Portfolio December 2015

The business of life & living

How it changed the film business

Radical plans to save the planet

HoNg koNg’s NeoN

cHef jeAN-geoRges

The fading business of lights

A revolutionary in the kitchen

New York

RewildiNg THe eARTH

mega-luxury

The rise of

120

jAws AT 40

apartments in

issue

Our quest for perfection.

PanoMaticLunar

Glashütte Original Boutique ”The Dubai Mall“ Financial Centre Street ⋅ 00971 04 3 39 87 62 ⋅ glashuttedm@rivoligroup.com

Glashütte Original Boutique ”The Burjuman Centre“ The Burjuman-Centre Dubai ⋅ 00971 04 3 86 74 06 ⋅ Glashutte.burjuman@rivoligroup.com

December issue 120

The business of life & living

Exclusive to Emirates First Class and Business Class

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid al Tayer MANAGING PARTNER & GROUP EDITOR ian Fairservice EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Gina JOHnsOn GROUP EDITOR mark evans marke@motivate.ae EDITOR maTTHew POmrOy matthew.pomroy@motivate.ae sENIOR ART DIRECTOR sara raFaGHellO sarar@motivate.ae sENIOR DEsIGNER rOui FranciscO rom@motivate.ae sUb-EDITOR salil kumar salil@motivate.ae EDITORIAL AssIsTANT lOndresa FlOres londresa@motivate.ae GENERAL MANAGER – PRODUCTION sunil kumar sunil@motivate.ae PRODUCTION MANAGER r. murali krisHnan muralik@motivate.ae PRODUCTION sUPERvIsOR veniTa PinTO venita@motivate.ae CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER anTHOny milne anthony@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs DIRECTOR craiG waGsTaFF craig.wagstaff@motivate.ae INTERNATIONAL sALEs MANAGER marTin balmer martin.balmer@motivate.ae GROUP sALEs MANAGER Jaya balakrisHnan jaya@motivate.ae sENIOR sALEs MANAGER micHael underdOwn michael@motivate.ae Emirates takes care to ensure that all facts published herein are correct. In the event of any inaccuracy please contact the editor. Any opinion expressed is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal, financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.

All dollar prices throughout the magazine refer to US dollars.

Published for Emirates by

20

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Portfolio.

THE RIsE OF LUxURy TOwERs 70 Right now in New York there’s a luxury property boom, with the number of apartments selling for more than $15 million having risen by 49 per cent compared to 2009. Increasingly they’re in new, purpose-built luxury towers. So who is buying and why is this happening now?

PRECISELY: OUR FINGERS WERE INVOLVED IN MAKING THESE HANDS At Moritz Grossmann, we take the word manufacture very seriously.

That’s why we insist on using fingers to make our hands. After all, they are the pinnacle of artisanal precision. www.grossmann-uhren.com

OR IGI N OF A N E W T I M E

Moritz Grossmann Japan Co., Ltd., Tokyo · Leicht Juweliere, Dresden · Juwelier CW Müller, Koblenz · Juwelier Reuer, Berlin Juwelier Carl Glück, München · Juwelier Windecker, Oberursel · Juwelier Seiler, Basel · Haute Horlogerie Schindler, Zermatt Atelier Wassmann, Zug · William & Son, London · Independence Limited, Hong Kong · Ahmed Seddiqi & Sons, Dubai

DECEMBER ISSUE 120

CONTENTS UPFRONT

26

INFORMATION

How does a lift work?

A lovely explanation

29

CARS

Juan Manuel Fangio’s Ferrari is up for sale

30

DESIGN

The brilliant design of a secret bar

32

VINYL REVIVAL

What really goes into to the pressing of a vinyl record

LIVING

88

HOTEL RESORT

Shangri-La in Mauritius

95

SIX TIPS FROM A CEO

From the boss at Bulgari

36

97

Some suggestions for your disposable income

Arguably the greatest watch ever made

MOST WANTED

39

AD BLOCKERS

What the advertising industry doesn’t understand

43

PRIMA CINEMA

If you have the money you can now watch first-run cinema films at home

INVESTMENT PIECE

99

TOP TABLE

Enrico Crippa’s celebrated Italian restaurant

102 BOOK

The disappearing face of New York’s shopfronts

23

31,041 copies January - June 2015

PORTFOLIO.

DECEMBER ISSUE 120

CONTENTS FEATURES

48 THE HALF-EARTH THEORY

Could giving half the planet back to nature really save us?

52 THE NEON OF HONG KONG

Why one of the most famous aspects of Hong Kong is slowly dying out

58 THE SHARK THAT CHANGED HOLLYWOOD

How the film Jaws created the summer blockbuster and changed cinema

78 JEAN-GEORGES VONGERICHTEN

The chef who helped create fusion dining now has a new mission

24

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design a n d technology.

luminor 1950 10 days gmt automatic (ref. 533)

PANERAI BOUTIQUES UAE: Abu Dhabi - Avenue at Etihad Towers, +971 2 681 8660 - The Galleria at Sowwah Square, Al Maryah Island, + 971 2 491 9748 Dubai - The Dubai Mall, +971 4 339 8444 • QATAR: Doha - Villaggio Mall, + 974 4451 9866 • LEBANON: Beirut - Beirut Souks, Weygand St. +961 1 999939 KSA: Riyadh - Mohamed Bin Abdul Aziz Street (Tahlia), C Center Building, +966 11 462 6558, Jeddah - Jameel Square Tahlia St., +966 12 284 0529, Al Khobar - Al Rashid Mall, +966 13 889 4187 • KUWAIT: Al Hamra Luxury Center, +965 2 227 0218 OMAN: MUSCAT - Royal Opera Galleria, +968 2200 9993 • BAHRAIN: Manama - Moda Mall, +973 1743 1166 pa n e r a i . c o m

PORTFOLIO.

METAL STICK

This weight makes it easier for the puller to lift the room. It hangs down on the other end of the line holding the room, so when the puller at the top lifts the room, it’s also lowering the weight.

WEIGHT

This thing listens to the different parts of the machines, sometimes with the help of a computer, and grabs the line if anything goes wrong.

The line stopper also grabs the line when the room stops at a floor to make sure it doesn’t move while people get on and off. It’s made so it will keep holding on if the power goes out.

LINE STOPPER

LINE HOLDER The lifting room sits inside a long hallway that goes up and down instead of to the side. It can be longer than any of the normal hallways in the building, but most people never see it.

TALL HALLWAY

Lifting rooms use a lot of power, but the lights and air systems in the building use even more.

POWER FROM BUILDING

A lifting room is a box that carries people up and down a building. Today’s cities wouldn’t make sense without lifting rooms. If we had tall buildings without them, everyone would want to stay on their own floor, because going up or down would take a lot more work than going the same distance to the side. Tall buildings might have to join up with each other, and people would mostly move between them while staying on their own floors. Most lifting rooms go straight up and down. A few go to the side while going up and down, to take people to the top of a hill. There are also lifting rooms that only move side to side; those are called trains. Lifting rooms are safe; there’s almost no way they can fall. There are a lot of different parts that help lift them, and each part is made to stop the room – instead of letting it go – if something goes wrong.

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff In Simple Words by Randall Munroe is out now

Randall Munroe, a former NASA engineer, explains things in simple terms

Lifting Room

UPFRONT

PORTFOLIO.

These lifters usually sit in a machine room above the top floor the lifting room can visit.

They use power to turn a big wheel that pulls a line running between the room and a weight.

LIFTER

26

There are controls on the inside of a lifting room that you use to tell it where you want to go. Some of these controls, like the one marked “DOOR CLOSE,” don’t always seem to do anything. Some people say that those controls don’t even go anywhere, because the lifting room’s computer knows when to open and close the door better than you do. This is half true.

On some new lifting rooms, the DOOR CLOSE control might not normally do anything. This is different in different buildings; it’s up to the person who owns the building to decide whether to make these controls work.

But the DOOR OPEN control is always joined to the lifting room’s systems, in case fire fighters need to take full control of the lifters – by putting a special key into the control place – to use them while fighting a fire.

PRETEND CONTROLS

Lifting rooms are held and lifted by a big group of metal lines. There are usually around four to eight of them, but it can be more or less than that.

These lines are very strong.

Usually, even just one of them would be enough to hold the whole room on its own, but we use more just to be safe.

PULLING LINES

LIFTING ROOM

FALL FEELER

This line is used in the lifting rooms in tall buildings to help keep the weight on the puller even.

When a room is all the way at the top or bottom, the lines holding it add to the weight on one side.

When that happens, most of the weight of this line hangs on the other side, which keeps things even.

WEIGHT LINE

If the fall feeler pulls on the line, these grab the metal stick really hard and stop the room from moving.

GRABBERS

This wheel is joined to the room’s stopping grabbers by a line. As the room moves up and down, the wheel turns. If the room starts going down fast, the wheel starts spinning fast, and the little arms in the middle of the wheel swing out and catch onto the teeth around them. This makes the wheel stop turning, which makes the room suddenly pull on the line— setting off the room’s stopping grabbers.

There’s a second catcher for the weight.

If you face the back wall instead of the door, people will think you’re strange.

POWER LINE

/INFOGRAPHICS If a lifting room does fall, these catchers hit a metal plate on the bottom of the room and make the landing a little softer.

CATCHER

Lifting rooms are usually empty.

People don’t put chairs or tables in them except to move those things to other floors. If you tried to use one of these rooms as an office, someone would probably yell at you.

EMPTY ROOM

These doors line up with the doors on the room. When the lifting room stops, both doors open together.

DOORS

This line brings power for the lights and controls in the lifting room. It sometimes runs to the top of the hallway, where the pulling machines are, or sometimes to the side of the wall part of the way up the hallway.

DECEMBER ISSUE 120

27

PORTFOLIO.

december issue 120

upfront / automotive

cars | worldwide

Juan Fangio’s Ferrari This 1956 Ferrari 290 MM is one of only four ever made and was raced

by Juan Manuel Fangio. It’s up for auction this month

I

n motor racing, names don’t come much bigger than five-time world champion Juan Manuel Fangio. The Argentine is considered by many to be the greatest of them all and this month, one of his Ferrari race cars is up for auction.

The Driven By Disruption auction in New York on December 10 could potentially set a record price. Sotheby’s estimates that the car will go for somewhere between $28 and $35 million, but if bidding is strong it could top the $38.1 million paid last year for a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. For a start, this 1956 Ferrari 290 MM was designed by Enzo Ferrari himself, especially for Fangio to drive in the famous Mille Miglia road race. Add to that, the Works car is one of only four made and reportedly the one of the quartet in best condition – and it’s a piece of history as well as a car.

Fangio finished fourth in that race – despite driving solo in an open top car in torrential weather – and it was his last time in the thousand-mile road race, but the car went on to be driven by other greats.

Phil Hill drove it during the Nurburgring 1,000 km, and Eugenio Castellotti, Luigi Musso, and Masten Gregory took it to victory in the 1957 Buenos Aires 1,000 km. In 1964 it left the road and went into private collection. Until now.

Incredibly, or perhaps testament to the greats who raced it, the car was never crashed, which is why it’s in such good condition.

“It’s hard to know where to start when describing just how important this 290 MM is,” says Sotheby’s car specialist Peter Wallman.

“Driven by the greatest drivers of the 1950s and built for possibly the greatest driver in history, this is a car with which Enzo Ferrari was personally involved and is a fundamental part of Ferrari folklore. Its originality, coupled with its extraordinary provenance and history, which are second to none, make it one of the most valuable cars that will ever come on the open market.”

$28-$32m Expected sale price of the car at auction this month

4

Number of Ferrari 290 MM built

29

Portfolio.

December issue 120

upfront / Design

nightlife | Shanghai

Flask & The Press A clever speakeasy in Shanghai

S

hanghai currently has something of a speakeasy fascination with many latenight bars opening throughout the city, but Flask & The Press in the Xuhui District is especially noteworthy.

Designed by Alberto Caiola, the front is a sandwich shop called Flask. It has a minimalist design with bare walls and serves classic diner grilled cheese sandwiches and Americana fare, but through a secret door – built into a Coca-Cola vending machine – is The Press, a cocktail bar.

Caiola describes it as “an intimate contemporary lounge concealed behind the facade of a cheery, sandwich shop… a juxtaposition of light and dark, elegance and funkyness, personal and playful”.

The bar itself is far bigger than the front diner and decked out in dark woods, leather and vintage telephones and typewriters on the shelves. The drinks are of the modern high-end mixology variety, and there’ll be no stumbling out to find late-night snacks after leaving, as you’ll be back in the front diner again where comfort food is served until 2am.

AddreSS

432 Shaanxi Bei Lu, near Fuxing Zhong Lu, Xuhui District, Shanghai

Beijing

Shanghai

30

Portfolio.

Top: Flask, with secret door Coke machine in the corner Left: Entrance to the speakeasy Bottom: The Press speakeasy bar

upfront / jobs Music | Vinyl

Pressing ever onwards Revival brings record-pressing machines back to life.

Words: Ben Sisario, Photos: Karsten Moran

T

32

he machines at Independent Record Pressing whirred and hissed as they stamped out a test record. The business’ owners waited anxiously for Dave Miller, the plant manager, to inspect the still-warm slab of vinyl.

“That’s flat, baby!” Miller said as he held the record, to roars of approval and relief. “That’s the way they should come off, just like that.”

Independent Record Pressing is an attempt to solve one of the riddles of today’s music industry: how to capitalise on the popularity of vinyl records when the machines that make them are decades old, and often require delicate and expensive maintenance. The six presses at this new plant, for example, date back to the 1970s.

Vinyl, which faded with the arrival of compact discs in the 1980s, is having an unexpected renaissance. But the few dozen plants around the world that press Portfolio.

the records have strained to keep up with the exploding demand, resulting in long delays and other production problems, executives and industry observers say. It is now common for plants to take up to six months to turn around a vinyl order – an eternity in an age when listeners are used to getting music online instantly.

“The good news is that everyone wants vinyl,” Dave Hansen, one of Independent’s owners and general manager of the alternative label Epitaph, said on a recent hot afternoon as the plant geared up for production.

“The bad news is everything you see here today,” he added, noting that the machines had to be shut down that afternoon because of the rising temperature of water used as coolant. To replace an obsolete screw in one machine, Independent spent $5,000 to manufacture and install a new one.

Dave Miller, the plant operator, inspects a record as he runs a test batch at Independent Record Pressing

The vinyl boom has come as streaming has taken off as a listening format and both CDs and downloads have declined. The reasons cited are usually a fuller, warmer sound from vinyl’s analogue grooves and the tactile power of a well-made record at a time when music has become ephemeral.

Most surprising is the youth of the market: According to MusicWatch, a consumer research group, about 54 per cent of vinyl customers are 35 or younger.

Hansen and Darius Van Arman, a founder of Secretly Group,

December upfront / jobs

issue 120

Top: Dave Miller, the plant operator, repairs a broken shear shaft on a recored press Middle: Noah Carmichael empties vinyl compound from a hopper as a machine undergoes repair for a broken shear shaft Bottom: Grain-size pellets of vinyl, used to make records

a consortium of small record companies that is a partner in Independent, said they believed their customers were often discovering new music through streaming and then collecting it on LPs. “None of this was supposed to happen, and yet it’s happened,� said Michael Fremer, a senior contributing editor at Stereophile magazine and a longtime champion of vinyl as a superior medium for sound.

For the music business overall, vinyl is still a niche product, if

54%

of vinyl consumers are under the age of 35

an increasingly substantial one.

According to the company Nielsen, LPs now represent about nine per cent of sales in physical formats. But for indies like Epitaph and Secretly, vinyl has become essential: Both now take in nearly as much revenue from LPs as they do from CDs. When it is operating at full capacity, Independent should produce up to 1.5 million records a year, Hansen and Van Arman said. But first the machines must be fully restored and tested.

33 33

Portfolio.

December upfront / jobs

34

The busiNess of arTisaNal Brooklyn-based Etsy has given people an online marketplace to sell their homemade goods – anything from jewellery to artwork to furniture. While they brought in $65.7 million in the third-quarter (a 38 per cent increase on the same quarter in 2014) it was less than expected and the brand incurred a net loss. Etsy’s stock price fell to $10.15 per share, representing a loss of close to two-thirds of its value since its IPO in April. Perhaps some things are better when kept niche and artisanal.

issue 120

Portfolio.

Top: Darius Van Arman of Secretly Group and Dave Hansen, GM of record label Epitaph Middle: Excess vinyl trimmed from the edges of a pressed record is jettisoned from a machine Bottom: Noah Carmichael, who does inventory and assembly, tests the sealer and shrink tunnel

While tweaking two machines, Miller, the plant manager, showed how many parts of the physical process must be aligned to make a record properly. Vinyl pellets are poured from a bucket into an extruder, and then formed into a small lump of vinyl that is placed between metal stampers forming the shape of each side of the record.

The machine then presses the stampers together with 68 kilograms per square inch of pressure. If the temperature, pressure or consistency of the vinyl is off, the result is an imperfect record that is scrapped.

“This is the dirty, brutal side of the record business,” Miller said.

“Nobody realises the work that it takes to actually make a record.”

Talk of a possible bubble hangs over the vinyl business, and some plants seem to be bracing for a decline even as they expand. United Record Pressing in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the biggest plants, has 30 presses running 24 hours a day and has acquired 16 more machines. Yet the plant, overwhelmed by demand, has stopped taking orders from new customers.

“Nobody realises the work that it takes to actually make a record”

“It’s difficult to turn people away, especially when it is maybe an independent artist,” said Jessica Baird, a representative of the company. “But we are trying to do the best we can for people who have been loyal to us for years, and that we hope will stick with us when the ebb and flow comes again.”

Hansen said he was not sure whether the vinyl gold rush would continue, either, but he has staked a considerable personal investment in it and called the plant part of his retirement planning.

“The dream is to build capacity for our label and provide a service for the indie labels that I love and respect so much,” Hansen said, “and at the same time, make a few bucks, too.”

december issue 120

upfront / spend

1

Lomo’instant Wide camera Instantly printed photos, but in a wide, panoramic size. There’s also a 35mm equivalent lens with optional attachments, built-in flash, three focus modes and long exposure option for creative shots. $200, lomography.com

2

3

the trunkster suitcase Designed

raLph Lauren Lounge chair The RL-CF1 lounge chair looks stylish and is made from the same high-tech carbon-fibre material that shapes the stealth bomber. Its price is accordingly sky high, but at least your chair won’t show up on radar.

with zipless entry for easier access, a built-in USB port for phone charging on the go, builtin scales so you can be sure your bag is never overweight and a tracker so you’ll always know where it is. $325, trunkster.co

$18,035, ralphlaurenhome.com

4

mini museum 2 After the success of the first Mini Museum, Hans Fex is back with another collection of 26 unique specimens encased in acrylic. Items in the second edition include an asteroid, a Bronze Age dagger, fulgurite made by lightening, Neanderthal hand axe, bone from a 300-million-year-old Dimetrodon, fossilised skin from a 65-million-year-old Hadrosaur, part of the Hindenburg airship and a piece of the Cray-1, the first supercomputer. Billions of years of life, science and history in the palm of your hand. $399, minimuseum.com

36

Portfolio.

fancy buying a bit of dinosaur? it’s easier than you might think The Dubai Mall may have paid a reported $2 million to get their 25-metre Diplodocus skeleton, but the trade in dinosaur fossils starts at more reasonable amounts. From trilobites at just $35 and a very reasonable $275 for a 65-million-year-old T-Rex tooth, it’s not wildly prohibitive to own a piece of dino history. Fans of the Jurassic Park films might like the $1,495 raptor’s claw, but those looking for a full wall display will have to shell out $245,000 for a 1.9-metre Orthacanthus Shark. For more see paleodirect.com

Most wanted

locking m, prompting e $31.9 billion ose grappling user must veryone hates sers. dvertising mit in New irectors, r ad-world y about xpanding their Many one to blame

ded on sing Week, conversation: ocking any’s shiny ystem, iOS an iPhone to te out of the market, not saviour of . essagene Kamaras, ive B) Europe. blem. m is, in me cases not put damental erience is says. that does perience, t, in terms or in terms is going to ng.” preted by a potshot at

9

200m Ad-block users worldwide

30%

Internet users in Germany are using ad-blockers

Google, which is the largest single player in the global digital advertising business and reaped some $5 billion last year from the digital ad market, according to then-CEO Larry Page.

(Page now runs Google’s holding company, Alphabet.)

But blocking “takes the publishing experience out of publishers’ hands”, says Scott Cunningham, IAB senior vice-president of tech and ad operations, adding that it is likely to hurt fledgling e-businesses.

Cunningham, both in conversation and at a press conference last week, likened ad blocking to hostage-taking, calling the practice of approving some ads and not others hypocritical.

He is not alone – many in the industry are furious. There have 39 even been lawsuits.

That doesn’t change the fact that most consumers loathe seeing ads on their phones. A recent AOL survey found that 75 per cent of online video ad viewers PORTFOLIO.

11/22/15 5:03 PM

december upfront / advertising

issue 120

complained about seeing the same ads over and over, 62 per cent were upset that there were so many ads, and nearly half thought the ads went on too long. In every category, respondents were angrier about mobile than tablet or desktop ads.

But even the makers of ad-blockers don’t think software that keeps out all advertising is a good solution. Marco Arment, the programmer behind Apple’s No1 ad blocker, Peace, pulled his product after a few days at the top of the charts.

“Ad-blockers come with an important asterisk: while they do benefit a ton of people in major ways, they also hurt some, including many who don’t deserve the hit,” Arment wrote.

Some industry observers, including Google’s Sridhar Ramaswamy, have said the ad industry won’t ultimately suffer but publishers – especially small ones – will.

“All the journalism that we love is supported pretty heavily by advertising,” Ramaswamy said at an Advertising Week session.

“The real problem is that ad blockers throw out the baby with the bathwater. They remove the diversity that has enriched all of our lives.”

And ultimately, consumers and advertisers may have a common enemy in “badvertising”: some of it is virus-ridden and dangerous to both the consumer and the client.

One of Cunningham’s plans to thwart blockers was to increase security for advertisers so that lists of ad networks could be made harder for ad blockers to

“The real problem is that ad blockers throw out the baby with the bathwater.

They remove the diversity that has enriched all of our lives” download; that in turn could help cut back on rampant “click fraud”, in which viruses tell advertisers who pay by the click that their ads have been used many more times than they actually have.

That still doesn’t solve the PR problem. Nobody has a favourite web ad and, more critically, digital advertising reliant on viewer profiles has helped to lead the “big data” boom, resulting in so much valuable information housed in so many places that breaches like the recent, disastrous hack of data giant Experian have become commonplace.

Apple’s public objection – echoed by many consumers – to the big-data-fuelled ad model is, in CEO Tim Cook’s words, that “you’re not the customer. You’re the product”.

Google doesn’t break out details on its mobile advertising dollars, but its falling cost-per-click (down seven per cent year-over-year last quarter and seven per cent the quarter before) seems to indicate a less robust mobile market share and an overreliance on desktop ads (which are losing market share as mobile balloons), and thus a weakness for Apple to exploit.

“Apple is one of our largest partners,” said Ramaswamy.

“We’ve had a collaborative

The moral case for using ad-blockers?

40

relationship, but we’ve also had difficulty and competition.”

The Google executive said he thought the solution was “a conversation with consumers” about advertising and that privacy concerns were overblown.

“People are actually OK that some of their information is used to serve ads,” he said.

Ultimately, Kamaras said: “We have to reconcile the fact that user experience is paramount but also that advertising is critical in financing the ecosystem.”

Lawsuits won’t work, he said, nor will ad-blockers-blockers – “Then you’ll get ad-blockersblockers-blockers.”

Instead, Kamaras said, advertisers are going to have to make their case to consumers.

“What I see as the best path,” he said, “is a digital entente between users and companies that is based on quality standards and codes of conduct, but also on an understanding that all these services can only be financed, today at least, by advertising.”

People laughed when Homer Simpson once said: “Quiet, the commercials are on! If we don’t watch these, it’s like we’re stealing TV!” But that’s currently the cry of the mobile advertisers. And on top of that they are essentially charging you to view their adverts. But those who have installed mobile ad blockers notice a difference.

The blocking app Purify claims a 21 per cent battery life increase from using their app when web browsing and page-loads that are four times faster. And because the adverts have to be loaded up, it doesn’t just slow browsing, it costs. If you’re paying for mobile bandwidth then essentially you are paying to see adverts.

When blockers like Purify and Crystal can reduce user’s web data consumption on cellular by an average of 50 per cent, as well as blocking user tracking, improving speed and extending battery life, is it any wonder people use them?

Portfolio.

December issue 120

upfront / tecHnoLoGY

P r i m a C i n e m a

technology | global

Prima cinema

Home cinema worthy of the name… if you can afford it

L

et’s start with the bad news. There is an informal club called the Bel Air Circuit and you’re probably not a member, nor will you ever be invited to join.

Founded decades ago by movie moguls including Louis B Mayer and Daryl Zanuck, it’s an exclusive movie distribution service provided by the big Hollywood studios to allow members – mostly industry types – to watch first-run films in the privacy of their own homes.

It’s believed that somewhere between 200 and 500 people are on the list. It includes people you’d expect to be there, like Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone (Viacom), Harvey Weinstein (Weinstein Co), Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, James Cameron,

Martin Scorsese, John Lasseter (Pixar and Disney Animation chief creative officer) and so on. But one source claims that the group’s members also include less likely cinephiles such as Dr Dre, Prince Saud Al Faisal, Barry Manilow and Phil Rosenthal, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond.

In short, it’s how the highlyconnected A-listers and Hollywood money men watch their newlyreleased films – at home on their spectacular home cinema systems on the same day the public is in crowded rooms with idiots talking and using their phones. But the industry is opening up, and nonindustry people – albeit ones with money – can now watch films at home on the same day they are released in cinemas. The service

$35,000 is how much the hardware to set up your PRIMA will cost before you even start watching films

is called PRIMA Cinema and for those who can afford it, it’s perhaps the ultimate in home cinema bragging rights. But there are a few conditions…

First off, as you’d imagine, it’s expensive. The hardware you need will cost you $35,000 and PRIMA won’t even consider taking your money unless your home cinema’s up to standard.

“PRIMA is for private, noncommercial viewing in a residence,” Shawn Yeager, CEO of PRIMA, tells us. “We do not tell the client what equipment to purchase, 43 43 but only that it meet minimum standards. There has to be an audio system capable of decoding 7.1 LPCM audio. There is a minimum resolution of 1080p on the display device and there can be no Portfolio.

December issue 120

upfront / tecHnoLoGY

accelerometer technology Renders the system inoperable if it is moved

Finger print recognition scan “The biometric security for authorisation ties an instance of playback directly to a person who must have been physically present at time,” Yeager explains. “Only authorised clients are allowed to create fingerprint templates, which are registered when they sign our user agreement. When a customer purchases a film, the biometric identity is invisibly watermarked into every frame of the film on a session basis. This means that if someone were to handycam the film, we know who was responsible, when they did it, where they did it, and what device they did it from, making them accountable in a provable way.”

more than 25 seats in the theatre.

There also must be a static WAN IP address at the home.”

All good so far? If you meet those requirements, the hardware you get is a rack-mountable, fourterabyte hard drive with fingerprint scanner. Films will automatically download to this as soon as they’re available, so if you want to watch one it will be sitting there in its entirety ensuring you never have buffering issues.

If you decide to watch a film, it will cost you a further $500. Per film. Unless it’s a 3D film then it’s $600. And if you decide to watch the same film again tomorrow you’ll be charged another $500.

44 You can’t just press play, however. First you need to pass a fingerprint recognition scan to ensure that it really is you. If nothing else, it’s probably a good way of stopping your seven-yearPortfolio.

old daughter watching Frozen six times in a row and racking up a huge bill. But it’s also for security that’s required by the film studios: after all, if they’ve spent $150 million making a film they’ll want to protect their product.

It also features accelerometer technology that will render the system inoperable if it is moved, so there’s no taking the system to your friend’s house.

The studios don’t mind PRIMA, because the security measures to prevent piracy are good and the sort of people who would buy this are not the type who regularly go to cinemas. And just as the 3D films (with increased ticket prices) have resulted in bigger box office takings worldwide, so charging $500 per film will boost income, although Yeager tells us that how studios account for PRIMA varies from studio to studio.

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Maxixmum number of seats you are alowed in your home cinema seats in the theater

$500

Per film.

Unless it’s a 3D film then it’s $600

PRIMA won’t tell us how many customers they currently have but the aim when they launched was to be in 250,000 homes within five years. What they did tell us was that on average, PRIMA clients view two-to-three films per month.

They currently have distribution agreements with 12 major studios including Universal (one of their financial backers), but are continually in talks with others.

Currently the service is only available in North America, but this is about to change. “We are going to be exhibiting at Integrated Systems Europe this coming February and would like to be in the EMEA region later in the year,” Yeager says, although he adds that cinema censorship in the Middle East is still being worked out with regards to how the laws apply in this situation.

The type of person this is aimed at would probably think nothing of spending $500 to watch a film.

They’re spend that on a bottle of wine without blinking and being able to have a cinematic experience at home – minus the other people who ruin going to the cinema these days – is worth it.

According to a PWC study, DVD sales saw a 28 per cent drop last year. Meanwhile, digital streaming and (legal) downloads are increasing with PWC projecting that by 2018, digital video will be earning distributors more profits than theatrical box office will.

PRIMA is ahead of the curve, albeit at a premium price, but this is the direction the industry is going.

Day-and-date viewing of firstrun films at home has been seen as inevitable as the time lapse between cinema release and VHS/DVD release has increasingly shortened.

But until now, big blockbusters were only in cinemas.

You need serious money, but you no longer need to be mates with Harvey Weinstein and the Bel Air Circuit to see the big films at home on its day of release.

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The HalfEarth Idea

rewilding earth

Research scientist William Lynn on the proposal to set aside half the planet for ‘rewilding’. Could it work?

A

much-anticipated book in conservation and natural science circles is EO Wilson’s HalfEarth: Our Planet’s Fight For Life, which is due early next year. It builds on his proposal to set aside half the Earth for the preservation of biodiversity.

The famous biologist and naturalist would do this by establishing huge biodiversity parks to protect, restore and connect habitats at a continental scale. Local people would be integrated into these parks as environmental educators, managers and rangers – a model drawn from existing large-scale conservation projects such as Area de Conservación Guanacaste in northwestern Costa Rica.

The backdrop for this discussion is that we are in the sixth greatextinction event in Earth’s history.

More species are being lost today than at any time since the end of the dinosaurs. There is no mystery as to why this is happening: it is a direct result of human depredations, habitat destruction, overpopulation, resource depletion, urban sprawl and climate change.

Wilson is one of the world’s premier natural scientists – an expert on ants, the father of island biogeography, apostle of the notion that humans share a bond with other species (biophilia) and a herald about the danger posed by extinc-

tion. On these and other matters he is also an eloquent writer, having written numerous books on biodiversity, science and society. So when Wilson started to talk about half-Earth several years ago, people started to listen.

As a scholar of ethics and public policy with an interest in animals and the environment, I have been following the discussion of halfEarth for some time. I like the idea and think it is feasible. Yet it suffers from a major blind spot: a humancentric view on the value of life.

Wilson’s entry into this debate, and his seeming evolution on matters of ethics, is an invitation to explore how people ought to live with each other, other animals and the natural world, particularly if vast tracts are set aside for wildlife.

I heard Wilson speak for the first time in Washington, DC, in the early 2000s. At that talk, Wilson was resigned to the inevitable loss of much of the world’s biodiversity.

So he advocated a global biodiversity survey that would sample and store the world’s biotic heritage. In this way, we might still benefit from biodiversity’s genetic information in terms of biomedical research, and perhaps, someday, revive an extinct 49 species or two.

portfolio.

Have we started the sixth mass extinction?

The International Union For Conservation Of Nature evaluated 52,205 species for their ability to survive.

Their findings, below, are stark – especially for mammals, birds and amphibians, where high percentages of known species were evaluated.

Biologist, naturalist and writer EO Wilson in his Harvard office.

Not a bad idea in and of itself. Still, it was a drearily fatalistic speech, and one entirely devoid of any sense of moral responsibility to the world of non-human animals and nature.

What is striking about Wilson’s argument for half-Earth is not the apparent about-face from cataloguing biodiversity to restoring it. It is the moral dimension he attaches to it. In several interviews, he references the need for humanity to develop an ethic that cares about planetary life, and does not place the wants and needs of a single species (Homo sapiens) above the well-being of all other species.

T

o my ear, this sounds great, but I am not exactly sure how far it goes. In the past, Wilson’s discussions of conservation ethics appear to me clearly anthropocentric. They espouse the notion that we are exceptional creatures at the apex of evolution, the sole species that has intrinsic value in and of ourselves, and thus we are to be privileged above all other species.

50 In this view, we care about nature and biodiversity only because we care about ourselves. Nature is useful for us in the sense of resources and ecological services, but it has no value in and of itself. In ethportfolio.

Mammals Of the 85% known species evaluated...

25%

are threatened

Birds Of the 99% known species evaluated...

13%

are threatened

Amphibians Of the 70% known species evaluated...

41%

are threatened

ics talk, people have intrinsic value while nature’s only value is what it can do for people – extrinsic value.

For example, in his 1993 book The Biophilia Hypothesis, Wilson argues for “the necessity of a robust and richly textured anthropocentric ethics apart from the issues of rights [for other animals or ecosystems] – one based on the hereditary needs of our own species. In addition to the welldocumented utilitarian potential of wild species, the diversity of life has immense aesthetic and spiritual value”.

The passage indicates Wilson’s long-held view that biodiversity is important because of what it does for humanity, including the resources, beauty and spirituality people find in nature. It sidesteps questions of whether animals and the rest of nature have intrinsic value apart from human use.

His evolving position, as reflected in the half-Earth proposal, seems much more in tune with what ethicist call non-anthropocentrism – that humanity is simply one marvellous but no more special outcome of evolution; that other beings, species and/or ecosystems also have intrinsic value; and that there is no reason to automatically privilege us over the rest of life.

Consider this recent statement

by Wilson: “What kind of a species are we that we treat the rest of life so cheaply? There are those who think that’s the destiny of Earth: we arrived, we’re humanising the Earth, and it will be the destiny of Earth for us to wipe humans out and most of the rest of biodiversity.

But I think the great majority of thoughtful people consider that a morally wrong position to take, and a very dangerous one.”

The non-anthropocentric view does not deny that biodiversity and nature provide material, aesthetic and spiritual “resources”. Rather, it holds there is something more – that the community of life has

rewilding earth

value independent of the resources it provides humanity. Nonanthropocentric ethics requires, therefore, a more caring approach to people’s impact on the planet.

Whether Wilson is really leaving anthropocentrism behind, time will tell. But for my part, I at least welcome his opening up possibilities to discuss less prejudicial views of animals and the rest of nature.

It is interesting to note that halfEarth is not a new idea. In North America, the half-Earth concept first arose in the 1990s as a discussion about wilderness in the deep ecology movement. Various nonprofits that arose out of that movement continued to develop the idea, in particular the Wildlands Network, the Rewilding Institute and the Wild Foundation.

These organisations use a mix of conservation science, education and public policy initiatives to promote protecting and restoring continental-scale habitats and corridors, all with an eye to preserving the native flora and fauna of North America. One example is the ongoing work to connect the Yellowstone to Yukon ecosystems along the spine of the Rocky Mountains.

When I was a graduate student, the term half-Earth had not yet been used, but the idea was in the air. My classmates and I referred to it as the “50 per cent solution”.

We chose this term because of the work of Reed Noss and Allen Cooperrider’s 1994 book, Savings Nature’s Legacy. Among other things, the book documents that, depending on the species and ecosystems in question, approximately 30 to 70 per cent of the original habitats of the Earth would be necessary to sustain our planet’s biodiversity. So splitting the difference, we discussed the 50 per cent solution to describe this need.

This leads directly into my third point. The engagement of Wilson and others with the idea of halfEarth and rewilding presupposes, but does not fully articulate, the

The first five mass extinctions

1

2

The first mass extinction event as 60 per cent of all terrestrial and marine life was killed.

Environment turned hostile and the world plunged into the second mass extinction event.

End-Ordovician, 443 million years ago.

Late Devonian, 360 million years ago.

3

4

5

Permian-Triassic mass extinction, 250 million years ago.

Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction, 200 million years ago.

CretaceousTertiary mass extinction, 65 million years ago.

Around 80–95 per cent of all marine species went extinct.

Half of all marine invertebrates and 80 per cent of all land quadrupeds extinct.

The end of the dinosaurs.

Virtually none of the large land animals survived.

By the end of the 21st century, over 90 per cent of us will live in a metropolitan area need for an urban vision, one where cities are ecological, sustainable and resilient. Indeed, Wilson has yet to spell out what we do with the people and infrastructure that are not devoted to maintaining and teaching about his proposed biodiversity parks. This is not a criticism, but an urgent question for ongoing and creative thinking.

Humans are urbanising like never before. Today, the majority of people live in cities, and by the end of the 21st century, over 90 per cent of us will live in a metropolitan area.

If we are to meet the compelling needs of human beings, we have to

remake cities into sustainable and resilient “humanitats” that produce a good life.

Such a good life is not to be measured in simple gross domestic product or consumption, but rather in well-being – freedom, true equality, housing, health, education, recreation, meaningful work, community, sustainable energy, urban farming, green infrastructure, open space in the form of parks and refuges, contact with companion and wild animals, and a culture that values and respects the natural world.

To do all this in the context of sav- 51 ing half the Earth for its own sake is a tall order. Yet it is a challenge that we are up to if we have the will and ethical vision to value and coexist in a more-than-human world. portfolio.

Hong Kong neon

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portfolio portfolio.

HONG KONG NEON

HONG KONG

IS LOSING ITS NEON GLOW IN DECLINE SINCE THE 1990S, THE SIGN-MAKER’S JOB IS FADING AWAY

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WORDS: CRYSTAL TSE PHOTOS: LAM YIK FEI PORTFOLIO. PORTFOLIO

Hong Kong neon

F

or nearly four decades, a giant neon cow suspended above a steakhouse in Hong Kong’s Western District was a neighbourhood landmark. It was where, if you were giving directions, you told someone to get off the bus or to take the next left. A glowing bovine beacon about three metres long and two-and-a-half metres tall, cantilevered over the street, you couldn’t miss it.

It was supposed to be an Angus, said Iry Yip, the manager of Sammy’s Kitchen. The sign was designed in 1978 by her father, Sammy Yip, the restaurant’s founder, who at 84 still sits behind the cash register.

But the sign-maker decided that longer legs would look better, hence the world’s only known long-legged, bluish-white Angus, with ‘Sammy’s Kitchen Ltd.’ emblazoned in green in English and in red in Chinese.

But in 2011, the city’s Buildings Department decided the sign was unsafe and ordered it removed. After an unsuccessful campaign to save it, the sign came down in August.“It feels like something is missing,” Iry Yip said.

“The street has become so empty.”

Since the mid-20th century, endless towers of flashing, throbbing neon have defined Hong Kong’s landscape as much as Victoria Harbor and the skyline of denseNeon signs ly packed high-rises.

“When you think of are so familiar Hong Kong and visual to people in culture, one of the first Hong Kong things that comes to the fore is neon signs,” said that it often Chen, the design takes a foreign Aric and architecture curator eye to see the of M+, a museum that is collecting images of beauty Hong Kong’s neon signs online and some of the signs themselves as they are retired, including the neon cow.

The Hong Kong immortalised in the films of Wong Kar-wai, the director of In The Mood For Love and Chungking Express, is awash in neon, Chen said.“If his representations of Hong Kong in the popular imaginations are seminal, which I think they are, you can’t separate that image from the neon ambient glow,” he said.

But the neon is dimming. Neon has declined since the 1990s, sign-makers and experts say, as building regulations have tightened and new signs are made of LEDs, which lack neon’s warmth but are brighter and less expensive to maintain.

The Hong Kong Buildings Department has no record of how many neon signs remain in the city or how many existed at their peak, but the department acknowledges that it removes hundreds of signs a year for failure to meet code. Signs are removed for safety and structural reasons, or when they are abandoned or unauthorised.

In a workshop with grey, peeling walls, Lau Wan, one of the last of Hong Kong’s neon sign-makers, heated a glass tube on a naked flame, effortlessly bending it into the Chinese character for Polytechnic University.

Lau, who has been making neon signs by hand since 1957, helped turn Hong Kong nights into blazing, garish days. He created one of the city’s largest and most famous signs, the red-and-white Panasonic billboard that covered an entire building on Nathan Road from 1973 to 1995.

According to Guinness World Records, another Hong Kong sign, a 64x16 metre ad for Marlboro cigarettes, was the world’s largest in the 1980s. It was eclipsed here in 1999 by a giant dragon sign, about 91x46 metres, Leila Wang, a Guinness spokeswoman, said.

Now, at 75, Lau said he feared his craft was dying. “I want it preserved, but I probably won’t be able to see it.”

His colleague, Wu Chi-kai, 47, is the second-youngest of the nearly dozen neon sign-makers left in the city, and no apprentices are being trained for the next generation.

Top: Traditional neon signs mix with newer ones made with LEDs in the Yau Ma Tei area Above: A signmaker crafting signboards at a factory in Kwai Chung

55

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Hong Kong neon

“Just like every other industry, if the business is good, there must be new blood,” Wu said. “If no one is joining the industry, the reason is the lack of business.”

Neon was a western import that quickly gained its own vocabulary in China, first in Shanghai, then Hong Kong, combining the ancient Chinese art of calligraphy with modern advertising.

What the medium itself represents has changed over time. When Hong Kong first fell for neon in the 1920s, it was an indicator of urban sophistication and prosperity.

By the 1960s and ’70s, when some neighbourhoods here were as chockablock with neon as Times Square, it was considered gaudy, if not headache-inducing. By the 1980s, neon signs were often associated with urban decay and red-light districts.

Today, as they grow scarcer, they have become retro56 chic artifacts and objects of nostalgia. Old signs are purchased as folk art by collectors and museums, while modern artists incorporate neon in their work.

Chen of M+ says the signs should remain in their natural habitat, suspended above the busy streets. But his museum has acquired signs to save them from the junk portfolio.

heap. M+, which for now has no space of its own, hopes to display them when its building is finished in 2019.

Plenty of handmade neon remains in the city for those who notice it. Chen says most residents do not.

“Neon signs are so familiar to people in Hong Kong that, of course, they almost don’t need to think about it,” he said. It often takes a foreign eye to see the beauty.

The sign-makers, however, downplay any artistic pretension. As their work began to blanket the city, art was not the point. “The only requirement at that time was to be able to immediately catch someone’s attention among a street full of signs,” Wu said.

“That was the standard.”

Most of the work today, Wu said, consists of indoor decorative signs for boutiques, bars and restaurants.

These pieces may be lovely, and may even be art, but they are obscure. The neon signs Wu and Lau once made were seen by a city of seven million.

“When foreigners came to Hong Kong, looking at the scenery of the narrow streets, and were stunned by the neon signs, it made us sign-makers quite proud,” Lau said. “We worked so hard for Hong Kong and were actually making contributions.”

Above: A sign in the Central District Left: A neon cow suspended above a steakhouse in the Western District was a neighbourhood landmark until it was taken down

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the shark that ate hollywood How Jaws created the blockbuster and changed the business of cinema Words: Mark Kermode

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jaws at 40

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portfolio.

F

irst things first: Jaws is not about a shark.

It may have a shark in it – and indeed all over the poster, the soundtrack album, the paperback jacket and so on. It may have scared a generation of cinemagoers out of the water for fear of being bitten in half by the “teeth of the sea”. But the underlying story of Jaws is more complex than the simple terror of being eaten by a very big fish. As a novel, it reads like a morality tale about the dangers of extramarital sex and the inability of a weak father to control his family and his community.

As a film, it has been variously interpreted as everything from a depiction of masculinity in crisis to a postWatergate paranoid parable about corrupt authority figures. But as a cultural phenomenon, the real story of Jaws is how a B-movie-style creature-feature became a genre-defining blockbuster that changed the face of modern cinema. In the wake of the epochal opening of Jaws 40 years ago, the film industry would find itself on the Sunday afternoon and I’d had to catch two separate brink of a brave new world wherein buses to get to the cinema. I sat on the right-hand side of saturation marketing and mall-rat the packed auditorium and I remember very clearly findteen audiences were the keys to ing the opening sequence so alarming that I wasn’t sure untold riches. To this day, many I’d be able to get through the rest of the film. As I told consider the template of contem- director Steven Spielberg several decades later, watching porary blockbuster releases to have poor Susan Backlinie being dragged violently back and been laid down in the summer of forth by an unseen underwater assailant, screaming blue 1975 by a movie that redefined the murder, I genuinely feared that I would lose control of parameters of a “hit” – artistically, my bodily functions (“I like that!” laughed the director). demographically, financially.

The lenient A certificate had meant that I’d been According to David Brown, one able to see the movie on my own, without an accomof the film’s producers: “Almost eve- panying parent or guardian, merely the warning that ryone remembers when they first “the film may be unsuitable for young children”. But saw Jaws. They say, I remember the the entire cinema seemed utterly traumatised by that theatre I was in, I remember what I unforgettable opening sequence, and in the wake of did when I went home – I wouldn’t this ruthlessly efficient curtain-raiser (you see nothing, even draw the bathwater.” I was no but fear everything), two people hurried to the exit. As exception. I first saw the movie at they left, I remember whispering to myself in a state of the ABC Turnpike Lane in north sublime terror: “I am never going swimming again, I London at the age of 12. It was a am never going swimming again…”

This, of course, had been the reaction of millions of cinemagoers in the US, where Jaws had become a summer movie sensation. In his influential essay, The New Hollywood, film historian Thomas Schatz notes that Jaws “recalibrated the profit potential of the Hollywood hit and redefined its status as a marketable commodity and cultural phenomenon as well”. Significantly, it achieved this success at a time when “most calculated 60 hits were released during the Christmas holidays”. Not

portfolio.

Director Steven Spielberg and camera crew on the set in 1975 in Martha’s Vineyard Massachusetts.s

JAWS AT 40

“JAWS WAS DELIBERATELY DELAYED UNTIL PEOPLE WERE IN THE WATER AT SUMMER BEACH RESORTS”

summer months not as dog days but as prime time, something that had previously only been true for the declining drive-in market. “The summer blockbuster was born on 20 June 1975, when Jaws opened wide,” First edition wrote the Financial Times’ Nigel Andrews, adding: cover “In the years after Jaws, the entire release calendar of Peter Benchley’s changed.” novel in This change was apparently confirmed two years 1974. later by the May 1977 opening of George Lucas’ Star It would go Wars, with its sequels The Empire Strikes Back and on to sell more than Return Of The Jedi setting new benchmarks for seasonal 20 million franchise profitability. In the process, Steven Spielberg copies and George Lucas became two of the most influential worldwide people in Hollywood, the men who, according to popular folklore, had invented the “summer blockbuster”.

Jaws opened across North America on 464 so Jaws, which according to David Brown was screens amid an unprecedented publicity blitz: “deliberately delayed until people were in the $2.5 million was spent on promotion, a subwater off the summer beach resorts”. Indeed, stantial chunk of which went on TV advertisone of the film’s most memorable tag-lines ing, still a novelty at that time. Promotional was: “See it before you go swimming!” Yet it tie-ins, including Jaws-themed ice-creams, wasn’t just the resorts where Jaws showed its were everywhere. I remember being on holiday in the Isle Of Man long before the film’s box-office teeth.

Despite the fact that the summer months UK opening (it didn’t arrive in the UK until had traditionally been slow for cinemas (why December) and buying the novel, the T-shirt go to the movies when the sun is shining?), and a garish Jaws pendant, all on the strength Spielberg’s brilliantly constructed shocker of the insane levels of news coverage that the struck a nerve with young audiences whose film’s US opening provoked. “Lifeguards were natural environment was not the beach but falling asleep at their stations,” remembered the shopping mall. Between 1965 and 1970, the film’s other producer, Richard Zanuck, the number of malls in America had grown “because nobody was going in the water; they from 1,500 to 12,500 and Jaws rode high were on the beach reading their book.” In the on the growing wave of multiplex cinemas first 38 days of its release, Jaws sold 25 million that these urban spaces increasingly housed. tickets; its rentals in 1975 were a recordAlong with confirming “the viability of the breaking $102.5 million. When adjusted for summer hit, indicating an adjustment in sea- inflation, the film’s total worldwide box office sonal release tactics”, Schatz also argues that is now estimated at close to $2 billion.

Such staggering success proved gameJaws struck a chord with a new generation of moviegoers who had “time and spending changing, establishing the financial merit money and a penchant for wandering subur- of the “front-loading” strategy, which used ban shopping malls and for repeated viewings saturation marketing to turn a movie into of their favourite films”. It didn’t hurt that an event. According to Carl Gottlieb, who these malls were air-conditioned, with the shares Jaws’ screenwriting credit with Peter multiplex cinemas they increasingly housed Benchley: “That notion of selling a picture as providing a cool alternative to the sweltering an event, as a phenomenon, as a destination, summer heat. was born with that release.”

In the wake of Jaws’ extraordinary success, Today, received wisdom has it that Jaws film-makers and studios started to see the essentially redefined the economic

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jaws at 40

models of Hollywood. This change led to some staggering box-office bonanzas, but it has come at a price.

“My husband keeps citing this as the movie that changed the way movies are made,” says Jaws actress (and wife of former Universal boss Sid Sheinberg) Lorraine Gary (Ellen Brody) in the 1997 BBC documentary In The Teeth Of Jaws. “It got us to where we are today, which is, if it’s not a hundred-million-dollar movie, it doesn’t get the kind of support it needs from the studio. It was a good thing at the time [but] it’s an awful legacy to now have everyone used to an enormous hit-you-over-the-head television campaign that costs so much money.”

Whether or not Jaws really did change the film industry for ever is one of the subjects to be debated at the Jaws 40th Anniversary Symposium at De Montfort University, Leicester, later in June. Here, prominent academics Peter Krämer and Sheldon Hall will go head to it remains one of the truly great and lasting classics of head on the still-heated question American cinema, a perfect piece of movie-making.” of whether Jaws was indeed the Jaws began life as a 1974 novel by Peter Benchley “first blockbuster” (Hall thinks about a seaside resort named Amity that is terrorised by not), while others debate subjects as a great white shark. Police chief Martin Brody, played esoteric as “masculinity and crisis by Roy Scheider in the film, orders the beaches to be in Jaws”, “Jaws and eco-feminism” closed, but the mayor and local businessmen insist they and (most tantalisingly) “Jaws: the stay open – with tragic results. Eventually, Brody is forced case of the archetypal American vil- to take to the sea with professional shark hunter Quint lain as queer dissident attacking the (Robert Shaw) and ichthyologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) to hunt down the shark and save the town. heteronormative”.

Conference convener Ian Hunter Film rights were secured by Zanuck And Brown for says that the purpose of the event $150,000 (plus $25,000 for a first draft of the script) is to investigate the movie’s pro- before the novel had been published (the book sold gress from popcorn hit to cinema 5.5 million copies before the movie opened). After classic. “The thing about Jaws is potential director Dick Richards reportedly blew the that it’s open to so many inter- assignment by repeatedly referring to the shark as “a pretations,” says Hunter. “It can whale”, the producers turned to rising director Steven be about Watergate, or the bomb, Spielberg, who had just finished work on his feature or masculinity, or whatever. Some debut, The Sugarland Express, and had made waves critics have claimed that it marks with the TV movie Duel, which pitted an emasculated the point that Hollywood became Dennis Weaver against a giant, predatory truck. more interested in archetypes than “I always thought that Jaws was kind of like an aquatic characters, but it was also the birth version of Duel,” Spielberg told me in 2006, when I of a new kind of family film. I interviewed him for a BBC Culture Show special on the remember seeing it in Plymouth on eve of his 60th birthday. “It was once again about a very Boxing Day 1975 and thinking that large predator, you know, chasing innocent people and this was really a film for us, for the consuming them – irrationally. It was an eating machine. generation of The Towering Inferno At the same time, I think it was also my own fear of the and Earthquake, offering the kind of water. I’ve always been afraid of the water, I was never thrills that had previously been the a very good swimmer. And that probably motivated me 62 domain of X-rated movies. For me, more than anything else to want to tell that story.”

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Steven Spielberg sets up a close look into the monster’s jaws

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HigHest-grossing films of 1975 1.JaWs $260,000,000 2.the rocky horror picture shoW $112,892,319 3.one FleW over the cuckoo’s nest $108,981,275 4.dog day aFternoon $50,000,000 5.shampoo $49,407,734 6. the return oF the pink panther $41,833,347 7. Funny lady $39,000,000 8. the apple dumpling gang $36,853,000 9. aloha, BoBBy and rose $35,000,000 10. the other side oF the mountain $34,673,100

“We started The production of Jaws proved problematic from the outset. First, there was the screenplay, which was Without a still in flux when principal photography began in May 1974 (Richard Dreyfuss famously declared: “We script, started without a script, without a cast and without a Without a shark”). Three drafts of the Jaws script were produced

by Benchley before playwright Howard Sackler was cast and brought in to do uncredited rewrites. But still things weren’t quite right and ten days before the shoot Carl Without a Gottlieb was enlisted to work with Spielberg on some dialogue scenes, bringing more warmth and “levity” to shark” the often unlikable characters. Gottlieb would continue to do rewrites throughout the production, often incorporating material improvised in rehearsal by the cast, with added input from John Milius.

With a projected budget of between $3.5 million and $4 million, filming got under way at the Massachusetts resort of Martha’s Vineyard. Several residents were cast in minor roles, but a few feathers were ruffled by the prospect of a Hollywood production rolling into town. “Martha’s Vineyard resident who plays Mrs Kintner] to the Vineyard is a very upmarket place,” stretch of coast where the beach scenes for Jaws were says Nick Jones, producer/direc- filmed. It’s very exciting to see those vistas that have tor of In The Teeth Of Jaws. “There become so iconic. And we got taken out to the wreck is a somewhat snobby element of of the Orca [Quint’s boat], which was just a shell the super-rich, but the businesses sticking out of the edge of the water. It was bizarre; we rely on tourist dollars. So there stood in it and touched it – it was like touching a piece was a little tension between those of the true cross.”

The Jaws shoot was originally scheduled for 55 who wanted the film crew there and those who didn’t. For exam- days, but the production swiftly turned into a logistiple, when the production needed to cal nightmare when the mechanical shark (three fullbuild Quint’s shack on a vacant har- size, pneumatically animated models were constructed) bour lot, they were refused planning consistently failed to play ball. Nicknamed Bruce after permission even though it was only Spielberg’s lawyer, Bruce Ramer, the shark had been a set. Finally, they were allowed to built by Bob Mattey, who had created the giant squid for continue on the proviso that they 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. The models worked fine put everything back exactly the way in the warehouse, but the minute they were dumped into seawater, they started to malfunction. Day after day went it was, including the trash.”

Nowadays, Martha’s Vineyard by without any usable footage being shot, storms and attracts tourists eager to visit the seasickness the film-makers’ only reward.

Recalling the ordeal of the shoot, Spielberg told locations where Jaws was filmed.

“It really is like walking around me: “Jaws to me was a near-death experience – and a a movie set,” says Jones. “Before ‘career death’ experience. I went to a party on Martha’s Jaws, there was a certain noto- Vineyard and a very well-known actress came over to riety from the Ted Kennedy me and said, ‘I just came back from LA and everybody Chappaquiddick scandal, but the says this picture is a complete stinker. It’s a total failure movie eclipsed that. When we were and nobody will ever hire you again because you’re making the documentary, we went profligate in your spending and you’re irresponsible.

65 with Lee Fierro [the Martha’s Everybody’s calling you irresponsible!’ I had

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never heard the scuttle before, I didn’t ever hear the noise that was coming from Hollywood about me. So I was halfway through shooting the picture and this person tells me that my movie’s a disaster, and I am a disaster, and it’s over. And I really believed for the second half of the film that this was the last time I was ever going to shoot a film on 35mm.”

The lengthy shoot took its toll on the cast too. In particular, tensions emerged between Dreyfuss and Shaw to match those between their respective characters, ichthyologist Matt Hooper and crusty sharkhunter Quint. Partly modelled on local character Craig Kingsbury (who has a small role in the movie as the ill-fated Ben Gardner), Quint is a hard-drinking troublemaker who takes pleasure in taunting his city boy colleagues. It was a role into which Shaw threw The most himself with scene-stealing gusto, to the alarm of famous reaction Dreyfuss. “There was a kind of sparring that went on shot in cinema.

Test audiences between us,” Dreyfuss told the BBC in 1997. “It was screamed so both playful and – on my part – desperate. [Shaw] loud and long knew how to dish it out so you had to learn how to that Schneider’s dish it back. He could be very vicious and his humour famous “You’re gonna need could be very cutting.” And, like his character, Shaw a bigger enjoyed a drink. boat” line was But while Shaw proved a somewhat volatile presence, inaudable. The his work on screen was note-perfect, which was more film had to be than could be said for the shark. By the time the film- re-edited with a longer pause makers had enough usable footage in the can, the production was more than 100 days over schedule, ing Spielberg to concede that “had the shark been with the budget spiralling toward working, perhaps the film would have made half the the $9 million mark, $3 million of money and been half as scary”.

It wasn’t until Jaws was test-screened at the Medallion which had been blown on what Spielberg derisively called “the theatre, Dallas, in March 1975 that the filmmakers got special defects department”. Yet the sense that they were on to a hit. “That was the Bruce’s failure to function proved first time I realised that the shark worked, the movie the making of the film. Unable to worked, everything about it worked,” Spielberg told get the action shots he wanted, me. “The audience came out of their seats. Popcorn Spielberg was forced to take a more was flying in front of the screen twice during the movie.

Hitchcockian approach, working And then I got greedy and thought, gee, could I make with editor Verna Fields to conjure the popcorn fly out of their boxes three times? And tense sequences in which what we that’s when I shot that scene in my editor Verna’s pool. I don’t see is more important that had this idea that maybe when Richard [Dreyfuss] goes what we do. Meanwhile, composer underwater to dig the tooth out [of the sunken boat], John Williams filled in the gaps what if Ben Gardner’s entire head comes out of the where the shark should be with an hole? And so I shot it in her pool with a prosthetic head ominous score that has become as and a plywood boat.”

The scene of Ben Gardner’s mutilated head floating synonymous with screen terror as Bernard Herrmann’s themes from into view did indeed prove a showstopper. It was just Psycho. The result was magic, caus- one of a number of intense, gory sequences that

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“had the shark been working, perhaps the film would have made half the money and been half as scary”

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earned Jaws the reputation of being the most shocking movie ever to be awarded a family-friendly PG rating in the US. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, critic Charles Champlin complained that “the PG rating is grievously wrong and misleading… Jaws is too gruesome for children and likely to turn the stomach of the impressionable at any age”. (The Motion Picture Association Of America defended its lenient rating by pointing out that “nobody ever got mugged by a shark”.)

All of which brings us back to the thorny question of what Jaws is really about. For years, I have insisted that Jaws is a classic monster movie “morality tale” in which the watery fate of potential victims is sealed by their on-land behaviour. Stephen King memorably On set with lead actor Roy Scheider and below with ‘Bruce’ the shark wrote: “Within the frame of most horror tales we find a moral code so strong Although the official explanation for Hooper it would make a Puritan smile,” and surviving the shark-cage attack was the unplanned that certainly seems to apply to Jaws. wrecking of the empty cage by a real-life predator Key to this reading is the character (and stuntman Carl Rizzo’s understandable relucof Hooper, who [plot spoilers ahead!] tance to get back in the water), it seemed clear dies in the novel after having a sor- to me that without the infidelity subplot Hooper did fling with Brody’s wife, Ellen, but became a heroic character who had to live. When miraculously survives on screen, largely I interviewed Spielberg in 2006, he reluctantly because the affair doesn’t happen in conceded that there was some logic in this. But by the film. Benchley, who makes a cameo the time I spoke to him again in 2012, for BBC appearance in the movie as a news Radio 5 Live, he wasn’t buying it. reporter, remembers that the very first “The shark doesn’t care whether you’re married thing Zanuck told him when writing the or single,” he laughed. “It just wants to eat ya!” But script was to lose “that love story, the what about Hooper’s survival? I insisted. Surely that whole sex nonsense”. Spielberg agreed, only makes sense because you cut out the affair? confirming to me that “my first impulse “Well, I cut the soap opera because I wanted to go was to get rid of the melodrama and out and do a sea-hunt movie,” Spielberg demurred. the soap opera aspects of the novel, the “I wasn’t interested in doing Peyton Place.” whole love affair with the ichthyologist So, Jaws isn’t a film about infidelity? (Or masand the police chief’s wife”. Instead, culinity? Or Watergate? Or whatever?) he wanted to “go right for that third “No,” replied Spielberg definitively. “It’s a film act”, cutting to the chase with dramatic about a shark.” results. But once the affair had been removed, so too was the subtextual jus- Jaws is showing on this flight on ice Film tification for Hooper’s violent death.

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The rise of new york’s luxury Towers 70

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New York has always attracted wealth and been the home of some of the most expensive real estate on earth. But right now there’s a luxury property boom in Manhattan in the form of skyscrapers with the likes of 432 Park Avenue setting new standards. So why is this happening now, who’s buying and what does it mean for the city?

Words: Matt Pomroy

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t 10.30am on the brightest and crispest of New York autumn mornings, the view from the upper floors of 432 Park Avenue is so elevated and so clear you can actually detect the curvature of the Earth.

You can see as far as Connecticut to the north, way past Brooklyn and Queens to the Atlantic Ocean to the east, while southern-facing windows overlook every part of Manhattan below 56th Street. And in the same way that tilt-shift photography makes everything look like a model, so being up here makes the city below look like miniatures of the huge buildings they actually are. The apartment takes up the entire floor, so it means you get 360° views out of huge 10-foot-by-10foot windows. It is, however, a view that will cost you $95 million.

That’s a price as breathtaking as the view, although it could be argued it’s about the same as a Mark Rothko painting and cheaper than a Picasso.

Unlike a Picasso the image changes with the seasons and unlike a Rothko you can actually tell what you’re looking at. And you’re not just looking at something, you’re looking down on it, and what you’re looking down on is one of the most iconic pieces of land on the planet – Manhattan. And right now it’s in the midst of a luxury property boom.

Amid this new scramble to build incredible high-end apartments, 432 Park Avenue is the big, grand statement, which is, as The New York Times pointed out, “redefining the aesthetics of affluence in a second Gilded Age”.

It’s currently the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere – a lean, 426-metre tower on Park Avenue at 56th Street.

Designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, the tower has 106 luxury condominium complexes that either occupy a full floor or half-floor, 12-and-ahalf-foot ceilings, private elevator landings, heated bathroom floors, swimming pool, screening room and gym. It even has its own top-class restaurant on-site just to cater to the residents, so if you don’t live here, you won’t ever be able to get a reservation.

Developed by CIM Group and Macklowe Properties, the man behind the building is legendary real estate developer Harry B Macklowe, one of the characters of New York real estate and a smart businessman. He owns around 12 million square feet of office space in the city and made his name 71 in 2003 when he paid the Trump Organization and Conseco $1.4 billion for Manhattan’s General Motors Building. Today the building is worth more than double that. But 432 Park Avenue – on the site of the former Drake Hotel – is one of many luxury towers being built (albeit arguably the most high-end) and they’re not just tall homes, they’re monuments to modern wealth. portfolio.

Perhaps significantly, according to one report, small studios to be used as staff quarters at 432 Park Avenue are going for between $1.53 million to $2.8 million. You can only buy one if you’re already a resident and just need somewhere for the nanny (or whoever) to be on hand. Other new properties One57 and 15 Central Park West also have them, and it’s actually these staff quarters that have seen the biggest increase in price since initial launch because they’re surprisingly hard to find. Most staff quarters in older buildings were converted into offices or extra bedrooms many years ago, but it seems that wealthy residents who have staff are on the rise once more.

So why is this high-end property boom happening in Manhattan right now?

Richard Wallgren, vice president of sales and marketing for Macklowe Properties, is the man charged with selling the apartments to the tiny sliver of the global population who can afford one. The fraction of the one per cent – those who almost certainly can buy without having to raise the cash by doing anything as prosaic as selling their current home.

“I think it’s just the general globalisation of the world economy and New York in particular has been the hub for wealth for many, many generations,” he says. “It was the hub for American wealth initially, the Fords from Detroit or the Carnigies, they all had major houses and apartments in New York as a symbol of their wealth and achievement.

And that now gradually has expanded to other parts of the world, beginning with England, with France, with Italy, many of those scions of industry from all of those countries have had apartments in New York.

And as further industrialisation and wealth creation has occurred in Russia, China, India and South America, it’s just a natural progression of wealth creation.”

At the last count by Forbes, there were 1,826 billionaires in the world, the highest number ever recorded. The 2015 list included 290 newcomers to the “three comma club” 72 and no matter what you think about the distribution of wealth or the one per cent, it’s clear that properties like this are becoming increasingly viable.

Asked to describe the sort of person who buys the property Wallgren is in little doubt: portfolio.

At the last count

by Forbes, there were 1,826 billionaires in the world, the highest number ever recorded “Our buyer has New York, has East Hampton, has Aspen, or maybe it’s not Aspen, maybe it’s Vale, and then of course they never go to Kennedy Airport, they go to Teterboro Airport with their private planes. They also have a yacht, they have a helicopter and an apartment in London. They may be Indian by birth, but they live in London and they have a country home in the South of France and a city home in New York – because they probably have some type of business operations in the United States.”

The über-wealthy are now global citizens.

Those who have bought include the Indian owner of a pharmaceutical company, a Greek in the shipping industry, a Turk who owns a major conglomerate; the ultra rich are from all over, but it seems that Manhattan and London are primarily feeling the effect of their wealth.

Anywhere else is an addition, as Wallgren points out: “Miami’s become very popular, but most people of wealth who are considering Miami, probably already have New York. It’s more of a playground as opposed to a sort of grown up wealth. Anyway, the super wealthy citizen goes not to Miami, but to Palm Beach.”

The effect on Manhattan has been significant. In late 2003 the average price for a Midtown condo was around $666 per square foot, but by the start of 2015 it was $2,395. The increase of 260 per cent is partly down to demand, but also the arrival of new luxury apartments that are commanding big fees. And there’s no great shortage of consumers. The buyer of that $95 million

111 W57th Street 77 stories [open 2016]

432 park

Seven of the high-profile Luxury-towers currently being constructed or proposed in midtown Manhattan 432 Park Avenue 96 stories [open 2015]

Central Park Tower 77 stories [open 2016]

One57 90 stories [open now]

53w53 82 stories [open 2018]

220 Central Park South 66 stories [open 2016]

520 Park Avenue 54 stories [open 2017]

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penthouse at 432 Park Avenue is a Saudi Arabian retail magnate, Fawaz Al Hokair – his new penthouse cost just over $11,500 per square foot. The average asking price in the building is around $7,000 per square foot.

Strangely, one of the driving factors for sales has not been the world-class entertainment and dining, investment, nor that Manhattan is a global centre of business, but the fact that some of the best schools in the world are on America’s East Coast.

The Chinese lady in big expensive looking shades being given the tour just ahead of us is apparently looking to buy a place so she can be near her children who are starting at a nearby University. She’s not the only one.

“Access to good education is now one of the drivers at the forefront of a buyer’s decision,” Wallgren says. “I think as our school systems have continued to improve and expand, we’re seeing a situation, particularly from China and the Middle East, where boarding schools and the private schools – Andover, Exeter, Choate and so on - are very appealing to super high-end purchasers and families. If you look on a map it’s very handy to be in New York and have your children meet with you on holidays and weekends.”

It may seem strange that the battle to get children into top schools is driving a luxury property boom but Wallgren met with one buyer simply because he wanted to get his very young children acclimatised to the American way of life, with a view to eventually getting into one of Manhattan’s prestigious private schools and eventually gaining a college education in the country. “Some of them are coming to New York because their children are going to places like Harvard, and they want a family place to meet as the children go to school in America.”

The city has always drawn in the wealthy, but there’s been a recent shift. Speaking to Portfolio in his Manhattan office, architect Viñoly is more than aware of the explosion of density and growth as increasing numbers of people move to cities. “If you remember the ’70s, then everyone was leaving and going to the country, 74 well, everybody is back!” he says.

“And this town is about verticality, it’s in the DNA of the city and New York has proven since its inception that it can absorb that in a brilliant way. People talk about the Manhattanization of other cities but whoever uses this term portfolio.

misses the point because this is impossible to reproduce. It’s a tiny island that doesn’t have any problem of sprawl and it has its energy.

Manhattan has a capacity to present itself as an urban object as opposed to a typical city.”

Viñoly points out that the top of the Empire State Building generates more money than the rest of the building combined, simply through people visiting there to enjoy the view from the top. This is another reason the new luxury properties are being built so tall – the value of the view. While the typical ratio for tall buildings (width to height) is 11:1 his building is nearer to 19:1 with each floor a perfect square stacked upon the next. The openings you see every eleven floors allow the wind to go through and diminishes the vortex effect, which is something that pushes and moves the building – like an airplane wing creating pressure on one side.

It was an economic decision as well as a design one. In order to have the views you have to be tall, and because there are tall buildings already there new developments need to grow even taller to create that prized view.

Deborah Berke is the design architect for 432 Park Avenue, responsible for interiors, whose design brief was simply “no set budget, make it look fantastic” but she adds “I honestly think that the two great luxuries in urban life – beyond obvious ones like the size and the location of your place – are natural light and distant views, because not everybody has them. In the city, natural light and distant views are hard to come by on dense streets.

“New York is a skyline-driven city – and if the image of Paris is the Eiffel Tower then the image of New York is the skyline – being part of that you have these two symbols of luxury, light and view, and then you’re a part of something that is signature New York.”

The recent new money, however, has not always found it easy to buy in New York. Like the social difference between East and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, so there’s still an element of that in Manhattan, with the Upper West Side being the home of old money while these modern luxury condominium towers represent the home of new money. There’s also an interesting reason for that: the co-op system.

Many other places around Central Park were created in the last Great Prosperity building boom of the late 1920s and like the famous Dakota building, have a co-op that

“Access to good education is now one of the drivers at the forefront of a buyer’s decision”

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432 park

have to approve you before you’re allowed to move in. The likes of Cher, Billy Joel, Madonna, Carly Simon, Alex Rodriguez and more recently Judd Apatow and Téa Leoni have all reportedly been rejected from the Dakota. And that’s just one building.

As Wallgren points out: “The structure of the co-op makes it difficult for many global residents to tolerate the process, because there’s complete transparency in terms of your rent condition, your taxes and so on. You’d need several letters of recommendation and those letters are key, in terms of the right schools, the right synagogues, the right churches, tennis clubs, golf clubs, all of those things. Obviously in a condominium it’s not necessary. You can’t shield the identity of your ownership in the co-op, whereas you can in a condominium and that’s enormously appealing to many international residents.”

Now that it’s easier for the ultra-wealthy to move into prime areas of the city, these buildings are proving hugely profitable and there’s a growing market for ultra luxury in a place with hugely limited land. It’s spreading, and the part of Harlem along Central Park North looking downtown has now become much more expensive, so there is a further gentrification of Manhattan, but the prime spots are increasingly sought after.

The neighbourhoods that people want to be in are tightly defined like Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue and the area ringing Central Park and there are very few development sites remaining and that’s one of the reasons why prices have continued to increase – the wealthy community wants to be in very prescribed neighbourhood. They want to “ring the park” and that means that land costs are extremely high and development sites are rare because they’re historic districts, or it’s already been developed by a co-op.

Plus, no-one wants to be a standalone at $50 million if everything else trades for $20 million.

And that’s what’s significant about 432 Park Avenue – all apartments are expensive. They sustain each other. “One of the adages of real estate”, Wallgren says “is you don’t want to be the most expensive on the block and have everything else be considerably lower, because the lower will pull you down as opposed to being sustained.”

The prevailing idea that these towers will be bought up by foreigners who will never

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use it as their home holds some weight, but Portfolio is told that over half the buyers are based in America despite varying nationalities.

In addition, Viñoly says, “There are not a lot of foreigners if you look at the roster of owners for 432, this is an important thing in terms of addressing what you may believe.” And the idea that it will never be more than a quarter full?

“There’ll be periods in January, February, March, or in July and August, where there’ll be few people here or they’re here for a few days on their way to somewhere, although we do have people that regard this as their primary residence,” Wallgren says. “There’ll be peak areas of the year where it will be fully occupied, particularly during holiday season or during the art auctions, which are extremely popular at Sotheby’s, or Christie’s, depending on what is up for sale – contemporary, classic, watch collections, these people are significant art collectors.

The ultra-rich are collecting art now more than ever, and the earlier comparison of the apartment’s price to a Rothko or Picasso is valid.

For some owners, the apartment itself (even at these prices) will be overshadowed by the value of the art hanging on the wall and the large wall spaces were created intentionally by Berke for the placement of art. It could turn out that – unbeknown to individuals in each apartment or the outside world – this building as a whole will come to house a collection of fine art that surpasses that of many galleries.

And that’s the world these people live in.

Some have pointed out that throughout history, the rich have always built big towers to get away from the poor, but this new extravagance is something different and happening in such quantity as to be notable of the times we are now living in. Although the architect himself points out that “at the end of the day everyone has to come down and walk on the street”, these towers are a whole new level of design, luxury and price. And it’s something that is only going to continue.

“Because the land costs are so expensive in Manhattan and continuing to appreciate,” Wallgren states, “that $95 million could very easily become $105 million before you know it. It’s not long ago when it was unusual for an apartment to trade for $25 million – these days, that’s just a yacht.”

He smiles and shrugs, “People are getting comfortable with these new numbers.”

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Jean-Georges Vongerichten The chef who led a fusion revolution is now aiming to start another one – sustainable, GMO-free and all organic.

Words: Matt Pomroy

T

he back-to-nature, farm-to-table locavore movement is not one that can really claim to have a single founder, just an increasing number of chefs and restaurants that are moving that way. But when one of the best chefs in the business decides to go in that direction, we really should take note. Especially when he’s a chef who helped change the course of modern dining once already.

His current status as one of the most important modern chefs working today is not the result of reality TV deals, book sales or hype; it’s the result of starting at the bottom, working hard and absorbing as many influences as possible. Here’s a recap of how he altered the way we dine…

Jean-Georges Vongerichten was originally headed towards a life of an engineer when, on his 16th birthday, his parents took him to Michelin-starred restaurant Auberge de l’ill

in Illhaeusern, France. “Eating there opened my eyes,” he says. “The ballet of the waiters, the incredible food, the silverware, the glasses, the whole show.” He waves his hand, in that very French of ways that says “incroyable”. His father, however, thought 16-yearold Jean-George was less than incroyable.

“My father said to the owner, ‘My son is good for nothing, do you have any openings for someone to help in the kitchen and wash dishes or peel vegetables,’ and the owner said they were looking for an apprentice. It was luck, in a way, because we never usually went to restaurants like that… we usually ate at home.”

At the time studying as a trainee at a restaurant – even a three Michelin-starred one – was not a glamorous thing to do. “Unlike today, being a chef was really one of the bottom of the jobs you could find, but I learned everything about cooking there as an appren-

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“Thirty years ago it was very unusual to find what I was doing”

Top: crab and squash blossom tempura, cherry tomatoes, raspberry vinegar Bottom: sea urchin, sourdough bread, jalapeno and yuzu

tice, they really took care of me and put me in the right direction.”

That direction eventually took him to Bangkok and it completely changed his life.

It would latterly also have a huge influence on the course of modern dining.

Like a second apprenticeship it gave the young Frenchman a chance to learn a new cuisine, something that few were doing at that time. If ever there was an example of how taking an overseas job can benefit your career then Jean-Georges is it.

“In 1980 not too many chefs were travelling, they tended to stay in their region and learn there so to go to Thailand at the age of 23 it was unusual, especially Bangkok, as at the time there were only three top hotels there so the city was very wild and untapped. All the smells – coconut, lemongrass, ginger – I was captivated, it was a kind of culture shock to arrive there from France. I’d never experi80 enced anything so exotic, not just the food, but also the religion and the people.

“I was cooking French food because I was a chef at the Normandy, a restaurant in the Orient Hotel, but I wanted to learn about Thai food. I had a team of 20 chefs and every portfolio.

day I would say to them I want to eat Thai food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and I want to learn every aspect of the local food.

“It really helped because six months later I was doing a blend of French and Thai food – things like seared foie gras with ginger and mango, lobster with a light curry sauce, mixing things up, you know? It changed my life completely. I went in a totally different direction.”

After Bangkok Jean-Georges went to Singapore, Hong Kong and Osaka in Japan, perfecting the blend of old and new world cooking. Then he took all he had learned to the most important global city for food.

“In 1986 I arrived in New York, but after five years in Asia the only place I was comfortable was Chinatown,” he says. “New York was overwhelming. There were not too many new style restaurants and it was mostly classical. Thirty years ago it was very unusual to find what I was doing.”

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jean-georges

WORLD MAP OF HIS RESTAURANTS Jean-Georges’ empire – 30 restaurants worldwide

USA NEW YORk 11 CHICAGO 1 LAS vEGAS 2 MIAMI 3

CHINA SHANGHAI 3

FRANCE PARIS 1 UAE DUbAI 2

JAPAN TOkYO 1

MExICO LOS CAbOS 2 bAHAMAS PARADISE ISLAND 2

WEST INDIES ST bARTS 2

JEAN-GEORGES’ FAvOURITE RESTAURANT

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My favourite meal is probably sushi because it’s such a pure form of eating fish. There are many places that are good, but my favourite is a place in Tokyo called Matsue Sushi.

The chef there is incredible. He’s a magician. But also I’ve noticed that the older the chef the better the sushi. Not only because of the experience but because of the body temperature. Whenever I go there and shake his hand on the way out his hand was cold.

As you get older the temperature of your body gets colder. Young chefs make sweaty, warm sushi, older chefs don’t.

All the sushi masters are over 60 years old and the temperature of their bodies is absolutely perfect. If you’re going to a sushi restaurant, look for one with an old master.

It sounds crazy but I’m telling you this is the truth. portfolio.

jean-georges

“The reason there are so many food allergies these days is because there are many things in food that are not natural”

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Fusion restaurants and mixing cuisines is pretty much the norm these days, from five-star to food-truck, but Jean-Georges was one of the pioneers. He was doing this back when his countrymen were still revelling in the butter-heavy world of Escoffier.

“I wanted to re-invent French food, but with the influence of the colonies, follow the path of the spice road and the silk route. My five years in Asia helped me develop my personal revolution. In New York there were lots of Italian, American and fast food restaurants, so blending up French and Asian, I was one of the first.

“It was really well received, I was surprised. Whenever people at that time started mixing things up it was called confusion and not fusion. But for me I was never in doubt, there was no way back.”

The New York Times said his food was a “radical imaging of the grand style of French dining” and the fusion style spread. Now, it sometimes feels like you have to try hard to find a restaurant that isn’t fusion.

“The world was getting smaller and smaller – especially the food world and more people are now mixing things,” he says, adding that the blend he is currently seeing a lot of is Peruvian-Japanese.

What he pioneered is now the norm.

But now he’s on-board with the new direction food it taking, Jean-Georges is more than just a convert to the locavore movement, he’s one of the biggest names leading the charge.

“There are always people inventing new ways of eating, but I feel that people now are going back to real thing,” he says and points to the ground. “Yes it’s a carrot, but people want to know where it grows, is it organic, how? What soil? Traceability is the future of food.”

His goal in all of his restaurants is to be GMO-free, only use organic products and to be as sustainable as he can. He admits that won’t be easy.

“Nobody wants to eat meat with hormones anymore, but it’s more difficult for things like oil for frying, flour, sugar, the common things you use every day – it’s hard to find them GMO-free.

“I’m really pushing my producer and grower in that direction. The role of a chef is to create food but also to help farmers be sustainable and look at the future of food as well in terms of health.

“I don’t want to eat something that’s no good for me and I don’t want my customer to eat anything that’s no good for them. It’s a response to what customers increasingly want but also as I’m growing older as a chef I want to live longer and live better. The reason there are so many food allergies these days is because there are so many things in food that are not natural.”

As is increasingly the way of things at top restaurants, Jean-Georges is also a big fan of the three-ingredients policy. Three ingredients, not including spices or seasoning, cooked exceptionally well rather than loading the plate and over-complicating the dish.

“People want incredible quality to their ingredients. They want a scallop to look like a scallop, taste like a scallop and not have it turned into a noodle or something else.

People are becoming more purist, so as chefs it’s for us to add a touch or combination to make it personal.

“I’ve been cooking for 42 years and there’s always something to learn – my mind and palate are always open,” he says with a smile.

“There’s always a new combination.”

living

portfolio.

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Portfolio.

Le Touessrok Mauritius’ best resort reopens

T

he legendary Le Touessrok resort in Mauritius has just re-opened after an extensive six-month renovation by new operators Shangri-La. Now called the Shangri-La’s Le Touessrok Resort & Spa, the refurb has seen the already famous resort elevated to Shangri-La’s exacting standards of hospitality and design.

Located on the east coast of Mauritius in the Trou d’Eau Douce Bay, the 200-room hotel is ideal for water sports and scuba diving from a luxury base, while just off the resort’s shore, there are two islands: Ilot Mangénie is open exclusively to Shangri-La guests and features a beach club with 3.5 kilometres of beach and on-island butlers. Guests also have access to the 18-hole, par 72 championship golf course designed by Bernhard Langer (considered a ‘Top 10 Course In The World’ by Golf World magazine) that is located a few minutes away by boat on Ile aux Cerfs.

The resort has, for more than 40 years, been one of the favourite destinations for those seeking winter sun. Now renovated, you can enjoy it in a bit more style.

Trou d’Eau Douce, Mauritius

Price From $800 per night

rooms 200

letouessrokresort.com

 MRU

December issue 120

featuring...

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Suites with direct access to the beach of Trou d’Eau Douce Bay

CHI, The Spa offers eight treatment rooms set within a secluded area

An 18-hole, par 72 championship golf course designed by Bernhard Langer Portfolio.

living / style

what to pack ...for cold weather in Stockholm, and beyond

W Average temp

-1°c

2 °C 1 °C -1 °C -1 °C Copenhagen Budapest Warsaw Vienna

also wear in...

DECEmbEr

stockholm

Chance of snow: 42%

additional info winter markets In the centre of the Stockholm Old Town area at Stortorget Square (close to the Royal Palace) is the winter market. The little red stalls sell Swedish Christmas sweets, smoked meats including reindeer and elk meat as well as other Christmas delicacies,

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glögg (mulled wine), and a range of Swedish handicrafts and decorative arts. But really, this is just a lovely place to wrap up warm and wander about for an afternoon. The market opens daily from 11am until 6pm and will run until December 23.

DeCember issue 120

city look

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accessories

1. Stone Island wind-resistant quilted jacket $1,085 2. The Kooples watch $405 3. Beams wool jumper with suede elbow patches $180 4. Canada Goose fur-trimmexd aviator hat $225 5. FjaĚˆllraĚˆven messenger bag $182 6. Chuck Taylor All Star Tekoa $100

Bally, leather wash bag $405 Hackett, Mayfair lamb leather gloves $215 Easy Money by Jens Lapidus $10

Tom Ford Black Orchid $100

Portfolio.

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living / style

W

what to pack ...for New Year in Sydney, and beyond

Average temp

22°c

17 °C 19 °C 21 °C 21 °C Hong Kong Nairobi Dubai Miami

also wear in...

sydney DECEmbEr

Sunshine: 9hrs

additional info

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More than a million people will be making their way into the city for New Year, so book a good harbour-view restaurant upfront

Portfolio.

Quay Innovative and modern Australian menu by award-winning chef Peter Gilmore in a light and airy room with Opera House views. Regarded as one of the best restaurants in the country. quay.com.au

The Dining Room Within the Park Hyatt hotel, this restaurant has spectacular harbour views across to the Opera House and contemporary French cuisine with a sixcourse tasting menu from chef Franck Detrait. sydney.park.hyatt.com

aRia Matt Moran has a hugely deserved reputation as one of the best chefs in the city and his ethos of seasonal ingredients works perfectly with his modern Australian food. ariarestaurant.com

DECEMBER ISSUE 120

CITY LOOK

ACCESSORIES

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Geurlain Rouge G Merveilleux Rose $55

Magerit ‘Zen’ diamond and ruby earrings $17,700

Aesop Tacit fragrance $110

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93 1. Elisabetta Franchi $680 2. Alexander McQueen bag $5,800 3. Versace red suede pointed sandals $1,174 4. Graff Disco Butterfly watch $131,000 5. Emillio Pucci belt $450 6. Manis Arora studded top $865

Lanvin Minaudières evening clutch in Art Deco-inspired gold detail $5,750

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DECEMBER ISSUE 120

LIVING / ADVICE

TIPS FROM A CEO

Jean-Christophe Babin CEO of Bulgari

VISIT Kathmandu. I have been there perhaps as many as 15 times in the last 30 years, and every time I am as surprised as a child, despite the poverty and the earthquake.

APP

Skyscanner. It allows me to check all the flights availabilities and possible connections.

For personal and business trips, it saves a lot of money.

BOOK Manual Of The Warrior Of Light by Paulo Coelho.

ARTIST You really should find some time to see Vincent Van Gogh’s work up close, for its unique blue and yellow and his incredible madness.

RESTAURANT I Due Ladroni in Rome. It is ten minutes’ walk from our office, and seems like the luxury canteen of Bulgari, but it has the best fresh fish and excellent staff.

95

CAR I’d have to say my Ferrari 599. It’s a treat for the senses in every respect. The V12 engine is just music!

PORTFOLIO.

Cancer Treatments.

First. Attentive. Precise. Effective.

The Center for Cancer Care at American Hospital Dubai Cancer not only affects your health, but also your family and lifestyle. Understanding this, the Center for Cancer Care at American Hospital Dubai has launched the first Linear Accelerator Unit serving Radiation Therapy patients in Dubai.

The Center delivers advance and multi-disciplinary cancer care and is directed by Dr. Salim Chaib Rassou, a Radiation Oncologist who undertook specialties in Radiation Oncology, Breast Pathology and Breast Imaging and has garnered years of experience in France prior to joining American Hospital Dubai in 2011.

With the addition of the RapidArc速 Linear Accelerator, Dr. Chaib Rassou and his team can offer radical treatment options. This technology delivers treatments faster and with more precision, a winning combination that enables physicians to improve the standard of care and treat patients more comfortably.

American Hospital Dubai remains the destination for cancer treatments, helping patients to live life with the best possible health.

MOH BS31428

Call us for an appointment today on +971 4 377 3030/31 or visit www.ahdubai.com

American Hospital Dubai accepts most major health insurance plans, please call (+971) 800 - 5500

december living / investment

issue 120

Patek Philippe Nautilus

investment piece

The 1976 Nautilus 3700/1A, arguably the greatest watch ever made

1

The casing has a mix of brushed and polished steel

2

Although not a diving watch, the design of the casing ensures that is it waterresistant up to 120m

5

The porthole shape design, with bezel and case, are screwed to each other, just like an actual porthole

3

Unlike the later models, the original has no seconds hand, and as a result the design is cleaner and more relaxed

6

The black dial with horizontal embossed bars has become one of the signature features of the Nautilus 7

4

While later editions tried out Roman numerials or dots, the white gold batons in place of numbers (with double at midday) is clean and iconic

Nautilus bracelets are notably thin and sleek, unlike most of the other sports watches from that era 8

The original was notably thin for a watch of this type with a height of just 7.6mm

In the world of watch design, one man stand above all others: Gérald Genta. And of all his creations there are two that have endured and become genuine classics, not just of watches but of modern design. The first is the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak from 1972, and the second is the Patek Philippe Nautilus from 1976. Horological types have argued the merits of both, but it’s the Nautilus that is largely regarded as superior. There have been many variants of the Nautilus over the years (the 2006 jumbo in a larger 43mm case is also lovely) but it’s the original that is the best of the lot. They don’t come cheap, but hold value and if looked after should appreciate. Priced at $3,100 upon launch in 1976, you can pick one up good condition one for around $50,000.

Portfolio.

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DECEMBER LIVING / FOOD

ISSUE 120

Top table Three Michelin-starred restaurant in the heart of truffle country

P

iazza Duomo’s head chef, Enrico Crippa, has a reputation for experimental cooking. The Italian attributes this to the formative years he spent running a restaurant in Japan, and the time he spent working with culinary greats such as Ghislaine Arabian at Ledoyen in Paris, Michel Bras in Laguiole, and one of the modern masters, Ferran Adria at El Bulli But what makes this restaurant work is the simplicity and attention to quality. Many of the vegetables used are grown in their garden at the back of the restaurant and, unlike some other places, Crippa resists the temptation to pile on too many ingredients.

The restaurant opened in 2005 and this year it received its third Michelin star.

A two-hour drive from Milan, the Alba region is certainly worth a visit if you have an interest in fine dining, and this restaurant is the pinnacle of modern Italian.

PIAZZA DUOMO, ALBA

1

EGGS AND EGGS SALAD Cod stock

Sour cream

Fresh caviar

Pressed caviar

Green salad dressed with butter and sage

Marinated egg

Alba CN, Italy

piazzadoumo.it

 MXP

2

3

PANNA COTTA MATISSE

LAMB AND CAMOMILE

A dessert created to resemble a painting by Henri Matisse, this uses a panna cotta base with coloured shapes made from jellied fruit.

Lamb cooked medium with camomile drops and light greens. If you order the full tasting menu, this will be the ninth course.

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CHEF’S RECOMMENDATION | ENRICO CRIPPA’S PICK OF THREE RESTAURANTS TO TRY 1. Ristorante Uliassi (Senigallia, Italy) “To try one of the best fish restaurants in Italy and Europe” 2. Maison Troisgros (Roanne, France) “Three Michelin stars over 30 years, taste a piece of their culinary story.”

3. The Ledbury (London) “Brett Graham is one of most talented chefs in Europe. Try the Australian touch in the heart of the UK.” PORTFOLIO.

living / food

Rules of the game

L

ondon 1798, sometime around lunch. A ruddyfaced man is sat browsing a newspaper in Thomas Rule’s new restaurant on Maiden Lane.

Admiral Nelson’s fleet has just destroyed the French ships at the Battle Of The Nile, and to help pay for this forthcoming war, prime minister William Pitt The Younger has announced that from next year there would be a new levy called income tax. Two pence in the pound? Oh, that won’t last. In other news, Edward Jenner has just published some interesting findings on his smallpox vaccination. But the table is now ready. Paper is folded and the pre-lunch snifter is downed. It’s game season. And that means grouse.

More than 217 years later that restaurant at 35 Maiden Lane, in Covent Garden, is still running.

It’s London’s oldest restaurant and still one of its greatest. Lauded when it opened, writers of the day were singing the praises of Rules’ 100 “porter, pies and oysters” and remarking on the “rakes, dandies and superior intelligences who comprise its clientele”.

Over the centuries noted acolytes have included Evelyn Waugh, John Portfolio.

RULES RESTAURANT london

London’s oldest restaurant is still one of its greatest pleasures, especially in game season

35 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London

12pm - Midnight daily

rules.co.uk

Betjeman and Graham Greene, who wrote about it in The End Of The Affair and would celebrate his birthday here. Charlie Chaplin ate here, as did Charles Dickens, and even the current James Bond film has a scene where M meets Moneypenny and Q at the restaurant. It’s as if Rules is the centre-point of a Venn diagram of Englishness, both past and present.

It’s a rare chance to spend a few hours living in an England that ceased to exist in all but a few rare corners of the country. That they

chose Rules as a setting for an episode of Downton Abbey is one thing – many places in the UK are used in period dramas – but the fact it’s still a working restaurant just as you saw on screen is entirely something else.

The political cartoons that adorn the walls are a reminder of leaders gone by, while politicians still favour the place and come here to trade gossip and argue over a long lunch. And it doesn’t close between lunch and dinner, meaning a late lunch can drift into the territory of

December issue 120

TradiTional dishes…

Steak and kidney pie

Wild mallard with berries and nuts

Rib of beef with Yorkshire pudding Charlie Chaplin, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are among the rich and famous to have been to Rules

the second helping, the third bottle and the forthright opinion.

And this time of year is the season to visit. It’s game season after all and this is what Rules is famous for. Rules also owns The Lartington Estate in the High Pennines so the farm-to-table ethos that others consider trendy is merely the way things have always been here.

“Game birds may contain lead shot,” the menu warns – more a sign of authenticity than serious concern as grouse, partridge, mallard, pheasant, teal, hare, rabbit and deer all appear on the menu, plus other traditional courses including oysters, salmon, potted shrimps and some brilliant pies and puddings.

It’s as if Rules is the centre-point of a Venn diagram of Englishness, both past and present

It won’t win Michelin stars, it won’t change the way we eat (its menu rarely changes), and it won’t start trends in the dining scene, although it’s been doing “seasonal and local” for more than two centuries. Crucially though, it won’t let you down. Rules is a constant in British dining, an edible 101 museum of how nobility once ate, a national treasure and a reminder that few things can top a wellmixed drink, followed by hearty food and a bottle of red on a cold December day in London.

Portfolio.

living / books

Store wars The battle to survive as a small business in New York is getting harder every year, but as traditional stores vanish from the city, there are two people ensuring they won’t be forgotten

1

Fares Deli Grocery on Avenue A in the East Village. Photo from 2009. No longer in business

J

ames and Karla Murray have been capturing images of storefronts since the 1990s and their second collection of images and interviews is out this month.

“These family-run businesses started out as traditional mom-and-pop stores passed down from generation to generation, and there was a time when they defined our neighbourhoods,” James says.

“Many were humble stores tucked away on narrow side streets, while others had become well-known institutions on historic avenues. Each store turned out to be as unique as their customers, run by owners with a commitment to tradition and special service.

Not only are these modest small businesses falling away in the face of modernisation, gentrification, and conformity, the once unique appearance and character of our colourful streets suffers in the process.

“Almost two-thirds of the stores from the book are now gone, which is extremely sad. The largest factor as to why stores have been rapidly closing is when the shop owner does not own the building they are located in, due to increasing real estate prices, their lease often does not get renewed or their rent is tripled, quadrupled or raised to such a high rate, that they can no longer stay in business.”

2

M&G Diner at 383 West 125th Street at Morningside Avenue.

The building is now empty

Store Front II: A History Preserved is out now

102

3

The Lenox Lounge in Harlem. It closed on December 31, 2012, after a lease dispute Portfolio.

december issue 120

4

Ralph’s in Tribeca closed in 2007 for conversion into a luxury condo

103

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Katy’s Candy Store on Tompkins Ave near Vernon Avenue, in business from 1969 until 2007

6

Zig Zag Records at 2301 Avenue U closed in December 2010 after 35 years of business Portfolio.

living / hotels

Down to the Details

Luxury hotels tick the same boxes, but some five-stars manage to set themselves apart through an original

1

2 The arT concierge aT The

Portfolio.

Words: Jean Grogan

1 The vinTage fashion Trunk aT The Berkeley, london The Berkeley Hotel is just a stiletto-throw from some of the best shopping destinations in London and the hotel plays to its fashion credentials by offering Berkeley Suites guests complimentary access to its Vintage Fashion Trunk. Edited by Carmen Haid, 104 founder of the Atelier-Mayer vintage boutique, the cream calfskin bespoke trunk features one-of-a-kind luxury accessories such as a 1970s Yves Saint Laurent handbag, 1970s Chanel quilted mini flower ear clips and a red Nina Ricci pillbox hat from the 1950s, stunning finishing touches to any outfit. If the guest finds that she cannot live without an item, The Berkeley’s concierge will arrange for its purchase and delivery. the-berkeley.co.uk

royal Monceau, Paris Paris can claim the title of art capital of the world with some justification. The problem for the visitor is that there is just so much to see. The Royal Monceau placed art and culture at the heart of its redesign by Philippe Starck. It proposes a unique and exclusive service to guests – the Art Concierge. Art Concierge Julie Eugène shares her insider knowledge of the best Parisian exhibitions and cultural events, organises private tours and viewings, and advises guests on investing in art. She can arrange for museums and galleries to be open after hours, invite an artist or curator to join art lovers for tea, organise studio visits, or even assist guests in starting their own collection. raffles.com

december issue 120

Service or amenity that reflects their destination or DNA. Here are five examples

3 Part-time Pets at the

Fairmont Hotel, VancouVer The loneliest part of long-haul travel is often leaving the family pet behind. The Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver employs Mavis and Beau, two yellow labrador golden retrievers, as canine ambassadors on alternate duty at the reception to meet and greet guests. Both Mavis and Beau are happy to accompany guests on a walk or jog and are philosophical about being petted by small children. Many other Fairmont Hotels worldwide have recruited canine ambassadors. Guests who form a lasting attachment can stay in touch with the ambassadors (yes, we know... ) through e-mail, letter or Facebook. fairmont.com/hotel-vancouver

4 the Platform greeting at the

sHangri-la Hotel, tokyo The Shangri-La Hotel in Tokyo takes welcoming travellers to the nth degree.

The hotel is located above Tokyo Station, the 100-year-old home of the bullet train, newly reopened as part of the mammoth Marunouchi renewal project.

Guests can SMS the hotel concierge their seat number from the Narita Airport Express and a Shangri-La greeter will be at your precise alighting spot on the platform to welcome you to Tokyo in the best Japanese tradition and whisk your luggage straight to your hotel room. www.shangri-la.com/Tokyo

many of the Fairmont Hotels worldwide have recruited canine ambassadors

5

the control tablet at the Peninsula, Paris and worldwide The Peninsula Hotel’s in-room technology is perfect for the tech-minded, thanks to owner, Sir Michael Kadoorie, who is not. He tested the tablet personally while it was under development in Hong Kong until he was completely satisfied with the intuitive simplicity of its design. It provides some of the fastest complimentary Wi-Fi of any hotel in the world, allowing you to control everything in the room from dimming lights, regulating the temperature, drawing the curtains and summoning housekeeping in your language of choice. The tablet streams international TV channels and new-release movies on the flat-screen, entirely free of charge. It includes the in-room dining menu, a section on what’s on in the hotel and in the city, and flight tracking for inward and 105 outbound flights. The bathroom tablet offers a spa experience with dimmed lighting and relaxing music.

Local and international VoIP calls are complimentary whatever the duration, as is the non-alcoholic mini-bar.

Portfolio.

DECEMBER ISSUE 120

LIVING / COLUMN

First impressions...

By Bill Bryson I first came to England at the other end of my life, when I was still quite young, just 20.

In those days, for a short but intensive period, a very high proportion of all in the world that was worth taking note of came out of Britain. The Beatles, James Bond, Mary Quant and miniskirts, Twiggy and Justin de Villeneuve, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor ’s love life, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, suit jackets without collars, television series like The Avengers and The Prisoner, spy novels by John le Carré and Len Deighton, Marianne Faithfull, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield, quirky movies starring David Hemmings and Terence Stamp that we didn’t quite get in Iowa, Harold Pinter plays that we didn’t get at all, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, That Was The Week That Was, the Profumo scandal — practically everything really.

Advertisements in magazines like The New Yorker and Esquire were full of British products in a way they never would be again — Gilbey’s and Tanqueray gin, Harris tweeds, BOAC airliners, Aquascutum suits and Viyella shirts, Alan Paine sweaters, Daks trousers, MG and Austin Healey sports cars, a hundred varieties of Scotch whisky. It was clear that if you wanted quality and suavity in your life, it was British goods that were in large part going to supply it.

Not all of this made a great deal of sense even then, it must be said. A popular cologne of the day was called Pub. I am not at all sure what resonances that was supposed to evoke. I have been drinking in England for 40 years and I can’t say that I have ever encountered anything in a pub that I would want to rub on my face.

Because of all the attention we gave Britain, I thought I knew a fair amount about the place, but I quickly discovered upon arriving that I was very wrong. I couldn’t even speak my own language there.

In the first few days, I failed to distinguish between collar and colour, khaki and car key, letters and lettuce, bed and bared, karma and calmer.

Needing a haircut, I ventured into a unisex hairdresser’s in Oxford, where the proprietress, a large and vaguely forbidding woman, escorted me to a chair, and there informed me crisply: “Your hair will be cut by a vet today.”

I was taken aback. “Like a person who treats sick animals?” I said, quietly horrified.

“No, her name is Yvette,” she replied and with the briefest of gazes into my face made it clear that I was the most exhausting idiot that she had encountered.

In a pub I asked what kind of sandwiches they had.

“Ham and cheese,” the man said.

“Oh, yes please,” I said.

“Yes please what?” he said.

“Yes please, ham and cheese,” I said, but with less confidence.

“No, it’s ham or cheese,” he explained.

“You don’t do them both together?”

“No.” “Oh,” I said, surprised, then leaned toward him and in a friendly but confidential tone said: “Why not?

Too flavourful?”

He stared at me.

“I’ll have cheese then, please,” I said contritely.

When the sandwich came, the cheese was extravagantly shredded – I had never seen a dairy product distressed before serving – and accompanied by what I now know was Branston pickle, but what looked to me then like what you find when you stick your hand into a clogged sump.

I nibbled it tentatively and was pleased to discover that it was delicious. Gradually it dawned on me that I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous. It is a feeling that has never left me.

“I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous”

Bill Bryson’s books include

106 A Walk In The Woods, Notes From A Small Island and A Short History Of Nearly Everything. The Road To Little Dribbling is his first travel book in 15 years PORTFOLIO.

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