Stranger than Fiction

April – May 2007/2008 ISSN 1750-3272 www.avantoure.com $5.00 | £2.50 | €3.50

JACKPOT

Stranger Than Fiction SCHOOL OF TRICKERY

Creating a Monster

Your Own Hollywood Spies for Hire Home and Away Second Life – Second Rate?

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6 OUR CONTRIBUTORS 10 CALENDAR JACKPOT 14

Gone Real

by Ambrozia Leary An essay on a controversial musician and song writer, Tom Waits

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Stranger than Fiction

by Alexei Iakovlev A look at the development of documentary cinematograph

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Through a Filmmaker’s Eyes

by Mark Macias An interview with a documentary film producer Solo Avital

TROPHIES 28

The Best Video Cameras

by Noah Davis A list of the best video cameras

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Gone Real

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Avantourist Accessories

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Love in the Time of Texting

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ANTHOLOGY OF TEMPTATION 40

Love in the Time of Texting

by Greg Lalas A look at a new way of conveying your feelings

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Show Must Go On A visualized dip into the world of emotions

SCHOOL OF TRICKERY 58

Twisted Pleasures

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Spies for Hire

by Mark Macias Highlights of the modern trends in the intelligence world

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Creating a Monster

by Denae D’Arcy An interview with Adam Bailey, a NY a special effects (fx) makeup expert

ADRENALINE RAINBOW 68

Home and Away

by Thabang Motsei A look at home swapping holidays

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Your Own Hollywood

by Denae D’Arcy NY Academy camps that teach you the secrets of acting and scriptwriting

HOMO LUDENS Your Own Hollywood

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Second Life – Second Rate?

by Lucy Rohr A diary of a Second Life avatar

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Twisted Pleasures

by Chris Hutty A list of movies with surprise endings

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The Button Club events

94 BEHIND THE SCENES

Home and Away

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Ivan Listo Our Art Director Ivan is a keen traveller who indulges in beautifully designed things. He believes that the essence of any design is communication. By scrutinizing the world he finds new ways of communicating through typography and graphic design. The ethos of his work is very much about understated elegance and simple chic.

Lucy Rohr Originally from Sydney, Lucy moved to London three years ago for the city's laid back lifestyle and weather. Undeterred when she found neither, she turned her hand to further study and the search for the ultimate London coffee experience. An incurable fantasist, she currently works as a shadow writer for Britney Spears. For avantoure Lucy plunged into the virtual world of Second Life and discovered that it can be very lonely there.

Greg Lalas A freelance writer from Brooklyn, NY, Greg regularly contributes to avantoure, Continental, National Public Radio, and Penthouse. Before journalism he tried his hand at just about everything, from professional soccer to bartending and teaching in high school.

For this issue, Greg has written Love in the Time of Texting.

Thabang Motsei Thabang Motsei is an eccentric, driven journalist, fascinated by the cross pollination of cultures and the intricacies of current affairs. Her interests include extreme sport, anything artistic, literature, live shows and textiles. She lives and works in London.

For this issue, she has written about home swapping holidays in Home and Away.

Chris Hutty A freelance photographer who has previously specialized in sports photography, Chris is developing a broader range as a photographer and journalist. He has travelled extensively in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, and is a keen diver and water sports enthusiast. For avantoure he has looked at movies with surprise endings, in Twisted Pleasures.

Rania Haditirto Since moving to New York to pursue her career as a modern dancer, Rania has worked at Elle, WNET Channel Thirteen, and as a freelance photographer. She loves outdoor sports and travel, and plays bass in a rock band. Rania is our Contributing Feature Editor.

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Mark Macias Mark is a television producer living in Manhattan, who loves to travel the world. Before moving to New York, he worked as a reporter for The Arizona Republic and State Press Magazine in Arizona. For our current issue Mark wrote Spies for Hire and Through a Filmmaker’s Eyes.

Nina Iskandaryan Head of Curriculum at the Caucasus Media Institute in Yerevan, Armenia, Nina supervises and teaches English and Russian courses, and freelances as an interpreter and translator. For this issue she has translated Gone Real and Stranger than Fiction from Russian.

Noah Davis Noah is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, who writes for Penthouse, Time Out New York, PopMatters.com and Mediabisto.com.

In his spare time he enjoys giving running tours of the city, playing basketball with local kids and searching for the next great idea for a story.

In this issue of avantoure Noah researched The best video cameras.

Denae D’Arcy A travel journalist who lives in London, Denae has been on assignments to Portugal, Germany, Denmark, Italy, France, South Africa and the United States. She previously worked as a news reporter for CNN, CBS, ABC and The Weather Channel. For avantoure Denae has written Creating a Monster and Your Own Hollywood.

Juju Stulbach Juju Stulbach is a native of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, but has lived in New York City for over a decade. She has had careers as a dancer, an actress and also as a singer and songwriter in the successful band Mosquitos, with which she has toured the USA. She is currently working on a new musical project. Ms. Stulbach is the lovely and charismatic subject of this issue’s photo shoot, The Show Must Go On.

Suzanne Bella Land Suzanne, aka “Bella”, is a multi-media artist/actor and audio content entrepreneur. Music composition, acting, filmmaking, narration, art, poetry oration, clinical hypnosis/motivational recordings and singing (Ambient indie) are her passions. Born in England she divides her time between London and LA, where she is excited to be collaborating with film score composer Jeff Rona (Chill Factor, Traffic, Sharkwater) on original material for which she wrote the lyrics, and sings. Bella is working on launching an audio content company designed for all digital media; for booking inquiries and business venture interest, contact her at soulartvision@yahoo.com.

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AVANTOURE Life is a game

Editorial

April – May 2008

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Serafima Bogomolova

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CEO and Co-Founder

Marketing and Sponsorship

Ilkka Huotelin

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Subscriptions

Rania Haditirto

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Cover

Denae D’Arcy

Illustration by Ivan Listo

Contributing Feature Editors, Moscow

Published by Avantoure UK Ltd. (Reg. No 5670709), Cregmalin, Mount Ararat

Andrei Polonsky and Alexei Yakovlev

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ISSN 1750-3272

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AVANTOURE magazine is published 6 times a year. Reproduction in whole or in part is not permitted without the written authorisation of the publisher. Editorial opinions expressed in

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AVANTOURE magazine does not accept responsibility for the advertising content.

The publisher and the authors do not accept any liability whatsoever in respect of any action

Contributing Writers Denae D’Arcy, Mark M. Macias, Lucy Rohr, Alexei Iakovlev, Rania Haditirto, Noah Davis, Chris Hutty, Greg Lalas, Thabang Motsei, Ambrozia Leary.

Translation from Russian into English Nina Iskandaryan Financial controller John M. Cade

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taken by readers on the recommendations set out in this magazine.

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MARCH 1 – 2, New Zealand

IRON MAN COMPETITION This year, the international Iron Man Competition is being held in one of the world’s most beautiful countries – at Lake Taupo in New Zealand. Over 1300 competitors of both sexes pump iron in events on land and in the water, while 20,000 visitors from around the world doubling the town’s population and creating an incredible party atmosphere. Prizes range up to $50,000. www.ironman.co.nz

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March 1 – 30, Australia

MELBOURNE FASHION FESTIVALL Do your Christmas shopping early this year at the Melbourne Fashion Festival, sponsored by L’Oreal.

Leading and up-and-coming designers exhibit their coolest threads in hotel ballrooms, boutiques and venues such as the Royal Exhibition Building, to an audience of celebrities, while shops are full of classic clothes and accessories. www.lmff.com.au

March 1 – 30, Micronesia

YAP DAY The Pacific island of Yap has a unique folk heritage, which it celebrates each year with an elaborate festival, which tourists have only been able to witness since the 1980s. Islanders give prizes for the most intricate tattoos and host epic narrative dances which often last for ten hours. New dances are created each year. Aside from its festival, Yap is known for its beautiful beaches. www.visityap.com

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March 14 – 24, Düsseldorf

FLAMENCO FESTIVAL If you can clap, stomp your feet and snap your fingers, you can do the flamenco. The Tanzhaus NRW in Düsseldorf hosts its annual Flamenco Festival in April this year, so book tickets early.

Flamenco has its roots in Gypsy culture, but has spread itself far beyond. The festival is devoted to modern and contemporary styles and consists of nine performances by European dance ensembles and twenty workshops for visitors. www.whatsonwhen.com/sisp/index. htm?fx=event&event_id=90969

March 1 – April 30, France

ICE DIVING IN TIGNES LAKE Imagine jumping into a hole in a frozen lake and swimming beneath the ice. At the Evolution 2 extreme-sports school at Lake Tignes, you can do just that, accompanied by professional ice-divers to ensure that it’s all perfectly safe. Check the below website for more on the ice diving season. www.evolution2.com/default_uk.asp

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April 13 , Italy

BRIDGE RUNNING IN VENICE Venice is built on 177 islands, linked by 150 waterways and 409 bridges. Each April for centuries, Venetians have staged a noncompetitive race across the city’s bridges, starting from the Piazza San Marco. There are two courses – one 10km and the other 14km – plus a 3km walking route, open to children as well. www.whatsonwhen.com/sisp/index. htm?fx=event&event_id=90441

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Gone R

Real

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By Ambrozia Leary

Way back in 1976, a journalist from ZigZag magazine asked Tom Waits about his plans and got this reply: “I don’t know, I might go to Phoenix. It’s close to Los Angeles. I drive with a wild hare up my ass every night, giving the finger to the oncoming traffic... Drive to Phoenix in a 1954 black Cadillac four-door sedan every now and then …Watch out for falling rocks and eighteen-wheel vehicles. Watch out for the clap. Watch out for fifteen-year-old girls wearing bell bottoms who are running away from home and have a lot of Blue Oyster Cult albums under their arm… If you go to the Tropicana Hotel, watch out for Chuck E. Weiss, ‘cos he’ll sell you a rat’s asshole for a wedding ring.”

Well, what else do you expect from Tom Waits?

Back in 1976 he was a loaded storyteller walking the alleys of West Hollywood. Untouched by Flower Power, though there might be some Bob Dylan poems among the junk in his sordid lodgings – but more likely Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski. The less junk the better, if you’re 26 and living like a rolling stone. “You’ve got a cigarette, but you ain’t got a match. You’ve got haemorrhoids, need a shave and … that’s fascinating.”

Yeah, you check out the street and it looks like there’s kind of a...

Kind of a blur drizzle down the plate glass And as a neon swizzle stick is stirrin’ up the sultry night air Looks like a yellow biscuit of a buttery cue ball moon Rollin’ maverick across an obsidian sky And as the buses go groanin’ and wheezin’

Down on the corner I’m freezin’ On a restless boulevard at a midnight road I’m across town from Easy Street…

Nighthawk Postcards (from Easy Street) An odd-looking guy wearing a baggy suit, a bootlace tie and pointy shoes, Waits is the poet of midnight wanderers and shabby drunks; the delirium, hallucinating roller coasters of galloping words, obscene staccato, screeching engines, amputated train whistles, weird trips of broken streets.

Stuff happens to him. One morning, his phone exploded with outraged calls from friends. “You son of a bitch, how could you do that? We all trusted you and you just went and sold yourself out!” It turned out someone stole his voice for an advertisement, and Waits had to go to court to prove he wasn’t a potato chip. Try imagining that.

Tom Waits was born in 1949 in San Diego in the back seat of a yellow cab in the parking lot of Murphy Hospital. His father, a Spanish teacher, used to drive his boy over the Mexican border for haircuts, because booze was cheaper there. One day a thick fog descended as dusk was falling and Tom was out swimming. An enormous pirate ship came out of the fog. There were dead pirates hanging on the mast and falling off the deck and smoke coming off its sails. Tom was close enough to where he could touch the ship’s bow. “Well, boy, saw a pirate ship, huh?” said his parents, and called him home to dinner.

That was his childhood.

That ship of fools has drifted through his life ever since – in America’s crazy streets, full of idiot laughter, misfits, slow dying and miracles.

Gravelly voices yelling: “You like us nice

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An odd-looking guy wearing a baggy suit, a bootlace tie and pointy shoes, Waits is the poet of midnight wanderers and shabby drunks; the delirium, hallucinating roller coasters of galloping words, obscene staccato, screeching engines, amputated train whistles, weird trips of broken streets.

and clean, how do you like us filthy?”

Just draw closer. Waits spent years tuning his ear to the language of white trash and its unruly poetry. He washed cars, flipped burgers and worked as a nightclub doorman, living the downside of the American Dream like his hero Bukowski.

And then he regurgitated the lot. “They’re harmful to swallow,” says Waits of his albums. “If rash develops, discontinue use and consult a physician.” Holding back isn’t his thing.

“Play it like your hair’s on fire. Play it like a midget’s Bar Mitzvah,” he told an interviewer from GQ in 2002. He wants to see the very guts of sound, the naked skeleton of song. For Waits, one of the most exciting sounds in all of music is that of a symphony orchestra warming up, preferably in an open field when an airplane is roaring overhead and a lorry grumbling far away. Even the best musician needs to have his tongue untied, you have to set the song free and let it live a life of its own. Otherwise you leave the recording studio with your arms bloodied and the dead body of the song lying on the table…

Critics have given up trying to define his style. His early provincial blues mutate into bebop rhapsodies, to become a swordfishtrombone hullabaloo to the sound of wrecked accordions, instruments made from

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junk or found at pawnshops, like the Mellotron and the Chamberlin. Waits squeezes all kinds of horrible and wonderful sounds from America, tying them in a sailor’s knot of tragedy and comedy. As he told Jim Jarmusch in 1992, “There are so many sounds I want to record. Carnival stuff… I still haven’t got a really good metal sound – when you see like swords in a real sword fight, or a real anvil with a real hammer.”

Making songs is like “trying to trap birds” or “photographing ghosts” – recording mumbling, nightmares, wolves howling on highways. The best music is overheard from neighbors playing with their radio, as a badly tuned Mexican guitar twangs in dense fog and a Chinese band moans Cuban tunes in Kentucky. Or listen to this air-horn from a train that it looks like a vacuum cleaner with horns attached, which a gloomy rocker from the garage next door soldered up and brought as a gift. You can hear the laughter of friends and an ugly falsetto. Burroughs strikes up a tune that Marlene Dietrich once sang. There was a one-armed piano player in Chicago; the song he played over and over again was called Without a Song.

And then there is Waits’ sand-paper voice, rubbing all ways. He has a million stories in his head, waiting to disclose in a bar with a picture of Mona Lisa

without any eyebrows. Or you can hail a taxi and say “Take me to the Taft Hotel” on Sunset Boulevard; it’s nice in the summer when there’s a carnival across the street. Then you can race through the suburbs, the realm of the American Dream, counting road-kill and making up rhymes like: I want a sink and a drain And a faucet for my fame At a New York café with walls painted a revolting puce shade, you can sit at a corner table with a red-checkered tablecloth, overhearing unbelievable things. Waits loves such places and could list flophouses, bars and Chinese joints all over the country. See for yourselves and have fun… Hear the tapping of salt-cellars, the exasperating creaking of wrecked chairs, customers coughing and mumbling. Through the glass you can see a fight outside, surely over some girl on drugs, everyone around here knows Annie …

In fifteen minutes, the scene changes, you’re done with your rubbery pizza, and the waitress is the right girl to marry. A yellow cab pulls to the curb with a rustling sound, you see “a transvestite leg come out of the cab with a $150 stocking and a $700 shoe and step in a pool of blood, piss and beer left by a guy who died a half hour before and is now lying cold

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somewhere on a slab”. As a gigantic moon rises overhead Waits’ tender, rasping baritone croons Night on Earth.

To the terrible wheeze of The Earth Died Screaming, an Eraserhead shuffles along Eighth Avenue sucking up houses through a straw…

His 1985 album, Rain Dogs, is about losing and finding. “You know dogs in the rain lose their way back home… ’Cause after it rains every place they peed on has been washed out.” On the song Bride of Rain Dog, “the dog that’s following the dog that’s supposed to know the way back” is “the one with the hair that goes straight up, with the big blue eyes and the spiked collar and the little short skirt and no underwear.”

How else would Tom Waits sing about the woman who changed his life?

Waits met Kathleen Brennan in

Hollywood in the early 1980s, in the “drunken, spinning, time-warping delirium of a good New Year’s Eve party in someone else’s house”. An Irish Catholic – “She’s got the whole dark forest living inside of her” – Kathleen is “an incandescent presence” in his life and music. He once claimed he fell for her because she was the first woman he’d ever met who could “stick a knitting needle through her lip and still drink coffee”. They paged a pastor and got married one night.

“She’s the egret in the family,” Waits says. “I’m the mule.” They have written many songs together – “You know, ‘You wash, I’ll dry’, you find a way to work.” He told GQ that Kathleen dreams like Hieronymus Bosch: “She’ll start talking in tongues and I’ll take it all down.” Kathleen is out of bounds and

does not give interviews. It is, however, known that she’s the force behind at least half the texts in Frank’s Wild Years.

“She’s a diamond who wants to stay coal” goes the refrain to Black Market Baby in Mule Variations…

Waits has been lucky with his associates. Meeting with Keith Richards in 1987, “I was expecting a big entourage like a Fellini movie and they just tumbled out of a limo. He comes in laughing, shoes all tore up,” Waits told Robert Sabbag of the Los Angeles Times. It was also at that time that he began collaborating with director Jim Jarmusch on an ongoing series of short films, Coffee and Cigarettes. As Waits reminisced to Magnet, “For me, they were like the hair in the gate. You know when you used to go to the movies and a big hair would get stuck in the

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Waits hasn’t lost his mojo. His latest album, Real Gone, mentions the Tyburn Jig – the dance that hanged men did at the end of the rope – in a sideswipe at “civilized” execution by lethal injection. projector, and you would sit there and watch that piece of hair? You would lose the whole plot for a while.”

Success snowballed. He was named songwriter of the year by Rolling Stone, acted alongside Roberto Benigni in Jarmusch’s Down by Law, then in Ironweed with Jack Nicholson and in Coppola’s Dracula. Together with William Burroughs they wrote The Black Rider, which was staged by Robert Wilson and won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance.

Waits teased reporters with a quote from Bob Dylan: When I asked him why he dressed With twenty pounds of headlines Stapled to his chest Suddenly he quit drinking, moved from LA to New York and then to a remote farm, now with three kids to

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bring up. It’s a place where they still paint barns red to match the blood of slaughtered cattle, grow eggplants and corn in case the Last Days are near, and hang chickens upside down on the porch to repel the evil eye. There are empty houses overgrown with weeds, and a big guy is standing in the middle of the road and crying to make your heart break…

The children are playing at the end of the day Strangers are singing on our lawn It’s got to be more than flesh and bone All that you’ve loved is all you own I’m gonna take it with me when I go.

(Take it with me/ Mule Variations) Waits hasn’t lost his mojo. His latest album, Real Gone, mentions the Tyburn Jig – the dance that hanged men did at the end of the rope – in a sideswipe at “civilized” execution by lethal injection.

There’s a bunch of soldier songs, a letter from a Rockford kid who died in Iraq, with a paraphrase from the glib ads for the Army that have the rock ‘n’ roll turned up full-blast: I’m not fighting for justice I am not fighting for freedom I am fighting for my life and another day in the world here.

(Day After Tomorrow) “I think we are all going into the crapper, waiting to be flushed,” he told Magnet in 2004. “But I also believe that when you do something really good, it goes into an account and other folks can write checks against it.”

As he sings in Make it rain, “I want to believe in the mercy of the world again.”

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by Alexei Iakovlev

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Stranger thanfiction

One Moscow summer night, I was talking with a scriptwriter friend on his balcony. “Look,” he said, “Something’s going to happen – something always happens to people at this crossroads.”

Sure enough, a cheerful group of pedestrians came to a standstill, unaware of us watching. Several of them abruptly broke away and hurried into a side street. “I told you,” my friend said. “Last time I saw a couple reach this place, the girl threw away her bouquet and ran off. Some people break up, some just turn around and walk back,” he added.

Jokingly, I suggested he install a camera on the balcony, to film such events and make a documentary about the secret of the crossroads. What happens to people as they approach it; what notions start to pulsate in their

brains? What happened in their lives an hour or day before that moment?

There would be raw material for horror movies, melodramas, thrillers or comedies…

However, my friend’s imagination was fired by the lover’s tiff he had witnessed. The flowers in the gutter, the girl’s heels echoing on the pavement as the young man fumbled for a cigarette. Though life itself allowed us a glimpse of these events, it felt like having watched a movie. Yet its

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authenticity could never be recreated by actors or directors. Nothing short of a candid camera can picture life as is, dispassionately reflecting reality in all its extraordinary strangeness.

One of the first ever films screened by the Lumière brothers in 1895 at a Parisian café was The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. People froze in their seats or fled in terror that the train would break out of the screen and crush the stalls. At other early screenings, people began to sob when shown a blowup of a crying female face.

Arousing strong emotions became one of the avenues of cinema development, and the stock in trade of what would become the film industry. Today, many feel that cinema is a victim of its own success at emotional manipulation and special effects, recycling stale,

predictable formulas.

No wonder there is renewed interest in documentaries.

Documentaries go back to the birth of cinema: the first films were nothing more than documentary footage.

They allowed people to see things beyond their reach – the Niagara Falls or the lifestyles of foreigners. Filmgoers could observe wildlife in its natural habitat, or significant events in history.

Filmmakers were pioneers who often risked their lives; one cameraman kept turning filming an angry lion until the beast tore him to pieces.

Many pioneers of the documentary genre started out as photographers.

Some used movie cameras simply to record real life; others, to try to understand the world, reveal its facets or praise it. You can trace these two

“Real Cinema does not defy the work of its precursors and is not the ultimate result of the evolution of the cinema. The top of the pyramid is reality itself which cannot be expected to fit into the limits of a film frame.” trends back to two individuals, Robert Flaherty (1884–1951) and Dziga Vertov (1896-1954).

Flaherty began his career as a prospector in Canada’s Hudson Bay region. His films of the local Inuit tribes made him famous and established the genre of anthropological documentaries. Vertov, by contrast, was a neuro-psychologist by training, who glorified the Bolshevik revolution in his native Russia, and film itself as a revolutionary new art.

Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) was a manifesto of the new art, rejecting all theatrical effects and explanatory subtitles. Life itself was

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Arousing strong emotions became one of the avenues of cinema development, and the stock in trade of what would become the film industry.

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the plot of documentaries and dictated the future nature of cinema. It often happened that, after scanning miles of film, a director ended up making a film that had nothing in common with the original idea.

Television created demand for various documentary genres: news reports, stories, biographic films, essays… As documentary cinema diversified, some film-makers returned to Vertov’s conception of it as a unique form of art, giving rise to the current trend of “Real Cinema”.

As the movement’s manifesto proclaims “Real Cinema does not defy the work of its precursors and is not the ultimate result of the evolution of the cinema. The top of the pyramid is reality itself which cannot be expected to fit into the limits of a film frame. Rather,

the opposite will happen: reality will engulf the cinema, making it one of its substances”. Footage of real events, people and objects is used to produce art projects whose meaning diverges from that of the original fact or event, and is inseparable from the film-maker’s subjective vision.

A case in point is the work of the US director Godfrey Reggio, who at the age of fourteen decided that the world was absurd, and spent the next two decades as a Catholic monk sworn to silence. On his return to the world, Reggio decided to shoot a “non-narrative, plot-less meditative film that compares natural phenomena to the modern civilization”. The result was Koyaanisqatsi (1983), which took nine years and 35 kilometres of film to produce; followed by Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002), likewise with a score by Philip Glass. This epic trilogy defies description, and can only be experienced.

More accessible to critics and the public alike were two documentaries released in 2004. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 set box-office records by taking over $220 million within a few months of its release, and won an unprecedented 20-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival.

While some explain its popularity as evidence of anti-Americanism, or condemn the film as sensationalist, neither is a valid criticism of Morgan Sperlock’s Super Size Me, a devastating

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expose of the nutritional horror that is McDonalds.

Alongside these are whimsical amalgams of art and documentary like Sansa (2003), made by Siegfried Debrebant, which follows an Arab artist from Montmartre who hikes from Paris to Tokyo without a passport. As Debrebant admitted, “I had a scenario but I sort of lost it”. The result was two hours of wonderful adventures, randomly shot in the streets of cities where the character found himself by pure chance. The Web is also changing documentary cinema. Video blogs like YouTube are a compendium of

private mini-cinemas. Alongside sloppy footage made with a mobile phone, blogs often host professional work by individuals or groups, such as the short film Kashi made by 1morelife.

The popularity of video blogging proves that people are bored with both the fictional reality of movies and the sleek

Documentaries go back to the birth of cinema: the first films were nothing more than documentary footage.

They allowed people to see things beyond their reach – the Niagara Falls or the lifestyles of foreigners. images presented by print media and television. They want authenticity.

And so my friend and I remained on the balcony as the sun set behind the rooftops and lights came on in the windows. In one I saw a man in a dressing-gown cleaning a pistol.

In another, someone knelt in prayer before an icon, crossing himself and touching his forehead on the floor.

Directly opposite, a semi-naked girl with a phone in her hand leant from an open window, finished talking, and blew us kisses. If I was making a film of her, who knows how the evening might have ended?

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The first day of any new job is nerve-wracking.

What will your workmates think of you? What if you mess up? But none of that compares to the first day on the job for film producer Solo Avital, when he faced the question: What if I lose my life?

by Mark Macias

Solo awoke early one Monday in March 2004, for a trial shoot of what would become his documentary, More than 1000 Words, shadowing an Israeli photographer covering the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. The man arrived to collect Solo with grim news. “An hour ago the Israeli Air force assassinated Hamas' leader Ahmed Yassin, and I cannot guarantee your safety. If you choose to join me then your life is in your hands.”

Solo had one minute to decide.

Would he pursue the documentary he yearned to create, or step back for the sake of his life and family? He decided to go for it. He jumped in the car with his camera gear, and the rest of the story is a legend.

More than 1000 Words has been nominated for 13 film awards, from New York to China and Poland to Canada. It has been sub-titled or dubbed from its original Hebrew into German, Japanese,

Croatian, Greek, English and many other languages. It was even accepted for showing at the Tehran film festival in 2007, until Iran’s Cultural Ministry overruled the decision and excluded the film's entry. Still, More than 1000 Words was the first Israeli film to be invited to play in Iranian theatres since the invention of cinema.

“I was amazed, thrilled, flattered,” Solo recalled, “First because I thought wow, the film really gets across all barriers of differences. It even appeals to Israel’s most notorious enemy, but on the other hand I know that many Iranian are good people. I know some of them personally and was only surprised that technically they have enough freedom there to show an Israeli film…. After the festival removed the screening from their program I was very sad, I so much hoped to give the Israeli Iranian people perhaps a small window of communications.”

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‘If you go out alive you are a hero, but if you got out in a body bag, you are a complete idiot.’ avantoure | jackpot

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I felt safer holding a camera in my hand than a machine gun. The Palestinians want their story told, so as long as you are equipped with a camera there’s a good chance you’ll come out alive.

The film follows Tel Aviv-based photographer Ziv Koren, whose reportage of the Israeli and Palestinian perspectives has appeared on the covers of newspapers around the world. For two years, Solo followed him to riots, terror attacks, and secret meetings with wanted militants, filming the life of a photojournalist. The film tries to uncover why Ziv would want to get up in the morning and pursue a life on the brink of death, rather than stay at home with his wife and daughters.

Of course, Solo faced the same risks as he accompanied Ziv into these explosively charged scenes. A few times, he himself faced death and walked away with a better appreciation of life.

“I’ll lie if I say that I wasn't scared shitless while bullets were flying over my head," Solo recalls. “If I reflect to what Ziv Koren said in the film, ‘If you go out alive you are a hero, but if you got out in a body bag, you are a complete idiot.’ What I think he was trying to say is that if you get hit, it is usually due to your own stupid mistake. If you know how to act and react in certain situations you should be fine.”

One close brush with death happened in April 2005 as they entered a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. They had arranged to meet a man with the nom de guerre Palestine, who was number 3 on Israel’s most wanted list.

Solo describes him as friendly. When they first met, he complimented Solo on his Hewlett Packard cap and offered to swap it for his own cap. Solo agreed,

and Palestine said “Thanks, we'll trade hats before you leave Jenin.”

They spent the next hour or so driving from one location to another with the film crew, in search of another militant. Suddenly, Palestine disappeared and the news crew rushed everyone into the bullet-proof van, ordered to leave Jenin immediately.

Afterwards, Solo discovered that an Israeli spy drone had been flying overhead.

Two days later, Ziv called him and asked: “Solo, did you exchange hats with Palestine?” No, Solo replied, Why? “Because you won't get another chance to do it; the Israeli Army gunned him down this morning,” said Ziv Solo credits Ziv with keeping him safe in war zones. He always listened to Ziv's instructions and tried to face his own fears. “It doesn't mean I wasn't afraid but fear is a protection shield from acting stupid. I felt safer holding a camera in my hand than a machine gun.

The Palestinians want their story told, so as long as you are equipped with a camera there’s a good chance you’ll come out alive. It was not always the case. We all know that on occasions journalists got kidnapped, but even then, in most cases they have been released.”

Solo hopes that More than 1000 Words will inspire other young artists to pursue their dreams. He's now working on a new project that couldn't be more different: a comedy documentary about Jewish humour. Its working title is Laughing in Tears, but there’s a chance it

could be renamed The Oy Factor. Solo can't talk much about the project but he says it will involve a very gloomy subject, the Third World War. “The greatest achievement for every filmmaker is to have his work seen by as large audience as possible, as diverse and different as possible, so obviously I am very happy that the film was viewed by millions around the world. If you keep it culturally unique but universally human, your story can work anywhere on the planet”.

COMMENT REC TO A FRIEND

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THE BEST VIDE

by Noah Davis

In the internet age YouTube and MySpace are what America’s Funniest Home Videos and Beadle at Home were a decade ago. We record our boldest escapades and the most trivial aspects of everyday living. Thanks to digital video, anyone with a computer and a little spare time can create a home movie to share with the world. Sure, ninety percent of internet video is unwatchable, but the other ten percent is superb entertainment.

Whether you’re an amateur shooter looking to film a family holiday, or a professional hoping to catch the eye of a commissioning editor, avantoure has tracked down the best digital video cameras across a range of prices to help you decide the one for you. Because if you’re going to put your face on the internet you ought to do it right...

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EO CAMERAS SONY HANDYCAM HDR-SR7 $1,399.99 The price tag on this model is steep, but the high-quality, high definition picture makes it worth the extra cost. The zoom will only go up to 10x, but do you really need to get any closer? It weighs less than a kilo, so you won’t need to hit the gym before toting this baby around. The 60 GB hard drive holds eight hours of HD video, enough time to bore even the best of friends. The camera’s drawback lies not in its features, but in the editing software. Picture Motion Brower isn’t terrible, but it’s not user friendly. Still, for recording and watching video on an HDTV, you won’t find a better option than the HDR-SR7.

PANASONIC SDR-H18 $699 Stunningly pretty, with a simple, sleek design, this camera produces remarkable quality footage for a product at the low end of the price scale – not high definition, but some of the best in its class. It doesn’t have a huge range of features, but suffices for any simple shot, and with a 30GB

hard drive, you’ll have plenty of space to shoot whatever you like for as long as you need. If you’re wary of the hard drive, the camera will also record to a removable SD/SDHC flash memory drive. The zoom goes up to 32x, so you can tape your friend as he sets himself on fire without worrying yourself.

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SANYO XACTI HD1000 $800 Sanyo has long been making some of the best video cameras on the market, and the HD1000 is no exception.

Designed to be held vertically, its 10x optical HD lens goes down to f/1.8, which makes it excellent in low light conditions. You can take 4 Megapixel still photos while shooting, without interrupting your video. It connects to your TV in one simple step with the advanced High-Definition Multimedia Interface, and records video to a SD or SDHC memory card. An hour and 25 minutes of footage will fit on one 8 GB card. Finally, a super-secret Sanyo algorithm (yep, that’s right, this camera uses algorithms) organizes the camera’s image stabilization feature so no one will notice your shaky hand.

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CANON XL2 $3,999.99 Significantly more expensive than the Sony HDR-SR7, but worth the extra two and a half grand if you’re seriously in need of high-end systems, the key to this camera’s success is the level of control it allows. Tasks that could previously only be accomplished in post-production can be dealt with during filming thanks to features such as the Canon Super Range Optical Image Stabilization, image gamma and detail controls, and dual aspect ratio. The camera’s Open Architecture Design lets you add and remove lenses, viewfinders, mounts and microphone adapters as needed, helping you capture the shot exactly as you imagined it – and it comes with Canon’s 20x Professional L-Series Fluorite optical zoom lens, which just sounds badass.

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PANASONIC AG-HMC150 $6,000 While our budget doesn’t stretch to the AG-HMC150, this is the camera to buy for anyone wanting professional quality video. An HD upgrade to the company’s immensely popular AGDVX100, this camera boasts three CCD imagers, optical image stabilization, and a boatload of other features we

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really don’t understand. There’s no internal hard drive, but a 32 GB SDHC memory card (sold separately) will provide enough space for 12 hours of video and audio content. Independent moviemakers, your camera is ready. It’s not available until later this year – but worth the wait.

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CANON HV20 $999 Tiny buttons are about the only drawback to this otherwise welldesigned, highly functional camera from Canon. Everything else seems just about perfect. We particularly like the motorized lens cap that retracts into the camera when you’re filming, like a gadget from Batman. Still images taken while filming look excellent; the microphone picks up sound quite well,

and the battery lasts up to two hours, a downright eternity for a model in this price range. The HV20 isn’t great in lowlight conditions, but very few cameras at this level are, and it performs well enough. Besides, how much video can you shoot in the dark anyways?

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HOME SWEET HOME This quirky yet classic-looking rug, made from woven plastic, resists dust, dirt and water.

Ella rug Price: $ 222 www.scandetails.com

CUTE AS A BUTTON This black and white woven wool cap will definitely keep your head warm, and might also melt hearts while you wear it. That’s how adorable you’ll look.

Victor Osborne Duster Cap Price: $ 150 www.oaknyc.com

TRIBUTE TO A MAESTRO A must-have for Fellini fans or anyone interested in film history, this book explores his work, inspirations, background and psychology. It is illustrated with superb film stills and photographs of Fellini and the stars with whom he worked.

Frederico Fellini Flexicover 7.7 x 9.6 in., 192 pages Price: $ 19.99 www.taschen.com

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ON WITH THE SHOW Cirque Du Soleil is not your average circus. Founded in Quebeq in the 1980s, its mission is to “invoke the imagination, provoke the senses and evoke emotions of people around the world”. Their shows fizz with creativity, from the explosive acrobatics to the costume and set design. If you haven’t already seen one of the eighteen shows on their world tour, get your tickets as soon as you can.

Cirque Du Soleil For information on shows in your area visit www.cirquedusoleil.com

HIT THE ROAD This bike is perfect for sociable urbanites, or country dwellers with a lot of errands to run. Zip in and out with this wonderful folding bike that folds up in six seconds and weighs only 19.4 pounds. Disk brakes, a 7000 series aluminum frame and a silent Kelvar belt make for safe, comfortable journeys.

Strida 5.0 Folding Bike Price: $ 799 www.fredflare.com (www.Strida.com outside the US)

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SOULFUL SHOES These shoes are a bit more playful than regular oxfords, being made of canvas, with a frayed trim and eyelet lace. Wear them on a spring day and go for a bike ride with a poetry book in your pocket, and watch heads turn… red tape rochdale canvas oxford Price: $ 124 www.oaknyc.com

SAY IT IN FRENCH This is a superb collection of erotic images, from Rodin to contemporary Manga cartoonists, softly sensual to shockingly kinky.

Erotica: 20th Century from Rodin to Picasso Flexicover 5.5 x 7.7 in., 192 pages Price: $ 9.99 www.taschen.com

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SWEET TALKER Look elegantly retro using this high-tech phone redolent of Thirties Art Deco, with wireless connection to Bluetoothenabled cell phones or PCs – perfect for catching up with long-lost friends on different continents.

Hulgar Bluetooth Phone Price: $ 175 ( $50 for base) www.greenergrassdesign.com

DREAMY This luscious fixture with its delicately etched patterns is designed by Tord Boontje for Artecnica.

You can assemble and shape its form in many ways, and it will always look fabulous.

Garland Light Visit www.artecnicainc.com for price and availability or call +323-655-6551

TIMELESS Nelson Ball Clocks were designed in the Forties and Fifties and remain icons of American design. This is a classic clock never goes out of style, and will perk up any home.

Nelson Ball Clock Price: $ 315 www.dwr.com

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ALWAYS AWARE Get a Garmin GPS system for your cell phone and you’ll never be lost again.

Garmin GPS Systeme www.garmin.com

NATURE LOVER This unique briefcase by Takumi Shimamura is crafted from Japanese cedar, with canvas edges for easy laptop storage and a waterproof exterior that’s both stylish and practical.

Bag Kaku Wooden Briefcase Price: $ 299.99 www.boystomengifts.com

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ACTION! Turn your dreams into reality and start making the film you’ve always dreamt of.

Final Cut Studio 2 is a musthave for any film or video editing. Your movie won’t edit itself, so go for it…

Final Cut Studio 2 Price: $ 1,299 www.apple.com

DOT COM We love our computers and the internet, so let’s celebrate them with these cute @symbol cufflinks. @cufflinks Price: $ 39.99 www.boystomengifts.com

SCREEN GODDESS A digital beauty is flawless, but that’s only because her creator is incredibly talented. This book takes us behind the scenes to see how a digital goddess is designed, and showcases work by today’s leading digital designers Digital Beauties Flexicover 5.5 x 7.7 in., 192 pages Price: $ 39.99 www.taschen.com

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Love in the time of texting

by Greg Lalas

When Brooklyn film-programmer Clinton McClung first knew Margi over a decade ago, cell phones were still relatively novel and text messaging was only known to techno-geeks. In fact, Clinton didn’t start texting until he got an iPhone just last year – which, coincidentally or not, was when he reconnected with Margi. Now they were older, wiser and more technologically current. They started dating and began texting each other. It was a new and thrilling way to connect.

“I don’t always like to call when I just want to say I’m thinking of you,” he says. “Sometimes, it’s just easier to write my thoughts out, even in such a short form. Our texts weren’t just ‘Meet you at 5 in Union Square.’ They were a great, ongoing conversation. And what’s really cool is, I don’t remember

every date we went on, but I have text messages about everything we’ve done – restaurants, bars, afternoons in the city.”

Eventually, Clinton realized that those messages would have to be erased to make room for others, so he decided to preserve them for posterity.

He made a 20-page comic strip documenting their romance, using their text messages as dialogue – and gave it to her on Valentine’s Day. Such is love in the time of texting…

The text message is an ill-defined form of communication. It is written, but its abbreviations, unique punctuation, emoticons, and gleeful lack of formal grammar make it not quite the written word. It has an oral, dramatic feel to it, yet is not speech either. It requires more thought than verbal dialogue; however

artless, there is always artifice involved.

In short, a text message is poetic.

It was inevitable that texting became part of our romantic lives. Like every form of communication ever used by humanity in its mating dance, it holds endless possibilities for affection, humor, innuendo, contrition, lust, jealousy and anger. It can easily and inexpensively connect lovers on different continents – and as easily destroy everything for a couple living together.

“It’s just another version of courting,” says San Francisco web editor Jonah Freedman. “It keeps the contact going. I’ve gone out with some girls who absolutely LOVE it when you text them after your first, second, or third date just to say, ‘had a great time, see you again soon.’”

The text message’s most romantic

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The text message is an ill-defined form of communication.

It is written, but its abbreviations, unique punctuation, emoticons, and gleeful lack of formal grammar make it not quite the written word.

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attribute is its brevity. A short and sweet note, even when delivered with an annoying beep-beep, can make someone’s day. “My husband and I often apologize through text,” says Denise Carpenter, a Boston therapist.

“We will start with the silent treatment.

Eventually, one of us wears down and sends the other a text saying something like, ‘You were wrong, but I love you anyway.’”

“Texting is just one more way to say, ‘I’m thinking of you,’” says Vanessa McLean, a Los Angeles-based commercial director. “It’s sweet, and often out of the blue. A nice little kiss on the cheek as someone is going about their day.” But that’s for a serious relationship; she’s wary of texting when just dating casually. “It creates a false sense of intimacy that can fall flat when you are actually face to face with someone.”

For every tale of textual love, there is a nightmare. Many are the outcome of texting’s inherent drawbacks: the difficulty of striking the right tone when you have only 160 characters that appear on a matchbook-sized screen; and the illusory sense of distance or

absolution from the consequences of words relayed by an inanimate object.

Louise, living in New York, recently met a man at a bar. After a few drinks, he gave her a ride home in his van.

A van, she thought. Who drives a van except crazies? But Louise liked him and gave him her number. Over the next week they exchanged texts but never found a good time to meet for a proper date. This began to irritate her, and eventually Louise lied that she had taken up with her ex-boyfriend.

Angered, the guy kept texting her, and when Louise left to visit her family in Arizona, she received a text at 4am on Christmas morning, reading: “Eat my c**k.”

In other circumstances, however, a sexually explicit text can be a turn-on.

“I love it when a girl texts me something nasty,” chuckles Freedman.

If a quick hello is like a kiss on the cheek, an overtly sexy text is foreplay.

Sometimes it’s just a tease, a hint of what you’re going to do when you get home or a recollection of what happened last night. Other times, it’s more interactive.

Sex-texting (or “sexting”) can be

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difficult in practice – one only has so many hands, after all – but its sheer eroticism is hard to beat. If a text message is poetry, a sext message is erotica.

This can get you into trouble, as Detroit’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, discovered. Having denied having a sexual relationship with his chief of staff, Christine Beatty, in a court case last summer, Kilpatrick was mortified when the transcripts of their text messages were leaked to the press.

“You made me feel so damn good the other night,” Beatty texted to Kilpatrick.

“I need you soooo bad,” he replied.

But more often than not, romance trumps sex in the texting world. It could be a simple “Hi, I’m thinking about you” or an invitation to dinner. Or, as was the case with a young couple in Los Angeles, it was a Shakespearean tragedy. They were both in the movie industry, and after working together on a long project acknowledged the spark between them. But he was attached and they were already into the final act.

Him: i you, timing sucks Her: i you :O( Him: last night. follow your _. we could always have tonight Her: just read the quote “the heart wants what the heart wants even if it is cruel and destructive” as much as i want it, i’m sorry, but i can’t do it.

Him: i get it, just hope it’s not regret. could be memorable Her: that’s the thing... think i would regret it afterward... would have a hard time just walking away Him: i understand, could do it and enjoy the moment, use it as a memory, but that’s me, it’s cool. wish it was different Her: i wish that too Him: it will be a what if of ur life Her: not a what if... you are with someone, you wouldn’t throw that away over one night.

Him: it wouldn’t be throwing it away. i’d just want to follow my feelings for the night. i can do that and leave it. i understand if you can’t. wish it were diff Her: i can’t. maybe another time, another place.

Him: i hear ya. oh well Her: :*O( Him: sucks the way things work. really does Her: definitely does Him: another time another place Her: let’s hope so

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the show must go on...

Art directed and produced Rania Haditirto Actress/Model Juju Stulbach Photography David Matthew Walters Styling Anett Gabriel Make-up Sonja Roberts

t

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Silk purple floral dress by Rebecca Taylor47 Ruffled cape by Betsey Johnson

What’s his type?

Wilting flower?

Bright and bubbly? or smoldering temptress? avantoure | anthology of temptation

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What avantoure | anthology of temptation

49 Ruffled cape by Betsey Johnson Black and white checked cotton blouse by Vivienne Westwood Vest by Vivienne Westwood Black leggings by House of Hengst Hat by NY Design Bow tie by stylist’s own

a funny face!

Are you a woman, really? or an artichoke? avantoure | anthology of temptation

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Maybe he loves you? me?

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Vintage polka dotted blouse Black dotted tulle skirt by Betsey Johnson Gold flats by Dolce Vita Hat by NY Design Plastic yellow&gold necklaces and charm bracelet by Patch NYC plastic red bracelet by Marc Jacobs Tights by Wolford Suspenders by stylist’s own

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Vintage blue silk/jersey gown Purple floral pillow by A Detacher

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Who are you?

What are you?

Where did you come from?

I think you’re the cause of all this.

I think you’re

Monster!

Help!

Monster!! avantoure | anthology of temptation

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I keep telling you, this isn’t ‘a few birds’!

These are gulls, crows, swifts...!

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Hell, maybe we’re all getting a little carried away with this.

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Grey strapless cotton dress by A Detacher Metallic satin evening bag by Judith Leiber Gold bird necklace by Patch NY Multi print grey cotton dress by A Detacher Black satin crystal butterfly evening bag by Judith Leiber

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By Mark Macias

Why would anyone want to be a government spy? The salary is modest compared to other whitecollar professions. Intelligence officers must be alert at all times, on or off-duty. Their lives may be at risk abroad, and even back home they can never regale neighbours with tales of their adventures in the field.

You might steal secrets from a hostile state, dodge bullets, terminate an enemy agent in a dark alley or recruit a seductive informant – perhaps even avert a nuclear attack.

But none of this can be revealed outside the clandestine world; in this profession of secrets, loquacious attention-seekers need not apply.

Of course, secrecy is alluring and espionage has long been glamorized in books and films – sometimes by

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writers who have been spies.

Ian Fleming saw wartime service in Naval Intelligence before he dreamt up the iconic James Bond.

Bond was suave, sophisticated and macho, bedding beautiful women in exotic locations or sipping martinis at cocktail parties, having shucked off his wetsuit and changed into a tuxedo. Bond made espionage look sexy, cool and fun…

Others painted a darker picture. John Le Carre worked for MI6 in Germany during the Cold War and described a shabby world of backstabbing colleagues, institutional deceit and personal betrayals in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. His later novels featuring George Smiley, the cuckolded, morally anguished

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master-spy, reinforced the Miserablist view of spying as a “wilderness of mirrors” (as the CIA molehunter James Jesus Angleton once described his profession).

In film, think Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt. Bourne never knew his own identity; was deprived of sleep for days on end, forced to kill strangers, tortured and repeatedly shot at, while Ethan Hunt spent much of the Mission Impossible series on the run from assassins. It’s hardly conducive to getting a good night’s sleep – or encouraging people to become spies.

In reality, government spies are civil servants with pay-grades similar to the diplomatic service.

In the US, which is open about such details, the CIA offers prospective “core collectors” (as it calls its operatives abroad) $52,000–72,000 a year, plus overseas living expenses.

That’s peanuts compared to what a lawyer or a bonds trader can make.

Intelligence analysts based at home start on lower pay scales, without living allowances; in Britain, a G-9 analyst gets about £25,000 before tax, which is less than many secretaries in London earn…

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No wonder that government spies are defecting to the private sector for higher pay and cushier perks – especially in America. Under the Bush Administration, whole areas of intelligence work have been outsourced to contractors, as Tim Shorrock reveals in Spies for Hire: the Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, to be published by Simon & Schuster this May. Last year, Naomi Klein’s Shock and Awe showed how the privatization of disaster relief exacerbated the havoc wrought by Hurricane Katrina and how contractors and mercenaries have influenced or determined US policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, it was the murder of four Blackwater security guards that precipitated the US assault on Fallujah, and contract interrogators who encouraged the dehumanisation and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Now Shorrock is about to blow the lid on the privatization of espionage…

The US government is reticent about its spending on intelligence, but at a 2007 conference sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency it revealed that 70 percent of its total budget went on private contracts. If outside estimates of its total budget at $48 billion are true, this amounts to a $34 billion windfall for private spies.

Elsewhere in the world, spies are also cashing in. At a venture capitalists convention in Silicon Valley in 2007, Oleg Shvartsman bragged that he managed a $3.6 billion dollar equity fund that served investors at “the top of the FSB and SVR”.

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You might steal secrets from a hostile state, dodge bullets, terminate an enemy agent in a dark alley or recruit a seductive informant – perhaps even avert a nuclear attack.

But none of this can be revealed outside the clandestine world; in this profession of secrets, loquacious attention-seekers need not apply.

The FSB and SVR are the internal security and foreign intelligence agencies of the Russian Federation – the successors of the Soviet KGB. As the USSR fell apart, thousands of KGB officers went into business; today, former spies occupy senior positions throughout Russia’s economy and government, under the vertikal system created by Putin.

In 2007 Russian Military Intelligence made an unprecedented public announcement that a US attack on Iran was imminent, causing a surge in oil prices and a fall on the Dow

Jones – earning millions for investors forewarned about the scam…

Even for non-spies, espionage practices are a part of work. Walmart is notorious for union-busting, exploiting workers and putting local shops out of business – and in 2006, was found to have spied on its employees with the help of a former CIA agent, intercepting personal emails between two executives having an affair on company time.

After the female executive involved sued Walmart, the company was obliged to disclose that its global security department employed many former CIA, FBI and cops.

A lawyer involved in the case, Sam Morgan, says spies in the corporate world are almost as sophisticated as spies for the state.

“There is no right to privacy in the private-sector workforce”. Many large corporations such as General Electric and Viacom make employees consent to the company reading their emails or listening to their phone calls as a condition of employment.

Spies with surveillance or research expertise are always in demand.

Optical, audio and cyber surveillance are incredibly sophisticated, and require sophisticated countermeasures if your company is being spied upon. Another skill-set is “pretexting” – being able to gather information without arousing suspicion or revealing the company’s involvement or intentions.

So while James Bond, Jason Bourne and Ethan Hunt might hold our attention with their adventures, perhaps the next spy thriller will come from within the corporate world.

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by Denae D’Arcy

Many people would pay a lot of money to look better, but one man in New York City earns a living by making people look hideous.

Adam Bailey is a special effects (fx) makeup expert who specializes in the creation of monsters. After seeing Adam’s work online, I was intrigued to discover how he does it and requested an interview. avantoure | school of trickery

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“I remember being instantly fascinated by the magic of someone becoming something else, with just a thin layer separating fiction from reality.”

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“It all comes back to the desire to be other people or creatures - just to feel what it’s like to wear another’s skin for a day.”

Normally, it takes me about ten minutes to apply full makeup before going to work, and if I’m really pushed for time I can do a makeover on the train without using a mirror. Few women have any formal make-up training, but wouldn’t we love to learn Hollywood secrets to looking gorgeous? With Adam, it was a passion for all things freaky that inspired him to teach himself make-up design and make a career out of simulating monsters.

“I remember being instantly fascinated by the magic of someone becoming something else, with just a thin layer separating fiction from reality.”

The urge to create such illusions himself

was so strong that “I went to my local hobby shop and picked up some liquid latex, rubber mask grease paint and any books I could find on the subject.”

Adam has been hooked ever since.

His favorite looks include Batman, the Wizard of Oz, ET, American Werewolf in London, Nightmare on Elm Street, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.

When film companies approach him to design a character (or characters), their concept may be specific, or still vague. “Much of the early planning of a project involves balancing issues of budget and time constraint with any ideas coming from

a director. All the rest is translating that to your imagination,” Adam explains.

It can take weeks to get a design just right. “First, photographs of the subject(s) and rough sketches of the makeup are made,” then adjustments “until your vision meets with that of a director.” From there, a design is made for a makeup around the actor’s physical features, before casting the subject’s head or body in plaster, onto which the cosmetic face or body will be sculpted. Another mold is made of the sculpture and cast in whatever material is best suited to the project.

The finished piece is then painted and applied to the actor. “It’s a long process with many steps and a lot of back and forth before the desired result is achieved.”

Like most craftsmen, Adam loves his work and is philosophical about any downsides. “There are so many crafts involved in the art of special effects makeup that it’s just a matter of seeing it as greater than the sum of its parts.

But generally, I am not a fan of mold making, which is always a tricky part of the process.” Adam finds it “hard to take a step back and see the work with new eyes for a while. Though I suppose it’s natural for someone in charge of suspending an audience’s disbelief to suspend their own with such an intimate knowledge of how it was done.

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“My best character designs are still lurking around in my head and in my sketchbooks. It’s in the making of a makeup rather than the finished product that I’m in love with. “

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Ironically, a make-up’s effectiveness reveals itself to me sometimes only after I’ve removed it.”

Meanwhile, Adam is continually playing with other ideas. “My best character designs are still lurking around in my head and in my sketchbooks. It’s in the making of a makeup rather than the finished product that I’m in love with. By the time I’m done with a piece, I’m already thinking of newer and more impressive future projects.”

He has even considered a new look for himself. “Testing my abilities to imitate others and blend in seamlessly as someone else has inspired many ideas. I’ve always wanted to create a makeup for myself in extreme old age, as a thug or as someone with slightly exaggerated features, and then interact in public. Also, to make myself into some of the people I have loved such as Buster Keaton, Marcel Duchamp or John Lennon. Perhaps make a film

around some fictional episode of their life as a parody. It all comes back to the desire to be other people or creatures just to feel what it’s like to wear another’s skin for a day.”

For those who fancy creating monsters, he advises taking a course with Dick Smith, “the godfather of makeup fx”, who offers sessions for beginners or professionals. Among the great books on the craft are Tom Savini’s Grand Illusions I and II, Richard Corson’s Stage Makeup, Mark Salisbury and Alan Hedgecock’s Behind the Mask, and Anthony Timpone’s Man, Makeup & Monsters. As with any art form, you can only achieve mastery through practice.

Observing nature, studying others’ work and learning from your mistakes are essential. “There ain’t much glory to this profession other than that of outdoing your last best effort,” Adam reflects.

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by Thabang Motsei

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A home swap is a personal affirmation of trust in human decency, whose fundamental principal is the Biblical injunction do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.

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Have you seen The Holiday? Its plot revolves around two women with guy problems, living in different countries, who arrange to swap homes and thereby each find the man of their dreams. Amanda Wood (Cameron Diaz) exchanges her Beverly Hills mansion for a quirky little cottage in Surrey, England, owned by Iris Simkims (Kate Winslet). Besides being the premise for a perfect romantic comedy, it’s something that any home owner can try for themselves – even without a mansion in Los Angeles.

Home swaps are the latest form of adventure travel. The concept is simple. You put your home (or holiday home) on one of the many home swaps websites; select a city you’d like to visit and search for a local swapper whose travel plans coincide with yours.

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Once you’ve agreed, all you need do is book your flight to Paris, New York or wherever.

Hang on, I hear you say, isn’t this a crazy risk to take? In a world where best friends can’t be trusted to feed the cat while you’re away, involving yourself in a home-swap is tantamount to gambling with your home as well as your holiday.

So why do it?

Why we love it Home-swapping is both practical and romantic. Whether you are a family seeking a home from home, a couple looking for a foreign love nest, or a solo traveller who hates anonymous hotels, a home-swap fits the bill. If your wish list includes a private garden or a swimming pool, a historic or atmospheric location, that too can be accommodated. And by swapping homes, you not only save

on the cost of renting accommodation abroad, but get somebody to look after your home while you’re there…

A home swap is a personal affirmation of trust in human decency, whose fundamental principal is the Biblical injunction do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. Treat the other’s home as if it were your own, with respect and care – and trust that they’ll reciprocate. Perhaps surprisingly for cynics, home-swappers usually do just that, and the shared act of trust can lead to others…

Over fifteen years house-swapping in Europe and the US, Lola Basch has had wonderful experiences and met fascinating people. “I never had a problem and found everyone treated my home with respect as I did to theirs.”

Another swapper, Brian David, has

exchanged homes in the US, Britain and Spain through Homelink. “We found exactly what we wanted, where we wanted.” He advises looking for villages within an hour or so of a big city, such as Henley outside London. Once he found a village that was an hour from Edinburgh, two hours from Glasgow and three from Aberdeen, which served as a base for exploring Scotland. “We got to know the people MUCH better. Our exchangers always told their neighbours we were coming and thus we had ‘friends’ when we arrived.” By home-swapping, you become part of a community rather than just another tourist in a foreign city.

How it works Most companies dealing with house swaps are internet based and charge a membership fee (ranging from £80-£1,000 in Britain) before they allow access to

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By home-swapping, you become part of a community rather than just another tourist in a foreign city.

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swappers on their website. Intervac was founded in 1953 by Dutch and Swiss teachers’ unions, to facilitate temporary housing for out-of-town members, and publishes two regional catalogues updated twice a year (www.intervacus. com). Visiting academics are also the client base for Sabbatical Homes (www. sabbaticalhomes.com), and generally reckoned good candidates for homeswaps, as their references and backgrounds are easily verified.

According to Which? Magazine, the world’s largest organization is Homelink, whose website (www.homelink.org) is a detailed guide to house-swapping, while IVHE, international vacation home exchange (www.ivhe.com) is another outfit with homes around the world.

As a registered member, you can put your home up for others to see and start getting in touch with other swappers.

Sites allow you ample space to describe your home and post digital images of its interior, garden or locality. Emphasize its advantages as a holiday or touring base. You have to sell it as if you were marketing a hotel. Power-showers, plasma TV, antique furniture or period fittings, a private garden or a park within walking distance – all these (or any other) features should be trumpeted. Don’t fib: if a prospective swapper says yes, they’ll expect to find everything that you promised, and complain if they don’t.

Once you’ve found a partner, the company will help you with the final stages by releasing an Agreement Form for both parties. Terms vary from one company to another, but generally specify how many people are visiting, the duration of the swap, what happens with the bills, the age of any children involved, pet care, whether the swap includes cars, and other such issues. It’s vital you have a signed copy of the agreement, in case of disputes or liabilities. Home-insurers usually require the policy-holder to notify them if other people are occupying the property, which may automatically invalidate any claims for willful damage.

If you don’t own your home, your rental contract may specifically exclude swapping, or at least require that you obtain your landlord’s consent.

The agreement should also state how the keys will be exchanged and who will welcome the visitors (perhaps a friend or family member). Make sure you let your neighbours know that strangers will be staying in your home while you’re away.

Leave adequate fridge, wardrobe and drawer space for your guests, and basic items of food so they can begin their stay in comfort. Of equal value is a folder containing appliance manuals, garbage collection days, phone numbers for helpful neighbours, doctors, babysitters, recommended local shops, restaurants and suchlike.

That done, you can simply depart for your new home from home. I’m off to Malta soon. Where are you going?

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your own Have your ever watched a movie and thought, “I could do better than that”? Or had a great idea for a plot or a character? If the saying that everyone has a book in them is true, then surely in our visual age, anyone has it in them to make a movie…

by Denae D’Arcy

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Okay, I hear you say, but what about the technicalities? What about the secrets of acting or scriptwriting? Surely it’s not so easy that anyone could have a go, or else we’d all be movie actors or directors, no?

Thanks for the reality check, I’d respond.

Truth is, anyone can learn the arts of movie-making, like any other craft. It’s simply a matter of studying hard under good teachers, tapping into your own creative skills, and learning how a film is put together. Of course, knowing

this is no assurance of success as a director or an actor, but it can raise you head and shoulders above all the other wannabes...

Now consider that, for a modest sum, you can experience the thrills and pitfalls of being an actor, camera operator or director on a real film set, with expert lecturers and film crew to show you how it’s done and give constructive criticism throughout the week-long course or “camp”. And the camps are held by

the New York Film Academy in the Big Apple, or other glamorous cities around the world, from Florence to Shanghai, and Budapest to Abu Dhabi, under the Academy’s auspices.

Unlike most other acting and movie camps in the US – which are for kids to goof around – the New York Film Academy’s courses are a serious induction into film making. Whether you want to learn to be an actor or a director, the effort demanded is intense. At the

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Students in New York can draw inspiration from the view of Union Square’s busy East Side, and such film legends as Mel Brooks, Billy Wilde, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, after whom the seven classrooms are named.

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PART I

directors’ camp each student must write, produce, direct and edit their own short film, as well as assist other members of the crew in the roles of director of photography and assistant camera person, so that everyone gets a broad experience of how sets work. The acting and animation workshops are just as thorough and intensive, and the studios used are fully lit and equipped. There are 12-15 students in each class.

Students in New York can draw inspiration from the view of Union Square’s busy East Side, and such film legends as Mel Brooks, Billy Wilde, Charlie Chaplin and Alfred Hitchcock, after whom the seven classrooms are named. You may even find yourself sitting in the same room as Hollywood progeny, as the Academy has trained Steven Spielberg’s and Pierce Brosnan’s sons, Peter Bogdanovich’s daughters, and Luc Besson’s sister. And you can certainly expect some Hollywood players to share their secrets. Lecturers include the producers Paul Zaentz (The Talented

Mr Ripley) and Hardy Justice (About a Boy), scriptwriters Bob Fisher and Steve Fabor (The Wedding Crashers), and the actor John Favreau (Swingers and The Replacements).

Kristen Coury attended a directors’ camp, where she ended up directing her own film, Friends and Family. The experience was grueling. “We did everything ourselves: shooting, picture and music edit - everything! We were working seven days a week, night and day – sometimes all night in the editing room.” The first few sessions focused on basics like threading a camera and lighting a scene; after five days, they spent the weekend shooting their first short. The next five days focused on editing, with time spent watching films to see how to ‘make it work’.

“We rotated with three other people, so we were teams of four, and we each held a different position each time.”

By the end, Kristen felt confident enough in her script and her skills to start a new career in film making.

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This camp is not for the shy; every student is obliged to face the camera and respond to the cry “Action!” on the first day of class.

If you’d rather try your hand at movie acting, the Academy does a one-week crash course, with thirty hours of classroom tuition over six days. Lecturers advise on voice and movement, scene study, film acting technique and film craft. This camp is not for the shy; every student is obliged to face the camera and respond to the cry “Action!” on the first day of class. “Calibrating performances based upon shot size and angle, hitting marks, emotional and physical continuity,

PART II

and strength and imagination in acting choices” are also part of the course, as are the basics of film making. The logic behind this is that actors perform better when they understand what happens behind the lens as well as in front of the camera.

So there it is. What’s stopping you from realizing your dream to make movies?

The New York Film Academy offers one-week courses in acting ($1000) and directing ($1500), and assists students in finding hostel or hotel accommodation in New York City (from $100 a night for a double room). For multi-week courses focusing on specific aspects of acting or directing, the Academy will issue the paperwork for an I-20 Certificate of Eligibility, needed to apply for a student visa at a US Consulate abroad. You will need to provide evidence of funds to pay for the cost of your tuition and living expenses while on the course.

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Second Life

by Lucy Rohr

I have to confess, I’m not good with technology. Despite growing up in a computer savy society, despite having a graduate university degree which many assume qualifies me as some kind of technological wunderkind, I am stalwartly technophobic. I am not on facebook, and any attempt at blogging has ended in tears. I do not read or pretend to ‘get’ science fiction…

So why would I even contemplate creating a virtual alter ego and joining the ten million residents of the virtual world Second Life? Being paid to write this article was part of it – but also a kind of morbid curiosity as to what it would be like.

So I joined Second Life and kept a diary of what happened…

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second rate?

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“I need money and a place to stay,” I say, hoping my words are not misconstrued.

Fortunately, Insanegermanpunkman is a gentleman, who promptly teleports me to Money Island where the ATMs shout at you.

JANUARY 6 Before embarking on my virtual adventures, I get to create a virtual body or avatar, which will be my on line persona. Initially I’m drawn towards a cute buxom babe called City Chick, but then I wonder: why be something I already am, when Second Life offers infinite possibilities.

And so Blitz Morane is born. Witty, urbane and with the unnerving habit of typing in the air with his fingers when he talks, he’s everything that I’m not: tall, bearded and male.

One Second Life download and install later, my monitor goes black before segueing into a pastel coloured 3D world. Palm trees sway in an intangible breeze and a stream gurgles nearby. The virtual landscape surrounding me is being generated by thousands of servers in a warehouse somewhere near San Francisco, but all the billions of elements that comprise the “metavers” of Second Life are

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JANUARY 9 created and owned by its residents.

Collaborative creativity has played a key role in Second Life ever since it was launched by Linden Lab in 2003.

“The thing about this metavers is that you can make things with other people”, says Linden’s CEO Phillip Roseale.

“People are free to use the platform and within that do whatever they like.”

There is no doubting the success of this formula. By 2006, the archipelago of islands that make up Second Life was roughly the size of Amsterdam, with a population density akin to Tokyo, with numbers rising by twenty to thirty percent each month. With over 40,000 people logging in at any one time the grid supporting Second Life sometimes crashed, and Rosedale acknowledges that accommodating such growth is one of the biggest challenges Linden Lab now faces.

After walking around Orientation Island, bumping into walls, trees and anything else in my path, I manage to teleport myself to the promisingly named Help Island, normally the second port of call for newcomers to Second Life.

I’m looking forward to updating my appearance, and must learn how to feed myself and find a place to stay. Instead I find myself in the midst of a party, where avatars dance (think: Woodstock meets a really tacky R&B club) and exchange smutty chat. Undeterred, I saunter over, repeatedly bumping into at least three dancing women, which I hope doesn’t count as harassment (there aren’t many rules in SL, but harassing other avatars can lead to virtual exclusion).

Several attempts to initiate conversation with foxxyhotstuff2 get me nowhere, so I start chatting to a bloke who looks like he’s spent the

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past decade in Fitness First, shooting steroids between bench presses.

He’s called Insanegermanpunkman (probably an accountant from Stuttgart in real life) and is a newcomer like me.

“I need money and a place to stay,” I say, hoping my words are not misconstrued. Fortunately, Insanegermanpunkman is a gentleman, who promptly teleports me to Money Island where the ATMs shout at you.

Unlike most traditional visions of utopia, Second Life sees nothing wrong with money and encourages speculation.

Second Life’s currency, the Linden, trades at around 265 to one US dollar.

While most avatars I meet still refer to Second Life as a game, Rosedale points out that roughly 40,000 people are making real money from it – though how much is disputed. One undoubted success story is that of Ansche Chung – “the virtual Rockerfeller” – who, since joining in 2004, has made around a million real-world dollars by buying and developing land in Second Life.

Transactions such as these have not escaped real-world businesses.

Everyone from law firms to Reebok say they recognize Second Life’s potential for developing client bases, virtual marketing, and hooking up with remote employees.

JANUARY 12 I’ve been away a few days and wonder how Blitz is faring. Reassuringly I find him in exactly the same place that I left him on Money Island. Still homeless, I decide it’s time to find myself a virtual pad and begin asking avatars I encounter if they can help. I get lucky with a suave young Spaniard called Jorgebolio, but after exchanging pleasantries it becomes clear that his English is limited so we switch to Spanish and discover that, in real life, we were once near neighbors in Barcelona.

By 2007 roughly 75% of the Second Life community was from outside

I still don’t have a home but have spent the past few days camping on Hippie Island, dancing on a mat, admiring long haired avatars and indulging in the occasional bong (complete with bubbling sound effects). avantoure | homo ludens

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And so Blitz Morane is born. Witty, urbane and with the unnerving habit of typing in the air with his fingers when he talks, he’s everything that I’m not: tall, bearded and male. the United States, raising hopes that Second Life could be used as an interactive language learning tool, but also legal and cultural issues. Last year’s introduction of a gambling ban and age verification represent an extension of real-life legal norms into virtual reality, hitherto a kind of benign anarchy.

True, there are town meetings and a few terrorists hanging around the place, but overall the autonomy of the individual reigns supreme and Second Life’s institutions are non-hierarchical.

But if you thought you could escape politicians in a virtual world, think again. Silicon Island is home to Barack Obama’s virtual campaign and you can find Hillary Clinton’s on Isles of Intrigue2 (no joke). The Republicans are here too, though I doubt the authenticity of the Disco Rudy campaign...

JANUARY 16 I still don’t have a home but have spent the past few days camping on Hippie Island, dancing on a mat, admiring long haired avatars and indulging in the occasional bong (complete with bubbling sound effects). Feeling in need of intellectual stimulation, I teleport to

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the Exploratorium, a real-world San Francisco museum that’s hosting an exhibition in Second Life.

Every exhibition is interactive in some way. To understand Brownian motion, I’m invited to ride on a giant bleeping blue ball simulating how different particles move. I am genuinely transfixed by the empty box illusion made all the richer by 3D graphics.

A lot has been made about Second Life’s potential as a virtual classroom, and several universities already conduct regular tutorials and classes. The ability to create objects in the metavers lends itself particularly well to subjects such as computer studies and architecture.

Is this the future of learning? Will juvenile avatars soon be beating each other up and skipping classes to hang out on Hippie Island? Hopefully not.

Either way, the Exploratorium allows millions of people around the world to interact with science in a way they may never have done previously.

JANUARY 22 An avatar called galacticarse has just landed on my head – genitals first – in Central Park, Dream Land, one of

Ansche Chung’s supposedly swanky developments. Annoyed, I teleport to a nearby mall, loitering outside the Adidas boutique until I meet Kain Chee, a diminutive avatar still in his arrival clothes.

“Having fun?” I ask.

“No,” he responds, “I wanted to have fun but I don’t really get how all this stuff works and it’s been kinda lonely”.

Despite its millions of members, acres of bars and purportedly limitless creative possibilities, I can’t help agreeing. Second life does feel lonely.

While the barrier between virtual and real will continue to shift, I find real-life relationships far more meaningful than being able to buy a chunk of pixels or have big-dicked avatars land on my head.

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TWISTED PLEASURES A surprise ending or unexpected plot turn can make or break a movie.

Would Sixth Sense have worked as well if Bruce Willis hadn’t turned out to be a delusional ghost? Would Norman Bates have been quite as scary if he wasn’t also dressing up in women’s clothes and calling himself mother?

by Cris Hutty

Movies have been surprising us with twists since the birth of the industry.

Indeed, the art of surprising an audience has existed as long as storytelling itself.

Suspense and surprise have always been writers’ tools; Shakespeare’s work is littered with plot twists that would embarrass many screen writers.

There’s no doubting that filmgoers liked to be surprised. There’s nothing quite like the jolt that comes from realizing that all your previous expectations and beliefs about a story or character have just been turned on their head. Trying to analyse why this might be is like trying to define why we like to laugh. Yet this doesn’t mean that simply tagging an unexpected twist at the end of the script will bring public or critical acclaim.

So what makes a successful movie twist? Clearly it’s not an easy question to answer, and anyone in possession of the perfect formula would be the filmic equivalent of an alchemist. By definition the best movie surprises are the ones

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you just didn’t see coming. Yet this leads to what seems to be the fundamental problem in surprising an audience – how do you come up with a plot change that goes against everything your film seemed to be leading to, without making your twist unrealistic or far fetched?

How many otherwise decent films have been ruined by an overly ambitious plot turn? Filmmakers must walk a tightrope towards a successful dramatic conclusion.

Another problem with surprise endings is that the rest of movie can become simply an elaborate set up for the twist. The best sign of a great twist movie is when one can watch it a second time and still enjoy the story, even though you know the outcome.

With some movies the twist has become so iconic that it’s impossible for new generations to watch the film without prior knowledge. Imagine watching The Empire Strikes Back without knowing that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father...

Sometimes a successful twist

movie can spawn a succession of poor imitations. M. Night Shymalan’s Sixth Sense was such an unexpected money spinner that Hollywood became obsessed with reproducing the formula; Shymalan himself become something of a joke for his surprise endings in subsequent movies. His audience’s expectation of a twist undermined and compromised its shock value and credibility. The best twists come in films where you are not expecting one.

That said, what impresses one viewer as an enjoyable surprise ending might strike another as predictable, clichéd, or unbelievable. Trying to agree on the best movie twist is like trying to choose the greatest movie ever. Yet most film-buffs could come up with their personal top five favourites, given some thought.

Here are mine. If you haven’t seen them already, be warned – I give away the twist.

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PSYCHO Okay, we all know the story – don’t we? You all thought Mummy’s boys were soft and maybe picked on them at school, right? Big mistake!

Or it would be if you went to school with Norman Bates, and organized a school reunion at the Bates Motel…

Hitchcock’s masterpiece features two savage twists. First, his leading lady Janet Leigh is slaughtered in a shower only twenty-five minutes into the film.

The audience is led to suspect that Bates’s oppressive, paranoid mother is the killer – but it turns out to be Norman (superbly acted by Anthony Perkins) wearing a dress and frightwig, as her murderous alter ego.

Psycho changed the face of big screen thrillers and served as a blueprint for much of the horror genre today. Its plot is so well known that it’s easy to forget that it actually contains a deftly worked twist in the revelation of Ma Bates’s identity.

Oedipal transvestitism has never been so scary!

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2 PLANET OF THE APES Who hasn’t wondered what it would be like to be an astronaut who ends up on a planet inhabited by talking monkeys?

I have – but maybe only because I’ve watched Planet of the Apes too many times. The unfortunates to experience this fate are George Taylor (Charlton Heston) and his team-mates. It is only right at the end of the film that Taylor – and viewers – simultaneously discover that the Planet of the Apes is actually Earth, in the future, when he finds the

Statue of Liberty, half buried on a beach.

While Darwin might have scoffed at the idea that apes would evolve into a superior talking race, and even those of us less versed in evolutionary theory may be skeptical, the film’s inverted relationship between man and simian features so many human

evils – intolerance, cruelty and racism – that we can forgive it for pushing the boundaries of belief.

By the way, forget the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes. It may be novel to see Helena Bonham Carter dressed up as a chimpanzee, but the film is rubbish otherwise.

3 FIGHT CLUB The imaginary friend has been a device in many movie plots – nowhere more effectively than in Fight Club. If you believed that your imaginary friend was real and looked like Brad Pitt, would you go on to form an underground brawling club and become the leader of your own terrorist cult? Well, Jack (Edward Norton) does, sleeping with a rather more human Bonham Carter in the process, and blowing up a city to the sound of the Pixies.

While some claim to have guessed that Pitt’s character Tyler Durden didn’t exist outside Jack’s head, it’s hard to believe them. Aside from the pure surprise of this revelation, Fight Club is a satisfyingly dark examination of the male psyche and the shallowness of consumerism and urban society.

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THE USUAL SUSPECTS

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Essentially a heist movie, over which the unseen legendary criminal mastermind Keyser Soze looms large. Reputedly, Soze is a man so evil that, when faced with threats to kill his family, he killed them himself, to prove that he feared nobody. A touch extreme perhaps, but effective if you want to be known as

the devil incarnate. The story is told from the perspective of crippled gang member ‘Verbal’ Kint (Kevin Spacey), the sole survivor of the heist gone wrong, under interrogation by the police. It is only in the final scenes that we discover that Soze is actually the product of Kint’s fiendish mind…

If ever there was a twist that made you want to watch a film all over again, this is it. That friends still debate the true identity of Keyser Soze is a testament to the film’s genius, or proof that they have nothing better to do. Some dissenters slam the final twist as poorly executed and overly complicated. You decide…

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5 MEMENTO Amnesia is another good premise for a story, used by many directors since Hitchcock. In Memento, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is left with the short term memory of a goldfish after two intruders rape and kill his wife and push Shelby’s head into a mirror. The film centres on his quest for revenge on the surviving killer.

Unlike a goldfish, Shelby can tattoo his own body with information or use Polaroid photos to reconstruct the past. The film intersperses scenes shot in colour in reverse chronological order, with black and white scenes in chronological order, so that when each begins we have no idea what preceded it – just like Shelby. This all leads grimly to the story’s beginning and the film’s ending, when we discover that Shelby has conducted his vengeful search many times before.

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PROJECT GOTHAM RACING 4 www.bizarrecreations.com/games/ pgr4/ I crash cars – a lot. My friends don’t let me drive, for fear we’ll end up wrapped around a telephone pole. That’s fine with me, I’ll take Project Gotham Racing any day. The fourth edition of the famous xBox title features some of the hottest cars on the planet and the toughest tracks to date, plus

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Hofit Golan and Liz Fuller

Lord and Lady Adam Guerin

Kaja Wunder and Anneka Svenska

Celebrities join The Button Club & male cancer charity Orchid, at Silicone Ball, raising over £30,000

Photography by Gabor Scott

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Antonio Soler

Nasser Boutaled, matteo Ferrero and Melissa Bangstrup

Roman Carel and Melissa Bangstrup The Button Club and male cancer charity Orchid welcomed guests to a star-studded Valentine’s fundraising evening, on Saturday February 9, at Porchester Hall, Bayswater, London.

450 guests including Brendan Cole, Princess Tamara Czartoryski Borbon, Hofit Golan and Rick Parfitt Jr joined hosts Antonio Soler, Kaja Wunder and Henry Northcroft to help raise awareness of male cancers. Guests were treated to a haunting performance by opera singer Summer, juggling by Stewart Pemberton and a breathtaking acrobatics display by British acrobatics champions 2Xtreme, before guests hit the dance-floor.

Princess Tamara Czartoryski Borbon, Carolina Rubio and a friend A raffle and a silent auction of luxury gifts, including: a diamond pendant from the Bond Street jewellers, Boodles; pens from Cartier and Mont Blanc; a Chloe handbag; a shooting day; Michael Owen’s football shirt; a Sunningdale golf day for four; a World at Sea cruise; Cartier Polo tickets; memberships to the Harbour Club, Volstead, Boujis and Chinawhite; and a tour of the Houses of Parliament were among the many spectacular gifts up for auction.

Angus Somerville, Orchid’s chief executive, made a moving speech about male cancer. “Orchid is delighted to have been beneficiary of the first Silicone Ball, which raised over £30,000

to help research into the uniquely male cancers, to give men a better chance of surviving testicular, prostate and penile cancer. The Silicone Ball has also helped to raise awareness of malespecific cancers like testicular cancer, which predominantly affects young men between the ages of fifteen and forty.” www.thebuttonclub.com/events/The_ Silicone_Ball/gallery/

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Freedom party weekend in Tallinn, Estonia Photography by Raimond

The Button Club and Lifestyle Concierge Agency Deluxe invited guests from across Europe to celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the Republic of Estonia with a fun filled weekend in its medieval capital Tallinn, on February 22–24.

The weekend culminated with the glamorous Freedom Party on Saturday night. Mercado, a newcomer on Tallinn’s gourmet dining scene, was transformed into a glamorous 1960s airport lounge where a delicious five-course dinner by local Master Chef Imre Kose was followed by an exciting programme by the Flying Angels, vocals by Susan Lillevali and dancing to tunes spun by London DJ Ebe. The Button Club members had a great weekend filled with clubbing in the local hot spot BonBon, medieval dining, sightseeing and making new friends. www.thebuttonclub.com/events_gallery

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Master Chef Imre Kose (in the middle)

Kristiin

Peeter Tava (in the middle), Heti Tulve and a friend

Kaja W

na Libe

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Campari Girls

Wunder, Mariliis Ivalo and Heti Tulve

Katri Teller, Annika Urm and Marge Rahu

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Sonja Roberts, make-up artist and Juju Stulbach, model-actress

Rania Haditirto

beh Sonja Roberts make-up artist and Juju Stulbach model-actress

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clockwise Ivan Listo, Craig Pecchia, Ani Berberian, Juju Stulbach, Rania Haditirto, Sonja Roberts and Annett Gabriel

hind the scenes

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Craig Pecchia, photographer’s assistant and David Matthew Walters, photographer

Annett Gabriel , stylist and Juju Stulbach , model-actress

Annett Gabriel, Juju Stulbach and Sonja Roberts , make-up artist

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