Is su e eIghteen | nov ember
2012
Produced in International Media Production Zone
Brad
lone star The Emirati chef out to change the fortunes of his country’s cuisine
driving force Why Audi’s genius for innovation shows no sign of slowing down
rachel weisz The Oscar-winning English rose on her need for normalcy
the Power list We chart the individuals who will be shaping the cultural world in 2o13
exotourbillon chronographe.
The ExoTourbillon Chronographe is the first timepiece in the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858 to unite a tourbillon and a chronograph function. It is the world’s first tourbillon having a balance, being larger than the cage, that oscillates outside of the cage on a higher plane – thus giving rise to the name ExoTourbillon. An innovation so unique a patent has been applied for. Montblanc manufacture calibre MB M16.60. Monopusher chronograph with regulator-style dial, four-minute tourbillon, 30-minute counter and second time zone with day/night display. 47 mm white gold case. Crafted in the Montblanc Manufacture de Haute Horlogerie in Villeret, Switzerland.
Montblanc Boutiques DUBAI: Deira City Centre, 04 294 3225 | Dubai Mall, 04 434 0300 | Emirates Towers, 04 330 4810 ABU DHABI: Etihad Towers, 02 681 1480 www.montblanc.com
The Montblanc Manufacture in Villeret
EXO: OUTSTANDING outstand in g IN ITS TRUEST FORM
The ExoTourbillon Chronographe is the first watch of the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858 that combines a chronograph and a tourbillon mechanism, two of the most admired horological complications ever devised and the speciality of the Montblanc manufacture in Villeret. With its column wheel and horizontal coupling, the chronograph embodies the finest artisanal traditions while the four-minute tourbillon features an innovation that has never been seen before. This ingenious device, which serves to eliminate the negative influence of gravity on rate accuracy, has been further optimised in the ExoTourbillon. By totally isolating the tourbillon cage from the balance, its rotation no longer affects the oscillation of the balance. The result is the world’s first tourbillon with a cage that is smaller than the now detached balance. In the ExoTourbillon, it oscillates in a separate plane – hence the name ExoTourbillon. A smaller cage also means less mass and, therefore, less energy is required to move it. This fully corresponds with the mission of the Institut Minerva de Recherche en Haute
Horlogerie: to cultivate authentic Swiss watchmaking traditions in combination with on-going innovation to ensure that this time-honoured discipline of craftsmanship continues to evolve. Needless to say, a patent application has been filed for this invention, which is reserved exclusively for timepieces of the Montblanc Collection Villeret 1858. The owner of an ExoTourbillon Chronographe is treated to the spectacular view of a large screw balance that can “breathe” freely and rotate about its own axis without being trapped in a tourbillon cage. Featuring a chronograph and a second time zone in addition to its innovative tourbillon, this regulator watch is only available in two limited editions.
Three cabin spaces and incredible range. Powered by Rolls-Royce engines, you can fly from London to New York or Dubai to Johannesburg in total comfort. The largest living space in its class divided into three separate areas allows you to work or rest. And with the largest baggage compartment in its class, you can carry everything you need to do more. Find out more about the Legacy 650 and our six other exceptional models at EmbraerExecutiveJets.com Latin America +55 12 3927 3399, U.S., Canada and Caribbean +1 954 359 5387, Europe, Middle East and Africa +44 1252 379 270, China +86 10 6598 9988, Asia Pacific +65 6734 4321
MORE POSSIBILITIES...
...FOR THE JOURNEY
Making ideas fly. Wealth. What’s it to you? Whatever your ambitions or aspirations, we can help them take off. At Barclays we focus our investment expertise and wealth management skills on helping you to a higher level of achievement. Please call us in Dubai on +971 (4) 365 2900, in Abu Dhabi on +971 (2) 495 8329, in the State of Qatar on +974 (4) 496 7515, or in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on +966 (1) 880 6500 or visit barclays.com/wealth
Wealth and Investment Management
Barclays offers wealth and investment management products and services to its clients through Barclays Bank PLC and its subsidiary companies. Barclays Bank PLC is registered in England and authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority. Registered No. 1026167. Registered Office: 1 Churchill Place, London E14 5HP. Barclays Bank PLC in the Dubai International Financial Centre (Registered No. 0060) is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority. Barclays Bank PLC DIFC Branch may only undertake the financial services activities that fall within the scope of its existing DFSA licence. Principal place of business: Dubai International Financial Centre, The Gate Village Building No. 10, Level 6, PO Box 506674, Dubai, UAE. This information has been distributed by Barclays Bank PLC DIFC Branch. Related financial products or services are only available to Professional Clients as defined by the DFSA. Barclays Bank PLC in the UAE is licensed and regulated
by the Central Bank of the UAE (license No. in Dubai 13/1844/2008; Abu Dhabi 13/952/2008). Barclays Bank PLC in the Qatar Financial Centre (Registered No. 00018) is authorised by the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority. Barclays Bank PLC QFC Branch may only undertake the regulated activities that fall within the scope of its existing QFCRA authorisation. Principal place of business in Qatar: Qatar Financial Centre, Office 1002, 10th Floor, QFC Tower, Diplomatic Area, West Bay, PO Box 15891, Doha, Qatar. This information has been distributed by Barclays Bank PLC. Related financial products or services are only available to Business Customers as defined by the QFCRA. Barclays Saudi Arabia is a closed joint stock company with its registered office at Level 18, Al Faisaliah Tower, King Fahad Road, Riyadh 11311, Saudi Arabia. Authorised and regulated by the Capital Market Authority (CMA Licence No. 09141-37). Commercial Registration Number 1010283024.
Contents / Fe atures
Editorial Director John Thatcher Advertisement Director Chris Capstick chris@hotmediapublishing.com Group Editor Laura Binder laura@hotmediapublishing.com
Image: Courtesy of Bulgari
Managing Director Victoria Thatcher
Sixty
The Weisz One
Sub Editor Hazel Plush hazel@hotmediapublishing.com
She bagged an Oscar and married Bond, yet Rachel Weisz would rather stay in than step out on the red carpet – as she tells AIR
Designer Adam Sneade Designer / Illustrator Vanessa Arnaud
Sixty Four
Softly Does It
Production Manager Haneef Abdul
Hollywood’s golden boy Brad Pitt dissects the murder, mayhem and politics at the heart of his latest flick, Killing Me Softly
Senior Advertisement Manager Stefanie Morgner stefanie@hotmediapublishing.com
Sixty Nine
Advertisement Manager Sukaina Hussein sukaina@hotmediapublishing.com
The Power List 2013 AIR profiles the movers, shakers and tastemakers set to change your cultural world come the new year.
Advertisement Manager Silviya Komanova silviya@hotmediapublishing.com
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Contents / regul ars
Eighty Two
Gastronomy Why the dearth of Emirati restaurants? AIR gets the inside scoop from the cuisine’s most celebrated chef: Emirati-born Ali
Twenty Two
Fifty Four
The global guide to what’s on, where to go, and what to buy this month
Celebrating 80 years of Chanel jewellery with a stunning new collection
Thirty Nine
Seventy Eight
Why collectors should look sharp for Christie’s Geneva’s ‘all-star’ November auction
Why Audi’s new S models are the perfect showcase for the innovative brand
Forty Two
Eighty Eight
World-renowned sculptor Anish Kapoor on avoiding the fame game, at all costs...
Glamour’s oldest icon, Gstaad, has a new stop-over for seasonal skiiers...
Fifty
Ninety Two
Sound design, al fresco accents and starchitect Piero Alessandrini
Pearl icon Paspaley’s Executive Director shares the secrets of family success
Radar
Timepieces
Art & Design
Tel: 00971 4 364 2876 Fax: 00971 4 369 7494 Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission from HOT Media Publishing is strictly prohibited. All prices mentioned are correct at time of press but may change. HOT Media Publishing does not accept liability for omissions or errors in AIR.
Interiors
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Jewellery
Motoring
Travel
What I Know Now
L.U.C Lunar One. Chopard brings the universe to the wrist in a stellar model precisely reproducing the phases of the moon and following the celestial patterns governing our division of time into days, nights, weeks, months and leap years. An exquisitely balanced dial highlights the poetry and romance of a starlit sky portraying the orbital moonphase display, complementing the perpetual calendar functions including a 24-hour scale. These aesthetically appealing and useful indications are powered by a chronometer-certified self-winding movement bearing the “Poinçon de Genève” quality hallmark.
Gama aviation
November 2012
Welcome onboard
I’m delighted to welcome you to the November edition of AIR, Gama’s in-flight magazine. I hope you’ll enjoy learning more about our global business aviation group and the services we provide as you browse through the pages. Gama is one of the world’s largest business jet operators – we have nearly 80 business jets operating all around the globe. Established in the United Kingdom in 1983, we’ve grown to have bases throughout the Middle East, Europe and North & South America as well as operating licences issued by the UAE, UK, US and Bermudan Authorities. As well as providing aircraft management and charter services, the group also provides aircraft maintenance, avionics design and installation, aviation software, aircraft cleaning and leasing services to a wide range of clients. Gama’s expansion in the Middle East continues to progress well; our regional fleet has grown significantly over the past twelve months with the arrival of a number of aircraft including the Bombardier Global XRS and the Airbus A318, along with the continued development of our regional footprint and services. Gama is now operating the only business aviation FBO at Sharjah International Airport, which is proving to be a very popular facilty for Sharjah and the Northern Emirates, as well as a practical alternative to Dubai International Airport. Business aviation remains one of the best tools available to corporations and individuals who want to make time for themselves and it’s been pleasing to see a continued resurgence in charter flights in 2012 – the world is travelling for business again and developing much needed revenue for the global economy. Thank you for choosing Gama – welcome onboard.
Dave Edwards Managing Director Gama Aviation
Contact details: charter.mena@gamagroup.com gamagroup.com
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Gama aviation news Gama Aviation enjoys expansion into Saudi Arabia
of hard work by the Gama team and our ability to demonstrate how the Gama culture and business model could be adopted in Saudi.”
Gama Group MENA FZE, part of the Gama Group, the global business aviation services company, recently expanded its services into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with Imitiaz Company for Aviation Services LLC as a strategic partner in Saudi Arabia. The new joint venture company, known as Gama Aviation, has been operational since June in Jeddah, Saudi’s second largest city and a vital centre for commerce and tourism. The company will specialise in aircraft management and aims to operate charter services under its own Saudi GACA Part 135 Air Carrier certificate. The next step will be to add aircraft maintenance and consultancy services, replicating the company’s expertise in Europe, USA and the Middle East. Gama’s first base will be at Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz International Airport where it will employ around five people in the start up phase. Gama Aviation in Saudi Arabia will be overseen by Gama’s Regional Managing Director, Dave Edwards. “This is a significant step for Gama and is the culmination of a substantial period of planning and negotiation,” said Gama CEO Marwan Abdel Khalek. “We are delighted to have Imitiaz LLC as our strategic partner in this venture, which will bring to Gama many years of experience in the Kingdom. Breaking into the important Saudi market, the biggest market for business aviation in the Middle East, is a huge achievement and a long held wish of Gama. This milestone reflects a considerable amount
Gama Aviation expands Russia based aircraft management activities
Jeddah is Gama’s second Middle East base
Gama Aviation announced at Jet Expo, Moscow, the addition of two brand new aircraft: a Bombardier Challenger 850 and a Boeing BBJ2 to its established portfolio of aircraft managed on behalf of Russia-based customers. Gama Aviation’s worldwide aircraft portfolio now exceeds 80 and includes a number of Boeing, Bombardier, Falcon and Gulfstream aircraft based in Moscow. With nearly 30 years of experience in Europe, USA, the Middle East and from this year Asia, Gama offers its clients a wide range of aircraft management, charter and maintenance services. Gama was one of the first business aviation service providers to support Russian customers in the 1990’s and the market today remains key to Gama’s continued development. “We have been supporting the needs of our Russian clients for over 15 years,” said Tom Wells, General Manager Gama Aviation. “Our clients respect our knowledge of the Russian market, our hands-on experience of all major business aircraft types and the global coverage of Gama’s operations. I am proud that the Gama team is able to deliver to Russia’s continuously growing business aviation community, our tailored solutions in a safe, service driven and cost efficient manner.”
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Gama appoints Richard Lineveldt as General Manager of UAE operations
Gama has announced the appointment of Richard Lineveldt (pictured) as General Manager, Gama Aviation FZE, with the task of implementing its growth strategy throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Richard began his career in business aviation in South Africa. Prior to joining Gama in 2008, Richard gained significant experience in a number of aviation operations roles around the world. Richard has been a key member of the Gama management team supporting a number of Gama’s recent expansion initiatives in the region. These have included the set-up of the exclusive operation of Sharjah International Airport’s Executive Handling Service (Fixed Based Operation) and the successful award of Gama’s United Arab Emirates Air Operators Certificate. “Having been a member of the team that established Gama’s operations in the UAE in 2008, I have been fortunate enough to see the group grow, both regionally and internationally, to establish itself as one of the few truly global business aviation services providers,” said Richard Lineveldt, General Manager, Gama Aviation FZE. “I particularly admire the fact that I am joining a Gama Senior Management team that is recognised and respected throughout our industry for its focus on safety, security, innovation and of course customer service.” “I am delighted to be able to appoint Richard to his new position as General Manager,” said Dave Edwards, Managing Director, Gama Aviation FZE. “Richard will help lead our activities in the Middle East and North Africa at a time of significant growth. His appointment is well earned and recognises his personal contribution to Gama’s success.”
500,000 Hours 200,000 Flights 28 Years
Gama Aviation Limited Business Aviation Centre Farnborough Airport Farnborough Hampshire GU14 6XA United Kingdom Tel: +44 1252 553000 Email: charter.eu@gamagroup.com Gama Aviation FZC Building 6EB Office 550 PO Box 54912 Dubai Airport Freezone Dubai United Arab Emirates Tel: +971 4 609 1688 Email: charter.mena@gamagroup.com Gama Aviation, Inc. Airport Business Center 611 Access Road Stratford
www.gamagroup.com
CT 06615
Business Aircraft Management, Charter,
United States
Maintenance, Design and Installation,
Tel: +1 800 468 1110
FBO Services, Valeting and Aviation Software.
Email: charter.usa@gamagroup.com
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Gama aviation news Gama Lights Up London
Aerobility has, since 1993 offered disabled people, without exception, the opportunity to fly aeroplanes. Aerobility was a critical part of Dave’s rehabilitation and gave him the confidence to achieve his Private Pilots Licence last year and then go on to perform his spectacular Paralympics Opening Ceremony ‘mission’ last night. “I am extremely proud of the dedication and support of the entire Gama Engineering team in successfully modifying and certifying the Tecnam Twin to enable Dave to perform last night’s spectacular flight over the London 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony” said Harry Lees, Managing Director Gama Engineering Ltd. “The exceptional team work and support provided by Aerobility, Tecnam UK and the Civil Aviation Authority in particular proves to everyone the maxim that if I can fly a plane, what else can I do?” Dave Rawlins long held ambition, after his British Army career, is to work in civil aviation. Gama Group is delighted to announce that Dave will be joining our Operations team at our Farnborough this month.
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Gama Aviation’s new Hong Kong location mirrors operations in Europe, USA and the Middle East. The new base offers its clients aircraft management and charter services throughout the region. In working together with Gama Charters Inc, Gama Asia can provide operations through its inhouse FAA Part 135. Gama’s new Hong Kong based operation is led by Neil Gibson. Neil joined Gama earlier this year and has a wealth of industry knowledge. Most recently Neil led PremiAir’s Charter & Management Division following other key posts within the business aviation community including CEO of TAG Aviation Asia, Managing Director of TAG Aviation UK and CEO of TAG Australia. “I am delighted to be able to lead our new Asia-based operations,” said Gibson, Managing Director, Gama Aviation Asia. “I know Gama’s broad international business aviation experience gained over 30 years, together with our proactive efforts to better serve Asia’s business aviation community will be very much appreciated.” In addition to establishing Gama’s Hong Kong base, Neil is also responsible for developing further Gama’s relationship with Asia Miles. Gama is the exclusive business aviation services provider within the Asia Miles loyalty programme.
Image: Paul Johnson, Flightline UK
Millions of TV viewers around the World tuned in to London 2012 Paralympics Opening Ceremony to be treated to a spectacular flying display. The London 2012 Paralympics Games organising committee chose the Tecnam P2006T twin aeroplane to be the first ‘act’ of the opening ceremony. Gama specially adapted the aircraft to enable it to put on the remarkable pyrotechnic show. This was flown over the London 2012 Olympic Stadium by Lance Corporal Dave Rawlins (a British Army soldier recovering from injuries sustained in Afghanistan) with co-pilot and former Concorde Captain, Tim Orchard, Tecnam’s dealer for the UK, Ireland and Iceland. The most challenging tasks of converting, flight testing and certifying the provision of pyrotechnic dispensers to the wingtips and installing LED strip lights to the wings and fuselage of the Tecnam Twin were achieved by Fairoaks, UK based Gama Engineering Ltd, a Gama Group company. Critical to the success of last night’s flight demonstration was the exceptional support provided by the UK based charity Aerobility.
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RadaR
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Image: Stella Tennant, New York, 2006. American Vogue © Mario Testino. This book, published in the occasion of the ‘In Your Face’ exhibition at the MFA Boston (until February 3, 2013), will only be commercialized in North/Central & South America
> The man who makes models super, Mario Testino, has released the weighty tome In Your Face, which depicts a who’s who of famous faces across its myriad glossy pages – from royals to mega-celebrities, Testino has shot some of the world’s most inaccessible subjects. Each of the book’s captivating images has been selected to feature by Testino himself, so it stands very much as a chronicle of a true master of his profession. taschen.com
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RadaR
Is this the UAE’s best hotel residence?
It’s certainly hard to think of any to top this, the 5-bedroom Imperial Villa which stands proud amid the manicured grounds of the Kempinski Hotel & Residences Palm Jumeirah. Partially hidden behind lush leaves, the White House-like abode is overtly opulent, packing in a gym, games room, two pools (one in its private garden and the other on its outsized roof terrace) and a kitchen to boot. It also affords its residents one of the best views in the city.
> This exceptional 1960 Aston Martin DB4 Series II, billed as the finest example of its kind, goes under the hammer at the UK’s Silverstone Auctions on November 17, with an estimated value of £180,000-£200,000 UK sterling. It is just one of the 351 of its type ever produced, and is presented in original Aston Martin Jet Black with light beige interior and several factory supplied options, including chrome wire wheels. A must-bid for the motoring purist.
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> If you’re in town for the F1 in Abu Dhabi, this limited edition release from luxury footwear brand Tod’s might just take your eye. The attentiongrabbing Gommino shoe for Ferrari, crafted in the finest calf leather and with its pebbled sole designed to evoke the silhouette of Ferrari’s highdesign car seats, is only available in Tod’s boutiques throughout the Gulf region from November 4, and comes in both red and black colours. A fitting marriage of two brands renowned for true Italian craftsmanship.
INDULGE
Avenue at Etihad Towers is dedicated to exclusive luxur y and home to the world’s most desirable brands. Immerse yourself in Abu Dhabi’s most sophisticated boutique retail destination and indulge in the joy of living and shopping. w w w.AvenueAtEtihadTowers.ae A . L A N G E & S Ö H N E • BA L LY • B o S S H U G o B o S S • B R E G U E T • BV L G A R I • B U R B E R RY • CA N A L I • CA R T I E R • C H L o é • D E G R I S o G o N o E R M E N E G I L D o Z E G N A • FAU C H o N L E CA F é • G I U S E P P E Z A N o T T I • G I V E N C H Y • H E R M È S • H E RV E L E G E R • I W C s C h A f f h AU s E N JA E G E R - L E Co U LT R E • J . M . W E S To N • K I To N • L A N V I N • M A N o L o B L A H N I K • M o N T B L A N C • o F F I C I N E PA N E R A I • P I AG E T • P o R S C H E D E S I G N Ro G E R D U BU I S • Ro L E X • SA LVATo R E F E R R AGA M o • S T E FA N o R I CCI • S T E P H A N E Ro L L A N D • To M F o R D • VA N CL E E F & A R P E L S • VE R SACE • VE R T U
RadaR
History in the Making In the not too distant future, amid untouched rolling sand dunes some 160 kilometers from the city of Abu Dhabi, will stand The Mastaba, a work in progress since 1977. When complete it will be the world’s largest sculpture. In this excerpt from his newly published book on the project, its co-creator Christo Vladimirov Javachef tells the story so far
A
mastaba is a traditional mud bench that used to be situated outside homes in the deserts of ancient Arabia for travelers to rest and receive water from the owner of the house. A mastaba has two slanted walls and two vertical walls with a flat top. When you stack barrels or any cylindrical objects horizontally, you automatically get that handsome geometric form. I started experimenting with stacking barrels into a mastaba shape in 1961, when I had my first personal exhibition in Cologne, Germany. The gallery was near the Rhine River harbor. Outside
the gallery, with the permission of the Port Authority, Jeanne-Claude and I stacked a number of oil barrels into a mastaba-shaped structure. In the late 1960s, we considered a number of opportunities to build a large-scale mastaba sculpture outdoors but never moved forward with them. In the 1970s, we became excited about the possibility of realizing a large mastaba in the desert of Abu Dhabi and remained committed to this location ever since. Beginning in 1977, I started to do preparatory drawings and collages of The Mastaba situated in that environment. We will use 410,000 multi-colored barrels to construct The Mastaba. These 55-gallon steel barrels will be brand-
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new and specially constructed by us to the highest quality specifications. In 1979, I built a large-scale model of The Mastaba and selected the exact colors. The slanted walls will be orange with a deep yellow band in the middle of each of the horizontally stacked barrels. The vertical walls showing the top of the barrels will have ten colors: bright yellow, light ivory, deep orange, ruby red, light pink, red lilac, cobalt blue, grass green, pastel green, and pale brown. The visual effect of seeing all these colors will be like thousands of tiny dots that together create a pointillist painting, or like an Islamic mosaic. We were always saying that there is a link to abstraction in the tradition of Islamic art. When I built the scale model, the different colors were randomly positioned, and thus have no pattern. The arrangement of the colors is irrational, whimsical. We then put the positioning of the colors according to the scale model into a computer, and now have the exact place of every barrel in our computer so we know exactly which colored barrel goes where. The proportions were decided even before we went to the United Arab Emirates. The sculpture will be 150 meters high, the bases of the vertical walls will be 300 meters long, and the bases of the slanted walls will be 225 meters long. This creates a proportion of 2-3-4. I tried many different proportions but liked this one most. The aesthetics of the vertical walls are very reminiscent of Islamic mosaics. Many people do not realize that Islamic culture has a long tradition of incredible architecture, design, proportion, form, and movement. During the 16th century in the West, we had kitschy Baroque forms, while in the Islamic world, they had monolithic marvels. Civilized society only exists through art. Art is one of the greatest expressions of humanity. All civilizations and nations will ultimately be judged by the depth and quality of their arts and culture.
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Images: Supplied Text: Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Mastaba. Project for Abu Dhabi is published by Taschen and available to order from taschen.com
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Critique
Film
Anna Karenina
Dir. Joe Wright This adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s timeless novel traces a woman’s search for happiness as her world changes immeasurably. At best: “Knightley embodies Anna as a girlish
woman; once smitten, she is raised to heavenly ecstasy before tumbling into the abyss of shame.” TIME At worst: “Intellectual distancing presses the life and feeling out of this adventurous adaptation.” Hollywood Reporter
This Must be the Place
Dir. Paolo Sorrentino An aging former rock star, shaken by his father’s death, returns to New York to discover the life he missed out on – and embarks on his father’s lifetime quest.
Amour
At best:
“Worth catching for the stunning soundtrack and Sorrentino’s mad direction.” Little White Lies At worst:
“The movie’s constituent elements are striking, but never speak clearly to the head or heart.” Radio Times
Life of Pi
Dir. Ang Lee When a young boy withstands a disaster at sea, he finds himself marooned with the only other survivor: a Bengal tiger – and the two form an unlikely, but powerful, bond.
At best: “A gorgeous and
accomplished rendering of the massive best-selling book... Exceptionally beautiful.” Hollywood Reporter At worst: “Technically adept, mildly engaging and thematically pedantic.” Boxoffice Magazine
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Dir. Michael Haneke Georges and Anne, a couple in their eighties, live a quiet life – until Anne is attacked, and the couple’s bond is put to the test. At best: “A tender, wrenching, impeccably directed story of love and death.” New York Times At worst: “The movie, which rarely leaves the couple’s apartment, adopts a palpably repetitive feel that slowly-but-surely drains the viewer’s interest.” Reel Film
Critique
Books
The bookshelves are inundated with the great and the good this month, but Kofi Annan’s Interventions: A Life in War and Peace tops the bill. Spanning his career as the UN secretarygeneral, the memoir lays bare not only the workings of one of the world’s most integral organisations, but the thoughts of the man who was once at its helm – and it’s a meaty read. “This is not a conventional point-scoring memoir,” writes Alec Russell in the Financial Times. “Not only is it free of the dreary accounts of process that clog up so many statesmen’s books [but] it also all but rises above the temptation to settle old scores... It is part reflection, part stricture and part call to arms.” For Colum Lynch of The Washington Post, the tome’s most poignant point is its insight into the UN’s weaknesses: “It provides a fresh opportunity to remind the world that the greatest blame belonged to the globe’s biggest powers for failing to provide the United Nations with the troops, the firepower and the will to confront evildoers.” Another memoir causing a stir this month is that of Mick Jagger; Phillip Norman’s 622-page ode to one of rock and roll’s most notorious founding
fathers. It’s punchy stuff, finds John Walsh of The Independent: “[The] book is a nicely sardonic history of the maddest decade in the last 100 years, and a fascinating study of an invented rebel who re-invented himself as a self-controlled conformist.” Many critics are citing Norman’s account as the definitive (although unauthorised) writings on the man himself – and, reviewing in The Boston Globe, Steve Morse coos: “Jagger is depicted as a paradox. Norman calls him an ‘elusive butterfly’ and implies he was a victim of the ‘Tyranny of Cool.’ Yet he also limns a more generous side that is less well known.” Joseph O’Connor’s return to short stories has proved satisfying fare for the literary critics of late. His work – which includes the best sellers Star of the Sea and Redemption Falls – is notoriously dark, and this recent foray is no exception. “Behind an exhilarating array of sharp dialogue and biting one-liners, [O’Connor’s] fiction charts the fragility of relationships, the cruelty of chance and circumstance throwing people together only to shatter their lives... [and it] reasserts a mastery of the form.” For The Guardian’s Chris Power, however, this collection is the weakest of O’Connor’s most recent works: “His novels have grown more formally adventurous, but the stories seem deprived of this confidence... At 100 pages the title story is described as a novella. But if novella is an inbetween word, Where Have You Been? is an inbetween work.”
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Critique
Images: Seismic Sanctuary, Pantea Rahmani, Salsali Private Museum
Art
Both politically and geographically, Iran is the centre of much on-going tension – a state that has long permeated the work of Persian artist Pantea Rahmani. This autumn, her most recent collection entitled Seismic Sanctuary is displayed at Dubai’s Salsali Private Museum, much to the delight of the region’s art critics. The gesso and white paint daubings (often mistaken for pencil drawings) include self portraits, but the most striking of works are the landscape views of Tehran. “It is a cacophony of concrete, flanked by grey hills and sheltered by a steely sky.” writes Christopher Lord of The National. “The city that much of the world knows of, but little about, is laboriously rendered: the brutalism of the blank-faced windows in the concrete high-rises, the constellations of street lights on the outlying hills.” Reviewing in Brownbook, Florence Pilkington is also transfixed: “Not only
has [Rahmani] brought Tehran’s beauty to life through the accuracy of her drawing, but also the awareness of what she is trying to portray through her new series by creating chaos in the middle of the city.” The Impressionists were known for their fascination with clothes, but the influence has rarely been examined until now. Paris’s Musée d’Orsay plays host to Impressionism and Fashion this month, a collection of original artwork and dresses that illustrate how Parisian tailoring infiltrated works by the likes of Renoir, Manet and Tissot. “Many of the dresses on display are works of art in themselves,” coos Richard Dorment of The Telegraph. “Theatre designer Robert Carson’s witty installation turns the gallery into a fashion show, leading down a central enfilade to the last gallery, a garden carpeted in astro-turf and alive with birdsong... The fabrics and patterns leave you lost for words.”
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In London, The Royal Academy’s most recent exhibition is creating waves throughout the art world. Bronze, a collection of sculptures originating everywhere from ancient China to 19th-century Britain, brings together the best of bronze artwork. Writing in The Telegraph, Andrew Graham-Dixon is enthralled: “[This] is an improbably oldfashioned, awe-inspiring blockbuster of a show... The chief curator, David Ekserdjian, has a keen eye, a sharp mind and self-evidently extraordinary powers of persuasion, to judge by the multitude of seemingly unlendable treasures he has managed to obtain from all four corners of the earth.” A reviewer at The Economist is equally overawed: “Bronze is a parade of masterpieces, a pop-up museum of some of the finest bronzes in the world. It is thrilling, overwhelming and ultimately exhausting. But it is fatigue in a good cause.” A must-see for the next time you’re in the city.
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C A P I TA L G AT E . A E
Images: Rob Blackburn, Circus Oz
Theatre
The circus is coming to America next month – Circus Oz, to be precise. Australia’s tireless troupe of acrobats, fire breathers and musicians is currently on tour Down Under with their From the Ground Up show – and if the Australian press is to be believed, audiences are in for a treat. Set on a busy construction site, the show features an exhilarating array of performances, finds Rebecca Whitton of Australian Stage: “Australia’s lovable, daredevil darlings have the audience in the palms of their hands. The show rollicks along, teasing and cajoling the audience and dazzling them with the company’s physical skills.” The troupe’s antics are “honest”, writes Whitton, their stunts obviously complex. Skye Gellmann of artsHub doesn’t find the act wholly tempting, however: “It could be that the classic circus act structure needs to be re-investigated,” she writes. “It doesn’t leave enough room for connections between the characters, the space and each other, to develop... Even so, it’s clever, a lot of fun, and the idea of charismatic circus builders is an impossibly charming one.” Also charming the critics is Lisa D’Amour’s latest dark comedy from its new post at Manhattan’s Playwrights Horizons. Detroit, a tale of life in suburban America, depicts two young couples struggling to make their mark on the world – not the most uplifting of plots, but one which has Charles Isherwood of The New York Times enthralled nonetheless: “A sharp X-ray of the embattled American psyche as well as a smart, tart critique of the country’s fraying social fabric, Ms. D’Amour’s dark comedy is rich and addictively satisfying... The fall theater season is young as a newborn babe, but [the] play, both disturbing and bracingly funny, kicks things off with a promising burst of fireworks.” Bloomberg’s Jeremy Gerard is ebullient about the show’s casting: “The cast is perfectly
balanced. [David] Schwimmer has a gruff geniality, while [Amy] Ryan simmers with anger beneath a daffodil exterior... Detroit is a horror story hitting very close to home.” Also in New York, Stephen Sondheim’s rarest of songs are enjoying an airing on The Clurman’s boards. The two-person revue hasn’t been performed on Broadway for 25 years, and The Keen Company’s staging is already being dubbed “a sparkling revival” in The Washington Post. The reviewer continues: “Songs by Sondheim, a legend in the American
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musical theater and one who somehow makes cynicism refreshing, are skillfully woven into a dialogue-free story about two lonely young people yearning for love.” Melissa Rose Bernardo of Entertainment Weekly is enamoured also: “Though I could have done without ‘Bring on the Girls’ – sung by Tam while cradling his MacBook – the new-for-thisproduction numbers are mostly treats. The gorgeous ‘If You Can Find Me, I’m here’ – from the 1966 four-song teleplay Evening Primrose – proves a stellar opener.” A true Broadway treat.
Timepieces
Frederic Watrelot Christie’s watch specialist on November’s Geneva sale Over the past thirty years a combined total of over two million collector’s watches have changed hands via the international salerooms, leading the worldwide community of scholars, collectors, specialists, museum curators and dealers to form in an official/unofficial way a list of the ten most significant wristwatches, in their opinion. To make it onto this ‘all-star list’ a wristwatch has to stand out by its historical importance, mechanical complexity, unmatched beauty, original condition, incredible rarity and superior provenance. This November Christie’s in Geneva will offer three Patek Philippe platinum wristwatches that deserve to be included in the list. The first two
are the world famous ‘J.B. Champion’ special order platinum observatory wristwatch, reference 2458 (estimate: $2,100,000-4,200,000) and the platinum chronograph wristwatch, reference 1579, one of three platinum examples ever made (estimate: $1,100,000-1,600,000). However, the final watch of the three is from the collection of Eric Clapton and carries the highest estimate at $2,700,000-4,200,000. Spectacular is the only word to describe this, the only reference 2499 cased in platinum by Patek Philippe available to a connoisseur collector. Launched in 1951, reference 2499 was in production for nearly 35 years, during which a total of 349 watches were made. The only two examples ever cased in platinum were most likely never intended for sale. In fact, one of them highlights the wristwatch section of the celebrated Patek Philippe museum in Geneva. The first and last time the other platinum 2499 watch was offered for sale was in 1989 when the firm, celebrating its 150th anniversary, consigned it to the historical ‘The Art of Patek Philippe’ auction, held in Geneva in 1989. Acquired at the above auction, by one of Europe’s most prominent
collectors in the field of vintage Patek Philippe wristwatches, it only changed hands once more before being acquired by Eric Clapton. As a consequence, this masterpiece of horology becomes available at auction this year for the first time since its original sale nearly a quarter of a century ago.
> New from Bulgari is the distinctly masculine Octo, so named because its round bezel frames a visually fascinating octagon. History has it that the octagon, a combination of the square and circle, was once considered the expression of absolute perfection, and this sleek, clean-cut timepiece hits that height aesthetically. It’s driven by the calibre BVL 193 (pictured), which provides a 50-hour power reserve, and offset by a suitably macho black alligator leather strap. - 39 -
Timepieces
> The Parmigiani Bugatti Vitesse; designed to evoke the style and ingenuity of Bugatti’s latest supercar and unique for its use of semiprecious stones of a rare purity which are set on its crown. A true style statement.
> Few watches are more striking than this, the eyegrabbing Velvet Amethysts and Spinels timepiece, new from Roger Dubuis. Produced in a limited edition of 188 pieces and designed to capture the spirit of rock and roll, the watch dazzles as its appearance changes in accordance to the level of light that hits it, producing a kaleidoscope of colours at every turn of the wrist. While beneath this gleaming exterior beats the Poinçon de Genève compliant caliber RD 821, made and assembled by hand and housed in a 36mm titanium case that’s fastened by a black, satin-finish strap.
> Harry Winston’s watches have been serial award winners of late, thanks in part to the brand’s determination to push the boundaries of design. This, the Ocean Tourbillon Big Date, is a case in point. Normally the tourbillon at work in a watch can only be seen from one angle – when seen at all, that is – but here it’s always visible and, more arresting still, is that you’ll see it apparently floating, as if detached from the other workings of the watch. An aesthetic trick of genuine elegance.
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Art & Design
Objects of Desire He’s a multi-millionaire, but the worldfamous sculptor Anish Kapoor is worried about money: there’s too much of it in today’s art market
Words: Bryan Appleyard
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I
thought I was interviewing Anish Kapoor, but instead I appear to be playing a game: hunt the thimble or some such. There is a row of doors, and we have to keep opening them to see if the thimble is inside. Yet each door reveals only further puzzles. There are strange objects, some messy, some shiny, and various young people, who keep confronting Kapoor with problems that have to be solved yesterday. A client in Korea is being especially recalcitrant. “This is no way to do sculpture!” Kapoor cries as he tackles the Korean question. He has, you see, acquired over the years a significant length of a street in southeast London. Starting with what is still proudly advertised as the premises of Dennison Kett (Rolling Shutters-Grilles), he has crept along 60 yards and now, behind the door-infested street frontage, he has 30,000 sq ft – think mediumsized suprmarket – in which about 25 people slave away at his sculptures, spraying, brushing, polishing and thinking up problems for when the boss next comes round. He is busy, absurdly so, globally so. But the busyness also includes an obsession with variety. He works simultaneously on a huge number of projects in a bewildering array of forms. Once, he would work on one object at a time, but it drove him mad; now he works on what seem to be dozens. “If a thing is not going well,” he explains, “you can just go on to the next.” Here are some of the works-in-progress I saw: giant concave, faceted mirrors; fibreglass bowls with intensely coloured interiors; concrete
blobs; rectangular forms of a solid, sponge-like material; earth paintings; curious tubes and trumpet-shaped things. In the white room in which we talk, there’s even a Philip’s Atlas of the World that turns out to be a Kapoor. It’s open at the Middle East: in one side, a circular, angled void is formed by cutting through the pages; on the other side, the void is square. Political? “I made it during the second Iraq war. I have a friend who told me about the concept of horizontal drilling – you drill into somebody else’s country. I suppose I was toying with the idea of world dominance.” A good word for Kapoor, “toying”. He has become, at 58, a capricious experimenter. Perhaps he always was. It’s just that one used to be able to say with confidence: “That’s a Kapoor.” That is no longer possible. Take two examples. At his current exhibition (it runs at London’s Lisson Gallery till mid November), there was a huge diesel engine that, not so long ago, powered a BT backup generator, and, er, that’s it. Yet this, too, is a Kapoor, his first “found object” work. More controversially, there is the Orbit, the tower in London’s Olympic Park. It looks nothing like a Kapoor, and scorn was poured on it the minute it was up. How did he feel about that? “It’s a very odd object. I’m not surprised it got a bad press, but I see it like this – once you go into the Orbit, it becomes a completely different object from the one you thought you were looking at from the outside. All those who have written about it well are those who went inside.” Fair enough, I’ve not been inside, but from outside, it makes me wince, and I’m a Kapoor
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Art & Design fan. Mind you, even he has problems with the Orbit. He says he doesn’t make any money out of his public works – the fee never covers the costs – but he didn’t even get a fee for this. “I’m the only person on that project who didn’t get paid. Not a penny, not one penny. In fact, it cost me money. At first, I minded, I made a big fuss about it, but not now.” Anyway, here he is, probably the biggest name in world sculpture. He has achieved what several generations of modernists failed to do: he makes high art that is popular. Thousands crowd around his huge Cloud Gate, in Chicago – where it is known as “the bean” – and his Shooting into the Corner, at the Royal Academy, was a popular sensation. It was, more than anything else, that exhibition in 2009 that established his popular success. Yet he comes from the most austere, implacably “difficult” tradition of late modernism, which includes artists such as Joseph Beuys and Donald Judd. For them, “meaning” was a spurious concept. Not for Kapoor. “Judd really was a great artist, but I want more. I want meaning. I want difficulty. I want the problem of meaning. Somehow I felt the need to mess with it and make it dirtier.” One way he does this is with titles. The great stretched tube with which he filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2002 was pulled back from absolute abstraction by its title, Marsyas, a Greek satyr who was flayed alive. Another huge
sculpture, in the north of England, is called Temenos, a Greek word for a special piece of land cut off from ordinary use. The titles demand the very mythological meanings at which Judd would have shuddered. Kapoor was born in Mumbai and, “Like all good Indian boys”, he accepted his father’s insistence that he go into a profession. He chose engineering. It didn’t last, and at some point, without any particular signs of talent – “I couldn’t draw” – he decided to become an artist. “Somehow I knew it, I just knew it. I had always made things and painted as a child.” He went to the art colleges of Hornsey and Chelsea and worked his way through the canon, finally arriving at the Beuys-Judd climax of late modernism. Thereafter, nurtured by Nicholas Logsdail’s Lisson Gallery, in London, his career trajectory was pretty smooth. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and won the Turner the year after. In 2002 came Marsyas and, last year, Leviathan at the Grand Palais, in Paris, the inflatable to beat all inflatables. Yet there remains something indefinable
‘Tate Modern has five million visitors a year, and one has to kind of wonder what that does to art’
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Cloud Gate The Orbit
Images: Corbis / Arabian Eye
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about him. He is neither aesthetically nor chronologically like a Hirst or Emin. Nor does he belong to the earlier generation of sculptors that includes Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow and Richard Long. He is also indefinable as far as the monstrous ogre that is the art market is concerned. Artists are often spoken of as in or out of the market. Jeff Koons is 100% “in”, because everything he makes is available for sale. Kapoor is half “out”, however, because his public works are not in there, and some of his works just will not sell. “Nobody has ever bought a wax piece of mine, and nobody has ever bought a big cement work – well, one was bought by the Prada Foundation. It was a risky thing to do. These are entropic works that fall apart.” Not that he is complaining. He is worth somewhere north of £80m (pounds sterling), according to The Sunday Times Rich List. It’s not small change, though it’s way behind Hirst, the market maestro, who is worth well to the north of £215m. Kapoor is also known as a hard-asnails negotiator. “No is not a word he seems to understand,” one insider said. I would guess he’s as manically perfectionist about his business dealings as he is about the finish on his mirrors and bowls. Business savvy is not, in itself, a refutation of aesthetic seriousness.
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Intellectually, he is a good deal more than half “out” of the market. In a special room in his warehouse are magnificent Indian sculptures from as early as the 5th century. He has collected them over the years, but he doesn’t think he should be allowed to own them: “It’s absurd that I can buy these things. They should belong to the world!” In other words, the market is a temporary resting place for art. It is not the last word. This puts him not only outside his contemporaries’ orbit, but positively opposed to them. Like me, he went to see the vast collection of objects Hirst sold at Sotheby’s in 2008. I came out feeling like a Strasbourg goose, force-fed, nauseous; he came out uneasy. He saw that the very popularity of art is in danger of turning it into another consumer good, an empty vessel, devoid of mythology and meaning. “It’s to do with our time – Tate Modern has five million visitors a year, and one has to kind of wonder what that does to art. I hope it does good things for people, but it’s as if art has become in the process very commoditised... What do we do, produce more stuff for Louis Vuitton, make more fancy-dancy goods? Everything gets subsumed into the market. Damien, in his way, says, deal with it. He has effectively said, my work is about the market. This is problematic, because I don’t want to do Louis Vuitton and make luxury goods.” If not the market, then what? Kapoor, like most great artists, is plainly, glaringly religious. His art, at its best, balances somewhere between this world and another, between the blankly material and the wholly mythological. He is in love with deep, black voids that suggest nothing and everything. One large one was so effective that a man took it for a carpet and threw his glasses down in disgust. The spectacles vanished into the void. Kapoor tentatively accepts much of this interpretation. “I fundamentally believe that somewhere we are, in spite of ourselves, religious beings; and there is something about many kinds of artists I admire, from Barnett Newman to medieval sculptors, that is religious. There is something about sculpture in general to do with the body, about how you are made to see it, that is very old, proto-religion. One of the things about abstract art is that it allows you to go back to the beginning, to ask daft questions like ‘What is consciousness? Who are we? Where are we?’” I think I found that thimble. Go and look for it yourself.
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Art & Design
New kid oN the block
The doors of Riyadh’s first curated contemporary art space are now open – but what does its content hold for the capital’s fledgling art scene?
Images: Supplied
A
s the Middle East’s creative prospects gather momentum, it’s impossible to ignore the region’s new energy for visual art. While Dubai’s Jumeirah Emirates Towers hosted Christie’s modern Arab art auction last month, and Abu Dhabi Art takes over Saadiyat Island this month, Saudi Arabia is enjoying its own contemporary renaissance. Alãan Artspace, Riyadh’s first curated gallery for modern art, couldn’t have come a moment too soon. Alãan – translated as ‘now’ in Arabic – reflects the energy of the Kindgom’s art scene. The space is dedicated to both emerging and contemporary creatives, and promises a line-up of local, regional and global names. The inaugural exhibition, SoftPower, is a potent start: featuring paintings, graphic design, graffiti and
installations by three female Saudi artists, the exhibit examines the realities of life in the capital. “The works reflect the artists’ desires to explore and at times subvert clichés of daily life,” says Sara Raza, SoftPower’s curator and head of curatorial programmes at Alãan Artspace. “The visual language they put forward is yielding, mutable, and employs the use of the mundane, the humorous and the ironic to suggest a new syntax and mode of thinking.” Over the coming weeks, the gallery will host guest speakers – the SoftPower creators among them – and invite discussions in the majlis. For collectors, the gallery signals new life in Saudi Arabia’s art world, and a chance to meet some of the region’s most powerful creative minds. A space well worth watching. SoftPower runs until 10 December; alaanart.com
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InterIors
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The Sound of Music Why Bang & Olufsen’s new creation is no ordinary design Fans of gadgetry can’t fail to be drawn to the new, saucer-like looks of the BeoPlay A9 from B&O Play. Circular, sleek and with big sound to boot, its high-end looks and range (powerful enough to fill the most spacious loft or penthouse) makes it easy to integrate into modern interiors. Add to it a range of coloured fabric covers and soild wood legs in oak, beech or teak, we’d say wireless music never looked (or sounded) quite so good. Available from mid-November at Bang & Olufsen stores, beoplay.com
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‘An architect is a bricklayer who studied Latin’ - Piero Alessandrini
The man behind prestigious homes (Sultan of Brunei’s villas) and public projects (Riyadh’s Italian Embassy) debuts his limited edition Plexiglass collection this month in Dubai I created these pieces specifically for Dubai because it is a culturally welcoming place, a place where people understand and appreciate new forms of expression. I came up with the use of Plexiglass because transparency is very important to me. It is something that can be kind of a moral principle. I think of it as ethereal rather than material, so it stresses the form and content of the object. It underlines the things that I want to show the most – colours, volumes and shapes. I love this material. I was inspired by origami because when you work with origami you have to respect the material, be kind to it. It doesn’t mean aggression, or cutting the material – it means folding it, being gentle with it. That’s what makes these items so unique. For example, the drawers look like they’re flying. I would like to be able to perceive these pieces as just useful functional objects, but I can’t help but treat them as art. We should use them, though – it gives them life. It is very important for me to be part of the UAE’s growing art scene. It is fundamental – evolution of culture is very important, and I do not like to look back. I admire the dynamic, evolving society here – it is a thrilling place. As an architect, I look at Dubai and see many beautiful things. It has a bright future. Exhibition and sale until November 30, La Galerie Nationale, Al Quoz.
> With the arrival of cooler climes, what better time to acquire eye-catching outdoor furniture? Here, Paola Lenti’s ‘Otto’ (available at Dubai-based Purity) offer a lemon and lime burst of poufs, crafted from rope-cord covers (opt for a block hue or two-colour combos). You won’t want to stay indoors... purity.ae - 51 -
Jewellery
StarS in her eyeS
Eighty new pieces from Chanel Fine Jewelry pay sparkling tribute to the 80th year since ‘Coco’ Chanel created Bijoux de Diamants. AIR looks back on a design legend
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I
t’s 1932 and Paris – a hub for the artistic avant garde – is simmering with excitement. For an invitation like few others has slipped into the hands of the city’s most revered circles: “Exhibition of Diamond Jewels created by Chanel, from November 7th to 19th, at the home of Mademoiselle Chanel, 29, Faubourg Saint-Honoré”. The invite arrives at a time when Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel (‘Coco’ as she became affectionately known) is renowned, revered and envied for her lifestyle, looks, and groundbreaking haute couture designs, creations that traded restrictive corsets for free-flowing garments in exquisite materials – a progressive approach that Chanel extended to her fine jewellery. “I want the jewelry to be like a ribbon on a woman’s fingers,” she proclaimed. On November 7, though, her diamond exhibition would leave her trademark costume jewellery behind (strings of fake pearls and fruit salad-hued rocks) for timeless, platinum-set diamonds. Women’s appetites stirred – as did the media’s: “On November 7th, the world famous couturiere will unveil her jewelery line”, reported French newspaper of the era, L’Intransigeant. The rumour mill
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spun on what ladies of Parisian high society could expect from the ground-breaking designer. Word had it that, much like her garments, the collection would bring the chance to drench oneself in one-of-a-kind designs. Come Saturday 6 November – the day of the press preview – excitement could scarcely be contained: high society, unable to stretch their patience a day longer, made too for a first glimpse of Bijoux de Diamants. The entrance to the exquisite Hôtel Rohan-Montbazon on 29 Faubourg Saint-Honoré (the ground floor rented entirely by Chanel) was flanked not just by 1930s hacks and paps, but filled with a long line of cars chauffeuring elegant socialites to the hotel’s door. Just as everyone had hoped, inside was a sight to behold: laid out not on trays (how jewellers of the day typically presented their wears), but upon the wax busts of mannequins, was Chanel’s glittering collection. Reportedly inspired by ‘the Parisian night sky’, stars, comets and moons shone in diamond-encrusted form. “I wanted to cover women with constellations,” Chanel told L’Intransigeant. “Stars! Stars of all sizes (…) See these comets where the head glitters on a shoulder and the sparkling tail slips behind the shoulders to fall back down in a shower of stars on the chest.”
The pieces – necklaces, tiaras, brooches... – received rapturous approval, the Candide newspaper printing: “Nothing more harmonious, more sumptuous, or lighter could be imagined than these stars that appear to glide around the neck, or these little bows with their air of innocence or these fringes set on tiaras like sparkling and magical strands of hair”. Chanel told how the sight of a star-lit night sky shrouding the Champs-Élyséeas inspired her collection – at least, that’s what she told weekly magazine L’illustration. “Why look any further?” she quizzed through wide, chocolate brown eyes. But Chanel’s reputation as a story-teller
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Jewellery (she was known to spin many a yarn to cover up her impoverished childhood and strict convent education), one wonders whether the true source of inspiration was deeper-set... Eighteen-ninety-five was the year Chanel’s mother died and her father surrendered his daughter’s care to sisters of an abbey in Corrèze. Each day, as morning broke, Chanel reportedly wandered the chapel’s pebblepaved floor – and beneath her feet were geometric patterns, crescent moons and pointed stars. Whether it was 19th century Corrèze or an exuberant 20th century Paris that inspired Chanel’s creations we’ll ever know. Regardless, the pieces were a revelation: dualuse designs allowed women to wear each item in different ways – a star motif from a necklace, for example, could be donned as a brooch or at the centre of a bracelet. Not only that, but one key design detail changed the way women
Images: Supplied
‘I wanted to cover women with constellations. Stars! Stars of all sizes ... See these comets where the head glitters on a shoulder...’
would wear jewellery: there was not a clasp in sight. “I have a horror of clasps! (…) I’ve banned clasps”, exclaimed Chanel to L’illustration. “Yet, my jewelry pieces can be reassembled. See this necklace; you can instantly make it into three bracelets and a brooch (…)”. Today, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Bonheur Chanel’s legend lives and breathes through her namesake Chanel Fine Jewelry - and none more so than in its new, tributary ‘1932’ collection (named after the year Chanel created Bijoux de Diamants). Indeed, your only dilemma in wearing an ode to the fabulous designer, may be settling upon just one piece: 80 items (bracelets, rings, watch, earrings, necklace…) – one to mark each of the years that have passed from that year to this – exist in dazzling, diamond-encrusted form. Comets and stars hark back to the ‘Parisian night sky’, while fringes, ribbons and feathers play on the thirties fashions. And if it’s a more modern taste of Chanel you covet, one addition is sure to turn your head: that of a lion. Mademoiselle Chanel’s favourite animal (and the creature of her star sign, Leo) is a new icon of high jewellery at Chanel. While a twist on the claspless ‘Comète’ necklace will also turn heads – encircling a woman’s neck, it (quite literally) dazzles with a magnificent diamond star, a 15-carat gemstone at its core, ending in a cascade of round diamonds. Whichever piece claims your affection, wearing one will immerse its wearer in any swirl of white, yellow and black diamonds, blue and pink sapphires or, of course, pearls. Those who acquire a piece should count their lucky stars.
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TARA JARMON • RIVOLI • FRED PERRY • JUST CAVALLI PAL ZILERI • MUMBAI SE • VILLEROY & BOCH • TRU TRUSSARDI • DKNY • BAUME & MERCIER • MONT BLANC • BALMAIN • CESARE PACIOTTI • BEBE • BIMBA & LOLA • TED BAKER • BLANCPAIN • MASSIMO DUTTI • TAG HEUR
• DOLCE & GABBANA • MIU MIU • CHAUMET • TOD’S • CHOPARD • ESCADA • GIANFRANCO FERRE • CRUCIANI • POLO RALPH LAUREN • ROLEX • VERTU • CANALI •
• SAKS FIFTH AVENUE • CHANEL • DIOR • LOUIS VUITTON • PRADA • HERMES • FENDI • CARTIER • VALENTINO • VERSACE
Weisz One The
Rachel Weisz loathes the red carpet, avoids the paparazzi and strives to keep her private life private – which is tricky when you marry James Bond. Tim Teeman meets the Oscar-winning actress Words: Tim Teeman
Images: Getty Images
W
ho’s the better hero, Bourne or Bond? “That’s an unfair question,” says Rachel Weisz. “How do I answer that? My loyalties lie with both.” Wearing a patterned blouse with her tamed tumble of dark hair, and in a Manhattan hotel suite that could win awards for drab airlessness, Weisz, star of the latest Bourne film and since last year wife of the latest James Bond, Daniel Craig, is looking more demure English rose (well, slightly wilting – she’s been incarcerated here for hours) than action-movie heroine. Oddly for a star, usually so primped and well lit, she is as beautiful up close as she is on screen, with a British chippiness to offset the bee-stung lips and perfect skin. She is equal parts vamp and bluestocking. Her accent is posh, but with roughened edges. How’s married life? “I’m enjoying it, yeah, yeah, very much,” she says, meaning, “No intention of telling you.” This is your first marriage, I say, to check that it is, although Weisz mishears or I stress the wrong word (“first”) and she looks stricken. “Correct. Don’t say it like there are going to be more.” Laughing, she accepts I was being “diplomatic” in case there had been more than one. Hey, I say, there could have been a teen marriage that had gone hopelessly wrong. “And we married on the Heath Extension under a tree,” she continues, imagining these nuptials, laughing. “Have you
been to Hampstead Garden Suburb [where she grew up]? It’s a funny area, designed with no pubs. People congregated to smoke at the phone boxes in Golders Green.” Weisz, 42, is warm but wary (possibly appreciative that anything Bond-related immediately becomes a headline). There is something crackling in the dead air, if not hostility then maybe her quite understandable boredom at having to play show pony. She is probably more wary since marrying Craig. Had she ever thought about getting married younger? “In my twenties I never imagined I would marry or be a mother. I didn’t ... you know ... I think some young women imagine their wedding dress. I think it’s an enjoyable idea. I just didn’t have it.” Why? “Because I was unmarriable in a Jane Austen kind of a way.” Meaning until Craig she hadn’t met the person
asked questions like this. Do you ask people who are 60 this?” She is smiling but bristling. Yes, I say nonplussed, I do – and it seems like a normal thing to ask. Weisz grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb with her parents – George, a Hungarian-born inventor (most significantly of an artificial respirator), and Edith, an Austrianborn teacher turned psychotherapist – and her younger sister, Minnie, now a photographer and curator. “I was very tomboy. I wasn’t very girlie. I was climbing trees all the time with my sister, scraped knees and odd socks.” Weisz “really wanted to be a spy, detective or scientist. It was the feeling there were secrets to be found out. I was a paranoid child, convinced of conspiracies all around.” Her parents separated when she was 15, after she had been ejected from a series of schools because of “disruptive behaviour”. “When I was
‘I think talking about acting is actually very boring, so we don’t talk much shop at home. Acting is interesting to do, but not to discuss’ she wanted to marry? “I didn’t say that.” I didn’t say she did; what does she mean? “I don’t know. I don’t know why I hadn’t before, but I did other things. I had a child and had a life.” She has a six-year-old son, Henry, with her former partner, the director Darren Aronofsky. Was becoming a mother significant? “Yes, it did become important. There was a moment when I really thought I wanted to be a mother and I was surprised. It wasn’t something I had thought about.” Was it down to the tick-tock of the childbearing clock? “I just think it was instinct.” Would she like to have more children? “I don’t know. Actually, I think of all the questions in the world, I find that the most incredibly personal, to be honest. I can’t really ... I suppose it’s none of your business.” She laughs and looks triumphant, as if she has somehow vanquished me, which is puzzling on at least two counts. In another part of our conversation, she draws a link between my spirit of inquiry and her own when researching her roles, and anyway, I was just asking a question: no tricks, no desire to trip her up. When I ask how her parents reacted to her desire to act, Weisz scoffs: “I’m too old to be
young, I felt people were not really saying what was going on, that a lot was being kept from me, which turned out to be quite accurate,” Weisz reflects. “When you’re a child, you don’t know anything. You’re not supposed to tell children anything.” On the understandable but wrongheaded principle of “protecting” the child, I suggest. “Of course, but I didn’t know what that meant.” What was she being protected from? Weisz laughs drily. “Well, I guess the secrets of how the world worked, what it was to be an adult, how dangerous the world was.” She performed in school plays, she says, “but I wasn’t the star. A girl called Suzannah Clayman was the star of junior school. She was Alice in Alice in Wonderland and I was the Dodo. I don’t think I even had a line. I was quite shy about performing. I wasn’t really like, ‘Get out there with jazz hands.’ I secretly wanted to act, but it took me a while. I was shy.” Weisz and her mother watched “a lot” of Elizabeth Taylor and Bette Davis movies. I ask who her inspirations were. “Watching Tom Petty as a young man sing Breakdown live – nothing phoney or fake. That is a pure, abandoned performance. I only saw it for the first time last
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week on YouTube, so I wouldn’t say it’s formative, but it sums up my answer. Watching other performers is my main inspiration, and mostly it’s music that inspires me. Watching Patti Smith sing live, or Martha Wainwright – they are probably the most inspiring female performers I have ever seen.” Before studying English at Cambridge, Weisz turned down a role in a little-known Richard Gere movie, King David. At university, “in awe of [experimental theatre company] Théâtre de Complicité”, she and some friends formed a theatre company, Talking Tongues. “It was very avant garde with some improvisation,” she says. “We thought we’d go around Europe doing avant-garde theatre, but we went off in different directions. I have sold out steadily ever since.” I had read of her “headbanging in Berlin nightclubs”. What was that like? “Fun. I loved it.” So is she happy to have “sold out”? “Right now I am looking for a play, preferably off-Broadway. I don’t want to sound too worthy, but I like interesting characters: you have to play that person, dress and speak like them, get their accent.” Her character in The Bourne Legacy appealed because she is “massively morally compromised”, while director Tony Gilroy is “very edgy. There’s a big dose of rock’n’roll in him and that’s how I like to work: ‘This isn’t a seminar, this is acting. Let’s do it.’ “I think acting is similar to what’s manifested in you,” Weisz continues, meaning journalism. “You seem to have an instinct to get inside someone’s skin.” She researches every role, for Bourne talking to female scientists “about every part of their lives” to play one herself. Of Bourne she says there were a “lot of stunts” – jumping over railings wearing harnesses and being dragged along the ground by ropes. “I just identify with the realism,” she says. “It is not fantasy. It could be happening around the corner. That is exciting to me.” But Weisz’s most lauded film roles are firmly from the art house: she won an Oscar, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award for her role in Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005), was seen in Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea last year and also features in Meirelles’s forthcoming ensemble drama, 360, scripted by The Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan. Weisz plays a cheating wife married to Jude Law. Meirelles says Weisz is an actor who
“hates” cliché and understands “immediately the intention of each line she has”. She “experiments and goes with the flow”, he says. “On Rachel’s first day, she had an intimate scene with Juliano Cazarré, a Brazilian actor that she had met half an hour before having to kiss. It’s a hard situation, but both of them were very open to try a connection, and in few minutes they were able to create very good chemistry. It’s a very good scene.” Weisz is measured about success. Of her Oscar, she says: “You might fantasise about something like that happening but never think it will happen in reality.” Such ceremonies are not favoured habitats. “There are moments when the agreement is, I will turn up on the red carpet not with dirty hair and no make-up – that’s part of the contract of my job,” she says so tonelessly I summon up an image of agents and assistants shoving her into couture and, rictus-smiled, out of the limo. “I can think of other more pleasurable things,” Weisz says archly. “It’s not relaxing, it’s not like being at home, putting your feet up and watching TV.” Weisz does, however, like designer clothes (“I love Rick Owens, The Row, Stella McCartney, Narciso Rodriguez, Alexander McQueen, Rag & Bone, Hussein Chalayan, Jason Wu”). But “finding comfy shoes that look good is the challenge. Living in New York, I definitely appreciate comfortable shoes as you walk a lot in the city.”
New York’s energy propels her, “but it’s also the thing that can drive you crazy”. She adds, “Everyone should have a child born in Manhattan.” Her son “likes graffiti and wears a baseball cap”. She smiles. “It’s so different to growing up in Hampstead Garden Suburb.” She and Craig live in the East Village, where, “There are so many ethnicities and foods, it’s impossible to be bored.” Do they share movie stories, or do they avoid work chat at home? “I think talking about acting is actually very boring, so we don’t talk much shop at home. Acting is interesting to do, but not really to discuss.” Weisz and Craig are frequently “papped” walking on the street, but, she says, it is easier to deal with living in New York. “I see my professional life and my personal life as two separate things. I cannot say that I am not a celebrity at this point, so I know not to show up at the places where I know I will be photographed. It’s fairly simple. I love that, in New York, no one cares about celebrity. You can maintain a certain level of anonymity and go about your day with your friends or family. In New York, everyone is the star in their own life – they are not too impressed by celebrity.” Neither is Weisz. She knows the game, she’ll play her part, but off screen this natural rebel strives for a normal-ish life. One hopes, away from this airless hotel suite, that still includes the odd night of riotous headbanging.
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Softly Does It
As Obama and Romney go toe-to-toe for the Presidency of the US, AIR meets up with Brad Pitt to discuss the corrupt America at the heart of his new movie Killing Them Softly Words: Fabian Waintal
Does the economic crisis affect the artistic side of movies? What do you think about the US, in this an election year? We are certainly living, in the US, in a time of a great divide. In a movie, for example, I’m interested in those other arguments that aren’t necessarily mine, certainly not mine. If you look at it as just a business you can stay very dispassionate about it. And of course there’s many facets to America, it’s a very complex, amazing country. I find it an amazing time to be there right now. But for me, one of the facets is the idea of America. That idea is innovation and integrity and fairness and justice…. but these are ideals that must always be protected and guarded, because it’s easy to slip – especially the more powerful the nation is. That’s my point of view.
Do you recall the last election when Barack Obama was elected as the first African American President?
I was there that night in Chicago when Obama won. Amazing night. People were out on the street, connected and jubilant. It was just an electric, kinetic event.
And what are your expectations about the upcoming election?
There’s a speech that is chosen at the end of the film as a real expression of hope. It speaks more to our great toxic divide, where it is more about the party winning the argument than the issues themselves. It’s a serious, serious problem… In this election we’ve seen a lot of negative ads, and I don’t want this film to be seen in any way as part of that.
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‘There will always be the age-old battle of art versus commerce’
Do you have any personal preference between the Republican or the Democratic parties in the States? Whenever you choose a character, aren’t you afraid of showing someone with different political ideas?
I’d love someone to develop a documentary about what makes a Democrat or a Republican really understand where people are. How they’ve developed these kinds of views going against our best interest. Democrats are excited to lean more to the left and I want to stand my own bias. So, I’m not opposed to characters who have different views than myself. I love democracy, even in the movies.
Do you think that Hollywood business is taking over the artistic aspect of the movies?
There will always be the age-old battle of art versus commerce. I don’t really wrestle with the relationship of the two. They’re not meant to get along, yet they’re symbiotic – they need each other. It’s a symbiotic relationship and it’s cantankerous and it will always be that. There’s something noble about making something that says something and uncovers something and being able to do it within that system where it has to be profitable, or the thing doesn’t get made. I just find it a really interesting relationship, I don’t argue with it though.
Is it pure coincidence to have a political movie out at the same time of the elections in US?
It’s a good idea to do it around the same date but we weren’t designing it so much for election year. Our interest, while reading the original book, was the height of the mortgage crisis. It’s wrong right and left. That was certainly the main entrance. It wasn’t deliberate, no. A movie takes too long to cut. Actually, this is the soonest we could have done it.
As a father, aren’t you worry that your children might see you in a movie as the killer?
Not in any way, because violence is an accepted part of the gangster world. Murder is an accepted possibility when you’re dealing with crime. I would have a much harder time playing someone like a racist. It would be much more upsetting for me than a guy who shoots another guy in the face.
Do you really like the movies with excessive violence?
We live in such a violent world... I grew up hunting, which is a very violent act. If you ever
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had a hamburger, you should have seen how they butcher a cow, it’s barbaric. It’s very violent. This is the world we live in. I see it as absolutely important to the film. I don’t see the world without it.
Did you see that video in which Will Smith slaps a Ukrainian reporter who tried to kiss him? Would you have reacted that way? I avoid all the entertainment gossip. But no, I don’t want to slap anyone. Why would that happen? I don’t want people to be hurt.
What do you like most about the killer character that you portrait in the movie?
Jackie Cogan, he’s wanting to get the job done, putting people through the least amount pain – there’s some humanity there (laughs). He wants to make it as comfortable as he can for the person that’s gotta go. It’s just an unfortunate part of the business, but it has gotta be cutthroat and that’s the way it is, those persons have to go. I equate that to business. Business can be very, very cutthroat in that way. We all accept the terms, sometimes people get fired, people make bad bets and sometimes the rest of us get metaphorically killed.
Did you find any difference in working with the director Andrew Dominik since you had already been working with him on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford?
There’s absolutely no difference. Working with Andrew is a continuation of the conversation where we left off. I really enjoy it. He’s got such a finely tuned radar for human behavior and I love to disagree with him. We fought all the time.
On the set?
Not on the set. We argue about stuff. It’s always respectful and it should be that way. I enjoyed that exchange specifically.
The actor or the producer?
The producer (laughs). It could go either way. We both came around each other’s point of view.
What was it about Killing Them Softly that interested you so much that you are also the producer of the film?
First and foremost, Dede Gardner (producing partner) and I have focused on films that might have a difficult time getting made and help them get made. To get behind filmmakers like Andrew Dominik who we believe in very strongly and
have great admiration for. That would be the first impetus. But we are also looking for stories that say something about our time and who we are. I certainly felt upon reading this that this was making those comments, like a commentary. We were certainly at the apex of the mortgage loans debacle, people were losing their homes right and left. It was at the forefront of the newspapers, as the economy still is. This is a commentary and the way it’s done in this film where you believe you’re watching a gangster film, or I felt like I was reading a gangster film, and then it wasn’t until the end when it coalesced for me as far as maybe what direction the film is pointing to overall. That this microcosm actually was saying something about the greater, the macro world.
zombie film, World War Z. We’re trying to do the same thing there. And historically, those films – they do the exact same thing. Other than that, I just trust the director.
As a producer do you want to avoid the action and the crazy comedy of the movie world?
We’d love to work together again sometime. She’s not here with me right now, she’s preparing for another movie that she’s starting very soon.
We are so proud of the guys that we were able to put together on this thing. Each one came in and added something specifically to the story. This is a hard court cast who are willing to take bidding in some upsetting ways. I have such respect for this cast. Each one, I felt I was watching Peter Sellers with (Richard) Jenkins and with (James) Gandolfini I thought I was watching Brando. I couldn’t give any more respect to them.
Would you like to work with Angelina Jolie again?
Is it true that you have a date to marry?
We have no date to get married. We actually, really, truly have no date. And I’m still hoping we can figure out marriage equality in the States before that date.
Images: Corbis / Arabian Eye
Yeah, I think if we look back on our favourite films that’s always happening. There’s always something going on underneath that is not necessarily in your face. I thought this was an interesting way of looking at the financial crisis, instead of going straight to the financial crisis. And after Killing Them Softly we jumped into a
As a producer, were you also involved in the casting process?
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The Power List 2013
In association with Audi
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We've tracked down the cultural powers who will be shaping what we eat, how we dress, what we read, where we go and more in the coming year. Some of them are already household names, some soon will be: all of them are on course to influence your world
In association with Audi
coloured mini-dresses with black shorts underneath, futuristic metallic eye makeup and pointy-toed heels all nodded to Simons’s couture collection, combining his own taste with the signature style of the house. It was fun but not silly, elegant but not boring, eye-catching but not ridiculous – everything the modern woman should be. Dior’s magazine described Simons’s first collection not as a fashion show but a manifesto – and while this might sound slightly grandiose, it certainly reflects the power the Belgian designer will come to hold over the way women dress in 2013. In fact Lorraine Candy, editor of Elle UK, who holds great sway with fashionistas the world over due to her authoritative voice on Twitter, recently remarked that “the clothes we [women] wear are about to undergo a dramatic reinvention”, and that is due in no small part to Raf Simons.
The Trendsetter Raf Simons
Paris Fashion Week was abuzz at the prospect of seeing not one but two newly-appointed creative directors show their ready-to-wear collections. Hedi Slimane at Yves Saint Laurent had already shaken things up by announcing the label was now to be referred to simply as ‘Saint Laurent’, while sceptics questioned whether Christian Dior’s Raf Simons would be able to marry his trademark minimalism with Dior’s ultra-feminine style. Simons’s collection won hands down – a fact hinted at before the show even began when British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman tweeted “Dior today. Sneaked a preview and sworn to secrecy but prepare to be amazed” – and later confirmed when the doyenne of 21st-century fashion herself, Anna Wintour, gave a thrillingly rare smile at his show. Slimane, on the other hand, was criticised for his focus on the 1970s, with fashion editors feeling that his collection bore little relevance to the world of today. The industry unanimously hailed Simons’s SS2013 collection as the dawning of a new era in women’s fashion. Gone was Dior’s recession-defying excess of previous seasons with the now-disgraced John Galliano at the helm, and in its place was a refreshing, altogether more minimalist entity. Simons, a self-proclaimed fabric obsessive, played with our conceptions of what a powerful woman’s outfit should look like, making iridescent organzas sophisticated and turning jackets into standalone outfits, a look quickly dubbed the ‘jacketdress’ and no-doubt soon to become a signature Dior piece. Elsewhere, tuxedo suits in Dior’s trademark ‘Bar’ silhouette, enormous ankle-length flowery skirts, pastel-
The King of Comedy Judd Apatow
Everyone in Hollywood likes to think they call the shots. Yet no one in the recent times of Tinseltown has effected change on the silver screen quite like Judd Apatow, the man behind the best comedy movies of the past decade. The likes of Jason Segal, Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill all owe their blossoming careers to Apatow’s vision, but it’s the path he’s laid for actresses to follow that really mark him as the industry’s game changer. Laugh-
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out-loud roles for females have been so noticeably absent from our movie screens down the decades that the view of there being no funny women out there became entrenched, with the reasons for it debated by the thoughtful: “Cinema’s women were allowed to be heroic, but also expected to be vulnerable, sensitive and saintly. By default they were pretty, fragrant and really rather ladylike. As such, they could hardly expect to be a barrel of laughs,” reasoned critic David Cox. And by the thoughtless: Veteran comic Jerry Lewis once said that women simply aren’t funny. Period. Then along came Apatow, who has shown up the latter opinion for what it really is: laughable. The producer, director, writer (you name the hat, he’s worn it) was once known solely as the maker of archetypal ‘man movies’ following a string of hits that included 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad, but the producer of last year’s Bridesmaids (the blockbuster flick that one critic described as “more feminist than Thelma and Louise” and another as “your first black president of female-driven comedies”) has empowered his female writers to script groundbreaking, mould-shattering, downright hilarious characters for his various vehicles. What sea change Bridesmaids delivered on the big screen, the Apatow-produced Girls has mirrored on the small screen, inspiring one seasoned critic to declare Apatow’s prized pupil Lena Dunham – the show’s young female writer and lead – as “the future of television”. Whatever Apatow’s next trick, you can be sure we’ll all be watching.
The Master Chef Sergi Arola
As he glides about the dining room of the Arola restaurant in Barcelona’s glamorous Hotel Arts, Sergi Arola is a model of laidback conviviality. He stops to chat with guests, recommend drinks, canvas opinions on dishes and share a joke before moving on to the next table, spreading good will in his wake. Arola’s chilled-out charm belies the huge responsibilities on the shoulders of this youthful 42-yearold culinary genius, who has been garlanded with every award going in the gastronomic world, including a pair of Michelin stars. He runs a spread of prestigious restaurants across the globe, including foodie paradises La Broche and Sergi Arola Gastro in Madrid, and has built a reputation for his formidable tasting menus, which combine playful touches with incredibly inventive combinations that twist the senses. Those who have tried his extraordinary guacamole macaroons, his wasabi bark tapas, his cactus tartare and his brilliant reinvention of patatas bravas can testify to his restlessly inventive skill in the kitchen.
Arola has been favourably compared to UK molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal, whose Fat Duck restaurant has done so much to push the boundaries of the culinary arts. He learned from the best – he was a student of both Ferran Adrià (he of El Bulli fame) and Pierre Gagnaire – and is the man most likely to take on Adrià’s mantle as world’s best chef now that El Bulli has been closed. His media appearances on ‘Esta cocina es un infierno’ (Hell’s Kitchen) have gained him a fanatical following in his home country and invited comparisons with arch media player Gordon Ramsay. But it’s Arola’s international ambitions which really mark this man as the gourmet name to watch in 2013. He has opened branches of his Arola restaurant in Paris (at the W Paris – Opéra hotel), in Penha Longa in Portugal and, in June this year, in Mumbai, a launch which has already proved wildly popular with the city’s cognoscenti. It’s Arola’s first foray outside of Europe but, given the ambition, drive and imagination of this globe-trotting, agenda-setting superchef, it’s unlikely to be the last.
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The Visionary Sebastian Thrun
Emotionally speaking, Silicon Valley likes to present itself as a perpetually sunny place, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to the odd attack of intellectual dyspepsia. And if Valley veterans have one big gripe these days, it’s that this verdant nook of California has stopped thinking big. The complaint goes like this: Silicon Valley’s brightest minds once invented things of immense significance – gadgets such as the first personal computer. But then the internet came along. According to the critics, the pursuit of big ideas was eclipsed by a rush for quick profits. The amount of money pumped into hard technological problems plunged while interest in iPhone apps soared. The result? Instead of cures for cancer or solutions to global warming, we got Angry Birds and Twitter. If you accept this assessment (and you don’t regard Twitter as a great leap forward for mankind), you wouldn’t be alone if you felt a bit cheated right now. For a quick reaffirmation of your faith in human ambition, meet Sebastian Thrun. It’s tricky to know how best to describe Thrun, but King of the Geeks isn’t a bad start. He arrives at our meeting on the outskirts of the Stanford University campus, not far from San Francisco, without fanfare, clad in a G-Star T-shirt and jeans. He’s 45, slightly built and somewhat bald, but could pass for a student. It almost feels as if he’s travelling incognito, which seems rather fitting. This, after all, is the superstar artificial-intelligence guru who leads the ultra-clandestine Google X project. A top-secret laboratory, Google X is thought to be based somewhere nearby in the heart of Silicon Valley and is home to the search giant’s feverish efforts to invent the future. Its “overall goal is to build transformative things”, the German-
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born Thrun tells me in his accented English – things that involve “massive technological challenges” and have the potential to “have a massive influence on society”. According to the billionaire Google co-founder Larry Page, the aim was to recreate the shoestring urgency and bloated ambition that powered the Apollo moonshot in the Sixties. Certainly, there’s no shortage of big thinking. The boffins who work at Google X believe that one day your personal computer will be so personal it will be wired into your brain, and that there will come a time when you’ll be able to ride an elevator into space. They are thought to be laying the foundations for “a web of things”. Roughly speaking, that would involve a world where nearly all your belongings are online – so your refrigerator could order groceries. And if all their prophecies come to pass, it’s possible that one day you’ll have the option of staying at home in your jimjams while your robot shows its face at your office. Amid the hype and the secrecy (when The New York Times broke the news of Google X’s existence last year, it suggested that it was run on similar lines to the CIA), Thrun cuts an almost Oz-type figure. One of the world’s most fêted robotics experts, he leads “project chauffeur”, the Google X effort to develop a driverless car. If it all pans out, it could prove the biggest revolution in mass transportation since the invention of the horseless carriage. He’s also involved in Google Glass, the company’s first foray into “wearable computing”. The project involves the development of a pair of “augmented reality” spectacles. The resulting gadget looks like a cross between a high-tech Alice band and a pair of sporty sunglasses. It presents information from the internet via a tiny, crystal-like screen suspended just above the user’s eye.
Handling the prototype that Thrun pulls from his satchel, I’m reminded of a prediction that Larry Page made in 2004: that ultimately Google will be “included in people’s brains... eventually you’ll have the implant”. If that strikes you as disconcerting, be aware that much of Silicon Valley fully expects an eventual fusion of the human brain and computer circuitry. (For his part, Thrun is on the record as saying the day when we outsource our memories “isn’t far away”. In response, one journalist advised her readers to “enjoy the luxurious privacy of your own memories while you still can”.) Finally, there’s Thrun’s personal side project, Udacity, a start-up company that has already provided a glimpse of a radical new future in education. It foresees a future where elite university courses are made accessible to massive student cohorts via the internet; where the world’s ivory towers are opened up to any prole with wi-fi. Reviewing all of this, you might expect a certain intellectual arrogance. In person, however, Thrun is softly spoken, self-effacing and strikingly personable. Indeed, in many regards, he is a very down-to-earth visionary. He met his wife, Petra Dierkes-Thrun, who now teaches English literature at Stanford, in Germany when he was 16 and she was 14. They were married in 1995 and now have a four-year-old son, whom Thrun immediately mentions when I ask him to cite his proudest accomplishment. They live in a bungalow on Stanford’s campus, which has been his home for the past nine years. If there’s one entry on his CV that suggests he really is out to improve society in 2013, it involves his work with Udacity in the field of education. Last year, he made a graduate course he was teaching at Stanford University available online, for free.
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Anyone with an internet connection could access a class in artificial intelligence that had previously been open to just a handful of students. He announced the project with a single e-mail; 160,000 people signed up, from 190 countries. “It would have been more,” he says, “but the university shut the application process.” Twenty-three thousand of the students passed, a cohort that would have taken him more than a century to teach in person. His vision of free, top quality education is likely to win support from overstretched parents globally – Thrun claims that Udacity can supply a world-class course in computer science for $1 per student. He estimates that Stanford charges about $3,000 for the same amount of learning. His eyes light up when he describes receiving thank-you messages from American soldiers who studied in war zones, and single mothers who wrestled with exams while bouncing infants on their laps. He quotes The Matrix (a sci-fi movie where machines run amok) to sum up his experience. “I can’t teach at Stanford again,” he said. “I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve seen Wonderland.”
The Hotelier Ian Schrager
When it comes to the hospitality business, Ian Schrager is the man with the Midas touch. Consistently ahead of the curve throughout his career, he started his business life with a bang by opening the legendary Studio 54 club in New York in 1977, before moving on to launch Palladium, an art-focused venue which played home to the great and the good of the Big Apple throughout the 1980s. It wasn’t long before Schrager turned his entrepreneurial sights onto hotels. He launched the nonemore-chic Morgans on Madison Avenue in 1984, singlehandedly creating a whole new genre of accommodation, the boutique hotel. It was so successful that he launched a string of other independent, quirky properties across the globe: there are now 13 in the group, including the legendary Sanderson in London, the delightful Delano in Marrakech and the exquisite Delano in L.A. Schrager innovated constantly as he grew his business, introducing the world to the joys of “lobby socialising” (in which the properties’ lobbies become the focal point for hanging out for guests and local residents alike), “urban resorts” and “lifestyle hotels”. Where he led, the biggest hotel brands in the world followed. Despite having achieved more than most businesspeople could fit into five lifetimes, Schrager hasn’t slowed down. This sleek, animated perfectionist has just turned 66 but could pass for 45, and he fizzes with a restless, infectious energy. His latest creation is a revolutionary new hotel brand, PUBLIC, into which he has poured a wealth of ideas and passion. The first property, in Chicago, opened to huge industry acclaim, and the brand is expected to roll out across the US throughout 2013. As if that weren’t enough, Schrager is developing a second luxury brand, EDITION, in partnership with Marriott International: the Istanbul chapter is open, and properties in Abu Dhabi, Bangkok, London, Miami and New York will follow shortly. Whether you’re a traveller or a travel industry professional, Schrager is the man to watch in the coming year.
The Social Butterfly Caterina Fake
You may not know it, but you almost certainly interact with one of Caterina Fake’s inventions most days of the week. This unassuming genius of the digital world was the co-creator of Flickr.com, the awesomely powerful photo-sharing site which, at last count, contains six billion images, and services more than 50 million members. Its success means that it’s hard to surf the net for more than five minutes without seeing content that’s hosted on its servers.
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Creating such a powerful and ubiquitous tool (and selling it to Yahoo for $35 million) would be enough for most people to consider taking a long, hard rest on their laurels, but not for Fake. You may well interact with another of her products on a daily basis: the rather wonderful Etsy.com, the web’s home of all things handmade and vintage. Or maybe you engage with her brainchild Hunch, a taste-driven development platform whose technologies have been fed into countless apps for iPhone and Android, and which she sold in 2011 for $80 million. Or perhaps you make use of the extraordinary wealth of free resources available at Creative Commons, of which Fake is chairman. However, if you thought Fake had finished inveigling her way into your online world, think again. The coming year will see the rise of her grandest and most intriguing creation yet: Findery.com, a social media masterstroke. The concept is simple but brilliant: people sign up, and are then able to tag locations across the world with ‘notes’ recommending products, services, views, experiences and other unmissable things. Then, when you’re travelling around the world, you can call on the combined intelligence of tens of millions of people, dropped straight into your phone and synched up with your GPS maps. The site has just moved into public beta – and when the final rough edges have been smoothed off, there will be a huge member acquisition campaign: if it’s even half as successful as the industry experts think it will be, then you can expect Findery to be the new darling of social media in 2013 and long beyond...
The Publisher
HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser Book publishers in the Arab world have been in the doldrums for years. Hampered by a perfect storm of low copy sales, low quality production and under-investment in authors, they have floundered in comparison to their counterparts in the west. Practices like the payment of author royalties and the use of trained editors on new books – which are standard in Europe and the US – are almost non-existent, which means fewer books are produced, and of a lower standard. Happily, it looks as though times are changing – and fast. The motor of this regeneration is one company, the Bloomsbury Qatar Publishing Foundation (BQPF), and its public face and greatest supporter is the chairperson of the Qatar Foundation, HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. Under her guidance, the BQPF co-venture between the Qatar Foundation and the prestigious Bloomsbury Publishing company is bringing the sensibility and business practices of a Western publishing company to bear on Arabic fiction and non-fiction with startling results. Its 2013 catalogue is crammed with beautiful,
quality new works by Arab writers, including wonderful books for children as well as adults. Emboldened by this new, professional platform, Arab authors are coming forward in their droves, and plans are afoot to launch English translations of their most successful works, opening them up to whole new audiences. Sheikha Moza’s work for the Foundation covers many areas of education and culture, and she campaigns tirelessly to promote its activities. She proudly launched the BQPF with Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle in 2010, when she spoke of it as a “far-reaching cultural partnership between Britain and Qatar” which was emblematic of “Qatar’s aim to build a knowledge-based society.” Since then she has helped the company to grow into a real cultural beacon in the Gulf, and one which looks set over the coming year to deliver on its enormous potential and change the region’s publishing industry forever. Before 2013 is over, and thanks in large part to Sheikha Moza, you can expect to have at least one of BQPF’s novels on your bookcase.
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The Tastemaker Hala Khayat
It’s no mean feat to create a legend, but on the night of 27 April 2010, Christie’s Dubai did just that. Les Chadoufs, a painting by Egyptian artist Mahmoud Said, reached a record-breaking $2,424,500 at auction. It was a monumental moment for the Middle East’s fledgling art market. Fast-forward to 2012, and the crackle of the auction room still lingers in the minds of the region’s collectors and gallerists. It has been an invigorating journey since that landmark year – and not just for the auction house. Abu Dhabi Art Fair has moved to the UAE Pavilion to accommodate growing crowds, Art Dubai continues to champion local contemporary artists to great acclaim, and DIFC’s burgeoning gallery neighbourhood is bursting at the seams. But there’s no time to draw breath: the Middle East’s art scene is shifting gears yet again. Hala Khayat, Christie’s Specialist for Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern and Iranian Art, sits before me with a wide smile on her face. It’s just five days before two more works by Mahmoud Said go under the hammer at the Christie’s Dubai auction – and Khayat was responsible for securing them both. The two pieces, entitled El Zar and Pecheurs a Rosette, have been selected from a private Egyptian collection. They’ve never appeared at auction before – and, of course, they are the star attraction of the Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art sale. The build-up has collectors and the press abuzz with anticipation. The lady responsible, however, is a picture of calm. What’s the recipe for success, I ask? “There is no method,” she shrugs. “I am very lucky.” It has been a frantic morning, but it obviously takes a lot to shake Khayat. After a flurry of phone calls, a web of crossed wires, I have tracked her
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down to Al Barsha, Dubai, half way between meetings in Jumeirah and Christie’s DIFC HQ. It’s a snatched moment. Last night, she hosted Art Night, a selected display of lots from the upcoming auction, and this evening will take her to the Turkish Consulate, for an audience with invited dignitaries. And, of course, the countdown to the auction ticks on. “I am lucky because most of the works that have been consigned by me in the past have been sold,” she continues. I can’t hide my incredulity. Surely there’s more to it than that? “I guess I just work hard – but there is no formula to it. Taste is very delicate.” If modesty is a virtue, then Khayat is righteous indeed – but the facts confirm what she is reluctant to concede. Just six years since they began, the biannual Modern and Contemporary Arab, Iranian and Turkish Art sales have raised over $225 million. Of course, Khayat’s eye for a star has been long in the making. Born into an art-loving family, she attended galleries in her home city of Damascus, Syria, from the age of seven – “The smell of the paint has stayed with me all my life,” she says with a smile. She shaped her passion with education, completing a BA in Fine Arts and later an MA in Design Studies. It was a matchless foundation for a career in the arts – but, yet again, the question of fortune arises: “I was very lucky to join at the beginning of Christie’s Dubai – I was documenting Arab artwork in Syria when I met the team, and it all went from there.” We’re chatting in a busy hotel lobby, and the softly-spoken Khayat is forced to raise her voice against the din. The art world, infamous for its larger-than-life personalities, might sound an unlikely passion for such a seemingly gentle soul, but her enthusiasm is palpable: “Many people think that what we do is random, that we just sit down and
pick works that we like – but there is much, much more to it than that. We travel all over the region, contacting gallerists for new pieces, and tracing specific pieces for our key buyers. A lot of thought, a lot of questions, a lot of discussions are happening.” Searching the entire Middle East for artistic gems is no mean feat, and the gravitas of the Christie’s name brings in thousands of unsolicited requests every season. “The team that chooses the final selection is very small, very specialist,” says Khayat. “We discuss the pieces, argue their merits, and somehow come up with a final list. We have to determine why every piece we put in the sale is important – why it has to be put into the auction.” So who has the final say, I ask? “Well, I kind of do…” she murmurs with a smile: “With my manager, of course…” I’m keen to press Khayat on her “luck” in picking top-sellers. Does she ever attempt to introduce collectors to pieces they may not have considered? “We respond to market trends, and we’re constantly aware of the buyers and their desires, although if we find something as a team that we think is exciting we try to get it into the auction. But I can’t influence people if they have a certain taste.” Occasionally, the Christie’s team suffer a few surprises too: take artist Farhad Moshiri, for example. “When we first sold his work, everybody liked it, but none of us guessed that in a few years he would become such a world-famous name. We started selling his pieces for something like $18,000, then $50,000 – suddenly it jumped to half a million dollars. Incredible.” Khayat estimates a near-even split of local and international buyers at the sales, so has the rest of the world developed a taste for Middle Eastern art? “It has never been a struggle to get international buyers interested – it all comes back to the intricacies of taste. If I feel passionately about
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a piece of art, someone on the other side of the world can feel the same way too.” And how has the local market developed? “When we first started the auctions, there was a bit of a nationalism trend – Tunisians would buy Tunisian art, Iraqis would buy Iraqi art, and so on, but now the taste is becoming more international. People buy because they like the pieces, rather than where the artist is from.” Next year will be a personal landmark for Khayat: she has been appointed Head of Sale for the April 2013 auction. I offer congratulations – it will surely feel wonderful to be at the auction’s helm? “I don’t want to tempt fate,” Khalat ventures, modest to the end. “We’ll see how it goes… I still feel scared occasionally. A lot of trust, a lot of money is on the line – and there’s no accounting for taste on the day. Art rules – not us.” It’s not until after I’ve turned off my voice recorder that Khayat’s tales of triumphs pour out. Stories of how she championed an unlikely piece, only for it to become the star of the show; of the satisfaction in finding a work that collectors didn’t even know that they craved. It’s all strictly off-record, of course – I’ve been sworn to secrecy – but you’ll soon see the proof for yourself. The sales figures for the October auction, the success of the April sale – both will no doubt secure her place at the top. No matter how she attests to the contrary, Hala Khayat continues to shape the Middle East art world.
Motoring
The Generation Game The latest S models from Audi are not just pushing the boundaries in terms of technology and performance, but a fitting tribute to more than 100 years of brand innovation
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Words: Chris Anderson
or years, everyone from philosophers to songwriters has been telling us to live in the present, not worrying about the future or the past. After all, there is no sense in wasting time on something over which we have no control. But it isn’t a sentiment shared by Audi, which has been using the innovation and racing success forged by its heritage to inform its current models, setting the groundwork for more development later on. For confirmation, look to its all new S6, S7 and S8 models, part of a line that always excites enthusiasts, which has plenty of nods to a history that extends over 100 years. Audi’s past is packed with automotive firsts, so why shouldn’t the company continue to draw on these, as well as its reputation for uncovering new ideas? In fact, it could be said that its first innovation was arriving at the company name itself. After leaving a rival car firm in Zwickau, Germany, in 1909, August Horch set up on his own. His surname was already trademarked, so he stumbled upon using its Latin translation instead, with ‘horch’ or ‘hark’ becoming ‘audi’. The Audi name established itself very quickly, mainly thanks to victories in the Austrian Alpine Run from 1911 to 1914, with the press referring to the Type C 14/35 hp as the ‘Alpine Conqueror’. Audi Automobilwerke GmbH then became a stock corporation in 1914, with Horch deciding to take a step back after the First World War, moving to Berlin. But a precedent had been set, and the spirit of innovation was alive. In 1921, Audi created Germany’s first left-hand-drive car – providing a better view of oncoming traffic and making it easier to overtake. Then in 1923, it released the first vehicle with a six-cylinder engine, while an eight-cylinder version followed in 1927. The economic crisis at the end of the decade then
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led to two significant developments – first, the pursuit of a smaller, cheaper car saw Audi releasing the first front-wheel-drive in 1931, while monetary pressures saw it join forces with three other brands to become Auto Union AG in 1934, symbolised by the now-famous badge made up of four overlapping rings. To raise its profile, the new company entered motorsport, and from 1934 its Auto Union Silver Arrow won races and set records all over the world. The Second World War saw the company’s factories repurposed by the army for building weapons, and by the mid ‘60s it had been sold to Volkswagen. Fearing that its own identity might be lost, Auto Union workers created a new car under the leadership of the company’s head of development, Ludwig Kraus, in secret. Their creation, the Audi 100, was a mid-sized luxury car, very different to anything from Volkswagen at the time. On being presented to company bosses, it was put into production straight away and marketed under the Audi name. The brand’s future had been secured, and a new slogan (arguably one the most memorable in the history of advertising) adopted: ‘Vorsprung durch Technick’, meaning ‘Advancement through Technology’. Maybe there was something about Audi that had served as inspiration for Kraus. As the creator of the first left-hand drive car and other important milestones, it was a legacy too important to let dwindle. And with Audi suitably reinstated under Volkswagen, it seemed that others were inspired too, as the breakthroughs
began to stir again. The Audi Quattro, released in 1980, and the first vehicle for commercial use with a permanent four-wheel-drive system, is perhaps the most famous, although there have been others, such as the first TDi (turbodiesel direct injection) engine in 1989 or the debut of LED daytime running lights in 2007. And such development was quickly reflected in terms of motorsport success. The Audi Quattro, for example, not only made a statement with its unusual transmission, but proved unstoppable in the World Rally Championship. The car won the first three races of the 1981 season, and in 1982 the company secured the constructors’ title. In 1983, Hannu Mikkola won the drivers’ championship in an Audi Quattro, while 1984 saw both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships belong to the brand. In 1987, an Audi Sport Quattro S1 set a new record at Pikes Peak, one of the toughest races in the US, and in 1990 a V8 Quattro won the German Touring Car Championship (DTM) against rivals such as BMW and Mercedes on its first ever attempt. Still the success continued. In 2008, Audi won the 24 Hour of Le Mans, both the European and American Le Mans Series, and the DTM championship, making it the company’s most successful racing year ever. With all of this in mind, it is hard not to feel the weight of history when coming face to face with the brand’s latest S models. An instant link with both Audi’s innovation and racing heritage is apparent in the fact that like all S vehicles, the new versions are equipped with that fantastic
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Motoring Quattro four-wheel-drive system, which may have advanced through the years, but maintains the original key advantages of better traction during acceleration, improved vehicle dynamics, and superior safety thanks to the exceptional road-handling offered. And if it’s good enough for the World Rally Championship drivers… The S models also represent one of Audi’s key lines, making use of high-end features and performance. In addition to the four-wheel-drive
system, there is a nod to the brand’s heritage in the shape of an all-new eight-cylinder engine. This four-litre V8 has also been influenced by the version found in the Le Mans-winning Audi R18 TDi, where the exhaust manifolds are not flanged to the outside of the engine, but emerge from the V angle between the cylinder banks, making a shorter gas path for a better engine response. With a turbocharger added, also between the cylinders, this new engine makes
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for some impressive performance figures. On the top of the range S8, the wheels are driven through an eight-speed Tiptronic automatic gearbox, supporting auto stop-start and break-energy regeneration. With 520 bhp, an electronically limited top speed of 152 mph and a 0-100 kph time of 4.2 seconds are promised. The S6 and S7, meanwhile, feature a detuned version of the same engine and a seven-speed twin-clutch S tronic gearbox, with 420 bhp and
that 152 mph top speed still in place. The 0-100 kph acceleration times on each are different, however, at 4.8 and 4.9 seconds respectively. But as well as building on the successes of the past, Audi is also using the opportunity to debut new technology with these models. The ‘cylinder on demand’ system, for example, lowers fuel consumption by deactivating four of the engine cylinders on part-throttle loads, and the Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) system
‘This is a brand in control of it past, present and future ’
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August Horch The Audi Type C (1912) Auto Union Type D twin-supercharger Silver Arrow Audi S8
Images: Supplied
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helps to suppress engine and wind noise. Four microphones hidden in the roof lining measure the unwanted noise, and emit an ‘anti-sound’ to combine with and eliminate it. This works in conjunction with sensors on the body constantly measuring structure-borne noise originating from the engine, sending data to a control unit. An actuator in the engine bearings then converts its signals into mechanical movements to cancel out the noise, making for a very quiet ride. And with the lavish interiors, noise is the last thing you want to be distracted by. The S8 is full of exclusive moon silver Valcona leather, with a leather-covered steering wheel and chic lighting. The S6 and S7, meanwhile, mix leather with Alcantara, while the S7 opts for sport seats in the back to mimic the ones at the front of the car. The exterior is just as exciting too, with oval twin tailpipe exhausts, aluminium-look door mirrors, and huge brake callipers hiding behind the large alloy wheels. A look that definitely means business. But it is rare that so much about a brand can be seen in just one particular model or line. Here Audi has taken the best of its past achievements and a little motorsport know-how, then encouraged its engineers to conjur up new ideas – in line with its reputation for setting new benchmarks - resulting in the new S models. The features the cars have inherited from Audi’s 100-year history acknowledge the past, while the new technology will no doubt find its way onto upcoming models in the future. August Horch was mindful of the present when he decided on the Audi name for his business all those years ago, but perhaps did not realise the enduring legacy it would create. This is a brand in control of it past, present and future, and we can all learn something from that.
gastronomy
Home Grown
Why Emirati restaurants in the UAE are one in a million – from the only national to hit the culinary big time. AIR meets Chef Ali
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Words: Laura Binder
have never eaten Emirati food. There, I said it. For any expatriate who has spent a few years living outside their home turf, such a statement would be met with astonishment (never tried sushi whilst living in Japan? For shame!) And yet, in the UAE, few would argue
that opportunities to tuck into Emirati cuisine are startlingly scarce. Indeed, frantic Googling revealed just one or two such eateries in restaurant-dense Dubai and only one in Abu Dhabi (along with a few bloggers cataloguing their virgin bites of Emirati fare). How can this be? I asked my
food-loving friends. After all, jet into any city in the world and one would expect the chance to savour the fruits of its region. Fly into the UAE, though, and you’ll have your pick of a veritable smorgasbord of international restaurants – offering everything
a gourmand could wish for, and in the swankiest surrounds – save for home-grown Emirati cuisine. It’s a fact that has eco warriors reaching for their pitch forks too – ask any hotel eatery’s head chef and they’ll happily regale all the corners of the globe from
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which ingredients are imported daily – the air miles don’t bear thinking about. In contrast, Emirati cuisine with all its signature spices – saffron, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, bay leaf – and regional meats and rice can be harvested right here. So why the resistance? In the capital of the Emirates I hoped to get my answer. Here gourmands (locals, expats, tourists…) can discover authentic Emirati fare, eaten beneath the gargantuan, golddipped dome of the Emirates Palace hotel. The restaurant is Mezlai – the first Emirati eatery to serve ‘authentic and traditional Emirati food only’. And the chef at its fore is not (as is usually the case) European, American, Asian… (the list goes on) but an Emirati national. Unsure whether this man was the product of fact or fiction (surely he’s really a quarter Emirati, a fifth French, half British?) I made for the restaurant’s achingly authentic environs to see for myself. There Chef Ali – in full chef whites and equally full of beans – led me proudly through Mezlai’s Arabic environs (its two floors harbour
‘There are no Emirati restaurants because there are no Emirati chefs...’ interior accents inspired by the seven emirates, as well as serveral enticing private majlises) – and straight into the hubbub of his working kitchen where Arabic orders were barked across steaming hobs. You are Emirati? I pressed as he hoisted an entire lamb’s carcass onto the steel counter for closer inspection. “Absolutely,” he nodded definitely. The burning question, then: why are there no Emirati restaurants, right here in the Emirates? “There is no Emirati restaurants, because there is no Emirati chefs,” he told me matterof-factly. “I think still Emirati people they are shy of this job. But if you will go around the world you find all of the
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gastronomy restaurants’ chefs are men.” Presumably then, convincing Emirati men (or women) to take their home cooking to professional levels is no easy task. “Some men I know, they cook at home but he will say, ‘no I don’t cook’. I say, I’m challenging you. He says ‘no I don’t cook, even egg I don’t do’. He thinks this is good, he thinks it is to be proud of, but it’s not good… Some people they feel shame, they say ‘even tea I don’t do!’” – he laughs. How then, did this Emiratiborn man break the mould? “I am an army man,” he told me simply. “And I like the food. I learn from my mother. “I feel I have something, I can cook but so many hotels would not take ‘the local’. They think I want a big salary, that I would not work and, and, and, and… It was difficult [to get my first post].” After leaving the UAE to train in the considerably chillier climes of Bratislava (“I paid money to go to that restaurant, to see the chefs, to train, to see what was going on in the kitchen”)
‘I was the only Emirati chef in the whole of Jumeirah – I worked with 95 nationalities’ Ali left the army and assumed two three-year-long posts in Dubai’s Jumeirah Emirates Towers and the Burj Al Arab consecutively. And what was the reaction to an Emirati chef? “People were surprised. I was the only Emirati in the of whole of Jumeirah – I worked with 95 nationalities.” Despite opinion to the contrary, Ali toughed it out in the professional kitchens, before the lure of head chef and consultant at Mezlai restaurant beckoned. Here, the much-loved food of his childhood makes it onto goldedged plates daily. Though he admits the Emirati family tradition of eating “sometimes with hands”, “sometimes lots of plates”, “all together at one time”, have been toned down to fit with a five-star hotel, Chef Ali keeps the cuisine as authentic as he can. “We change the presentation only – we keep the meat or chicken or fish the same and put some vegetables,
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rice, potato separate – this is what you do only. But the home cooking, the mother cooking, that is the same.” What then, I asked, is ‘true’ Emirati food? “The food is the food; makbos is makbos, tahta is tahta; Bahrain, Emirates, Qatar is the same – nothing is different: meats, rice, chicken with rice and spices all of this…” Judging by the colour of some dishes (saffron rice is sunflower yellow, dyed by orange saffron milk, tomato-braised shark has blood-red sauce) flavour is also key: “Spices, are very, very important,” nodded Ali. “Our spices are like Indian spices but every one has his style.” Indeed, the plates being sent across the service counter by Ali and his team displayed a rainbow of colours and indulgent, heart-warming textures: traditionally-roasted (and UAEraised) chicken was yellow-tinged and plump; whole Omani lobster pink and juicy; sides went in the form of camel milk mash; while lamb shoulder medfoun revived the Emirati tradition of slow-cooking meat in banana leaves in an earthen hole by being placed in
a special oven. Diners certainly won’t leave feeling hungry, I thought. “Locals and tourists we have eating here,” Chef Ali told me as he sprinkled spice on top of what looked like English porridge, but was in fact the UAE’s national dish, Hariz – barley, chicken and spices boiled low until creamy (and delicious mopped up with bread, I later learned). “But from outside [the UAE], they are surprised with local food, they never taste the food. When you travel somewhere, you have to do this! The reaction is good.” Curious tourists aside, would Emiratis eat in local restaurants if they were in more plentiful supply, or is this yet another reason why such eateries have remained on the Emirates’ backburner? “Sometimes,” mused Ali. “Some they like to eat local food every day, every day, they don’t change. Me? I’m a chef, but I don’t eat sushi.” Chef Ali does carry hope for the future of Emirati cuisine, though. The father of seven children, I asked him if there is a budding chef among them.
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“One,” he smiled, after reeling off each and every one’s name and vocation. What then would be the ultimate goal – Michelin stars? “I hope so,” Ali nodded, wide-eyed, “I hope to be a Michelin star restaurant. We can do it.” It dawned on me that Dubai and Abu Dhabi is yet to gain a Michelin guide – could an absence of a strong local cuisine be the cause? “You know what the problem is? They don’t want to change the food for fine dining… [with fine dining] the plate becomes like a picture. But still here, the local, you need lamb and beef, they eat with the hands. Some people will come here and say ‘this food is not enough – more rice!’ That is the style of eating.” Michelin fame aside, Mezlai’s very success is breaking the mould of the UAE’s thriving restaurant scene and – as I tucked into Medfoun, Hariz and homemade zaatar Rgag (that’s Emirati bread to you) – I hoped the next wave of cooks and restaurateurs would take note: nothing beats a ‘home’ cooked meal; as Chef Ali will testify.
gastronomy
D
Al Maryah Island
Lulu Island Al Markaziyah
Abu Dhabi Marina Village
Al Khubeirah Emirates Palace
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Jumeirah Etihad Towers
City SliCkerS If you’re in town for the F1 and keen to delve into Abu Dhabi’s dining scene, here’s our pick of the city’s top tables
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Mezzaluna
Inside the world’s most expensive hotel you’ll find this devotee to the finest dishes from Italy and the Mediterranean. The opulent setting means the food here has a lot to live up to, and to its credit it doesn’t shy away, delivering powerful flavours which last long in the memory. Emirates Palace (971) 2 6909 000. A
Hakkasan Abu Dhabi
If you know of Hakkasan from its London flagship restaurant you’ll know what to expect from this, its original UAE outpost: Thrillingly good
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Chinese food that leaves you craving more the second you finish. The best place to enjoy dim sum bar none. Emirates Palace (971) 2 690 7999. B
Quest
It takes some restaurants years for its culinary charms to entice a loyal customer base. In the case of Quest, that timescale has been shortened to just a few months. The Asianinfluenced modern fine dining dishes on offer here are as delightful as the sweeping views afforded to diners. Jumeirah Etihad Towers (971) 2 811 5555
Mushayrib Island
Sas Al Nakhl Island
Al Matar
Bain Al Jessrain
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Bice
In a city that’s ever changing, BiCE has proved a stalwart of fine fare, maintaining its celebrated high standards for upwards of a decade. Here, the classic and contemporary enjoy a harmonious marriage to produce ever-excellent Italian food. Hilton Abu Dhabi (971) 2 692 4160. D
Finz
The first of the city’s restaurants to elevate seafood to fine dining levels when it opened in the mid noughties, Finz continues to deliver on inventiveness and quality. The
king prawns here are outstanding, as is the tandoor twist given to the local catch, hamour. Beach Rotana Abu Dhabi (971) 2 6979 000. E Marco Pierre White Steakhouse & Grill
MPW has lent his name to countless new restaurants recently and the results have been mixed, yet this outpost of his steakhouse concept does justice to White’s hard earned reputation. The British-inspired menu is all the better for its simplicity, which means the chefs can pay careful attention to each of the
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dishes served. Fairmont Bab Al Bahr Abu Dhabi (971) 2 654 3333. F
Bord Eau
Of the new wave of fine dining restaurants to open in Abu Dhabi, this is probably the finest pick. Fabulously adventurous when it needs to be and always drawing on authentic produce, the French food served up here never falls short of first rate, while the view from the terrace as you dine – of Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque – truly captures the city. Shangri La Hotel, Qaryat Al Beri (971) 2 510 8888.
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Postcards from
Abu Dhabi
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Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque cuts a figure as impressive as the skyscrapers for which the UAE is famed: this is the largest mosque in the country, the jewel in the crown of the Emirates’ capital. The realisation of the vision of the late ruler His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the mosque can hold up to 40,000 worshippers, and is bedecked in lashings of mother of pearl, gold, crystal and marble.
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This month, the Yas Marina Circuit will once again host the Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. The inaugural 2009 race saw the most thrilling climax in championship history as Red Bull’s Sebastian Vettel snatched the driver’s crown from pre-race championship leader Fernando Alonso.
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Avenue at Etihad Towers officially opens its doors this month, becoming the capital’s first all high-end shopping destination. It’s home to the likes of Van Cleef & Arpels, Hermès, Manolo Blahnik, and Lanvin.
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The spectacular UAE Pavilion, the first of Saadiyat Island’s planned cultural destinations to open, will this month hosts the second annual Abu Dhabi Art, a fair which brings together collectors, artists and their works from all over the world.
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The first private beach club to adorn the shores of Saadiyat Island, Monte-Carlo Beach Club brings the best of the Monaco-based brand to the UAE. Featuring beach-side cabanas, a vast palm-fringed infinity pool and lavish dining in four on-site restaurants and lounges, there is no spot more exclusive in which to recline.
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Sir Bani Yas Island, nine kilometres off-shore from Abu Dhabi, was founded in 1971 as a dedicated nature reserve. Today, the isle is home to thousands of free-roaming animals, including the indigenous Arabian Oryx, which elsewhere teeters on the edge of extinction.
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When visiting Abu Dhabi, Emirates Palace is definitely an address to call on: a lavish opus of gold arches and marble minarets, the luxury abode was one of the world’s most expensive to build. The suites on the top-most floor are reserved purely for Emirati royalty.
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The headquarters of property development company Aldar is hard to miss: the world’s first circular skyscraper, it’s suitably striking. The award-winning construction was achieved by creating a revolutionary steel grid structure, allowing it to reach over 100 metres in height.
Images: Corbis / Arabian Eye; Shutterstock; Supplied
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Travel
Peak Retreat
G
o to Gstaad and the snow-drenched surrounds of the Bernese village (home to one of the biggest ski areas in the Alps) seem thick with luxury: in short, there’s something special in the alpine air. Perhaps it’s down to the jet set who have graced its slopes: in the Swinging Sixties Time labelled it “The Place”, drawing snow-seeking guests (some of them so taken by Gstaad they bought private residences there); Elizabeth Taylor, Roger Moore, Roman Polanski, Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, Princess Diana… the list, if I may, snowballed. Or perhaps it’s down to the designer names which line the village’s picture-perfect, ice-edged promenade: Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Chopard, Cartier all pose on pathways, while boutique browsing results in stellar seasonal buys from the likes of Chloé and Oscar de la Renta. Little wonder, then, that über-luxury hotels have also long graced Gstaad’s hilltops (Gstaad Palace Hotel, Grand Hotel Bellevue, the Hotel Olden…) and yet, due to the ski retreat’s sky-high standards, not a single new hotel build has been permitted for a century. Until now: jet in this December (a private jet airport in Gstaad making it that bit easier) and you’ll be on time for The Alpina Gstaad’s grand opening. Change – of the classiest kind – is afoot. And, in typical Gstaad style, The Alpina promises to be every inch the star – part of a $337 million development, the structure cradles 56 rooms and suites, private apartments and two chalets (though investors can hold their cheques – residences have already been sold). Perhaps less surprising is that the hotel’s architecture is very much in
keeping with its surrounds – nestled in the hilltop area of Oberbort and teetering over chocolate box Saanenland. “The architectural design is inspired by local Swiss alpine culture and the rugged authenticity of the Bernese Oberland,” tells Jean-Claude Mimran – one of the hotel’s joint owners (the other being real-estate mogul Marcel Bach). “It will be a luxurious hotel providing indulgent Swiss mountain experience.” In winter, that “mountain experience” takes shape in the form of dog-sledding, ice climbing, sled rides and snowshoe walking, plus heli-skiing for thrill-seekers. While, if it’s green flora-speckled hills and Swiss sunshine you covet, summer spurs on clay pigeon shooting, hiking, horse riding, trout fishing and river rafting. Behind the hotel’s authentic façade is a more contemporary look, with interiors merging modern ideals with local craftsmanship (centuries-old fir wood, stone, leather and lattice work). Highlights include a cigar room, private cinema and, for gourmands, the first European outpost of MEGU – the acclaimed New York Japanese restaurant. Spa-lovers, meanwhile, will enjoy the 2,000 square metre Six Senses Spa. (In the Panorama Suite you’ll have a private spa, Jacuzzi and massage area, nestled beneath a peak-framing skylight.) And while some Gstaad traditions show no sign of budging (the annual Ferrari and Maserati auction at the historic Gstaad Palace Hotel being one) purveyors of luxury are cottoning onto this newcomer – Louis Vuitton has hired the Alpina for the launch of its new Gstaad store. Sounds like reason enough to acquire a new winter wardrobe… thealpinagstaad.ch
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Images: Supplied
Why the sparkling slopes of Gstaad laid the perfect foundation for a new five-star hotel – its first in 100 years
life lessons
What I KnoW noW
James Paspaley
Executive Director, Paspaley
We are a family business; I grew up with the company. Life and business have always been intrinsically linked for me. You spend so much of your life working that life can be pretty awful if you don’t have any passion for what you do. I have been very lucky in that regard; I have a real love for it. Pearling is an interesting business. The comapny has been in the family for three generations. It has a genuine story – and I think that is clear in the product. At times, the pressure of running a family business can be immense. We talk about it at work, at home, on holiday… whenever we’re all together. Board meetings are family dos, but holidays can turn into business meetings too. I don’t think that a work/life balance is always applicable to family businesses. If you think that you have an insurmountable problem, start at the bottom and work on it slowly –
life’s not too complicated. There are challenges every day; in pearling, we are dependent completely on nature. Earlier this year, when a cyclone went through Western Australia, we had a lot of issues to deal with. It’s important to take a step back from work every now and again. Our head offices are in Darwin, in the far north of Australia, and I live there too. The notion of commuting is almost nonexistent; there’s no rat race, and life moves at a more comfortable pace. I love it.
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PIAGET BOUTIQUES: Abu Dhabi: Avenue at Etihad Towers, 02 667 0044 Dubai: The Dubai Mall, 04 339 8222 - Wafi New Extension, 04 327 9000 Dubai: Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, Atlantis 04 422 0233, Burj Al Arab, 04 348 9000 Burjuman Centre, 04 355 9090, Mall of the Emirates, 04 341 1211