Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 - Issue 78 i The Rake

I’ve been travelling for the past four weeks, with two more weeks to go. Before I go into the details of my trip, let’s pause to examine the enormity of this. As I left a world that had essentially been locked down to contain the spread of the most virulent pandemic of the past century, I was curious to understand and experience life post-Covid. My simple conclusion is that it is glorious. I am immensely grateful for every moment spent with friends, in person, across a table, laughing, sharing stories and engaging in the most primal and fundamentally necessary behaviour of remaking and strengthening our bonds. One thing you learn as you grow older — and this is something my mother pressed upon me at an early age — is…

Not long ago, a fresh rumour gained traction amid the phantasmagoria of the QAnon conspiracy theoryindustrial complex. It held that John F. Kennedy Jr. had faked his death in a plane crash in 1999 and was about to emerge from a Pennsylvania bolthole to be declared Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick for the 2020 election. Some went further, positing that JFK Jr. was responsible for the recondite call-to-action postings of Q himself. For a movement that contains such self-evident truths as the existence of a cannibalistic cabal of paedophiles running the ‘deep state’ from the basements of Washington pizza parlours, this particular shibboleth not only verged on the comparatively plausible but tapped into an inchoate yearning for the advent of some kind of American saviour, maybe the yin to Trump’s yang.…

I can tell yooz all, being a hybrid is a source of immense pride — and I’m being dead-ass truthful about that. Being a designer dog means that I’m neither one of those arbitrary mutts with the genetic variety of a U.N. summit nor one of those darned best-in-show, worst-in-health purebred preeners — ya know, all silky, droopy ears and chronic hip dysplasia. No, it’s dumb good luck being the result of a carefully crafted quest, back in the 1960s, to cherry-pick the best virtues from Cocker Spaniels and Miniature Poodles. See, the thing about us hybrids is, we have what people in this neck of the woods call ‘indoovidooality’: to put it more scientifically, we’re in an intermediate stage of high variation, just like purebred pedigree dawgs once were,…

The rudimentaries of many ancient human innovations — from animal husbandry to timekeeping via beaded jewellery and blacksmithing — have been fixed ever since they were conceived. Like certain tangible inventions (the paperclip, the mousetrap and the bicycle, to name three), in terms of the principles by which they function, they have always pretty much left the patent office alone to deal with the fuzzier brushstrokes of human ingenuity. Other progressive pursuits — automotive engineering, navigational equipment, medicine and the distribution of text all spring to mind — improve, fundamentally, at a dizzying rate, and seem destined always to do so. The creation of textiles is most firmly in the latter camp. Weaving began with Neolithic Homo sapiens stretching, twisting and lacing together plant fibres, and has since undergone constant…

I make no secret of my loyalty and love for the house of Wilsdorf. In fact, if you cut me in half, I suspect it would say ROLEX TUDOR around the circumference of my core, much like a stick of Blackpool rock. In light of this mono-focus, I think I secretly believe that I am the biggest fan of the Genevan maison. However, during a delightful lunch at Silverstone with one of the brand’s most established ambassadors, I accept that I met my match. Sir Jackie Stewart is the perfect brand representative, and the evidence for it goes way beyond his bespoke Rolexembroidered shirts. Stewart believes the brand is one of the greatest ever, and his love of Rolex watches is demonstrated by his vast personal collection. Rolex care deeply…

Connoisseurs who relate to the sobriquet ‘liquid sunshine’ — bestowed upon whisky by the bottle-bothering Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw — may, each time they stroll down St. James’s Street in London, imagine they can see a golden miasma around the premises of Justerini & Brooks, especially in the run-up to their annual Cask of Distinction programme, a celebration of ultra-rare, exceptional whiskies that guides participants to the pinnacle of various distilleries’ output. The programme takes the concept of astute, informed curation into the stratosphere. Each year, four master blenders congregate at the wonderfully named Liquid Library at the Diageo archives in Scotland. Using their combined judgment and expertise — the sum of which, aggregated, would take a couple of lifetimes to accumulate — they’re tasked with bringing together the…

When The Addams Family first aired its morbid comedy, in 1964, it did so in an era of lowbrow television sitcoms that lacked much character substance or development. The Addams Family and its lovable yet macabre band of misfits changed that, doing so in a way that was enchanting and endearing. They were guided by everyone’s favourite patriarch and the show’s leading man, Gomez Addams. A man with a taste for theatrics, Gomez encapsulates the primary qualities of a literary rake. Whether it was with a cigar in hand — “I’ve smoked since I was five… mother insisted,” he said — dancing the tango with his beloved wife, Morticia, or engaging in a midday sword fight, Gomez entertained, thrilled and charmed his way through both iterations of The Addams Family.…

Whenever I write my letter, I tend to go down one of two routes: superfluous and whimsical or dead-serious and sentimental. As I look at the news today, I see a new Islamic emirate set up by a death cult that has been left to summarily execute musicians, academics and homosexuals; the ongoing financial effects of Covid playing havoc with world economies; shortages galore in Britain because of the slow process of untangling from the E.U.; and if someplace hasn’t set on fire, it’s probably flooded. In such times it is clear what tone I need to take in this letter. Whimsy it is. What an issue we have for you. New York is the playground from which we have drawn our inspiration this time. It happened almost by accident,…

For me, George Hahn is an unexpected delight in a topsyturvy, unbalanced world that needs perspective, humour and great coffee. This raconteur du jour on the Instagram scene shot to prominence when he posted a video he calls the “78 seconds that changed my life”. It was a satirical take on Fox News’ insistence that, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, the metropolitan heartlands of America resembled war zones. In the video Hahn repeated these lines but added that it was a “hellscape” because the streets were lined with people “getting ice cream” and “having dinner”. Then an editor in New York emailed me a link to a New York Times profile of a man pictured in his apartment with a copy of The Rake on show. Same guy!…

In an assisted living facility in Beverly Hills, there lives a spry 92-year-old named Edith Tooker. Secreted away until the time is right is her memoir, Backless in Hollywood and Other Tales. It’s a document so incendiary that it could reframe Hollywood history — and to such a degree that it has been likened to “a mid-century Me Too”. Spanning the bridge between then and now is the night of February 28, 1957, the 14th Golden Globes. Waiting in the wings to present the best supporting actor award to Earl Holliman was a head-turning ingenue in a town already full of them. The name she had adopted was Vikki Dougan, and she had a problem. The mink stole she was wearing over a pink satin backless dress had to be…

GREG WILLIAMS Greg established his reportage style as a photojournalist in the 1990s, covering war zones in Burma, Chechnya and Sierra Leone. An assignment for The Sunday Times Magazine gave him his first access to the film industry, and he has now shot specials on more than 200 movies, including four poster campaigns for the Bond franchise. Greg has also enjoyed exclusive access to the Baftas, the Golden Globes and the Oscars, and is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue. In addition to his photographic output, Greg is a filmmaker, principally with his first-person documentaries, and a product designer (his Leica Q2, in partnership with Daniel Craig, is Leica’s fastest selling large-scale edition). His education platform, Skills Faster, is home to his Candid Photography course, which has…

Artie Shaw was easy to love but hard to like. Good looking, immaculately stylish and supremely talented, he dominated the swing era as the ‘King of the Clarinet’, inciting the devotion of the jazz cognoscenti and the paying public — as well as many of the most beautiful women of his time. Despite this, he lived a life of dissatisfaction, resentment and misanthropy, contemptuous of all around him and even of his own spectacular gifts. A master of his instrument, he sold millions of records while also pushing popular music in new directions. With a restlessness that began in his teens, he lived as many lives as a cat, burning through jobs, bands and marriages as he pursued not only music but a string of secondary careers and sporting achievements…

The Ralph Lauren Black Stirrup collection It’s reasonable to speculate that the invention of the stirrup, and its journey to Middle Ages Europe from Jin Dynasty China — allowing horse riders at either end of the Silk Route far greater control of the animal, especially while wielding weapons — affected the course of history as profoundly as did the knitting needle. Ralph Lauren’s emotional link to all things equestrian, meanwhile, goes back further than the brand’s introduction of the polo player logo in 1971 — a few years before, in fact, shortly after Ricky Loew-Beer became Ricky Lauren in late 1964. “After we were married, Ricky and I were shopping in one of those authentic riding stores, and I bought her a boy’s tweed hacking jacket,” Lauren has explained. “Whenever…

Everyone loves a watch that fulfils a purpose. Dive watches made to conquer depths that we will never reach. Chronographs intended to time laps we will never race. Even dress watches, paired with tuxedos we rarely wear. We find intense joy in the specialised and the niche. That’s all well and good, but there’s an even greater joy to be found in the quotidian — a comfortable, reliable ritual that makes up so much of our daily, ordinary life. The ordinary is calming and has a distinct charm. It’s also a life that calls for a particular sort of watch — an everyday companion, proven and reliable. This is exactly where the genre of watch known as the field watch fits. Hard wearing, robust and functional, the field watch typically…

According to the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University, memory works in the following way: it is encoded in the senses either acoustically, visually or through tactile experience. At this stage, information flows from the cortex — the area richest in nerve cells — to the hippocampus, a structure embedded deep in the temporal lobe. It is stored there as electrical patterns in four different types of memories: long term, short term, working and sensory. Sensory memory is a deepfreeze storage system that gets transferred to short-term memory each time you are reminded of some seminal sensory experience. Because it is stored so deeply in our brains, it sometimes triggers surprising and complex emotions. It was, for example, the taste of a madeleine that prompted Proust to write In Search…