TO INFINITY AND BEYOND NEW TECHNOLOGY
The Internet of Things is about to take control of everything
MONEY MATTERS
How athletes are crowdfunding their careers
DAVID FROST
The broadcaster’s life in pictures
HOW STEVE JOBS SAVED PIXAR
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CONTENTS / OCTOBER 2013
36
Damien Hirst’s largest ever exhibition opens in Doha, Qatar
54 39
Frieze London, one of the most exciting events on the contemporary arts calendar, opens in Regent’s Park
65
Jazz saxophonist Pete Wareham shares his favourite tracks
46
A guide to Rio de Janeiro
62
Exploring Shanghai’s East Bund neighbourhood
Where Glasgow chef Darin Campbell fills his belly
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OPEN SKIES / OCTOBER 2013
71
Visiting the Women’s Museum in Dubai
CONTENTS / OCTOBER 2013
78
An inspiring image of a public baths with a long history
138
96 87
The small cinema in Frankfurt supporting indie film
How struggling athletes are asking the crowd to fund Paying a visit their careers to Barcelona with a veteran architect
108
18
126 114
A journey on the African railway dubbed the Lunatic Express
OPEN SKIES / OCTOBER 2013
How Steve Jobs saved Pixar
The technology that is going to change your life forever
contents / october 2013
150
Shots of the late, great David Frost that will please your eyes
Front (31) Calendar The Grid The Question The Street Skypod The Room Consume
33 42 44 46 54 56 59
BLD Mapped Local Knowledge Place Column Store
brieFing (165)
Main (95) A Sporting Chance Our Man In Nairobi To Mombasa By Train The Man Who Saved Pixar Internet of Things The Frost Report
62 65 71 78 81 87
96 108 114 122 138 150
News Comfort Visa & Stats Route Map Fleet Last Look
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Open skies / OctOber 2013
167 175 177 178 184 186
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EDITOR’S LETTER
T
Gareth Rees, Editor
“I HAVE TO ADMIT THAT IF I HAD THE CHOICE BETWEEN A COWBOY TOY POSSESSED BY TOM HANKS OR A SPACE RANGER IN THRALL TO THAT BLOKE FROM HOME IMPROVEMENT, I WOULD CHOOSE THE COWBOY EVERY TIME.”
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his issue is about greatness, the greatness of people and the greatness of things. People and things that have and will change the world. I have been known to be late to the party on a few great things. My wife (then girlfriend) had been encouraging me to watch Toy Story, which celebrates its 18th birthday this year, for several years, before I finally succumbed and sat down a couple of years ago, in my late twenties, to devote 80 minutes of my young life to a cartoon about a cowboy doll and a plastic astronaut. A while later, a friend of mine, let’s call him Ali (because that’s his name) admitted, in fact boasted with pride, that he had shed a tear watching Toy Story 3, the final film in Pixar’s wonderful trilogy. By that time, I had watched the sequels, too. I have to admit that if I had the choice between a cowboy toy possessed by Tom Hanks or a space ranger in thrall to that bloke from Home Improvement, I would choose the cowboy every time. I am a traditionalist when it comes to playthings. But, by the time I had watched the films, I loved them both, and Andy’s other little friends. Those films, like many of the great things in our lives, wouldn’t have existed without one man: Steve Jobs. Our cover star. The man who not only brought us all the pretty gadgets that litter our lives, but also Toy Story. He had a little help, as you will discover when you read Empire writer Adam Smith’s engrossing feature on page 128, but it was one great man’s belief (and money) that turned Pixar from a pipedream into the household name it is today. Steve Jobs. Need I say more? After Steve, we move on to the greatness of things. The Internet of Things (IoT), to be precise. Former Stuff.tv editor Paddy Smith has done a wonderful job of explaining what the IoT is, and how everything, from fridges to pet dogs, are going to be connected by it very soon indeed, on page138. Paddy has been sprinkled with a little greatness himself, and has the ability to tell a story
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OPEN SKIES / OCTOBER 2013
ON THE COVER / When I read Adam Smith’s Pixar story, I wanted Steve Jobs on the cover. I found an image, printed it, scrawled these coverlines in marker and pinned it to the wall. The image changed a couple of times, but the concept stayed the same. We had a few problems, but thanks to our art director, Olga, it all turned out well in the end.
about some pretty complex technology that an idiot (me) can understand. Sticking with the Internet, you will find a magnificent story by regular OS contributor Noah Davis on page 96 about a number of struggling athletes – future greats to a man (and woman) – who are harnessing the financial clout of the crowd to finance their dreams of glory. Before I go, I have to mention one more great man: David Frost. The veteran broadcaster died at sea on August 31, while we were creating this issue, and I couldn’t resist joining the conga line of media outlets paying homage to the charming man who lived a life that most can only dream of. The series of photographs that starts on page 150 is my favourite feature in this issue. What a man. What a life. Those are just four of the captivating stories that you will find on the following pages. There are many more, I promise you. This is my first issue as editor of Open Skies. I hope a little bit of that greatness has rubbed of on the team and I. Enjoy the issue.
CONTRIBUTORS ADAM SMITH
Adam Smith is senior writer for Empire. He has written about movies for publications as diverse as FHM, The Guardian and GQ, and regularly appears on BBC Radio 4 and The World Service. He is also author of The Rough Guide to 21st Century Cinema (2012). Adam wrote our cover feature on Apple founder Steve Jobs’ other major success, the building of Pixar into an animated movie giant.
“PIXAR, AFTER IT WAS BOUGHT BY STEVE JOBS, UTTERLY CHANGED THE LANDSCAPE OF ANIMATED FILM AND HOLLYWOOD,” SAYS SMITH. “RESEARCHING THIS PIECE, THE PIVOTAL ROLE OF JOBS WAS OBVIOUS, BUT WHAT SURPRISED ME MOST WAS THE IMPORTANCE OF THE OTHER KEY PLAYER IN THE STORY, JOHN LASSETER. WITHOUT HIM, I DOUBT THIS REVOLUTION WOULD HAVE HAPPENED AT ALL.”
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CONTRIBUTORS
SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED CREATE THIS MAGAZINE
NOAH DAVIS
Noah is a freelance writer and reporter living in Brooklyn New York. He writes for The Wall Street Journal, Details, ESPN and many other publications, and he is deputy editor at American Soccer Now. “After writing the feature about athletes crowdfunding their sporting pursuits, I considered launching a campaign for my journalistic ventures. But I decided that was a bad idea.”
GEOFF BROKATE AND KAYE MARTINDALE Having met while travelling, Geoff and Kate started to work together. Having lived and worked in Barcelona for many years, the city is close to their hearts. They returned to interview architect Ricardo Bofill, and capture a striking image. “When it came to taking Ricardo’s photograph, there was no natural light, so we went back the next day,” they say. “Again the light was fading, and he told us we only had 10 minutes of sun remaining. Fortunately he could see what we were trying to do, and together we created a great photo.”
PADDY SMITH
Paddy’s analysis of the tech industry has been sought by everyone from Disney to the BBC. In 2006, he launched monthly gadget title Stuff in the Middle East, before returning to the UK to transform the brand’s website, Stuff.tv, into an international portal for technology news. In this issue, Paddy explains why the Internet of Things will control the future. “We can now connect 100 things to the internet for every atom on the planet,” he says. “So where do we start?”
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ANDREW BIRBECK
Andrew is an author, writer, bookworm and blogger. A regular contributor to titles such as The Irish Times he’s travelled worldwide. As a long time fan of books, booze and the Greek islands, writing about Santorini’s Atlantis Books was something of a dream assignment. “When travelling we all find places which call to our hearts and beg us to stay. For me Oia is such a place. Atlantis Books’ founders Craig and Oliver listened to their hearts and didn’t give up. I hope I’ve done their dream justice.”
TAHIRA YAQOOB
Tahira Yaqoob is a freelance journalist based in Dubai and writes for the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The National. She recently discovered Dubai’s Women’s Museum, which she has written about in this issue. “Stumbling across the Women’s Museum tucked away in a tiny alleyway was a revelation,” she says. “Professor Rafia Ghubash is an embodiment of how far women in the UAE have come in the space of a generation.”
Girl Power A visit to Dubai’s Women’s Museum guarantees an eye-opening journey into the city’s past
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front Santorini: A pair of American expats quit the States to run a bookshop in Greece GLaSGow: A top chef offers a culinary glimpse into Scotland’s largest city frankfurt: One small cinema is a bastion of Frankfurt’s independent movie scene
60 62 87
october
CALENDAR
october 1 to 31, sydney, Australia
October 1 to 6, Dublin, Ireland
Good Food Month
The Presidents Cup Team USA travels to Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin to take on an inexperienced International team bolstered by veteran golfers Ernie Els and Adam Scott, but also featuring seven players with no experience in The Presidents Cup. The US team, meanwhile, features eight players who have made prior appearances, including Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. presIDentscup.com
the second annual sydney morning Herald Good Food month will see the food industry in sydney, melbourne, canberra and Brisbane celebrate Australia’s love of all things edible with four weeks of food-related events, some of which will be hosted by rene redzepi, chef-patron of copenhagen’s renowned noma restaurant. the Age Good Food month will follow in melbourne and regional Victoria in november. GooDFooDmontH.com
October 3 (at the earliest), stockholm, sweden
Nobel Lit Prize october 3 to 6, cape town, south Africa
rockinG the daisies
this year’s rocking the Daisies festival, which takes place on the cloof Wine estate in Darling, just 80km outside of capetown, will feature performances from Alt-J, skunk Anansie and the Hives, among others, as well as art installations, wine tastings, a food village and a traders’ market. catch the Daisy train from Jo’burg or the bus from capetown. capacity is limited to 15,000, so buy your tickets now. rockInGtHeDAIsIes.com
The Nobel administration doesn’t set a specific date for the announcement of this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it is likely to be early October. This year’s bookies’ favourite is the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who has made a name for himself beyond his native Japan with modern classics such as Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and, most recently, 1Q84. Other possible contenders include US author Joyce Carol Oates, Hungarian writer Peter Nadas, South Korean poet Ko Un and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro. noBelprIze.orG
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Open skies / OctOber 2013
October 4 to 7, Hong Kong, China
October 3 to February 10, 2014, New York, USA
VASILY KANDINSKY AND THE TOTAL WORK OF ART: FROM BLAUE REITER TO BAUHAUS 1910 TO 1925
Fine Art Asia
One of Asia’s largest fine art fairs, Hong Kong’s Fine Art Asia will host more than 100 galleries from both Asia and the West. Timed to coincide with the height of the Hong Kong art season and auctions by Sotheby’s, the event will feature displays of art, jewellery and furniture. FINEARTASIA.COM
This exhibition of works by the Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky at New York’s Neue Galerie examines a key 15-year period in the artist’s career, between his involvements in the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group in Munich, Germany, to the birth of the Bauhaus movement. The exhibition will feature more than 80 paintings, drawings and objects. NEUEGALERIE.ORG
October 9 to 20, London, UK
BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
October 9 and 10, Manchester, UK
Russell Brand’s Messiah Complex
Highlights of the BFI London Film Festival include gala screenings of John Lee Hancock’s Saving Mr Banks, the story of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins, starring Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity and the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. BFI.ORG.UK/IFF
Barmy British comic and Hollywood regular Russell Brand will be performing at the O2 Apollo Manchester in the north of England for two nights this month. The gigs are part of Brand’s Messiah Complex World Tour. RUSSELLBRAND.TV
Skypod
Pete Wareham page 54 34
OPEN SKIES / OCTOBER 2013
Calendar
October 10 to January 22, 2014, Doha, Qatar
Damien Hirst: Relics
Qatar Museums Authority’s director of public art, Jean-Paul Engelen, helped put together British contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s first show in the Middle East – his largest ever
What does your role at QMA involve? It’s my responsibility to develop a long-term arts programme to educate and engage the local community. I enjoyed 16 years at Christie’s in London and New York, but I believe what is going on in Qatar is an unprecedented cultural renaissance. How did this exhibition come about? Sheikha Mayassa’s commitment to contemporary art and education has been the key factor in introducing Damien Hirst to Qatar. She and the Qatari royal family understand the importance of art, and how it can be used to strike up a mutually beneficial dialogue across different cultures. The exhibition is also part of the Qatar UK Year of Culture, a year to celebrate the long-standing friendship between the two countries.
How have you been involved in putting together the exhibition? My role has been very hands-on right from the beginning, but it would have been impossible without a great team. The public art team consists of many different nationalities, ranging from Qatari to German, Italian and Sudanese – more than eight. I have been very lucky.
culture shock / Damien Hirst’s most famous work, the shark in formaldehyde (below) will be on display in Doha.
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Open skies / OctOber 2013
How closely have you worked with Damien Hirst? I have been working very closely with Damien, as this very much a collaborative effort between QMA and Damien. He has mentioned that he is both thrilled and honoured to be part of the QMA, and Qatar’s process for cultural development. What concerns did you have about displaying work from such a controversial artist in the Middle East? I actually don’t think the show is controversial at all for our audience. I think they will look with fresh eyes without many pre-consumed misconceptions. Relics is part of a series of cultural projects initiated by QMA to promote and support local and international art production, foster appreciation and understanding of artistic practices and create opportunities for cultural dialogue. It also aims to encourage local audiences to take part in debates and discussions about the arts that can challenge our understanding and unveil new perspectives. Based on that, I hope and believe the public will react positively and encourage new channels of communications. What can visitors expect from the exhibition? Relics is not only Hirst’s largest ever show, but it is his first solo exhibition in the Middle East. It spans more than 25 years of Hirst’s artistic career, and includes both iconic and previously unseen works. In Relics, Hirst has remained dedicated to exploring the complex relationship between art, love, life and death. What work will be on display? His instantly recognisable works include the spot paintings, the series of animals preserved in formaldehyde and the diamond skulls, For the Love of God (2007) and For Heaven’s Sake, which will be shown together for the first time in Relics. qma.org.qa
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OctOber
CALENDAR
October 11 to 20, glasgow and edinburgh, scotland
ScOtLand LOveS aniMe 2013
October 12 to January 5, 2014, Tokyo, Japan
Ever and Never: The Art of Peanuts
This exhibition, curated by the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, will feature 100 original drawings by the creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip never before seen in Japan, as well as a selection of sketches and photos. The exhibition will be hosted by the Mori Arts Centre Gallery on the 52nd floor of Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills.
The scotland Loves anime 2013 festival, which takes place in both glasgow (october 11 to october 13) and edinburgh (october 14 to october 20), scotland, aims to promote the art of animation with film screenings, workshops, exhibitions and graduate showcases. LovesanimaTion.com
mori.arT.museum/eng
October 13, chicago, usa
Chicago Marathon October 17 to 20, London, uK
Frieze LOndOn
staged by the publishers of Frieze magazine in regent’s Park, London, Frieze London is one of the highlights of the contemporary art calendar. This year’s show features hundreds of galleries, as well as a programme of talks and the Frieze Film and Frieze Projects exhibitions, which feature works commissioned especially for the event.
It’s probably a bit late to enter this year’s Chicago Marathon, but if you’re in the Windy City, it’s worth going along to watch the 40,000 plus runners who take part in one of the six races that make up the World Marathon Majors championship. chicagomaraThon.com
FriezeLondon.com
Mapped
rio de Janeiro page 65 39
Open skies / OctOber 2013
OCTOBER
CALENDAR
October 21 to 30, Dublin, Ireland
DUBLIN PUPPET FESTIVAL
Featuring 13 puppet theatre companies from around the world, this year’s Dublin Puppet Festival will feature shows, workshops and discussions. PUPPETFEST.IE
October 10 to November 28, Europe
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan and his band embark on a European tour this month, which will see them perform 30 gigs across Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Italy, France and the UK. The tour will begin in Oslo, Norway, and end with three nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. BOBDYLAN.COM
Until November 4, Paris, France
Roy Lichtenstein: Une retrospective October 28, Athens, Greece
OCHI DAY PARADE
Some people would see the annual Ochi Day Parade as a reason not to visit Athens, but if you are game for busy streets and a carnival atmosphere, you should head to the Greek capital on October 28. The Greek’s commemorate Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxes’ refusal to allow Benito Mussolini’s forces to occupy Greek territory in 1940 with a public holiday and military and student parades.
An exhibition of pop art paintings by Roy Lichtenstein opens at The Centre Pompidou in Paris this month, featuring some of the artist’s most famous works, including Whaam! (1963), as well as his lesser-known sculptures and Chinese-style landscapes.
What is Gulf return?
Column
page 81
CENTREPOMPIDOU.FR
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OPEN SKIES / OCTOBER 2013
THE GRID
October 10 to 12 WWE Abu Dhabi, UAE WWE wrestlers, including WWE Champion Randy Orton, will perform at Zayed Sports City Tennis Stadium this month. wwe.com
October 29 to November 1, Dubai, UAE
Downtown Design
Cristina Romelli Gervasoni is Fair Director for Downtown Design
October 11 The Killers @ Sandance Dubai, UAE American rock band The Killers will headline the first Sandance festival of the season at Atlantis The Palm, supported by Icelandic indie-folk five piece Of Monsters and Men and Bob Marley’s former band, The Wailers. sandance.ae
What is Downtown Design? Downtown Design is owned and managed by Art Dubai Fairs LLC, the company behind Art Dubai and Design Days Dubai – two of the most successful art and design collectors’ fairs in the region. Downtown Design will bring together a selection of international design brands renowned for their quality products and focus on manufacturing craftsmanship. The Fair will be the first design event in the region that is focused on showcasing the best in international design and the newest trends. Why does Dubai need an event like Downtown Design? Downtown Design aims to be a major catalyst in the growth of the design industry, and Dubai has enormous potential to become a
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OPEN SKIES / OCTOBER 2013
October 11 Omid Djalili Dubai, UAE British comedian Omid Djalili returns to Dubai for a performance at Dubai World Trade Centre on October 11. omidnoagenda.com
global center for design. There is a distinct lack of high-quality design events in the region. Despite there being a natural demand, there is currently no design fair of international standard. What will it offer visitors? Held in a unique venue at the foot of Burj Khalifa, the fair will not only showcase design from some of the world’s top brands, there will also be special installations such as Temporary Museum of Milano, which has never exhibited before in the Middle East. In addition, there will public talks with lead designers, such as Pauline Deltour and Giulio Cappellini. Visitors can expect to see design never seen before in the region, increase their knowledge through the fair’s extensive programme and meet with leading design brands and top designers. downtowndesign.com
the question
WHY CAN’T SOME PEOPLE TELL LEFT FROM RIGHT? You’re driving down the street with your friend in the passenger seat, giving you directions. “Turn right here,” your friend says. You turn right. Your friend turns bright red. Is he having a heart attack? No, he’s angry. He thinks you’re an idiot. But it’s not your fault, you thought you were turning left. You’re one of those people. You suffer from what scientists, with their degrees and doctorates and whatnot, have dubbed “left-right confusion”. Simple. Concise. Does what it says on the tin, etc. Why complicate matters further? Firstly, don’t worry, you’re not a alone. Many people suffer from left-right confusion. In 1978, researchers polled 364 university staff, and found that many of them couldn’t tell left from right. These were smart people. The same researchers thought it was a problem mainly suffered by women, but today’s experts are sceptical about that, believing
TWITTER Q&A @sage_gateshead explains itself in 140 characters of less
instead that women are just more likely to admit that they have a left-right problem. The truth is that the science fraternity doesn’t really know why some people are terrible at giving directions. Lateralisation – the idea that the left side of the brain deals with some functions, while the right deals with others – could have something to do with it. The more asymmetrical your brain, the more prone to left-right confusion you are. In 2009, some British scientists discovered that people who could hear better in one ear than the other were more likely to suffer the affliction. But even they weren’t sure. It seems you’re not the only one who is confused. Now, if you could just take a right here.
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@OpenSkiesMag: We are looking for a cool venue to interview via Twitter for the October issue. Interested? @sage_gateshead: Hi, Sounds interesting! What sort of things would you want to discuss? Upcoming events etc? Thanks @OpenSkiesMag: Yes. Very basic stuff. We can do it now if you like? @sage_gateshead: Fire away! @OpenSkiesMag: What is Sage Gateshead? @sage_gateshead: Sage Gateshead is an international home for music and musical discovery. We also host international conferences & events. @OpenSkiesMag: What sort of events do you hold there? @sage_gateshead: We host a range of music styles from rock to classical & jazz to world! We have a huge education programme suitable for all! @OpenSkiesMag: What can visitors expect if they visit in October? @sage_gateshead: Highlights include @RNSinfonia, @ thefeeling, Halle, @TravisBand & @jamiecullum. We’re also hosting BBC Free Thinking Festival. @OpenSkiesMag: Aside from the live music, what else could visitors sign up for in October? @sage_gateshead: A wide range of music-making classes suitable for pregnant women through to our popular over 50s Silvers Programme. @OpenSkiesMag: Sorry, was that the answer to our first question, or the one about the BBC Freethinking Festival? @sage_gateshead: That was to the first question, we’ve replied to the BBC Free Thinking tweet. @sage_gateshead: BBC Radio 3 brings together leading thinkers for a weekend of provocative debate, new ideas, music and performances. @OpenSkiesMag: That’s great. Thank you very much. Goodnight.
the street
East Bund, Shanghai
Words and images by James Bollen
If someone mentioned Shanghai’s Bund to you, familiar images of its Art Deco buildings, such as the Peace Hotel, would probably come to mind. But if they mentioned the East Bund, you may not even be aware of its existence.
The East Bund is in the city’s northeastern district of Yangpu. Despite having an array of industrial and residential buildings dating from the city’s 1920s heyday, and history as intriguing as can be found downtown, it is often
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overlooked by tourists and expatriates alike. With the opening of the Shanghai International Fashion Center in 2012, and the extension of a subway line to the area, which will be built in the next couple of years, this is set to change.
Yangshupu Road and Shanghai lane houses Lane houses with a mix of Chinese and Western architecture unique to Shanghai dot the length of the East Bund’s main thoroughfare, Yangshupu Road, which was built in 1863 and runs across Yangpu’s entire waterfront. For a taste of traditional Shanghai lane life, walk along their alleys, where you can explore buildings dating from the city’s 1920s and 1930s heyday.
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Over the years many lane houses have disappeared from the centre, or been garishly restored, while Yangpu’s remain raw and undeveloped. Look out for four numbers above their entrances – they mark the year they were constructed. Yangshupu Road starts near the Line 4 metro station of the same name. The first train departs at 6.01am, the last at 10:01pm. Yangshupu Road
Open skies / OctOber 2013
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the street
Shanghai Waterworks Science and Technology Museum
Starting at the western end of Yangshupu Road, the fortress-like Yangshupu Waterworks were built in 1883 in the Victorian Tudoresque style by the British-owned Shanghai Waterworks Company Ltd. It was the first modern water plant to operate in China, is one of the country’s oldest, and supplies drinking water to more than two million residents today. As it’s still in operation, the plant is closed to visitors. However, the vast area it covers can be glimpsed by visiting the waterworks museum. Although most of the captions are in Chinese, among the museum’s collection is an array of fascinating photographs of old Shanghai, and both Chinese and foreign staff working at the waterworks. 830 Yangshupu Road Tel: +86 21 65126789
Shanghai International Fashion Center
Four-and-a-half kilometres from the western end of Yangshupu Road, the Shanghai International Fashion Center was formerly the Number 17 Cotton Mill. Shoppers seeking
bargains from international brand name factory outlets, rather than workers, now fill the factory buildings. At the same time, both upcoming and established young Chinese designers who can’t afford to rent retail space and only sell their clothes on popular domestic online sites such as Taobao
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have, as part of a government initiative, been given an area within the centre to showcase and sell their wares. There’s a chance you could buy a piece made by a future Chinese equivalent of Vivienne Westwood or Paul Smith. 2866 Yangshupu Road Tel: +86 21 6070 8200 in-sfc.com
the street
Longchang Apartments
Fans of Chinese cinema should head up Longchang Road to the Longchang Apartments just past Pingliang Road at number 362, where scenes from Kung Fu Hustle, directed by Stephen Chow, were filmed. You may come across his young fans paying pilgrimage to the place. The building used to be part of the Glen Road Police Station built and run by the British in the 1920s. It is now home to more than 200 families, and while they live in basic and cramped conditions, they enjoy close relations with their neighbours. 362 Longchang Road
MD Gallery
The MD Gallery is situated in a renovated textile factory at 188 Linqing Road, and the gallery’s roster of contemporary talent includes street artists JR, Shepard Fairey and Zhang Dali, as well as other famous and emerging Chinese and international artists. In JR’s case, part of his Wrinkles of the City project is set in Yangpu District, a result, as owner Magda Danysz explains, of his feeling “that this was the most authentic part of Shanghai and I wanted to pay a tribute to the people of the district by bringing art there”. Magda says the work exhibited in the gallery
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showcases site specific projects and lets visitors see “how the artists can interpret our world, and gives us insight into their vision of our contemporary environment”. So far Magda’s gallery is the only major gallery to be found in the area. Does that make it a pioneer? She says the gallery’s location is a “very local part of town: a real feel of Shanghai”. At the same time, she notes that while the area is changing, “the magic of Yangpu is based on the subtle balance between tradition and a futuristic vision. All in one district”. 188 Linqing Road Tel: +86 21 16748872 magda-gallery.com
Pack in a world of memories and souvenirs
From a City Centre, near you. For those who love to travel, no matter where you go, there is a City Centre for you. Visit and discover a perfect addition to your itinerary. Enjoy shopping for popular fashion brands, the latest gadgets, unique souvenirs and indulge in a wide range of dining delights. Welcome to City Centre. Easy to visit but hard to leave. citycentremall.com D E I R A
M I R D I F
S H A R J A H
A J M A N
F U J A I R A H
B A H R A I N
M U S C AT
Q U R U M
M A A D I
A L E X A N D R I A
B E I R U T
the street
Chiang Kai-shek’s Old Villa and Fuxing Island Park A curious adjunct to the Shanghai International Fashion Center lies further east over on Fuxing Island. To get there, continue south along Dinghai Road beside the fashion centre to Dinghai Bridge, which (perhaps in a nod to the street art on show in Magda Gallery) is adorned with the graffiti of lovesick high school students. After crossing the bridge, continue up Gongqing Road to Fuxing Island Park. It’s about a 20-minute walk to the park along
the factory and tree-lined road. Or take bus number 577 just past the ferry on Dinghai Road and alight at the third stop. Uniquely located beside cargo wharves, you can hear the mechanical clanks of cranes and glimpse them through the park’s trees. It’s also the location of a villa said to belong to Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek where he spent his last ever night in Shanghai, and mainland China, before escaping via a waiting ship to Taiwan in 1949. The park’s staff may show you
Mixer
The aptly named Mixer is (for now) Shanghai International Fashion Center’s one and only café restaurant, which also has a branch in Taipei, by way of Italy – its main dishes are spaghetti and pizza-based. In addition there’s a selection of Taiwanese bubble teas and ‘Ice Mountain’ desserts. While manager Chen Erdong says this branch of Mixer isn’t directly inspired by Milan or Versace, he’s sure it will “be an influence on and influenced by” the Shanghai International Fashion Center. Building Number 12, Shanghai International Fashion Center Tel: +86 21 6070 8176 sifc.org.cn
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the entrance to the underground tunnel leading from the villa to the Huangpu River, which they say Chiang left from (the tunnel itself is considered too dangerous to enter). Though the park was rebuilt and reopened in 2009, Chiang’s old villa, like other parts of the district, looks virtually untouched. It’s somewhat symbolic of Yangpu’s seldom explored blend of the developing and the developed. 386 Gongqing Road Tel: +86 21 6568 3806
skypod
Pete Wareham Genre: Jazz AGe: Undisclosed City: London
Jazz super-group Melt Yourself Down recently released their self-titled debut album. The group’s saxophonist, Pete Wareham, formerly a member of experimental jazz bands Acoustic Ladyland and Polar Bear, reveals his favourite tracks
01.
02. 03. 04.
Nuba Nour Lil Baladina
Rango Holeela
Dr John Revolution
Rufus Harley Bagpipe Blues
I arrived in Copenhagen to play Roskilde with the Heliocentrics after a journey spent listening to Nubian music, and at the airport I met a master Nubian drummer playing with Nuba Nour. I was bowled over by the coincidence – and this track.
Following that chance meeting at the airport, I checked out some of the other acts associated with Nuba Nour, and these guys came up. Listening to this while driving along the Hastings beachfront on a hot day is bliss.
I spent last summer listening to this. Turns out some friends of mine know half the band very well, and another friend has a contact in New Orleans, should we ever fancy visiting. Bring it on.
My friend was Rufus Harley’s manager, and said he was a very mystical person. Rufus phoned him the day before his daughter was born and accurately predicted the sex and weight of the baby and the time of her birth.
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05. 06. 07.
08.
Dincer Dalkilic Egeli Gemici (Aegean Sailor)
Abdul Khalil Ensemble Samra Ya Samra
Esma Redzepova & Usnija Jasarova Romano Horo
Recently I have been loving Turkish and Arabic music – the energy, the precision, the joy. Incredible technique mixed with raw humanity.
From the album Eternal Egypt. The directness and energy of Africa mixed with the sophistication and elegance of Arabian virtuosity.
Atoms For Peace Before Your Very Eyes I’ve always been a Thom Yorke fan, and this track from his new project is fantastic. A wonderful blend of earthiness and electronica.
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From Songs Of A Macedonian Gypsy. Sweet voices, wild clarinets and rampant guitars – like a wild dance by the fire in the middle of the night.
the Room
TexT: giNA jOhNSON iMAgeS: CAFÉ ROYAL
ROOM 422
CAFÉ ROYAL, LONDON
With the inescapable throng of London’s Piccadilly Circus on its doorstep, the newly revived Café Royal is a soothing oasis of Brit cool. The once famous haunt of literary legends and aristocrats has (mostly) shed its former chintz to reveal a slick, luxurious inner shell of masculine luxury, sophisticated technology and extreme comfort. Retaining the more iconic hallmarks of bygone years, the legendary Grill Room remains as it ever was, majestically restored to its original Louis XVI decor, to preserve the memories of celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Princess Diana and other luminaries of last century who were once patrons. The décor is a fusion of old and new features, the original marble staircase – painstakingly restored by hand during the four-year renovation period – juxtaposed against the metropolitan-style loft spaces of the suites and street-accessible The Bar, which is frequented by a mixed bag of suits, cashed-up tourists and Soho’s hip set. At the heart of the hotel sits Ten Room; with his menu featuring Loch Duart salmon, Cornish crab and Challans duck breast, executive chef Andrew Turner provides a faultless interpretation of traditional British cuisine outshone only by the extraordinary talent of famed pastry chef Simon Jenkins. If there’s one place where you might consider ordering dessert first, this is it.
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INTERNET SPEED: 35MB PILLLOWS: Four (hypoallergenic pillows on request) BED SIZE: 200cm x 200cm CLUB SANDWICH DELIVERY TIME: 21 minutes COMPLEMENTARY SNACKS: Fruit bowl, homemade chocolates, mineral water and Taittinger Champagne TOILETRY BRAND: Floris EXTRAS: Nespresso machine, sound system, television set inside the bathroom mirror TV CHANNELS: 48 VIEW: 4/5 RATE: Starting price for this suite, £1,500 (US$2,330)
Three new bouTique hoTel openings
thE BUngaLows dallas, Usa
Hotel ZaZa Dallas has opened 12 one- and twobedroom suites in addition to its 153-room hotel. The suites have their own kitchens, living rooms, porches and patios and are decorated with a selection of contemporary art and curios such as a 1960s VW Beetle tailgate and a 1940s television. hotelzaza.com
Vida downtown dubai, UaE
Vida Downtown is a new 157-room property in Downtown Dubai, a short walk from Burj Khalifa and The Dubai Mall. The hotel has two restaurants: 3 In 1, which serves what it describes as “modern oriental cuisine”, and La Serre Bistro and Boulangerie, a FrenchMediterranean restaurant and café housed in an attractive two-storey glass cube. vida-hotels.com
thE London Edition London, UK
The second property from Edition Hotels, a collaboration between Ian Schrager and Marriott International, The London Edition has opened in the city’s Fitzrovia neighbourhood. The property has 173 rooms, a restaurant, two bars, an event space and meeting rooms. The group’s first property is The Istanbul Edition. edition-hotels.marriott.com/london
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consume albums
FIlms
THE 20/20 EXPERIENCE PART 2 Justin Timberlake
Pop The follow-up to and second instalment of Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience, released earlier this year, again sees JT team up with long-time producer Timbaland.
NEW Paul McCartney
Pop Macca teams up with Mark Ronson, Ethan Johns, Paul Epworth and Giles Martin for his 16th studio album, and his first since 2007’s Memory Almost Full.
REFLEKTOR Arcade Fire
Indie The follow-up to the Canadian band’s 2010 LP The Suburbs is the their fourth album.
GRAVITY Alfonso Cuaron
Thriller The director of Children Of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth focuses his lens on an astronaut (George Clooney) and a medical engineer (Sandra Bullock) who are left floating around in space following an accident.
12 YEARS A SLAVE Steve McQueen
THE COUNSELOR Ridley Scott
Director steve mcQueen once again teams up with the inimitable michael Fassbender to tell the tale of the abduction of freed slave solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), but this time Fassbender is joined by brad Pitt, benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti and Paul Dano.
Written by National book award winner Cormac mcCarthy and directed by sir Ridley scott, this story of a lawyer embroiled in drug trafficking stars michael Fassbender, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Javier bardem and brad Pitt.
Historical drama
Thriller
books
DAVID AND GOLIATH Malcolm Gladwell
Non-fiction The doyen of pop social science uses the dog-eared tale of the shepherd boy David’s victory over the giant Goliath to explore how people overcome seemingly impossible odds.
POLICE Jo Nesbo
Crime The latest police procedural from the kingpin of Scandinavian crime noir, Jo Nesbo, follows Detective Harry Hole as he investigates a series of Oslo police murders in his own inimitable style.
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BLEEDING EDGE Thomas Pynchon
Fiction American literary giant Thomas Pynchon’s first novel to be set in New York since his 1963 debut, V., explores the murky world of Manhattan’s new media hub, Silicon Alley.
consume THE BOOKSHOP
Atlantis Books
HIPPY TALE / Philosophy graduates Craig and Oliver left the States, drove to Greece in a van and opened a bookshop
What brought you to Santorini? Philosophy. My friend Oliver and I were both studying back in 2002, and we needed time out. Someone mentioned Santorini. We went to Athens and got on the boat. It’s quite a leap from boatride to bookshop. What happened? We ran out of books. There was nowhere to buy more. That’s when I had the idea. Oliver loved it, and said let’s call it Atlantis Books. How serious were you? So serious that we called the American Embassy in Athens. A woman there told us there’d be no problem. She lied, but it was a wonderful lie. So the wonderful lie became reality. Yeah, all through graduation and when we went back home to the States the idea wouldn’t leave us alone. Oliver and I worked like hell day and night in different jobs to save some money. Some good friends got involved too. When and how did you return? In January 2004 a bunch of us met in London. The original six, the Motley Crew. We bought a van and drove to Greece. What happened that first year? An incredible building was free, just below the castle, where people gather to watch the sunset. We set up shop there and friends just kept coming. It was one long literary cocktail party. Then we got kicked out. How big a blow was that? It felt like we should carry on. A ruin was available in the centre of town. We took it and set about renovations. How did the locals react? Some thought we were a cult, others a CIA outpost or opium den. In time, though, they mellowed. Overall the community was great. They took us more seriously than we took ourselves. Times have been tough. How have you made it through? Local support is crucial, and the publishing side of the business, Paravion, really took off. Baggage restrictions and digital media were killing us. People still wanted a story, or something special to send home. Katherine Mansfield came to the rescue. We re-packaged her short story Feuille d’Album. The cover looked like an old airmail envelope and you could put a letter inside. Now we print all sorts of stories and ship worldwide. What’s next? I see Atlantis developing as a cultural hub for artists, writers and musicians. We hope to buy an old farmhouse nearby, which would be perfect for that. Next year a festival kicks off on July 4 with two of the original Motley Crew, Maria and Chris, getting married on the shop terrace. After nine years of friendship they realised they were in love. I thought I’d seen it all. Doesn’t get any better. Finally, do you ever worry the volcano will erupt again? Well, if it does we’ve got the best view. atlantisbooks.org
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ImAGeS: WIll BrAdy; CArA tOBe
Oia, Santorini, Greece Questions: Andrew Birbeck / Answers: Co-founder of Atlantis Books, Craig Walzer
BLD
Glasgow
Darin Campbell, executive head chef of Hotel du Vin Glasgow & Bistro, shares his favourite places to eat in Scotland’s largest city
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B
l
d
BREAKFAST
LUNCH
DINNER
Kember & Jones Fine Food Emporium is a deli, café, kitchenware and cookbook store. There’s not a better place to go in the West End of Glasgow for a relaxing and enjoyable breakfast. Kember & Jones café sits in the heart of trendy Byres Road – a must-see destination if visiting Glasgow, which is full of restaurants, cafés, independent stores and fashionable watering holes, and great for a spot of people watching. I always order the vanilla poached pears with Greek yoghurt and honey, and my wife enjoys their coffee – it’s their own signature espresso blend, 100 per cent Arabica – along with a delicious pastry from their own bakery. It’s breakfast heaven. Enjoy a stroll to the Botanic Gardens at the top of Byres Road to work off the pastry.
Recently opened Burger Meats Bun is the new kid on the block for relaxed, informal dining in Glasgow. It’s run by Ben Dantzic and James Forrest, both ex-Michelin – one was a chef, the other front of house – who are following their passion for simple food done brilliantly. Attention to detail is second to none, and you can see that all the way through the business, from branding to plate. Last time I had the Smokin’ Bacon Burger – home cured and smoked bacon, Dale End Cheddar, spiced ketchup and BMB burger sauce with braised onions. Don’t forget to order a side of the Thai Chilli Cheese Chips – unforgettable. They also have a great range and knowledge of quality beers, spirits and wines. It’s the ultimate posh burger joint.
Travel back to the West End for dinner at The Hanoi Bike Shop – Glasgow’s first Vietnamese canteen. Wandering into this lantern-filled restaurant is the perfect escape from the rush of the city. Old bikes and tools adorn the walls and create an authentic feel. The welcome is warm and the food is the best Vietnamese I’ve tasted in the UK. I love to have the Lo So Bo – slow cooked beef flank with cinnamon, anise and clove soy. This place is a fantastic choice for vegetarians, as they make their own tofu in-house. For a fresh and light dish, try the Rau Mui Dau Phu: Bike Shop homemade tofu and fresh coriander with seasonal greens in chilli and lime soy – you won’t find better.
Kember & Jones Deli Café 134 Byres Road, Glasgow G12 8TD Tel: +44 (0) 1413373851 kemberandjones.co.uk
Burger Meats Bun 48A West Regent Street, Glasgow G2 2RA Tel: +44 (0) 1413536712 burger-meats-bun.co.uk
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The Hanoi Bike Shop Ruthven Lane, Glasgow G12 9BG Tel: +44 (0) 1413347165 thehanoibikeshop.co.uk
Introduces
HOTELS
&
RESORTS
For your business trips, conventions, seminars & incentives
Bamako, Bangui, Banjul, Bissau, Brazzaville, Dar Es Salaam, Djerba Entebbe, Hammamet, Kigali, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Tunis
www.ledgerhotels.com www.laicohotels.com
mapped SEDAWATTA
13 SAO CRISTOVAO
15 CENTRO MARACANA
SINGHAPURA
ANARAI
04
CATETE
RIO COMPRIDO
14
TIJUCA
URCA
BOTAFOGAL 05 06 06
16
08
07 01 COPACABANA
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10 03
11
IPANEMA
02 09
Rio de Janeiro
It’s an exciting time to be in Rio de Janeiro. As the city gears up to host the World Cup next year and the Summer Olympics in 2016, Rio is in even more of a party mood than usual. But let’s face it: the pursuit of pleasure (and leisure) is nothing short of the Carioca way of life. From the expanses of white beaches to the waterside cabanas where cachaça is poured by the litre, and the bohemian-chic restaurants that crowd the hilltops of Santa Teresa, Rio is a destination for those in pursuit of the vida boa.
HOteLs
restaurants
bars
GaLLerIes
01. Copacabana Palace Hotel 02. Fasano rio 03. La suite rio 04. Hotel santa teresa
05. Miam Miam 06. Olympe 07. epifania Oriental Contemporâneo 08. roberta sudbrack
09. baretto Londra 10. academia da Cachaça 11. bar D’Hotel 12. Palaphita Kitch
13. Museu de arte do rio (Mar) 14. Museu Internacional de arte naïf do brasil 15. a Gentil Carioca 16. ateliê Monica Carvalho
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mapped HOTELS 01 Copacabana Palace Hotel Perhaps Rio’s most storied hotel, the glamorous Copacabana Palace, which overlooks the Avenida Atlântica beach, has long been the byword for Brazilian elegance. Since 1923 the Art Deco landmark has attracted a steady stream of rich and famous guests. 02 Fasano Rio It’s only fair to expect impossibly glamourous décor when Philippe Starck is at the helm. The Fasano Rio design hotel supplies mid-century bossa nova style (varnished wood floors, tufted leather chairs) and ocean views in abundance.
eLeCTRiC avenue / Avenida Atlantica spans the full length of Balneario Beach
rESTauranTS
03 La Suite Rio This boutique hotel is decidedly exclusive: it houses just seven rooms. If you’re lucky enough to score a reservation, expect spacious accommodation, two pools, a tropical garden and even access to a private beach.
05 Miam Miam The delightfully kitsch Miam Miam, outfitted in 1950s retro furnishings, serves up rib-sticking, comfort food iterations of Brazilian classics. The city’s foodies flock here for the spicy moqueca (seafood stew) and French-inflected dishes.
04 Hotel Santa Teresa Situated in the trendy heart of boho, Santa Teresa, the eponymous design hotel, occupies a historic coffee plantation mansion. Santa Teresa attracts a young and stylish crowd with its sleek rooms, lounge bar, gastronomic restaurant and spa.
06 Olympe A 30 year-old Rio institution, haute dining destination Olympe recently underwent a redesign and menu edit. In its sleeker, more contemporary guise, the restaurant’s tasting menu includes delicately
01
03
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handled, masterful dishes like sole with taro, beetroot carpaccio, and lemon caviar. 07 epifania Oriental Contemporâneo Helmed by chef Juliana Reis, (still only in her mid-twenties), Epifania brings an enlivening breath of haute Asian cooking to the upscale Leme neighbourhood. Plates like panko-crusted salmon sushi are best washed down with a sake caipirinha. 08 Roberta Sudbrack Before opening her own restaurant, chef Roberta Sudbrack cooked for seven years at the Presidential Palace. Her attention to detail shows: gorgeous plates like Dorado with green corn compote showcase her winning take on light, tropical Brazilian fare.
07
mapped
GaLLErIEs 13 Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) The newly opened Museu de Arte do Rio, which partly occupies the former Dom João Palace, comprises a rapidly expanding collection of Brazilian artwork, spread out across eight galleries. The architectural wonder is crowned with a striking, undulating rooftop. ARt sCeNe / A Gentil Carioca is a major showcase for Brazil’s contemporary art scene
bars 09 Baretto Londra Perhaps the city’s most lavish and upmarket lounge, Baretto Londra attracts a glamorous and wellheeled set. Located on the ground floor of the Fasano Hotel, the bar sports an Anglophile theme, done up in Union Jacks and British album covers. 10 Academia da Cachaça Rum-like cachaça is Rio’s spirit of choice, and whether it’s mixed into a caipirinha or drunk straight, it’s sure to slake your thirst. Lively Academia da Cachaça stocks hundreds of bottles of the stuff, accompanied by savoury bar snacks.
12 Palaphita Kitch An oasis of a bar on the banks of Rio’s Lagoa, Palaphita Kitch provides a classic tropical vibe with its open-air environs, thatched canopies, and array of caipirinhas flavoured with native fruits like umbu and jabuticaba.
15 A Gentil Carioca A cutting-edge gallery in the up-and-coming, historic Centro neighbourhood, A Gentil Carioca plumbs the diversity of Brazil’s contemporary art scene. With a focus on young, local artists, exhibits include paintings, sculptures, installations, and conceptual work. 16 Ateliê Monica Carvalho Artist Monica Carvalho’s workshop-cum-gallery is dedicated to native Brazilian crafts, which are made from indigenous materials ranging from hedgehog quills to hand-woven fabrics. Sourced from Brazil’s interior, raw supplies are used by Carvalho for jewellery and sculptural pieces.
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Bar D’Hotel On the second floor of Leblon’s high-end Marina All Suites Hotel, the rainbow-hued Bar D’Hotel offers sweeping views of the shoreline and a menu of one-of-akind Brazilian cocktails. The spicy, sour, and watermelon-heavy Gisela is dangerously sippable.
14 Museu Internacional de Arte Naïf do Brasil Dedicated to the “naïve” genre, which is characterised by its bold colours and patterning, the MIAN displays works ranging from paintings by Henri Rousseau, the genre’s forefather, to contemporary Brazilian examples by Aparecido Azedo.
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LOCAL KNOwLEDGE
Women’s Museum
They worked behind closed doors, deftly managing property, construction and retail businesses without ever leaving their homes Words by Tahira Yaqoob / Images by Farooq Salik
T
he UAE’s founding fathers and entrepreneurs are often heralded as the pioneers of their time, forging international trade and diplomatic links in what was then a new dawn for the nation. But what has not been lauded quite as loudly – until now – is the role their wives, mothers and daughters played in building the solid foundations of the nation’s political, economical and trading clout.
The Women’s Museum in Dubai aims to set the record straight. From education to medicine, politics, literature and industry, it bears testament to the role women in the UAE historically played in creating peace and economic stability for centuries – and largely from their own homes. They might not have been seen doing business in public, but they built intricate networks of employees and business connections by phone and courier, traded everything from
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cattle to property and gold, and were hungry for knowledge, even before the first girls’ school opened in 1935. Today, female undergraduates in the UAE outnumber men two to one and women are present at every level of government and commerce, from Sheikha Lubna Al Qasimi, the Foreign Trade Minister, to Raja Al Gurg, Managing Director of the Easa Saleh al Gurg group. According to the museum, they owe their success to a long tradition of women holding their own against their menfolk. “Women here were empowered a long time ago but have not had a chance to tell their story,” says Professor Rafia Ghubash, the Emirati founder of the museum. “Do not think because we are covered, we are not empowered. Our grandmothers’ achievements are greater than recognised. They
LOCAL KNOwLEDGE Among the exhibits on displAy Are letters, politicAl missives, diAries, jewellery, clothes And household objects
LESSON TIME / The museum aims to educate visitors
worked, they had businesses and they contributed.” The privately-owned museum, spread over three floors and tucked away in a tiny alleyway behind Dubai’s gold souq, has been something of a labour of love for Professor Ghubash. The university academic and practising psychiatrist had long wanted to build a cultural centre, and when a house near her childhood home in Deira came on the market, she bought it in 2007. Known as Bayt Al Banaat (House of Girls) because of the unmarried women living there, the building had special significance for Prof Ghubash, who remembered being dispatched there as a child by her mother, bearing gifts. It also inspired her to come up with the theme of a celebration of the UAE’s most notable women. The professor ploughed an estimated $4 million of her own money and spent nearly seven years carrying out painstaking research and collating artefacts. Little was written in history books. Instead, Prof Ghubash – whose first job on her stellar career path was as an investigative reporter
– had to rely on old-fashioned methods of research, knocking on more than 800 doors and begging Emirati friends and relatives to trawl their archives and family heirlooms for significant finds. Her royal connections helped, and when the museum finally opened in December last year, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President
and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, spent two hours examining its treasure trove. “The museum took a long time to complete,” says Prof Ghubash. “I spent four years doing research full-time. It was not easy at all. Everything was done from scratch.” In the end, Prof Ghubash collated such vast reams of material, only a fraction could be included in the museum. The rest will eventually form an encyclopaedia and digital archive. Among the exhibits on display are letters, political missives, diaries, jewellery, clothes and household objects, all telling a story of the
ON dISpLay / All the exhibits aim to tell a story
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LOCAL KNOwLEDGE evolution of women’s roles over the past 200 years, against the backdrop of the ever-transforming UAE. We learn that women fought alongside men to protect the coast at Ras Al Khaimah in 1819 when the British mounted a campaign to protect trade from India being raided around what they termed ‘the pirate coast’. In 1956, when Arab nationalistic fervour ran high, Emirati women made their voices heard on radio and in newspapers. They held political forums in their majlises and, in 1971, Emirati schoolgirls staged demonstrations over three islands being contested by the UAE and Iran. Then there are the individual tales of derring-do and determination. There was Suhaila
Bint Al Shaikh, who began trading cattle, perfume, gold and textiles from the age of 17 in the 1940s, before becoming one of the most successful property brokers of her time in Dubai; Sheikha Sana Bint Mane Al Maktoum, a ship broker and property manager; Lubna Lootah, an architectural engineer turned fashion designer. Among the royal family, Professor Ghubash came across numerous stories of women who led by example. They included Sheikha Latifa Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan, wife of the late ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, who instilled leadership and political skills in her children, Sheikha Salama Bint Boti, the mother of the UAE’s founder
A speciAl wing is dedicAted to the poet oushA bint khAlifA Al suwAidi, known As ‘the girl of the ArAbs’ 75
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Sheikh Zayed, who brought an end to decades of tribal warfare by extracting a promise from her sons to maintain peace, and Sheikha Meera Bint Mohammed Al Suweidi, the wife of Sharjah’s former ruler, Sheikh Sultan Bin Saqr Al Qassimi, who took over the reins and ran the emirate for two years while her husband was undergoing medical treatment. A special wing is dedicated to the poet Ousha Bint Khalifa Al Suwaidi, known as ‘the girl of the Arabs’, with calligraphy-inscribed walls featuring her work, while a floor of the museum is given a contemporary twist with an exhibition of leading female Emirati artists such as Maitha Demaithan and Alia Al Lootah.
LOCAL KNOwLEDGE
History girls / The museum’s arhive boast a glut of historical images like these
But at the heart of the museum is Prof Ghubash’s true inspiration – her mother. Born in 1932, Ousha Bint Hussain Lootah never went to school, but she was a consummate businesswoman, juggling property and retail interests and becoming one of the first women in Dubai to open her own bank account.
younger generations will keep benefitting from the hardships women before us have gone through “It was a surprise for me to find how good my mother was at documenting everything by camera and by collecting newspapers,” says Prof Ghubash. “For someone who did not have a formal education, she was very intelligent and taught herself. She was a role model.” What she instilled in her six children was the value of education and a sense of self-worth, telling them: “Your rights are born with you. Do not think the government or a man or your husband will give you your rights. They are inside you, you have to practise them.” So Prof Ghubash embarked on a career path in the footsteps of the women she admired.
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She studied medicine at Cairo University before completing a doctorate in epidemiological psychiatry in London. Returning to the UAE, she became assistant professor of psychiatry in Al Ain University, then was voted in as the first female president of the Arabian Gulf University in Bahrain in 2001. During her eight-year stint there, she founded the Arab Network of Women in Science and Technology. And just as she was motivated to succeed by those who had gone before her, a new generation now looks up to her for inspiration. Doctors Alia Al Bawardi and Saeeda Al Marzooqi both studied medicine under Prof Ghubash and are now assistant professors at Al Ain University. They spend every Saturday volunteering at the museum. “Women here have this urge to prove themselves,” says consultant pathologist Al Bawardi. “We do not shy away from hard work and choose difficult careers and longer hours. I think younger generations will keep benefiting from the hardships women before us have gone through.” womenmuseumuae.com
place
Szechenyi Bath and Spa / Budapest Szechenyi Bath and Spa was the first thermal baths on the eastern Pest side of the Hungarian capital, Budapest. Built in 1881 as a temporary public baths, it was converted into a permanent structure in 1913 and the distinctive yellow building was completed. The complex has been upgraded and modernised many time since the early 20th century, but one thing has never changed – its popularity. szechenyibath.com
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Photo: Ami VitAle/NAtioNAl GeoGrAPhic Society/corbiS
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WHAT IS GULF RETURN? Deepak Unnikrishnan was born in India, and he now lives in America – but he was raised in the UAE, where his parents still live. They are building a house in Kerala, where Deepak and his sister will one day return (maybe). This is the story of an expat family Words by Deepak Unnikrishnan / Images Family Photos
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ulf return is a term used to describe former Malayali expats who have returned to their respective hometowns from the Gulf. There is a Gulf Return house being built by my parents in Kerala. It’s my parents’ final project, started late, and it frightens me a little, because it is for the kids i.e. my sister and I. We are expected to live in it, my sister tells me. I cannot guarantee that this will ever happen. Sis takes care of our parents in the UAE. What we may end up doing is visiting, as my parents visited their parents’ homes, dragging us along. My family is used to putting down roots in one country, only to pull them up again. We’ve been doing it for generations.
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My maternal grandparents lived in Nairobi for more than two decades. They spoke Swahili. My mum, Amma, was born there, but eventually everyone returned to the house Grandpa (my mother’s father) had built, piecemeal, in Kerala. The children were sent home first. Elsewhere, my future father, Acchan, had plans of his own. So he left home in his late teens for Bombay, and then left Bombay
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FUN TIMES / Deepak with his mother, Fun City, Al Ain
for the Trucial States in his early I fIrst saw twenties. He met Grandpa in a clinic the InsIde of in the UAE; both men were unaware that they would be in-laws soon. My an aIrcraft mum jokes that she married Acchan when I was for his looks, less impressed by the amenities in his ancestral home – the 80 days old. toilet was an outhouse. My history the Uae Is begins in the Gulf. My parents lived my home their lives in the Gulf. It’s home. I was born in Kerala. I have an Indian passport, but I’ve never lived in the country. I first saw the inside of an aircraft when I was 80 days old. The UAE is my home. It’s where my sister was born. It’s where I did my schooling, where my voice broke, where I first lost family, where I have family. It’s where one of my uncles chipped a tooth eating dates for the first time. The city in which I crushed a pigeon with my BMX. Where Grandpa picked me up from kindergarten in his fire-red pick-up. A place where I scraped my knees on gravel playing football. It’s also where Grandpa died. I don’t recall being on the plane back to Kerala with Grandpa’s coffin, but I remember tiredlooking Gran visiting us months later to get better.
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I am surprised I remember anything at all. I was four. If Cadbury or Nestlé tracked their confectionery buyers in the 1980s and early 1990s, my parents’ would’ve received a commendation for buying more chocolate and biscuits in a day than Willy Wonka’s factory managed to produce in a week. Like most biennales (expats who visit home once every two years), my parents planned our summer trips to Kerala two years in advance. Then they stockpiled. At Customs, in Cochin or Bombay, our suitcases bulged like animals in hibernation. Gulf loot: bras, Yardley powder tins, strong cologne from Duty Free, and other secret things for my aunties. Shirts, pens, liquor and cigarettes for the gents. An extra bottle of Scotch for the thirsty men at Customs. Clothes for the cousins, knick-knacks for the neighbours, and, confirmation
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of my family’s status as bringers of imported wonderfulness, expedition-size tins of Tang and Nido. I made sure we never went without video games, Safari chips, and Disney cartoons. Some trips, mum bought a VCR or a camera; somebody always wanted one. Uncle, mum’s brother, driving Grandpa’s Toyota Corolla, picked us up from the airport. The car used to be red; Uncle painted it black. After the customary rest stop, refreshed by Thumbs-Up or Mango Frooti, when the Corolla eased into Amma’s home, the one Grandpa built, Tingu, destroyer of mailmen, wagged his tail. After Gran passed, the house sat vacant, got sold. Uncle kept the Corolla. When he left for the Gulf himself, he carefully dismantled the car. The car is the family’s Herbie. Grandpa’s in there somewhere. As a family, we last visited India together in 1995. I now live on a different continent. A temporary resident, as I’ve always been. My parents go back and forth sometimes, but the visits, I assume, don’t touch the heydays of our childhood. Back then you visited the motherland as though your family had just “sacked Persia”, as Gran used to put it. You first distributed the plunder, then you spent weeks visiting temples important to your mother, drinking 100 cups of tea or juice in houses you had never been to before and attending the weddings of strangers. If your mother still dressed you in shorts, you stood like a prized colt as aunties pinched your bum, telling you stories about what your father liked to do when he was six. In some
houses, old people picked you up and cried. As you grew older, aunts stopped pinching your bum. They felt your face though, or held your palm. You saw the grey in their hair. They checked if you had any too. Sometimes they asked over the phone if they would see you again. If they did see you, they asked when you would visit again. If your parents weren’t with you, they would inform you that they were waiting for their return. When the house is finished, I would say. When sis marries, they would say. Here’s what’s strange. I barely know these people. They are family, they are blood. They are also strangers, but familiar strangers, people my parents left, whom they may return to. And almost every single one of them has a daughter, a son, a spouse, a grandchild or a relative in the Gulf. It’s a club. I am in it. They are in it. It’s enough to communicate. Malayalam is what I use. I have lived in the U.S. for 12 years. Moved nine times. Existed as student, job-seeker, job-holder, job-leaver, and now student again. I am a visa man. Impermanence has followed me. Deepak Unnikrishnan is a short story writer brought up in the UAE
(clockwise) GRowinG up / Deepak with his parents and grandfather; posing in front of a taxi; with his grandfather; on Abu Dhabi Corniche with his mother and grandmother
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Orfeos
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Words by Joe Minihane / Images by Ferhat Bouda
rankfurt is a city more famed for its financial prowess than a fetish for film. But a short tram ride away from the straight-laced world of Germany’s banking centre sits an independent cinema that is at the vanguard of a thriving,
movie counter-culture. Orfeos is a former type foundry, converted into a theatre in the 1970s before becoming a cinema owned by German film company Pandora. It wasn’t until 1999, though, after a huge refurbishment bankrolled by new owner (and next door neighbour) FunDeMental Studios,
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that it took on its current guise as the focal point of Frankfurt’s arthouse film scene. “The scene here is very strong,” says Antje Witte, who has managed Orfeos since its earliest days at the turn of the 20th century. “You have the financial district, yes. But in every city where you have a financial
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SMALL TIME / Orfeos’ screening room has just 79 seats, preferring the intimacy of a small cinema to the chaos of the multiplex
area there is an underground scene. A very big one. I would say there is a great scene here.” The most striking thing about this one screen space is just how luxurious it is. With mainstream cinemas so focused on stadium seating and cramming thousands of popcorn-munching punters into huge IMAX theatres, it’s a joy to
step into somewhere that feels so personal. “The philosophy was that we wanted to create a room where visitors could escape,” says Witte. “Somewhere you could go and enjoy with friends, a place that was lovely, charming. That idea, it’s timeless.” With just 79 seats, it’s certainly charming, and most definitely not
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a major concern. The adjoining restaurant, which was a separate entity until FunDeMental merged the two in the late 1990s, clearly goes a long way to ensuring Orfeos keeps going. But the rarefied air of the small theatre is the real joy. The back rows are made up of converted reclining first class aeroplane seats from the 1970s,
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dinner date / If you like popcorn with your movie, you’ll be disappointed, but Orfeos’ adjoining restaurant will ensure you don’t go home hungry
replete with extra cushioning and footrests. Cinemagoers are able to bring drinks into the theatre with them from the well-stocked bar and are given an aural treat thanks to full Dolby 7.1 surround sound. Orfeos, with its ties to FunDeMental, is also used as a post-production house for mixing the sound in movies, hence the inclusion of the kind of topend sound technology usually associated with vast rooms in out-of-town movie theatres. This testing helps it earn extra cash to keep the main focus of the business alive and well. While that focus is largely on independent cinema from Germany, Witte says Orfeos
sets itself apart from local rivals by showing carefully selected American films. When we slipped into the theatre, a dubbed trailer for Julianne Moore’s What Maisie Knew follows one for 2012 French caper Paulette. Variety, it seems, is vital in keeping this local hangout different from rival establishments throughout Frankfurt. Likewise, offering more than just standard screenings is what helps keep Orfeos in the limelight and shining as a beacon for new and independent cinema in the city. “There are three other cinemas in Frankfurt that show movies like we do,” says Witte. “But our philosophy is to invite filmmakers and have discussions between them and the audience. We do that very often. Last year we invited 80 guests, that’s a lot. It’s normally German filmmakers, but it depends who is travelling around at any particular moment.”
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In fitting with that ambition of making film a more immersive experience for the audience, there’s a distinct lack of the commercial feel that accompanies many of the more left field cinemas in places like London or New York. When asked whether the stunning main room is a pain to clean up after hungry movie lovers have scattered sticky popcorn across the floor, Witte replies that the Orfeos doesn’t sell the popular cinema snack. It’s evidently a wilful attempt to make the whole experience a touch less grubby and slightly fancier than your average cinema trip. Then there’s the lack of pre-movie commercials. The bane of most film fanatics’ lives, the Orfeos eschews them in order to serve up short films after a smattering of trailers. “We often show short films before the feature starts, but only when it fits
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store to the main movie,” says Witte. “So there’s not an action short followed by a comedy feature or vice versa. Our guests like it because they know they have to be on time to see the latest in new short cinema.” This love of shorts saw Orfeos host the German Short Film Award tour earlier this year, giving punters the chance to check out new movies and get the inside line on filmmakers who will doubtless be returning for Q&As about their own features in years to come. Understandably, this singular approach, coupled with Orfeos’ location outside of central Frankfurt, means that Witte and her team have to fight hard to ensure that it remains on the city’s cultural map. “It’s very important, you have to remember where we are,” says Witte, looking out from the restaurant’s deck and down to the quiet road and tramline in front. “Around here there is nothing. There’s the odd hotel, but that’s it. We used to have the university here, but it closed step-by-step and moved to the north of Frankfurt. It’s not so easy.” This shift has meant that there’s been a major change in the crowd that graces Orfeos each evening. “I would
short stuff / Orfeos hosted the the German Short Film Award tour in 2013
say our guests have changed from younger guests to older ones,” says Witte. “It’s important that younger people come, it’s why we show the shorter films. It’s important to excite them.” Despite this, it’s evident that Witte’s enthusiasm, coupled with a reputation for showing the best in new cinema, means Orfeos is in a strong position. And while many may look to Berlin
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and beyond for a taste of German film, the team here has managed to subvert Frankfurt’s staid global reputation as a hub for flights and finance and put Orfeos at the front and centre of the city’s culture. Hamburger Allee 45 60486 Frankfurt Tel: +496970769100 orfeos.de
The Man Who Saved Pixar How Apple’s founder Steve Jobs (with a little help) took Pixar from relative obscurity to unparallelled success
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our man in: Architect Ricardo Bofill’s life in Barcelona the future: You think the internet is big now? Wait until the Internet of Things arrives david frost: Some very cool pictures of the veteran broadcaster
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A SPORTING
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STRUGGLING TO FINANCE THEIR CAREERS THROUGH TRADITIONAL METHODS, MANY YOUNG ATHLETES ARE TURNING TO THE INTERNET, AND THE CROWD, TO FUND THEIR SPORTING DREAMS
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SMILEY FACES / Ski racing brothers Drew (above) and Danny Duffy (below) turned to crowdfunding to finance their sporting dreams
rew and Danny Duffy are two normal kids from suburban Massachusetts who happen to be exceptionally good at Alpine ski racing. In middle school, the Duffy Brothers, or D2 as they affectionately refer to themselves, and their family relocated to Green Mountain Valley School in Vermont. At the renowned ski academy, they trained twice a day and hit the slopes every morning in the winter between studying. The work paid off. Drew, 18, and Danny, 19, are the No 1 ranked giant slalom skiers in their respective age groups. A few months ago, the United States Ski Team came calling and extended the duo an invitation to join the development programme for the 2013-2014 season. But with great athletic success comes great financial strain. “Our family, like many others with athletes pursuing their athletic dreams, has happily supported our boys on the road to the National Team,” says the boys’
The Duffy family needed some help. They found it in the crowd. The boys launched a campaign to raise US$50,000 on RallyMe.com, a crowdfunding site targeted to athletes 98
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CROWD FUNDED / Drew Duffy couldn’t have joined the US Ski Team’s development squad if it wasn’t for the US$52,601donated by the public
mother, Betsy. “The costs involved – with private education, equipment and travel for two top-level ski racers – are extensive.” Those costs rose when they learned that the US Ski Team requires development squad members to pay $25,000 to cover food, travel and other costs. The Duffy family needed some help. They found it in the crowd. The boys launched a campaign to raise $50,000 on RallyMe.com, a crowdfunding site targeted at athletes. In return, they would give their boosters swag ranging from a personal email thank you to an invitation to D2 Sky Day at Sugerbush’s Mount Ellen. The boys contacted family and friends to ask for donations and encouraged those people to promote the rally. Money started arriving. “It was mainly extended acquaintances and family friends,
but even people we didn’t know were donating because they saw it on a friend’s Facebook page or something like that,” Danny said. The brothers hit their goal. When the campaign ended, 161 people had pledged a total of $52,601. An anonymous donor matched the first $25,000, meaning the teenagers have almost an extra $40,000 each to spend on their continued pursuit of
Crowdfunding is a concept for the internet age. A person establishes a monetary goal, explains the project offers rewards, and sits back as donations arrive 101
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skiing excellence. A couple of weeks after the conclusion of their rally, Drew and Danny jumped on a plane to Chile for pre-season training. The season begins on November 12. Crowdfunding is a concept for the internet age. A person establishes a monetary goal, explains the project – an album, a movie, a game, or something else – offers rewards, and sits back as donations arrive. The two biggest platforms are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The former, founded in 2009, has helped users raise more than $750 million. Some of the projects boast a bit of star power like the Veronica Mars sequel that raised more than $5.7 million from almost 92,000 backers, or Scrubs star Zach Braff’s Garden State sequel that scored $3.1 million, but ordinary people who want help getting something off the ground and proof of
The success of Kickstarter and Indiegogo spawned legions of spinoffs, as entrepreneurs try to grab a slice of the revenue opportunities concept start the vast majority of campaigns. Kickstarter, Indiegogo and the hundreds of other options provide a platform and take a percentage of the money raised, usually five per cent. One of the major differences between sites is what happens when a campaign doesn’t reach its funding goal. With Kickstarter, the money only comes if the target is hit. Indiegogo, however, gives all the money pledged regardless of the actual goal. For example, if your $100,000 campaign only reaches 67 per cent of its target, you will still get $67,000. In both cases, any cash beyond 100 per cent goes to the
OLD PRO / Former pro skier Bill Kerig decided to found crowdfunding website RallyMe while making a documentary about female ski jumpers
project as well. More money for the person raising it means more as a platform fee. The success of Kickstarter and Indiegogo spawned legions of spinoffs, as entrepreneurs try to grab a slice of the revenue opportunities. There’s Appbackr for apps, Tunefund for music, Seedinvest for startups, Emphasis for journalism, and many others for countless industries. In addition to RallyMe, a number of platforms
CHAMPION SPIRIT / Michael Shpigelman (left) and David Ancor (right) founded crowdfunding site MakeAChamp. com. The site has raised $100,000 for athletes so far
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exist for athletes. They focus on all different types of sports, but many target athletes in disciplines that are chronically underfunded. RallyMe, for example, is the official crowdfunding platform of six United States sporting federations, including the bobsled and skeleton, snowboarding and freeskiing. Pursu.it, meanwhile, targets solely Canadian athletes – not surprising, since canuck kayaker Julia Rivard and gymnast Leah Skerry founded
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the platform, while Sportroo.com is a joint venture between six staffers in Australia and the UK. Unlike Kickstarter, which caters to “Brooklyn, creative, artsy-type of projects”, according to Adrianne Jeffries, a reporter for The Verge, the sports-focused ventures have some features that are specifically tailored to the needs of athletes. “Sports could be something that could thrive as a crowdfunding vertical outside of Kickstarter, because the incentives are so different from the incentives of projects that do really well on Kickstarter. If they are looking for a small amount of money every year from their existing fans, that’s very different from Kickstarter, which is about a one-off thing,” Jeffries says. The truth about athletes in smaller sports: they almost always need money. RallyMe founder Bill Kerig stumbled across the idea while making a documentary about female ski jumpers. As a former pro skier himself, he understood the financial strain but he saw it more dramatically after spending time filming the women “These were world champions, the best in their sport, and they spent half their time begging for money,” he says. “They would be at farmers’ markets, standing behind a
MakeAChamp, which formally launched 18 months ago, has helped athletes raise around $100,000 table, literally with a coffee can out there asking for a dollar.” Kerig, who raised $26,000 through crowdfunding for the documentary, saw an opportunity and RallyMe was born. The site launched in November 2012, has run around 200 campaigns, and raised more than $250,000 for athletes. That’s not a huge amount of money compared to Kickstarter, but it’s growing quickly, and most campaigns ask for somewhere in the four-digit range. The athletes involved have figured out a portion of their financial puzzle. RallyMe serves as a supplement to their income. They keep whatever they raise, even if they don’t reach their goal. There’s an ancillary benefit as well: emotional support. “We have lots of athletes saying things like ‘all of a sudden I felt like I wasn’t alone. I have 300 people who gave money and who believe in me’. We urge the athletes and the teams to think of
The truth about athletes in smaller sports: they almost always need money FINANCIAL FIGHT / MakeAChamp.com founder David Ancor used videos of his judo fights to encourage support from the crowd
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those as important relationships in their lives. Next year they are going to need to raise more money and, oh, by the way, anything that motivate these athletes to train harder and to be more responsible with their life choices is a good thing,” Kerig says. A year-and-a-half ago, Canadian judo athlete David Ancor was struggling. The judoka had moved from Toronto to Montreal, where the national training center was. But Ancor wasn’t training. He had a torn anterior cruciate ligament, and was living alone with a set of crutches and very little money. The bills kept piling up, and he needed funds. Ancor had some videos of his fights and, along with the help of a teammate who happened to be a web developer, put them online on MakeAChamp.com next to a short video asking for $500 to help him get to an upcoming tournament. The crowd took over. “The first couple of days were slow. There was no money coming in. But our landlord who knew we were doing judo gave me $30 and I said thank you, and all of a sudden money just started pouring in,” he says. In total, Ancor raised US$1,200. “It was probably the most unbelievable experience of my life. I have never felt so much support, and it was literally motivating me to train harder and harder, and it was giving me money. I had an abundance of motivation and I was actually able to pay for training. I ended up getting third at that tournament.” MakeAChamp, which formally launched 18 months ago, has helped athletes raise around $100,000. They start an average of 10 new campaigns a week, which have a 48 per cent success rate. As with RallyMe, it can be just as much about the support as the money. “The life of an athlete is really, really crazy. We are somewhere between homeless and living off the support of our parents to trying to squeeze every single dollar out of the government. And year
by year the government is tightening the leash,” the 21-year-old Ancor says. “You have to sacrifice a lot, whether it is the quality of the food you are eating, quality of life or medical expenses. It’s literally that or not going to tournaments like you are supposed to. You are playing that kind of game. I really, really believe that every single penny counts for an athlete. They are able to get that little of a break. In highperformance sports, whether it’s Olympics or something else, every inch counts. If you’re going to give an athlete another $1,000, which is the average an athlete makes, it can make all the difference.” After golfer Mitch Gillis graduated from Oregon State University, the 2007 BC Amateur winner decided to turn pro. He believed he had the talent to reach the PGA Tour and convinced a group of investors to fund his efforts for five years in exchange for a percentage of his on-course winnings. Unfortunately, Gillis failed to reach his target, and he couldn’t secure another round of funding when his deal ended in 2012. The Canadian, not afraid of creative financial schemes, turned to RallyMe to help him raise the $12,500 he needed to pay for the Web.com Q-school. It was an easy decision. “Once I didn’t get a return to my initial group of investors I struggled asking for money again,” he says over the phone while driving back from a practice round in Phoenix, Arizona where he lives (he shot a 67). “I was absolutely comfortable [with RallyMe] because there are givebacks that aren’t monetary. An investor wants a return. With crowdfunding, you either want to help a guy out or you want to help a guy out and get some sort of swag. I’m giving golf lessons. If somebody who is a golf junkie wants to improve his game, he can either pay a random instructor or he can chip into my rally and I can help him with his game.”
BRIGHT FUTURE / Amateur golf champion Mitch Gillis raised $12,500 on RallyMe.com to pay for entry into the PGA’s qualifying school
That’s good in theory, but perhaps not in practice. Gillis says that fewer than 10 of the supporters were people he didn’t know, despite a story about the rally running on one of Canada’s most-trafficked golfing blogs. Kerig estimates that fewer than 10 per cent of the people who donate on RallyMe are total strangers to the athletes they support, and 30 per cent come through social media. The rest are friends, family and other acquaintances. This raises an issue: these people might grow tired of repeatedly funding the athletes. Yearly crowdfunding
The economics of the smaller sports dictate that the athletes are almost always in fundraising mode, so the platforms simply add another revenue stream 106
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asks may have diminishing returns. But the economics of the smaller sports dictate that the athletes are almost always in fundraising mode, so the platforms simply add another revenue stream. Another potential pitfall for crowdfunding sites is the business model. The lower amount of money raised means that the platform’s take is lower, too. But Jeffries believes there’s room in the marketplace for a few sports-focused sites to survive. “It doesn’t cost that much money to run a type of site like that. You really just need a nice design, a third-party payment processor and good marketing,” she says. “If you had a small but dedicated community that was putting up a steady stream of these projects, a small company could maintain a crowdfunding site.” Kerig says that one of the major reasons RallyMe partnered with the US federations is so that year in, year out they have a new group of athletes who need to raise revenue to compete. If you build it, the skiers, sliders and racers will come.
RICARDO BOLFILL Architect, 73
Our Man in...
Barcelona The veteran Spanish architect dreams of building an entire city
M
y life has been that of a nomad architect; I’ve worked in more than 35 cities and on more than a thousand projects. I started building when I was very young, winning a lot of prizes and experiencing a lot of success. At the age of 40 I was one of the most well-known architects in the world. But that was a long time ago, so my ego has relaxed about that kind of success now. That I have accomplished so many things doesn’t have much value, because for me, what’s important is what’s coming next and all the projects that I would like to realise. I laugh when people say I’m successful. There are so many things I haven’t achieved, I haven’t even built a whole city yet. In 1957, during the Franco regime, I was at university. I was a founding member of a student movement against the dictatorship. During a demonstration I was arrested and expelled from university and sent into exile. This left me with the desire to dedicate myself to study in other European universities. Upon completing my studies in Geneva, I went to Paris, and then Algeria. Since then my work has taken me around the world. I always returned home though. It’s a privileged place. Barcelona is special because it isn’t a capital. There are two kinds of cities: cities that are the capital of the state, and regular cities. Cities that aren’t capitals, such as Barcelona, rely on civil society to give
the city a reason to exist. And that’s why Barcelona has always had to reinvent herself and has always stayed fresh and current. As it’s not the centre of anywhere, it has been able to play a role in counterculture, and the people here have always challenged the status quo. And it’s a place where the battle for personal freedoms is constantly played out. I have inherited that desire to defend personal freedom; even as a child I had that fire. I feel Barcelona and its people are influenced by living by the Mediterranean. We have been imbued with the characteristics of the sea. It has made us nonviolent, open-minded and with a love of freedom. And, as with any port city, it has the mixed community and influences that come with a lot of traffic. Before the 1992 Olympic Games the city had turned its back on the sea. The coastline was a wasteland of industrial buildings. The first and most important thing we did was to face the city towards the sea. I am proud to have been a part of its transformation. I was drawn to architecture for many reasons. I suppose one reason is that when I was growing up the inner city here was very grey and underdeveloped. Spain was still recovering from the civil war, and the cities only inspired boredom in the population. I studied lots of different disciplines but found that architecture has a relationship with everything that I
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toxic disaster / When Ricardo Bolfill bought the cement factory that he now calls home it was a wreck spewing out pollution (see above left). art work/ Bolfill turned the building into “a work of art”, partly Brutalist, partly surreal and partly traditional, which he says is still a work in progress (see top right).
was interested in, plus I got to influence and manipulate space, which was very interesting for me as I am claustrophobic. My favourite project in Barcelona is the building where I live and work [a former cement factory]. I have projects around the world that are more intellectual and more impressive than this, but for me, this is the best. The history of this building is interwoven with my life. Forty years ago I had a small office in Barcelona, but I wanted a big place where I could create a new kind of community. I have achieved that here. At that time nobody wanted to make the projects that I was designing so I had to be everything; the architect, the builder and the PR. I wanted to create a community that represented another kind of economic system, another way of living that had cultural implications that no one dared to do. So I had to do it myself. I took over the cement factory. It was a big risk for me. It was a toxic environment that created so much smoke and pollution. I dared to transform this disaster into a work of art. It is an on-going project, as it’s such a huge space. There are still so many areas under construction. It’s an artwork that has to be seen from many perspectives. In part it’s Brutalist, because of its rawness; it’s also a homage to vernacular industrial buildings; it has a surrealistic quality; and it contains elements of Catalan history and has been influenced by all the places I’ve ever visited. I feel that this building is an expression of myself, so it’s difficult to sum it up in a few sentences. It’s very eclectic and contains so many visions and
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aspects. I don’t like to repeat myself in architecture – I like to keep evolving. My whole life has been dedicated to trying not to be satisfied with what I have created, so that I can keep developing and honing my style, and this building is testament to that Gaudi was an amazing creative force: the most remarkable in history. He never repeated himself. He never made two doors or windows the same. But now we live in a different time. We don’t have the means or workmanship that they had then. What have I tried to do is keep his philosophy alive, and to never repeat myself. I try to allow each of my projects to be nourished by the genius and cultural infusion of its surroundings. The most distinct neighbourhood in Barcelona, the one that best represents the individualistic quality of the city, is Eixample. It was built in the era of modernism, in the time of Gaudi. Every house, every building, is distinct. The metal workers, carpenters and artisans were all producing their best work in order to outdo the building next door. The spirit of Barcelona comes from being an invaded city that, as I said before, is not a capital. The city itself has to constantly reinvent itself and its people have to make things happen. Everyone in this city is open-minded, individual and an artist. Even the business people, under the layers of money and transactions, aspire to become artists, photographers, film makers… That’s why people say that rich families never last long in Setting Sail / Barcelona, because their The W Barcelona (top left), known as the Sail Hotel, children always leave due to its shape is one of to become artists. The Bolfill’s most famous, and drive to create beauty is part of the expansion of stronger here than the the Port Of Barcelona. drive to create money. Barcelona is a great port city/ city to become a nomad, to Port Vell (middle left) was throw out the guidebook part of the development of the city before the1992 and explore on foot. You get the best sense of the vibrancy of the city by strolling from Barcelona Olympics, which one neighbourhood to the next. You can go to Gracia, to el Born, the beach, Montjuic, Bolfill says he is proud to and the ambience changes so much – all these areas offer a unique glimpse of the city. have played a role in. In Barcelona there is great food everywhere, so you can stop off in any place royal plaza / that you like the look of. I like to go to the restaurants at the W Hotel and the Placa Reial is a a public National Theatre of Catalonia. But you can eat in world-class restaurants or go to square next to the famous Barceloneta and eat in one of the simple seafood restaurants and it’s just as good. La Rambla in Barcelona, The nightlife here offers so much variety, and it’s not very segregated. You popular with tourists and locals alike. Bolfill liked to can go out in the evening and mingle with people from all walks of life. The night go out at night and mingle is also a perfect time to walk around and take in the flavours of the different with the diverse group of neighbourhoods. In one night you can easily feel that you have visited five different people in the city (bottom left). cities, but you can be yourself everywhere. ricardobofill.com
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FROM NAIROBI TO MOMBASA By TRAIN
Photojournalist Mark EvElEigh bought a tickEt to ridE kEnya’s swahili coast on a railway linE with a colourful history
ALL ABOARD / Travellers eagerly await departure on the Lunatic Express from Nairobi Station
With the blast of a horn, like a wounded bull elephant, the old train rumbled into Nairobi Station. There was a flurry of activity as passengers hauled luggage to the edge of the platform. To the Swahili travellers this train is known as gari la moshi (the car that smokes), but most tourists would know it as the Lunatic Express. There have been accusations of lunacy ever since the idea was first conceived to build a railway line from the Indian Ocean over a thousand kilometres to Kampala, in the heart of Africa. Now, more than a hundred years after the project was started, friends in Nairobi had looked at me like I was equally crazy when I told them that I was planning to take the three-day train journey from Nairobi to Mombasa. “But the plane is so much faster,” a bush-pilot friend exclaimed. “Even the matatu minibuses are quicker and cheaper… and probably more comfortable too,” a park ranger told me. “You’re crazy to go by train,” they all seemed to agree.
W
the building of that railway line was one of those crazy things that could only really happen in africa. everybody should experience it while they’re in kenya
ROAD WORKS / The Trans-Africa Highway is peppered with trucks and buses emblazoned with bizarre slogans
Just as I was on the verge of being convinced, an old friend, who is an experienced East Africa correspondent, weighed in on the side of lunacy. “The building of that railway line was one of those crazy things that could really only happen in Africa. Everybody should experience it while they’re in Kenya,” he said. “I’ve done it three times.” Reassured by his enthusiasm, I booked two tickets, and by mid-afternoon the next day my girlfriend, Nina,
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and I were already dragging our bags into a surprisingly crowded Rift Valley Railway carriage. “Either there are a lot of crazy people in Nairobi,” Nina pointed out, “or there are a few good reasons for taking the Lunatic Express after all.” Within a few minutes we were already convinced that our decision had been the right one. The tracks slithered quickly away from the grumbling traffic on Mombasa Road, and we passed within a few metres of the boundary of Nairobi National Park. A small herd of zebra kicked up their heels, galloping away from the fearsomely noisy beast beyond the fence, and we could see the silhouettes of stately giraffes, loping across the horizon like nature’s skyscrapers. The majority of the tourists who come to Kenya to see wildlife completely overlook this immense wilderness on the edge of Nairobi (almost as large as the capital itself ), which is stocked with lion, leopard, buffalo, antelope, giraffe and rhino. Nairobi National Park is probably the most accessible wildlife real estate in the world. Less than an hour after leaving the baggage carousels at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport we were already sitting around a campfire at Nairobi Tented Camp, listening to lions
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before the railway line was built, this journey would have taken as much as a month by ox-cart
waiter seated us with a young Kenyan businessman called Joseph and his Dubai-trained hotelier wife Christina. “We decided this would be the perfect way to start our honeymoon,” Joseph told me. “The roaring out on the plains. Anyone who’s never visited a train might take 15 hours, or 17, or maybe much more, high-end safari camp will be unable to imagine the level but we’re not in a hurry. This is the most relaxing way of real luxury it’s possible to enjoy to begin our beach holiday.” while sleeping under canvas. We sipped Tusker beer and ate Two days later we were spicy biryani that was probably cramming ourselves and our kitintroduced to Kenya along with bags into an infinitely more bathe 32,000 Indian labourers sic railway compartment for the who were imported to build the overnight journey to Mombasa. railway. The engineering proI was thinking with fondness of ject was started in 1896 as part my spacious tent with its comof what became known as the fortable four-poster bed, dressing scramble for Africa. It was hoped table and luxurious en-suite baththat it would seal British colonial room. We reminded ourselves might in East Africa, and the opthat things could always be worse: timistically named Uganda Railbefore the railway line was built, way (it wouldn’t actually reach this journey would have taken as Uganda until 1931) was viewed much as a month by ox-cart. almost as a military exercise. It We were already beyond was accepted that there would be the old bush-town railway junccasualties, but the final death-toll tion of Athi River by the time we of 2,498 Indian and African lives DUST BOWL / The red earth of Tsavo coats staggered down the length of the – killed by Maasai spears, lions everything from trains and cars to elephants, baobabs and people train to the dining carriage. A and sickness – even disgusted
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rails continued their inexorable creep into the highlands. More recently, in 2006, the World Bank approved a grant of $70 million to help the railway line fulfil its original purpose as a competitive mode of transport. There are those who say that the story of the Lunatic Express is an ongoing saga. By the time we got back to our $50 per person first class cabin, the night staff had arrived to convert our daytime sofa into two narrow bunks. Even in first class the Lunatic Express falls far short of the luxury rail trips offered by the likes of Europe’s Orient Express or South Africa’s Blue Train. The shared washrooms at the ends of the carriages were barely up to dealing with this mass human migration, so we resigned ourselves to bathing as thoroughly as possible out of the soupbowl-sized basin in the cabin. During the night we rattled unceasingly eastwards alongside the Trans-Africa Highway. I woke once or twice, imagining what it must be like to be upfront, driving this great thundering beast with eyes peeled for lumbering elephants and the herds of belliger-
We resigned ourselves to bathing as thoroughly as possible out of the soupboWl-sized basin in the cabin many of the colonials. A contemporary British newspaper dubbed it the ‘Lunatic Line’ and, in 1971, the writer Charles Miller coined the phrase ‘Lunatic Express’ in the title of his excellent book. As we rattled towards the old stone bridge that is the line’s most famous landmark, conversation turned to the legendary man-eaters of Tsavo. I told Joseph how I’d camped in the area several years before and had sat around a campfire with Maasai security guards who told me how they could often hear the descendants of the man-eaters roaring at night. It was here, in 1898, that two lions managed to bring to a halt the most ambitious project in the entire British Empire. Over the course of several months they ate 28 railway workers (some sources say that the figure may have been as high as 135). It was only after they were shot by the British construction supervisor that the bridge was finally completed and the
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ent buffalo that sometimes number a thousand strong. I knew from experience that even on the highway itself you frequently have to slow or stop for what are literally ‘zebra crossings’ as migrating herds follow their ancient trails, oblivious to roaring trucks. At dawn I was woken by the warm glow of the sun, weaving golden threads into a savannah tapestry that was already burnt, by the long dry season, to the colour of a lion’s hide. I caught a glimpse of my bad-hair-day reflection in the window – like an image from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – and it struck me that padded cabins would be a fitting interior design quirk on the Lunatic Express. When we sat down for breakfast we were still cutting across that seemingly endless Tsavo wilderness. To Joseph and Christina – both city-born Kenyans – the desolate aridity of this region was intimidating, even through the train windows. At 8,000 square miles (almost twice the size of Qatar) Kenya’s biggest national park is actually a spellbindingly diverse region that attracts its own dedicated admirers, who see it as Africa at its wildest.
There is something about the restful rhythm of a long-distance train journey that lulls the soul. Rail travel takes you back to a ‘timeless’ era, when clocks and itineraries still carried less importance than the sheer pleasure of travel for travel’s sake. Like an ocean-going voyager it takes a while to get your sea-legs, so that you can march confidently along the carriages without stumbling. After a while you begin to imagine that your breathing, and perhaps even your heart-rate, are
it struck me that padded cabins would be a fitting interior design quirk on the lunatic express
synchronised with the hypnotic tak-a-tak-tak, tak-atak-tak thrum of the steel wheels. It has never been claimed that the Lunatic Express ran like clockwork, but by the time we started to see the first coconut palms and minarets of the Swahili Coast we were only running barely behind schedule. By that time, however, I was actually hoping there would be something to slow us down. A couple of hours later, as we unpacked at Serena Mombasa and spread our belongings around our vast faux-Arabic suite, I realised with surprise that I actually missed our cramped little cell on the Lunatic Express. Maybe I am crazy after all, I thought.
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BIG GAME / The Lunatic Express runs through Tsavo National Park – Kenya’s biggest, – which covers 8,000 square miles
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THE STORY OF HOW STEVE JOBS, H AV I N G R E C E N T LY B E E N O U S T E D FROM APPLE INC, BOUGHT THE G R A P H I C S G R O U P, R E N A M E D I T PIXAR AND, WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM HIS FRIENDS, CHANGED T H E F U T U R E O F A N I M AT E D F I L M S
THE TALENT / Animator John Lasseter helped Steve Jobs save Pixar
The story of Pixar, the digital animation company that with films such as Toy Story, Cars and WALL-E revolutionised animation, saved a Hollywood studio and invented a brand medium, not to mention delighting bil-
lions across the globe, begins not with the razzle dazzle of a Hollywood premiere, or the vicious infighting of a studio boardroom, though as we shall see its story takes in these locales and more, but with a lamp. It is an ordinary Luxo angle-poise lamp of the kind under which writers, students and indeed animators have toiled in the wee small hours for over 70 years. This particular lamp sits on a desk in a nondescript building in San Anselmo, Marin County
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California, a desk belonging to John Lasseter, an early thirtysomething animator who has soft, slightly owlish features and the slightly doughy complexion of a man who spends too much time indoors in front of computer screens. Lasseter has been obsessed with cartoons from when he was a boy, and has never shed his love of the form. “I even watched them when it wasn’t cool in high-school,” he said years later. “I ran home to watch Bugs and his Buddies on Channel 11.”
E N T E R , T H E N , S T E V E J O B S . A N D I F T H E A L R E A DY L E G E N DA RY F O U N D E R O F A P P L E C O M P U T E R W A S N ’ T A C T U A L LY R I D I N G A W H I T E H O R S E , H E M AY A S W E L L H AV E B E E N A future in his beloved medium beckoned, and by the early 1980s he was toiling as a junior animator at Disney: his dream job. It hadn’t been a dream that lasted; he had been summarily fired after only a few years in the job. Shortly after this crushing disappointment he had found himself at Pixar, a computer company that manufactured hardware for the then nascent field of digital animation, his knowledge of the principles of traditional animation deployed for making short films that demonstrated the prowess of the technology. Lasseter stares at the lamp, then, and ponders it. The key objection to the new digital technology, he knows, is that it is inhuman, incapable of generating the subtle movements that give animated characters their irresistible, unique appeal. Lasseter is convinced that this wasn’t the case; that computers are simply tools, tools that in the right hands
can be just as expressive as pen and ink. If he could only show people how an inanimate object could be brought to life. Say a Luxo desk lamp… Lasseter had first become fascinated with digital animation in the very early 1980s when he was working at Disney. A couple of friends of his invited him to look at some early footage from a revolutionary project they were working on. As Lasseter watched the smooth, futuristic lines of what would become Tron play out on the screen he had an epiphany. “The moment I saw it I was, ‘This is it!’” he remembered later. “This is the future.” Pixar, meanwhile, had begun in 1977 as a research project into digital imaging funded by an eccentric and deep-pocketed entrepreneur by the name of Alexander
THE SCEPTIC / George Lucas wasn’t convinced by computer animation
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Schure. Schure recruited the best in the nascent field of computer graphics and set them up in a well-supplied lab in New York. By the early 1980s the outfit had been bought by George Lucas. The director of Star Wars was unexpectedly flush with cash and, fascinated with computers, bought the company and incorporated it into Lucasfilm. The relationship between the new owner and his employees was good, at first. But the Pixar staff soon realised that Lucas’ plans were at odds with their own. Lucas thought computers had a role in the filmmaking process, but only behind the scenes. They would automate dull, repetitive work, and be used for individual special effects sequences. He was unconvinced by the idea that computers might animate an entire feature film, precisely the dream that obsessed many of the Pixar staff. What seemed to be a match made in heaven inevitably, then, soon soured. The turning point came when the Pixar staff screened their short film Andre and Wally B for Lucas. The tale of an odd-looking (and for the technology conveniently geometrical) child and his adventures with a hyperactive bee had been months in the making, and wasn’t even complete when screened (the last six seconds took the form of pencil drawings). Though Lucas had been polite at the time, the film had reinforced all his views about computer animation. It simply didn’t work, the images were too basic, the characters lacking in human warmth. He was more determined than ever that the company should concentrate on other, less ambitious areas.
But luckily for Pixar Lucas’ wallet soon had other demands on its contents. After a costly divorce from his wife Maria he was in need of ready cash, and, in 1986, Pixar went up for sale. But who would be interested in the huge risk, both technical and financial, of making digitally animated feature films? The future of Pixar seemed to be destined to shift backwards, to where it had started, in brute technology: manufacturing black boxes that could be used for, among other things, medical imaging. It was a grim time.
Dynamic Duo / A rare shot of Steve Jobs, with John Lasseter, but without his uniform of roll-neck and jeans
Enter, then, Steve Jobs. And if the already legendary founder of Apple Computer wasn’t actually riding a white horse, he may as well have been. In fact, Jobs had been ignominiously fired from Apple a few months before he
said. “And I realised that they were way ahead of anyone else in combining art and technology, and that’s what I’ve always been interested in.” Jobs proceeded to pour time and money (nearly $50 million in three years) into the company, and he took more than a passing interest in the deeply unprofitable animation division, now run by John Lasseter. At first many had doubted that the two men would be able to stay for long in the same room with each other. Even their clothes reflected their
Lasseter wouLd not rest untiL h e h a d p r o v e n t h at d i g i ta L a n i m at i o n w a s a s va L i d a n a r t form as its traditionaL cousin became Pixar’s knight in shining armour. “I wanted to buy it [Pixar] because I was really into computer graphics,” he later
radically different personalities. Lasseter’s Hawaiian-shirted casualness was at odds with the by now established Jobs uniform
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of neatly laundered jeans and a black roll-neck sweater, as assertively minimalist as one of his Macintosh computers (though on a rare occasion, in deference to Pixar’s bohemian atmosphere, he could be seen wandering the halls in a T-Shirt and a pair of board shorts). Jobs was infamous for his often brutal, bullying management style and what became known as his ‘reality distortion field’ – an uncanny ability to bend other people’s perceptions of what was possible to service his vision. Lasseter, meanwhile, was quietly spoken, averse to conflict and concerned about the welfare of his staff. But in fact they shared a key characteristic: a steely will deployed in the service of perfection. Just as Jobs had forced his engineers at Apple to return again and again to the drawing board with the Macintosh, Lasseter would
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not rest until he had proven that digital animation was as valid an art form as its traditional cousin. The ostensible purpose of the animation division had been to make short films that demonstrated the powers of the hardware that made Pixar’s profits. But, like Lasseter, Jobs saw a more glorious future for it. Lasseter told him about a notion for a story he had, a Luxo lamp that would come to life. It would demonstrate once and for all that computer animation could be as subtle and involving as its traditional counterpart. Jobs opened his wallet yet again and greenlit the project. Luxo Jr was a triumph. In a mere 60 seconds it told a complete story that was funny, mov-
ing and indubitably human. The technology now proven, Jobs and Lasseter decided to push hard for the next milestone – a full-length animated feature film. It’s ironic that a film about the redemptive value of friendship should have its genesis in the middle of one in the process of being apocalyptically torn apart. Michael Eisner, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company, was at war with his deputy Jeffrey Katzenberg, and the battle was raging on fronts throughout the company. The surprise was that they had ever become friends in DISNEY STORY / Jeffrey Katzenberg took a huge risk when he decided to work with Jobs and Pixar
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the first place, so different were their backgrounds, attitudes and styles. Eisner was a reserved, cool headed, strategic operator who kept his cards close to his chest, while Katzenberg was instinctive, a micromanager, loud, emotional and prone to embarrassing social gaffes that made his boss wince. They too had become friends at Paramount Pictures, and when Eisner had moved on to become CEO of Disney he soon appointed Katzenberg as his partner, promising him (according to Katzenberg at least) the role of president when Frank Wells, the much loved current head, retired. In 1994 Wells would be tragically killed in a helicopter crash while on a skiing vacation. Katzenberg waited for a call from his friend making good on his promise. It never came. It was a betrayal that Katzenberg could not forgive and marked the final straw for the two men’s relationship, but even before that catastrophic meltdown the two had endlessly jockeyed for position within the beleaguered company. The upside of this situation for John Lasseter and Pixar was that Eisner had begrudgingly given Katzenberg the animation department to run, believing it to be in terminal decline. Katzenberg, whose passion was animation, had made an unexpected success of the outfit, notably with smash hit The Lion King. Jobs visited Katzenberg at Disney. In his drive to revivify the department Katzenberg had bought Pixar computers. “Are you happy with Pixar?” Jobs asked. Katzenberg replied in the affirmative. Then Jobs continued. “Do you think Pixar is happy with Disney?”. A slightly flustered Katzenberg replied that he hoped so. “Well, we’re not,” said Jobs with typical directness. “We want to do a film with you. That would make us happy.”
Katzenberg was torn. For one thing he was at heart a traditionalist; he had immense respect for the Disney animators, almost all of whom were hostile to the idea of a digitally animated feature. As a boy he had been delighted by Disney’s 2D classics such as Snow White and The Jungle Book, and felt that part of his job was to act as guardian to this grand tradition. And despite having seen and been delighted by Luxo Jr, making a completely computer animated film was still a huge gamble. Would audiences warm to the characters over not a single minute but one-and-a-half hours? In the end Katzenberg decided to risk it. But he wasn’t the
only one chewing his fingernails. The truth was that Pixar was in fact near bankruptcy. Despite Jobs’ regular infusions of cash, the computers and software that were meant to be the company’s bread and butter simply weren’t selling. The Disney project, and the transformation of Pixar from a hardware company into a Hollywood production company (surely one of the oddest corporate metamorphoses in recent history) was its last chance. Now both Disney and Pixar needed a story. They looked expectantly towards John Lasseter. In early 1991 Lasseter and his writing partners Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter began drafting a screenplay. Lasseter had always been obsessed with toys. Brightly coloured relics of his childhood packed every spare space in his office. Now he pondered what the essence of a toy was. What was its purpose in life? “Everyone has had the traumatic childhood experience of losing a toy,” he began to write. “Our story
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WINNING TEAM / The animators in this picture of the Toy Story team became millionaires
takes the toy’s point of view as he loses and tries to regain the single thing most important to him: to be played with. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. It is the emotional foundation of their existence.” Though the bare conceptual bones of the film are there in that first paragraph the screenplay that Lasseter and co first delivered was very different to the film that was finally made. For a start there was no Woody, and no Buzz Lightyear. Instead the screenplay featured Tinny, an old-school tin soldier who is the victim of every toy’s worst nightmare. “In the original story Tinny is on vacation with his owner and he gets lost at a rest-stop,” Lasseter remembered later. “There he is found by a junk man and thrown into the back of his truck where there’s this old ventrilo-
HEARING VOICES / Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, the voices of Woody and Buzz Lightyear
quist’s dummy. They decide to stick together, and by the end they end up in a kind of toy heaven, a preschool, where they’ll never get lost and never get outgrown.” Unhappy with this first pass Lasseter started revising. Exit Tinny and enter Lunar Larry. An amalgam of all the elements of the Pixar team’s (all-male) favourite action figures, Larry was “the toy that any boy would absolutely kill to own”. Larry then became Tempus from Morph, who in turn morphed into Buzz Lightyear. The ventriloquist’s dummy, meanwhile, became cowboy Woody, the physical and temperamental opposite of Buzz: an old, dependable plaything, traditional and a little staid compared to the hyperactive Buzz. But the artistic challenges of making Toy Story paled when compared to the technical ones. Each frame of film required 300 megabytes of data – a gargantuan amount in 1991 – and took three hours to render. Even at a frugal 77 minutes, the film would contain 1,560 individual shots and require 800,000 hours on the most powerful computers money could buy. Eventually Lasseter had enough material to screen a rough
cut to Katzenberg, who, uncharacteristically had taken a backseat role so far. As the lights went up in the Disney screening room it was obvious that the film had serious problems. Woody had become a devious character, prone to mean tricks such as fooling Buzz (then still Tempus from Morph) into falling behind a chest of drawers, or at one point shoving him out of the bedroom window. He was deeply unsympathetic. Katzenberg told Lasseter that he needed to re-imagine the piece as a buddy movie and to set the protagonists up as a pair of toys with very different personalities who are nevertheless forced to work together and in the end become friends. “Go out and watch 48 Hours and The Defiant Ones [a 1958 film about two convicts who escape prison chained together],” he told Lasseter. For the voices of the toys Lasseter had always wanted Tom Hanks as Woody, but he was less sure about Buzz. Finally he settled on Tim Allen, star of smash hit TV TOY SOLDIER / The original star of Toy Story was a toy soldier named Tinny
sitcom Home Improvement, who softened Buzz, transforming him from a bellicose action man into a more relatable character. “I saw him not as a superhero but more like a really good, well-trained cop,” Allen said later. Toy Story was finally released in March of 1995 to ecstatic reviews. “An aural and visual delight”, wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. In the years that followed digital animation went from strength to strength, eventually eclipsing its traditional forebear almost completely. Jeffrey Katzenberg, after being fired from Disney (and subsequently extracting a record-breaking $280 million settlement from the company, an eye-watering settlement that finally put paid to his old boss Michael Eisner’s career there too) set up DreamWorks SKG and there headed up the animation division that gave the world hits such as Shrek, Antz and Madagascar. Pixar, meanwhile, went from strength to strength, producing two smash-hit sequels to Toy Story as well as Monsters Inc and its sequel, WALL-E, Cars and Up. Eisner’s dismissive attitude to the company was cited as one of the reasons for his firing. In 2006, Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney for $7.4 billion. The computer company had turned out to be a spectacular investment. John Lasseter, who had been so ignominiously canned from his first job there, was appointed chief creative officer of the entire company. His office is packed with toys, now including Woodys and Buzzs, and when he works into the evening he works under a lamp. A Luxo, naturally.
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INTERNET OF THINGS: A network of objects connected to other objects via the internet
As the number of ‘things’ talking to each other on the internet starts to outnumber the number of people,
Paddy Smith asks his computer to pen an explanatory piece
BY PADDY SMITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL STERRY
n 1980 the 25-year-old chairman of Microsoft presented his bold vision: “A computer on every desk and in every home.” Looking back, it’s hard to resist a smile when you consider that Bill Gates delivered this mission statement with what most of his peers considered undue braggadocio. Computers were huge, complicated, confusing and expensive. They were for experts, and experts with money at that. No one could have foreseen that one day we would be surrounded by computers in our daily lives. No one except Bill Gates, perhaps, but even his 25-year-old self would have gawped at the extent to which we live side-by-side with our binary cousins in 2013.
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Even as we allow ourselves a wry smile in the age of laptops, tablets and smartphones, we should prepare ourselves to guffaw, to shriek with laughter further down the line. We will LOL (laugh out loud) and ROFL (roll on the floor laughing). We may even LOAO (you’ll have to look that one up). Because while you may have at least one computer on your desk, at least one in your home and at least one in your pocket – and while all of those computers connect to each other and billions of other computers via the internet – our connected lives are about to explode in new directions thanks to the Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT), sometimes called the Thingternet, is a catch-all term used to describe connected devices that are not traditional computers (and for the purposes of this article, you can consider your smartphone to be a traditional computer) but which connect to each other, to computers and to people (yes, that’s you) in order to delegate yet more of our lives to technology. Let me explain. It’s not new to imagine objects could talk to one another and communicate useful information without human intervention. A sensor tells a computer something has changed and the computer acts accordingly. A simple analogue parallel would be the dashboard warning in your car that tells you if a door is open. And while that function is usually done with nothing more complicated than the switch that turns the fridge light on when you open the door, more recent vehicles are able to report tyre pressure to their drivers in real time and submit a warning if it gets too low. But it’s the extension of this kind of functionality that presents the real thrill of the future. Your car might, for instance, sense that the fuel mixture is not correct, diagnose itself with a broken oxygen sensor, search the inventories of nearby service centres and direct
you to one that has the correct part in stock. OK, it’s not a sexy example, but it does give you an idea of what power the IoT holds for those who can harness it in the near future. And what of our homes? Here, the Thingternet is already penetrating our daily lives. A range of inexpensive connected devices has cropped up over the past few years. There’s the Hue, a connected light bulb made by Philips that can be turned on and off (and made to change colour, hence the name) from an internet connected smartphone anywhere in the world. The Nest thermostat lets you control the temperature of your house remotely. There’s multiroom hi-fi from the likes of Sonos and Pure that can pull audio files from your network (or the cloud) and play their contents wirelessly in any room in the house. Needless to say, that’s also controlled from a smartphone or tablet app. There is the Netatmo weather station that reports temperature, humidity and air quality. And there are a plethora of wristbands and clip-on widgets (Fitbit, Jawbone Up, Nike Fuelband) that measure your daily calorie burn and chart it via your computer or mobile device. Slated for release this year, Parrot’s Flower Power will tell you how much sunlight your plants are getting and whether they have enough water, fertiliser and heat, while the HAPIfork will log how long it takes you to eat a meal, how many forkfuls you have taken and the interval between those mouthfuls. Yes, seriously (the idea is to help you lose weight). A more mainstream arrival on the IoT scene this year will be the August Smart Lock, designed by Yves Béhar, the industrial designer behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, and this year’s Ouya Android games console. Fitting snugly in place of your old-fashioned keyhole assembly, it can detect your approach and unlock the door so you can get in without having to put down a bag of shopping and rummage through
OUR CONNECT LIVES ARE ABOUT TO EXPLODE IN NEW DIRECTIONS THANKS TO THE INTERNET OF THINGS your pockets. Better still, you can give limited guest access. You could, for instance, give each of your dinner guests access just for the evening of your party, or allow the washing machine repair man to enter your property between noon and 2pm on the day booked for service. And the August Smart Lock is pertinent for another reason: there is an inherent human mistrust of the relationship between technology and security. That’s not a new phenomenon – when the London
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Underground first introduced escalators in 1911, a one legged man called Bumper Harris is said to have been hired to ride up and down to prove to nervous commuters the new contraptions were safe. Yet there is arguably no more important time to manage our fears than the tipping point at which the number of things using the internet outweighs the number of people using it. We may no longer tremble at the thought of having a foot mangled in the workings of a moving staircase, but we are all too aware of the dangers of letting machines handle our data behind our backs. There are still hundreds of thousands of people in the developed world who are afraid to do their banking online. What will they make of their life data being bandied from machine to machine? In many ways, those technophobes have got a point. For all the talk about securely encrypted data, those encryptions are only as good as the engineer that built them. If one software engineer can build
it, another can break it, just as one locksmith can open another’s locks. (It’s worth pointing out that modern data encryption patterns are much harder to overcome than the crude mechanics of a physical lock, though the digital hacker benefits from invisibility.) So far, the big hacking scandals have usually resulted from human error. Making your password “password” is akin to leaving the door on the latch while you pop out for a three-week holiday. But when machines need to communicate with each other – with real-world consequences – the data cannot be fielded by intelligent life. That may be for the better in the long run, but it does present dangers in the short term. Because the IoT is a relatively new phenomenon, a secure infrastructure to support the explosion of devices connected to the internet simply does not exist. The required systems could be built, but in the interests of expediting the technology it is uneconomical to do so until the Thingternet reaches some sort of critical mass. Call it chicken and egg. And therein lies the problem – you don’t know where your data is being kept or whether it is truly secure. Yet. Here’s an example. You buy, let’s say, a smart thermostat. You have set this gadget to turn on the air-conditioning when you are within fivemiles of your home. It obliges you by triangulating your position (using your smartphone) throughout the day (and night) and reporting back to the control unit. But that data about your location is not going directly from your GPS-enabled smartphone to the static thermostat. It is being passed through a third-party server somewhere in the world, on to your home router, then to its destination. And because that server may not be as secure as we would all ideally like (and your home router almost certainly isn’t), it may be relatively easy for an unscrupulous amateur to find out whether you are likely to be
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home soon. Or not. Talk about leaving the door on the latch. There are more than 10 billion devices connected to the internet in 2013. That is more than one for every man, woman and child on the planet. In fact, the number of internet connected things overtook global population in 2008. And that’s not even the scary bit. That number is rising by around 100 devices per second. Cisco, whose Connections Counter can be found online, reckons we could see as many as 50 billion devices connected by 2020. And yet this smacks of Bill Gates and his farflung dream of putting a computer on every desk and in every home. (Or, to demonstrate history repeating, the disputed inventor of the telephone, Antonio Meucci, who bragged that one day there would be a telephone in every major American town.) By 2020, we could easily be looking at 100 billion or more connected devices: cars, watches, locks, lightswitches, domestic appliances, hi-fis, plant pots, fish tanks and keyrings. Not to mention desktop PCs, laptops, smartphones and tablets. And that’s before we’ve even left the house.
IT’S NOT NEW TO IMAGINE OBJECTS COULD TALK TO ONE ANOTHER AND COMMUNICATE USEFUL INFORMATION WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION
Plummeting technology prices and ongoing miniaturisation will conspire to put more and more things on the internet, particularly in industry. If you are in the warehouse business, there is a good chance you already use an electronic tagging system to track your goods. That may be RFID (as used in trackable baggage or automated toll road systems), QR (those funny-looking square matrices), Bluetooth, barcodes or NFC (Near Field Communication). If you don’t, you are probably looking into it. But soon, you may be able to have every item in your inventory report itself to your database. You could start renting warehouses in Siberia and have robotic forklift trucks do your bidding while you control operations from an iPad screen. On a beach. Your customers’ computers would know when their deliveries were arriving automatically. And report to their human overlords. Via an iPad. On the beach. You get the picture. You might think this all sounds a bit far-fetched, so to jolt your memory let’s have a quick recap on internet history. Cast your mind back to the early-90s and try to remember what the internet looked like. Back then, it was a series of pages of static information, each linking to others in what proved eventually to be a pretty transformative bit of networked thinking. Of course, in 1993 you were probably a bit too dazzled by the flashing “page visitors” counter to realise quite what a revelation it would be to connect lots and lots of computers together. Then “web 2.0” happened. Pages started doing things – they were able to go and find things for you, and allowed you to interact.
You could leave comments or buy something or book tickets. Dizzied by the possibilities, financiers poured money into start-up ventures that were frankly crippled by the expectation that they should at some point turn a profit. A company called Google started doing well in search and bluntly refused to carry advertising on its home page. Investors didn’t see the point of it. Some money was made, most of it was lost. For fear of sparking another round of unwise investments, nobody called the internet’s next revolution “web 3.0”. Instead, the proliferation of social networks was known as the social internet. Conversations moved away from inboxes and telephone lines and strayed into semi-public fora. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn emerged victorious, but a number of also-rans and niches remain in the swim. Undeterred by their inability to make money, excitable investors paid well over the odds when Facebook made shares available. Better broadband speeds saw the emergence of online video as a top-tier medium to compete with the written word and pictures. Previously hobbled by poor interfaces and slow connection speeds, the mobile internet was thrust from the wings by Apple’s introduction, in 2007, of the iPhone. For once, investors piled their cash into the correct company, and Apple completed its return from the brink of bankruptcy by introducing (with a flourish) the iPad, a device that would take the baton from the smartphone and run victorious towards the finish line of the mobile internet. The networks applauded from the sidelines by throwing ever-faster mobile data technologies into the mix. That pretty much brings us up to date, except that the beginning of the next chapter is only partly written. The next chapter is, of course, the Internet of Things. But rather than simply evolving what already exists (in the way web 2.0, the social inter-
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A SECURE INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT THE EXPLOSION OF DEVICES CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET SIMPLY DOES NOT EXIST
THE INTERNET OF THINGS IS TO THE INTERNET WHAT THE COMBUSTION ENGINE WAS TO STEAM POWER
net and the mobile internet have), the IoT is a reinvention of what we think the internet is. It takes the greatest technological enlightenment of our time and turns it from an abstract informational exchange to a real, living, physical entity. Scary, huh? Well, not really. If you can imagine a world where your alarm doesn’t go off because you’ve marked a day off in your calendar, where your car intelligently communicates with other vehicles to drive itself in a road train while you do the crossword, where your fridge orders more milk when the bottle in the door gets a bit whiffy, and where your surroundings adapt to your position and likely needs, then you will see the benefits of such a world. If your imagination fails you, don’t worry – you won’t have to wait long until all of these things are a reality. Some of them already are. Yes, that critical mass that will get the car to set your alarm earlier if it needs to be filled with petrol on the way to work in the morning is still a few years off, but isolated use of the IoT is in the ascendant. One oftcited example is Sparked, a Dutch start-up that developed a way of connecting cattle to the internet. Each cow transmits 200MB of data per year, letting the farmer know if they are in poor health or fall pregnant. Humans are next on the list. You, ahem, herd it here first. Technological limitations are being pared away to make way for this revolution. In 2011, the trans-
ition to IPV6, a new internet protocol version tested in 2011 and permanently launched in 2012, means we can have 100 times more internet addresses as there are atoms in our world. It’s probably enough. That said, when the previous iteration, IPV4, was introduced, it was thought its 4.3 billion address limit would be inexhaustible. Another case of a telephone in every town? Or a PC in every home? Size and expense of sensor production are also dropping, enabling us to make miniaturised, disposable connected devices that can, for instance, be swallowed for use in medical diagnostics. But the increasing ubiquity of data sharing devices (particularly with medical and financial implications) is a worry for legislators. The European Commission has been fossicking for answers to these imponderables for more than a year. The Koreans and Chinese have also bent their ears to the railway line. But so all-encompassing is the potential of the Internet of Things, it is proving difficult, if not impossible, to foresee what challenges we might face in the fullness of time. What is exciting (and/or terrifying, depending on your perspective) is the virtually limitless applications of the IoT. Today’s excitement about the possibilities is quickly soured by the potential implications of living in such a world. You may be enthralled by the idea of a health sensing wristband that could work out which nutrients your body needs, devise the week’s recipes based on that data, compile the necessary shopping list, place the order and let the delivery man into your apartment with your provisions. But what if your life insurance provider caught wind of the fact that you were not taking in the optimum spectrum of nutrients? Suppose it became a condition of your coverage to be monitored? What if the ubiquity of connected sensors were to eventually remove
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the freedom of choice for which wars have been fought? That is, of course, an extreme example and it’s hard to imagine a world where our data could so flagrantly be abused. For the most part, we should be excited (if with a healthy pinch of trepidation) about the dawning day of the connected world we’ve been talking about since the pre-internet age. Those who fear the possible eventualities would do well to remember that while its progress is rapid, the IoT will not engulf us overnight. It will necessarily be a gradual progress, checked by lawmakers and consumer choice, and with outcomes beyond what we are able to dream in 2013. And it will be safe. The Internet of Things is to the internet what the combustion engine was to steam power. It is the flint arrow to the internet’s blunt club. Scratch that – it is the cruise missile. But without a solitary inventor it is more than all of these things – it is a crowdsourced evolution of human history that is capable of improving everything in our world. The IoT ought to make life better for every human on Earth, now and in future, and we can all play our part in its story.
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HEALTHY AND DELICIOUS DINING - THAI STYLE Thai food has rapidly grown in popularity among casual dinners and gourmets alike, earning it a status as one of the world’s most popular cuisines.
The popular Thai menus can be found in Thai Restaurants worldwide. For a proper Thai culinary experience, look for the Thai Select Logo; a sign of Authentic Thai Cuisine worldwide. www.thaifoodrestaurant.com
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report
From November 24, 1962, to December 28, 1963, David Frost hosted That Was The Week That Was. The groundbreaking show was a highlight of the 1960s comedy boom, which also included Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller’s comedy revue, Beyond The Fringe, the launch of the satirical magazine Private Eye and the opening of Peter Cook’s Establishment club in London’s Soho. The show’s creator, Ned Sherrin, stated that its aim was to “prick the pomposity of public figures”, and that’s exactly what Frost and his cohorts (some of whom appear in the picture on the right) did, lambasting political figures such as Secretary of State for War John Profumo. In February 1983, Frost teamed up with five more talented individuals to launch TV-am, the first ITV contractor to be defined by hours of the day instead of a geographical region. The station broadcast more hours of TV than any other ITV company at the time. The group (shown from left to right in the image below) was known as the Famous Five: Robert Kee, Angela Rippon, David Frost, Anna Ford and Michael Parkinson.
David Frost’s life wasn’t all a party. This image shows the young Frost at his typewriter in his New York hotel room in 1965. At the time, an American version of That Was The Week That Was was running on NBC. Three years later, in 1968, Frost signed a £125,000 contract for a show three times a week – the biggest salary ever offered to a British broadcaster.
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This image provides a glimpse into Frost’s private world, showing him playing football in his dressing gown in his London flat in 1962.
David Frost married Lady Carina FitzalanHoward, daughter of the 17th Duke of Norfolk on March 19, 1983. The couple had three sons: Miles, Wilfred and George. The image on the left shows Frost winning a fathers’ race at Prince William’s School Sports Day in 1989. Frost was known as a ladies’ man in his younger days, dating a string of actresses in the 1960s and 1970s. He is shown in the image below innocently dancing with Princess Caroline of Monaco in 1976.
David Frost interviewed every British prime minister between 1964 and 2010, and every American president between 1969 and 2008. The image below shows Frost chatting with Harold Wilson, the first British PM he interviewed, in front of the Gladstone Memorial. While the image on the right shows comedians Eric Idle and Dan Aykroyd sending up Frost’s famous interview with President Richard Nixon on Saturday Night Live in 1977. Idle plays Frost and Aykroyd plays President Nixon.
One of David Frost’s interview-based shows, The Frost Programme, ran from 1966 to 1968 and 1972 to 1973, and was revived in both 1977 and 1993. Frost coined his famous catchphrase “Hello, good evening and welcome” during one of the show’s earlier runs. The top image shows series stills from a 1972 interview with George Harrison and John Lennon.
As comfortable speaking to actual royalty as he was rock royalty, in the above image Frost interviews a young Prince Charles on The David Frost Show, which ran on American television from 1969 to 1972.
David Frost takes time out to survey New York from a rooftop in 1969. Having signed a record-breaking American televison deal in 1968, the 30-year-old Frost was at the height of his fame, and one of the world’s biggest television stars.
IMAGES: GEttY IMAGES, rEx FEAturES ANDcorbIS IMAGES
Imagine a world where exquisite residences complement cutting-edge business facilities, a world where a new type of shopping experience awaits. This is Mall of İstanbul. - Moi Park, designed by the architecht of Hollywood Studios - 50 different restaurants in Gusto Moi - Cinetech offering movies in 16 theatres - Thousands of global brands in 350 stores -
Let's meet at Cityscape Global 2013 October 8-9-10 / Stand No: 7E30
www.mallofistanbul.com.tr
New Taipei Route Emirates to launch its new route to the Taiwanese capital in February 2014
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briefing LUXURY JET: Emirates launches its Emirates Executive private jet charter service ULTimaTE aiRpoRT: The National Geographic Channel explores Dubai International Airport RoUTEmap: Discover the world as connected by Emirates
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briefing
news
New route to taipei emirates is extending its already extensive flight network to include the Taiwanese capital, Taipei. Starting February 10, 2014 six non-stop flights every week will link Taiwan with the world through Emirates’ Dubai hub. Since the 1980s, Taipei has sought to position itself as one
of the world’s truly dynamic and vibrant cities by combining modern innovation and traditional philosophy to create an enthralling clash of culture and chaos. Visitors can enjoy a morning taking in the sights from Taipei 101, the second tallest building in the world, and an afternoon contemplating the city’s
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temples, including the impressive Longshan Temple, built in 1738. Those who favour shopping should spend an evening seeking a bargain in one of the city’s night markets. The Shilin Night Market is considered by many as the best, offering the latest in fashion and local food.
briefing
news introducing EmiratEs ExEcutivE EmiratEs is now offEring a nEw ExEcutivE chartEr sErvicE.
The luxury Airbus A319 private jet provides customers seeking a tailor-made travel experience the opportunity to enjoy ultimate comfort for up to 19 guests. Emirates Executive will service most global destinations and is available to both business and leisure travellers. The private aircraft is fitted with a multi-use lounge with two sofas, mechanical tables that can be altered for business or leisure use and two 42-inch HD LCD TV screens. Ten private suites, complete with fully lie-flat seats, and the Shower Spa with luxurious products, offer travellers the opportunity to relax and rejuvenate while onboard. Emirates’ award-winning ice entertainment system is also available and is complemented by full high-speed internet and mobile connectivity. A range of menu choices tailored to all dietary requirements is served by the multilingual Executive cabin crew.
emirates-executive.com
frEE night in milan EmiratEs has tEamEd up with thE armani hotEl milano to offer Emirates passengers the opportunity to
receive a free night’s stay between November 1, 2013 and January 31, 2014. Passengers can make the most of the northern Italian city when booking a stay at the Armani Hotel Milano, with one free night offered to guests purchasing a two-night stay. Up to three free nights can be claimed when booking six or more consecutive nights at the hotel. Emirates Skywards Gold members will also receive a free room upgrade for the duration of their stay. Emirates Skywards Platinum members will receive a room upgrade and complimentary American breakfast for up to two guests, plus an exclusive discount on purchases at Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani stores in Milan’s luxurious Fashion District.
Perfect timing Don’t miss your next Emirates flight. Make sure you get to your boarding gate on time. Boarding starts 45 minutes before your flight and gates close 20 minutes before departure. If you report late we will not be able to accept you for travel. Thank you for your cooperation.
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briefing
news EnvironmEnt rEport highlights kEy EfficiEnciEs
EmiratEs has publishEd its third annual EnvironmEntal rEport looking into The
Emirates Group’s environmental competence and initiatives. The report, covering the 2012 to 2013 fiscal year, demonstrates that significant efficiencies have been made through a series of green initiatives. The report reveals improvements in Emirates’ fuel efficiency and reduction of carbon dioxide emissions as the airline added new, modern aircraft and retired older, less efficient ones.
After coordinating with 34 countries, Emirates Flight Operations is saving more than 4,200 tonnes of fuel and 13,200 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year due to its iFlex programme, which has opened up 25 new airways structures across the African continent for Emirates’ South American operations. The report also shows that Emirates has doubled its total recycling volumes in the reporting period, to 10,697 tonnes, primarily due to the inclusion of a used cooking oil and gas
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recycling programme for one of its subsidiaries, Alpha Catering. Other environmental initiatives highlighted in the report include Emirates Group Central Services’ mail reduction campaign, which reduced the amount of mail items at the Group’s headquarters in Dubai by 25 per cent, and the work done by its Flight Operations team to reduce the noise impact on communities, for which it was awarded the 2012 and 2013 ‘Fly Quiet’ Award at San Francisco Airport. emirates.com/environment
BRIEFING
NEWS
Evolving away from French-style restaurants, Villa Romana St. Tropez-Dubai utilizes unique theatrical-focused service as enhancement to your dining experience.
ULTIMATE AIRPORT DUBAI A NEW 10-PART SERIES FROM THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL takes viewers behind the
scenes of Dubai International Airport, from check in and customs to security and shopping. To be aired throughout October in many regions worldwide, the programme accesses all areas, including the prestigious Emirates Engineering Hangar and Emirates Cabin Crew Training College. It also looks into what’s like to be one of the 60,000 staff that keep 344,000 flights, 57 million passengers and two million tons of cargo moving through the airport every year and how you build a brand new concourse to house 33 of Emirates impressive Airbus A380s. The box set containing all the episodes is coming to ice Digital Widescreen this November.
Our authentic Villa Romana St. Tropez cuisine will please even the most demanding palate accompanied by a great selection of international beverages. A world class team is ready to take you on the Villa Romana adventure, where dining is an Exotic, Elegant and Refreshing experience. Located on the shores of the Habtoor Grand Beach Resort and Spa.
Doors open from 6pm - 1am
briefing
news
NEW ROUTE: CONakRy SiNCE gaiNiNg iNdEpENdENCE fROm fRaNCE iN 1958, Conakry has developed into a modern and
vibrant port city. It is the largest city and capital of Guinea and sits on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. Originally located on Tombo Island, it has grown to incorporate the nearby coast and houses a
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quarter of the country’s total population in its five distinct districts. Conakry is one of the wettest cities on earth, with 3,800mm of annual rainfall, but it also has some of the hottest and driest months of any country in West Africa, giving the city a unique climate.
Open skies / OctOber 2013
briefing
news
granDe mosquée
illes De los
This impressive structure can accommodate 10,000 worshipers in its inner hall. In the grounds you’ll find the grave of Guinea’s first president, Sekou Touré, who was instrumental in securing Guinea’s independence.
For relaxation, visit this small group of islands: sandy beaches and swimming with the locals, and is only a 30-minute boat ride away from the mainland.
Centre Culturel franCo-guinéen Discover the rhythm of the city by paying a visit to the Centre Culturel for a local drum and dance lesson. ccfg-conakry.org
marCHé meDina One of West Africa’s largest markets, Marché Medina sells everything. For a mix of unusual crafts and the very best in locally made clothing, head to the Centre d’Appui á l’Autopromotion Féminine, a local women’s cooperative.
Port City/ Conakry is on the Atlantic coast of West Africa
NEW ROUTES: Clark (Philippines): from October 1, 2013 New York via Milan (transatlantic): from October 1, 2013 Conakry: from October 27, 2013 Sialkot: from November 5, 2013 Kabul: from December 4, 2013 Kiev: from January 16, 2014 Taipei: from February 10, 2014 Boston: from March 10, 2014
PoPulation: Two million language: French is the official language, but Susu is also very common CurrenCy: Guinean Franc Climate: Tropical monsoon HistoriCal faCt: The Port of Conakry used to export vast quantities of groundnut oil most famous Citizen: Sekou Touré was the country’s first president and an advocate for African culture. Camara Laye, award-wining author of L’Enfant noir and Le Regard du roi, was also from Conakry WHat is Conakry famous for? Guinea is the second largest exporter of bauxite in the world DiD you knoW? In Conakry it is impolite to eat while walking Emirates will fly from Dubai to Conakry linking to the four-times weekly Dubai to Dakar service from October 27, 2013
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briefing
comfort
Wellness in the air
To help you arrive at your destination feeling relaxed and refreshed, Emirates has developed this collection of helpful travel tips. Regardless of whether you need to rejuvenate for your holiday or be effective at achieving your goals on a business trip, these simple tips will help you to enjoy your journey and time on board with Emirates today.
smart traveller
Drink plentY of Water Rehydrate with water or juices frequently. Drink tea and coffee in moderation.
travel lightlY Carry only the essential items that you will need during your flight.
Before Your JourneY Consult your doctor before travelling if you have any medical concerns about making a long journey, or if you suffer from a respiratory or cardiovascular condition. Plan for the destination – will you need any vaccinations or special medications? Get a good night’s rest before the flight. Eat lightly and sensibly.
Wear glasses Cabin air is drier than normal, therefore swap your contact lenses for glasses.
at the airport Allow yourself plenty of time for check-in. Avoid carrying heavy bags through the airport and onto the flight as this can place the body under considerable stress. Once through to departures try and relax as much as possible.
use skin moisturiser Apply a good quality moisturiser to ensure your skin doesn’t dry out.
keep moving exercise your lower legs and calf muscles. This encourages blood flow.
During the flight Chewing and swallowing will help equalise your ear pressure during ascent and descent. Babies and young passengers may suffer more acutely with popping ears, therefore consider providing a dummy. Get as comfortable as possible when resting and turn frequently. Avoid sleeping for long periods in the same position.
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make Yourself comfortaBle Loosen clothing, remove jacket and avoid anything pressing against your body.
When You arrive Try some light exercise, or read if you can’t sleep after arrival.
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VISA & STATS Guide to us customs & immiGration Whether you’re travelling to, or through, the United States today, this simple guide to completing the US customs form will help to ensure that your journey is as hassle free as possible.
CUSTomS DEClArATIon Form
electronic system for travel authorisation (esta) If you are an international traveller wishing to enter the United States under the Visa Waiver Programme, You must apply for electronic authorisation (ESTA) up to 72 hours prior to your departure.
esta facts:
All passengers arriving into the US need to complete a Customs Declaration Form. If you are travelling as a family this should be completed by one member only. The form must be completed in English, in capital letters, and must be signed where indicated.
Children and infants require an individual ESTA. The online ESTA system will inform you whether your application has been authorised, not authorised or if authorisation is pending. A successful ESTA application is valid for two years, however this may be revoked or will expire along with your passport.
apply online at www.cbp.Gov/esta nationalities eliGible for the visa waiver*: Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Czech republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, latvia, liechtenstein, lithuania, luxemburg, malta, monaco, The netherlands, new Zealand, norway, Portugal, San marino, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom**
* subject to chanGe ** only british citizens qualify under the visa waiver proGramme.
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ROUTE MAP
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NEW ROUTES:
Clark (Philippines): from October 1, 2013 New York via Milan (transatlantic): from October 1, 2013 Conakry: from October 27, 2013 Sialkot: from November 5, 2013 Kabul: from December 4, 2013 Kiev: from January 16, 2014 Taipei: from February 10, 2014 Boston: from March 10, 2014
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• • • • • • • •
Contract Drafting & Review Business Setup , Offshore & Free Zone Companies Corporate & Commercial Legal Services Litigation & Arbitration Debt Collection Banking, Insurance & Maritime Cases Real Estate, Construction & Labor Cases Trademarks, Patents & Copyrights
ﺻﻴﺎﻏﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﻘﻮﺩ ﻭﻣﺮﺍﺟﻌﺘﻬﺎ ﺗﺄﺳﻴﺲ ﺍﻟﺸﺮﻛﺎﺕ ﻭﺍﻷﻭﻓﺸﻮﺭ ﻭﺍﳌﻨﺎﻃﻖ ﺍﳊﺮﺓ ﺍﳋﺪﻣﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﻘﺎﻧﻮﻧﻴﺔ ﻟﻸﻓﺮﺍﺩ ﻭﺍﻟﺸﺮﻛﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﺘﻘﺎﺿﻲ ﻭ ﺍﻟﺘﺤﻜﻴﻢ ﲢﺼﻴﻞ ﺍﻟﺪﻳﻮﻥ ﻗﻀﺎﻳﺎ ﺍﻟﺒﻨﻮﻙ ﻭﺍﻟﺘﺄﻣﲔ ﻭﺍﻟﻘﻀﺎﻳﺎ ﺍﻟﺒﺤﺮﻳﺔ ﻗﻀﺎﻳﺎ ﺍﳌﻘﺎﻭﻻﺕ ﻭﺍﻟﻌﻘﺎﺭﺍﺕ ﻭﺍﻟﻘﻀﺎﻳﺎ ﺍﻟﻌﻤﺎﻟﻴﺔ ﺍﻟﻌﻼﻣﺎﺕ ﺍﻟﺘﺠﺎﺭﻳﺔ ﻭﺑﺮﺍﺀﺍﺕ ﺍﻻﺧﺘﺮﺍﻉ ﻭﺣﻘﻮﻕ ﺍﳌﺆﻟﻒ
• • • • • • • •
DUBAI EMIRATES TOWERS, 14TH FLOOR, SHEIKH ZAYED ROAD P.O. BOX: 9055, DUBAI, UAE TEL: +971 4 330 4343 | FAX: +971 4 330 3993 contact@emiratesadvocates.com | www.emiratesadvocates.com ABU DHABI Tel: +971 2 6394446 auh@emiratesadvocates.com
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WITH AFFILIATE OFFICES IN SAUDI ARABIA, QATAR, BAHRAIN, KUWAIT AND OMAN
FOR 24 HOUR LEGAL ASSISTANCE, PLEASE CALL +971 (50) 328 99 99
route map
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route map
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the FLeet
Our fleet contains 207 planes made up of 195 passenger planes and 12 cargo planes
Boeing 777-300eR
Number of Aircraft: 90 Capacity: 354-442 Range: 14,594km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 64.8m
Boeing 777-300
Number of Aircraft: 12 Capacity: 364 Range: 11,029km Length: 73.9m Wingspan: 60.9m
Boeing 777-200LR
Number of Aircraft: 10 Capacity: 266 Range: 17,446km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m
Boeing 777-200
Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 274-346 Range: 9,649km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 60.9m
Boeing 777F
Number of Aircraft: 10 Range: 9,260km Length: 63.7m Wingspan: 64.8m For more information: emirates.com/ourfleet
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Airbus A380-800
Number of Aircraft: 38 Capacity: 489-517 Range: 15,000km Length: 72.7m Wingspan: 79.8m
Airbus A340-500
Number of Aircraft: 9 Capacity: 258 Range: 16,050km Length: 67.9m Wingspan: 63.4m
Airbus A340-300
Number of Aircraft: 4 Capacity: 267 Range: 13,350km Length: 63.6m Wingspan: 60.3m
Airbus A330-200
Number of Aircraft: 23 Capacity: 237-278 Range: 12,200km Length: 58.8m Wingspan: 60.3m
boeing 747-400erF
Number of Aircraft: 2 Range:9,204km Length: 70.6m Wingspan: 64.4m Aircraft numbers as of October 2013
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last look
Berlin Daniel Werner 33, retail Manager, 14oz, Berlin
I have lived in Berlin for five years now. It’s the most international city in Europe. Living here is still quite cheap, which attracts creative people from all around the world. This is what makes the Berlin art, music, nightlife and fashion scene so unique. I work in the area of Berlin-Mitte and Kurfuerstendamm, and I spend most of my time there. The area is known as Berlin’s fashion district. I love being inspired by the crowd, which is made up of creative people from all over the world, discovering new trends and enjoying all the small hidden bars and clubs. I am definitely a denim guy, mixing it with urbanwear or workwear.
words and images: zoe noble uberlin.co.uk
14oz-berlin.com
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Discover Luxury
The largest selection of 19th Century French antiques in the region, 19th Century Antiques specializes in rare furniture, bronzes, paintings, clock sets, and vases of exceptional quality and taste.
JUMEIRAH EMIRATES TOWERS, BOULEVARD | DUBAI, UAE TEL: +971 4 3887000 FAX: +971 4 3887111 | WWW.19CENTURYANTIQUES.COM
cartier.com
calibre de cartier ChronogrAph 1904-Ch mC thE 1904-Ch mC, thE nEw AUtomAtiC winding ChronogrAph movEmEnt, wAs ConCEivEd, dEvElopEd And AssEmblEd by thE CArtiEr mAnUFACtUrE in thE grEAtEst wAtChmAking trAdition. this movEmEnt is EqUippEd with ingEnioUs systEms For Utmost prECision: A ColUmn whEEl to CoordinAtE All thE ChronogrAph FUnCtions, A vErtiCAl ClUtCh dEsignEd to improvE thE ACCUrACy oF stArting And stopping thE timing FUnCtion, A linEAr rEsEt FUnCtion, And A doUblE bArrEl to EnsUrE UnrivAllEd timEkEEping. 18k pink gold 42 mm CAsE, mEChAniCAl mAnUFACtUrE ChronogrAph movEmEnt, sElF-winding, CAlibrE 1904-Ch mC (35 jEwEls, 28,800 vibrAtions pEr hoUr, ApproximAtEly 48 hoUr powEr rEsErvE), CAlEndAr ApErtUrE At 6 o’CloCk, 18k pink gold oCtAgonAl Crown, silvEr opAlinE snAilEd diAl, gold FinishEd ChAmFErs. AlligAtor strAp.
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