Rogue Habits

A Prodigious Playground of Piled Pallets: Enter Palletfest

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"Upcycling" sounds like one of those words coined by Faith Popcorn to make recycling sound twee. That's actually not too far off; the first recorded usage of the term was by Reiner Pilz in 1994, complaining that re-purposed industrial by-products were broken up instead of anybody thinking how to use them in their present form. When you melt a bottle down to [...]

Swiss Dreaming: How To Spend One Perfect Day In Zurich

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In the minds of many foreigners, Switzerland is a land of offshore funded banks, unbelievably practical and small knife gadgets, political neutrality, snow-capped Alps, and glorious chocolate. Beyond the stereotypes, both good and bad, Switzerland is a gorgeous country that deserves further exploration. Zurich, the country's cultural and commercial capital, [...]

Hamster Wheel Desk: Innovative Office Furniture or Snarky Capitalist Satire?

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Let's make one thing perfectly clear: The human body is evolved to run. We survived up the evolutionary food chain to become the dominant species on the planet not by our brains or brawn, but by our tootsies. Cheetahs may sprint faster in short bursts, but we humans win by sheer persistence. Contrary to the popular notion that we hunted with spears and arrow[...]

Album Review: Yesway's Self-Tited LP

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The spectres of folk music's past haunt Yesway's self-titled début album. While such a description might serve to paint these newly emergent songwriters as gothic miserablists, these spirits are very much benevolent ones, content to waft with a gleeful fervour out in the open air, before dissolving into dewy embers with the morning's first light. Sounds floa[...]

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

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Ever since the 2011 documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" was released, Sukiyabashi Jiro, the restaurant and its 87 year old master sushi chef, Jiro Ono have become world famous. The original branch helmed by Jiro and his oldest son, as well as the second branch, a mirror image of the first location, and run by Jiro's youngest son, Takashi, are Michelin starred[...]

Capsula Mundi: We Are All Branches On the Tree of Life

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The dead vastly outnumber the living, bringing to focus the unnoticed problem of funerary pollution. The old, wasteful interment into the ground or a crypt, in a fully decked coffin, eats up real estate and consumes resources. The new, environmentally conscious citizen wants to stay respectful of Mother Earth even upon returning to her bosom. So was born the[...]

The Good, The Bad, The Inauthentic: Music of The Midwest-Folk Broken Down

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I'm British, and as such I'm interested in how, with the aid of the net, traditions from overseas have spread and converged with this small island I call home. Halloween is a good example – instead of dressing up as bed-sheet ghouls or plastic vampires, such as we were formerly accustomed to, we now dress up as Kim Kardashian, or Highway 61-era Dylan; such h[...]

A Taste of Cambodia

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Cambodia is a mystical, breathtaking and adventurous country. It is well known for both its impressive Angkor temples just outside Siem Reap and its tragically recent past at the hands of Pol Pot, whose dictatorial rule led to the death of approximately 25% of the population in the 1970s. Despite this horror, the Cambodian people are some of the most welcomi[...]

EDM: Forging Derivative New Frontiers

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As electronica darling Richard D James, aka the Aphex Twin, returns to his kingly pedestal with much critical harrumph, something of a tribal clash has emerged on the World Wide Whinge, taking place between two different generations of music fans. In the red corner we have the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre, the IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) crowd. In the [...]

Neighborhood Feature: Sawtelle Blvd

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As an Asian food mecca, Sawtelle Blvd. is colloquially referred to as Little Osaka by Angelenos. Located just west of the 405 Freeway, Sawtelle Blvd’s delicious stretch of eateries and Japanese influenced stores generally spans from Santa Monica Blvd. to Olympic Blvd. This handful of blocks boasts a plethora of restaurants ranging almost every spectrum of Ja[...]

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