Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 - Issue 53 i The Rake

“He would construct those intricately rhyming narratives inside his formidable brain.” When the Coogi brand was founded in 1969, its trippy indigenous-influenced knitwear was designed to give wealthy American tourists the chance to drop a wad of Aussie dollars on a fair-dinkum kitsch souvenir of their trip ‘Down Under’. Little did its founders in the tony Melbourne enclave of Toorak suspect that — like many other symbols of brash upper-class affluence — their $500 creation would be co-opted as an aspirational symbol by the U.S. urban community. No one played a greater role in cementing Coogi gear’s status as playa-wear than Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. Critics at such respected organs as The Source, Billboard and Rolling Stone have held Biggie up as the greatest hip-hop M.C. of all…

Oliver Jackson-Cohen is something of an enigma. When The Rake spoke to him, the 30-year-old was taking a six-month voluntary hiatus from acting, which for someone still establishing a career is highly unusual, albeit sincere. “I just haven’t read anything that is at all of interest to me,” he says. “The only thing you can really control as an actor is what you say no to.” The Mr. Selfridge star is tall, too, and he has found himself having to lower his 6' 3" frame on camera to please bigger egos. When you are as marketable as Jackson-Cohen — fluent in French and English, handsome and gifted — his billing as a rising star isn’t hard to understand, but with a few questions to clear up, and a genuine interest…

We open on a wide interior shot of the Hoops nightclub in the Bronx on a Saturday night in 1978. Perhaps the smash hit of the day, Le Freak, is playing. The camera pans to a young actor with a big future and swagger to match at the bar. His name is Joe Pesci, and he is about to be distracted from his Jack Daniel’s by a photograph pinned to the bar. Flash backwards a few weeks to backstage at the same venue, where a 17-year-old blonde Bronx native is shivering in a bathing suit but determined to take out first prize in a beauty contest — a pair of black high heels with an ankle strap. She wins more than footwear. Or to put it in her words: “So…

To create cotton cloths is no easy feat, as it’s a highly skilled craft that requires years of hands-on experience. For centuries, Turkey, and the formerly imperious and vast Ottoman Empire, was the epicentre of trade, with its capital, Istanbul, bridging the gap between east and west. In addition to its perfect geographical location for the exchange of goods, Turkey’s climate also lends itself to agriculture, and one of the nation’s foremost areas of expertise is growing and weaving cotton. South of the city of Izmir, and alongside the crystal blue western Aegean coast, resides Söktas, a specialist designer and supplier of luxury cotton and cottonblended shirtings that was founded in 1971 by the Kayhan family. The family’s expertise in cotton predates Söktas’s founding, and they’ve been growing it in…

Special thanks to the Shangri-La Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa, Oman In the early nineties, the producers of the satirical British puppet show Spitting Image painted their rubber effigy of the then prime minister, John Major, battleship grey, in order to emphasise his unfathomable dullness. Psychologists studying the connotations of grey say that humans have come to associate the colour with dampness, depression, hibernation and lack of energy. All in all, let’s be honest, grey — the colour of storm clouds, lead, Tupperware, industrialisation and dead pigment cells in hair follicles — gets a bad press. For a long while, grey lumbered through the realm of men’s clothing with this burden upon its shoulders. Being the colour of un-dyed wool, it became associated with the peasantry in the Middle…

This page has, over the years, hosted fervid toasts to syphilitic sex pests, vainglorious turtle killers, bank-robbing plastic Buddhists, and, most recently, a psychotic baby whose confinement to fictional realms is all that’s preserving humanity from a global dictatorship. So it’s with no apology that, this issue, we focus on the anti-hero of a book containing scenes so sadistic its publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped it three months before its release. When it eventually saw the light of day, The New York Times titled its review ‘Snuff This Book!’. Women’s movements organised boycotts, shops refused to stock it, and its 27-yearold author — Bret Easton Ellis — received 13 death threats from people willing to carry out murder as part of their quest to shield the public from literary accounts…

As a Brit, the last few months have been spent in varying degrees of anxiety. The political landscape is such that we all have a stake in insecurity, and the future is about as clear as the Ganges. Within macro terms such as ‘millennial’, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘fake news’ and ‘vested interests’, we have tangible micro results that happen when everyone tries to solve the world’s problems in one fell swoop — ‘Grenfell’, ‘Manchester’, ‘London Bridge’, ‘Finsbury Park’. These are the events that test resolve and ideals — so we see liberals become more censorious, the diverse becoming more tribal, and everyone blaming everything but themselves. People I speak to in the industry feel worried. Brexit aside, political discourse is again creating a dividing line between the good and the rich. Nothing…

O.K., so maybe margarita hour in some subterranean Midtown hell-hole — seats held together by duct tape, muted Yankees game on a vintage valve T.V. in the corner, the sound of pinball flippers and bells mingling with some crackling gospel dirge from the jukebox — isn’t the best place to bend strangers’ ears with stories of my ancestors, and the touch of canis lupus about our features doesn’t exactly make us the first barflies people gravitate towards for the purposes of casual acquaintance. But they’re stories worth telling. Call me hyperbolic, but the dispersal of humans over our planet can be partly accredited to Siberian Huskies. Without our help — pulling heavy loads over vast, hostile distances, herding reindeer, acting as tireless watchdogs — entire tribes of nomads would never…

Jaquet Droz Loving Butterfly Automaton According to chaos theory pioneer Edward Norton Lorenz’s famous hypothesis, the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil might just cause a tornado in Texas weeks later. The 300 delicate lepidopteric flutters this piece can produce in around two minutes really ought to cause a watch industry storm that’s off the E.F. scale. The Loving Butterfly Automaton’s story begins around 240 years ago, when the founder, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, and his son, Henri-Louis, were in the midst of creating a range of extraordinary automata — tiny animated mechanisms — that delighted the far-flung kings and emperors of Europe and Asia, and are deemed by some academics to be an early form of the computer. These included The Writer (featuring a young boy scoring his name with…

On June 10, 2007, HBO showed the final episode of its modern-day Mafia saga The Sopranos. Despite the much-discussed ambiguity of its final scene, the thrust of the series was clear: the era of the gangster was over. Ten years on, there is no doubt. The Mafia — for The Sopranos still a current event — is now history. In 2017, we look to the business world to provide our larger-than-life baddies. Following The Sopranos, HBO made Boardwalk Empire, a period drama about the birth of the American gangster. Later this year we will have a view of its death, when John Travolta stars in The Life and Death of John Gotti. The film tells the story of the man often called The Last Don. As boss of the Gambino…

The conflict of nature and science has long permeated legislative halls, denominational pews and the private domains of people’s beliefs. Technology has slowed down our natural evolutionary progression and draws our bodies away from our primitive selves and the faculties of nature. Yet from time to time, we see the two work in harmony, enhancing each other and proving themselves to be unassailable bedfellows. One example of this was recently unveiled in the Dominican Republic. In The Rake I have waxed lyrical about the tobacco grown in the Vuelta Abajo in Cuba. The awesome transformative effects of a cigar have for many years given me pause for thought and a chance to be still and think. I have associated Cuba with this opportunity for contemplation, but in all honesty I…

DAVID SMIEDT Writer, comedian and social commentator David Smiedt was born in South Africa, lives in Australia, but insists he is yet to grow up anywhere. He is the author of six books (including the wonderfully titled From Russia with Lunch: A Lithuanian Odyssey) and has penned jokepeppered features for international titles including GQ, Elle and Cosmopolitan. These days, dividing his time between writing and stand-up comedy, David is inordinately proud of having once forced an Australian television station to suspend broadcasting for an entire minute after telling a spicy Heather Mills joke live on air. In his capacity as a selfappointed style counsellor to all who will listen, he insists that polyester is mildly more heinous than genocide. As usual, David takes a look at the life and work…

The actor Mickey Rourke is a Hollywood myth incarnate, a beautiful man undone by a dependence on his own face, a saddle-soaped Dorian Gray. The smirking eyes, harsh frame and soft voice combined to subvert the eighties lead, a soulful minimalist to Michael Douglas’s greedy kitsch. Chiming with the era’s more quixotic auteurs, he abandoned his screen prime to box. Like Jean-Paul Belmondo (the subject of a previous Rake profile), Rourke was an undefeated amateur fighter, but by the time he wanted to act again, that face was a pulpy caricature of itself. For 15 years, Rourke was the heavyweight bruiser turned industry punchbag until a single film in 2009, one of the most potent life-art blurs in recent cinema history, revived him. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Born in…

1. “A vintage Patek chrono is one of the most elegant things a man can own,” Benjamin says, but that’s not the only reason this timepiece deserves attention: it’s the only known 1463 to be retailed by Cartier, carrying the signatures of both the French and Swiss houses. It was owned by a woman from the Upper East Side for more than 20 years before Benjamin won it at auction last year. 2. Benjamin’s family owned a range of cigarette lighters in the 1970s, so although he doesn’t smoke, they’ve occupied a bigger-than-usual part of his life. He inherited the silver Zippo from his grandfather and inadvertently nicked the modern S.T. Dupont from his friend John Mayer during a night out in London. 3. Although this 1930s Cartier watch was…

It was a grey, flinty day when The Rake stepped barefoot aboard the new Riva 100’ Corsaro during its recent Hong Kong global launch. Yet for the Ferretti Group — owners of the storied Italian boatbuilder founded by Pietro Riva on the shores of Lake Iseo in 1842 — the prediction is for nothing but blue skies in Asia. With demand for luxury vessels growing in step with the booming economy across China and south-east Asia, creating new millionaires and billionaires by the day, the company is confident there’s smooth sailing ahead. Ferretti Group — whose stable includes Riva, Custom Line, Ferretti Yachts, Itama, Mochi Craft, CRN, and the so-called Lamborghini of the sea, Pershing — is the world’s second largest producer of motoryachts more than 20 metres in length.…

It was, as usual, P.G. Wodehouse who summed it up best: “I’m bound to say that New York’s a topping place to be exiled in. Everybody was awfully good to me, and there seemed to be plenty of things going on, and I’m a wealthy bird, so everything was fine.” Although it is Bertie Wooster explaining his love of New York, in the 1919 story Leave It to Jeeves, the sentiments were Wodehouse’s. A century ago the British comic novelist and stage writer was a hit on Broadway: his shows played to packed houses, and New York became a sort of playground for him. Thitherto the Old World’s relationship with New York had been largely as a place from which to import heiresses for the European marriage market, and to…

Special thanks to the Oman tourist board, the Shangri-La Muscat, the Anantara Al Akhdar resort and the 1000 Nights Camp.…

This is going to come across as disingenuous, but the burger is undisputedly the US of A’s greatest contribution to culinaria. Few subjects elicit greater diversity of impassioned opinion and inspire more heated debate; fewer foods still draw one into such fevered fanatical fixation. I won’t delve into the myth and lore of the history of the burger, or its cultural and economic significance as an American icon — that’s what Wikipedia is for. But should you be a bun-and-patty fetishist, the late, great Josh Ozersky’s The Hamburger is required reading (as if I needed to tell you). Everything you ever wanted to know, and then some, about whether the spheroid of ground beef clamped betwixt a bun is the birthright of red-blooded men and women or a symbol of…

Early in the 16th century, the Warrior Pope, Julius II, commissioned Donato Bramante to build St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. Julius died in 1513 and Bramante a year later, with the church’s foundations in their infancy. It took several popes, generations of able architects, hundreds of stonemasons, and 120 years until the majestic building was complete. The thought of mirroring Bramante today, and attempting to create something so grand and awe-inspiring that you’d never see it finished, is unfathomable with modern-day technology. However, one can draw a comparison to the cognac Louis XIII, and the dedication and sense of commitment of those involved, not to mention the house’s respect for the terroir, its savoir-faire, and, most importantly, the 100 years it takes to produce it. Founded in 1874, Louis…

Too often these days, British brands talk to me in the tone of the besieged. There is always an issue beyond their control — rent, supply, etc — that requires a reconsideration of strategy and redirection of investment. The glimmer of hope is the emergence of a luxury that necessitates the kind of understatement, quality and prominence that only the British can provide. One heritage brand that seemed the most vulnerable has emerged as an outlier of the trend and has seen numbers verging on the extraordinary. New & Lingwood are a marvel; they ooze the charm and elegance of the Piccadilly Arcade’s Victorian and Regency origins that are sought-after around the world. They are a cosy riposte to the sterile criteria of the Candy & Candy generation, and to…