Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2016 - Issue 49 i The Rake

Al Pacino is a short man in long films, a sapling looking for a city, a counter-cultural epic hero who poses and imposes against the hues of the time. In the early seventies his sad good looks broadened the under-palate of cinematic manhood: winter-wet eyes, pepper-tree nose, a mouth stilled to fine fear and a voice that sifts motes of dim music. Raised in the Bronx, Pacino developed a close relationship with his grandfather when his father abandoned him and his mother when he was two. It also infused a hungry work ethic: early jobs included shoe shiner, furniture mover, fresh-fruit polisher and movie usher (he was fired from the latter for admiring himself once too often in the mirror on the stairs). A rebel from a young age, he…

“The chances were a million to one that what’s happened to me would happen,” says Jack Reynor, settling into a generous helping of the Loire Valley’s finest in the bustling ground-floor bar at London’s Corinthia Hotel. “I’m still pinching myself.” Reynor’s dizzying ascent is, indeed, the stuff of wild nocturnal imaginings. A few years ago, the work was drying up for long periods, despite plaudits for his work. “I couldn’t even get an audition for network T.V. at home in Ireland,” he says. Then came a role in Transformers: Age of Extinction, and Reynor was suddenly hot property. Parts in 2015’s Macbeth and the forthcoming update of The Jungle Book have turned Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch and Christian Bale into colleagues, while his next project — a quickfire (in every…

Michael Nouri and I met at Davidoff of London through our mutual friends Edward and Eddie Sahakian. Michael, the star of 1983’s Flashdance and a 50-year veteran of showbusiness, was minding his own business in a leather armchair sampling a Cuban cigar. His reclined nonchalance belied the fact that he commanded the room. He has a sense of style that he inherited from his father, who was clearly a remarkable dresser and bon vivant. When Michael was old enough to make his first trip to London, in 1964, he did what any self-respecting rake would, and sought out Henry Poole for a suit. He purchased a suit and a bespoke pair of shoes from Lobb, which (although his outfit today is matched with a stunning pair of Maxwell slip-ons) he…

Charlie Stockwell’s greatest gift is his capacity to reach into your subconscious and unearth from it the inchoate goals related to the motorcycle of your dreams. Then, refracted through his own imagination, he will clarify and augment, he will reimagine and express a rolling masterwork of art — air cooled, V-twin, boulevard-decimating art that is greater, more beautifully poised in full orgiastic sculptural detail, than you could ever have imagined. As a result, he has become one of the planet’s most soughtafter master bike builders. However, unlike the dazed and confused, hung over, muttering and semi-coherent garage industry builders of old, Stockwell, the two-time winner of the U.K. and Ireland Battle of the Kings, whose roots are in art and design, a man with a massive social media presence, an…

This year has been a tumultuous one, not least because of political controversies, natural disasters and, of course, some not-so-natural ones. In a cruel work of fate, the world of luxury watches has also been forced to suffer: China’s crackdown on corruption, and its introduction of a ban on gift-giving by party officials, has sent shockwaves through the industry, causing luxury watch sales to plummet and some in Switzerland to scratch their heads. That, however, hasn’t stopped the finest watchmakers from continuing to innovate, and as a result we’ve seen some truly remarkable timepieces in 2016, including the most affordable tourbillon ever, from Tag Heuer (the Carrera Heuer-02T), the thinnest minute repeater, from Bulgari (the Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater), and a number of stunning re-editions, including the Omega Speedmaster CK2990…

For centuries in literature, the fox has been portrayed as the crafty, hungry trickster of the animal kingdom. The Reynard cycle, which started in medieval France and spread across Europe, set up an anthropomorphic fox as a scourge of the establishment and became a movable feast of local satire. In La Fontaine’s fable, the fox flatters the crow’s beauty, begs the bird to sing, and runs away with the delicious cheese that falls out of its mouth. Even when things don’t go his way, he is a master of spin: in Aesop, the fox can’t reach the grapes on the tree, then claims he didn’t want them anyway because they’d gone off (from which stems the phrase ‘sour grapes’). Vulpine symbolismpops up in Chaucer, Machiavelli and Ben Jonson; even the…

It’s hard for The Rake not to see Paul Feig as a kindred spirit. I declared in our previous issue that I have a particular principle as regards timekeeping. So when this consummate multi-hyphenate shows up 30 minutes early to Wolfgang Puck’s restaurant WP24, at the top of the Ritz-Carlton in Downtown Los Angeles, he is already a man after my own heart. But it was not just his timekeeping, more his sartorial aplomb. The acclaimed actor, writer and director walked into our interview wearing a stunning grey pinstripe double-breasted suit from Anderson & Sheppard, perfectly matched with a purple Charvet boutonnière, purple tie, and a white two-fold cotton shirt with twin stripes in — you guessed it — purple. The photographs reveal the rest, and the best thing is…

Let’s face it, unlike many of the other women featured in this column, Audrey Hepburn was never the type you’d imagine lying on your flokati rug murmuring breathless expressions of carnal pleasure to a consistently expressing tempo. She was more the gamine you’d seduce through moonlight and stanzas, a soul and body of equal fragility. In an era of big, blousy, blonde broads (and Liz Taylor), Hepburn was all diminutive elegance. Even in her young years, the starlet who trained as a dental assistant, in case she never made it on stage or screen, somehow blended sophistication with wholesomeness. Not to mention a beguiling, scatterbrained silliness that saw her leave her 1953 Oscar in the ladies’ room by mistake. Beneath the translucent skin and gossamer sensibilities simmered a don’t-fuck-with-me toughness.…

On December 12, 1972, Baron Guy Édouard Alphonse Paul de Rothschild and his wife, Baroness Marie- Hélène de Rothschild, threw a little soirée at the Château de Ferrières, their mansion in Brie, on the outskirts of Paris. Of course, this being the Rothschilds, it wasn’t so little: it was, in fact, a soirée on steroids. The ‘Diner de Têtes Surrealistes’ had a dress code of “black tie, long gowns, surrealist heads”, and guests arrived to find the redoubtable château — designed and built in 1859 by Sir Joseph Paxton, architect of London’s Crystal Palace, and hailed as “the finest example of Second Empire style” — floodlit with moving orange lights, to give the impression it was ablaze. Inside, the 150 guests encountered a mise en scène that only confirmed the…

Richard Mille Rake Lifetime Achievement by wei koh Every industry has one man — the Giò Ponti, the Enzo Ferrari, the Mies van der Rohe — whose impact is so profound he alters its course for ever. Accordingly, future historians will define two eras in modern horological culture: the time before Richard Mille and the time after. So definitively has Mille shaped the face of contemporary watchmaking, you could say that almost every brand has been in some way or another influenced by him, regarding his concepts for hyper-modernity, transparency, technicality, high performance, lightness, shock resistance and ergonomics. But Richard’s vision has been born of sheer originality, and in the first year of the new millennium he unveiled a future for watchmaking that represented the first seismic rupture from the…

Since I was a boy I was fuelled by the singular ambition to be a gourmand. I remember the precise moment the goal, if not the term, was formalised in my adolescent mind in Proustian technicolor. It was the first time I tasted terrine de foie gras with black truffles imported by my parents’ garrulous friends from Périgord. It was served in thick, cold slices, cut with a knife dipped in hot water. The thrilling and seemingly endless journey of lushness — compelled by the earthy, carnal lasciviousness of black truffles and contrasted with the dryness of the underlying toasted brioche and the heady ephemera of the ice-cold Dom Pérignon that washed it down — triggered a series of neural explosions that have defined the first 50 years of my…

GAVIN BOND Gavin is London-born and New York-based, dividing his time between America’s east and west coasts. He studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins, but has been in the U.S. for the past 20 years, photographing for clients such as Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, HBO, Showtime and several other major film studios and television networks. When he is not working with the world of Hollywood he istravelling back and forth to Mexico City, working with the Black Jaguar- White Tiger Foundation, which he says he is “very proud to be a part of. My dear friend Eduardo saves big felines including jaguars, tigers, leopards and lynxes from circuses, zoos and illegal breeders.” He is working on an exhibit that will be launching on a global scale in 2017 to…

For some actors, the key to a role starts with the voice. For others, it’s the walk. For Adolphe Menjou, who made his debonair mark during the waning days of silent cinema in the 1920s, it was all about an impeccably waxed moustache allied to an immaculate dress suit. In an era when character was telegraphed, kabuki-like, through appearance and gesture, the moustache, he wrote, “was the mark of a villain — a rich city slicker or a foreign nobleman”, and the Pittsburgh-born, French/Irish-descended Menjou ran the roguish gamut, playing “Russian aristocrats, Italian Marcheses, and suave but unsavoury blackmailers”. He revelled in his status as the go-to guy for blithe decadence — he even played Lucifer in D.W. Griffith’s 1926 epic The Sorrows of Satan — and he avidly embraced…

We’ve been compared to bubble-gum pop puppets by that publicity-quaffing smarm sprinkler Piers Morgan, due to our heavily preened appearance. Our moustaches call to mind that of Fu Manchu, while our freeflowing fur — reminiscent of the bouffant locks of the rock stardating supermodels who lit up Carnaby Street in the sixties — have traditionally made us the dog breed of choice for kaftan-wearing hippies (admittedly, this is only a badge of honour if one relishes seeing black and white prints of one’s uncles and second cousins being led around the slums of Brighton and Haight-Ashbury). Yes, our appearance invites whoops of admiration and incredulous guffaws of laughter in equal measure. But ask the casual pundit what they know about Afghan Hounds other than our striking — and, to many,…

L.U.C Time Traveler One Spoiler alert: if Phileas Fogg, the protagonist in Jules Verne’s epic literary race against the clock, had kept time using a dualtime function wristwatch, instead of the timepiece we might assume he used — a Victorian silver pocket watch by H.J. Norris, perhaps — he may have spent the final leg of his journey, the train ride from Liverpool to London, boisterously celebrating winning his wager under the disapproving gaze of his Indian bride-to-be, rather than mistakenly admitting defeat. Accuracy would have been one of Fogg’s major priorities — we’re talking here about a man who sacked his former valet for bringing him shaving water at 84°F instead of 86°F — as would stylish aesthetics (certainly if we take the dapper iteration played by David Niven…

Hedonist: from the Greek hédoné (‘pleasure’) — one who regards pleasure as the chief goal of life A number of figures, both real and fictional, have done more than their fair share to make crash helmets cool — James Hunt, Judge Dredd and Boba Fett among them — but perhaps none more so than Reginald Flint and Lindsay Chong, the duo behind Hedon, the company that makes the most dashing, comfortable and impressively crafted motorcycling headgear a man can wear. And there is more to these wares than the cool factor and quality: Hedon’s helmets, as the name suggests, are about capping off the sheer, unadulterated pleasure to be found on a motorised two-wheeled steed. Hedon’s story begins in 2011, when Flint and Chong decided to blend their extensive experience…

There is one photograph of Bob Carlos Clarke in his own state of undress. He’s a late-teen, perhaps early twentysomething, doing a handstand on a deserted beach in cloudy Ireland. The film is black and white, and the tones so grey they make you reach for the light switch. Except here, in the centre, illuminating the scene, is Carlos Clarke, his feet leant against the roof of a sand-specked Volkswagen Beetle, for balance, while the rest of his inverted frame stretches towards the ground, and blood, one has to imagine, rushes to his head. It is in this, the subject’s contortion, that the photograph’s appeal becomes clear. His bare arms and torso are strained to the point of failure, nipples stretched oval, main arteries bulging and sternum defined in a…

For a man who wore knee-length shorts for the majority of his adult life, Scout Master Dan, a man with an appearance not unlike a bespectacled hairless Sphinx cat, but belied by a personality like Father Christmas — only a slightly inebriated, verbally abusive, expletive-hurling Father Christmas — knew a hell of a lot about Scouting. One of his favourite subjects, upon which he enjoyed holding long soliloquies, was the art of layering for cold-weather sports such as mountaineering, ice climbing, trekking and camping. Perhaps it was because, hailing from Canada, Dan was immune to the cold (hence the ubiquity of the aforementioned khaki plus-fours), and thus loved expounding upon it and its frigid grip with the enthusiasm of one perennially prevented from experiencing it. And it was during one…

Chances are, if you are contemplating the gap in your life into which would fit perfectly the bag owned by the chap next to you — the one with mosaic-embossed and debossed motifs — it will be made by Mark/Giusti. Mark Farhat, the creator of this emerging brand, is an impressive man. Raised in the rather peripatetic existence of a diplomatic family, he saw the world from a young age and soaked up the cultures and idiosyncrasies he came across. When he was diagnosed with cancer as a teenager, he was the only person unable to see the negative side. Despite the cancer’s returning five times, he managed to pursue a B.A. and a master’s, and he is now the proprietor of a luxury brand so attuned to the zeitgeist…

Many of us — bar-room philosophers in particular — articulate the word with reverence bordering on awe. Grown men underscore its sanctity with a thump of palm on oak — second syllable, usually — when barking it across a pub table. Its utterance conjures up images of sages in togas pacing the squares of ancient Athens, fingering their voluminous beards and pioneering brilliant new ways of conducting civic harmony. So ingrained in our collective belief is its being unequivocally a good thing, the United States government’s annual human rights report on China always — always — waxes superior about the Communist Party-controlled state’s lack of democracy with the same air of unambiguous rectitude it might if bemoaning the lack of food, water and medicine in West Africa. And yet, according…