Category Archives: Happy
Swedish Lunch Disco
{repost from Slate}
The country’s new midday office raves.
By Nathalie Rothschild|Posted Tuesday, May 1, 2012, at 1:01 PM ET
When it comes to lunch breaks, the laissez-faire French like to take two hours out of their workday to savor their food in the company of colleagues while workaholic Americans prefer dining solo in front of their computers. Well, in Sweden we have a whole other vibe going. Here, more and more workers are forgoing both leisurely lunches and “al-desko” dining in favor of daytime raves.
It started in the fall of 2010 when 14 friends decided to dance their lunch breaks away in their office garage. They called their gathering “Lunch Beat.” As rumors about this literally underground movement spread, more and more people joined in. Today, Lunch Beat events are being arranged by a core group of organizers at venues around Sweden, attracting up to 600 people each time, and copycat clubs are popping up across Europe. Lunch Beat events can be arranged by any individual, group or company anywhere in the world as long as the organizers respect the founders’ Manifesto, a list of 10 rules specifying, for instance, that Lunch Beat discos must be nonprofit events, take place at lunch time, have 60-minute long DJ sets, and include a takeaway meal. In 2011, “lunch disco” was officially recognized as a new word by the Swedish Language Council.
The basic idea behind Lunch Beat is that workers take an hour out in the middle of the day to let loose in the company of fellow dance-enthusiasts. The founders have dubbed it “your week’s most important business lunch” and say that they want to create a sense of community among participants. But the discos are not meant to be crass networking opportunities. After all, the fourth rule of the manifesto is “You don’t talk about your job at Lunch Beat.” Instead, the aim is to embody “playfulness, participation and community,” the founders write. It’s intended almost to be a way of forgetting about your job, so you can feel energized and inspired when you get back to your desk.
With its strobe lights, smoke machines, funky wall projections, pounding techno music, and crowded dance floor filled with fist-pumping, sweat-dripping revelers, Lunch Beat recreates the atmosphere of nightclubs. Organizers look for spaces where there are not a lot of spectators or passers by, because they want dancers, not gawkers. The party starts promptly at noon and ends at 1 p.m. sharp. And while a sandwich, fruit, and water are included in the ticket price, drugs and alcohol are strictly forbidden.
Advertisement I attended the latest Lunch Beat on April 24, in Stockholm. It took place in a room with blacked-out windows in Kulturhuset, a multipurpose cultural venue in the city’s commercial center. The party attracted all sorts of professionals: engineers, insurance brokers, designers, and charity workers. One of the Lunch Beat founders, Daniel Odelstad, said the parties “give the lie to the myth that Swedes never dance sober.” DJ Johannes Drakenberg agreed. “Everyone was dancing from the moment I started playing”, he said. “I hadn’t expected that the crowd would have so much energy to dance to tribal techno in the middle of a workday. This is much more fun than playing at nightclubs.”
Several people were on the dance floor before noon, waiting for the DJ to arrive. Eventually a big crowd arrived, with people from their 20s to their 50s. Once the dancing started, there was no standing around, no self-conscious mirror-checking. Few even took breaks to drink water, preferring instead to grab a drink and a sandwich on their way out. While some came alone, most people danced next to the colleagues they’d arrived with, but just like at other techno dance clubs, the crowd was facing the stage where the DJ was spinning his records rather than dancing in pairs or groups. The crowd cheered and whistled whenever the DJ revved up the music and over time the place got hot and sweaty, just like a real club. At the end of the hour, when we all dispersed, the crisp air and business-as-usual atmosphere outside felt surprising. Some dancers compared the Lunch Beat experience to an energizing workout, a fun alternative to the gym. Others felt it was more like a wholesome nightclub where everyone was focused on the music and on dancing instead of getting drunk or finding someone to hook up with. There was a distinct lack of sexual energy at the Stockholm Lunch Beat, which, coupled with the ban on alcohol and drugs, made the whole thing reminiscent of straight-edge, the 1980s subculture whose clean-living adherents refrained from alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs but still partied hard. Odelstad insists that Lunch Beat is not a “manifestation for soberness” but added that serving alcohol would not “fit with the concept. After all, this is Sweden,” he added, “and here we just don’t have a culture of drinking at lunch like they do in, say, Denmark or the Netherlands.”
We could see it as a sign of our uptight, health obsessed times that the wholesome version of the rave has replaced the real one. In the 1990s, techno clubs were seen as dangerous, morally deprived places. The Swedish police set up a special department to monitor the growing number of underground raves and carried out frequent raids to hunt for drugs. Now, a “rave” is the kind of event that companies officially sanction, purchasing Lunch Beat tickets for staff as a perk. Lunch Beat has been featured on Sunt Liv (meaning Healthy Life), a website set up by unions and local government employers which promotes public health and good work environments. The organizer of a Belgian version of Lunch Beat said that the European Community is planning to send a group of staff members along to the first event in Brussels. From pierced teenagers to European bureaucrats in only 20 years. What a long distance to travel.
The Most Astounding Fact
Astrophysicist Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson was asked by a reader of TIME magazine, “What is the most astounding fact you can share with us about the Universe?” This is his answer.
Happy Birthday Dr. Suess!
What Dr. Seuss Was Really Up To
By Allen Cates via Relevant Magazine
Your childhood was way more political than you think.
One hundred and eight years ago today, Theodore Geisel was born—you may know him better by his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss. He wrote the books that helped you (and countless others) learn to count, recognize letters, pronounce silly words and imagine a world where cats wear hats and Sam-I-Am relentlessly petitions for the deliciousness of green eggs and ham.
However, Dr. Seuss’ 60 books (which have sold more than 200 million copies) are more of a mental exercise in disguise. Seuss’ books not only made reading fun for kids, but also elevated the act of learning itself. Consider this line from I Can Read with My Eyes Shut (1978): “The more that you read, the more things you’ll know. The more that you learn the more places you’ll go.” Prescribing reading as a launching pad for a bright future is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the social, political and moral messaging the good doctor expressed in his stories. Although he claimed to not begin books with a moral in mind, the creator of Thing 1 and Thing 2, with their hair colored blue, had more than just wacky words up his sleeve … he had an agenda, too.
With this weekend’s box office release of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax bound to stir up discussions about the movie’s environmentalist overtones, it’s time to look again at some Seuss classics with an eye for any other not-so-subtle subtexts that could be peeking back at us from behind the Truffula trees.
1. Horton Hears A Who! (1954)
Another Seuss classic that has recently been reimagined as a CGI feature film, Horton Hears A Who! is about an elephant proving the voices in his head (or on a speck) are real—and then some. Horton is written as a metaphor for a subject that was very dear to the author: the importance of big people (or powerful governments) looking after and listening to little ones. The story came to be after Dr. Seuss visited Japan in 1953, just one year after the end of U.S. occupation there and eight years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While there, Seuss was deeply impressed by the people and places he visited, even going so far as to dedicate Horton Hears a Who! to his, “Great friend, Mitsugi Nakamura, of Kyoto, Japan.” More than half a century removed from World War II, it might be hard for a reader in 2012 to fully appreciate the wartime annihilation/occupation/reconciliation context from which the metaphor of Horton and his speck were inspired. But it’s not hard for modern readers to appreciate the timeless profundity of the most famous line from Horton: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
2. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957)
Because the animated version of The Grinch is re-introduced to the world every holiday season, it has become the most well-known of Dr. Seuss’ stories. As Dickens did with Ebenezer Scrooge, Dr. Seuss literally redefined the essence of what it means to be a heartless fun hater. Set in the cheery-cheeked hamlet of Whoville, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a Seuss-ified critique of both the over-commercialization of Christmas (the Whos with all their presents) and its antithesis: holiday humbuggery (old Mr. Grinch). But, in the end, the Grinch realizes Christmas is not about material things that can be “stolen,” but instead about the intangible joys of the season. Taking another cue from Dickens, the Grinch is ultimately redeemed, which is not only fitting but required for any great story about Christmas—after all, it’s the beginning of the story of redemption itself.
3. Green Eggs and Ham (1960)
Green Eggs and Ham, Dr. Seuss’ best-selling book, is about more than green eggs—but it is still, most certainly, about color. Although less elaborate than some of his other analogous stories, Green Eggs and Hamis, at least on the surface, about the power of perseverance in the face of stubborn resistance. (“You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may.”) But it is more than coincidence that his Green Eggs and Ham was published the same year President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act, which mandated federal oversight of elections in the South. It may be a stretch to imagine, but when Sam-I-Am is pressing his neighbor to try a strange gastronomic concoction, Seuss is pressing his readers to consider the goodness in things previously untried—like integrated schools systems and churches. At the very least,Green Eggs and Ham is about navigating life with an open mind and, at its best, it’s Seuss’ way of saying, “Don’t judge a book, or an egg—or a man—by its color.”
4. The Lorax (1971)
This “post enviro-pocalyptic” fable is clearly about the fragility of nature and the consequences of reckless human industry. Resources are pillaged, animal species banished and moderation is thrown to the wind by the greedy Once-Ler who disregards the grandfatherly Lorax’s warnings. The fact that readers never see the Once-Ler’s face (only his money-grubbing and cigar-wielding hands) reinforces the idea that business corporations are faceless and, in the case of the Once-Ler and his “Thneeds that everyone needs,” soulless and destructive—taking whatever they want no matter how it affects the planet. Critics have scolded Seuss’ fable as being too simplistic and negative. But seeing how this is a children’s book, and 20th-century manufacturing didn’t exactly get an A on its report card of environmental stewardship, Seuss can be forgiven his opaque symbolism. Seuss’ greater point: When you are entrusted with something, don’t squander it; take care of it, and speak up for what’s right even if you get shouted down.
5. Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990)
Arguably, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is the most cliché graduation gift ever given by an out-of-touch relative. But this book, the last written by Dr. Seuss before he died in 1991, is unquestionably one of his most profound. Unlike in earlier works, the narrator is sage-like and directly encourages the reader to persevere through fear and loneliness, bang-ups and hang-ups. Despite what the title suggests, Places is not an allegory about destinations, but about the journey of life, shaded with hardship but ultimately hopeful. The central message is about moving forward, or as the doctor says: “Step with care and great tact, and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.” Knowing that his health was failing (he was 86 years old at the time), Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is the proverbial exclamation point that Dr. Seuss stamped on his canon of work.
Whether or not you see layered meaning in the fanciful work of Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, his singular style of rhyme-centric storytelling and fantastical drawing has stood the test of over a half century. And while his readers might grow up, few can forget the first books that helped them fall in love with books.
After 464 posts and 98,094 hits I’ve migrated to a new domain! Bienvenue and 欢迎 to www.theworldinsmallhandfuls.com. Please bookmark, subscribe, like and anything else you can do with social media. I look forward to collecting more of the world in small handfuls with you.
With peace and gratitude.
Raconte-Moi Une Histoire
by m83
I heard about this frog
It’s very tiny frog
But its also very special
You can only find it in the jungle
So far away from you/me
But if you find it
And if you touch it
Your world can change forever
If you touch its skin
You can feel your body changing
And your vision also!
Blue becomes red, and red becomes blue
And your mummy, suddenly becomes your daddy
And everything looks like a giant cupcake
And you keep laughing, and laughing, and laughing
Nothing is ever quite the same really
And after you finish laughing
It’s time to turn into a frog yourself
Its very funny to be a frog
You can dive into the water
And cross the rivers, and the oceans
And you can jump all the time, and everywhere
Do you wanna play with me?
We can be a whole group of friends
A whole group of frogs
Jumping into the streets
Jumping into the planets
Climbing buildings
Swimming in the lakes, and in the bathtubs
We would be hundreds, thousands, millions
The biggest group of friends the world has ever seen
Jumping and laughing… forever
It would be great, right?
