If you want to take an international trip but avoid quarantine in 2020 it looks as though you'll have to get quite tactical about the destination you pick, be blessed with the right passport and get very familiar with government travel advice.
Instead of a clear and synchronized travel approach from countries, what's emerging is a confusing patchwork of national policies.
There's not much constraint on how one can use the aircraft
.
The light jet seats up to 12 people, including pilots – but it is far more than just a passenger plane. It can carry more than a tonne of cargo, or four passengers and at least a couple of motorcycles. It has a huge cargo door 1.3m wide by 1.25m high to the rear of the fuselage on the left: a door that size is rare in a private jet…There's more. The PC-24 can tackle short runways with a steep, difficult approach. It's speedy with a respectable range. And it can land on gravel or grass runways – the only jet to boast such an ability short of military weightlifters like the giant Boeing C-17 Globemaster.
...With the cargo-area bulkhead moved forwards, fewer seats can leave more room for stuff. Flying with just one or two pilots frees up the entire 14.2cu m cabin, which is 7m long. And finally, in medical evacuation mode there is room for three patients on stretcher beds, plus accompanying medics. There's not much constraint on how one can use the aircraft.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don't you give us some details about you and your story.
I began my career as an artist through photography while studying Management in my native Venezuela. I was working at the time in a family-run business exploring digital printing and later in life, I decided to apply my professional skills to art making, as I progressively became interested in sculpture. Today, my artwork is the result of an intrinsic connection between two and three -dimensional planes, working with sculpture in parallel with photography.
I began producing acrylic 3D sculptures and compositions made from different types of colorful plastic sheets, affixing them onto surfaces, other times as free-standing structures or traditional fixtures on a wall. As a direct consequence of these productions, I began photographing my pieces as a way of documenting them, thereby generating a significant volume of autonomous photographic work which created an intimate connection between the photograph and its related piece, developing a visual yet independent dialogue through language, photography, and sculpture.
At the same time I was supporting myself through custom work I did in my acrylic shop, furniture, displays and any job I could make using my skills and equipment. One day a friend of mine from childhood was in town, he used to be the director of an Art Museum in California and even though I had a long time without talking to him I send him a message and ask him to come over and take a look at my work. I was not even showing my work at that time, I just had this small collection of pieces created by me which I felt where good enough for me to dream of having an Artist career. (something I dream about all my life and honestly felt it was not going to happen in this lifetime of mine).
I needed an opinion from someone I respect and trust given the subjective nature of art critique. I already had a family with two children at that time and could not afford to play the artist, I had a big responsibility but the urge to create, the ability to express myself with a clear voice was so overwhelming that I only need one encouraging word that would unlock my vision to give me license to dream of truly becoming a professional artist. And so it happens that one afternoon my friend swing by and took one look at my small collection of pieces and he could not believe these were the first pieces I ever made…
He took me under his wing and prepare my first show which obviously took many people by surprise, a lot of people did not believe in me and look at me as if I was a bit crazy but the show was a great success and so my artist career began and I never look back. On the contrary, I just spring forward working like a madman, evolving, growing and developing this new sense of myself. It's been several years from that time and I still have this feeling of gratitude, this sense of purpose and obligation to become the very best version of myself. Very few people get to do what the love the most in life, the possibility of realization is not a given and when you are lucky enough to find it specially when you thought it was too late for it then you know you must honor it every day for the rest of your life.
Has it been a smooth road?
As a struggling artist many times you must take another paying job we all have hear this before but the truth is that not being able to work on your Art is one of the most miserable feeling you can have, it just feels like a great waste of time. When you are an artist you know that transcendence, redemption and the ability to deeply communicate with other human beings only can be realize through art.
To sell an art piece more than the money you get to spend is a promise that you can keep making art and maybe if you sell enough you will be able to do it all day and everyday of your life…. that is a dream worth taking risks, exposing yourself and revealing without fear your most intimate essence.
It's a road full of uncertainty and many discouraging moments, disappointments and self doubt. But when you know this is your mission in life, when you know there is anything else that can take you to developing your full potential then you become a survivor and find the way to push forward and have faith in yourself.
So let's switch gears a bit and go into the J.Margulis Visual artist story. Tell us more about the business.
I believe that courage, empathy, and kindness are all ingredients in a powerful and elusive formula, which arms us with a clean and ever-sharpening lens that catches fleeting glimpses of our true nature. Small fractions of divine understanding that reverberate in our essence with the power to shape our deepest beliefs and completely change our perspectives, and so, the way we act in the unfolding of our own existence.
My work is about the physical representation of this belief. I digitally design 3-D objects and compositions, and cut them in slices from different types of plastic sheet materials. These slices are then fixed to a rigid canvas, a pedestal or held together in space. Most of my work is done using acrylic sheets with different levels of translucency in a range of colors, graphic patterns, textures and photographic images directly printed on the sheets' surfaces. The bright and fully saturated color palettes to which I instinctively gravitate to, is heavily influenced by the traditional Mexican arts and crafts which made a great impact on me during the time that I lived there.
I treat my three-dimensional pieces as light traps or secret blueprints, in which by controlling the placement of its components, I'm able to create intriguing 3-D containers. Their designs are then fully revealed by applying or "pouring" light into them. In a sense, light becomes the ink that reveals the design by following a 3-D template. The light source may vary from natural to one or more fixtures, placed on precise locations in relationship to the subject, with specific power, color temperature, angle and proximity.
These exposed patterns and designs are not absolutes or unique because as the viewer changes his point of view, the work expresses a different narrative that is completely new in its own essence. It intrigues and fascinates me how the object mutates in front of me, with no other resource but a simple change of perspective. Going back and forth naturally, I try to synthesize and integrate different perceptions that coexist as different facets of an object.
Every time, I find myself trying to lock that seemingly unreal angle in which we are able to contemplate the amazing connections among complex layers of facts, prejudices, and beliefs; that "sometimes surreal" frame in which we discover how easily we could be absolutely wrong and misjudge everything that surrounds us, while tragicomically posing ourselves as proud holders of truth and owners of higher grounds.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I think that the future is already here. Social media and online gallery platforms has created this scenario where there is a personal and direct relationship between the artist and the audience.
Right now anyone can truly get to know an artist by following his or her development on a continuous basis through social media images and the artist expressed ideas and thoughts. There is this virtual conversation in which art gets infused into people's daily life. You can talk to the artist, you can tell them what you like, what you don't like, celebrate the success or critique the shortcomings there is this amazing relationship potential not only with the art but with the artist itself.
Getting in touch: VoyageMIA is built on recommendations from the community; it's how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
Fantastic! If they only knew what actually happened... #SardinesInACan
https://youtu.be/w0n5_aJfEtg
When Pan Am's first B-747 came to London's Heathrow Airport in 1970,
the normally staid British were flabbergasted and awed by such a huge
aircraft.
As you can tell from this contemporary British newsreel clip, there
was no lack of eager observers crowding around, through, and on the
brand new clipper.
Pan Am was looking forward to a new epoch in global transport with
the advent of the 747, offering economies of scale that were scarcely
imaginable only a few years earlier. What it would mean to average
travelers - much more room, much lower fares, greater opportunity to see
the world - is an almost palpable current running through this bit of
history.
Honig realised that perceptions of beauty depend just as much on the individual as on the culture where that person is from.
“Even though there were over-arching themes to beauty, individuals, no matter their culture, had different perspectives of what the word ‘beautiful’ means. It’s hard to know what is cultural and what is personal..."
A history marked by extended periods of prosperity and cultural richness, time and again cut short by violence.
Tracing Jewish History Along the Rhine
NYTimes.com
Hebrew letters inspired the configuration of this synagogue and community center in Mainz, Germany. It was erected in 2010 at the site of the old synagogue destroyed by the Nazis.Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times
Cultured Traveler
By PETER WORTSMAN
In the summer of 1963, when I was 12, my parents, German-speaking Jewish refugees from Vienna, took us children on a boat trip up the Rhine. It was our first time in Germany, the country that had annexed our parents’ native Austria and sent them running for their lives. Family sentiments ran strong: longing spiked with anger, nostalgia with regret. All I really cared about were the castles crowning every slope and the chocolate-covered marzipan. But when we rounded a boulder-strewn bend in the river — “The Lorelei,” the legendary perch of the siren who lured boatmen to their doom — my mother was so moved she leapt up and declaimed, in German: “I don’t know what’s come over me, / That I should be so sad.”
The elderly man seated beside me smiled wistfully and whispered in thickly accented English: “You know vat a minyan is?” I nodded. A minyan, I knew, is the Hebrew word for the quorum of 10 men it takes to engage in public prayer. His was a coded question to sift out fellow Jews floating up the mythic vein of the German identity. And though I did not realize it, “The Lorelei,” the verse my mother had begun to recite, was penned by Heinrich Heine, a native Rhinelander of Jewish descent. And it was not just among the most beloved poems of the German language, but my mother’s hymn to a lost world.
That memory resurfaced last April, almost 50 years later, when my wife and I retraced that childhood journey, from Cologne to Mainz. What we found stirred mixed emotions. Vestiges of Jewish life along the banks of the river recalled a history marked by extended periods of prosperity and cultural richness, time and again cut short by violence. Virtually intertwined with the grape vines that dot the region, scattered tombstones and a few reconstituted sanctuaries tell the story.
There have been Jews in the Rhineland for as long as anybody’s been singing about it. They first sailed down the Rhine along with the Roman army. The earliest written testament to Jewish life in the region is an edict signed in A.D. 321 by Emperor Constantine allowing Jews to be elected to the curia of Cologne.
Traces of the Jewish presence had long been buried under in that city, our point of departure. Leveled by Allied bombs in World War II, Germany’s fourth largest city is a hodgepodge of nondescript ’50s-era functionality and splinters of the past, out of which a great cathedral, a Unesco World Heritage site, rears its twin spires. Construction began in 1248 and didn’t end until 1880. At 516 feet, it was briefly the tallest structure in the world (until the Washington Monument took first place); today, the spectacle of its man-made majesty etched against the sky still takes the breath away. It also contains an arcane reminder of ancient Christian-Jewish relations, tucked away in a dark corner.
Photo
Construction on the Cologne cathedral began in 1248 and didn’t end until 1880.Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times
We took an English-language tour of the interior, admiring, among other wonders, one of the highest Gothic vaulted ceilings in the world, the ornately gilded reliquary holding the supposed bones of the Magi, and Gerhard Richter’s luminescent 11,500-piece stained-glass window in the south transept. But our young guide had no idea of the whereabouts of the object I was after. We finally found it affixed to the north wall, toward the rear of the cathedral: a plaque posted by Archbishop Engelbert II in 1266 establishing in Latin the terms of the so-called Judenprivileg (Jews’ privilege). It literally set in stone medieval Jewry’s subservient status and prescribed perks for so-called Schutzjuden (protected Jews), notably the right to proceed unmolested when burying their dead.
Continue reading the main story
The original impetus for our trip was a site of grander scale than the plaque: a recently completed archaeological dig that uncovered the foundation of a Carolingian synagogue dating back at least to A.D. 800 and an entire city block of Cologne’s Medieval Jewish community. Discovered and saved from demolition by the archaeologist Otto Doppelfeld in 1953, the dig is still an open pit, partly covered by a tent, in the city’s historic center. When the Archaeological Zone and Jewish Museum, a vast area of approximately 110,000 square feet, opens to the public, visitors will have a privileged peek back at some 1,700 years of intertwined German and Jewish history. Unfortunately, the opening, originally scheduled for 2015, was recently postponed until 2018 — held up by the cost of construction as well as the reticence of some members of the city government to countenance such a massive museum directly in front of the Renaissance city hall.
Though we didn’t have access to the site, we huddled against the fenced-off area, near a street sign that reads Judengasse (Jews’ Alley), peering down into the open pit, trying to decipher the story the stones laid bare.
Photo
Katja Kliemann, an archaeologist, stands inside a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, in Cologne.CreditBenjamin Kilb for The New York Times
In its heyday in the mid-14th century, the Jewish community — an important minority of about 1,000 among an overall population of some 40,000 — flourished in the shadow of the cathedral. But in the centuries prior, extended periods of prosperity and peaceful coexistence with their Christian neighbors had been shattered, first by marauding crusaders who in 1096, and again in 1146, whet their blades on Jewish blood before heading for the Holy Land. All hell broke loose yet again in the terrible Black Plague Pogrom of 1349, when Jews, falsely accused of poisoning wells and spreading the disease, fell victim to the fury of mobs.
Evidence of that violent history is reflected in the finds, including heaps of scorched and smashed pottery and fragments of stone tablets with some of the earliest inscriptions in Yiddish, essentially medieval Rhineland German written in Hebrew. Katja Kliemann, an archaeologist involved with the dig, said the profusion of objects and their shattered state demonstrated “both the richness and the fragility of the relationship between Christians and Jews.” (For now, highlights from the dig, including a golden ring, are on rotating display at the underground ruins of the Praetorium, the Roman governor’s palace, around the corner on Kleine Budengasse.)
An eighth-century mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, within the complex of the future museum, offers another telling clue. To descend its steps is to turn back the clock several centuries. Peering into the basin, where generations of women and men sought ritual cleansing, my wife and I tried to picture their reflected faces. (The mikvah, currently closed to the public, will reopen pending completion of the museum.)
Photo
Boats on the Rhine in the town of Boppard.Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times
The Museum Ludwig nearby, on Heinrich-Böll-Platz, holds another kind of treasure trove, one of the world’s great collections of German Expressionist and other 20th-century modernist paintings, some by Jewish artists, like Ludwig Meidner and the Russian Marc Chagall, all reviled as “degenerate” by the Nazis. The paintings were safely hidden in a bank vault for the duration of the War by Josef Haubrich, a discriminating collector; he later donated them all to the German public “to give them an opportunity to see and contemplate for themselves ... what had been withheld from them” during the dark years of the Third Reich.
Continue reading the main story
We hopped the train from Cologne to the lovely old river town of Boppard, where we boarded a KD Line boat for a leisurely six-hour cruise up river to Mainz.
The narrow, winding stretch of the river from Boppard to Bingen is particularly picturesque, with castle ruins and terraced vineyards every which way you look. A crisp white grauer burgunder sipped on deck enhanced memories of my mother’s recitation as we piloted past the treacherous Lorelei bend, and the loudspeaker crackled with a tenor singing Heine’s verse set to music by Friedrich Silcher.
Photo
Heiliger Sand Cemetery, just outside Worms, Europe’s oldest Jewish resting place.Credit Benjamin Kilb for The New York Times
Next stop, Mainz. Of the numerous Jewish settlements along the Rhine, those in the three cathedral towns of Mainz, Worms and Speyer collectively comprised an illustrious medieval center of life and learning known as ShUM, an acronym composed of the first letters of the city names in Hebrew. In 2012 the state governments, municipalities and Jewish communities of the ShUM collectively sought inclusion in the list of Unesco World Heritage sites. The application is still pending.
While heavily bombed, Mainz managed through judicious architectural reconstitution to retain a taste of the past. Still, all that’s left of the once rich Jewish heritage are a few tombstones, including one dated 1049 — said to be the oldest known Jewish tombstone in Europe — and a small store of sacred objects at the Mainz State Museum (Landesmuseum).
But echoes linger. “A principio creavit Deus celu et terram,” reads the Latin translation of the opening words of the Old Testament in clear black type on three copies of the Gutenberg Bible, precious tomes held in a dimly lit vault at the Gutenberg Museum, Mainz’s most visited site.
It is Hebrew letters, though, that inspired the abstract configuration of the modern synagogue and community center on Synagogenplatz, erected in 2010 at the site of the old synagogue destroyed by the Nazis. The oddly shaped geometric structure is intended to represent the five letters of the Hebrew word qadushah, or holy. We joined a tour led by Stella Schindler-Siegreich, a leader of the Mainz Jewish community, 900 strong today. I asked her what she thought of the Cologne dig. “Museums are nice,” she allowed, “but Jewish life is more important, or else there’ll be nothing left but an old cemetery.”
While much of Worms, with its clunky, blocklike postwar architecture may lack the charm of Mainz, the town made a concerted effort to reconstruct and showcase remnants of its Jewish past. The old Jewish quarter around its Judengasse retains a haunting allure. Burned down by the Nazis on Kristallnacht, Nov. 9, 1938, the 11th-century synagogue, also known as the Rashi Shul, named for the illustrious Talmudist Shlomo Yitzchaki (a.k.a. Rashi) who studied there, was rebuilt from scratch and consecrated in 1961. A 12th-century ritual bath survives untouched. History also spared the serene Heiliger Sand Cemetery, just outside town, Europe’s oldest Jewish resting place, whose tombstones tilt like the backs of old men.
Our last stop was Speyer, the loveliest of the three ShUM cities, whose reconstructed historic center is ringed with wine taverns. The SchPIRA Museum, on Kleine Pfaffengasse, near the corner of Judengasse, evokes a medieval Jewish courtyard, comprising the surviving eastern wall of a 12th-century synagogue and a monumental ritual bath.
Sipping riesling in the vaulted cellar of the Speyer Ratskeller, the restaurant in the cellar under city hall, I found myself reciting Heine’s verse and mulling in joy and sadness over more than a millennium and a half of history. “A fairy tale from ancient times, / I can’t get it out of my mind...”
The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records
Freitas
is a wealthy businessman who, since he was a child, has been unable to
stop buying records. ‘I’ve gone to therapy for 40 years to try to
explain this to myself.’
By MONTE REEL
Paul
Mawhinney, a former music-store owner in Pittsburgh, spent more than 40
years amassing a collection of some three million LPs and 45s, many of
them bargain-bin rejects that had been thoroughly forgotten. The world’s
indifference, he believed, made even the most neglected records
precious: music that hadn’t been transferred to digital files would
vanish forever unless someone bought his collection and preserved it.
Mawhinney
spent about two decades trying to find someone who agreed. He struck a
deal for $28.5 million in the late 1990s with the Internet retailer
CDNow, he says, but the sale of his collection fell through when the
dot-com bubble started to quiver. He contacted the Library of Congress,
but negotiations fizzled. In 2008 he auctioned the collection on eBay
for $3,002,150, but the winning bidder turned out to be an unsuspecting
Irishman who said his account had been hacked.
Then last year, a friend of Mawhinney’s pointed him toward a classified ad in the back of Billboard magazine:
RECORD COLLECTIONS. We BUY any record collection. Any style of music. We pay HIGHER prices than anyone else.
That
fall, eight empty semitrailers, each 53 feet long, arrived outside
Mawhinney’s warehouse in Pittsburgh. The convoy left, heavy with vinyl.
Mawhinney never met the buyer.
“I don’t know a thing about him — nothing,” Mawhinney told me. “I just know all the records were shipped to Brazil.”
Just
weeks before, Murray Gershenz, one of the most celebrated collectors on
the West Coast and owner of the Music Man Murray record store in Los
Angeles, died at 91. For years, he, too, had been shopping his
collection around, hoping it might end up in a museum or a public
library. “That hasn’t worked out,” The Los Angeles Times reported in
2010, “so his next stop could be the Dumpster.” But in his final months,
Gershenz agreed to sell his entire collection to an anonymous buyer. “A
man came in with money, enough money,” his son, Irving, told The New
York Times. “And it seemed like he was going to give it a good home.”
Those
records, too, were shipped to Brazil. So were the inventories of
several iconic music stores, including Colony Records, that glorious
mess of LP bins and sheet-music racks that was a Times Square landmark
for 64 years. The store closed its doors for good in the fall of 2012,
but every single record left in the building — about 200,000 in all —
ended up with a single collector, a man driven to get his hands on all
the records in the world.
In an office
near the back of his 25,000-square-foot warehouse in São Paolo, Zero
Freitas, 62, slipped into a chair, grabbed one of the LPs stacked on a
table and examined its track list. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, khaki
shorts and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt; his gray hair was thin on top but
curled along his collar in the back. Studying the song list, he appeared
vaguely professorial. In truth, Freitas is a wealthy businessman who,
since he was a child, has been unable to stop buying records. “I’ve gone
to therapy for 40 years to try to explain this to myself,” he said.
His
compulsion to buy records, he says, is tied up in childhood memories: a
hi-fi stereo his father bought when Freitas was 5 and the 200 albums
the seller threw in as part of the deal. Freitas was an adolescent in
December 1964 when he bought his first record, a new release: “Roberto
Carlos Sings to the Children,” by a singer who would go on to become one
of Brazil’s most popular recording stars. By the time he finished high
school, Freitas owned roughly 3,000 records.
After
studying music composition in college, he took over the family
business, a private bus line that serves the São Paulo suburbs. By age
30, he had about 30,000 records. About 10 years later, his bus company
expanded, making him rich. Not long after that, he split up with his
wife, and the pace of his buying exploded. “Maybe it’s because I was
alone,” Freitas said. “I don’t know.” He soon had a collection in the
six figures; his best guess at a current total is several million
albums.
Recently,
Freitas hired a dozen college interns to help him bring some logic to
his obsession. In the warehouse office, seven of them were busy at
individual workstations; one reached into a crate of LPs marked “PW
#1,425” and fished out a record. She removed the disc from its sleeve
and cleaned the vinyl with a soft cloth before handing the album to the
young man next to her. He ducked into a black-curtained booth and
snapped a picture of the cover. Eventually the record made its way
through the assembly line of interns, and its information was logged
into a computer database. An intern typed the name of the artist (the
Animals), the title (“Animalism”), year of release (1966), record label
(MGM) and — referencing the tag on the crate the record was pulled from —
noted that it once belonged to Paulette Weiss, a New York music critic
whose collection of 4,000 albums Freitas recently purchased.
For the truly compulsive hobbyist, there comes a time when a collection gathers weight — metaphysical, existential weight.
The
interns can collectively catalog about 500 records per day — a
Sisyphean rate, as it happens, because Freitas has been burying them
with new acquisitions. Between June and November of last year, more than
a dozen 40-foot-long shipping containers arrived, each holding more
than 100,000 newly purchased records. Though the warehouse was
originally the home of his second business — a company that provides
sound and lighting systems for rock concerts and other big events —
these days the sound boards and light booms are far outnumbered by the
vinyl.
Many
of the records come from a team of international scouts Freitas employs
to negotiate his deals. They’re scattered across the globe — New York,
Mexico City, South Africa, Nigeria, Cairo. The brassy jazz the interns
were listening to on the office turntable was from his man in Havana,
who so far has shipped him about 100,000 Cuban albums — close to
everything ever recorded there, Freitas estimated. He and the interns
joke that the island is rising in the Caribbean because of all the
weight Freitas has hauled away.
Allan
Bastos, who for years has served as Freitas’s New York buyer, was
visiting São Paulo and joined us that afternoon in the warehouse office.
Bastos, a Brazilian who studied business at the University of Michigan,
used to collect records himself, often posting them for sale on eBay.
In 2006, he noticed that a single buyer — Freitas — was snapping up
virtually every record he listed. He has been buying records for him
ever since, focusing on U.S. collections. He has purchased stockpiles
from aging record executives and retired music critics, as well as from
the occasional celebrity (he bought the record collection of Bob Hope
from his daughter about 10 years after Hope died). This summer Bastos
moved to Paris, where he’ll buy European records for Freitas.
Bastos looked over the shoulder of an intern, who was entering the information from another album into the computer.
“This will take years and years,” Bastos said of the cataloging effort. “Probably 20 years, I guess.”
Twenty years — if Freitas stops buying records.
Collecting has always
been a solitary pursuit for Freitas, and one he keeps to himself. When
he bought the remaining stock of the legendary Modern Sound record store
in Rio de Janeiro a couple of years ago, a Brazilian newspaper reported
that the buyer was a Japanese collector — an identity Bastos invented
to protect Freitas’s anonymity. His collection hasn’t been publicized,
even within Brazil. Few of his fellow vinyl enthusiasts are aware of the
extent of his holdings, partly because Freitas never listed any of his
records for sale.
But
in 2012, Bob George, a music archivist in New York, traveled with
Bastos to São Paulo to prepare for Brazilian World Music Day, a
celebration that George organized, and together they visited Freitas’s
home and warehouse; the breadth of the collection astonished George. He
was reminded of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who
lusted after seemingly every piece of art on the world market and then
kept expanding his private castle to house all of it.
“What’s the good of having it,” George remembers telling Freitas, “if you can’t do something with it or share it?”
The
question nagged at Freitas. For the truly compulsive hobbyist, there
comes a time when a collection gathers weight — metaphysical,
existential weight. It becomes as much a source of anxiety as of joy.
Freitas in recent years had become increasingly attracted to mystic
traditions — Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist. In his house, he and
his second wife created a meditation room, and they began taking
spiritual vacations to India and Egypt. But the teachings he admired
didn’t always jibe with his life as a collector — acquiring, possessing,
never letting go. Every new record he bought seemed to whisper in his
ear: What, ultimately, do you want to do with all this stuff?
He
found a possible model in George, who in 1985 converted his private
collection of some 47,000 records into a publicly accessible resource
called the ARChive of Contemporary Music. That collection has grown to
include roughly 2.2 million tapes, records and compact discs.
Musicologists, record companies and filmmakers regularly consult the
nonprofit archive seeking hard-to-find songs. In 2009 George entered
into a partnership with Columbia University, and his archive has
attracted support from many musicians, who donate recordings, money or
both. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has provided funding
for the archive’s collection of early blues recordings. David Bowie,
Paul Simon, Nile Rodgers, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme all sit on
its board.
Freitas
has recently begun preparing his warehouse for his own venture, which
he has dubbed Emporium Musical. Last year, he got federal authorization
to import used records — an activity that hadn’t been explicitly allowed
by Brazilian trade officials until now. Once the archive is registered
as a nonprofit, Freitas will shift his collection over to the Emporium.
Eventually he envisions it as a sort of library, with listening stations
set up among the thousands of shelves. If he has duplicate copies of
records, patrons will be able to check out copies to take home.
Some
of those records are highly valuable. In Freitas’s living room, a
coffee table was covered with recently acquired rarities. On top of a
stack of 45s sat “Barbie,” a 1962 single by Kenny and the Cadets, a
short-lived group featuring the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on lead vocals
and, as backup singers, Wilson’s brother Carl and their mother, Audree.
In the same stack was another single — “Heartache Souvenirs"/"Chicken
Shack,” by William Powell — that has fetched as much as $5,000 on eBay.
Nearby sat a Cuban album by Ivette Hernandez, a pianist who left Cuba
after Fidel Castro took power; Hernandez’s likeness on the cover was
emblazoned with a bold black stamp that read, in Spanish, “Traitor to
the Cuban Revolution.”
While
Freitas thumbed through those records, Bastos was warning of a future
in which some music might disappear unnoticed. Most of the American and
British records Freitas has collected have already been digitally
preserved. But in countries like Brazil, Cuba and Nigeria, Bastos
estimated, up to 80 percent of recorded music from the mid-20th century
has never been transferred. In many places, he said, vinyl is it, and
it’s increasingly hard to find. Freitas slumped, then covered his face
with his hands and emitted a low, rumbling groan. “It’s very important
to save this,” he said. “Very important.”
Freitas
is negotiating a deal to purchase and digitize thousands of Brazilian
78 r.p.m. recordings, many of which date to the early 1900s, and he
expects to digitize some of the rarest records in his collection shortly
thereafter. But he said he could more effectively save the music by
protecting the existing vinyl originals in a secure, fireproof facility.
“Vinyl is very durable,” he said. “If you store them vertically, out of
the sun, in a temperature-controlled environment, they can pretty much
last forever. They aren’t like compact discs, which are actually very
fragile.”
In
his quest to save obscure music, Bastos told me, Freitas sometimes buys
records he doesn’t realize he already owns. This spring he finally
acquiesced to Bastos’s pleas to sell some of his duplicate records,
which make up as much as 30 percent of his total collection, online.
“I said, ‘Come on, you have 10 copies of the same album — let’s sell four or five!’ ” Bastos said.
Freitas
smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but all of those 10 copies are different,”
he countered. Then he chuckled, as if recognizing how illogical his
position might sound.
Freitas and the interns joke that the island is rising in the Caribbean because of all the weight he has hauled away.
In
March, he began boxing up 10,000 copies of Brazilian LPs to send to
George in an exchange between the emerging public archive and its
inspirational model. It was a modest first step, but significant.
Freitas had begun to let go.
Earlier this year,
Freitas and Bastos stopped into Eric Discos, a used-record store in São
Paulo that Freitas frequents. “I put some things aside for you,” the
owner, Eric Crauford, told him. The men walked next door, where Crauford
lives. Hundreds of records and dozens of CDs teetered in precarious
stacks — jazz, heavy metal, pop, easy listening — all for Freitas.
Sometimes
Freitas seems ashamed of his own eclecticism. “A real collector,” he
told me, is someone who targets specific records, or sticks to a
particular genre. But Freitas hates to filter his purchases. Bastos once
stumbled upon an appealing collection that came with 15,000 polka
albums. He called Freitas to see if it was a deal breaker. “Zero was
asking me about specific polka artists, whether they were in the
collection or not,” Bastos remembered. “He has this amazing knowledge of
every kind of music.”
That
afternoon, Freitas purchased Crauford’s selections without inspecting
them, as he always does. He told Crauford he’d send someone later in the
week to pick them up and deliver them to his house. Bastos listened to
the exchange without comment but noted the destination of the records —
Freitas’s residence, not the archive’s warehouse. He was worried that
the collector’s compulsions might be getting in the way of the archiving
efforts. “Zero isn’t taking too many of the records to his house, is
he?” Bastos had asked a woman who helps Freitas manage his cataloging
operation.
No,
she told him. But almost every time Freitas picked up a record at the
archive, he’d tell a whole story about it. Often, she said, he’d become
overwhelmed with emotion. “It’s like he almost cries with every record
he sees,” she told him.
Freitas’s
desire to own all the music in the world is clearly tangled up in
something that, even after all these years, remains tender and raw.
Maybe it’s the nostalgia triggered by the songs on that first Roberto
Carlos album he bought, or perhaps it stretches back to the 200 albums
his parents kept when he was small — a microcollection that was damaged
in a flood long ago but that, as an adult, he painstakingly recreated,
album by album.
After
the trip to Eric Discos, I descended into Freitas’s basement, where he
keeps a few thousand cherry-picked records, a private stash he doesn’t
share with the archive. Aside from a little area reserved for a
half-assembled drum kit, a couple of guitars, keyboards and amps, the
room was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling shelving units filled with
records.
He
walked deep into an aisle in search of the first LP he ever bought, the
1964 Roberto Carlos record. He pulled it from the shelf, turning it
slowly in his hands, staring at the cover as if it were an irreplaceable
artifact — as if he did not, in fact, own 1,793 additional copies of
albums by Roberto Carlos, the artist who always has, and always will,
occupy more space in his collection than anyone else.
Nearby
sat a box of records he hadn’t shelved yet. They came from the
collection of a man named Paulo Santos, a Brazilian jazz critic and D.J.
who lived in Washington during the 1950s and who was friendly with some
of the giants of jazz and modern classical music. Freitas thumbed
through one album after another — Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald,
Leonard Bernstein, Dave Brubeck. The records were signed, and not with
simple autographs; the artists had written affectionate messages to
Santos, a man they obviously respected.
“These dedications are so personal,” Freitas said, almost whispering.
He
held the Ellington record for an extended moment, reading the
inscription, then scanning the liner notes. Behind his glasses, his eyes
looked slightly red and watery, as if something was irritating them.
Dust, maybe. But the record was perfectly clean.
(CNN)
-- James Bond piloted a Douglas DC-3 airliner. Indiana Jones hopped a
ride on one for his last crusade. This aviation icon even stars in a
reality TV show.
Almost 80 years after its introduction, a few
hundred DC-3s are estimated to still be flying worldwide. That's kind of
unbelievable in an age when dozens of younger types of airliners have
already retired to aviation boneyards.
"When we take them to air shows I watch people gravitate toward (them)," says Joe McBryan, co-star of History Channel's "Ice Pilots." McBryan owns Canada's Buffalo Airways and its six operating DC-3s. "People always have a story. They say their dad or grand-dad flew one ... or they flew on one when they were young."
Later
a military version of the plane helped win World War II by dropping
thousands of paratroopers during the D-Day invasion of France, 70 years
ago this month.
Result: The DC-3 has touched millions of lives.
But what about this plane keeps it flying all these years later?
Photos: DC-3 flies high after 80 years
Pilots
will tell you the DC-3 won't quit because it was so well-built. Some
say its design and rugged landing gear helped it touch down safely on
short runways.
But for McBryan -- age 70 and still flying almost daily -- it's about love.
"You
can choose your friends and coworkers but you can't choose the one you
love. An airplane is the same. And in 1969, the DC-3 came and it stayed
with me," McBryan says.
During some of the coldest weather on the
planet, McBryan's planes ferry tourists, hunters, adventurers and
regional workers across Canada's remote Northwest Territories.
The
45-minute DC-3 flights from Yellowknife across icy Great Slave Lake to
Hay River are pretty basic. Passengers get no meals, no WiFi, no video.
"There's coffee and cookies and juice," McBryan says. There is an
alternative to in-flight entertainment: "A lot of passengers like the
sound of the engine. It will lull you to sleep. It's a perfect sleeping
noise."
McBryan's son once said the engines sound like a "funeral procession for the Hell's Angels."
On
the flight deck, for McBryan, it's all about the plane's feel. These
classic aircraft are controlled with a yoke connected directly by cables
to the tail and wings. No fancy fly-by-wire electronics like newer
airliners. No flashy heads-up displays for speed or altitude, either. An
old fashioned instrument panel works just fine, thank you very much.
"It's very comfortable," he says. "You're in your own nest. You have the ability to feel what the airplane's doing."
007 flies the Gooney Bird
In 2008, a Gooney Bird helped James Bond get out of a jam.
Fans of the Bond film "Quantum of Solace," may recall actor Daniel Craig in the cockpit of a beat-up DC-3.
"Let's see if this thing will fly," Bond says in the film.
Does it? Oh yeah. And then some.
After
takeoff, a super-fast jet fires on the Gooney Bird, forcing Bond to use
the DC-3's slow speed to outwit the jet pilot. The jet winds up as a
stain on a rocky mountainside. Chalk up a win for low and slow.
Back
in the 1980s, a DC-3 served another movie franchise hero. In "Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade," Indy flies from New York to Newfoundland to
the Azores and Europe on his quest for the Holy Grail.
Getting
on board a DC-3 is an uphill climb. Literally. The plane's tail sits on
the ground when it's not flying, forcing passengers to walk up a
steeply inclined aisle to take their seats.
"One
of the most common comments I hear when some passengers come on board
is, 'Wow, there's really an angle here,' " says Ric Hallquist, a
longtime pilot for Missionary Flights International.
Three
times per week, Hallquist flies DC-3s loaded with cargo or passengers
from South Florida to the Caribbean. In addition to passengers,
Hallquist and his co-pilots have hauled horses, ATVs and pretty much any
legal cargo they can fit through the aircraft door.
Douglas DC-3 airliner-Typical coast-to-coast ticket in 1940: $300 ($4,918 in 2014 dollars)
-Military version, C-47, used in WW II for cargo and troops
-Number of DC-3s still flying today: at least 400
-Introduced by Douglas Aircraft in 1936
-Features: cantilevered metal wings, retractable landing gear
The
Gooney Bird's rugged landing gear with its big struts can handle rough
runways in places like Haiti or the Dominican Republic, Hallquist says.
"And the air frame is just so strong, it really is."
But the plane can also be temperamental, especially for pilots without much DC-3 experience, says Catalina Air Boats pilot
Robby Bolling, who flies a daily DC-3 cargo route from Long Beach,
California, to Catalina Island, about 30 miles offshore.
"You just
have to respect it, not abuse it," says Bolling. "I kind of feel like
I'm going back in time to the 1940s or '50s. flying these airplanes
around."
When the DC-3 flies, folks around the airport start
shooting photos, Bolling says. "I always notice that. It's kind of like a
rock star."
Bolling fears the plane won't be around much longer. He says he'll miss it.
Back in Yellowknife, ice pilot McBryan sees it differently. He believes the planes could easily fly for another 30 years
"They
keep making parts, so there won't be a shortage," says this son of a
prospector. If anything stands in its way, McBryan says it will be a
shortage of leaded fuel that his DC-3's engines burn. The
environmentally hazardous leaded fuel is being phased out.
But
losing the DC-3 would be a shame, McBryan says. There's simply nothing
else like it. The plane is about as near humans will get to growing
wings.
"Strap a DC-3 to your a** and let the wings extend out," he jokes. "That's the closest thing you will come to a human flying."
