieve a more secure retirement.

QUOTES

“Ontario is taking a leading role in piloting a modern Basic Income, and we are thrilled that the Honourable Hugh Segal will be lending us his considerable expertise in this regard. We want to ensure that we are developing a thoughtful, evidence-based approach to test the idea of a Basic Income, and we look forward to Mr. Segal’s advice as we begin this work.”

— Dr. Helena Jaczek, Minister of Community and Social Services

“I am delighted to be working with the government to help lay the groundwork for a Basic Income Pilot in Ontario. The potential for a Basic Income to transform income security in Ontario and across the country is tremendous, and I look forward to contributing to this bold initiative.”

— The Honourable Hugh Segal

QUICK FACTS

Finland, Netherlands and Kenya are all looking at developing pilot projects that test the idea of a basic or annual guaranteed income.
MINCOME in 1975-78 tested the idea of a guaranteed annual income in Dauphin, Manitoba.

LEARN MORE

About social services

Send us your thoughts via smart device and computer videocamera- [vidrack align="center"]

L’Ontario va de l’avant avec le Projet pilote portant sur le revenu de base

La province nomme Hugh Segal conseiller special

La province a nommé l’honorable Hugh Segal pour lui donner des conseils sur la conception et la mise en œuvre d’un Projet pilote portant sur le revenu de base en Ontario, tel qu’annoncé dans le budget de 2016.

Le revenu de base, ou revenu annuel garanti, représente un paiement versé aux familles ou aux particuliers admissibles. Il garantit un niveau de revenu minimum. L’Ontario concevra et mettra en œuvre un programme pilote pour confirmer l’hypothèse voulant qu’un revenu minimum contribue à accorder un soutien du revenu de façon plus efficace, tout en améliorant les résultats en matière de santé, d’emploi et de logement pour les Ontariens et les Ontariennes.

En tant que conseiller spécial pour le revenu de base, M. Segal fera appel à sa connaissance des modèles de revenu de base canadiens et internationaux et consultera des dirigeants pour aider l’Ontario à concevoir un projet pilote.

Segal remettra un document de discussion à la province d’ici à l’automne sur lequel l’élaboration et la mise en œuvre du projet pilote reposeront et ce, de façon bénévole. Le document de discussion inclura des conseils sur les critères éventuels de sélection des groupes cibles et/ou des lieux, des modèles de prestation et des conseils sur le mode d’évaluation par la province des résultats du Projet pilote portant sur le revenu de base. L’Ontario entamera un dialogue supplémentaire avec des spécialistes, des communautés et d’autres intervenants dans le cadre de l’élaboration et de la mise en œuvre de ce projet pilote.

Offrir un soutien aux Ontariens et aux Ontariennes grâce à un Projet pilote portant sur le revenu de base s’inscrit dans le plan économique du gouvernement, qui vise à favoriser l’essor de l’Ontario et à concrétiser sa principale priorité, à savoir stimuler l’économie et créer des emplois. Ce plan en quatre volets consiste à investir dans les talents et les compétences, tout en aidant plus de gens à obtenir et à créer les emplois de l’avenir en élargissant l’accès à des études collégiales et universitaires de haute qualité. De plus, le plan fait le plus important investissement dans l’infrastructure publique de l’histoire de l’Ontario et investit dans une économie sobre en carbone guidée par des entreprises innovatrices, à forte croissance et axées sur l’exportation. Enfin, le plan aide la population ontarienne active à bénéficier d’une retraite plus sure.

CITATIONS

« L’Ontario adopte un rôle de chef de file pour introduire sous forme de projet pilote un revenu de base moderne. Nous sommes ravis que l’honorable Hugh Segal mette son expertise considérable à notre service. Nous voulons nous assurer d’élaborer une approche réfléchie, fondée sur des données probantes, pour tester le concept de revenu de base. Nous comptons sur les conseils de M. Segal dans le cadre du lancement de ces travaux. »

— Dre Helena Jaczek, ministre des Services sociaux et communautaires

« Je suis ravi de collaborer avec le gouvernement pour jeter les bases d’un Projet pilote portant sur le revenu de base en Ontario. Le revenu de base pourrait transformer radicalement la sécurité du revenu en Ontario et dans tout le pays. Je suis heureux de contribuer à cette initiative audacieuse. »

— L’honorable Hugh Segal

FAITS EN BREF

La Finlande, les Pays-Bas et le Kenya songent tous à concevoir des projets pilotes qui testeront la notion de revenu de base ou de revenu annuel garanti.
MINCOME a testé en 1975-1978 l’idée d’un revenu annuel garanti à Dauphin, au Manitoba.

POUR EN SAVOIR DAVANTAGE

Renseignements sur les services sociaux

Sci-Tech

Limelens Smartphone Lenses Take on the Traditional DSLR Camera

June 23, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Due to rapid advances in technology, the quality of smartphone cameras is now on a par, if not better, than some point-and-shoot cameras and entry-level DSLRs. With the increasing demand for smartphone accessories to maximize users’ photographic potential, Limelens offers superior quality smartphone lenses at a price within reach of the masses. Limelens lenses capture intricate detail that a smartphone camera could not achieve on its own.

Limelens product range includes The Thinker, a dual macro/wide lens and The Captain, a 190 degree fisheye lens, with more smartphone camera accessories to follow. The lenses boast incredible framing capabilities, removing the limitations of the smartphone camera to produce stunning photographs with a greater choice of photo angles, framing and composition.

Available at www.limelens.com for $99 USD, the Limelens introductory Set includes both lenses as well the Limeclip attachment that fits over 40 devices including leading smartphones and tablet brands.

(See compatibility here) Limelens is taking advantage of the exponential growth of smartphone users and their insatiable desire to share their pictures on social media platforms.

Faye Jones, the Communications Director of Limelens says “While purists may argue about the limitations of smartphone camera capabilities, stand-alone cameras cannot compete with the portability of the smartphone and the public’s desire to share their photos instantly. Online photo sharing has become a way to express identity, rather than compete”. Jones says

“Limelens has recognized that people are choosing smartphones over conventional cameras and we have responded to this trend with the introduction of Limelens, a range of sleek, intuitively designed smartphone lenses that are compatible with major smartphone brands”.

The quality of smartphone camera images, and the features they offer, means that less people are spending money on regular cameras. According to data from Japan’s Camera and Imaging Products Association, camera sales have been steadily declining. In 2010 sales were at a high of 120 Million units but sales have reduced to 30 Million in 2015. For the Silo, Dawn Ryden.

Limelens offers a versatile attachment compatible with 40+ devices whilst ensuring the lens is stable and is easily attached and removed.
Limelens offers users the ability to take photographs with wider angles, in order to capture all elements of their photograph.
Limelens offers users the ability to capture incredible details of their subject, of which a smartphone camera alone could never accomplish.
Limelens provides smartphone photographers with a sense of community, encouragement and inspiration for their projects, no matter their distance, experience level or ability.

About Limelens:

Limelens was founded by UCT (University of Cape Town) student and entrepreneur Tyler Bodmann and has been in development since August 2014. The Limelens team includes Joel Bronner, Faye Jones, James Badenhorst and Michael Dickens. Limelens is driven to create products with the intention to intrigue and enable its ever-evolving photographic community to see, capture and create differently. The Limelens philosophy implores a vision of adventure and discovery through this new creative medium to accumulate to a movement so aptly called The Limelife. Launched in the Spring of 2016, Limelens smartphone accessories offer users the ability to take photos with wider angle and incredible detail while maintaining image quality. Compatible with over 40 smartphone and tablet brands, Limelens is the most versatile lens attachment available to smartphone camera users.

Culture

International Etiquette Expert, Sharon Schweitzer Shares Father’s Day Ideas

June 15, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Without him, you would not have known how to change a flat tire, nor the difference between a socket wrench and a ratchet wrench. His insights on sports led you to your favorite team. He’s always been there with a helping hand and now with the approach of Father’s Day on Sunday, June 19^th, take the time to give back to him. What’s the best way to do that? Here’s the “etiquette skinny!”

"The best Evil Son" ;)

Sharon Schweitzer, an international etiquette expert, author and founder of Protocol & Etiquette Worldwide, says stay ahead of the curve, mail those cards and plan now. Spoil the amazing man that has guided you through your life.

Sharon’s tips:

Plan a Memory: Father’s Day is a time to set aside everything else and devote the day to your dear dad. If you are not a golfer but your dad is, take some time to share his favorite pastime. Go on a hike, a brewery tour, concert, camping trip or lunch at his favorite restaurant. Celebrate everything your dad has taught you, and also create something new and memorable with him on this very special day.
Share the Day: Sometimes we need to share Father’s Day with Dad and also brothers, uncles, godfathers, grandfathers, stepfathers and others. Host a celebration for your loved ones for maximum time with your favorite people. Mother’s Day is famous for brunch. On Father’s day host a BBQ, cookout or inclusive celebration.
Remember Father Figures: For some, Father’s Day is difficult as fathers have passed or may have been absent. Consider using this time as an opportunity to show appreciation for the male mentors in your life. A father figure is more than biological, and can be a role model, leader or inspirational man who helped shape your world.
Share Your Time & Express Gratitude: A national survey of the average North American’s major life regrets highlighted that one of the biggest regrets is not spending more time with parents. Use this day to express how much your father has meant to you over the years. Communicate your gratitude, care and love during this time with him.
Dr Evil and Scotty Evil.
Gift-Giving: Gifts for dads can range greatly depending on your father’s interests. Consider the three P’s to guide your gift giving: Practical, Personalized, and Perfect.
Practical Gifts: Is he practical? Go for the gift that won’t get tossed in a closet or re-gifted. Talk to your dad about his needs or communicate with family members. Contribute toward a group gift he will truly love, for example: Business and casual clothing, restaurant gift certificates to his favorite place and hobby accessories (paints and art supplies, how-to books).
Personalized Gifts: Go the extra mile to highlight his name, family crest or favorite team. For example: An engraved Watch, personalized beer growler, glassware or flask and sports team wine stoppers.
Perfect Gifts: Find the gift that quintessentially represents your dad or his future goals. Where does he want to go? What’s on his list? A perfect gift for your father: New sports equipment like a golf club, fishing rod, or tennis racket; a fly-fishing or deep-sea trip he wants; or concert tickets to his favorite band.

As part of your Father’s Day, please consider these tips from Sharon. For the Silo, Bruce Serbin.

Culture

United States ‘ NSA Spy Town ‘ Going To Real Estate Auction

June 13, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

An abandoned United States Navy Information Operations Command spy town with 80 homes and amenities such as bowling alley and football field is going to auction and featured this week by our friends at TopTenRealEstateDeals.com.

“United States Spy Town Auction”

It’s not the first time that an entire American town has gone on the auction block, but it might be the most unusual. Sugar Grove Station, West Virginia was originally a United States Navy military base to support part of the National Security Agency’s surveillance operation. Though the array of giant parabolic dishes that continue to track location and content of international telecommunications activity is still in operation and not part of the sale, they are completely obscured from view behind thick forest on their ridgetop one mile distant. When it became unnecessary to house related analytical staff at the base, it was retired in the fall of 2015 and put up for auction to the highest bidder over $1 million.

Lincoln Housing homes looking very inconspicuous.

Built between 1960 and 2014, the fenced and gated rural town has private full-service utilities to support as many as 500 people on over 120 acres. Included are 80 homes on tree-lined residential streets in like-new condition, a swimming pool, bowling alley, youth daycare center, community center with fireplace which was designed to function as a restaurant with bar, a gym, full-sized indoor basketball court, tennis and racquetball courts, a football field, large playground with kiddie pool, and twelve guest cabins for visitors. There are also several large buildings for multiple use as well as a four-section hobby building for working on cars, woodworking shop and other creative pursuits. For community safety, a police station and fire station are already in place.

Sugar Grove is surrounded by the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests between the Allegheny Mountains and the south fork of the Potomac River. It is located within a 13,000-square-mile area known as the National Radio Quiet Zone, so cell phones, WiFi and any equipment operating on radio frequencies are restricted from use. The Quiet Zone was established in 1958 by Congress so as not to interfere with the operation of the nearby parabolic dishes or the National Radio Astronomy Observatory 30 miles away.

Interior of dorm housing unit. Note the security desk.

Former U.S. Navy base, Sugar Grove Station, perfect as a corporate retreat, academic campus, corporate training center or left to one’s imagination is up for auction by the U.S. General Services Administration with a minimum bid of $1 million. Auction ending date not yet determined. For the Silo, Terry Walsh.

Visit TopTenRealEstateDeals.com for more photo’s and for other famous homes and real estate news.

Transportation

3rd Concours d’Elégance Elite Concept Car Event

June 9, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Peter Auto is delighted to announce that the Concours Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille, which will be held on 4th September in the Chantilly Domain for the third time, is welcoming two new partners: BMW and ACJ (Airbus Corporate Jets).

Last year's Chantilly. — Last year’s Chantilly.

BMW was present at the 2015 event as entrant in the Concours d’Elégance reserved for concept cars and won the 1st prize with the 3.0 CSL Homage R. In 2016, the year which marks the Bavarian make’s centenary, BMW has joined the Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille in the context of a wider partnership that will be announced at a later date.

ACJ provides its clients with the most modern business jets in the world based on the full range of planes made by Airbus, leader in the field of aeronautics, thanks to its unique expertise, innovative technology and bespoke customer service. A fully personalised interior can be installed in these very spacious VIP planes including, for example, a lounge, an office, a bedroom and a bathroom. By combining interiors with unique living spaces and a range of action that enables its clients to cover the whole world, ACJ facilitates their life style. With ACJ Chantilly Arts & Elegance welcomes a partner whose values of excellence, innovation and luxury dovetail perfectly with those highlighted by the event.

Last year's winner- the BMW CSL R concept car. What a beauty! — Last year’s winner- the BMW CSL concept car. What a beauty!

BMW and ACJ join a list of prestigious partners who have renewed their confidence in Peter Auto in 2016 for the Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille: DS Automobiles, Le Point, Bonhams, Relais & Châteaux, Charles Heidsieck, Radio Classic, the IDEC Group, etc.

The first two Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille were an instant success with the public, manufacturers, collectors and partners. They were also rewarded in Great Britain by the prize for the Motor Car Event of the Year in 2014 and 2015 at the International Historic Motoring Awards. In 2015 the event received the backing of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, which has renewed its support in 2016.

The 3rd Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille follows in the same vein as the previous ones by continuing with the Concours Automobile allied with a wide range of activities that include the French Art of Living, Fine Arts, Arts of the Table, Fashion, Music, Watch making, etc. with the partnership of prestigious houses and brands. Thus, all the ingredients are combined to make it a rendezvous that’s unique in its field in an exceptional setting only a few kilometres from Paris. The riches of the Chantilly Domain and the eponymous princely town give Chantilly Arts & Elegance Richard Mille the quintessence of art and elegance, which all the visitor can enjoy at this convivial, family event.

Reviews

New ‘Duct Tape DIY Book’ is Taking Crafting and Fashion World by Storm

June 8, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

From the author of the #1 best-sellers, Tape It & Make It, Tape It & Make More and Tape It & Wear It comes the fourth book in this revolutionary “duct tape craft series:” Duct Tape Bags: 40 Projects for Totes, Clutches, Messenger Bags, and Bowlers (Clarkson Potter, July 2016). With the upcoming release of her new book, Richela Fabian Morgan is continuing to take the crafting and fashion world by storm, turning the humble roll of duct tape into the trendiest craft item since glitter glue.

Everyone from trendy teens to famous fashionistas can begin exploring the infinite uses this easy-to-follow guide provides to making handbags so fashionable, you won’t actually believe they’re made of duct-tape. Part art-piece, part usable accessory, Fabian Morgan shows how each of these gorgeous handbags can be recreated one manageable section at a time.

“About eight years ago, my kids and I were in our local hardware store when we spotted duct tape with patterns and colors,” says Fabian Morgan. “Since then, duct tape has been an obsession of mine. My daughter and her friends were my excuse to break out my vast collection of tape and try out different ideas for craft projects. Out of all the projects, the bags were the biggest hit! I started making bags for myself. So, it was only natural that I turned my attention to writing a book on duct tape bags. I wrote other books on duct tape crafts with a total of 242 projects spread out over three books, everything from housewares to costumes. Duct tape bags were on my radar. I had to write this book!”

Duct Tape Bags provides DIYers with 40 fun projects using duct tape, including:

Clutches and wristlets
Hobo and Shoulder Bags
Satchels
Messenger and Flap Bags
Tote Bags
And tons of other one-of-a-kind bags!

One of Rachel's Duct Tape Bags. — One of Rachel’s Duct Tape Bags.

Read more about Richela Fabian Morgan by using the links at the bottom of this article and:

Reveal what inspired her to begin crafting with duct tape.
See finished samples of the many bags included in her book.
Do print or video demos and step by step how-tos not only on her bags but any of the 240+ projects found in her duct tape books.
Provide the perfect summer duct tape projects for girls, boys and teens.
Look ahead to back to school: duct tape wallets, folders, book bags, pencil cases, lunch boxes and more!
Find tips to incorporate recycled items in your duct tape projects.
And so much more!

With detailed step-by-step instructions and primers on duct tape “fabric,” different types of closures from magnet snaps to jeans buttons, and bag accessories like bows and luggage tags, Fabian Morgan catapults this trend from the streets into the stratosphere. A mix of pop art and urban style photos of each project and a cool vibe throughout will make you want to immediately roll up your sleeves and rolling out the duct tape for a bag of your own! For the Silo, Erin MacDonald-Birnbaum

About Richela Fabian Morgan: Richela Fabian Morgan began her duct tape odyssey 8 years ago with a simple bi-fold wallet, before writing the best-selling crafting books Tape It & Make It, Tape It & Make More, and Tape It & Wear It. She is an indie crafter specializing in paper, adhesives, and found materials, and has taught craft projects at elementary schools, public libraries, and charitable organizations around the U.S. Her next duct tape crafting book, Duct Tape Bags, will be published by Clarkson Potter in July 2016.

Connect with Richela on:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/CraftyRichela
Twitter: www.twitter.com/CraftyRichela
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/craftyrichela
Instagram: @richelafm

Duct Tape Bags will be released July 12, 2016 and can be pre-ordered from Amazon.com and all major booksellers. Contact [email protected] for more details.

Earth

Circular Economy Is New Direction For Waste Free Ontario

June 3, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

In late Spring 2016, Ontario passed legislation to divert more waste from landfills, create jobs, help fight climate change and lead towards a waste-free province. Currently, Ontario is producing too much waste, and not recycling enough. Over eight million tonnes of waste is sent to landfill each year. Absolute greenhouse gas emissions from Ontario’s waste have risen by 25 per cent between 1990 and 2012 as the amount of waste disposed in landfills has increased.

The Waste-Free Ontario Act will: encourage innovation in recycling processes and require producers to take full responsibility for their products and packaging, lower recycling costs and give consumers access to more convenient recycling options to help fight climate change by:

-reducing greenhouse gas pollution that results from the landfilling of products that could otherwise be recycled or composted
-overhaul Waste Diversion Ontario into the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority, a strong oversight body with new compliance and enforcement powers that will oversee the new approach and existing waste diversion programs until transition is complete.

The province will also be finalizing its draft Strategy for a Waste-Free Ontario: Building the Circular Economy, within three months of the legislation coming into effect. The strategy outlines Ontario’s vision for a zero waste future and proposed plan to implement the legislation.
Harnessing the value of waste as a resource is part of the government’s economic plan to build Ontario up and deliver on its number-one priority to grow the economy and create jobs. The four-part plan includes investing in talent and skills, including helping more people get and create the jobs of the future by expanding access to high-quality college and university education. The plan is making the largest investment in public infrastructure in Ontario’s history and investing in a low-carbon economy driven by innovative, high-growth, export-oriented businesses. The plan is also helping working Ontarians achieve a more secure retirement.

QUOTES
“Ontario is moving in an exciting new direction for managing waste in the province. The Waste-Free Ontario Act is an important step in creating Ontario’s circular economy — a system in which products are never discarded, but reintroduced and reused or recycled into new products. Managing our resources more effectively will benefit Ontarians, our environment and economy and support our efforts to fight climate change.”
— Glen Murray, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change

QUICK FACTS
Every 1,000 tonnes of waste diverted from landfill generates seven full-time jobs, $360,000 in wages (paying above the provincial average) and $711,000 in GDP.
Every year in Canada, an estimated $1 billion in valuable resources is lost to landfill.
Eventually the Waste-Free Ontario Act will eliminate industry funding organizations such as the Ontario Tire Stewardship and Ontario Electronic Stewardship.
The Blue Box program is available in about 95 per cent of Ontario households and keeps approximately 65 per cent of residential printed paper and packaging from landfills.

LEARN MORE
Read about the draft Strategy for a Waste-Free Ontario: Building the Circular Economy
Learn more about Ontario’s current waste programs

BACKGROUNDER via Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change
The Waste-Free Ontario Act and Strategy
Ontario has passed the Waste-Free Ontario Act and will be finalizing the draft Strategy for a Waste-Free Ontario: Building the Circular Economy, within three months of the legislation coming into effect.
Together, the proposed legislation and strategy would:
-Foster innovation in product and packaging design that encourages businesses to design long-lasting, reusable and easily recyclable products
-Boost recycling across all sectors, especially in the industrial, commercial and institutional sectors, which will reduce waste and lower greenhouse gas emissions
-Incent companies to look for ways to make their recycling processes more economical while staying competitive
-Shift the costs of the blue box from municipal taxpayers to producers while continuing to provide convenient collection services for Ontarians.
-Develop an action plan to reduce the amount of organic materials going to landfills.

The draft Strategy embraces a vision of “an Ontario where we have zero waste and zero greenhouse gas emissions from the waste sector and where all resources, organic or non-organic, are used and reused productively, maximizing their recovery and reintegrating recovered materials back into the economy.”
Ontario’s vision would be fulfilled with the draft Strategy’s two goals: a zero waste Ontario and zero greenhouse gas emissions from the waste sector. To achieve these goals Ontario would work towards systematically avoiding and eliminating the volume of waste, while maximizing the conservation and recovery of resources. This would also help the province meet its climate change commitments and help Ontario build a low-carbon economy.
Disponible en Français

Vintage

First “Party Star”, Socialite Dorothy Taylor’s Beverly Hills Mansion For Sale

May 27, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

“The Countess of Beverly Hills Mansions” Before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, socialite Dorothy Taylor may have been the first Hollywood celebrity who wasn’t in the entertainment business. She was the ultimate party host and frequent 1930’s scandal rag fodder. Her lovers included Gary Cooper, Bugsy Siegel, George Raft and an Italian count.

Dorothy’s trip to celebrity fame began after she inherited $12 million in 1916, the equivalent of about $275 million today. The first thing she did with her money was divorce her British aviator husband, Claude Grahame-White, and embark on a long party in Europe’s best circles. In 1923, she married Italian Count Carlo Dentice di Frasso, many years her senior. On the outskirts of Rome, the new countess acquired and restored one of Europe’s most famous homes, Villa Madama, that had been designed in the sixteenth century by Raphael. It was later used by Benito Mussolini during World War II for National Fascist Party functions.

While residing in the villa, actor Gary Cooper was doing a movie in Rome and became quite ill. Dorothy took him in and during his recuperation began an intense affair with him under her husband’s nose. Since she and the count were at that point leading separate lives, Dorothy went on with the affair and moved to Hollywood where she purchased a mansion in Beverly Hills. Making friends of some of Hollywood’s most important stars through her Cooper connections, Dorothy called in the best decorators and landscapers and created a luxurious estate that was classic Art Deco filmdom glamour. Dorothy and Cooper eventually went their own ways but remained distant friends. She was always known as the woman who taught Gary Cooper how to dress, making him the most elegant man in Hollywood.

Through her new Hollywood friends, Dorothy eventually rented her mansion to Marlene Dietrich and headed off to search for sunken treasure on the studio-owned schooner, Metha Nelson; Captain Bligh’s ship in the 1935 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty.” Also on the ship was American gangster Bugsy Siegel. Although the trip turned into a disaster when the schooner was tossed violently by 70 mile-per-hour gale winds that split the main mast and destroyed the sails, it was the start of a new affair with Bugsy. She always rejected gossip of her association with Bugsy, instead referring to him as Benjamin to her friends.

In 1947, Dorothy sold the Beverly Hills house to MGM pianist Jose Iturbi, who lived there until he died in 1980. In 1954, Dorothy died of heart failure in a train compartment while she was traveling with George Raft from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after attending one of Dietrich’s performances.

Hand painted murals & mirrored verre églomisé panels.

Once again for sale, the beautifully preserved Spanish Revival estate hasn’t changed much since its heyday in the 1930s when it was featured in “House and Garden.” At approximately 8,000 square feet, it has four bedrooms and five baths on 1.12 acres. The home was built for entertaining with large public rooms and although it looks like wallpaper, the walls are covered in hand-painted murals. In the dining room, the walls are mirrored verre églomisé panels that depict towering palms. There is also a two-bedroom guest house and pool nestled within the mature landscaped grounds. The asking price is USD $26.9 million. Dimitri Velis of Hilton and Hyland in Beverly Hills is the listing agent. For the Silo, Terry Walsh.

Visit our friends at TopTenRealEstateDeals.com for more famous homes and real estate news.

Culture

International UFO Symposium Landing in Brantford, Ontario June 24-26

May 24, 2016 The Silo 2 Comments

As a young child living in rural Newfoundland on the outskirts of Grand Falls, Osie woke up screaming every night from her terrible UFO nightmares.

She believes she was abducted as a child – and is still being abducted today – by aliens, who have been doing medical procedures to her for her entire life.

At this summer’s Alien Cosmic Expo, June 24-26, in Brantford, Ontario, at Best Western Brant Park Inn- Osie will discuss how her life dramatically changed only a few years ago when she discovered she not only had psychic powers but how becoming a medium paved the way for her understanding what was happening to her during her nightmare.

Osie revealed her story for the first time as one of the Experiencers interviewed in Brantford author Bob Mitchell’s book, “What if? Close Encounters of the Unusual Kind.”

Interestingly, Josie never had any interest in UFOs or aliens until her nightmares returned in 2015 and she began having very vivid out of body experiences that led to horrific encounters with other worldly beings.

Initially, she never saw the beings although she could hear them telepathically and knew they were around her.

“I saw shadows, outlines and they’re above me,” she explained. “I know they were doing stuff to me because I was screaming.

“There was so much pain. I didn’t hear any sounds. All I know is that I didn’t want to be there. I felt as if I was passing out and coming to again.”

Osie will also be on hand at ACE for Friday’s Experiencer Day where ticket holders can wander and ask questions of several invited guests.

How many of you have ever seen a UFO or encountered an alien being and never had the courage to tell anybody about the incredible experience?

What if you’ve been abducted? Who do you talk to? Can you trust even your family or closest friend with your darkest secret?

You’re not alone.

Take a read of this excerpt from “Forbidden Knowledge-Revelations of a multi-dimensional time traveler” co-written by Experiencer Jason Quitt and Brantford author Bob Mitchell.

Jason often had a difficult time keeping these topics bottled inside of him. One night his father noticed he was distressed about something.

“Unable to hold it in anymore I burst out in tears and emotion,” Jason said.

Jason told him what had been happening to him and how he was able to have out of body experiences.

“I also told him about the beings,” Jason said. “He was stunned. He tried to calm me down. But he really didn’t say too much to me.”

But his father begged him to see a psychiatrist.

“I flatly refused and was actually quite hurt and insulted by this suggestion,” Jason said. “But looking back I see how from his perspective why he wanted this for me.”

A few days later Jason was back at his father’s house and was using his computer when he noticed his father had bookmarked many pages dealing with schizophrenia.

“I knew then that I couldn’t share these experiences again with people who didn’t have a solid background in this subject,” Jason said.

“It really made me think of how Experiencers are treated in this society. I can only imagine an Experiencer sharing their story with their parents and the next thing they know they’re on heavy medication and told something is wrong with them or that the devil is influencing them.”

Indeed, you’re not alone.

People throughout the world are struggling with this dilemma every moment of their lives.

But on Friday, June 24 at the opening day of the Alien Cosmic Expo in Brantford, Ontario you’ll be able to unburden yourself to people, who know exactly what you have and are continuing to go through.

Several Experiencers, including a few who will be telling their story on stage throughout the weekend will be participating in “Experiencer Day.”

It’s your chance to share your stories with them and ask the questions you have been seeking answers for in safe and comfortable surroundings without fear of being ridiculed or judged.

“When I read that passage from “Forbidden Knowledge” it really struck a nerve with me,” said Jo-Anne Eadie, organizer of the Alien Cosmic Expo. “I actually became very emotional. I understood what Experiencers must be going through.

“It’s why a feel so strongly that we need to able to talk about these events in a safe environment such as Experience Day.”

Confirmed Experiencers so far include Joanna L Ross, Sherry Wilde, Grant Cameron, Janet Lessin and Dr. Sasha Lessin, Barry Strohm, Osie, and Elizabeth April.

The cost for Friday’s “Experiencer Day” is $99 and includes a special Friday night dinner featuring Travis Walton, one of the most recognized abductees in the world. You’ll also watch a screening of his documentary “Travis: The True Story of Travis Walton” – a documentary by Onwinges Productions.

Walton is also expected to make an appearance during the day at the Experiencer event.

The cost for just attending Friday night’s dinner and show is $45.00 + tax

Barry Strohm

Barry Strohm has learned the history of humanity from a unique source – the spirit of an alien named Mou.

On Friday, June 25, Strohm will be among the Experiencers on hand for Experiencer Day as the Alien Cosmic Expo opens its weekend run in Brantford, Ontario.

As an author and channeler, Strohm had been communicating and receiving information from Mou and he will reveal what he has learned during his lecture on Sunday, June 26. His incredible experience is told in his book “Aliens Among Us,” which those attending ACE will also be able to purchase. In his book, Strohm takes readers on a journey that explores humanity’s past and present connection to other worldly species. Strohm, owner of Golden Lane Antique Gallery in New Oxford, Pa (one of the most haunted places in the U.S.) has discovered that aliens are able to communicate through psychic channeling and explain many of Earth’s mysteries, including what really happened at Roswell, Rendlesham Forest, Biblical alien references and how extraterrestrials have and continue to influence mankind. His wife Connie has also been abducted and the alien spirit connected to Barry has explained why and what happened during her encounter.

Strohm has also met a Reptilian. He is also known for making predictions about future events, Perhaps he will make some while at ACE.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

This acclaimed 3 day event will be jam-packed with international researchers, authors and lecturers including Stanton Friedman, Richard Dolan, the Honorable Paul Hellyer, Grant Cameron and many more. To view the full line-up and to make note of all events please visit our friends at Alien Cosmic Expo.

Politics

Ontario Passes Landmark Climate Change Legislation

May 18, 2016 The Silo 1 Comment

Today, Ontario passed landmark climate change legislation that lays a foundation for the province to join the biggest carbon market in North America and ensures that the province is accountable for responsibly and transparently investing proceeds from the cap and trade program into actions that reduce greenhouse gas pollution, create jobs and help people and businesses shift to a low-carbon economy.

Under the Climate Change Mitigation and Low-Carbon Economy Act, money raised from Ontario’s cap and trade program will be deposited into a new Greenhouse Gas Reduction Account. The account will invest every dollar in green projects and initiatives that reduce emissions.

Following extensive consultation with industry and other groups, the legislation was strengthened by now requiring enhanced accountability and public reporting on the province’s upcoming Climate Change Action Plan and investment of cap and trade proceeds.

From J. Magnuson's Book on the approaching post-carbon economy. Link below. — From J. Magnuson’s Book on the approaching post-carbon economy. Link below.

Ontario will post its final cap and trade regulation upon royal assent of the legislation. The regulation covers detailed rules and obligations for businesses participating in the program. The final design was also informed by extensive consultation https://www.ontario.ca/page/cap-and-trade-consultations-summary with businesses, industry, the public, environmental organizations and Indigenous communities.

Climate change is not a distant threat – it is already costing the people of Ontario. It has damaged our environment, caused extreme weather like floods and droughts, and hurt our ability to grow food in some regions. Over the near term, climate change will increase the cost of food and insurance rates, harm wildlife and nature, and eventually make the world inhospitable for our children and grandchildren.

Fighting climate change while supporting growth, efficiency and productivity is part of the government’s economic plan to build Ontario up and deliver on its number-one priority to grow the economy and create jobs. The four-part plan includes investing in talent and skills, including helping more people get and create the jobs of the future by expanding access to high-quality college and university education. The plan is making the largest investment in public infrastructure in Ontario’s history and investing in a low-carbon economy driven by innovative, high-growth, export-oriented businesses. The plan is also helping working Ontarians achieve a more secure retirement.

QUOTES

“Passing the Climate Change Mitigation and Low-Carbon Economy Act marks the start of the next chapter in Ontario’s transformation to an innovative and prosperous low-carbon economy — one that will benefit households, businesses, industry and communities across the province. This legislation is about enshrining in law our resolve and action to protect and strengthen our environment for generations to come.”

— Glen Murray, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change

QUICK FACTS

§ Ontario’s Climate Change Action Plan is the next step in Ontario’s ongoing fight against climate change and is expected to be released in spring 2016. The plan will describe actions that will help more Ontario households and businesses to adopt low- and no-carbon energy in homes, vehicles and workplaces.

§ Ontario’s $325-million Green Investment Fund http://www.ontario.ca/greeninvestment , a down payment on the province’s cap and trade program, is already strengthening the economy, creating good jobs and driving innovation while fighting climate change — a strong signal of what Ontarians can expect from proceeds of the province’s cap and trade program. These investments will help secure a healthy, clean and prosperous low-carbon future and transform the way we live, move and work while ensuring strong, sustainable communities.

§ The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Account will receive proceeds from auctioning allowances under Ontario’s cap and trade program. The first auction will be held in March 2017.

§ Ontario intends to link its cap and trade program with Quebec and California.

LEARN MORE

Ontario’s Climate Change Strategy https://www.ontario.ca/page/climate-change-strategy

Learn How Cap and Trade Works https://www.ontario.ca/page/cap-and-trade

Green Investment Fund https://www.ontario.ca/page/green-investment-fund

Supplemental- Joel Magnuson’s Book- The Approaching Great Transformation: Toward a Livable Post-Carbon Economy

Reviews

Better Bungee™ Is Stronger Environmentally Safe For All Uses

May 10, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

The Better Bungee is excited to officially launch into the US and CANADIAN market, available at GRAINGER and AMAZON, The Better Bungee, made in the USA of a new high tech material; that will not crack, break or become brittle and is virtually weightless, allowing The Better Bungee to safely stretch twice its original length but still retain its stretch. The Better Bungee is great for organizing the garage, hauling, storage and more! A great life hack for organizing, saving space in small rooms or uncluttering your garage.

US Made Bungee is Ultra-Lightweight, Stronger and More Versatile

The Better Bungee™ is the most durable, top-of-the-line tie downs to fit every application; cargo control, ATV, Camping / Outdoor adventures, Motor Cycles, Boating, water sports, to mention a few. The Better Bungee™ products are made to withstand extreme temperatures and weather conditions, are resistant to oil, diesel fuel, salt water and most household chemicals. Made in the USA of a new high tech material; that will not crack, break or become brittle and is virtually weightless, allowing The Better Bungee to safely stretch twice its original length but still retain its stretch. Available on Amazon.com, Gemplers.com, Imperial Supply and Grainger.com. The variety of straps, cords, ropes, lengths, colors and accessories make this product one of a kind.

Deb Dershem, President of The Better Bungee™ “We are excited to launch the Better Bungee into the US with a high-tech environmentally friendly material that is safer and stronger and lighter in weight. It is the BETTER option now on the market for any rubber or shock cord applications.”

The Better Bungee™ Product Offerings:

The Better Bungee™ heavy duty Strap is available with galvanized, stainless and over-molded nylon ends available in lengths of 12”, 18”, 24”, and 36”. This product stretches to twice its length. The super strong nylon ends are molded into the material to create a one-piece strap. The ends will not pull out and are super strong and non-marring.

The Better Bungee™ Cord is a medium duty one-piece cord with over-molded super strong non-marring ends and is available in lengths of 12”, 18”, 24”. This product stretches to twice its length.

The Synch™ Cord is medium duty; has a loop on one end and an over-molded super strong non-marring end on the other. It is available in 30” and is perfect for applications where 2 hooks just won’t work. It can make an anchor point easily by wrapping the cord around a bar or through a hole; then put the hook through the loop, pull tight then secure the hook end. It makes a superior storage organizer for cords, rope and hoses! Also great for holding things tight against a garage wall.

The Slotted Strap is versatile and heavy duty, will adjust from lengths of 12” to 36” and has either 2 over-molded super strong non-marring nylon ends or two galvanized hooks. It can be used as an all in one tie down or for storage and organization. This product is extremely versatile! When you can only have one this is for you!

The Better Bungee™, Build A Bungee™ kit comes with rope or strap. This is the answer to any custom bungee cord needs. Rope is available in 2 sizes: 1/4” or 5/16” and non-marring adjustable hook ends for building customized bungee cords. Add our super strong O-ring to create custom cargo.

Innovative- Better Bungee Rope and Strap Kit

The Better Bungee™ rope and strap is a great replacement for shock cord. It can be used to customize just about anything- tarp tie downs, shock cord on canoes, kayaks, covers for trucks, the uses are endless. The rope material is available in reels of 50 feet and in diameters of 5/16” and 1/4”. The strap material is 5/32 x 3/4″ and available in reels of 50 feet. Larger or smaller rolls are available in bulk packages.

About The Better Bungee™

Launched in 2016, The Better Bungee™ is the creator of superior bungees and tie down systems. They are the only company in the industry to use the Betterthane 8000™ to manufacture all of their products. Superior design and manufacturing practices allow us to sell our products at a price point that is economically feasible for all people. The versatility, environmentally friendly, safety and durability of this product are what set it apart from other bungee product lines. Available in the US and Canada. Contact [email protected] for ordering information.

Gaming

DreamHack Austin 2016 Featured ZOWIE Official eSports Monitors

May 9, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

COSTA MESA, Calif. — May, 2016 — BenQ America Corp., a globally renowned LED and gaming monitor expert, recently announced that ZOWIE, the company’s eSports brand, would be the official monitor sponsor of DreamHack Austin 2016. Making its first-ever stop in North America as part of the DreamHack ZOWIE Open World Tour, the event took place May 6-8 at the Austin Convention Center. Pro gamers competed using the XL Series eSports monitors for all PC gaming tournaments. Additionally, ZOWIE extended its partnership to supply its RL eSports console monitors for the Capcom Pro Tour’s Street Fighter V and Pokkén Tournament matches.

The North American eSports market has seen phenomenal growth, attracting millions of gamers and online viewers. Committed to eSports, ZOWIE is pleased to partner with DreamHack to deliver the ultimate pro gaming experience with its XL and RL monitor lines.

“BenQ ZOWIE is created for eSports and only eSports. We believe that gaming is all about the experience, whether it’s PC or console eSports. Our relentless pursuit to provide the most professional experience drives us to craft eSports products, including the XL and RL monitors, that are based on a deep understanding of the sport and fine-tuned to meet the pros’ specific usage scenarios,” said Lars Yoder, president of BenQ America. “With our XL and RL monitors, professional players will have the high performance they expect for competition.”

ZOWIE EC2-eVo Gaming Mouse

DreamHack Austin 2016 attendees were able to test-drive the full range of ZOWIE products at booth 135. The complete ZOWIE lineup includes the XL and RL series monitors, SR and TF mousepads, as well as the EC, ZA, FK, and newly released FK1+ mice series. ZOWIE mice fit every particular gaming style with options for right- and left-handed players in addition to ambidextrous ones. As a sneak peek, visitors also had an opportunity to experience the soon-to-be-released ZOWIE VITAL audio system, an intuitive, driverless device that provides convenient adjustments to improve both sound and audio communication for games.

ZOWIE also conducted its own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive death match tournament at its booth three times per day each day — noon, 3:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. — to give players a chance to win a custom ZOWIE G-SR mousepad.

Follow @DreamHackOpen and @DreamHack on Twitter and stay tuned to @ZOWIEbyBenQ for other deals.

About ZOWIE
Introduced in late 2008, ZOWIE is a brand dedicated to the development of the best competitive gaming products to improve eSports athletes’ combat performance. In 2015, the ZOWIE brand was acquired by BenQ Corp. to aggressively lead the company’s eSports product line with products that deliver true competitive advantages. More information is available at ZOWIE.BenQ.com/.

About BenQ America Corp.
The BenQ digital lifestyle brand stands for “Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to Life,” fusing lifestyle with technology, enjoyment with productivity and aesthetic design with purpose-built engineering. It is this mantra that has made BenQ the No. 1-selling projector brand powered by TI DLP® technology in The Americas(1). BenQ America Corp. offers an extensive line of visual display and presentation solutions that incorporate the very latest technologies. The company delivers a broad range of Colorific™ projectors, ZOWIE eSports gear and monitors, interactive large-format displays, mobile audio products, cloud consumer products and lifestyle lighting for any application and market — education, home, gaming, enterprise, government, house of worship, digital signage, A/V and IT — with cutting-edge models that lead the industry in performance, reliability, environmental sustainability and aesthetics. Whether it’s interactive digital whiteboards for classrooms, full HD 3D projectors for home theaters, short-throw projectors for boardrooms, interactive flat-panel displays for digital signage or LED backlight monitors for professional gaming, BenQ continues to defy the limits of digital displays. The company’s products are available across North America through leading value-added distributors, resellers and retailers.

More information is available at www.BenQ.us.

(1) Based upon Q1’15 – Q3’15 data from the Quarterly Projector Shipment and Forecast Report from PMA Research

About BenQ Corporation
Founded on the corporate vision of “Bringing Enjoyment and Quality to Life,” BenQ Corporation is a world-leading human technology and solutions provider aiming to elevate and enrich every aspect of consumers’ lives. To realize this vision, the company focuses on the aspects that matter most to people today — lifestyle, business, healthcare and education — with the hope of providing people with the means to live better, increase efficiency, feel healthier and enhance learning. Such means include a delightful broad portfolio of people-driven products and embedded technologies spanning digital projectors, monitors, interactive large-format displays, audio products, cloud consumer products, mobile communications and lifestyle lighting. Because it matters.

Transportation

Supercars At London Motor Show Include Rolls Royce Dawn

May 6, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

London’s famous Motor Show is back! Thanks to our friends at selectcarleasing.co.uk for the nifty infographic.

Gaming

DarbeeVision Video Scaling Processor Gives Gamers the Competitive Edge

May 4, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

ORANGE, Calif. — May 2016 — DarbeeVision, Inc., a pioneer in the field of digital image enhancement, is taking gamers to new heights. The company’s new HD DVP-5000S HDMI® video processor is a stunning new advancement in the evolution of picture imaging that makes gaming action pop, giving players a sharper edge over their opponents. Going beyond traditional imaging enhancement, the DVP-5000S is powered by DARBEE Visual Presence™ (DVP) technology, a powerful human-vision-based computational image-processing model that renders game details in a more true-to-life vibrancy. Video games are displayed with greater depth, clarity, and realism with no input lag, delivering an ultra-immersive gaming experience.

With the New DVP-5000S Video Processor, Gamers Experience Enhanced Image Depth and Detail for Improved Gameplay.

Dbl click image to zoom for better comparison. — Double click image to zoom for better comparison.

With DARBEE Visual Presence™

“It can cost gamers the lead when they don’t know what they’re looking at because the image is so flat that it blends into the scenery,” said Larry Pace, president of DarbeeVision, Inc. “Our DVP-5000S enhances the details so gamers can make much more accurate decisions during fast-action gameplay. No matter if you’re using the latest and greatest gaming system, the DVP-5000S sweetens the picture quality even further — with less than 300 micro-seconds of processing lag.”

No bigger than the size of today’s smartphones, the DVP-5000S is a sleek, plug-and-play device that fits right in with any gaming system. Just connect an HDMI cable between your console or PC and the unit’s input, and another HDMI cable between the unit’s output and your TV or gaming monitor, and immerse yourself in the unexpected clarity and never-before-seen details of your favorite game. For example, in first-person-shooter (FPS) games, players gain the competitive edge because critical details are revealed that allow them to see opponents crouched or lying prone waiting to attack. In role-playing games (RPG), players are able to spot handholds and paths quickly and easily, accomplishing more levels in less time.

The DVP-5000S uses DVP technology to embed depth information into any image or video stream in real-time with virtually no lag and independent of fidelity, whether gaming in SD, HD, or UHD. This process gives your eyes the perception that what you’re seeing is real, breathing new detail into flat images without touching color, contrast, sharpening, or resolution. It even adds depth perception and realism to 3D to make it appear less artificial.

Using the unit’s remote control and split-screen demo mode, viewers can easily adjust the effect to their desired taste or choose between three auto-calibrated processing modes, including a “Gaming” mode, which dynamically improves the image quality of video games. Additionally, the “Hi-Def” mode is recommended for high-quality content such as Blu-ray®, while the “Full Pop” mode is designed for low-resolution and/or low-quality video sources.

With each new DarbeeVision product and OEM partners’ products, the company moves closer to its goal of bringing DVP technology to the entire world. DVP processing technology is so effective that Galaxy Microsystems, manufacturer of high-performance gaming cards, partnered with DarbeeVision to optimize its hardware and deliver the best gaming experience for its users.

The DarbeeVision DVP-5000S is available now for $249USD. More information about DarbeeVision is available at www.DarbeeVision.com.

About DarbeeVision

DarbeeVision is a leading pioneer in digital image enhancement, offering solutions that solve the universal problem of flat images by implementing an advanced computational method that embeds depth cues to allow the human eye to process picture the way the brain intends it. DARBEE technologies — Visual Presence™, Reveal™ and Probe™ — represent the next step in the evolution of digital imaging delivering never-before-seen levels of depth, clarity and realism. The company offers consumers ranging from the casual viewer to videophiles and gamers, as well as OEM partners and dealers across the entertainment, security and medical sectors a unique opportunity to take image quality to unprecedented new heights. DARBEE technologies are fidelity-independent and work with all video content — SD, HD, upscaled HD to 4K UHD, 4K UHD, IPTV, OTT, VOD, virtual or augmented reality, omni-view 360-degree video, cable, satellite, Blu-ray, and still images — making its solutions compatible and complementary with existing and future image processing and display technologies. Headquartered in Orange, California, the privately held company has set out to make its image processing solutions ubiquitous. More information is available at www.DarbeeVision.com.

OEMs can fully tap into the innovative advantages of DarbeeVision’s IP technology — already inside some of today’s prominent video display devices — by calling 714-787-1006 (Please mention The Silo when calling) or emailing [email protected]

Culture

America Meditating Radio Show Launches “Meditate The Vote – Real Conversation”

April 27, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Building a better and more cohesive environment through collaboration

Washington, D.C. – “Meditate the Vote – the Real Conversation” is the brainchild of the globally broadcast America Meditating Radio Show. In the midst of the election fever and the buzz that follows it, it is even more important that the citizenry is brought together to converse on mutual issues to create a better and more cohesive understanding of ways of moving the country forward and making the world a better place. Can getting into our Zen zone help Americans to decide who they vote for or what they do regardless of who enters office?

The #MeditatetheVote grassroots campaign to bring respect, compassion and a peaceful dialog to our election process, intends to create an avenue where people from diverse backgrounds can express their views via various means of social media including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube and gatherings in homes and other venues. This campaign, supported by an alliance of friends, thought leaders and organizations from around the country, will be launched on the 1st of May, coinciding with the start of National Meditation Month and will continue leading up to Election Day on the 8th of November, 2016.

Our goal is simple. Meditate the Vote simply asks folks to amplify the quality of conversation using the Meditate the Vote questions to stimulate more inclusivity and partnership in the country as we lead up to Election Day on November 8th. Meditate the Vote does not endorse any candidate or political party. It is a movement to socially engage all folks into a higher and more cohesive way of working together as a people and a country.

The internet and social media platforms will be used in spreading the word with participants making videos saying “I, Meditate the Vote” and why, as well as sharing feedback from their conversations using Meditate the Vote questions.

There is also the Pause for Peace App available for users of Android and iOS devices to allow for constant communication, meditations and videos, and for listening to the America Meditating Radio Show featuring various prominent thought leaders sharing methods for personal development. For the Silo, Antonia Silvera.

About America Meditating

America Meditating was launched in June 2012, as a nationwide initiative to promote unity and peace as everyone is encouraged to pause for moments throughout the day to reflect within and create an environment where love, respect, and trust reign.

It subsequently resulted in the birth of the popular America Meditating Radio Show hosted by teacher and motivational speaker, Sister Jenna. The program is available across the globe on numerous platforms including Blog Talk Radio, iTunes, Stitcher, Aha Radio, Speaker, the Pause for Peace App, and the Player.FM App.

Supplemental: The David Lynch Foundation was established to ensure that any child in America who wants to learn and practice the Transcendental Meditation program can do so.

Travel

Finally, A Toronto Beer Festival On May Two Four Long Weekend

April 18, 2016 The Silo 2 Comments

It’s time to plan your May Two Four Long Weekend – by staying in the city! Building on the success of its perennial sell-out summer event, Toronto’s Festival of Beer is announcing the 3rd Annual Spring Sessions of Toronto’s Festival of Beer. On May 21st and May 22nd beer fans will break out their coziest cottage gear at Sherbourne Common outdoor space, at the foot of Lower Sherbourne Street. Spring Sessions will bring together more than 20 breweries, food vendors, along with all the amenities of a cottage in the city! Plus the first 500 people who purchase tickets for each day will receive a limited edition Spring Sessions snapback hat.

“We are thrilled to bring this incredible beer experience to the people of Toronto on the May Two Four long weekend.” says Les Murray from Toronto’s Festival of Beer. “Everything you’d expect at a cottage will be here in the city, topped off with an amazing array of brews!”

Several breweries will be sampling their beer at Spring Sessions, including: All or Nothing Brewhouse, Creemore Springs Brewery, Henderson Brewing Co., Steam Whistle Brewing, Granville Island Brewing, Beau’s All Natural Brewing Company, Big Rig Brewery, Great Lakes Brewery, Brickworks Ciderhouse, Mill Street Brewery, and more.

With some of Toronto’s hottest restaurants preparing food on site, you will be able to pair your favourite brew with offers from: Tiny Tom Donuts, Ontario Corn Roasters, Ted’s World Famous BBQ, Chimney Stax Baking Co., The Pie Commission, Smokes Poutinerie, Oyster Boy and more. For the Silo, John Sinden.

Tickets for Spring Sessions of Toronto’s Festival of Beer are on sale now for $30cdn, which includes five sampling tokens and a Commemorative Festival Mug and a limited edition Spring Sessions snapback hat to the first 500 people who purchase tickets for each day. This is a 19+ event. Tickets for the festival can be purchased online at www.beerfestival.ca/spring

When:

Saturday, May 21st: 12:00PM-7:00PM

Sunday, May 22nd: 1200PM-7:00PM

Where:

Sherbourne Common. At the foot of Lower Sherbourne Street, next to Corus Quay at George Brown College.

About Toronto’s Festival of Beer:

The TFOB Mission is all about beer; showcasing local and international beer at Spring Sessions on the May Two Four Weekend, as well as, Canada’s largest summer beer celebration, Toronto’s Festival of Beer on July 22nd – 24th at Bandshell Park inside Exhibition Place. This summer, beer fans from across the country will come to celebrate their favourite golden beverage while enjoying culinary delights from some of Canada’s top chefs, beer education sessions, live grilling demos and so much more! Last year, over 35,000 attendees enjoyed live music from great acts like Naughty By Nature, 54-40, and Lowest of The Low. This year, fans will enjoy House Of Pain on Friday night and Big Sugar on Saturday afternoon.

Travel

Montreal Restaurant Renoir Is Part Of Culinary Golden Mile

April 14, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

SOFITEL MONTREAL GOLDEN MILE

ON S’EN MET PLEIN LES PATTES

Chaque jeudi Every Thursday

Du 14 au 28 avril, de 17h à 20h

From April 14 to 28, from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Bar à crabe des neiges et oursins

Snow crab and sea urchins bar

Le printemps arrive, le crabe des neiges aussi ! Joignez-vous à nous au restaurant Renoir pour découvrir nos fameux cocktails ainsi que des produits sélectionnés par notre Chef Olivier Perret.

Spring is coming, so is the snow crab! Come join us at the Renoir restaurant to discover our famous cocktails and products selected by our Chef Olivier Perret.

Servis avec mayonnaise maison et garnitures

Served with home-made mayonnaise and garnish

30 $

Taxes et service non inclus

Taxes and service not inclued

Restaurant Renoir
1155 Sherbrooke Ouest
Montréal, H3A 2N3, Québec
[email protected]
+1 (514) 788-3038
www.Restaurant-Renoir.com

#RenoirDesNeige

#RestaurantRenoir

#SofitelMontreal

1155 Sherbrooke Ouest – Montreal – Quebec – H3A 2N3 – Montreal – Canada
Tel: +1 514 285-9000 – Fax : +1 514 289-1155 – [email protected] – www.sofitel.com/Montreal

Culture

May 4 is Yom HaShoah ‘ Holocaust Remembrance Day ‘

April 13, 2016 The Silo 1 Comment

The Holocaust was a time of devastation, hate and corruption and is considered one of the most terrible events in human history.

While the horror and mass extermination of more than six million Jews is known as fact around the world, it is more than just history to Arthur Weisze— it is his most vivid and harrowing memory.

“The most appropriate tribute that we can pay to the victims of the Holocaust is to never let the world forget that it happened,” says Danna Horwood, Executive Director at Margaret’s Legacy. “Education is a vital tool to ensure it is not forgotten and to remind generations why we cannot allow history to repeat itself.”

Margaret’s Legacy is an umbrella agency that seeks to provide Holocaust education through tools such as the documentary ‘Margaret and Arthur’s Story’. This thirty-five minute film chronicles Margaret and Arthur Weiszes’ experiences during WWII, their escape from Hungary to Canada and their new life in Hamilton, Ontario—told through the eyes of Arthur and Weisz’s descendants.

In an effort to give younger audiences a better understanding of what happened during the Holocaust and its lingering effects, the documentary addresses the themes of courage, survival and love, and educates youth about the need for tolerance and kindness in the world.

“As we approach Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, [Full name is Yom Hashoah Ve-Hagevurah CP] it is important to listen to the stories of those who lived and experienced this tragic time,” adds Danna. “It will become harder as time goes by, to learn from first-hand experiences and to truly feel the impact that the Holocaust had on six-million Jews and their families.”

Danna Horwood and her youngest daughter Jamie Rose (both descendants of Margaret and Arthur Weisz) will present to community members at the Hamilton Hebrew Academy on May 5th. Margaret and Arthur’s Story’ will also be screened. For the Silo, Lauren Dam

For more information, please visit http://www.margaretslegacy.com/site/home.

About Margaret’s Legacy:

Margaret’s Legacy is an umbrella agency that seeks to provide holocaust education through tools such as the documentary ‘Margaret and Arthur’s Story’. Using their harrowing, yet inspirational story as a backdrop, Margaret and Arthur’s Story is a documentary produced specifically for young viewers to educate them about the Holocaust, its impact and why we cannot allow history to repeat itself.

Supplemental- How the Holocaust rocked RUSH front man Geddy Lee

Fashion

Multi Aroma Diffuser from the Future…available Today

April 8, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Digital Habits presents Bouquet at Fuorisalone 2016, revolutionary IoT multi-aroma diffuser that blends physiology and olfactory scenarios. A new humanism of industrial projects: technological products become essential and sensitive, able to transform the perception of the environment in which they are placed.

Fuorisalone 2016, April 12th – 17th, Milano, SuperStudioPiù, Selected Objects

At Fuorisalone 2016 (April 12th-17th) following the main theme “White pages”, which refers to those metaphorical ‘white pages’ whereby the future world still needs to be written, Digital Habits presents new products that integrate physical and computing elements, shapes and sensitivity, to draw new atmospheres in the home.

Bouquet is the new product of the Digital Habits collection, which brings a new sensory dimension into the living experience: the sense of smell. This project is extremely innovative and investigates the relation between olfactory perception, physiology and psychology.

The body, made of blown glass, is divided in two compartments that contain two different aromas. This decision came after studies on the influence that smell can have on different human activities. With Bouquet it is possible to diffuse separately or simultaneously two different scent scenarios: e.g. relaxing, energizing and so on, according to personal preferences.

Thanks to the inner clock and a Mobile App, it’s also possible to schedule via Blutooth the aroma diffusion during the day to create, at the right time, welcoming situations. For example an activating aroma can help a prompt and energetic wake-up in the morning, while a relaxing aroma can create the right conditions to get asleep.

Bouquet has the following characteristics:

Multi-scent, to select the most fitting fragrance to the different moments of the day.

Smartphone App with bluetooth connectivity to manage and set one or more diffusers wirelessly.

Scenario Manager to automatically schedule an aroma diffusion according to the time of the day (wake-up, back-home, getting asleep), personal habits (concentration, relaxation) and the purpose of each room of the house (living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen).

Do you have room for another smarthphone app? Sure you do!

Presence, to detect the temporary or permanent presence of people in a room and clean the air or flavor it with a pleasant smell.

Custom Intensity, settings to manage the level of intensity of the fragrance depending on personal preference and room size.

Ecosystem, integration with the Digital Habits product range to create new experiences that blend elements of light, sound and scent and recreate situations such as a natural wake-up.

A colored and tunable white light controlled by the Mobile App, is also integrated in Bouquet to complete the sensory experience. Bouquet complements the collection of Digital Habits multi-sensory products such as Cromatica and OSound Light, which transform the perception of the space in which they are placed creating new domestic atmospheres.

At the Fuorisalone 2016, Digital Habits will also presents:

a new version of Osound Light which combines a Bluetooth speaker and a disc of light that creates unexpected atmospheres and gradients.

Dragon, fractal led lamp that grows in the space thanks to the aggregation of smart modules. Dragon is now presented in new table and wall versions.

Another Moon and Kizuki, two new IoT projects resulting from the collaboration between Digital Habits and QUANTUM the innovation accelerator based in Tokyo, part of the global advertising agency TBWA. Another Moon is an object that marks the lunar phases within metropolitan private environments where this awareness is fading out. Kizuki is an IoT signage that allows to intuitively and subtly ‘feel’ the climate within your home.

DIGITAL HABITS

Digital Habits is the innovation platform of the international design studio Habits. Founded in 2012, it focuses on creating interactive and IoT products.

The Digital Habits collection includes objects of sound, light and scent. The products create seamless multisensory environments, which involve different perceptions and activate synesthesia.

Digital Habits products are now available in the most exclusive retail locations such as the Armani Mega Store in Via Manzoni in Milan and Mondadori Mega Stores.

Per ulteriori informazioni o per segnalare la tua pubblicazione scrivi all’indirizzo [email protected]

Sci-Tech

9 Things to Know about Wearable Tech in Health and Fitness

April 4, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

Here’s a fun wearable Infographic from our friends at igotcrazy.com. Do you agree with their projections of use?

•    By 2019, more than 33% of U.S. adult population is expected to be using the wearable tech?
•     According to a survey wearable technologies such as fitness trackers, smart watches and GPS tracking devices are expected to be the No. 1 fitness trend in 2016.
•    Wearable devices could possibly be a way for companies to better understand their team.

Culture

Celebrate 20th Century Fox Alien Day On April 26 With Re-Issued Reebok Shoes

March 29, 2016 The Silo 2 Comments

Is the Alien(s) franchise overdue for an official day of recognition and fan celebration? I think so. Fans of the original 1979 movie and the sequels and prequel that followed are a loyal bunch. They spend money on toys, posters, t-shirts, Blue-ray box sets and some like me, shelled out big bucks in 1987 for a pair of Reebok’s Bugstomper shoes. That’s dedicated fandom.

#AlienDay426

This week’s big announcement of #AlienDay has coincided with reports in the media of ‘new’ Reebok Aliens shoes. I have serious doubts that any of those writers responsible for the reports are hard core fans of the franchise. If they were, they would know that the Reebok shoes being written about were actually available almost 30 years ago.

Perhaps I’m splitting hairs here. There’s a good chance that the re-issue shoes might be slightly different than the original Bugstompers. Images and an official 20th century fox poster being used to promote the re-issues show the Alien character Ripley in a pair of very noticeable “high top” Reebok Bugstompers. Back in the day, only “mid top” shoes were available.

What else besides shoes?

Beginning at midnight and lasting 24 hours, 4/26 (an homage to the planet LV-426) will be filled with product launches, nationwide screenings and a Twitter trivia contest that will give away ALIEN merch every 42.6 minutes. Now you know what that twitter hashtag #AlienDay426 is all about: make April 26 the de-facto fan day for the Alien franchise. CP

Did you know?

The most sought after Alien collectible is the 1979 Kenner 18″ Alien doll– a fine likeness of H.R. Giger’s design. Originally pulled from toy store shelves due to frightening parents and children alike.

UPDATED- Aliens | July 2016 Comic Con Full Panel (James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Paxton)

Click me! New Music created from early sci-fi soundtracks.

Culture

The Metapolitics of Burning Man- ‘Fighting the Lie of The Normal Art Economy’

March 27, 2016 The Silo Leave a comment

OCCUPY BLACK ROCK! THE METAPOLITICS OF BURNING MAN by MARK VAN PROYEN

As annual journalistic rituals go, the annual Time Magazine “Person of the Year” has been the most enduring barometer of the spirit of the moment of its announcement. For close to a century, the banner was “Man of the Year,” but after Corazon Aquino and Queen Elizabeth smiled at the world from the front cover of that inﬂuential publication, gender neutrality became the preferred modality. In 1982 “the computer” received the coveted award, so gender went out the window altogether. But the 2011 award was given to “the protestor,” and the representative image was a masked face of an angry-eyed anonymous person.

TOP Black Rock City from above Photo: AJPN Anthony Peterson BOTTOM Black Rock City seen from Old Razorback Mountain Photo: Peretz Partensky — TOP Black Rock City from above Photo: AJPN Anthony Peterson
BOTTOM Black Rock City seen from Old Razorback Mountain
Photo: Peretz Partensky

This image followed a long year of public demonstrations that started at Cairo’s Taﬁr Square in late January 2011, spread to the shores of Tripoli and then moved on to Damascus. In September 2011, it arrived in New York’s Zucotti Park, a tiny sliver of public space surrounded on all sides by the world’s most prominent ﬁnancial institutions. According to the surging multitudes that participated in what would come to be known as Occupy Wall Street, those institutions were evil, and needed to be called into account.It took the major media a full ten days to report the story of the occupation of that little park, although the story had already been thoroughly distributed via social media networks. The movement’s rhetoric was ingeniously crafted for those modes of distribution, and usually took the form of declarative slogans. These proclaimed that the protestors represented the 99 per cent of the American population that would no longer stand for being ﬂeeced by irresponsible government tax policies, a lack of regulation of the ﬁnancial markets and a vast system of political bribes routinely called “campaign contributions.” Conservative commentators squealed “Class War!” in comic disregard of an OWS placard reminding its readers “they call it class war when we ﬁght back!” From the OWS point of view, that war had been ongoing since Ronald Reagan’s ﬁrst term in ofﬁce. When the major media did get around to picking up the story, “What do they want?” or “What are their demands?” were published everywhere, as if the protestors were unintelligible in their calls for economic justice and political fair play. OWS did not give in to the “demand for demands” and this is crucially important, because their movement never was nor is now a conventional exercise in political advocacy. It is much better to describe it as a case of spontaneous socio-cultural upheaval intended to reshape contemporary political priorities into a more ethical form. In an America where an uber- wealthy minority has garnered a proportionally larger piece of the economic pie for decades, one might have anticipated that the protesters would have adopted a more conventional form of utopian rhetoric. But theirs was decidedly pragmatist. They pointed at real problems that could and should be solved in a political practice governed by simple sanity. One sign read, “I don’t mind you being rich. I mind you buying my government out from under me.” The sign referred to the draconian political atmosphere created when the Supreme Court voted ﬁve to four to overturn the McCain/Feingold Campaign Reform Act in the now infamous Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission decision of 2010. 3

The real issue at stake in the Occupy Movement’s actions is the control that money exerts over the political process. The movement reveals the plutocratic Achilles heel of neoliberal corporatism’s claim that it is more democratic than its chief rivals in model government. I call these rivals “state capitalism” and “theocratic tribalism,” and intend them to be non-euphemistic names for what are conventionally called socialism and religion-based social organization. Because of its distinctly modern emphasis on upholding the prerogatives of individual political actors, neoliberal corporatism is easy to sell as the ideology of choice for free thinkers. But, as history shows, free thinking never stays free for long, because it too has to live in a marketplace of encouragements and discouragements governed by instrumental rationales that are epiphenomenal to the formation and protection of wealth. In other words, those who have the gold set the standards, regardless of any vision of or obligation to social fair play. This insures that instrumental reason will always protect itself from any utopian vision so that in the realms of conventional discourse, we are always given an “intelligentsia” that functions as the public face of bureaucracy and policy. However “oppositional” its posture of hidden loyalty might be, it will nonetheless always end up ﬂeeing from the Socratic mandate that philosophical thinking helps its aspirants to actually live better. From the point of view of the Occupy movement, that mandate desperately needs to be returned to the core of any thinking that seeks to establish anything resembling a political priority.

When I refer to model forms of governmentality, I am not pointing to any operational political entity, any and all of which are circumstantial admixtures of the three models of neo-liberalism, state capitalism and tribal theocracy all achieving legibility much in the same way that tertiary colors do through the mixture of the primary hues of red, yellow and blue. For example, social democracy is really a blend of neo-liberal corporatism and state capitalism. Another example reminds us that there will always be a black market of goods and subversive ideology working in the shadows of any state capitalist system, or for that matter, within any theocratic tribe. Any system conﬁgured around any of these three model forms will also contain latent aspects of one or both of the others, arranged into dominant and subordinate formations. These are always in a perpetual state of change and reconsolidation.

They are also always in a state of subtle redeﬁnition, and the factors that shape these redeﬁnitions can sometimes come from surprising vectors. The Occupy Wall Street movement is one such example, surprising in that it refuses to operate according to the rules of normative political advocacy. Whereas the extremely conservative Tea Party rallies held during the previous year were examples of a durable tradition of anti-government American populism, the OWS movement is representative of an equally durable anti-bank populism that has a long-standing place in American history reaching back to early colonial laws against debtors’ prisons. Even though the two groups blamed different entities for the economic misery that swept the land after the 2008 ﬁnancial crisis, there is an important difference: in an act of support for the second amendment, Tea Party activists often brought guns to their rallies. The only ﬁrearms seen at Occupy Wall Street (and its more contentious sister event, Occupy Oakland) were in the hands of over-zealous law enforcement ofﬁcers. Occupy Wall Street events are signiﬁcantly more complicated animals than their Tea Party predecessors. The movement has gone far out of its way not to be co-opted by the mass media or any collection of candidates for public ofﬁce. Conversely, the Tea Party groups were all too happy to be ventriloquized by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News afﬁliates. OWS had a justiﬁable concern that any such afﬁliation would inevitably lead to the seven stages of political futility: cooptation, division, dilution, paciﬁcation, neutralization, disappointment and betrayal. Because of these concerns, what one sees coming out of the Occupy movement is not an exercise of politics deﬁned by the normal terms and conditions of any conventional political science. Rather, it operates as an example of what Alain Badiou has called a Metapolitics, that is, a strategic restaging of the ethical grounds by which political matters are imagined, understood, debated and acted upon. According to Badiou, Metapolitics is a form of “Resistance by Logic.” 4

No group, no class, no social conﬁguration or mental objective was behind the Resistance… there was nothing in the course of this sequence which could have been described in terms of objective groups, be they ‘workers’ or ‘philosophers’…. Let us say that this resistance, proceeding by logic, is not an opinion. Rather, it is a logical rupture with dominant and circulating opinions…. For the contemporary philosophical situation is one where, on the ruins on the doctrine of classes and class consciousness, attempts are made on all sides to restore the primacy of morality. 5

It is particularly interesting to look at Badiou’s metapolitical thesis in light of his larger project to transform the most basic grounds of philosophical inquiry so as to place greater emphasis on ethics. He is well known for proposing a change in the basic categories of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics, logic and epistemology), seeking to restage them as the interdependent “truth procedures” of “art, love, politics and science.” 6

His metapolitical restaging of the truth procedure of political science can be understood to be of a piece with his postulation of an ethical “inaesthetics.” This seeks to deny the meditative subject/object relationship of contemplation with something suffused with “immanence and singularity,” leading to a “transﬁguration of the given.” The Occupy Wall Street movement has followed suit on this score, fashioning itself as an immanent and singular metapolitical gesture that has embraced a unique resistance by logic that was and still is a vigorous disruption of logic. It has accomplished this by staging a theatrical moment that calls attention to the withering state of the commons, that being the place of democratic co-existence and rational debate where all citizens can freely enter and exist regardless of their inability to rent media time. And let there be no mistake: in the second decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century, social media has become the new commons, needing only a shared event to galvanize its attention to the point of putting a wide-ranging discourse about political priorities into play on a vast and unregulated scale. Occupy Wall Street is one such event, one whose time has clearly come. But the model for this kind of actual/virtual exercise in reformulating a common space into a rhetorical congregation had been established two decades earlier in a very different public location that also galvanized a vast virtual community. It too was a brilliantly conceived exercise in a metapolitical “resistance by logic.” That space was and still is the vast Black Rock Desert, a dry lakebed in northwestern Nevada that is administered by the Federal Bureau of Land Management.

Karen on Eileen and George, from Crude Awakening PHOTO: ROGER MINKOW M.D. — Karen on Eileen and George, from Crude Awakening
PHOTO: ROGER MINKOW M.D.

The event was and still is Burning Man. Since the early beginnings of the Internet, many observers have postulated that there was revolutionary potential in its ability to widely and instantaneously distribute unmediated information. Some have proclaimed it to be the new commons, this in recognition of how the forces of neoliberal corporatism have turned the old commons into shopping malls of various kinds, those being places where the subtle doctrine of “pay to play” began to slowly displace all other opportunities for political participation. Burning Man was the ﬁrst major instance of an organized recognition of this new communal possibility of the digital revolution, and the ﬁrst to act upon it at any meaningful scale. It did so by “occupying” a piece of public land in a wilderness area, and then conﬁguring itself as a kind of free city where monetary exchange and corporate advertising would not be allowed. Participation, collaboration and self-reliance were upheld as paramount civic virtues, and art was deﬁned and welcomed as the product of any “radical free expression” that any person could devise, regardless of any lack of previous experience or education. When web-browsing software ﬁrst became available in 1994, Burning Man was already nine years old, and had already been using email networks and virtual bulletin boards to distribute its messages to a growing audience. The emergence of such communications technologies were a natural ﬁt for the event, and even to this day, it has never paid for any advertising beyond the printing and mailing of its own promotional materials. That was the same year that the mass media initially came out to report on the event. The following year, the population doubled, making it clear that a tax on participants was needed to cover necessary costs for staging the event on a much larger sale. Admission tickets were sold, and federal rules were re-written so that the federal Bureau of Land Management could charge the organizers of Burning Man a hefty fee to use the space. Soon after that, much more money was spent in legal fees to support litigation that should have never have come to any court’s attention, if constitutional guarantees of rights to free assembly and self-expression were deemed worthy of any respect. But they weren’t, because it was difﬁcult to convince certain political operators that the self-expressive thing that had engendered Burning Man’s free assembly of pilgrims had anything to do with art. From their point of view, what was happening at an increasingly large scale every year in the Black Rock Desert on Labor Day weekend was much more frightening, in that its almost complete lack of artistic supervision portended something akin to a mass participation Satanic ritual.7 It also threatened to unmask the lie that art had become.

From the perspective of an art world populated by museum curators, globe trotting art collectors and the toney gallerists working the crowds at international art fairs, Burning Man represents a kind of Special Olympics for Art. To give credence to this view, all any nay-sayer would have to do is attend the event and take in its many starry-eyed unicorns and countless geodesic domes built in service to obscure comic-book deities fashioned from disﬁgured mannequins. If our nay-sayer were guided by courage and in search of additional evidence to support her initial observation, the next logical destination would be the large indoor exhibition space called the Café, which is usually decorated by the work of a great many amateur photographers and collage artists working on heavy doses of misinformed spiritual pretense and undeserved self-esteem. And yet, as revealing as the Café environment might be, it still pales in comparison to the best place to witness Burning Man’s culture of unfettered creativity, that being the array of unmapped theme camps located away from the Esplanade that separates the event’s semi-circular camping area from the mile-wide no-camping zone at its core. Here, one is liable to ﬁnd a vast assortment of incomprehensible do-it-yourself efforts at representational makeshiftery, often times manifested in things that look more like distorted family entertainments than the objects of any conventional art history. Looking like the mutant offspring of a theme park and a slum conceived in the prop closet of George and Mike Kuchar’s Studio 8 Production Company, 8 these provisional amalgamations of such materials such as ﬂuorescent fabric and solar powered lava lamps oftentimes seem to allegoricize the traumas and contradictions of a consumer culture blindly addicted to the debt-driven circulation of pseudo-goods and non-services; all saying something troublingly oblique about an America that is amusing itself to death in the age of Walmart.

The real value of Burning Man lies in how it reverses this model. It does so by simply allowing its participants to amuse themselves back to life through their participation in a week of collective catharsis. Fortunately for our dyspeptic pilgrim, the artistic offerings of Burning Man get bathed in a seemingly endless sea of electro-luminescent blinky lights when nightfall arrives, and her attention will then most likely be diverted by an omnipresent soundscape of pulsating techno music punctuated by the explosive ﬂashings of propane ﬁreballs surging into the sky. To this, add the lumbering peregrinations of large, slow moving vehicles that appear as grotesque carnival rides taken from a Dada-themed amusement park, and the picture of a vastly absurd semiotic entity comes close to completion, a relational esthetics

gesamtkunskwerk 9 that is metaphorically and geographically located at the exact half-way point between San Francisco’s Mission District and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty protruding from the north shore of the Great Salt Lake. It is equal parts game space and refugee camp, and as such, it presents itself as a gargantuan omni-participatory rejoinder to the regulation of subjectivity embedded in the cognitive illusions bred by normative market-deﬁned existence. And for this reason, the ensemble experience of participating in Burning Man provides a much-needed transﬁguration of everyday assumptions about what passes for cultural nourishment. Its chief lesson lies in the way that it demonstrates how well a do-it-yourself social economy can work if and when it reframes itself in the terms of a do-it-with-others ethos, and this represents a profound political revelation as well as its chief metapolitical legacy to be later taken up by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Rather than calling this vast entity by its proper name of Black Rock City, lets give it a more descriptive moniker: the living model of an alternative version of contemporary culture based on advancing an ethical glocalism as the highest of priorities. And then let us note that, in theatrically performing itself as such a model, it also forms itself into a fun house mirror reﬂection of the absurdities of twenty-ﬁrst century existence, all-the-while organizing itself as a temporary corrective for many of that century’s social and political shortcomings, especially those pointed toward systematically excluding people from social participation for no good reason. At Burning Man, the stranger is always welcome, and there are always opportunities for any given participant to do things that she never imagined herself to be doing. And in so doing, she oftentimes learns a great deal about the roles that she plays in her everyday life, in turn allowing her to imagine and act upon other roles that might lead her to a better world, at least for herself and maybe for others. Yes, Burning Man does feature a great deal of so-called “New Age” art made by people who might best be called hippies, and yes, almost all of that art is at best a guileless exercise in naïve cluelessness that is scripted not so much by any “radical free expression” as it is by the simplistic recirculation of pop cultural cliché. At worst, it is something on a par with toenail fungus, but even that can be strangely entertaining when contrasted with the vastness of the desert. Indeed, accounting for maybe two- or three-dozen notable exceptions during the past decade, we would have to concede that almost all of the art at Burning Man is as bad as its detractors say that it is. But in admitting this fact, another obvious question comes to the fore: in the great scheme of things, how important is it whether any of it is bad or good? And following from this, another obvious set of questions: who or what are the entities that are empowered to decide on any such differentiation? What values do they represent? What is masked by the authoritative proclamation of said values? And again: why does any of it matter?

Turnabout being fair play, it now becomes obligatory to imagine what an everyburner might make of the current world of contemporary art, resplendent as it is when ensconced within opulent museum architecture and festooned with price tags that are the monetary equivalent of real estate when it is not. It is undeniable that those environments are the sites of a kind of authoritative coldness designed to intimidate the viewer into a kind of passive submission to the historical authority of those things that are beheld within them. It is also undeniable that the large majority of those snobjects contain very little that conveys the kind of truthful generosity that might reward the attention of the serious viewer who is not party to the vested interests that have been inﬂuence-peddled into the visible existence of their environment’s adoration.

And so, our everyburner would no doubt ask: given the sorry state of the world, why all the fuss? Presumably, money is part of the equation, although it is difﬁcult for the uninitiated to see exactly how it plays out through the elaborate web of private, corporate and public support that buoy any given museum’s orchestration of the importance effect. As Paul Werner succinctly put it in 2005: “The illusion that art museums could be run for proﬁt like everything else was derived from the notion museums themselves had worked so hard to foster: that art and capital were all one and circulated in the same manner.”10

Werner goes on to quote former Metropolitan Museum director Phillipe de Montebello’s statement that “It is the judicious exercise of the museum’s authority that makes possible the state of pure reverie that an unencumbered esthetic experience can inspire,”11 and then goes on to state that “by the same logic, the absence of ‘a state of reverie’ interferes with ‘the judicious exercise of authority.’” Werner drives this point home when he writes “What Brecht wrote of the Nazis then now applies to cultural apparatus of the twenty-ﬁrst century: they want to turn the People into an audience. Same policy, different means.”12

Once again, we are reminded of the truism stating that propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated believe that they are acting on their own free will. How you might ask, and the answer is obvious: in the way of the translation of a certain class of objects—let’s call them symbolic commodities—into a certain class of equities. It is easy to suppose that said equity is simply gained from the fortuitous position that any given investor might take amid the normal value/worth ﬂuctuation of the commodity in question. But works of art are not commodities in same way as are barrels of crude oil or tons of copper, nor is it a form of reserve currency as are ounces of gold or silver. The commodity value of a given work of art is instead a function of its status as a reliquary representation of its own myth status, and that is something that continues to be manufactured long after said work of art leaves the studio of the artist who created it. Ultimately, it is the museum that conﬁrms the mythic status of the objects that it chooses to display and collect, creating a fortuitous feedback loop that points to how the world of contemporary art has been transformed into a rather perverse epiphenomena of the ﬁnancial services industry.

Here is how the normative art economy actually works. Artist a) makes a work of art b) and shows it at the gallery of dealer c), who gets it written about by critic d) and then sells it to collector e) for f) amount of money. Collector e) hangs on to artwork while the reputation of artist a) rises by way others repeating the same machinations described in the aforementioned equation, and then, at a fortuitous moment, she either sells said artwork for proﬁt f)+x , or more normally donates said artwork to museum g), for which she receives donor recognition h), which represents the fair market value that museum g) places on artwork b).

Because the work has been accepted into museum g)’s collection, its fair market value automatically rises, so that donor recognition h) is actually worth much more that the original purchase price f) of work of art b). And it is donor recognition h) that collector e) sends to the tax collector as a claim for a tax deductable charitable contribution that reduces collector e)’ s overall tax burden by a signiﬁcant sum of money (yes, the federal government does support the arts!). The value added portion of this equation lies in how much greater a sum of money donor recognition h) represents in relation to original cost of artwork b), and in many cases that sum is ten or 20 or 100 times the original investment. Thus the economy of art is laid bare, and it can rightfully be called a speculative marketplace in objects that might represent a signiﬁcantly enhanced tax-deductability that can be exercised at some future juncture, all assuming that museum g) is interested in acquiring work of art b) at any point in time. This means that work of art b) has to ﬁt in with what museum g) considers to be a worthwhile esthetic experience, based in part on its own vested interest in perpetuating its ability to exercise such consideration. Werner gets that particular point right when he states that “if the Guggenheim, or any other museum, had actually covered its expenses through admissions, that would have harmed its true function: The manufacture of exclusiveness.”13

But, even though money is a major part of the equation, it by no means is all of it. It is worth noting that Werner’s remarks about the museum world point to a speciﬁc historical moment, and that moment was deﬁned by the aftermath of the politically motivated reformulation of the National Endowment for the Arts that took place between 1989 and 1994. After that reformulation (which effectively ended government support for the arts in the United States), both the world of the museum and the larger world of contemporary art were momentarily recast as perverse sub-functions of the entertainment industry, with a reigning style called “Pop Surrealism”14

This coming to the fore as the stylistic marker for the art of that brief and bygone moment, and indeed, a perfectly useful and legitimate term that could accurately describe much of the art that one might ﬁnd at any given iteration of Burning Man. In fact, it is a far more accurate term than the more common ascription pointing to it as new form of “outsider art.” This is so because at that particular moment, there was a major lack of clarity about what was inside or outside of anything other than what ﬁnancially motivated turnstiles might keep in a state of separation, and in the wake of the cessation of government funding, an increase in audience size became an necessary institutional mandate. Thus, we had an art style that “took its inspiration from popular culture,” meaning that it was trying and failing to be popular culture, rather than the kind of critical comment on it that we saw with 1960s Pop Art. Part-and-parcel with the 1990s embrace of Pop Surrealism as an audience development strategy was another related trend called Postart spectacle, which transformed whole museums into elaborately staged pseudo-operas of the type made famous by Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy and Martin Kippenberger—artists who all infused Pop Surrealist esthetics with the theme park ambience of an arena rock concert. Finally, it is worth noting that the rhetorical pendent that was hung around the neck of this esthetic shift toward popular entertainment was something called “art writing.” It did not come from the traditional world of art historically trained art critics, but instead issued from a new hybrid discourse that proclaimed itself to be something called “visual studies,” which in many cases was little more than culturally sensitive entertainment reporting—“celebrity porn journalism” to use a deservedly uncharitable term. Its most characteristic feature was a shameless willingness to be used as a tool for institutional audience development.

Nonetheless, in the art world, all of this was brief and transitional, because the focus would again shift in dramatic form after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, making Pop Surrealism suddenly look very anachronistic. Very soon thereafter, Globalism became the new buzzword for a suddenly robust emphasis on a transnational art hailing from under-recognized parts of the world. Presumably, Globalism represented an impetus toward encouraging the embrace of art as an instrument of national liberation, or failing that particular pretense, as a focal point for the kind of cultural lubrication that might politically facilitate desirable access to the labor, natural resources and markets of the developing economies so dearly prized by neoliberal corporatism. It might also represent a politically motivated usage of art as an instrument of paciﬁcation, that is, as an administrative technology for deﬂecting the potential for actual conﬂict into the containable realm of symbolic conﬂict. The visible shape that this newly globalized art took on was not manifested in any particular form of artistic cultural production, but instead, was revealed as a relatively new form of cultural presentation called the Mega-Exhibition. These were exempliﬁed by such time-honored extravaganzi as Documenta and the Venice Biennial, but also by a metastasizing host of newer entries into the global mega-exhibition fray, held in such cities as Istanbul and Taipei. These are giant affairs that operate under the guidance of an elite class of internationally renown curatorial directors, and in addition to operating as certiﬁcation mechanisms for the investability of the art contained by them, they also function as major engines of cultural tourism and transnational ideological propaganda that have been used to enrich the coffers of their host cities. It is also worth thinking about how other imperatives might be in play. As Okwui Enwezor has written, globalism embodies a new vision of global totality and a concept of modernity that dissolves the old paradigm of the nation-state and the ideology of the ‘center,’ each giving way to a dispersed regime of rules based on networks, circuits, ﬂows, interconnection. Those rhizomatic movements are said to operate on the logic of horizontality, whose disciplinary, spatial, and temporal orders enable the mobility of knowledge, information, culture, capital, and exchange, and are no longer based on domination and control… globalism was part of the maturation of a certain kind of liberal ideal, which in its combination of democratic regimes of governance and free market capitalism was prematurely announced as the end of history.15

These attributes are all pointed at the imagination of “a truly uniﬁed world system whereby all systems of modern rationalism would ﬁnally be properly fused.”16

Of course, the inquiring mind will ask, to what end? And more importantly, to whose end? Of course, answers to these questions are never made clear, perhaps because they cannot be made clear. But it is worth pointing out that the impetus toward the aforementioned fusion is a very different thing than the impetus toward cultural diversity, and it is also interesting to note that among the many topics of cultural identity that have surfaced during the heyday of the global mega-exhibition, the debt obligations of post-colonial nation states is one that almost never comes up. That is because the thing instigating and beneﬁting from the aforementioned fusion is a global, trans-national banking system that has learned how to use both art and nation states as tools for its own purposes. That much said, we can go on to productively note Burning Man is also a mega-exhibition, but in many ways it is also an anti-mega-exhibition, especially in the ways that it preﬁgured, mirrored and satirized the “the rhizomatic logics of horizontality, interconnection and dispersal” that have become de rigueur themes in twenty-ﬁrst century art. III

Electrical Suit sketch by Dr. Austin Richards AKA Dr. Megavolt

For all of Burning Man’s claims of being a place apart from the default world that it pretends to leave behind, it nonetheless does seem that the event sustains an oblique relationship to that world. During the technologically addled 1990s, Burning Man seemed to be prophetically far ahead of the cultural environment surrounding it. The chief reason for this was its far-reaching imagination of the ways that new technology could recast how social relations might be reconﬁgured in critical relation to what Naomi Klein would later call “Disaster Capitalism.”17

In those days, the presiding spirit of Burning Man was not any getting back to the mythical garden that so captured the imagination of the Woodstock generation so much as it was a celebration of various kinds of real and imagined love taking place amongst the post-apocalyptic ruins of rampant military adventurism and ﬁnancial and ecological unsustainability. But in 2001, the specter of real apocalypse became traumatically evident when the 9/11 terrorist attacks ushered in an unfunded war wedded to the draconian trappings of the National Security State. Suddenly, the world caught up with Burning Man’s parsing of the utopian and dystopian themes of technologically-assisted social capitalism, making them seem redundantly similar to the mass media narratives about a brave new cyber-economy as well as the emergence of other forms of Postart spectacle that had come into prominence in the art world. The fact that Burning Man had become the putative darling of a kind of trivializing mass-media condescension did not help, and over time the event become more-and-more indistinguishable from the “wild and crazy” caricatures that were heaped upon it. By 2007, the event had clearly become a victim of its own clichés of ﬂagrant silliness, mired in a repetitious cycle of nostalgia for the exuberant 1990s. Soon after that, that the world would pass it by, because in 2008, the story would take another turn, a downturn to be exact. The ﬁnancial crisis that exploded in October of that year once again recalibrated the larger terrain of cultural understanding, and the urgency of that moment began to make Burning Man look every bit as indulgent and frivolous as it did the institutional art world. Soon thereafter, a new concern for the politics of social justice had come into the foreground, eclipsing the themes of alternative identity and self-sustaining community-of-desire that were such prominent features of the event during its 1990s heyday. It was time to pass the metapolitical torch of the do-it-with-others ethos so that a very different ﬁre might be lit with the aid of a few well-placed Falstafﬁan pitchforks.

Returning to Badiou, we read that the ethical understanding of justice is something quite speciﬁc. It is based on the following injunction: “to examine political statements and their proscriptions, and draw from them their egalitarian kernel of universal signiﬁcation.”18

If Burning Man has done nothing else, it has certainly created an Archimedean ground from which such an examination might proceed, much more successfully than anything that happened in the institutional art world during the same time period. Following from this recognition, we might then ask how the metapolitical kernel of Burning Man was passed to Zucotti Park, as if, in an age of social media, the assertion and exertion of any inﬂuence on anything can somehow be supposed to not be operable until proven otherwise. We know that one of the key instigators of the OWS movement was Micah White, the Berkeley-based co-editor of the Vancouver-based journal Adbusters , therefore a Bay Area connection is easily made, although it is not clear if White was in any way inﬂuenced by Burning Man. Because there is a very large contingent of Burning Man participants that hail from New York City, one could easily suppose that their experience of the event might have had something to do with the encampment at Zucotti, especially since Occupy Wall Street initially took place just ten days after the conclusion of the 2011 Burning Man event. But there is one important kernel of indisputable inﬂuence that clearly stands out, and that is Bill Talen, who is better known in his performance guise of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, a New York-based performance group that has extensively toured the United States and is the subject of two widely circulated documentary ﬁlms. What makes Talen’s performances so timely for this discussion is his evocation of the tropes of a theocratic tribalism that are severed from the politics of hate and fear, all enacted in service to the kind of communitarianism and pleas for justice that earmarked the earliest Christian communities of the second century. Obviously, those same values are in short supply among so-called evangelical churches populated by legions of CINOs (Christians-in-Name-Only), reminding us of how deeply perverted the gospel message has become in twenty-ﬁrst century America. The fact that the more organized churches proclaiming allegiance to the gospels have been outdone on this score by a performance artist should be cause for concern, outrage and cruel mockery. Starting in 2002, the 30-member band and gospel choir of the Church of Stop Shopping has regularly performed at Burning Man, putting on a rousing revival show that is a stunningly convincing mimic of similar services consecrated to “the old time religion” a la Elmer Gantry, only at Burning Man, it was comically staged under the shadow of an 40-foot-tall efﬁgy that echos the real old old old time religion of Neolithic cult worship.

At the forefront of the Church’s performance is Talen’s character named Reverend Billy, who preaches in passionate, Elvis Presley-inﬂected voice about the evils of consumerism and the tragic human cost of debt-driven consumption, backed up by a gospel chorus and small orchestra featuring a church organ. The chorus sings songs about the virtues of an economic democracy that is described as a promised land, and the mood is always persuasively festive, even joyous.

Talen’s passionate and eloquent sermons come across like rhapsodic poems made from the many fragments of Occupy Wall Street signage, and in fact, Talen did perform (sans choir) at the 17 September 2011 beginning of OWS, just a few days after returning to New York from Burning Man. Subsequently, he performed with the choir at Zucotti Park on several other days, to audiences that grew ever larger during the month of October. These were rousing and inspirational shows that galvanized the attention of ever-growing crowds in a way that gave them a coherent group identity, meaning that, for a few brief moments, the Occupy protesters found themselves attending a church of their own politically inclusive revelation, which allowed them to see themselves as being a part of something much larger than themselves.

As always, Talen’s performances were a brilliant obversion of the pernicious role that religion has come to play in American politics, where so-called “values” candidates have been using church afﬁliation for decades as the preferred excuse for supporting candidates and policies that embody the hateful opposite of Christian morality. Such ethically duplicitous rhetoric also has a metapolitical name, and that name is Neoconservatism when practiced by Americans who identify with Judeo-Christian tradition, and fundamentalism when practiced by others. Either way, the word “fundamental” applies in all of its many nuances, especially the one that highlights its deﬁnitional opposition to enlightened sophistication. Essentially, Neoconservatism is a subtle theologicization of the neoliberal doctrine that deﬁnes the subject along the secular lines of economic self-interest, but it deviates from that doctrine in that it assumes that self-serving moral edicts are required when the economic interests of cultural Others begins to gain too quickly in relation to the economic self-interest of the culturally entitled.

Talen’s Reverend Billy performances are so entertaining and well executed that it is easy to miss the seriousness of the metapolitical critique embodied in them. Certainly, they provide a thoughtful and dramatic critique of the empathy deﬁcit disorder that is bred by neoliberal corporatism, and they command and entice their audiences to insist on ethical correctives. As for the relation of his work to his experience of Burning Man, Talen himself has a clear vision of the similarity between Burning Man and the OWS movement. He writes: Burning Man and Occupy Wall Street share this: we discovered that living together is a performance with long-range power. How we live—people watch and learn. Then they live back at us and we change too. We experience the decisions of how to live as drama, and (we found out) as protest—more than traditional theater which rarely has electrical charge these days. For years we were the butt of journalist jokes, calling us refried 60s protesters—angry people carrying signs and chanting. All that was wiped away by the glorious arrival of Occupy, which was the simple notion of living together in public, in a park under the scrapers of Wall. Sharing food, stories, making media, ﬁguring out laws, discussing health, feeding each other—LIVING TOGETHER is the devastating protest form of our day. Burning Man’s fascination—you see it around the world—ﬂows from living together under arid desert conditions for a week. BM also chucks the conventional stage and ﬁnds a new charged theater in sashaying in outrageous costumes and nakedness in front of 50,000 people who are doing the same thing back at you. Burning Man is great theater—leaves Broadway in its playa dust. And Wall Street guys are there too—wearing ﬂuorescent underwear while they check out a 100-foot-long chandelier. How change comes to the world from these two forms of theatrical living— stay tuned! It has begun.” To this I can only say Amen.

notes- *apologies for layout issues, text spaces have been modified to allow for full citation listings.

Alain Badiou,

Metapolitics

(1998), translated by Jason Barker, London: Verso Books, 2005, p. 19.

Jean Tingley, “On Statics,” (text from a leaﬂet dropped near Dusseldorf in 1959. Recorded in

The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume VI

, edited by Gunther Stuhlman, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1966 p. 284.

See Adam Schiff, “The Supreme Court Still Thinks That Coroporations Are People,” (July 18, 2012)

The Atlantic Monthly

; http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/07/the-supreme-court-still-thinks-corporations-are-people/259995/court-still-thinks-corporations-are-people/259995/

Badiou, Op. Cit., p. 5.

Ibid, pp. 5–6.

For a synopsis of Badiou’s key claims, see his

Manifesto for Philosophy

, translated by Norman Maderaz, State University of New York Press, 1999. Further references to Baudiou’s ideas are extracted from this source, unless otherwise cited.

Claims of Burning Man being a socially dangerous satanic ritual were made on the 18 May 1998 broadcast of Pat Robertson’s 700 Club program on the

Christian Broadcast Network

George Kuchar (1942–2011) and Mike Kuchar (b.1942) were San Francisco-based underground ﬁlmmakers whose low budget works used and misused exaggerated gender clichés to satirize the most preposterous aspects of conventional “sinematic” exposition. George Kuchar’s most well known ﬁlm was titled

Hold Me While I’m Naked

, 1966, while Mike Kuchar is best known for his 1966 ﬁlm titled

Sins of the Fleshapoids.

In 1997, they collaborated on a book of comic reminiscences titled

Reﬂections from a Cinematic Cesspool

(San Francisco: Zanja Press). Here we might note a persistent albeit unconﬁrmed rumor that San Francisco’s long-running stage play titled

Beach Blanket Babylon

was originally indebted in some way to the George Kuchar esthetic. In Jennifer Kroot’s 2009 documentary ﬁlm titled

It Came From Kuchar,

it was revealed that Bill Grifﬁth’s comic character named

Zippy the Pinhead

was modeled on George Kuchar.

Gesamtkunskwerk

literally means “total work of art.” It was coined by Richard Wagner to describe his view opera production as a synthesis of all of the arts. See his

The Artwork of the Future

(1849, translated by William Ashton Ellis) at http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagartfut.htm. “Relational Esthetics” was a term originally coined by Nicholas Bourriard in 1986 as a way of calling attention to certain artistic practices that were/ are less concerned about the creation of a ﬁnal product than they are about the social processes of inclusion and participation leading up to it. Bourriaud deﬁned the approach simply as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” (p. 113). See Nicholas Bourriard,

Relational Esthetics , Dijon, France: Les Presses du Reel , 2002. For a critique of Bourriard’s thesis, see Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,”

October 110, Fall 2004. Bishop points out that “The curators promoting this ‘laboratory’ paradigm—including Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van der Linden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud—have to a large extent been encouraged to adopt this curatorial modus operandi as a direct reaction to the type of art produced in the 1990s: work that is open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be ‘work-in-progress’ rather than a completed object. Such work seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual ﬂux. There are many problems with this idea, not least of which is the difﬁculty of discerning a work whose identity is willfully unstable. Another problem is the ease with which the ‘laboratory’ becomes marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment. Venues such as the Baltic in Gateshead, the Kunstverein Munich, and the Palais de Tokyo (in Paris) have used metaphors like ‘laboratory,’ ‘construction site,’ and ‘art factory’ to differentiate themselves from bureaucracy-encumbered collection-based museums; their dedicated project spaces create a buzz of creativity and the aura of being at the vanguard of contemporary production. One could argue that in this context, project-based works-in-progress and artists-in-residence begin to dovetail with an‘experience economy,’ the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experiences. Yet, what the viewer is supposed to garner from such an ‘experience’ of creativity, which is essentially institutionalized studio activity, is often unclear.” (p. 52) Bishop goes on to quote Bourriard: “It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows” (p. 54;

Relational Esthetics,p. 45), Then she adds “This DIY, microtopian ethos is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core political signiﬁcance of relational aesthetics.” (p.54). It is worth noting that there has never been much difference between Bourriard’s assertion of “Relational Aesthetics” art practices and Allan Kaprow’s much older advocacy of Happenings, the ﬁrst principle of which being “the line between the Happenings and daily life should be kept as ﬂuid as possible,” so that “the reciprocation between the handmade and the ready-made will be at its maximum power.” (Allan Kaprow, “The Happenings are Dead: Long Live the Happenings!” (1966) in Jeff Kelly ed., The Blurring of Art and Life: The Collected Writings of Allan Kaprow , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 62). The key point lies in how both Relational Esthetics and the earlier Happenings resurrect the tenants of Lukasian social realism by substituting real-time face-to-face encounters for the older tropes of representing and/or narrating ideas of “class consciousness.” More recently, similar activities have again rebranded themselves as “Social Practice Art,” as a way of emphasizing more speciﬁc political ambitions. See Nato Thompson, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991 to 2011,

Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 2012. But even here, the obvious equation of institutionally supported “social practice art” with inefﬁcacious postures of mild political concern (scented with the bad faith of loyal opposition) are never directly addressed. An important early instance of a Relational Esthetics artwork was San Francisco-based artist Tom Marioni’s Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art

, a weekly relational esthetics performance that has been ongoing since the mid-1970s. Clearly, San Francisco-based Burning Man is far and away the largest and most complex example. Neither was mentioned in Bourriard’s famous book.

10.

Paul Werner,

Museums, Inc.

, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2005, p. 9.

11.

Ibid., p. 15.

12.

Ibid

p. 58.

13.

Ibid

p. 41.

14.

Pop Surrealism was the name of a 1998 exhibition organized by Richard Klein, Ingrid Schaffner and Dominique Nahas held at the Aldrich Museum in Ridgeﬁeld Connecticut. It contained the work of artists such as Peter Saul, Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy, Lisa Yuskavage, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, John Currin and Robt. Williams, and could be said to have reprised and expanded upon an earlier exhibition titled Helter

Skelter that was organized in 1992 by Paul Schimmel at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The monthly publication Juxtapose (founded by Williams in 1994) has done much to promote many of the artists associated with the Pop Surrealism movement, but the publication’s claim that the movement originated in southern California is erroneous. The real historical sources of the Pop Surrealism movement is found in the earlier work of Bay Area-based artists such as Peter Saul and George Kuchar, as well as the underground comics movement that was based in the same area during the middle 1960s. Chicago artists of the early 1970s such as Jim Nutt, Gladys Nielson and Karl Wirsum were also important early inﬂuences. The most important aspect of the Pop Surrealism movement lied in its embrace of a populist turn in art that was responsive to circumstances related to the political controversies surrounding government funding for the arts. In 1998, the National Endowment for the Arts published the ﬁndings of a multi-year research project that concluded that the arts were widely perceived to be irrelevant and elitist. The project was called American Canvas

. See Gary O. Larson,

American Canvas: An Arts Legacy for Our Communities

, Washing ton D.C.: US Government Printing Ofﬁce, 1998.

15.

Okwui Enwezor, “Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” in Andreas Huyssen ed.,

Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in Globalizing Art

, Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 148–149.

16.

Ibid

p. 149. In an anonymous introductory remark made in the online journal

Italian Greyhound , we read that “Enwezor uses as an illustration of the serious and thoughtfully considered nature of righteous internationalists in fomenting new representations in academic programs and curated collections by pointing to a think tank he participated in 1997 in Italy whose members came from Brazil, Turkey, Cuba, Australia, South Africa, and Thailand, amid other countries. These panelists endeavored to recode the complex dialectics between globalization and the long process of modernization towards market basked-economies on the course of which much of the developing world was set since the early days of decolonization. Enwezor reports that this group drew and reached no conclusions other than to continue meeting at subsequent retreats and biennale exhibitions.” The same anonymous interlocutor also summarizes a response formulated by art critic George Baker to Enwezor’s essay that takes exception to its optimistic assessment of the equalizing nature of enormous international art fairs, arguing that “the only valid deﬁnition of globalization is one that must include an acknowledgement of the invasiveness of multinational corporations.” Baker deﬁantly asks “who and where is the audience for mega-exhibitions?” echoing Enwezor’s use of the words “spectatorship” and “spectacle.” The roving biennale, Baker says, “creates a traveling fair for global elites, excluding both artists and the local populations where such exhibits take place.” Baker dismisses Enwezor’s Trauma and Nation model concepts, claiming instead that “shows such as Documenta existed for years merely as a forum for exported American art and views of art.” Baker further argues “mega-exhibits are in fact created, like the Olympics, with the intent of deﬁning, promulgating, and delineating American culture.” Baker asks “why it is that biennials,” (which are, he says, “essentially the same showcasing of many of the same works repeated in different time zones”) “are the new model for counter-hegemonic spectatorship?” (See the summary provided at athttp://italiangreyhounds.org/errata/2007/06/13/“mega-exhibitions-and-the-antimonies-of-a-transnational-global-form”-by-okwui-enwezor-vs-“the-globalization-of-the-false-a-response-to-okwui-enwezor”-by-george-baker/)

17.

See Naomi Klein,

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,

New York: Henry Holt &Co., 2007.

18.

Badiou, Op. Cit., p. 17.

19.

Bill Talen, Email correspondence with the author, 7 April 2012.

SLOW BURN245BARBARA TRAUB

SLOW BURN

BARBARA TRAUB

Monolith

, 2012

246SLOW BURN247BARBARA TRAUB

Playa Play

, 2000

Greeter Station

, 1997

Double Expusure

, 1995

248SLOW BURN249BARBARA TRAUB

Guiding Light

, 1999

250SLOW BURN251BARBARA TRAUB

Ravishing Raven

, 2000

Desert Rat

, 1997

252SLOW BURN253BARBARA TRAUB

Dust Cloud

, 1996

Tableau Vivant

, 1994

Water Woman

, 1997

#AlienDay426

What else besides shoes?

Did you know?

Canada's 'biggest little blogspace'