VW's hippie hauler is ending its long, strange trip

Andre Penner / AP

Brazil is the last place in the world still producing the iconic vehicle, or "bus" as it's known by aficionados, but VW says production will end Dec. 31.

It carried hippies through the 1960s, hauled surfers in search of killer waves during endless summers and serves as a workhorse across the developing world, but the long, strange trip of the Volkswagen van is ending.
Brazil is the last place in the world still producing the iconic vehicle, or "bus" as it's known by aficionados, but VW says production will end Dec. 31. Safety regulations mandate that every vehicle in Brazil must have air bags and anti-lock braking systems starting in 2014, and the company says it cannot change production to meet the law.
Although output will halt in Brazil, there should be plenty of VW vans rolling along for decades if only because there are so many, and they are so durable. VW produced more than 10 million Volkswagen Transporter vans globally since the model was introduced 63 years ago in Germany, though not all resemble the classic hippie machine. More than 1.5 million have been produced in Brazil since 1957.
The VW van is so deeply embedded in popular culture, it will likely live on even longer in the imagination.
"The van represents freedom," said Damon Ristau, the Missoula, Montana, director of the documentary "The Bus," which follows van fanatics and their affection for the machine. "It has a magic and charm lacking in other vehicles. It's about the open road, about bringing smiles to peoples' faces when they see an old VW van rolling along."
Perhaps nothing with a motor has driven itself deeper into American and European pop culture than the VW, known for its durability but also its tendency to break down. Van lovers say its failures only reinforce its charm: Because its engine is so simple, it's easy to fix, imparting a deeper sense of ownership.
The van made an appearance on Bob Dylan and Beach Boys record album covers, among many, though in music circles its most closely linked to the Grateful Dead and the legion of touring fans that followed the rock group across the U.S., the machines serving as rolling homes. Steve Jobs is said to have sold his van in the 1970s to buy a circuit board as he built a computer that helped launch Apple. The vehicle is linked to the California surf scene, its cavernous interior perfect for hauling boards.
But in poorer regions like Latin American and Africa, the vehicle doesn't carry the same romantic appeal. It definitely doesn't hold the cool mystique in Sao Paulo that it does in San Francisco.
It's used in Brazil by the postal service to haul mail, by the army to transport soldiers, and by morticians to carry corpses. It serves as a school bus for kids, operates as a group taxi, and delivers construction materials to work sites. Brazilians convert their vans into rolling food carts, setting up on street corners for working-class lunchtime crowds.
In Brazil it's known as the "Kombi," an abbreviation for the German "Kombinationsfahrzeug" that loosely translates as "cargo-passenger van."
One recent drizzly morning in Sao Paulo, Jorge Hanashiro took a break inside his light green 1974 Kombi while his wife, Anna, served deep fried meat and vegetable pastry pies to customers at an open-air market.
"There may be safer and more modern cars around, but for me the Kombi is the best vehicle to transport my stall and products to the six open air markets I visit each week," the 77-year-old Hanashiro said. "It is economical, rugged and easy to repair."
The vehicle has found its way into the hearts of Brazilians like Enio Guarnieri, 54, who stood grinning next to the blue-and-white 1972 van he keeps in his cluttered garage in a working-class Sao Paulo neighborhood.
Guarnieri bought the vehicle a year ago to stoke childhood memories. When he was 10, his father taught him to drive a van.

Andre Penner / AP

In this Sept. 3, 2013 photo, Jorge Hanashiro and his wife Ana, prepare deep fried meat and vegetable pastry pies at an open-air market, with their light green 1974 Volkswagon van or Kombi, parked nearby, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

"Driving a Kombi with your face up against the windshield is a thrilling adventure," he said. "There is no other van like it. There is no other van that is so easy and inexpensive to maintain. Anyone with a minimum amount of knowledge about engines and a few tools can fix a Kombi."
A VW plant in Mexico stopped producing the classic version of the van in 1995, leaving a factory on Sao Paulo's outskirts as its last lifeline. Production in Germany was halted in 1979 because the van no longer met European safety requirements.
Sao Paulo advertising executive Marcello Serpa says the van's spirit will live on after its demise.
He has a 2007 version meant to have a 1960s American hippie feel. He painted it in bright green, yellow, blue and red colors with cartoon-like drawings of his wife, daughters and himself, surfboard in hand.
Serpa said the bus evokes "a spirit of playfulness and happiness," causing people to pause and smile when he drives it down Sao Paulo's chaotic streets.
"The Kombi is part of Brazil's cultural and emotional landscape," he said, "and that explains the strong feelings of affection most people have for it." 

Cheerleader uniform too short for school, yet somehow fine for games

The Pinellas school district in Florida won't let its cheerleaders wear their uniforms during school hours this year. One district principal says the issue boils down to fairnesss and an attempt to hew to a recently implemented stricter dress code. Countryside High School principal Gary Schlereth told the Tampa Bay Times, "A parent looks at their son or daughter getting 'dress coded' for wearing something short, then they look at the cheerleading uniform and they say, 'What about that?'" The logical objection to the double-standard of a district-approved uniform being banned in school has been raised: Christine Johnson, mother of one of Countryside's cheerleaders, asked the Times, "... Why can they wear it in front of thousands of people at a football field if they can't wear it on game day at school?" Another school principal, Lakewood High School's Bob Vicari told the Tampa Bay Tribune that, "I have at least 80 to 100 students that have come to me with positive comments about our new dress code," which doesn't sound like a thing high school students would really ever do, but we'll take his word for it.

Kate Upton nabs prestigious Model of the Year Award

She's the most in-demand model on the scene right now.

by Amy Wicks

Is any model hotter right now than Kate Upton? From scoring a second Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover to becoming the new face of David Yurman (and landing a major role in a new Cameron Diaz film) there's no doubt she's the most in-demand model on the scene right now.

The people behind the 10th Annual Style Awards seem to agree, because they will award Kate with the prestigious Model of the Year at their ceremony on Wednesday, at the beginning of New York Fashion Week.

If you want to catch Kate's acceptance speech but you weren't able to snag a ticket to the event at Lincoln Center, don't worry. The ceremony will be televised on Sept. 14 on CNN.

More from Glamour: 8 Workout Moves for a Toned Body in Two Weeks

Kate is walking away with the biggest award of the night but plenty of other fashion folks will also be on hand vying for 10 awards. According to Modelinia, nominees include Zac Posen, Victor Cruz, Frederic Fekkai, Patrick Demarchelier, Rachel Zoe and John Varvatos. The event will be hosted by Nicole Richie.

When cold beer isn't enough, now it's frozen

Japan's Kirin Brewery has launched its new beverage in LA. It says the slushie-topped brew stays frosty for 30 minutes.

Just in time for summer's last hurrah, or maybe the season's final set of heat waves, comes an answer to many a beer drinker's prayer: a really cold, frosty brew.

And when we say cold, we mean frozen. Japan's Kirin Brewery, a part of Kirin Holdings (KNBWF +0.76%), has unleashed upon the world its latest invention, Kirin Ichiban Frozen Beer. The draft beer is served via what looks like a converted frozen margarita or slushie machine, and according to a company press release is "topped with a 23°F frozen beer foam that keeps the beer chilled for 30 minutes."

The frozen beer is currently available at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, as well as some "select restaurants and bars" elsewhere in the city. Kirin officials said they brought the beverage across the Pacific after it became a big hit in Japan.

"After test-launches in Honolulu and Orlando and overwhelmingly positive feedback, Kirin Ichiban Frozen Beer is ready for a larger presence in the U.S.," Randy Higa, president of Kirin Brewery of America, burbled in the press release. "We couldn't think of a better place for this beer to make its California debut than sunny Los Angeles."

Along with La-La Land, Kirin also has plans to launch its frozen beer at locations in Honolulu, New York and at the Japan Pavilion of Walt Disney (DIS -0.41%) World's Epcot theme park in Orlando, Fla.

But how does it taste? According to a review in the FoodBeast blog, frozen beer "doesn’t taste like much of anything really," although the frozen-yogurt-consistency of the foam did indeed keep the reviewer's beer chilled for a half hour, or a few innings, on a hot day at Dodger Stadium. And FoodBeast noted the 16-ounce beer slushies retailed "at the inflated you’re-stuck-at-a-sports-game price of $10, but may vary at other locations."

The Zagat restaurant rating guide also weighed in on the new Kirin product. "The foam is a lot stiffer than you'd expect," wrote reviewer Lesley Balla, "and the best way to get around it, we found, was to poke a hole in it, even if we still got foam on our nose."

THIS DATE IN HISTORY

1. 44 years ago today Jerry first graced the cover of Rolling Stone for a cover story about the "Good Old Grateful Dead."
   
   Click here to read the original article: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/good-old-grateful-dead-19690823

   

© AP / Elmore Leonard

Author Elmore Leonard dead at 87 

DETROIT (AP) -- He was the master of his genre, the Dickens of Detroit, the Chaucer of Crime.
Every novel Elmore Leonard wrote from the mid-1980s on was a best-seller, and every fan of crime stories knew his name. George Clooney was an admirer. So were Quentin Tarantino, Saul Bellow and Stephen King and millions of ordinary readers.
Leonard, who died Tuesday at age 87, helped achieve for crime writing what King did for horror and Ray Bradbury for science fiction. He made it hip, and he made it respectable.
Bing: More on Elmore Leonard
When the public flocked to watch John Travolta in the movie version of "Get Shorty" in 1995, its author became the darling of Hollywood's hottest young directors. Book critics and literary stars, prone to dismissing crime novels as light entertainment, competed for adjectives to praise him. Last fall, he became the first crime writer to receive an honorary National Book Award, a prize given in the past to Philip Roth, Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller.
Few writers so memorably traveled the low road. His more than 40 novels were peopled by pathetic schemers, clever conmen and casual killers. Each was characterized by moral ambivalence about crime, black humor and wickedly acute depictions of human nature: the greedy dreams of Armand Degas in "Killshot," the wisecracking cool of Chili Palmer in "Get Shorty," Jack Belmont's lust for notoriety in "The Hot Kid."
Leonard's novels and short stories were turned into dozens of feature films, TV movies and series, including the current FX show "Justified," which stars Timothy Olyphant as one of Leonard's signature characters, the cool-under-pressure U.S. marshal Raylan Givens.
Critics loved Leonard's flawlessly unadorned, colloquial style, as well as how real his characters sounded when they spoke.
"People always say, 'Where do you get (your characters') words?' And I say, 'Can't you remember people talking or think up people talking in your head?' That's all it is. I don't know why that seems such a wonder to people," he told The Associated Press last year.
Leonard spent much of his childhood in Detroit and set many of his novels in the city. Others were set in Miami near his North Palm Beach, Fla., vacation home.
He died at his home in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Township, where he did much of his writing, from complications of a stroke he suffered a few weeks ago, according to his researcher, Gregg Sutter.
Crime novelist James Lee Burke said Leonard was a "gentleman of the old school" whose stylistic techniques and "experimentation with point of view and narrative voice had an enormous influence on hundreds of publishing writers."
Leonard's work contained moral and political themes without being didactic, Burke said. "And he was able to write social satire disguised as a crime novel, or he could write a crime novel disguised as social satire."
Leonard didn't have a best-seller until he was 60, and few critics took him seriously before the 1990s. Now the Library of America, which publishes hardcover editions of classic American writing, is planning a three-volume set of his work.
He had some minor successes in the 1950s and '60s writing Western stories and novels, a couple of which were made into movies. But when interest in the Western dried up, he turned to writing scripts for educational and industrial films while trying his hand at another genre: crime novels.
The first, "The Big Bounce," was rejected 84 times before it was published as a paperback in 1969. Hollywood came calling again, paying $50,000 for the rights and turning it into a movie starring Ryan O'Neal that even Leonard called "terrible."
He followed up with several more fast-paced crime novels, including "Swag" (1976). Leonard was already following the advice he would later give to young writers: "Try to leave out the parts that people skip."
In 1978, he was commissioned to write an article about the Detroit Police Department and shadowed police officers for nearly three months. Starting with "City Primeval" in 1980, his crime novels gained a new authenticity, with quirky but believable characters and crisp, slangy dialogue. But sales remained light.
Donald I. Fine, an editor at Arbor House, thought they deserved better and promised to put the muscle of his publicity department behind them. He delivered: In 1985, "Glitz," a stylish novel of vengeance set in Atlantic City, became Leonard's first best-seller.
Hollywood rediscovered him, churning out a succession of bad movies including the humorless "51 Pick-up" starring Roy Scheider. Its director, John Frankenheimer, failed to capture the sensibilities of Leonard's work, and his ear missed the clever dialogue.
It took Barry Sonnenfeld to finally show Hollywood how to turn a Leonard novel into a really good movie. "Get Shorty" was the first to feel and sound like a true Leonard story.
Then Quentin Tarantino took a turn with "Rum Punch," turning it into "Jackie Brown," a campy, Blaxploitation-style film starring Pam Grier. But Steven Soderbergh stayed faithful to Leonard's story and dialogue with "Out of Sight."
Writing well into his 80s, Leonard's process remained the same.
He settled in at his home office around 10 a.m. behind a desk covered with stacks of paper and books. He lit a cigarette and began writing longhand on the 63-page unlined yellow pads that were custom-made for him.
When he finished a page, Leonard transferred the words onto a separate piece of paper using an electric typewriter. He tried to complete between three and five pages by the time his workday ended at 6 p.m.
"Well, you've got to put in the time if you want to write a book," Leonard told AP in 2010.
Leonard sold his first story, "Trail of the Apache," in 1951, and followed with 30 more for such magazines as "Dime Western," earning 2 or 3 cents a word. At the time, he was working in advertising, but he would wake up early to work on his fiction before trudging off to write Chevrolet ads.
One story, "3:10 to Yuma," became a noted 1956 movie starring Glenn Ford. That same year, "The Captives" was made into a film called "The Tall T." But the small windfall wasn't enough for Leonard to quit his day job. ("3:10 to Yuma" was remade in 2007, starring Russell Crowe.)
His first novel, "The Bounty Hunters," was published in 1953, and he wrote four more in the next eight years. One of them, "Hombre," about a white man raised by Apaches, was a breakthrough for the struggling young writer. When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for $10,000 in 1967, he quit the ad business to write full time.
"Hombre" became a pretty good movie starring Paul Newman, and the book was named one of the greatest Westerns of all time by the Western Writers of America.
Soon, another Leonard Western, "Valdez Is Coming," became a star vehicle for Burt Lancaster. But as the 1960s ended, the market for Westerns fizzled. Leonard wrote five more, but they sold poorly, and Hollywood lost interest.
Leonard was born in New Orleans on Oct. 11, 1925, the son of General Motors executive Elmore John Leonard and his wife, Flora.
The family settled near Detroit when young Elmore was 10. The tough, undersized young man played quarterback in high school and earned the nickname "Dutch," after Emil "Dutch" Leonard, a knuckleball pitcher of the day. The ballplayer's card sat for years in the writer's study on one of the shelves lined with copies of his books.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, he majored in English at the University of Detroit. He started writing copy for an advertising agency before his graduation in 1950.
He married three times: to the late Beverly Cline in 1949, the late Joan Shepard in 1979, and at the age of 68, to Christine Kent in 1993. He had five children, all from his first marriage.
His son, Peter, followed in his father's path, going into advertising for years before achieving his own success as a novelist with his 2008 debut, "Quiver."
In 2012, after learning he was to become a National Book Award lifetime achievement recipient, Leonard said he had no intention of ending his life's work.

"I probably won't quit until I just quit everything -- quit my life -- because it's all I know how to do," he told the AP at the time. "And it's fun. I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'"

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Cops Ran Out of Free Doritos in 10 Minutes at Seattle Pot Festival

On a day where free Doritos and pot aficionados join forces, it's only obvious that people who might be suffering from the munchies would want to get their hands a little dirty with some orange-y goodness.

But when the salty, cheesy snacks are free? Forget about it.

The Seattle Police Department descended on the city's annual Hempfest, which celebrates marijuana culture, to put into action a plan dubbed "Operation Orange Fingers."

In a move to draw attention to marijuana usage rules and restrictions in the state, officers handed out free Doritos with stickers about pot laws stuck on the bags. Not only delicious, but educational, each bag displayed a sticker of do's and don'ts of I-502, Washington's ballot measure that legalized the possession of marijuana in November.
But Seattle police found themselves at a serious deficit soon after they started sharing their chip stash with the Hempfest crowd. They managed to dole out the entire stash of free Doritos in about 10 minutes, according to the department's Twitter account.
Still, they satisfied the needs of "pretty much everyone who showed up for the morning gate-opening," they tweeted.
So what do the cops consider the don'ts of an overwhelmingly popular pot law? The stickers instructed Washingtonians to remember to avoid driving while high, giving or selling weed to people under the age of 21, as well as forgoing pot use in public.

The do's? "Listen to the Dark Side of the Moon at a reasonable volume," the stickers said. For more information, Doritos-devourers could head to a website with more information on following state laws when smoking marijuana, or what it calls "marijuwhatnow literature."

"Distributing salty snacks at a festival celebrating hemp, I think, is deliberately ironic enough that people will accept them in good humor," Sgt. Sean Whitcomb told Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger. "We want to make sure people learn the rules and that they respect the vote."