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It is the laugh you hear first. Heh heh heh heh heh. Unhurried. Like he’s got all the time in the world to do it. Some of the buildings here at Château Miraval, where Brad Pitt is just now tumbling out from wherever he spent the night, cup of coffee in hand, are nearly 200 years old, and the laugh rings off the stonework: heh heh heh heh heh. It rings through the terraces of olive trees. It ruffles the stone pots of lavender and rosemary. It sends the literal butterflies alighting on literal pink blossoms into the air, up toward the Provençal sky, which is the same soft blue as it was when Matisse painted it. It echoes off the lake and the vineyards and the ancient chapel and the black Mercedes convertible, top down, that is now arriving, with George Clooney at the wheel. Black sunglasses. Black polo. Loafers. When he sees Pitt, he yells: Brother! And then you hear the laugh again: heh heh heh heh heh.
Pitt and Clooney—they are used to living like this. Surrounded by beauty. In majestic isolation. They have been friends for nearly a quarter-century, in part because of what they share: an understanding of where the road that every young actor dreams of walking—that road that represents some intoxicating combination of money and attention and success—ends up. It ends up here. In a place a regular human could barely describe (trust me, I’m trying), let alone relate to. What else can you do but laugh?
Yesterday, Pitt was at Silverstone Circuit in England, shooting a massive film about an F1 driver that’s now titled…F1, riding in a custom-built F2 car stretched to F1 size, hitting 160 down the straights. “We’ve been doing this so long,” Pitt says. “I think it gets harder and harder to find a new experience or something to be excited about, and this one has been that for me.” Clooney, for his part, has just come from Italy, where he is finishing an untitled Noah Baumbach film with Adam Sandler and Laura Dern. In the movie, Clooney plays a movie star—“It’s a stretch,” he says, laughing.
Both men are due back to work within a day or two. But for the moment they are here, at Miraval, Pitt’s sometime residence, since he and his then wife Angelina Jolie bought the property in 2011. (In 2021, she sold her half, a transaction that is now being bitterly and extensively litigated.) Clooney and his family have a home in the area too, just down the road, on an estate they bought three years ago. “Literally, I just drove from my house,” Clooney says. “I’ve been there for two years. I’ve never been here. It’s nine minutes.”
“During the pandemic,” Pitt clarifies, about when and how the Clooney family purchased their estate. “Online.”
“Yeah, online,” Clooney admits.
There is a lot of this—rich-guy teasing. Comparing notes on Portuguese stonemasons, the craftsmen to whom you turn to build and maintain your terraces of olive trees and such. This lake right here, Clooney asks: Is it natural? Pitt says it’s runoff, from the winery, but a few years ago he had it enlarged, and Clooney mutters to himself: This guy enlarges his lake. Who does that?
Read the rest of this article at: GQ
This week, a new range of Google smartphones capable of AI image generation has been launched. But for an increasing number of people, the appeal of a less cutting-edge piece of equipment is proving hard to resist: the point-and-shoot camera.
The US footballer Megan Rapinoe was seen snapping from the stands at the Paris Olympics. The model Alexa Chung captioned a recent Instagram of her with a camera: “Just another Millennial with a dependency on Snappy Snaps, fighting digital threat with an analogue mode. 😑” A recent glimpse of home life for Rihanna and A$AP Rocky showed a disposable camera lying among the clutter. Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift have both been snapped holding their point-and-shooters.
A mixture of early 2000s digital cameras and film cameras, a new generation are also embracing the old technology. This week on Instagram, Myha’la, a star of Industry, which just returned for its third season, posted a selfie holding a point-and-shoot. The Bear star Ayo Edebiri took her own camera to the Emmys. Both are 28. The model Bella Hadid, 27, is a fan. Online, gen Z content creators give cameras the TikTok treatment, seeking to deinfluence people from the latest It-product and offering dupes for expensive models.
According to a study earlier this year from Cognitive Market Research, the global film – camera market value is on course to reach £303m by 2030, up from £223.2m in 2023. Kodak has seen demand for film roughly double in the last few years and in July, Harman, Britain’s only manufacturer of 35mm film, announced a multimillion-pound investment in new equipment inspired by growing demand. Tesco, which still has more than 480 photo-printing locations, has seen an uptick in demand for its film processing services with usage up nearly 10% this year.
Earlier this summer the Pentax 17 was launched to become “the first film camera to be made by a global camera brand for 21 years”, according to Paul McKay, a co-founder of Analogue Wonderland, which sells film products while seeking to support the growing number of analogue film photographers. Pentax “had to bring engineers back out of retirement … to teach younger engineers. All this because they thought this market was “growing and wasn’t going away”.
Shops catering to younger crowds, such as Urban Outfitters, are selling Hello Kitty-themed disposable cameras, Fujifilm Instax Minis in lilac and matcha-green and Lomography cameras.
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
Much like the decade that produced them, the movies of the 2000s were shaped in response to such profound and irrevocable change that it’s difficult to assign them a cohesive identity of their own; it can be tempting to think of them as a long suspension bridge between then and now rather than as a well-defined era unto itself. When the sun rose on the start of the new millennium, the vast majority of films were shot and projected on film, superhero movies were still considered an outlandish gamble, middle-class malaise was American cinema’s preoccupying crisis, and James Cameron was the biggest director on the planet. By the time the smoke cleared 10 years later, digital had pushed celluloid to the brink of extinction, Marvel was beginning to exert an iron grip on the multiplex, the listless men of Tyler Durden’s generation had found their own forever war to fight, and James Cameron was the biggest director on the planet (some things never change).
In that light, it hardly seems like a coincidence that so many of the decade’s most essential films are themselves dislocated in time and/or uncertain of their own reality. Nor does it seem like a coincidence that it’s so difficult — and so rewarding — to try and determine which films those are. Fun as it was to look back at the ’80s last summer, and the ’90s the summer before that, relitigating settled history is a very different project than making sense of the recent past (albeit with enough distance to make the effort worthwhile).
Read the rest of this article at: Indie Wire
Gary Beeck’s island had all the basic ingredients of a tropical daydream: swaying palms, epoxy-clear water, a blond frill of sand fading to jungle. But a surge of trepidation hit when Beeck, a retiree from Perth, Australia, neared the uninhabited island off Sumatra’s volcano-pocked coast in May. Later that day, the boat and crew that carried him would return to shore; Beeck would stay behind, alone.
“When I saw it, I thought: ‘What am I doing?’” Beeck says. “Do I really want to be left?” He did, though. Beeck had booked a “castaway” stay on the island though the travel company Docastaway. For 12 days and with just a few basic survival supplies, he planned to live off wild coconuts, plus whatever food he could catch and forage. During the drive to the boat launch that morning, a local guide had offered a final chance to purchase provisions before leaving civilization behind—there were ripe mangoes, sweetly starchy bananas. He said no. Later, and only when it was too late to change his mind, Beeck would reconsider. He should have bought the mangoes.
Beeck, 67, doesn’t shy from adventure. He’s explored the Himalayas by motorbike and steered his own sailboat through the Mediterranean, South China Sea, and Malacca Straits. His gaze sometimes lingered on the desolate-looking islets he passed. “I’ve always wanted to sort of plow my boat into a desert island, and just see if I can survive,” he says. Docastaway, then, offered a relatively sensible alternative to that fantasy: castaway-lite, with the option to call for help if things went sideways.
When Docastaway began in 2010, the company says, it was the first place to specialize in sending travelers to fend for themselves on desert islands. Since then, the castaway business has grown. In 2013, No Limit Journeys launched survival-style island trips it calls “the hardest and most real” available, with destinations in Tonga, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Chile. Offering bushcraft classes and trips to the Philippines, Tonga, Indonesia, and Panama, the U.K.-based Desert Island Survival was founded in 2016 by Tom Williams, who outlasted 10 other DIYers in the northern Canadian wilderness to win the first season of Alone UK. In 2018 another British company debuted, Untold Story Travel, combining survivalist training with individual sessions in which travelers test their endurance and fishing prowess.
“We have found there to be a continually increasing number of solo stays and couples who want the experience of complete isolation with no other human contact,” writes Mark Allvey, an Untold Story Travel cofounder, in an email. In 2017, luxury travel company Black Tomato launched a service, “Get Lost,” which deposits travelers in remote locations from polar tundra to jungle, where they rely on their own navigation and survival skills as a support team keeps watch from a distance. It’s “all designed around being in a profound state of disconnection,” says the company’s head of product, Carolyn Addison. “We’ve certainly seen an increased interest in that.” A number of travelers, it seems, are dreaming of profound solitude in the world’s most remote places.
That very sentiment inspired Docastaway founder Álvaro Cerezo. In photos, the 43-year-old Spaniard has deeply bronzed skin; not the fleeting tan of a scorched vacationer, but a mahogany cast from a life spent mostly outdoors. Cerezo grew up on the resort-choked Málaga coast, and, at eight years old, began slipping away from home, paddling a kayak or inflatable boat along the shore until he found a place he could have all to himself.
Read the rest of this article at: Afar
In late 2010, McDonald’s convened representatives from the world’s largest meat companies for the inaugural Global Conference on Sustainable Beef, a three-day affair held in Denver.
On the surface, the conference was meant to demonstrate that the beef industry was willing and able to reduce its environmental footprint. But in truth, it served as a gathering for industry to discuss its very survival in a world that had become alarmed about climate change. According to a beef industry news site, the 300 conference participants came together to “begin the process of reclaiming, defining and embracing the concept of sustainability to assure the future of beef production, and beef consumption, worldwide.”
Meat producers and fast food giants had reason to worry. Four years earlier, in 2006, the United Nations had published a landmark report that singled out animal agriculture as one of the most polluting industries on the planet, one that has “such deep and wide-ranging environmental impacts that it should rank as one of the leading focuses for environmental policy.”
The report was noteworthy in part because it provided the first estimate of animal agriculture’s significant role in global warming. Fossil fuels like coal and oil had already been targeted as environmental villains, and the meat industry had to fear that it would be next.
So the meat industry did what other industries have done under similar pressure in the past: demonstrate that it could change just enough to avoid being forced to change even more by the government. Ann Veneman, who served as agriculture secretary under President George W. Bush, said as much during her keynote address at the Denver conference. According to another beef industry news site, Veneman “made it very clear that if the industry ignores the problem, then somebody else will get to define the issue for the industry, and in many cases that means governments imposing unworkable regulations.”
The Denver conference led to the creation of a new organization: the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, a network of beef processors, fast food chains, and other industry stakeholders, which has since spun out a dozen national and regional roundtables. The US roundtable’s 154-page “sustainability framework” provides ranchers and others throughout the supply chain with recommendations, like how to reduce water pollution and optimize energy efficiency. But the group explicitly imposes no standards or verification schemes.
To put it in fast food terms, it’s all bun and no beef. Yet for more than a decade, McDonald’s and other food giants, alongside meat lobbying groups, have pointed to the roundtables as proof they’re taking climate change seriously.
But after 14 years, McDonald’s, like other arms of the broader meat industry, has little to show for it all, and in fact — as one executive admitted to GreenBiz earlier this year — the company doesn’t even yet know how to measure and validate progress. (McDonald’s and the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef did not respond to a request for comment.)
The story of McDonald’s and the beef industry’s sprawling network of roundtables is just one part of an extensive campaign by the meat and dairy sector to downplay its environmental impact, delay regulations, deflect responsibility, and assure the public and policymakers that its voluntary initiatives are sufficient to avert environmental ruin. And it’s working: From 2010 to 2022, US meat production increased by over 13 percent while the industry successfully staved off calls for regulation at home and on the international stage.
Read the rest of this article at: Vox
