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Category / How to start a subculture

So How Did a Company Selling Rubber Tires Become the World’s Authority on Restaurants?

It actually makes a lot of sense. It’s also genius marketing. But really, how did the world’s most talented chefs and esteemed restaurants and come to be so concerned with the approval (and stars) of a company that sold rubber tires? Let’s go back to the very first issue that Michelin published in 1900. At that time…

These Vending Machines for Stray Animals Should Be in Every City Around the World

Animal lovers gather round! Some very clever folks in Istanbul have created a vending machine that releases food and water for the city’s stray dogs in exchange for recycled plastic bottles. I couldn’t help but share this in the hopes that they get a little buzz to help spread the word. Take a look at how it works…

The Rock & Roll Cult of Sunset Boulevard

The only Hollywood-based cult of the 60s and 70s that comes to mind is the Manson Family, so when I happened upon this photograph of a secretive but wild group of beautiful young people who strolled around LA in the 1970s wearing colorful gowns, devoted to a Hollywood restauranteur-turned-spiritual leader who had 13 wives, a Rolls…

Japanese Mermaids: Ancient Pearl Hunters of the Sea

These women are the last of their kind. In their floral wetsuits, they fill their lungs with air and dive for long periods of time deep into the Pacific ocean, with nothing more than a mask and flippers. They are known as Ama and make a living hunting for abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls.…

Muse du Jour: A Closer Look at the Modern Witch

We finally know what we want to be when we grow up. A forest dwelling, diadem wearing witch à la Patricia Crowther, Maxine Sanders, or Doreen Valiente. Never heard of them? Neither had we, until a trip to the Museum of Witchcraft & Magic gave us a crash course in “the Craft.” These magical practitioners…

What Happened to the Other Muses of Andy Warhol?

“One person in the ’60s fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known,” wrote Andy Warhol in his 1977 autobiography, From A to B and Back Again, “And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love.” He never gets more explicit, preferring instead to steep in that infamous brand of Warholian…

An Off-the-Curriculum Introduction to BDSM & Fetish Art History

A little slap and tickle – kinky or otherwise – has been good medicine for us down the ages. Public consumption of the practice of BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Dominance and Submission, Sadochism and Masochism) really came into its own during a ‘golden age’ of fetish art in the mid 20th century. Fetish art has…

6 Startling Things I Didn’t Know about Bettie Page

Last night, I watched Bettie Page Reveals All, a 2012 documentary about her life history, with much of it narrated by Ms. Page herself and that wonderfully thick Southern accent of hers. Now here is the part where I admit that I ‘ve never really paid much attention to Bettie Page as a cultural icon before; always just putting her in that category…

Instagram’s Most Adventurous Naked Hippie

I think this is the shot that got me hooked on the Magdalena experience. Yup. It’s got everything I could ever need in an Instagram photo: abandoned building; check, ghost town; check, vintage typography, old neon sign, female body confidence and serious wanderlust vibes; check. It was taken in Rico, Colorado, a historic silver mining town in the Pioneer Mining District, which has…

Chasing American Dreams at the 1st Miss Soviet Union Beauty Pageant

The year was 1988, the iron curtain was falling and the final leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was patching up foreign relations with America after a schmoozy dinner with Ronald and Nancy Reagan in Washington. The country was ushering in a new era of social freedom and a flood of information about the lives of people abroad had triggered a…

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