Lisa Carrington / Amos Chapple / The Checks / Jacko Gill / The Phantom Band / Seth Rogen / Jessica Watson
A BEYOND THE ORDINARY MAGAZINE
DECEMBER 2011
HOW TO MAKE GENIUS NEYMAR
AND THE FORGING OF SOCCER’S WONDER BOY
AIRS AND GRAZES
Red Bull X-Fighters season review SEAN PENN
“I’ve always been driven by anger”
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December 2011
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Bullhorn
cover photography: jürgen skarwan. photography: philipp horak
staying power Sometimes the cards just fall right for you. While we were putting together this issue of The Red Bulletin, our cover star, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, a relatively unassuming 19-year-old boy-man who just happens to be the most coveted young footballer on the planet, signed a much-improved contract extension that keeps him at the Brazilian club Santos FC until after the World Cup of 2014. In three summers’ time, that tournament will be held in Brazil, and if Neymar can lead his country to glory on home soil, then even the oligarchs and sheikhs and members’ representatives at Europe’s top clubs will be wincing as they flip the tops off their gold pens and open their chequebooks to try and sign him. Just like we were wincing when the rumours of him signing for Chelsea or Real Madrid or Manchester City or Barcelona wouldn’t go away, despite our exclusive interview suggesting he would be loyal to his home state team. A young footballer turning down a mega-millions move? It was never in doubt. If Neymar is driven by a love of the game, then Sean Penn, double Oscar winner and rousing rebel, is mainly powered by anger. “I wouldn’t recommend it as In four years of cycling around the remote communities of Zambia a source of motivation,” he tells as a caregiver on a bike supplied by World Bicycle Relief, Susan The Red Bulletin this month, has pedalled the equivalent of halfway round the world. Read “but it’s always worked for me.” about the lengths that she goes to on page 70 Elsewhere, there’s Jessica Watson, who sailed around the world just in time for her 17th birthday, a review of the 2011 season of Red Bull X-Fighters, and a report from Zambia on the remarkable work of a lone woman who, with two-wheeled help from World Bicycle Relief, is a guardian angel for HIV sufferers in remote villages.
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Fusing high-end magazine editorial with eye-catching moving images www.redbulletin.com/ipad
THE WORLD OF RED BULL
IN DECEMBER
CONTENTS
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52 58 38
PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHIE HOPSON/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, ANTONIA STEYN, PHILIP PLATZER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, JEFF KRAVITZ/GETTY IMAGES, CRAIG KOLESKY/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, JOERG MITTER/RED BULL X-FIGHTERS, JEFFERY A. SALTER/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
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BODY+ MIND MORE
Bullevard
Action
14 HERE IS THE NEWS Recent history and crystal balls
28 RED BULL X-FIGHTERS A year on tour with the world’s finest FMX virtuosos, laughing in the face of gravity
18 JACKO GILL History beckons for the young shot-putter aiming for glory at London 2012 20 KIT BAG: FORMULA ONE ENGINES How Renault put the va-va-voom into Grand Prix motor racing 23 YANN TIERSEN Making beautiful music – beyond Amélie 24 WINNING FORMULA Topspinning tales of Rafael Nadal 26 LUCKY NUMBERS: NOBEL PRIZE Gather ye, for the Oscars of boffindom Every month 06 KAINRATH’S CALENDAR 08 PICTURES OF THE MONTH 98 MIND’S EYE
82 TRAVEL: NYE TOP 10 Edinburgh to Melbourne, via every dream ticket between 84 FOOD FOR THOUGHT Top chefs secrets
38 THE DARK SIDE OF THE PENN He’s Hollywood, sure. But there’s another ‘H’ to Mr Penn: humanitarian
86 GET THE GEAR Pro wave-rider Jordy Smith has what it takes to tame big surf
44 NEYMAR: HOPE OF A NATION Has a Brazilian footballer ever been so feted by his countrymen? Not since Pelé…
88 PRO TIPS A kayaker’s Wednesday hell
52 JESSICA WATSON: TEEN SPIRIT The teen sailing sensation. Be warned: she’ll make you feel an underachiever
90 KIWI BANDS The bounce of The Checks 92 WORLD’S BEST CLUBS Cape Town’s Café Caprice
58 FLORIDART The Swiss art scene ventures to Miami
92 SETH ROGEN On his comedy, and cancer
64 SURFERS OF THE APOCALYPSE South Africa’s surf generation take on the oceans’ toughest breaks
93 TAKE 5 The Phantom Band reveal their spectral inspirations
70 A BIKE TO CHANGE THE WORLD This heavy, steel-framed bicycle has the power to transform African communities
94 WORLD IN ACTION Our guide to global essentials 96 SAVE THE DATE This month’s diary tips 05
illustration: dietmar kainrath
K a i n r at h
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G r i m s e l , sw it z e r l an d
CABLE GUY
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CrEDIts
photography: raINEr EDEr/MaMMut
No, this isn’t a scene from new Bond flick Skyfall, pirate-released on YouTube. This is 39-year-old Swiss mountaineer Stephan Siegrist, who, with the help of equipment supplier Mammut, came up with idea of trying something different from his regular challenge of scaling an Alp. He’s also a bit of an extreme photography nut and enjoys being the subject of spectacular images, such as this. Still reckon it looks hairy? Not for Siegrist, who lives for the thrill of peaks such as the Cerro Torre in Patagonia or the north face of the Eiger. After these epics, clambering along a cable-car cable 25m off the ground is “just a bit of fun”. www.stephan-siegrist.ch
CrEDIts
e l C halté n , arG e nti na
GONE with thE wiNd
photography: Klaus FENglEr
“A journey into the epicentre of the elements” was how extreme climber Stefan Glowacz (in the foreground) described his successful ascent (at the third attempt) of the north pillar of the Cerro Murallón mountain in Patagonia, with partner Robert Jasper. He wasn’t kidding: this 1,100m climb has a nineplus difficulty rating, thanks to conditions that forced Glowacz and Jasper to cut a base camp into an ice face, with a chainsaw, on their upward journey. Their route has been nicknamed ‘Gone With The Wind’ on account of the ferocious gales that whirl around the peak, but there was nothing ‘Hollywood’ about this trip – except, perhaps, its capacity to reduce grown men to tears. More high literature: Stefan Glowacz Expeditions, Extreme Climbing at the End of the World. www.glowacz.de
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M o u nt St E lia S , al a S k a
room, with a view
photography: Vitek LudVik/red BuLL Content pooL
There’s never a crush on the slopes when you’re skiing on Mount St Elias – the second-highest peak in the US and Canada, that sits on the Alaska-Yukon border. Why so? No pistes and only the bravest of ski-adventurers for company. It’s a challenge that takes the likes of extreme athletes Jon Johnston, Axel Naglich, and Peter Ressmann to tackle. The trio attempted the impossible in 2007: to climb the 5,489m peak and ski down the longest snow-covered plumb line on Earth. Their enemies were Mount St Elias’ characteristically wild climate and their own bodies – and only two of them, Naglich and Ressmann, completed the ascent and descent. Their epic adventure is captured in director Gerald Salmina’s documentary, Mount St Elias. Mount St Elias is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. You can order and learn more about its chill thrills at www.mountstelias.com
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Bullevard Little bits of culture and sport
Musical chairs World-class performers and producers in the hot seat for lectures at the Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid
RZA Wu-Tang Clan leader on working with Kanye West and the small matter of the future of hip-hop.
POLKA ACE Artist Yayoi Kusama tells a poignant, pointy story Trees, screens, people... as far as Yayoi Kusama is concerned, you name it, it looks better with spots on it. The Japanese artist has been enriching the environment with polka-pocked paintings, sculptures and performance pieces for almost 60 years. In 2008, Christies in New York sold her 1959 painting No.2 for US$5.1m, still the record for a living female artist. Now the 82-year-old’s autobiography, Infinity Net, is available in English. It reveals a traumatic childhood in Japan and her experiences of the glamorous New York art scene of the 1970s. www.yayoi-kusama.co.jp
Flowers That Bloom Tomorrow, a 2011 sculpture by Yayoi Kusama
PEACHES Electro star sermonised about her one-woman Lloyd-Webber show, Peaches Christ Superstar.
ERYKAH BADU Understanding the power of the vocal at an audience with the Queen of Neo-Soul.
PICTURES OF THE MONTH
WE HAVE A WINNER!
EVERY SHOT ON TARGET
NILE RODGERS Learning from a master: producer of Bowie and Madonna; Chic’s pop classics; cancer survivor. Watch all the lectures now at redbullmusicacademy.com
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Taken a picture with a Red Bull flavour? Send it to us via our website: www.redbulletin.com Every month we print a selection, and our favourite pic is awarded a limited-edition Sigg bottle. Tough, functional and well-suited to sports, it features The Red Bulletin logo.
Santorini It’s not just the debt in Greece that soars: Yoann Leroux freeruns at Red Bull Art of Motion. Daniel Grund
B U L L E VA R D
Well played
2011’s best video games
REVOLTING AND TASTY
Three reasons why that guy’s asleep at his desk again
Documenting social upheaval and cakes online
Everest-ful: Chris Davenport says ‘hi’ up high
PHOTOGRAPHY: DIRK MATHESIUS/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, GIANFRANCO TRIPODO/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES, NEAL BEIDLEMAN, LAIF, CORBIS (2)
On the roof of the world Freestyle skier Chris Davenport and his team prepared for their Himalayan expedition for several weeks. They weren’t merely intending to climb Mount Everest – any tourist can do that these days – but get up there and ski. “I was struck indescribably a number of times during the ascent,” says the 40-year-old American. “It’s magical to see the sun rising over Tibet at 4:30 in the morning and the ‘roof of the world’ bathed in a pink-orange light. It’s a surreal play of colours.” Davenport was overcome by emotion as he reached the summit (8,848m) in glorious sunshine. “To know that you’re standing at the highest point on Earth is a moment you’ll never forget. You just feel very grateful to be there.” And yet danger is never far away. “I had to promise my wife that I’d only get in touch when I was past the notorious Khumbu Icefall and safely back at base camp.” Davenport made another dream come true in the Himalayas too. During “one of the most inspiring descents” on Lhotse, a neighbouring mountain about 400m shorter – the world’s fourth highest – he and his team were able to leave tracks in untouched powdery snow 30cm deep. www.chrisdavenport.com
Tampa Red Bull Flugtag, Florida style:
Team UFO forget the put-pilot-in-plane-first rule. Robert Snow
BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY Versus The Joker in a vast urban adventure thick with Bat-lore.
CALL OF DUTY: MW 3 War games ranging from Berlin to Sierra Leone to a Serbian diamond mine.
Xeni Jardin is one of four editors of Boing Boing, one of the world’s top 20 most viewed blogs, only it’s way more influential than that. Its mix of geek culture, socially aware reportage, book reviews, baked goods, and pictures of cats has made it a touchstone of internet life. Jardin writes on everything from facial hair to the Occupy movement. Why has Boing Boing become so successful? It was a happy accident, really. It started out as a printed magazine of sorts, about technology and science fiction. We are proof that you can achieve success if you follow your obsessions. What is good blogging? A friend of mine says that it’s like being a DJ. A great DJ knows what people want.
The net powered uprising in some countries... As a culture, we’re catching up with the shock of power and the disruptive balance of power the internet creates. This generation found a tool not seen as a tool that led to tremendous social disruption. ...yet online bullying rises. The web has to be a secure and joyous environment for innovations and creation to take place. The best antidote for bad speech is more good speech. Do not feed the trolls! Why the obsession with cakes and moustaches? Insane haircuts and beards are also popular. As for cakes, we’ve had Yoda, a DNA strand, a Dalek, the solar system. The perfect cake may be a dulce de leche Nyan Cat, shitting fruity rainbows across a coconutstar-studded night sky. www.boingboing.net What a web she weaves: the internet’s Xeni Jardin
L.A. NOIRE 1940s detective yarn fusing games and movies: so cinematic it was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Belo Horizonte “So, in Brazil, do Red Bull
Soapbox cars go dead fast?” “Why, of corpse they do!” Marcus De Simoni
Sharjah Red Bull Quicket: two overs, two-a-side and, in India, always a crowd gathering. Naim Chidiac 15
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From left: Guy, Troy and Alan
Skate break
Spell bound Hagen Gilden sold his first mixtapes in high school. Ten years on, Gilden, aka DJ Spell, was top of the class at the national finals of Red Bull Thre3Style at The Studio in Auckland. The prize: a trip to Vancouver, Canada, in December to represent NZ in the world final against DJs from 20 countries.“I’m excited to show the world that we have dope DJs,” says Spell (left). The Red Bull Thre3Style format is simple: each DJ plays a 15-minute set to include at least three different musical genres. Judges choose the winner based on track selection, creativity, mixing skills, stage presence and crowd reaction. DJ Spell won over the dancefloor with a blistering mashup. The 24-year-old from Hamilton makes music videos by day and works on his DJ skills at night. “I just want to keep working on my craft, keep learning and keep getting schooled,” he says. www.redbullthre3style.com
Gora Zar Cyclists enjoy their downtime at Red Bull Road Rage in Poland Jakub Konwent
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Top: Grafitti at Chernobyl; Bottom: Nongriat in India
Focus pocus
Photographing the world – it’s a tough job Before he was hired to travel the world taking pictures of unesCo world heritage sites, amos Chapple was asked: “do you have a mortgage? do you have kids? are you married?” Chapple answered no to all three questions and landed the job of a lifetime. over five years, the 29-year-old from auckland has visited over 50 countries. red bulletin: What is your most memorable UNESCO site? amos chapple: the upper svaneti in the republic of georgia. i spent a night in a hut in the hills. i peered out of a window at the villages twinkling below. i promised myself i would keep living that life. What do you need in order to succeed as a photographer? think of yourself as a labourer. it might be raining, you might be tired and cold but you must keep going. if you stay out there working you’ll maximise the chance of walking into something magical. Any other advice? don’t pursue an area you’re not naturally suited to. i can live hard and cheap, so i’m suited to travel photography. www.amoschapple.com
Anglet So which way’s the sea? Surfer Michel Bourez tutors young wave-riders in France Alex Laurel
Zagreb Words not fists, pack a punch in the ring at the Croatian Red Bull MC Battle Tomislav Moze
photography: averil howie, graeme murray/red Bull Content pool, amos Chapple (2)
‘Mi nombre es Troy y me gusta el helado’ or ‘My name is Troy and I like ice-cream’ is the Spanish phrase Troy Bilbrough hopes will help him survive a 2,500km skate adventure through South America in December. The 22-year-old and his friends Alan Carnaby, 22, and Guy Parsons, 23, plan to longboard from Machu Picchu in Peru across the Andes to Santiago in Chile. They’ll need to skate 12 hours or 100km a day. But why? “For the adventure of it,” says Bilbrough. “Travelling by longboard you see a lot of places off the beaten track. Every day is a new adventure; you could get invited into a village for a feast or end up lost in the forest. Anything can happen.” www.skateventure.com
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B U L L E VA R D
THE GOLDEN SHOT
JACKO GILL
Could New Zealand win both the men’s and women’s shot put at next year’s Olympics? Valerie Adams is favourite in the latter; a 16-year-old Aucklander is targeting the former
Born December 20, 1984 Devonport, Auckland The family that throws together… Gill’s father, Walter, was a national shot put champion, his mother Nerida won an NZ discus title and older sister Ayla came sixth in the hammer at last year’s World Junior Championships No buts: let’s put Gill was 11 years old when he decided a shot put marathon was a good idea. After 500 throws and 37 personal bests, he asked his dad to get some plasters for his raw, bleeding fingers so he could carry on
Jacko Gill isn’t much of a morning person, but the shot put phenom has a better excuse than most 16-year-old boys for falling out of bed around midday. Since Gill convinced his parents to let him leave school last year to chase his Olympic dream, he trains seven days a week, from early afternoon until late at night. “He’ll be lifting weights in the lounge at two in the morning,” says his father, Walter. “He’ll bound up the stairs and down again, and then do more lifts. It sounds like a train coming through the house.” The family home’s lounge and basement have been sacrificed for the weights, medicine balls and punchbags that Gill has used since the age of 11 to transform his body into the perfect throwing machine. In June of this year he won the World Youth Championships (athletes aged 17 and under) with a throw of 24.35m, 4m longer than his nearest rival. He broke his own under-18 world record – and in doing so set his 13th age group world record – and did so with a broken finger on his throwing hand. Gill says it was, “a bummer” that his finger wasn’t 100 per cent and he’s equally blasé about his talent. “I just get in the circle, throw the shot and get out,” he says. “I’m not Usain Bolt. I’m not into showboating.” Last year, in his first major international meet, Gill, aged 15, managed to break Bolt’s record to become the youngest winner of a world junior Too young to take part in this year’s World Championships, Jacko Gill hopes to throw his way to glory at London 2012
Strong competitor: Jacko Gill trains with weights every day
title (athletes aged 19 and under). And he wants to do to for the shot put what Bolt has done for sprinting. “Shot put has been on the decline,” he says. “The world record hasn’t been broken for 21 years. I want to break it and bring some interest back to the sport.” At 1.9m tall and weighing 108kg, Gill is small in comparison to the behemoths who usually stalk the shot put circle, but he has explosive leg power, superfast rotation speed and, says his coach Didier Poppe, “he knows more about shot put than anyone I know”. He may have quit school, but Gill is a diligent student of shot put. He emails the current shot put world record holder, Randy Barnes of the USA, for advice. He has trained with New Zealand’s Olympic and world champion shot putter Valerie Adams and has taken tips from Les Mills, who held the senior NZ record for 44 years before Gill set a new standard in April. But he admits he had a “terrible technique” until he started working with Poppe two years ago. “The first time I saw him he didn’t look like a shot putter,” says Poppe. “We made some big changes and now there’s no one else who throws like him. They’re all looking at him and scratching their heads.” Gill is confident of throwing the qualifying standard for the 2012 Olympics and his goal is to win a medal in London next year. But is it too much, too soon? “If you had asked me the same question two or three years ago, I would have been very cautious,” says Poppe. “Before I was trying to pull the brakes, because he was going too fast, but I don’t worry any more. With Jacko, nothing is impossible.” Check out Jacko Gill’s skills at www.youtube.com
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WORDS: ROBERT TIGHE. PHOTOGRAPHY: ADRIAN MALLOCH, STU FORSTER/GETTY IMAGES
Name Jacko Gill
B U L L E VA R D
Irina Sizova
HARD & FAST
WORDS: RUTH MORGAN, ROBERT TIGHE. PHOTOGRAPHY: CRISTIANO BARNI, TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, AP PHOTO/YANG YOUNG-SUK, SCOTT SINTON, CLAYDAN KRIVAN
Top performers and winning ways from around the globe
Tien Hee d fifth Marc Coma (Spain, centre) won a recor gues Pharaons Rally in Egypt, but Hélder Rodri (left) finished second to become the first p. Portuguese world cross-country rally cham
THE DOODLE BUG
Absent-minded art becomes a prize-winning pursuit. All that’s needed is a pen and a lecture At a rain-sodden race in Valenica, Spain, Casey Stoner of Australia crowned his 2011 MotoGP title-winning season with a narrow victory.
Golf’s world No2, Rory McIlroy, was six shots back in second behind Rickie Fowler at the Kolon Korea Open: the 22-year-old American’s first pro title.
Studies suggest doodling is good for the brain, but the Red Bull Doodle Art competition was all about finding doodles that looked good on paper. Hundreds of entries were received from students around the country with Irina Sizova, a 19-year-old architecture student at Auckland University, and Tien Hee, a 22-year-old design student at Massey University, Wellington, taking the title of best student scribblers. : Does your doodle have a title? : ‘Rugby Fever.’ : Umm, ‘Hobo drowns in own beard’. What was the inspiration? : I’m currently hooked on an artist called McBess: it’s an homage to him. When do you usually doodle? : I don’t have much time because I’m so busy studying, but I try to doodle in my diary during lectures. : Lectures are an amazing source of ‘free time’ to sit and sketch for an hour or two. What materials did you use? : A pencil, a 0.2mm fine black pen and some black and light grey felt. That’s it. : To stay true to the spirit of impromptu doodling I used a 0.3 Staedtler fineliner pen. So is it the start of a career in doodling? : Not sure, but I think I’ll have to start incorporating doodles into my architectural drawings! www.redbull.com
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B U L L E VA R D
KIT EVOLUTION
VA-VA-VOOM!
The unsung heroes of the Red Bull Racing Formula One success story – engine partners Renault – have a long tradition of innovative motorsport success. But things have changed since the 1980s: these days it’s all about excruciating attention to detail
Back in the mid-1980s, the Formula One ‘turbo’ era was approaching a peak of sophistication and Renault were one of the leading exponents of this exciting technology. Their 90-degree V6 motor took advantage of technical regulations that permitted ‘boosted’ engines of 1.5 litres to compete against nonturbo engines of twice the size. Renault’s 20
EF15 was cutting edge: 24 valves (this was later improved with pneumatic springs for better performance and reliability) and the electromagnetically controlled fuel injection made by Renix generated up to 1,100bhp from the 120kg engine for qualifying sessions. In races, with the wick turned down (to aid reliability) drivers made do
with a ‘mere’ 870bhp – still 70-80bhp more than that produced by today’s 2.4-litre V8s. This technological marvel was made available to Renault’s customer teams, Lotus, Ligier and Tyrrell, as well as the factory entry. Ayrton Senna was the first driver to win using a Renault customer engine, at the 1985 Portuguese Grand Prix at Estoril.
WORDS: WERNER JESSNER
BIG BOOST RENAULT EF15, 1984
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PHOTOGRAPHY: NICOLAS MENU
DEVIL IN THE DETAIL RENAULT RS27, 2011 On the 2011 Formula One grid, three teams use identical Renault RS27 engines: Red Bull Racing, Lotus Renault and Team Lotus. Today’s engine manufacturers have minimal freedom when it comes to construction: the technical regulations dictate down to the last half millimetre how the engines must be built: 2.4 litres displacement, eight cylinders
in a V-formation (at a fixed 90 degrees), 32 valves, no mechanical ventilation, no exotic materials, a maximum of 18,000rpm and weighing at least 95kg. This tight spec trims power to around 720bhp, but there is added shove from KERS, a kinetic energy recovery system that provides an extra 82bhp for 6.6 seconds per lap. Now, more than ever, the
differences between engine makers are in the details: fuel consumption, responsiveness, durability, power curve, installation and so on. This is where the Renault, in a Red Bull Racing chassis, comes out on top, to win back-to-back constructors titles in 2010 and 2011, taking its title total to nine. www.redbullracing.com
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There are more strings to Yann’s bow than just the Amélie soundtrack
One-man band
earlier albums, so it’s strange to be stuck with this ‘soundtrack composer’ tag.” this is odd, given that he went on to do the soundtracks for tragicomedy Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and sailing documentary Tabarly (2008), but, as seems to be his way with most things, He’s not a composer, he’s directionless and hates doing he didn’t approach them conventionally. music for movies. So how has the Frenchman made one of “i’m not a composer,” he says. “i can’t make music the best and most intriguing soundtracks of recent times? for a particular scene in a film. For me it’s stupid to try. When i’ve worked on soundtracks, i just made songs as i usually would, not thinking about anything else.” With a shaggy curtain of hair, two-day-old stubble and tiersen started learning the piano aged four and Name a round-necked navy-blue jumper, yann tiersen looks took up the violin at six, receiving classical training at Yann Tiersen every inch the rugged French musician. But, as he’s a succession of music schools. aged 13, he smashed Born quick to point out, he’s from Brittany in the far northhis violin, bought a guitar and started a band. When June 23, 1970 west of France, a place, he says, that has more in his band broke up in the early 1990s, tiersen mended Brest, Brittany common with celtic nations than French tradition. “We his violin and returned to the piano, but this time Known for don’t have cheese and wine, we swig beer!” threw off the straightjacket of classical Lending his unique tiersen is a classically trained multiform, making music with no rules or sounds to hit film instrumentalist who tore up the rulebook aim, experimenting with instruments Amélie, in 2001 in his teens and hasn’t looked back since. from the accordion and toy piano to the Life’s work But the 41-year-old knows certain rules harpsichord, mandolin, flute and ukulele. Mastering every have to be obeyed and as he sits for “When i make music, i start from instrument he gets his interview in a meeting room at his record nothing,” he says. “it’s just me and a mic. hands on – including the typewriter label’s London office, his fingers fidget i like not knowing where i’m going, i just Skyline is out now over a packet of marlboro reds. let the song build itself, in a way.” on Mute Records tiersen has just released Skyline, his his new album is a collection of seventh studio album, and if you don’t know atmospheric tracks steeped in a feeling his name, chances are you’ve heard his music. he of brightness, despite being heavy with guitars, it’s made the soundtrack for the 2001 hit film, Amélie, a thematic contrast to last year’s darker Dust Lane. his blend of strings, piano, accordion and even it represents the latest step in tiersen’s lifelong typewriter sounds accompanying the tale of a shy love affair with music, a relationship that excites parisian waitress. his stirring chansons in the film him as much today as it did as a child. earned him new fans outside France and a BaFta “music is something beyond a language,” he says. nomination in the uk. a decade and four albums “it’s mysterious, something ‘other’. you communicate on, he’s more than just ‘the Amélie guy’. emotions but it’s on a subconscious, almost physical “i hate doing soundtracks!” tiersen insists in level. it will always be my focus.” and with a quick a heavy accent. “i didn’t make the music specifically “au revoir”, he’s out the door, clutching his cigarettes. www.yanntiersen.com for Amélie. it was a mix of tracks taken from my
Words: ruth morgan. photography: picturedesk.com
Yann tiersen
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winning formula
Spin, DoctoreD
Tennis is faster because the players are fitter and the racquets are better? Partly. It’s also because of topspin
the prof “to understand how topspin affects the game of tennis,” says dr Martin apolin, from Vienna’s institute of physics, “let’s first look at what happens to a ball hit without it, at a height that just clears the net horizontally (fig.1). the height of the net at its centre point is 91.4cm. regardless of a ball’s horizontal speed, its vertical speed remains constant. so first you need to know how long the ball takes to reach the floor from the height of the net. the relation between the time (t) and depth (s) of the fall is: t = √ 2s/g . g, where gravitational acceleration (g), is given as 10m/s2. so the time taken for the ball to drop 0.914m to the ground is 0.43s. “the distance between net and baseline is 11.89m. for the ball to stay in play, it can’t travel further than that in 0.43 seconds. speed is distance over time and if we assume the extreme case, where the ball lands 11.89m from the net, we get a maximum speed of 27.7m/s (100kph). any faster than that, and the line judge will call the ball out. “Measurements from hawk-eye, a ball-tracking system used for clarification in disputed line calls, show that hard hitters like nadal can hit the ball at speeds of 180kph over the net. Balls hit that hard land in the court because of one thing: spin. “our estimation above, explicitly referring to non-spinning balls, gives a maximum speed of 100kph. yet nadal hits the ball so it travels 80 per cent faster than that. the topspin he applies to the ball shortens the flight path – but why? “nadal and his peers can generate topspin of 5,000rpm, or 80rpm per second, so imagine a ball, hit with topspin, travelling from right to left. the ball encounters a head wind from the left (fig.3a). as the ball spins, a thin boundary layer of air molecules rotates with the ball. “this creates a circulating air flow around the ball (fig.3b). the head wind and circulating air flow combine (fig.3c) and air is forced behind the ball. total momentum must be maintained, and thus the ball is forced down. this downward force is known as the Magnus effect, and in addition to the downward force of gravity, causes the fast-moving, fast-spinning ball to drop faster than it would without spin.” www.rafaelnadal.com
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Words: dr Martin apolin, ruth Morgan. photography: getty iMages. illustration: Mandy fischer
the pro “Without topspin, modern tennis wouldn’t be what it is,” says Martin Baldridge, a tennis coach of more than 30 years who also competes in international senior tournaments. “rather than hitting the ball straight off the racquet, topspin is achieved by starting from below and pushing up the back of the ball, imparting a forward rotation to it. the rotation creates air pressure which forces the ball down to the court faster, meaning players can hit harder and still keep the ball within the baseline. “in the last 10 years, levels of professionalism, training, and physical fitness have gone up so much that players are hitting the ball harder and harder, and the only way to control that consistently is to put a lot of rotation on it. hard hitters like rafael nadal are kings of spin, making the ball rotate at speeds of up to 5,000rpm.”
Pulling the strings: Rafael Nadal dominates the play with topspin. No other stroke in tennis can produce more spin – without it Nadal’s power would be severely diminished
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NOBEL PRIZES
An amalgam of declined awards, crushed limousines and cataclysmic divorce settlements on the occasion of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony
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On December 10 (the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death), Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee (both from Liberia) and Tawakkul Karman (Yemen) will receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their “peaceful fight for women’s rights and security”. The Nobel Peace Prize category has the highest number of female winners at 15. In contrast, American political economist Elinor Ostrom, in 2009, remains the only woman to have won the Prize in Economic Sciences, which was first awarded, alongside the original five-prize line-up, in 1969.
Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel had registered 355 patents, including those for dynamite and the more stable gelignite, by the time of his death in 1896. In his will he decreed that the bulk of his enormous fortune – a nine-figure sum in today’s money – should go into a foundation. The interest earned by his fortune was to fund a prize for those “…who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” The prize fund was to be divided into five equal parts for physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, literature and peace. Tawakkul Karman
10 In addition to a medal and a certificate, each Nobel laureate also receives 10 million Swedish krona (about $1.9 million). American economist Robert Lucas Jr had to share his 1995 prize for economics with his ex-wife Rita, because when they divorced in 1988, she negotiated that she would receive half of any Nobel Prize money her husband might be awarded Robert Lucas Jr within the next seven years. There’s another incentive to try to win a Nobel Prize; a study shows Nobel laureates live between one and two years longer than those who are merely nominated.
Since 1991, Harvard University has been awarding an anti-Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize, for achievements that make people laugh then make them think. Their 2011 peace prize went to Arturas Zuokas, mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running over Theodore them with a tank, while the 2009 prize for Roosevelt mathematics went to Gideon Gono, Governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
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The first American to be honoured was Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906. The only Vietnamese laureate to date, Le Duc Tho, refused the Peace Prize he was awarded in 1973 as he had not yet been able to reach a peace settlement to the Vietnam conflict. The only other nominee to refuse an award was Jean-Paul Satre, who declined the prize for literature in 1964 because he had consistently declined all official honours.
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The Curie family
The Curie family of scientists are closely bound up with the Nobel Prize. Marie – the first female prize-winner and one of only four people to win the honour twice – and husband Pierre jointly received the 1903 prize for physics and Marie the prize for chemistry in 1911. In 1935, their daughter, Irène JoliotCurie, also received the prize for chemistry. Sigmund Freud had less luck when it came to matters Nobel; he was nominated for an honour on 12 occasions, but came away empty-handed every time. www.nobelprize.org
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WORDS: ULRICH CORAZZA. PHOTOGRAPHY: YAHYA ARHAB/EPA/PICTUREDESK.COM, RALF-FINN HESTOFT/CORBIS, SZ-PHOTO/PICTUREDESK.COM, UNITED ARCHIVES/PICTUREDESK.COM
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PhotograPhy: BalaZs gardi/red Bull X-Fighters (2)
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tHe dUeLLIStS This year’s World Tour was all about the battle between two riders and two distinct styles – the flamboyant, instinctive showmanship of Spain’s Dany Torres (this page) and the ultra-honed perfectionism of defending double champion Nate Adams (left). The duel would take them all the way from the opening round in Dubai to a final dramatic competition in Sydney.
Stop 1 – dUBaI
PhotograPhy: BalaZs gardi/red Bull X-Fighters, daniel grund/red Bull X-Fighters, Joerg Mitter/red Bull X-Fighters
Perennially tipped as FMX’s ‘one to watch’, Dany Torres’ progress to the very top has been blighted by injury in recent years, but fit and fresh for round one of the 2011 World Tour in Dubai, the Spaniard was unstoppable. In the build-up, all the headlines had been about Nate Adams vying for a third Red Bull X-Fighters crown, but after Saturday night on Jumeirah Beach the story had changed. Now it was all about Torres – and whether the stunning form he displayed in Dubai could be carried across the whole season?
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“It’s disappointing, but I’m still definitely aiming for a third title. This will just have to be my throwaway round” Nate Adams, Dubai
Levi Sherwood (bottom left) nails a Heelclicker Flip, while Nate Adams (top left) performs a Superman Double Grab during round one at Jumeirah Beach in Dubai (main picture)
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“It was an incredible night and one I imagine I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Totally spectacular” Robbie Maddison, Brasília
Stop 2 – BRaSÍLIa Frustratingly, the answer to the Torres question was no. In the lead-up to round two in Brasilia he injured a foot, and despite battling through qualifying, he was forced to sit out the finals. That left the way clear for Adams to ride to a head-to-head showdown with Robbie Maddison in the competition final. While ‘Maddo’ gave his best performance for some time, Adams was in irresistible form, blasting through a flawless run that saw him storm to the series lead. Perhaps The Destroyer’s near-perfect run had been inspired by the presence of 100,000 fans in Brasilia, the largest crowd ever seen at an FMX competition.. 32
Stop 3 – RoMe
PhotograPhy: andreas sChaad/red Bull X-Fighters, oliVer sChran/red Bull X-Fighters, Joerg Mitter/red Bull X-Fighters
Rome made its World Tour debut in 2010, but such was the passion of Italian FMX fans that for the 2011 edition, the event migrated from the compact Stadio Flaminio to the cavernous surrounds of the Stadio Olimpico, home of both Roma and Lazio football clubs. And in front of 45,000 fans, Torres’ woes continued. After blitzing qualifying, he looked genuinely unbeatable, but in the main event he overextended a Saran Wrap Backflip to Nac Nac trick and tumbled off the bike and into a wall. The Spaniard was unhurt, but the crash ended his Rome challenge. Adams flew to a second consecutive victory, beating Norway’s Andre Villa in the final, while Australian youngster Josh Sheehan came out of nowhere to take third. Adams was looking ominously consistent and sent a further chill down the spine of rivals by announcing: “Now I’m going for the Tour title.” It wouldn’t be quite so straightforward, though, as the next round would show.
Robbie Maddison (left) laps up the adulation in Brazil. The stunning Rome setting of Stadio Olimpico (top right), and Josh Sheehan performing a Tsunami Backflip in Rome
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Stop 4 – MadRId After lucking into his Rome win through Torres’ misfortune, Adams was the victim of payback a month later in the run-up to the Madrid round. After a crash in Rome, and another accident in practice at home in California, and nursing a damaged knee, shoulder and hand, the defending champ was forced to forego the trip to Spain. Torres gleefully took the chance presented and buoyed by a full-house crowd in the historic Plaza de Toros de las Ventas bullring, he rode a spectacular final against Blake Williams, including some huge, brand new trick combinations in his run. It was Norwegian Andre Villa who profited most, though. The Norwegian, who had been title runner-up to Adams last year, tricked his way to fifth in Madrid, but having notched three podium finishes in the opening events, stealthily stole into first place in the Tour standings ahead of both the Destroyer and third-placed Torres.
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PhotograPhy: andreas sChaad/red Bull X-Fighters, Joerg Mitter/red Bull X-Fighters
The crowd at Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de las Ventas (above) was wowed by local hero Dany Torres (main pic), who unleashed tricks such as this Superman Seat Grab Flip
“This is really important. Two months ago I had an injury, but now I can ride in Madrid and this crowd is the best” Dany Torres, Spain
Stop 5 – poznań Red Bull X-Fighters returned to Poland after a three-year absence, and Poznań’s new state-of-the-art stadium (above) should have been the venue for Andre Villa to stamp his authority on the 2011 Tour. But in qualifying the Norwegian under-rotated a backflip, crashed heavily and broke his left femur – an injury that ended his season. The final then was all about Torres and Adams. The Spaniard unleashed a barrage of huge moves, including a 360 Nac, the one trick Adams had over him earlier in the season. However, Adams, hot of the back of two gold medals at the X Games, was in no mood to be defeated and delivered a big-tricking masterclass to take his third victory of the season. With just one round left, he was back on top of the standings, but only 45 points ahead of Torres.
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Stop 6 – Sydney Red Bull X-Fighters’ first-ever visit to Australia should have been the scene of a thrilling showdown between Torres and Adams, but once again injury intervened, and it was Adams who lost out, a torn rotator cuff and cracked humerus sidelining the American before the start of competition. Torres just needed fourth or better to clinch the title and he sealed the deal by advancing to the semi-final when he met local hero Josh Sheehan. The Aussie Tour rookie delivered a torrent of double backflips to dismiss Torres, but with Adams only able to watch from the sidelines, Torres had done enough to be crowned king of the 2011 World Tour. Sheehan went on to beat ‘Rubber Kid’ Levi Sherwood in the Sydney final, the Aussie’s first Red Bull X-Fighters win, confirming the arrival of a new young superstar on the FMX scene.
PhotograPhy: Joerg Mitter/red Bull X-Fighters (2), Flo hagena/red Bull X-Fighters
www.redbullxfighters.com
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His Dark Places If Sean Penn were only an indisputably great movie actor, that would be OK. But his humanitarian efforts, and struggles with his own humanity, make him as fascinating off screen as on Words: RĂźdiger Sturm Photography: Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum
SEAN PENN (opposite) Driven by his restless demons and a childhood overshadowed by a stormy relationship with his mother, the actor’s life has been punctuated by inner turmoil and impassioned political gestures
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As Cheyenne in This Must Be The Place
the word ‘statuesque’ is used to describe a certain kind of movie star, but to Sean Penn it applies in a very different way. thick upper arms, which look as if they have been sculpted, curve out of his t-shirt. Lines of his face like sharp stones. eyes of marble frozen in a gaze. the only sign of life is the American Spirit cigarette, on which Penn drags repeatedly, in flagrant violation of the smoking ban at the illustrious Carlton Hotel in Cannes. every cinemagoer knows what strength lies within. it can take on the most varied of forms: the bitter avenger, as in Mystic River, for which the 51-year-old won his first Oscar; the campaigning liberator, as in Milk, which brought him Oscar number two; or the bizarre, as in his latest film, This Must Be the Place, in which he plays a washed-up former rock star, a mixture of robert Smith and Ozzy Osbourne, flitting round ireland and the USA. Ask Penn where this energy comes from, and he won’t say. “i have no interest in analysing myself,” he says, laconically, in a tone that makes it sound like he’s gurgling pebbles. Penn’s voice and gaze then trail off into the ether, before he decides to give insight after all. “i admit that i’ve always been driven by some sort of anger. An anger which is completely undeserved. i wouldn’t recommend it as a source of motivation, but it’s always worked for me.” it’s anyone’s guess as to what he means by the word “undeserved”. there is good reason to assume that he might put his existential orientation down to the influence of his mother, eileen, a former actress who gave up her career for the sake of her family and battled alcoholism for much of her life. She was, as she admitted, provocative and prickly towards her eldest son, who therefore spent his youth battling with her. Her reaction to his first appearance on stage was typical: “You’re awful. Give up now.” earlier girlfriends tried to get him to see a psychotherapist for his anger problems, but it came to nothing. His marriage to fellow actor robin Wright, which ended in divorce in 2010, was a 14-year battle of wills between two partners who each gave as good as they got (as had been the case with Madonna, his first wife). When Wright is asked about Sean Penn now, she says: “i don’t think i need to say anything on the matter.” How bearable is a life when you’re plagued by inner demons? it is no coincidence that Penn’s fourth and perhaps most personal work as a director, 2007’s Into The Wild, tells the story of the rise and fall of a dropout. the need to give up on, and move away from, the bourgeois way of life is his default existential setting. “i feel it every day and always have done,” says Penn. “there have been times when i’ve dropped out in my own way and that gave me new strength and energy. i can thoroughly recommend it to everyone because you get a whole new kind of perspective
on your life. And you should do it over and over again. it’s the healthiest of all the addictive behaviours.” that said, Penn has yet to wander off into the solitude of nature. “the urge to leave everything behind isn’t as strong if you can make yourself useful, regardless of how you do it,” says Penn. “it’s only when you feel you’re counterproductive that there’s nowhere better than the wild.” And Penn has had a raison d’être during the last two decades: his children with Wright, daughter dylan Frances and son Hopper Jack, now 20 and 18 respectively. “Nothing in life has given me as much satisfaction as bringing them up,” explains Penn. “it’s thanks to them that i never gave up on civilisation altogether.” the “dropping out” that he speaks of takes a number of forms; acting is only one of his outlets. Penn is driven on by other, more radical needs, saying: “it’s never been more important for us to pull together as humankind. i love humanity.” this isn’t just lip service. Penn doesn’t think of himself as a charitable ambassador who, shielded by bodyguards, jets into a crisis zone to shake the hands of photogenic people in need. “You need a greater dose of life if you want something new to happen inside of you,” is a motto he lives up to. in September 2011, he was out on tahrir Square with egyptian demonstrators, protesting against the delay in making reforms. He travelled to iraq shortly after the US-led invasion, to get a first-hand picture of what was really going on. He had the same motive when he went to the ghettos of Los Angeles convulsed by race riots in 1992, where a supermarket trolley smashed through his car’s windscreen. in 2005, he waded through the brackish water hours after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans to rescue victims of the flooding. His most spectacular intervention came in 2010, where, soon after the earthquake in Haiti, the charitable organisation he founded, J/P HrO, was running camps for around 55,000 survivors. (By the autumn of 2011, that figure had gone down to around 23,000.) When he has to, Penn can eloquently put across his point of view and side of the argument, such as in his reports on iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle, and his articles on meeting Fidel Castro and Venezuelan head of state Hugo Chávez, for The Nation. Ask him face to face about this work, and he plays it all down. “in Haiti, i have a very good team which i rely on to a large extent, because when i’m working on a film, i concentrate fully on that and only keep myself informed of what’s going on,” explains Penn. “So, i would be filming This Must Be The Place during the day, and then in the evening i would get back to the trailer and check my messages on the answering machines, hoping that nothing disastrous had happened in
Sean’s mother was provocative and prickly towards her eldest son… Her reaction to his first appearance on stage was typical: “You’re awful. Give up now”
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Penn plays an ageing rock star in his latest movie
Haiti. We were barely finished when i got the news of the cholera outbreak. As much as i wish it had never happened, it was at the right time for me. it would have been really frustrating if it had happened while we were filming.” As a highly decorated member of the Hollywood community, Penn is used to an environment where people aren’t necessarily interested in this sort of thing. they would much rather know what kind of feelings he has for Scarlett Johansson, whom he was seen whispering sweet nothings to for a couple of months earlier this year. But is there, as far as he is concerned, a tension between his professional life and everything else? “i do appreciate that,” says Penn. “Am i confronted with it? i don’t really know. everyone fights against that. Part of me feels that one of the biggest fights i have to fight has nothing to do with the excessive hype of the illusion of celebrity. i mean, even if we paid teachers the same wage as actors, ie, if we lived in a fair world, you’d still have to wrestle with your performance as an actor. i mean, you’re trapped in your own nature, your body, your own rhythm and weaknesses.” As confused as the words may sound – and it’s the answer he most stumbled over during our time together – they make sense on closer inspection. Penn doesn’t see himself as part of an industry that defines itself with the word “show”. His hyper-concentration focuses on his internal processes and the “wrestle” is with himself: the person he is trapped inside, yet through which he still has to try to take on the identity of another role. As far as he is concerned, his public image is just “another battle; it’s dead weight. it’s a war on the public’s ability to concentrate”. in other words, forget Sean Penn the person and just embrace the role. Being Sean Penn, then, is a battle, on two fronts: the roles he chooses to play as an actor and the role he hasn’t chosen for himself as a public figure. Neither we, nor he, can reduce this conflict, this swing between destructive and productive character traits. take, for example, the subject of Penn’s welldocumented admiration for the rock ’n’ roll storytelling of Bruce Springsteen. Ask him to name his favourite song by the Boss and, “i made a film about it,” is his short answer. the song is Highway Patrolman, and its lyrics inspired Penn’s directorial debut, The Indian Runner, which he also wrote, about an upright, happily married policeman called Joe who tries to look after his brother Frank, an aggressive soul, but can’t stop his tendency for self-destruction. At the end, Joes lets Frank wander across the border to evade arrest for murder. in one interview, Penn confirmed that these two personalities also swirl around inside him, that he is in some ways both Joe
and Frank. He’s better equipped at bringing the two sides into balance now than in his younger days, although in 2010 he was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and ordered to attend anger management classes after an incident involving his kicking right leg and a paparazzi photographer [the community service was completed through Penn’s relief efforts in Haiti]. Channelling that anger in other directions requires commitment, and Penn is not a man for compromises. “When i go jogging,” he says, “i want to collapse on the ground from exhaustion at the end of it. Otherwise i feel i haven’t pushed myself hard enough, that i haven’t applied all my energy. i want to do the same in every area of my life.” And he can express it in a more philosophical way, too… “it’s a crappy joke when we say God exists,” he says. “if we say God doesn’t exist, it’s the same crappy joke. Because, damn, nobody knows if he exists and no one will ever know. But you just accept it and act accordingly in whatever you do. As edgar Lee Masters put it in his poem, Davis Matlock: “Well, i say to live it out like a god / Sure of immortal life, though you are in doubt / is the way to live it / if that doesn’t make God proud of you / then God is nothing but gravitation / Or sleep is the golden goal.” “i think i’m optimistic enough to say that we can [accept it and act accordingly],” explains Penn. “But the pessimist in me says we won’t bring ourselves to.” Penn seems very determined to live a life according to this principle, and he has moments of peace where “something taps me on the shoulder”. When does that happen? “When i can surf for a good 10 minutes on the ocean stretched out before me,” says Penn, who as a teenager, discovered what he calls the “harmony” and “spirituality” he experiences when surfing. it seems, therefore, that it is possible for Sean Penn to serenely enjoy the magic of a moment, that he can experience something akin to real happiness. “Yes, i can find a sunset beautiful, for example,” he explains. “But the times when the world shows you its magic are rare. You have to grab them when they come. But the concept of happiness is a little too much for me. i just think to myself, ‘Oh, that’s pretty.’” A hint of amusement seems to resonate with Penn in this answer, and all of a sudden he appears to be in something of a good mood. But, as he’s already said, it’s all a question of interpretation with these things… And we’ll never know for sure, for it is then that Sean Penn gets up and trudges out of the hotel suite. A walking monument, his gaze turned inwards to thoughts of his very private, very gruelling universe.
“When I go jogging, I want to collapse on the ground from exhaustion at the end of it. Otherwise I feel I haven’t pushed myself hard enough. I want to do the same in every area of my life”
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Sean Penn helps Haiti: www.jphro.org
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GOLDEN BALLS Few players have been so feted so young as Santos FC’s Neymar. At the age of 19, he’s already been shortlisted for FIFA’s Ballon d’Or award Words: Cassio Cortes Photography: Jürgen Skarwan
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its. The face replying to my questions – a reported $10.5-million-per-year, greatesthope-of-an-entire-country-to-win-thenext-World-Cup face – is full of zits, of all sizes and colours within the spectrum from pink to red. It’s understandable given that the face’s owner is only 19. And anyway, the zits are seldom noticed by most people, which is also quite understandable given that only a few centimetres above them, arguably the most outrageous haircut in global football draws all eyes to itself. It is a 1980s-style London punk type of mohawk, which has recently been dyed blond. Which in turn has caused thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands of young Brazilians to bring despair to their parents by emulating said barnet. This country of 190 million, the self-proclaimed ‘Land of Football’, has its first Gen-Z superstar, backed by in excess of 2.6m followers on Twitter and chased through the streets with Beatlemania-like hysteria. As is tradition in Brazil, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior goes by the first name appearing on the birth certificate from February 5, 1992, which means he was two years old when Romário almost single-handedly gave his country its fourth FIFA World Cup back in 1994, and 10 when Ronaldo and Rivaldo conspired to bring Brazil its fifth – and so far, most recent – title in football’s be-all, end-all of championships. Most importantly, it means his shoulders will be a mere 22 years of age when asked to carry a colossal burden: the responsibility of being Brazil’s main player and team leader as the country bids for its sixth World Cup title on home soil in 2014. “Winning a World Cup has to be any player’s ultimate career goal,” concedes Neymar as we chat in the dressing room of Santos FC’s Vila Belmiro stadium, where his own locker sits just three doors down from the one used from 1956 to 1974 by Santos’s – and, arguably, football’s – greatest player of all time, Pelé. “But to win it in front of the Brazilian fans would have a truly incredible taste,” he adds, appearing unfazed by the task ahead. In Europe, perhaps only the most hardcore football fans know what Santos FC means. Shortly put, it’s where Pelé – 46
“ To win the World Cup in front of the Brazilian fans would have a truly incredible taste ”
referred to as simply ‘The King’ in Brazil – made many of his club appearances. In total, he scored 1,088 goals of his mindboggling 1,281 career total for this club. Alone in this coastal city of 420,000 people, with no cross-town rivalry and a rich history, Santos is a club with few haters, almost like a ‘second-favourite’ to most Brazilians, even though its fans are dwarfed by the followers of teams like Flamengo or Corinthians. Entering the 1916-built Vila Belmiro – known as ‘The World’s Most Famous Vila’ – is like travelling back in time to the 1950s and ’60s, when Pelé was piling up goals here. It’s full of idiosyncratic charm but quite cramped, with space for only 20,120 spectators, justifying its other nickname, the one preferred by most Santos fans: ‘Alçapão’, or ‘The Trapdoor’: where rivals come to disappear. A Santos player since he was 12 years old, Neymar takes us through every corner of the Vila with obvious familiarity and shows nothing but absolute respect for the club’s glorious past – a legacy that has often been a burden to its other young players. “Santos and the Vila will forever be the House of Pelé,” says Neymar. “To me, he’s like a myth. When we first met a few years ago, he just told me: ‘Have faith in God, because He’s already given you everything else.’” Neymar’s cool demeanour and his mohawk’s constant alterations perfectly symbolise his own often-repeated motto: “ousadia e alegria”, or “boldness and happiness” in a loose translation from Portuguese. It is a mantra taken so seriously by the athlete that it’s been stitched to his custom-made Nike boots. It takes boldness, for instance, to say “no, thanks” when Chelsea FC come knocking at your door, as they did in 2010. Similar approaches from almost every European football giant have been rebuffed by Santos, as Brazil’s good economic climate has enabled the club to devise a sponsorship scheme that’s kept Neymar on home shores longer than other rising stars. He has personal contracts with Nike, Nextel, Panasonic and Red Bull, among others, and their combined value generates a world-class income. They’ve also helped create world-class hero worship – whether intentionally or otherwise – by keeping Neymar at home and making him a larger-than-life figure in a country so used to waving its stars a teary-eyed farewell as they head to Europe in pursuit of glory and riches. “I’m 53, so I didn’t really see Pelé in his prime,” says Alberto Francisco, who owns
Still only 19, Neymar is already a hero at Santos FC’s Vila Belmiro stadium after helping the club win the Copa Libertadores for the first time since the days of PelÊ. Santos have now won the Copa three times
Son of Santos: Neymar has been on the Brazilian club’s books since the age of 12, but for the past 18 months the football press has printed stories linking him with a transfer to the likes of Real Madrid
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a bar across the street from Vila Belmiro and who’s known as the club’s most loyal fan, as his tattoo of the club’s logo (on his forehead) attests. “But of all I’ve seen he’s the best by far. Much better than Robinho, who always wanted to leave Santos for Europe,” he adds, in reference to the AC Milan playmaker, who Neymar himself has declared as his personal hero. “Neymar proved his love for Santos when he chose to stay.” In fact, Neymar’s relationship with his country’s ardent football followers has been special from the outset. After he burst onto the national scene in early 2010, the public outcry for his presence at that year’s World Cup in South Africa was widespread and included an online petition that pulled in more than 14,000 signatures. The fact that head coach Dunga didn’t call him up served only to make Neymar an even greater star after Brazil sank in the quarter-finals against the Netherlands, manifestly lacking the creative spark that an out-of-shape Kaká could not provide. Despite not having played a single minute for the Seleção, Neymar’s skilful style became the solution to all of the national team’s problems in the minds of its fans. “Of course I wanted to go [in 2010] – who doesn’t want to play in a World Cup?” he continues inside the dressing room. “But having so many fans demanding my presence also felt very special.” Not as special, though, as the greatest achievement of his playing career so far: leading Santos to their third Copa Libertadores (South America’s equivalent of the UEFA Champions League) title last June, the first since the 62/63 double, in which Pelé starred. The Libertadores win also set up the prospect of a tantalizing duel in the FIFA Club World Cup this month in Japan: a battle for global supremacy between the Santos of Neymar and the FC Barcelona of Lionel Messi, the reigning European champions. “I know that’s the duel everybody wants to see, but we can’t forget what happened to Internacional last year,” he says, serenely. In 2010, South American champions SC Internacional were eliminated in the World Cup semi-finals by Congolese side TP Mazembe, who went on to lose to Inter Milan in the final. And yet the Libertadores was only one highlight of what’s been a magical 2011 so far: up to October 31, Neymar had played in 62 matches (42 for Santos, 13 for the Brazil national team and another seven for Brazil’s Under-20 side) and found the net on 41 occasions – impressive for a 64kg, 1.74m specimen who routinely
2011 FIFA BALLON D’Or ShOrTLIST Éric Abidal
France, Barcelona
Sergio Agüero
Argentina, Manchester City
Xabi Alonso
Spain, Real Madrid
Daniel Alves
Brazil, Barcelona
Karim Benzema
France, Real Madrid
Iker Casillas
Spain, Real Madrid
Samuel Eto’o
Cameroon, Anzhi Makhachkala
Cesc Fàbregas
Spain, Barcelona
Diego Forlán
Uruguay, Inter Milan
Andrés Iniesta
Spain, Barcelona
Lionel Messi
Argentina, Barcelona
Thomas Müller
Germany, Bayern Munich
Nani
Portugal, Manchester United
Neymar
Brazil, Santos
Mesut Özil
Germany, Real Madrid
Gerard Piqué
Spain, Barcelona
Cristiano Ronaldo
Portugal, Real Madrid
Wayne Rooney
England, Manchester United
Bastian Schweinsteiger
Germany, Bayern Munich
Wesley Sneijder
Netherlands, Inter Milan
Luis Suárez
Uruguay, Liverpool
David Villa
Spain, Barcelona
Xavi
Spain, Barcelona
The FIFA Ballon d’Or shortlist, above, will be whittled down to a just three players at the beginning of December. The Ballon d’Or will be presented to the Player of the Year in Zurich on January 9, 2012.
takes a beating from defenders flailing to stop his unpredictable runs and feints. That light weight – former Real Madrid coach Wanderley Luxemburgo, who coached Santos for five months in 2009, called him a “butterfly fillet” – is nonetheless what makes Neymar almost indestructible, as less energy is dissipated in each fall to the ground. “People on the street tell me I should beef him up,” reveals Santos FC’s head fitness coach, Ricardo Rosa. “But I would only change his haircut! Neymar has amazing recovery capability. When I try to tell him to take things a little more easily, he laughs me off.”
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ore than mere teenage enthusiasm, Neymar’s ability to sustain such a marathon of matches also comes from his DNA. His levels of CK enzymes in post-match blood tests are half the average of other Santos players. CK enzymes are a byproduct of muscle recovery, so the fewer you have the less damage your muscles have suffered from physical effort “He’s so fast and thinks so quickly that he’s mostly able to keep a safe distance from the defenders,” says journalist Giovane Martineli, who covered Santos for sports newspaper Lance as Neymar was climbing the youth ranks. “If you had to define his playing style in one word, that would be it: ‘quick.’” Neymar himself agrees: “I’ve always said that dribbling is my strongest point as a player.” What about the weakest? “Several. That’s why I practise every day.” Practice is also how he got to the stage where he could emulate a characteristic shared by Pelé and Ronaldo – being equally comfortable kicking with his left or his right leg. “Training my left leg is something I’ve worked on hard since I was a kid,” he admits. That diligence has caused a few members of the Brazilian press to label Neymar as a “laboratory” athlete in the mould of Tiger Woods or Andre Agassi: a precocious star deprived of a childhood by parents projecting their own dreams via their offspring. Neymar senior was a professional footballer who never made it to the Brazilian first division. “At the age of 11 we could already see he was extraordinary,” Neymar senior recalls in our first meeting, during October’s Red Bull Street Style national final in Rio de Janeiro. His son’s there as a judge – courtesy of a Hollywood-like operation that has him picked up by a helicopter at the Engenhão Stadium minutes after scoring the equalizer in Santos’s 1-1 away 49
Neymar’s hairstyle has become de rigueur among the younger fans of Santos FC
The Santos dressing room includes a prayer area, confirming the notion that in Brazil, football is a religion. And when Neymar is around this part of the stadium, one of the club’s bodyguards can be found nearby
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draw with Flamengo, then being delivered at Santos Dumont airport directly into a van which was then escorted by police to the Red Bull Street Style venue, the Circo Voador nightclub, where he was greeted by 1,500 crazed fans. Backstage after the event, the Red Bull Street Style freestylers swarm over him. “Junior,” as he’s called by family and closest friends, seems to genuinely enjoy posing for pictures and hanging out with the Red Bull Street Style players, all teenagers like him. He’s attentive to all who ask for an autograph, stopping only to attend to his BlackBerry whenever it goes “bling-blong” – which seems to happen every 30 seconds. “He’s got no problem with the attention,” Neymar senior believes. “What would you rather be – successful or anonymous?”
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is father is, however, credited as the one holding Junior close to the real world. For his 19th birthday this year, Junior asked for a Ferrari as present. He got one – in 1/18 scale from a toy shop. Nowadays his daily ride is a Mini Cooper, although a Porsche Panamera is also in the garage for the (ever rarer) weekend getaways. On such occasions, he can be found in the company of his baby son, Davi Lucca, whose name is now tattooed on his right forearm. “Becoming a father has matured me a lot,” says Neymar. “It’s an even greater reason to work hard on the field.” It is clear, however, that the ascendance to superstardom has forced Neymar into a sheltered existence. He’s protected like a jewel by an entourage that includes his father, one or two security guards and Santos’s Eduardo Musa, the man put in charge of raising the sponsorship money to retain him at the club (“The Jewel”, incidentally, is how he’s referred to by the press in the city of Santos). “When we launched his bobbing head doll last year I realised he’d become like a Beatle,” Musa reveals. “The launch was going to be at a shopping centre, and we warned them to reinforce security and they said, ‘Don’t worry, we did an event with Ronaldo last month and it went smoothly.’ Well, when we got there the next day there were 1,500 frenzied kids inside the toy shop, trying to take a picture, get an autograph, and simply trying to grab him. The store windows started shaking from inside and we had to call the whole thing off – it turned into frickin’ World War III in there.” “The thing I miss the most is playing football on the beach with my friends,”
“ “ The thing I miss the most is playing football on the beach with my friends ” ”
Neymar says about fame’s downsides. “I haven’t been to the beach at all here in Santos for well over a year.” But it’s not like he hadn’t seen it coming. Neymar’s wonderkid status placed him among stars from an early age. In 2005, his agent Wagner Ribeiro took him to visit another one of his clients, Robinho, then playing for Real Madrid. Neymar practised at Real’s training complex and hung out with David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane et al – for a week. “That week is something I’ll never forget,” he admits. “One day, after Real beat Deportivo La Coruña 4-0 at the Santiago Bernabéu, I went out for dinner with Ronaldo, Robinho, Beckham, Zidane and Roberto Carlos. I just kept my mouth shut, not wanting the dream to end!” By then, Neymar was already earning a monthly salary in the region of $17,635 from Santos and Ribeiro, and being followed by a psychologist to cope with the upcoming stardom. Last year, a speech therapist was added to the staff to improve his diction, another element in a mix that makes Neymar the best-prepared Brazilian player ever. This preparedness helps explain how he’s achieved another impressive feat: becoming one of the 23 players shortlisted for FIFA’s 2011 Ballon d’Or Player of the Year award, the winner of which will be announced on January 9 – the first time it’s ever happened to a player currently active at a Brazilian club.
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hree days after our Vila Belmiro interview and two hours after Neymar scored six times (albeit twice offside) in Santos’s 4-1 trouncing of Atletico-PR in the Brazilian League, we’re boarding a first-class flight to New York, where he’s been invited by the MLS to present the match ball for the New York Red Bulls versus LA Galaxy play-off game. The USA may not have as many football fans as England or Brazil, but those who do come to stadiums are well informed. Announced on the PA system as “The Superstar of the Brazilian National Team”, he’s welcomed on the pitch by a round of applause. Minutes earlier, David Beckham of the Galaxy and Thierry Henry of the Red Bulls stopped their pre-match warmup to come to the sidelines and chat with him. Six years after that magical Madrid dinner, Neymar and Beckham were now shaking hands as fellow superstars. “For sure Neymar deserves to be among the 23 selected for FIFA Player of the Year in 2011. In fact, he could be the Player of the Year in a few years,” says Beckham. Follow Neymar’s progress at www.twitter.com/njr92
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Sails Like Teen Spirit Just after Christmas, an 18-year-old will lead a crew of teens into the world’s deadliest boat race. Vicious squalls, choppy seas and injuries are the norm for Jessica Watson, the youngest person to sail solo around the world
additional photography: action press
Words: Vanessa Murray Portraits: Richie Hopson
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There are few stretches as treacherous as the 630 nautical miles (1,165km) between sydney and hobart, tasmania, that are raced every year on december 26. gale-force storms known as ‘southerly busters’ hurtle across the Bass strait, making the sea choppy and challenging. in 1998, six sailors lost their lives. six years later, only 59 of the 116 starters completed the race. “the competition is very close and very competitive,” says 18-year-old sailor Jessica Watson. “on top of the competition, the race is infamous for its challenging weather conditions. it’s going to be tough, and it could be dangerous, but we’re doing it because we want a challenge. We know what we’re taking on.” Coming as they do from an 18-year-old skippering the youngest crew to compete in the 66-year-old race, those words might be mistaken for youthful hubris. of course, Jessica Watson is no normal youth. on may 15, 2010, at the age of 16, she sailed into sydney harbour after completing a solo circumnavigation of the globe, the youngest person to do so. her feat was lauded by australia’s then-prime minister, Kevin rudd, and this year she was crowned young australian of the year. her 2010 book, True Spirit, was a bestseller and she’s spoken to crowds as large as 10,000. so what qualifies her and her crew for a race as notoriously tough as this? “We
might be young, but we’re very experienced,” says Watson. “on the crew are two solo round-the-world sailors, four rolex Fastnet competitors [the european equivalent of the rolex sydney hobart yacht race], two sailors who crewed in the 2010 sydney-hobart and a multitude of smaller races – and that’s just in the past 12 months.” since the beginning of october, Watson and her crew of nine, who come from all over australia and the UK, and have an average age of 19, have been working on team building and leadership, problem solving, emergency planning, media and brand management training. they have also spent more than 300 hours at sea. the crew first set sail in the relatively calm conditions around pittwater on australia’s east coast, honing their sailing, manoeuvring, boat speed and offshore skills in their boat, a maxi yacht [100ft] christened ella Baché – another Challenge. off-shore sessions geared to prepare them for the shifting wind and weather conditions followed that. in november, they sailed from sydney to hobart and back, and spent a week sailing in the storm Bay and derwent areas, where, as the crew’s coach, Jonno Bannister, explains, “the race can be won or lost”. “they’ve spent a solid month out in the conditions, which has helped them with strategy and navigation, and it has given them experience as a team on that boat, in those waters,” says Bannister, who will compete against ella Baché
Above: A plane welcomes Australian Jessica Watson into Sydney Harbour on May 15, 2010, as she becomes the youngest sailor to circumnavigate non-stop and unassisted around the world. Then only 16, she took 210 days to complete her mission, having set off on October 18, 2009. Opposite: Still just 18, Watson has already released her own book charting her adventures. She’s now a national celebrity and this year she was named Young Australian Of The Year
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– another Challenge along with co-coach Chris lewin in the actual race. not only have they been spending all day every day training together, the crew live together too. “We’re taking this seriously, but the team dynamic is great, and we’re having a lot of fun too!” says Watson. “When we get home at the end of the day, we’re usually pretty shattered, but we always eat together; we pair up and take it in turns to cook for everyone.” When the first breezes fill the racers’ sails on Boxing day, Watson and her crew will set out from sydney harbour and sail down the south-east coast of australia to Cape howe. they’ll cross the Bass strait, skirt tasmania and enter storm Bay before finishing at Battery point – if they finish. “at its simplest the sydney to hobart is four incredibly challenging days that you not only have to get through, but also demand that you maximise the boat’s performance with the skills and efforts of nine other people,” says lewin, who’s skippered a boat in four sydney-hobart races, including the notorious 2004 race. “Jessica and her crew are stepping into a very competitive division of one of the premier yacht races in the world.” he describes Watson as “fantastic” to work with: “she has her strengths and weaknesses, which is good, as it gives me a job to do. But ultimately she is very self-aware, eager to learn, and genuine.” When she completed her solo circumnavigation after 210 days at sea, Watson was three days shy of her 17th birthday. it made her the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop and unassisted around the world – although she doesn’t hold an official record, as the World sailing speed record Council (WssrCd), don’t acknowledge records set by sailors under the age of 18; they think it’s dangerous. so is the crew’s average age of 19 an advantage or a liability? “their youth is a strength,” says Bannister. “We’ve got a group of fit, enthusiastic people who have gone through a structured training plan that’s left them as prepared, if not more prepared, than anyone else in the race.” like many eager sailors, Watson grew up watching the start of the sydneyhobart race with her family on tV. Julie and roger Watson weren’t typical parents to Jessica and her siblings: elder sister emily, younger brother tom and younger sister hannah. she was eight years old the first time she sailed. and after attending a sailing camp on australia’s gold Coast, her and her siblings moved on to weekend classes and club racing. But it wasn’t love at first tack. “i was frightened to be out on the water and so
additional photography: getty images
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“Sailing iSn’t about Strength, it’S about knowledge”
Having already sailed her 34ft yacht, Pink Lady, around the world in record time on her own, Jessica Watson is now set to skipper the youngest crew ever to take part in the notoriously difficult Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. With an average age of just 19, Watson and her crew of nine will set off in a 100ft maxi yacht from Australia’s east coast on December 26. Some say they are too young for such a demanding voyage, but the crew’s coach, Jonno Bannister, disagrees. “Their youth is a strength,” he says. “We’ve got a group of fit, enthusiastic people who are as prepared, if not more prepared, than anyone else in the race”
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additional photography: aCtion images, rex FeatUres, getty images (3), pa
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far from shore,” recalls Watson in her book. “But i didn’t want to be left on the beach, waiting for everyone to come back bragging about a race. i wanted to be in the thick of it.” as she got better at sailing, her confidence increased and she began enjoying it more. her family enjoyed it too – so much so, that in 2004, her parents sold their real estate business and brought a 52ft motorboat called home abroad that became just that: home. For the next five-and-a-half years, the Watsons cruised up and down the east coast of australia. the children were home schooled and all had chores on the boat. “this new life gave us kids amazing freedom,” says Watson. “We’d stop at islands where we’d be the only boat in the anchorage. We’d swim, snorkel, collect shells and explore beaches and islands.” reading solo sailor Jesse martin’s memoir, Lionheart: A Journey Of The Human Spirit, at the age of 11 inspired Watson to pursue her own solo navigation of the world. “it wasn’t so much the action-packed nature of it that appealed to me. it wasn’t the thought of knockdowns and big waves; it was all about putting a plan in place and getting the details right. “to me,” she continues, reflecting on her many years of meticulous preparation for her journey, “sailing isn’t about strength, it’s all about knowledge.” Watson’s remarkable teenage odyssey went ahead with the support of her parents, adventurer don mcintyre, other solo sailors like tom mowbray and high-profile figures such as sir richard Branson. “she’s 16, she’s not a baby anymore,” quipped the entrepreneur on a visit to Brisbane in september 2009, when Watson and her parents were being heavily criticised for her plans. (around the same time a dutch court had forbid 15-year-old laura dekker from her own solo circumnavigation attempt.) “i left school at 15 and started my own business, and at 16 you’re pretty grown up,” said Branson. “she should go for it. and you know it’s risky – it’s risky walking over the road, it’s risky in cars, risky on motorbikes, risky on bicycles. it’s far safer sailing around the world. she’ll have the adventure of a lifetime.” Watson’s 210 days on ella’s pink lady were both an unparalleled adventure and a gruelling test. “there were some tough days out at sea,” she admits, “like the storm in the atlantic where ella’s pink lady was rolled upside down four times.” she survived with just minor damage to her boat and the conviction that she could cope with anything – which is just
out on their own These sailors’ records might be disputed by international sailing bodies, but there’s no denying the bravery of their attempts. We profile the four teenagers who have joined Watson in making headlines for their around-the-world solo attempts Zac Sunderland, 20 (uSa) Port of departure: Marina del Rey, California June 14, 2008-July 16, 2009 Spending most of his childhood on a boat was enough preparation for Zac Sunderland. He set off just after his 16th birthday on The Intrepid. He went on to become the youngest person to solo circumnavigate the globe (with stops), sailing 27,500 nautical miles (50,929km) in 13 months. Mike Perham beat his record a month later.
Mike PerhaM, 19 (GBr) Port of departure: Portsmouth, UK November 18, 2008-August 27, 2009 Two months after Zac Sunderland finished in California, Mike Perham – younger by a few months – arrived in Portsmouth to claim bragging rights back from the Californian. Perham had a brutal journey aboard the 40ft Totallymoney.com, travelling 28,000 nautical miles (51,855km) in his nine months aboard, with a stop or two for repairs. On one of those stops, in Cape Town, he briefly met Sunderland, who was sailing the other direction. At the moment, Perham is the youngest person to sail around the world.
aBBy Sunderland, 18 (uSa) Port of departure: Marina del Rey, California January 23, 2010-June 12, 2010 (broken off) Sibling rivalry might be one explanation for Abby Sunderland’s solo attempt. But it might have also been beating her brother’s record that spurred on Abby, 16. She made it as far as the Indian Ocean, where her boat rolled 360 degrees and she lost radio and satellite phone contact. She was discovered by an Australian search plane and rescued by a French commercial boat two days later. She’s since written a book about the experience.
laura dekker, 16 (nl) Port of departure: Gibraltar August 21 2010-still at sea The Dutch teen’s attempt has been defined not by open water but by courtrooms. Dutch youth welfare officials tried to stop the voyage, even limiting her parents’ custody of their daughter, claiming that she was too young to attempt such a thing. Despondent, Dekker attempted suicide. The courts eventually relented, however, and she set sail in the 38ft Guppy, vowing to never return to Holland. Her voyage has been plagued by repair issues, but she’s currently undertaking her final, and most treacherous, passage across the Indian Ocean.
as well, as the sydney to hobart race is one of the world’s toughest. this year, around 100 teams from around the world are expected to enter, including the current race record holder, the australian-owned and skippered Wild oats xi, which crossed the line after one day, 18 hours, 40 minutes and 10 seconds in 2005. “the length of the race will vary depending on weather conditions, but it’ll most likely take around four days,” says Watson. “it might not sound like a lot compared to the 210 days i spent at sea on the around the world voyage, but they are going to be four very intense days.” Watson is passionate about inspiring and empowering young people to achieve their potential and become active participants in their own futures, even going so far as to kick-start an online debate about lowering australia’s parliamentary voting age from 18 to 16. she has acted as an ambassador for the australian youth Climate Change Coalition, helping give young people a voice on climate change. “it bugs me that climate change is something that is going to affect our future,” says Watson. “yet it’s the older generation that chooses how the issue is tackled or not tackled.” in June 2011, Watson was named as a youth representative for the Un’s World Food programme. “this is a wonderful opportunity for me to help young people in countries not as well off as us,” said Watson at the time. “i want to help them achieve their dreams by ensuring they get the basic necessity of a meal every day.” Come race day, the crew’s biggest challenge is going to be refining their boat speed, reckons Bannister. “When they get tired, they need to have that last five per cent of reserve energy to optimise the boat and everything they can do on it. that’s a challenge for every boat.” Bannister and lewin admit that after the first three weeks of training, they went back to their own crew and told them they’d better step it up. “these guys are going to be pretty competitive; we need to be on our game to be in with a chance of beating them,” says Bannister. Watson herself is feeling positive about the race – whatever the outcome. “i’d rather be sailing than anywhere else,” she says. “i love the challenge of making decisions and overcoming problems. it will be great fun – the crew are such a dynamic and likeable bunch. nothing inspires me more than people who stand up and say, ‘yes, we can do anything!’ you don’t have to be anyone special to achieve incredible things.” www.jessicawatson.com.au
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MiaMi
nice The city of vice is now the city of culture, thanks to Art BAsel MiAMi BeAch. In 10 years, the slick art fair has transformed Miami and spawned a lasting creative legacy Words: Esther Park Photography: Jeffery Salter
The Wynwood Walls, boasting world-class street art and launched during Art Basel in 2009, are the most visible examples of Miami’s cultural transformation
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Gallery Diet, in the former Puerto Rican barrio of Wynwood, features up-and-coming artists such as Debo Eilers, whose work is pictured here
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n a dilapidated area of Miami, a neon sign on the outside of a building blinks the word “Diet”. its hot-pink, cursive lettering conjures up an old city diner in the middle of an industrial wasteland. But no food is served in these parts – only art. Welcome to Wynwood: the new pulse of the Miami Art scene. “When i opened my gallery four years ago, i used to put my keys between my fingers – just in case – and run to my car with the fear of getting mugged,” says Gallery Diet’s owner, the brightly coiffed Nina Johnson. “Now, it’s common to see pedestrians walking throughout the day, grabbing lunch, checking out art. it’s amazing what this area has gone through in only a few years.” tucked between interstate 95 and Biscayne Bay, the Wynwood Arts District is the most obvious manifestation of a thriving, growing utopia of creative mavens, artistic entrepreneurs and culture vultures who are changing the face of this city. credit for this artistic renaissance is due, largely, to a 40-year-old art fair from a small city in switzerland which this month is celebrating its 10th anniversary as a Miami outpost. Art Basel Miami
Beach now brings in more than 300 galleries from all over the world and attracts in excess of 50,000 international visitors to the city. there are now 15 adjacent contemporary art fairs spread across the whole city, from south Beach to downtown, and to the graffitied ghettos of Wynwood and Overtown. “the Miami art community is going through an incredible decade,” says Dennis scholl, a prominent collector and the vice president of arts for the John s and James l Knight Foundation. “let’s face it, it’s an incredible change – a sea change, really – of what has happened down here in just a short span of time.” Based in Miami, Knight Foundation has provided Us$40m in arts and culture funding for a diverse portfolio of genres, from a locally driven film festival to music promotion websites. A purebred Miamian, scholl is considered by many to be the grandfather of the city’s cultural growth. he believes what has taken place here “could not have happened anywhere else”. “long before Basel, Miami had this wonderful confluence of a very good, working artist community, up-and-coming museums and internationally renowned collectors with these public spaces
showing their private collection,” says scholl, who exudes a jolly, Yoda-like wisdom. “Now Art Basel gets here and it shines a very, very bright light on what’s already going on here. that became a light that helped sustain growth.” if south Beach – with its stretches of white sand, sun-dappled pools and over-the-top nightlife – never lacked for light, Art Basel’s gleam has certainly brought out a few additional glints. Along the pedestrianised lincoln road, Frank Gehry has funded a striking new building for the New World symphony. At the other end of the road, swiss star architects herzog & de Meuron have built a multi-storey car park that (somewhat bizarrely) also hosts events and dinners. “All this is a result of 10 years of people focusing on culture in Miami and you’re finally seeing a city that’s beginning to take itself seriously,” says scholl. But it is just across the Venetian causeway from south Beach, past the decadent homes and yachts gracing the exclusive Venetian islands, that Art Basel’s lasting legacy is most visible. the once neglected Wynwood area is now bursting with galleries and colourful warehouse walls painted by
Aramis Lorié opened the Grand Central event space in Miami’s often-ignored Downtown area in 2010. Art Basel’s tastemaking clientele encouraged him to push the city’s live music scene in new directions
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Considered by many to be the grandfather of Miami’s cultural growth, collector Dennis Scholl believes the unique confluence of his city’s working artists and its up-andcoming museums enabled Miami to make the most of Art Basel
The Don Draper of the city’s art scene, Thom Collins is a former Art Basel regular-turned current director of the Miami Art Museum. “Before Basel, I didn’t have a sense of Miami being a centre of visual culture,” he says
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world-class street artists, from Brazil’s Os Gêmeos to shepard Fairey. Only four miles south on North Miami Avenue lies Downtown Miami, which will be home to a groundbreaking new 11,000-squaremetre home for the Miami Art Museum (also designed by herzog & de Meuron), set to open in early 2013. “the Basel experience doesn’t speak to the true character of the city as a culturally productive centre,” says thom collins, a sort of art-world version of Mad Men’s Don Draper. collins manages to combine Zen intelligence with an undeniable swagger. “in fact, all the excess stuff that takes place during the fair – the parties, the dinners – all that simply dilutes what Miami truly has to offer as the leading international cultural destination of the Western hemisphere.” these are truly bold words from a man whose first impression of Miami was based on little more than the cocktailfuelled south Beach exclusivity that is Art Basel Miami Beach. collins, who previously served as the director of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York, remembers coming to Art Basel’s soft launch in December 2001 and “ping-ponging from one contemporary art
event to another”. Now, as director of the Miami Art Museum, he has a different understanding of the fair’s role in the grand scheme of things. “the cultural institutions in town – the collectors, the artists – really learned how to use Art Basel as a platform to advance their own interests,” says collins. “in doing so, they have been able to paint a more detailed picture of Miami as a cultural centre.” Branding is just one of the fair’s residual benefits. thanks to Art Basel’s high profile, the past decade has seen the number of artists drawn to the city rise. their studios and galleries are now dotted around neighbourhoods like Wynwood, where drug dealers once plied their trade and their clients stumbled in the streets. inside lester’s, a new makeshift cafe and bookshop located in the heart of Wynwood, Michael Vasquez sips from a glass of lukewarm Dogfish ale and looks pensive. “honestly, the scene kinda started by accident,” he explains. “i don’t think we knew what we were doing back then… We were just doing what we do and will continue to do so, regardless if Art Basel came or not.” Vasquez’s “we” refers to a core of 10 or so local artists that scholl described
as the “already established, working visual artists’ community.” Along with Vasquez, artists such as Naomi Fisher, Bert rodriguez, hernan Bas, Daniel Arsham, and Mark handforth experienced success far away from the glitterati of south Beach, and long before Art Basel’s impact. “there’s two kinds of scenes for Miami artists,” says Vasquez. “One scene is what i call the real scene – these are the galleries and visual artists producing real stuff. then there’s like a scene, sort of like our 2nd saturday Art Walks – it’s like a circus, a bad car accident. that’s the scene that a lot of kids now are used to when they talk about the Miami Art scene and that’s not necessarily a good thing.” Vasquez takes a last swig of his beer and sighs. “ten years ago, there was nothing here. there were literally two art galleries, and that was it,” he says. “Now there’s a whole new generation of kids who are into art. there’s a need for more galleries and places to hang out and there’s art everywhere – literally.” Vasquez points across the street to Wynwood Walls, a colourful mosaic of street art created by some of the world’s best graffiti artists and a red-hot tourist attraction since its Art Basel debut in
One of the scene’s established locals, Michael Vasquez’s powerful portraits of ghetto characters have earned him plaudits and recognition beyond his city’s borders. Here he is in his Wynwood studio
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Wynwood’s artist community is tightknit. Daniel Milewski (left) exhibits his work at Gallery Diet with Nina Johnson (right) and is the owner of Lester’s, a makeshift bookshop and cafe that caters to the local community
2009. “so this is now the Miami Art scene. it’s constantly expanding, moving forward – if this is the response to Basel, then so be it.” Yet Wynwood’s growth appears to be largely organic, born of the area’s tightknit artist community. For example, lester’s was opened at the end of May by Daniel Milewski, who also exhibits at Gallery Diet, just a few blocks away. “it’s always interesting to see the constant flow of people who come to lester’s on any given night,” says Milewski. “We do a lot of original programming – like readings, lectures, DJs – but on those off-nights, we still get regulars that come through. that’s just awesome to see that we really did strike a chord, that there really is an audience hungry for a place like this.” From transformed warehouses to a downtown full of Art Deco and shimmering high-rises, an area largely ignored after dark now pulls a diverse crowd flocking to a 1920s-era railroad station called – appropriately – Grand central. Opened by the man dubbed the ‘Downtown Don’, the music and events venue is part of Aramis lorié’s desire to expand the city’s nightlife palette. On one night towards the end of september, Australian super band
cut copy played Grand central, a rarity in a city known for a music aesthetic drifting more toward Us rapper Pitbull and French house producer/DJ David Guetta. “Yeah, five years ago, cut copy wouldn’t even consider playing in Miami,” says lorié, hidden under a scruffy, weekold beard and his signature cuban fedora. “Now, we’ve got great musicians asking to perform, especially when Art Basel comes around.” last year’s performances by twin shadows and the Brothers Macklovitch (DJ A-trak and chromeo’s Dave 1) were the musical coup of Art Basel. “last week, we had Peaches dressed up in her boob costume, just killing it to a packed house. Yeah, that was quite Basel-y,” laughs lorié. the absurdity of Basel – a swiss city best known for its beautiful old cathedral – being used as an adjective by a fedorawearing nightlife impresario might be lost on lorié. But there’s no denying the benefit its tastemaker crowd has given his nightlife efforts. “From new money to new businesses to new residents, it has really made Miami a well-rounded city, y’know?” says lorié. “Now you can wake up, take a swim in the ocean, grab some amazing gourmet food, see some great art, do some expensive shopping, grab more great food,
then come here and have the best night of your life. What’s not to like?” Perhaps only that Basel’s shining spotlight may soon be cast elsewhere. Perennial rumours that the art fair is looking for a new city to grace have increased ahead of its anniversary this year. “i think it would be stupid for Basel to not come back,” lorié continues. “And if they don’t, Miami’s already changed. “We’re seven years old now… we’ve already got the world-class art centres; culture-wise, we’ve got a warehouse district now occupied by contemporary galleries, and affordable studios for artists to work in; music-wise, we’ve got live music venues like Grand central popping up everywhere; people-wise, we’ve got some of the most diverse group of transplants from all over the world moving here. And not to mention, the beautiful weather for eight months out of the year.” lorié motions upward to the clear, Downtown Miami evening sky and smiles. “try going to Art Basel in December anywhere else in the states, and not freezing your ass off,” he says. “Art Basel cleveland just doesn’t sound as sexy as Art Basel Miami Beach.” www.artbaselmiamibeach.com
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South African surfers Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker (pictured), Chris Bertish, Andrew Marr and Frank Solomon have built their big-wave reputation in the cold waters off the coast of Cape Town
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cold hades
Four South Africans stand out in the sport of big-wave surfing. Three pioneers and one young gun reveal a world that’s a lot tougher than you ever imagined
pHOTOGrApHy: NIC BOTHMA/pICTUrEdESk.COM
Words: Steve Smith It’s black down there. And eerily still. Black’s not a colour that one normally associates with surfing. Not even big-wave surfing. Blue… maybe green… or white when those multi-storey walls of water come crashing down. For Chris Bertish, though, it’s black. He’s a kilometre off the Californian coast, held down 40ft beneath a freezing winter ocean that’s currently buckling and heaving as lines of huge waves – some reaching as high as 60ft – roll across the surface above him. No light reaches him down here. This is Mavericks and Bertish is in the midst of a real-time nightmare at what is arguably the most dangerous spot in the world. Big-wave surfing is by its very nature dangerous, but even among the legendary breaks, Mavericks stands out as a killer. The best have died here… Mark Foo… Sion Milosky… all renowned big-wave exponents. Each winter, created by the planet’s biggest storms, deep ocean swell travels thousands of kilometres at great speed, only to find its path suddenly blocked by an unusually shaped rock formation rising up from the sea bed. This causes the hunkered-down wave to suddenly square up and dissipate its energy on a huge slab of rock. To sit in this impact zone, to paddle into one of these waves, to get to your feet and make the drop, bottom turn, and then scud along the face before pulling out earns you a special place among surfing’s big-wave elite. Get it wrong and you can end up where Bertish is now. Fall at Mavericks in these conditions and one of two things can happen. One, you can be dragged underwater for around 58 seconds, travelling just under one kilometre toward the shore. Backwards. That’s almost twice as fast as Usain Bolt can run 65
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Andrew Marr
“Just about every other sport has rules that says you can’t do this or that. For me, surfing big waves is one place where I have complete freedom to do what I want and express myself with the ocean”
forwards. And while this all happens, you’ll be pummelled by thick, icy water that’s doing its level best to tear off your arms, legs and head. you’re trying hard to think of white fluffy clouds or whatever other happy oxygen-conserving place you go to calm your mind and heart rate. you’re also trying very hard not to think of the huge rocks all this water is about to throw you at. That’s still preferable to option two though… which is what Bertish is currently experiencing. Instead of being hurtled toward the shore, he’s been sucked down the face of Mavericks’ wave-inducing rock outcrop. And he’s been sucked down with such force that it’s even pulled down his 9ft surfboard – one that usually has the buoyancy to stay on the surface no matter what breaks over it. “It was like going over some kind of underwater waterfall,” recalls Bertish. “I just went down and down, and it got darker and darker. There was one thing going for me though… I was still attached to my leash.” The composite-rubber cord Velcroed to his ankle stretched to more than twice 66
“At one stage, maybe when I was younger and you have those pipe dreams, I felt it was possible to make a living out of this, but in SA big-wave surfing is just not big enough”
its size, but crucially, it didn’t snap. Using it as a guideline, Bertish hauls himself upwards until he reaches his board. Using what remains of his strength he grabs the nose, fully expecting to see light and breathe air. But it’s still dark. “I knew I was starting to black out,” says Bertish. The little black spots at the corners of my vision were starting to dance – but I held on and it suddenly got lighter, and I popped up on the surface…”
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ertish went on to win the contest. And that, people, is what big-wave surfing is all about. yes it is about the adrenalin and the glory, but it’s also about the abyss, the cold Hades. Mostly, though, it’s about the ability to return from this place and paddle out for more. It’s a quality imbued in four South African surfers. A quality that has placed Chris Bertish, Grant ‘Twiggy’ Baker, Andrew Marr and Frank Solomon in the sport’s upper echelon and that has earned SA big-wave surfers a sizeable
reputation. It’s a reputation indelibly written in the cold waters of Cape Town. In winter, the Mother City is basically a boot camp for aspirant big-wave surfers. The whipping north-wester herds in deep ocean monsters that stack up at three very heavy spots, all within a 15km radius: ‘Crayfish Factory’, ‘Sunset’… and the boardshort-soiling ‘dungeons’. Nowhere else in the world do you have three serious big-wave breaks so close together. And these aren’t aquamarine-watered tropical beaches that just happen to have large waves either. The winter sea of the Western Cape is a harsh environment. The water temperature can be an extremity-numbing 7°C or 8°C, the currents pull like a tugboat and underneath it all, 5m great white sharks are known to rocket up from the deep and grab their prey with such velocity that they breach the surface and arc through the air like some kind of devil’s dolphin. knowing how a big wave “works” – where it comes from and what it’s likely to do – are essential survival skills for a big-wave surfer. you’re part surfer, part meteorologist. Andrew Marr could write a doctoral thesis on dungeons.
pHOTOGrApHy: ANTONIA STEyN (3), ANT FOx (1)
Chris Bertish
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Grant Baker
“Preparation is everything in what we do and I find my mental readiness is related to my physical condition. The fitter, stronger and better I am surfing, the more mentally focused and prepared I will be”
“Legendary big-wave spots Waimea Bay in Hawaii and Mavericks are singlesourced waves, all lined up coming from one direction, and with long intervals. your take-off area is x-marks-the-spot specific. That means you know exactly where it’s dangerous and where it’s safe. At dungeons, though, the swell arrives from different angles and there can be an element of south and west to it. We also have strong winds closer to the coast that can further influence things. plus there are two outside reefs beyond dungeons – Vulcan and Tafelberg – that warp or refract the waves so you have all this crossover energy. your take-off spot can therefore be anywhere along a 300m sweep, making your safety zone much smaller. So yes, there’s a lot of aspects that make this a very tough wave.” Like Mavericks, dungeons is also just under a kilometre off shore beyond Hout
Frank Solomon
“There’s no big rainbow at the end of the tunnel… you just really, really have to want to surf big waves. There’s only five or six guys in the world who are making it as a career”
Bay’s Sentinel peak and at the Tafelberg reef, waves as high as 60ft trip over the deep-water rock reef with incredible power. Between 1999 and 2008 dungeons hosted the red Bull Big Wave Africa event – a now legendary contest that put Cape Town on the map as a big-wave spot, and also provided a platform for these four guys to announce their presence. True to the roots of the sport, red Bull Big Wave Africa was strictly a paddle-in event. rather than being towed into the wave by a Jet Ski and strapped into a small, manoeuvrable board, surfers had to paddle in on big guns. Unlike tow-in surfing where your speed allows you to catch a wave way before it breaks, the paddle-in variety is a far ballsier affair. To catch it, you have to paddle and take off when the wave’s at its critical point and then still make the vertical, near-free-fall drop to the bottom.
“I have had some bad wipeouts at places like Jaws, Mavericks and Todos,” remembers Twiggy Baker, “but none so intense as the one I had at the slab just up the reef from dungeons. I pulled into a barrel and it closed out with so much force that it knocked me out, put me in hospital and left me wondering what my name was for a few days. ” Of the four surfers here, Baker stands out and to some degree, stands apart. He’s the one guy who’s been able to turn this extreme sport into a full-time career. A few years back – pre-recession times – he snagged a major contract with Billabong that allowed him the funds to travel the world in pursuit of big swell. He has, of course, backed this up with some of the most talked about paddle-in rides ever. Baker has won all the major trophies and awards the sport has to offer: the Mavericks Surf
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Contest, The Billabong xxL Big Wave and red Bull Big Wave Africa. “yes, it’s an amazing job, but there’s no real money in it,” says Baker. “Look, if I hadn’t had worked for 15 years to set myself up, I could never be doing what I am doing. Fortunately, Billabong pays me enough to travel the world and surf the biggest waves I can and that’s a gift. So to have to drop everything is easy and the travel becomes a part of the lifestyle, it’s something I enjoy. Watching a swell develop and hoping that the waves are going to be big and perfect, travelling all that way and seeing that you have made the correct call, there’s no feeling like it.” Bertish and Marr have travelled the same road. No less talented than Baker, they’ve put in equally hard yards. From 1999 to 2010, Marr – about as humble and polite a person as you’ll ever meet – spent a few months every year surfing in Hawaii, specifically at the iconic Waimea Bay. Ask his peers and they’ll tell you there aren’t many people around who have surfed this spot with more aplomb. Ask Marr and he’s typically modest: “Look, there are a lot of really, really good people surfing The Bay, but I felt comfortable out there.” With that kind of experience and his respectful approach to Hawaii’s notoriously tetchy local surfers, one would’ve expected an invite to The Quiksilver In Memory of Eddie Aikau – universally known as ‘The Eddie’. Held only if the swell is big enough, this is the premier Hawaiian big-wave contest. Unfortunately for Marr, an invite has not been forthcoming. “A few years ago I thought there was a possibility,” says Marr. “I seemed to gain steam – I did well at red Bull Big Wave Africa and at the Billabong xxL –
it’s been a bitter pill to swallow. After surfing Mavericks for over a decade and spending every cent he had (and a lot he didn’t), Bertish was finally invited to participate in the 2010 Mavericks Surf Contest. Given 36 hours notice, with his credit card and overdraft maxed, and having borrowed money from his brother, he arrived in California with r230 ($37) in his pocket. And it turned out that fate was among the spectators watching that day.
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he waves were massive. Even by Mavericks’ standards. Faces of up to 60ft were lining up, a magnitude usually deemed unpaddleable, but conditions were perfect – glassy and wind-free. The go-ahead was given and throughout the day the waves just got bigger and bigger. “I’d been surfing there for 15 years and I had never seen waves like that,” says Bertish. “I knew that if fell in a certain place I would not survive. That’s quite a dramatic feeling – especially when you’ve been surfing these waves for so long. That day redefined what big-wave paddle-in surfing was all about. From that contest onwards there was a new benchmark.” Surviving a huge fall and neardrowning in his first heat, Bertish fought his way into the final where he was the only surfer to ride two waves without falling. These were waves so big that 40 spectators were injured when white water unexpectedly washed over the rocks where they were standing. He had won. It was the archetypal underdog achievement... except the scene didn’t quite go to plan. The effects of the
year. Currently ranked 10th after competing in the season’s first two events, Solomon is doing his utmost to build a career in the sport. But it’s been hard. After gate-crashing a red Bull Big Wave Africa practice session as an unknown 20-year-old, he was eventually invited to compete in 2008, the last year it was run. despite not catching a wave in the event, he did catch the attention of Grant Washburn, Big Wave Africa competitor and Mavericks stalwart. Washburn issued a casual invitation to stay in San Francisco and surf the mighty Mavericks. Off Solomon went. But again he never caught a wave – a lack of swell that year meant Mavericks never broke once in the three months he was there. The following year his luck flipped and 2009 was an El Niño year with a cyclic weather phenomenon, generating its usual consistent array of big waves. “The waves were massive every day and there was a huge crew of SA guys there including Chris, Andrew and Twig, plus James Taylor, Mike Schlebach, and Jacques Theron,” says Solomon. “It was very cool – we arrived as a crew and surfed together. The guys at Mavericks were like ‘Holy shit, who are these guys?’ Normally each country has one or two good big-wave surfers, but suddenly here were a whole bunch of them. There was a little animosity about us taking over their wave, but they took notice.” If anything, Solomon is tenacious. Working casual jobs and scraping together enough money to spend successive seasons surfing at Mavericks and Waimea, he also sent several emails to Big Wave World Tour director Gary Linden that eventually got him a shortnotice invitation to the Quiksilver
but then again to be competitive with other people in waves of that nature was always at odds for me. What I enjoy is the camaraderie – it’s a big part of the experience in Hawaii. Out there on big days you really get a sense that you’re looking out for one another. If anything, my underlying competitiveness would be in seeing someone taking off on a really big wave and being inspired to push myself to achieve that too.” Bertish did genuinely want it, though, and without Marr’s philosophical comforter, 68
global recession meant no sponsorship was forthcoming and Bertish didn’t get all of the promised US$50,000 prize money. The contest’s sponsor went bankrupt… “When you work so hard and you still can’t get enough backing to carry on, it’s pretty disheartening I guess,” he admits. Which brings us to Frank Solomon. Unlike the other three, who are all approaching 40, Solomon is only 28 – a young gun by big-wave surfing standards. He’s competing on The Big Wave World Tour, now into its third
Ceremonial in Chile. Arriving the night before his morning heat, Solomon had not only never seen the break before, but he had six of the top Big Wave Tour surfers in his opening heat. “I woke up the next morning to find half the contestants doing yoga or drinking strange tea and I was like, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ Still, I started the heat well. I got a big wave right off the bat, then a nice barrel... and then this huge set approached. I was on the inside and knew I had to go for it. I got that one
pHOTOGrApHy: SETH MIGdAIL
“The waves near San Francisco were massive every day and there was a huge crew of SA guys over there”
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“Once you’ve paddled for a wave and committed to it there’s no pulling back,” says Frank Solomon (pictured). “That wave is going and you’re going with it, so you’d better make sure you get to your feet”
and won the heat. I got on the cover of the main surfing mag back home and made the cover of the newspapers. It was such a sick feeling, bru.” despite narrowly losing in the semis, Solomon had reached a critical plateau – he knew he could handle himself in this elevated company. “I’d never competed in a big-wave contest before,” he says. “you see other guys get waves, then you do, but you never think about how well you’re doing. I thought I could hang with the big boys, but I never knew for sure until then.” Another good showing at the following Billabong pico Alto Invitacional in peru saw him beat two Big Wave World Tour champs Carlos Burle (2009/2010) and Jamie Sterling (2010/2011) on the way to another semi. He is now, without doubt, a card-carrying member of the big-wave elite. But where to from here? While he’s getting help from a couple of sponsors and a career as a big-wave surfer looks within touching distance, in reality it’s along way from being a certainty. “Sure. But Twiggy and some of the overseas guys have managed it, and I know I can do it,” says Solomon. “With the excitement and the danger, bigwave surfing has the potential to have a broader audience than small-wave surfing. It looks like there are some big sponsors that want to get involved.” He could be right. The Big Wave World Tour currently feels a lot like the birth of professional surfing back in the mid-’70s. And similarly big-wave surfing will change, too. Competition sharpens fangs and the old camaraderie will erode a little. Twiggy Baker is already witnessing it. “yes, there are a few of us who do this together and we are a close crew,” he says. “We spend time together and look out for one another in and out of the water. But I’ve recently found the competitive side has become cut-throat. Certain individuals are not shy to paddle on your inside and steal waves. In the end, I guess competition is what it is and you can always go free-surfing instead.” Frank Solomon’s not opting for the free-surfing option and there’s every reason to be optimistic that he could be on the way up. It remains a hard road though, and not many people crack it. But unlike Marr and Bertish, he has time on his side. For the latter two, they’ll take solace in the legacy they’ve left behind. These guys have inspired the next wave who already speak the names of Chris Bertish and Andrew Marr with awe. www.bigwaveworldtour.com
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POSITIVE LIVING HIV, illness, poverty. When the nearest hospital is 40km away, the bicycle becomes a means of survival. We accompany caregiver Susan on her journey and learn the secrets of her smile Words: Werner Jessner Photography: Philipp Horak
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This is Susan, 39. She lives in a hut with her mother in Chibundi, 100km north of the Zambian capital of Lusaka. With the help of her bicycle, she visits and cares for HIV-positive patients in her area
For her clients, Susan is an angel on a bike. She provides medicine and, just as importantly, she also provides comfort and someone to talk to
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ambia may be knee-deep in catastrophe, but it’s a country that hasn’t lost its smile. Its people are fond of saying, “I live positive.” And it’s a philosophy that applies to the country as a whole, despite the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimating that the average life expectancy in Zambia is just 52 years and four months. That’s 207th out of the world’s 221 states. Women give birth to an average of six children; half of Zambia’s population is under 16. Almost one million Zambians – out of an estimated population of 14 million – are HIV-positive. But “I live positive,” they say as they’re making their way along on the Great North Road out of the capital, Lusaka, heading for Chibombo, thus quickly taking the sting out of the joke they’ve just made. “Living positive” means being happy, come what may. Two thirds of the country’s population live below the poverty line and eight out of 10 Zambians are farmers, which means they wrest as much as they can from the rock-hard earth during the rainy season, so as not to go hungry during the dry months. Out in the villages, an inflation rate of 72
more than eight per cent doesn’t particularly attract anyone’s attention. A chicken is a much more reliable unit of currency. Susan lives some way west of Chibombo, where the tarmacked road network is nothing but a memory and the bombed-out gravel tracks have given way to pure savannah. Susan is 39 years old. For the purposes of this article, we will call her – and all other protagonists – by first name only. Many of the people who we will come across here are severely ill. Some are much closer to death than they are to life. Susan is a gentle little woman with a clear voice. She lost her husband many years ago. He is buried in South Province. She is not particularly sentimental in remembrance of him. By Western standards, her two sons have already come of age. She and her mother – also a widower – farm a couple of fields that only the initiated would recognise as such during the dry season. Maize, peanuts, sweet potato, okra. Susan shares a plough with her aunt who lives with her family in the neighbouring mud hut, but they no longer have any working animals. Their two cows are dead, one died when calving, the other choked after eating a plastic bag. Nameless dogs have been the biggest animals on the farm ever since. Susan’s most valuable possession is a Buffalo bike; it has a lugged steel frame, no gears and weighs 20kg. World Bicycle Relief, an aid organisation that provides bikes to community home-based care volunteers, originally loaned her the bike for two years, and after that it became her property. As a caregiver, Susan looks after the sick people in her area, takes them medicine, speaks to them and gets them to the hospital
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– some 40km from the village – on the bike rack. Africa brings every bike to its knees: it’s all the sand, mud, bad roads and heavy loads. None of the 74 languages spoken in Zambia has a word for “maintenance”. The black paint on the top tube of Susan’s bike is worn away, evidence of innumerable mounts and dismounts in her kitenge (a traditional wrap-around skirt). It no longer has brakes and there isn’t much left of the saddle, which is held together with old shoelaces. The steering has a centimetre of play and the crank arms, with the bare pedal axes sticking out, scrape both sides of the frame when she pedals. In four years, Susan has been the equivalent of halfway round the world on her bike. At temperatures of 40°C in the dust of the dry season; at 30°C in the sticky closeness of the rainy season. When tracks, paths and roads have been clogged with mud. Once her work on the farm is done, Susan goes to see people mortally threatened by HIV. Her job title is caregiver and she’s a guardian angel for the sick. Susan’s clients are people who can no longer manage the walk to the nearest medical facility; it takes around four hours to get there and another four hours to get back, not to mention the waiting time on arrival. Providing medicine is actually the easiest part of her job. Much more important is the contact she makes with the breaking, the broken and the struggling. On foot, Susan would be able to visit one HIV-positive person a day. Maybe two. Ten kilometres there and 10 back would be feasible. Incidents and emergencies would make things more difficult. Distance is the factor to consider for those who live in the Zambian savannah. In an age where instant information is available at any time from the worldwide web, where visits to the bookshop or newsagent are no longer vital, we are gradually losing our sense of distance. In Zambia, the bicycle is the fibreglass cable and Susan is the message. Sometimes it’s good news. More often it’s bad. Three of her clients have died in recent years; Susan has buried all three. You wouldn’t recognise cemeteries as such when you go past them. To the untrained eye they just look like untended fields.
Petersen Susan’s first client of the day is Petersen. There is not much left of this former Zambian Army soldier. His cheeks are gaunt and the grey stubble hidden among his protruding bones is difficult to shave. His collarbone and shoulders stick out of his 56-year-old skin; there’s hardly any meat on them. He was released from military serviced in 1989 and returned to his village. He married and went on to have six children with his wife. The youngest is now 11, the oldest 23. The round, clay granary, approximately a metre in diameter and standing on stilts 50cm above the ground, is well stocked with maize. Petersen insists he is “very happy” as he squints out over his yard of compacted clay where his kids and the neighbours’ kids play Nsolo (a game played with four rows of six scooped-out holes in the ground and two nuts per hole used as playing pieces). “Very happy.” If you didn’t know better, you might almost think he was a happy pensioner. His wife hugs him gently. He seems fragile. You can only imagine the kind of pain he is in. Petersen is Susan’s client; he knows that he is HIV-positive. His wife has never been tested. It's a common story with the diagnosis of HIV in Zambia. Tuberculosis, then persistent illness, a lost referral slip, a voluntary self-test, then certainty. You wouldn’t even guess that Petersen is the same person as the strong man depicted in the pictures in his hut, wearing a funny hat at the wheel of his truck, with his weapon in firing
In four years, Susan has been the equivalent of halfway round the world on her bike. It no longer has brakes and there’s not much left of the saddle position, arms round his comrades. Those memories aren’t important now. Susan is important. Susan, who listens to him. Susan, who brings him medicine. Susan, who he can give messages to. Occasionally she helps him cook. She lights the fire, wets the pots and rubs ash onto them so that they don’t go black in the flames, then fills them with water, heats it until the germs are dead, stirs in maize flour, peanut butter, a pinch of salt and carries on stirring until the whole thing solidifies into nshima, Zambian bread. You roll balls of it by hand. It’s served with vegetables and sometimes chicken or fish. When Susan leaves, Petersen stresses again that he is “very happy”. He’s a man with a full life, a winner when it comes to average life expectancy by his country’s standards.
Mildred How did she contract HIV? The elegant lady in a jaunty little hat says she has her suspicions, but her prime suspect died back in 1999. Then, as now, it was not uncommon for Zambian men to have other partners in addition to their primary wife. Primary wife Mildred is mother to two surviving children; she has regular contact with her son who has given her three grandchildren. She has more ducks than grandchildren; unusually, she has plenty of them. “A lot of people don’t like my ducks,” the feisty woman explains. “But I do.” These exotic animals are kept as a source of food, plus she can boil their eggs or stir them into nshima. Her second luxury is a vegetable garden; Mildred is proud to showcase her almost sophisticated life, full of culture, interests and attentiveness. Mildred cultivates her treasured tomatoes, cabbage and a type of spinach, all protected by a high fence made of woven grass. She can sell a bunch of spinach for 1,000 kwacha, equivalent to about 41 cents. A small fish, the size of a couple of fingers, from the brackish water of a nearby brook, will set you back 5,000 kwacha. Every now and then Mildred splashes out on one. She’s careful about what she eats and has never drunk alcohol. As the sun goes down, she retains her dignity. She stands straight and upright, as if she still might carry things on her head. She speaks clearly and thoughtfully. Susan tells us about the pain Mildred experiences, once she’s back on her bike. Mildred didn’t identify her illness for far too long. (She must have gone through six rainy and six dry seasons with headaches, diarrhoea, fevers and haemorrhoids, but who would dare demand this kind of detail from a woman like Mildred?) Susan sets off for the next set of people awaiting her attention around 10km away. Her pace is quick, the sand tracks clogged. She sits up straight on what remains of her saddle, her back 73
Action
Top: Thick sand on the Zambian tracks makes progress arduous work in the summer months. Mud during the rainy season makes it even harder. Bottom: The World Bicycle Relief bikes are called ‘Buffaloes’ and they’re built like them: made of steel, they have no gears and their racks can carry up to 100kg. But the harsh conditions of Africa can still break them
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Top: The vegetables Mildred cultivates by hand in her garden (which are protected against intruders by a wall made of grass) provide both a livelihood and means of payment. Bottom: Susan demonstrates how to use a femidom, the female version of the condom. All of the people in the room are due to become parents; one of the 15 couples present is HIV-positive but doesn’t know it. Susan will have to tell them
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Action
“Very happy.” Petersen is a man with a full life, a winner when it comes to average life expectancy by his country’s standards extended, holding the handlebars as far back as possible so that the front wheel doesn’t sink into the road surface. It’s an efficient, dignified riding style. It also means Susan feels the sharp pain in her chest, unexplained by doctors, somewhat less.
Hildah and Ireene
Tolex, 36, has known he’s HIV-positive for six months. His 32-year-old wife, Hildah, is also HIV-positive. No one knows how many of the children kicking a tattered ball around between the kitchen hut and the latrine are also infected. The kids with a white mark on their heads have worms. Tolex watches them run about as they play in their shabby football shirts. Eto’o – Samuel, the former Barcelona striker from Cameroon – is on the back of one of them. None of these children has ever seen him play – how could they when they don’t have electricity, TVs or newspapers? Tolex has been in a state of shock ever since discovering he was HIV-positive. Susan’s trying to get him back on his feet. Tolex and Hildah’s youngest child was named Ireene at birth, but now her mother likes to call the two-month-old lethargic bundle of joy by the name of Priscilla too. It still isn’t clear which name will prevail. Father HIV-positive, mother HIVpositive, and yet there’s still a good chance the child might be born HIV-negative. If you act quickly enough, antiretroviral combination therapy can lower the likelihood of the mother passing the virus onto her unborn child. But you can only tell if it has worked once the child is born. Ireene, who weighs well under 3kg at the age of eight weeks, is unaware of her fate. Today it will be determined, a two-hour bike-ride away from her hut. Susan has organised a DNA test for baby Ireene at the hospital in Shimukuni to screen for HIV and other conditions. The word ‘hospital’ makes you think of medical equipment and the application of science. Actually, this is just three sparse rooms. Still, the one doctor and two nurses manage to see 10,000 patients a year. The first room stinks of varnish and is being used for junk. “Sorry, we’re renovating,” explains head physician Justin with a shrug of the shoulders. He can just about make a living as he tries to manage this chaos. The second room is used as both a delivery ward and the holding area for new under-age mothers; there are 10 teenagers and six new-born babies in this small room that is about 15m2. The youngest person here is just six hours old. The third room is for examinations. This is where Susan will carry out the DNA test on Ireene. The little one looks pretty anaemic – pale almost – after the long journey. You might notice her lethargy, too, but she was already tired during the 76
home visit. The first world would probably classify Susan’s work as that of a certified nurse. This, a woman who lives in a mud hut with her mother, a woman who can quickly wring the neck of a chicken or a dog neck if need be; a woman who draws water from the domestic well in an old, torn, plastic jerrycan, a woman who balances bundles of firewood on her head. But at the clinic, she’s transformed into a respected figure, a sage, a saint almost. You can see the respect in the way her patients look at her. Susan personifies comfort assistance and knowledge. Susan set off on her bike at 5am, an hour before sunrise, to be at the clinic for 7am sharp. If she wanted to do the same job without a bike, she’d have to set off on foot no later than 2am. In contrast to her outreach work as a caregiver, she is paid for her job at the hospital, earning the equivalent of 54 cents an hour. Were it not for the bike, the sum would be laughable. There are cards stored in a lockable cabinet, the only piece of premium technical equipment in the hospital. The cards are white and have five coin-sized circles printed at the top. Underneath is a name field. First Susan enters the details of the person being examined. Then she has to fill the circles with droplets of blood. With an anaemic little thing like Ireene, it is an excruciating procedure. Susan has to prick Ireene in the heel four times to get the five drops of blood from her. The little one only cries at the first two jabs. Hildah will be back here in two months. By then, the Ministry of Health transporter truck, which sets off from Lusaka for the provinces once a month and returns the month after, will have brought the results.
Purity and Isaac
One afternoon, 15 couples expecting a child jostle their way on to the narrow benches of the empty village mortuary, which also serves as a meeting place. This is the enlightened elite of the area. These couples are modern people, the husbands in particular. They hold hands. They touch their bumps, some of which are already noticeable, while others are still hidden. At the front is a girl, aged around 13, with a small child in her arms. The child calls the girl mama, not sister. The 13-year-old is the only person in the room who doesn’t have a partner and her belly is already swollen again. There is a lecturer who advises on how HIV can be transmitted, on diseases that can accelerate its progress – such as malaria – and on ways to give a foetus, even if inside an infected body, the best chance of a life without infection, both at the point of birth and when being breast-fed. The people listen to him. They are young, virile, life-affirming. The talk itself is dry and does what it has to do. Then it is Susan’s turn. She sweeps through the mortuary like a dervish of the heart, enthralling the boys and men just as much as she does the girls and the women. Susan has her audience spellbound in under two minutes. She demonstrates how to use a femidom, the female version of the condom. Grab the end, twist it out, leg up and pop it in. Alternatively, you can crouch down. Dear gentlemen, please make sure you enter the femidom, and don’t miss the target. Ladies, please also make sure. There is giggling among the audience. Safe sex is vital and it takes a person with Susan’s charisma to get the message across, especially as illness and suffering have a powerful ally in some of the teachings of the Catholic Church. Susan always goes to Mass on Sundays, even though its stance on contraception contradicts her own advice to patients. At the end of the young parents event there is the quick HIV test. Two drops of blood, a half-hour wait and then a
Top: In emergency situations Susan lends her bicycle to reliable people like Simon, whose nephew broke his arm while we were there. Bottom: One of the three rooms that makes up the hospital in Shimukuni. This is where Susan carries out DNA tests. She needs five drops of blood to do so; it took two hours to get that much blood from baby Ireene
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Top: Edith’s livelihood is the village tavern. Her customers are all men, as the well-being of Zambian society tends to rest on women’s shoulders in the main. Bottom: Susan lives with her mother in the house her bike is leant up against. It is brought into the house at night. In the background is the kitchen where she prepares nshima and vegetables. Sometimes there’s meat or fish too
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Action
Many in Simon’s situation put themselves in the hands of witch doctors. People like Susan have to free them from these charlatans diagnosis. One of the 15 courting couples taking the blood test consists of a 17-year-old girl – we’ll call her Purity – and her boyfriend, 10 years her senior, called Isaac. Isaac already has children, which isn’t surprising for a 27-year-old in Zambia. It’s highly exceptional that Purity has waited until 17 to have her first child. She attended school till Grade Seven; from then on her education would have cost her money. Isaac is the man of her dreams. He is “…handsome, intelligent and he looks after me”. But Isaac is also HIV-positive. Seventeen-year-old Purity is too, only she didn’t know till now. With one sentence, Susan transforms the life of an optimistic teenager into a “fate”, a “case”. Susan wishes she didn’t have to do what she does next, but says, “I have to tell you this. It’s my duty.” She explains to the couple that they can no longer have unprotected sex under any circumstances due to the risk of re-infection. She prescribes them both medicines, including ones that should prevent their unborn child becoming infected. All in a day’s work for Susan. Purity doesn’t quite understand what is happening to her. Isaac doesn’t say anything. Back on the road, Susan is happy she has her bike. She can never become inured to days like this, but the bike ride does her good. The bike increases Susan’s operating range by a factor of five. She can see five times as many people as she would be able to visit on foot. But she hasn’t become five times stronger. Susan’s mother says she is concerned about the pain in her chest that her daughter talks about with increasing frequency.
Edith
It looks like Edith now has to contend with cancer too, as if being HIV-positive and having lost her husband recently wasn’t enough already. An examination next week will say for sure and finally establish the cause of the terrible pain she feels when urinating. Her oldest child, just 15 and still going through puberty, is already pregnant. However, the youngest child has been entrusted to the care of the NGO World Vision. Last May, Edith sold her maize crop at the end of the rainy season. It was a good harvest. The proceeds, a million kwacha, formed her start-up capital for a shop with a ‘beer-shack’ attached. By shop, we mean she bought a couple of bars of soap, some candles and ribbon. And the ‘beer-shack’? An open-fronted hut where she serves munkoyo, a cloudy, viscous, alcoholic brew made of maize and munkoyo roots, which ferments behind the bar and smells disgusting to a Western nose. (Every now and then, a consumer is taken to hospital when the munkoyo brewer has made a poor root selection.) For the group of men hanging out in front of Edith’s shebeen, drinking
munkoyo is the pastime they’re best at. And whenever the atmosphere threatens to turn a little sour under the mulberry bush, Edith clears away the goods from her supermarket into the hut she lives in. Which means that at short notice she no longer has a shop. And customers are rare as it is. Edith can’t allow herself to close up her shop and bar to go to hospital, and doesn’t want to go any more in any case. She lets the world wash over her. She doesn’t want to go on fighting. She has written her silent cry for salvation in big letters on the ochre clay walls of her house: “Let people talk. They too will tire.” Susan has just one message left for Edith, which she tries to drum into her doggedly and insistently on every visit. When her daughter gives birth, she should send her back to school; that is the only way out of poverty. If her daughter did go back to school, she might even qualify for a World Bicycle Relief bike one day. There are specific programmes for women who want to. Edith half-heartedly promises she will, while her daughter stands bored at the munkoyo bar and flirts with the customers.
Simon
Simon received 12 years of school education, but then decided to stay at home in Chibundi and work as a farmer. He attended courses in the city and teaches the other farmers about crop rotation and fertilisation. He also earns money by burning charcoal and selling it in the city. He borrows Susan’s bike to do so. Simon writes a lot. His handwriting is clear. His notes are detailed. Simon can speak almost 10 languages, including a lovely, soft English that he communicates with a gentle sing-song accent. His lungs are already beginning to fail. Simon has five children aged between six and 18, the oldest two of whom help him financially. His two youngest live with his sister and go to school. One small miracle is that his wife and all five children are HIV-negative. Even though his wife helps him out in the fields, Simon can feel that his strength is failing him. Susan implies that he is really very weak. He has frequent diarrhoea and suffers with constant headaches. Some days he can’t get out of bed. Those days are becoming increasingly common. But he would never complain, typical man that he is. Susan adds, “Our men only let on when it’s already too late. That’s probably the main reason why infected women in Zambia live longer than infected men.” What Simon originally mistook for a plain bout of cholera turned out to be HIV infection; his neighbours took him to the hospital and had him tested. There was medicine at the hospital. That was his good fortune. Many in Simon’s situation would have placed themselves in the hands of witch doctors. They have considerable power and form part of the established culture. Drinks, tinctures and ribbons will supposedly help against HIV. Only their hut or their yard is safe, they tell their patients. All others are possessed. People like Susan then have to try, gently, to free the victims from the clutches of these charlatans. Often it is too late. Simon is a clear-thinking, rational man. Where does he see himself in five years’ time? “I wish I still had another five years,” he says in a whisper and laughs. Susan says the earlier the disease is detected, the better the medical treatment you get, the healthier your life and the greater your chances of a second life. Being HIV-positive and having AIDS are two different things. You have to remain alert, be cheerful and set yourself goals. Getting up every day, saddling her bike and facing the world is a start. Susan lives positive. She has done so for more than 10 years. www.worldbicyclerelief.org
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Coming Attraction summer 2011 Auckland 3 2 3 Q u e e n S t o r 4 2 G r e y s A v e / / / Newmarket S h o p S 1 8 N u f f i e l d S t / / / w w w. h u f f e r. c o . n z
Body+ Mind More
Contents 82 TRAVEL IDEAS Top New Year’s Eve spots 84 GLOBAL FOOD 86 GET THE GEAR Surfer Jordy Smith 88 TRAINING 90 NZ BANDS The Checks
PHOTOGRAPHY: BRIAN BIELMANN/REd BuLL cONTENT POOL
92 BEST CLUBS Café Caprice, Cape Town 92 MUST SEE Seth Rogen’s new movie, a comedy about cancer 93 TAKE 5 The Phantom Band’s go-to LPs
Breaking news: South African surfing superstar Jordy Smith reveals the things he needs to compete on the ASP tour on page 86
94 WORLD IN ACTION 96 SAVE THE DATE 98 MIND’S EYE
more body & mind
The last hurrah new Year’s eVe
out and about this month’s travel tips
It’s that time again: December 31 is a celebration that prompts eating, drinking and general merry-making across the world, in many different ways. So if a beer at the local pub doesn’t quite cut it for you this year, we’ve got 10 ways to welcome 2012
SCOTLAND
NEW YORK
Primal countdown
nYe in nYc
Befitting the country that gave us Auld Lang Syne, Scotland doesn’t do New Year by halves. Edinburgh is the centre of celebrations for Hogmanay, as it’s known, with 100,000 people flooding the city for a street party with Scottish folk music and céilidh dancing. But if you like your music a bit more modern, you can see in 2012 with Primal Scream as they perform tracks from their seminal album Screamadelica against the backdrop of Edinburgh Castle. www.edinburghshogmanay.com
If you want big and glitzy, then it must be New York. People pack into Times Square as pom-poms, confetti, and fireworks turn the city centre into one big sea of colour. But it’s the one-minute descent of the New Year’s Eve Ball at 11.59pm, on a pole atop the One Times Square building, that’s the main event. What started out as a modest construction of wood and iron in 1907 is today a 12ft-wide ball of crystal and lights weighing more than five tonnes. timessquarenyc.org/nye/nye.html
New Year in New York
Fireworks over the Danube in Budapest
GERMANY
JAPAN
CHILE
the oddest show
ringing in
FamilY aFFair
Watching an upper-class lady celebrate her 90th birthday with her butler may not sound like a New Year’s Eve tradition, but in Germany, the night is not complete without a re-run of British comedy sketch Dinner For One. First broadcast in 1963, the 18-minute show, totally unknown in the UK, is a must-watch for those in the country on the night – and no one really knows why. Multiple screenings on multiple channels mean you can’t miss it. Search for the show on YouTube
Compared to other cities, Tokyo is quiet on New Year’s Eve, but people still flock to the area around the 1,000ft Tokyo Tower for panoramic views of the city’s fireworks displays. People eat toshikoshi soba, special NYE noodles, whose long length represents a long and prosperous life. At midnight, the jjoya no kane, or night-watch bell, at every Buddhist temple in the country sounds 108 times, representing release from the 108 earthly desires according to Buddhist tradition. www.tokyotower.co.jp
Don’t expect a normal party in the Chilean city of Talca. After attending evening mass, the throng heads over to the city cemetery at around 11pm to be with dead relatives at midnight. For a more sociable kind of celebration, the city of Valparaíso, a three-hour drive down the coast, hosts ‘New Year’s by the Sea’, the biggest fireworks display in Latin America, watched by around a million people who pack the bay and the hills that overlook it. www.southamerica.cl
AUSTRALIA
HUNGARY
looking uP down under
hornY in hungarY
When a fireworks display is big enough to warrant a Creative Director, you know it will be memorable. Since 1996, Sydney, Australia, has emerged as the world leader in New Year’s Eve celebrations, with its annual 25-minute midnight mass of pyrotechnics said to be the biggest in the world. Last year, 1.5 million people gathered to watch the daddy of all fireworks displays in the city’s harbour, with another 1.1 billion watching on TV around the world. www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/nye
Hungary is a land of traditions and superstitions, especially at New Year. Loud sounds are thought to ward off demons for the coming year: this used to mean firecrackers, but since they were banned, people have switched to blowing horns at the many free concerts in Budapest’s city centre squares. On New Year’s Day, Hungarians eat pork and lentils – the pig brings luck, the pulses wealth – but not chicken, which scratches away luck, or fish, which swims away with it. budapest-tourist-info.com
ride on time
caPe carniVal
Those left cold by New Year’s revelry shouldn’t mind getting a bit chillier to avoid it. A section of the Tibetan Plateau (34.7N, 85.7E; put it in Google Maps), is the place furthest from fireworks and furore, and guaranteed party-popper free. At this remotest place on Earth, temperatures reach -40°C, and thanks to the rough terrain, you’re not going to make this year’s ‘bash’: travel from the nearest town takes three weeks: one day by car, the rest on foot. www.tibetlhasatravel.com
Then, of course, there is Cape Town, and the Minstrel Carnival that brings everyone onto the streets. The celebration has its roots in the era of slavery, when January 1 was a slaves-only day of holiday, and ties in with American minstrel performers that came to the city during the 19th century. The name can make outsiders somewhat uneasy, but today, organisers say the carnival is a celebration of life, freedom and New Year. And right they are, too. www.capetown-minstrels.co.za
N HO
ULU LOS ANGELES OL
GU AM SY D
AUCKLAND
new Year’s: leaVe
Y
SOUTH AFRICA
NE
TIBET
Guam, western Pacific Ocean to Honolulu, Hawaii
Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, USA
Auckland, New Zealand to the Cook Islands, South Pacific Ocean
Time difference: 21 hours
Time difference: 20 hours
Time difference: 23 hours
Flight time: 15 hours
Flight time: 13.5 hours
Flight time: 4 hours
THE COOK ISLANDS
And if one New Year isn’t enough, double the fun with cunning time-zone management, and wind back the clock to have two New Year’s Eves on one evening (it does help to have a private jet). Here are some of the most attractive options:
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Words: ruth Morgan. photography: Li rui/Xinhua press/Corbis, brian harkin/getty iMages, dr/ndr/anneMarie aLdag, durand guy/gaMMa/piCturedesk.CoM, shutterstoCk, stan honda/aFp/getty iMages, etheL davies/robert harding, eye ubiquitous/reX Features, reuters, tiM CLayton/Corbis, bernadett szabo / reuters
Residents of Talca, Chile head to the graveyard to party with dead relatives
MORE BODY & MIND
THE WORLD’S BEST CHEFS
Double vision
WHAT’S ON THE MENU AT HANGAR-7
HELENA RIZZO & DANIEL REDONDO The origins of the recipes may be traditional, but the food created by this couple who run Maní, in Sao Paulo, is far from ordinary
With four very different temperate zones and a kaleidoscope population drawn from each of the world’s continents, Brazil should be too big and too diverse to have just the one national dish. But there is still a meal that seems to unite all Brazilians: feijoada, a stew of beans, vegetables and meat off-cuts, that’s traditional cheap bellytimber. And despite its humble origins, this national treasure is one of the dishes – along with a virtuoso take on the Waldorf Salad – that Helena Rizzo and Daniel Redondo have chosen to express their culinary philosophy. An aromatic jellied stock of beans and pork is the spicy centrepiece, shaped into small balls using molecular ingredients and served with bacon and roast cassava flour. Hey presto: feijoada 2.0! Helena Rizzo and Daniel Redondo are both only 33, but the couple’s cheeky take on tradition has made them shining lights of the São Paulo food scene. Opened in 2006, their restaurant, Maní, is unconventional: where else would the bosses – a former model and a dedicated weightlifter – arrange yoga sessions three times a week for their staff?
OUR PHILOSOPHY
OUR RESTAURANT Maní Rua Joaquim Antunes, 210 Jardim Paulistano São Paulo www.manimanioca.com.br When you go to Maní it’s like entering a mixture of a library, a club, a pub, a youth club and a Michelin-starred restaurant – and an amazingly stylish mixture at that. That could well have something to do with Helena Rizzo’s past as both a model and architecture student.
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Nature and technology Rizzo and Redondo use a lot of local ingredients, but also like to mix it up with avant-garde molecular cooking. Home and abroad Rizzo, who hails from the south of Brazil, has spread her wings to embrace the world when it comes to advanced cooking and has been heavily influenced by double Michelin-starred Milan restaurant Sadler and El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain, where she first met Redondo. Private and professional Rizzo and Redondo are a couple both in their private and professional lives. Tricky? “No,” they say. “Couldn’t be easier.” One does the day shift; the other works evenings. And when anyone asks to see the boss, Helena points to Daniel and Daniel points to Helena.
Hangar-7’s Guest Chefs Every month, a guest chef comes to the Ikarus Restaurant in Hangar-7, at Salzburg airport, and teams up with the permanent in-house kitchen staff to create two special one-off menus. The guest chefs for December are Daniel Redondo and Helena Rizzo of Maní in São Paulo. Find more information about their menus and other forthcoming guest chefs at Ikarus at www.hangar-7.com. Culinary Highflyers 2011, the Hangar-7 cookbook, is available now. Order online at shop.hangar-7.com
PHOTOGRAPHY: MARCELO MARAGNI/RED BULL HANGAR-7 (2), HELGE KIRCHBERGER/RED BULL HANGAR-7
The couple’s innovative Waldorf Salad
MORE BODY & MIND
All aboard!
GET THE GEAR
JORDY SMITH South
Africa’s surfing superstar chills out at his home in Camps Bay, Cape Town, and runs us through the kit he uses on the ASP tour
2 Nikon D7000 camera I’m always travelling and seeing great places. I try to take as many photos as I can and this bombproof Nikon with its 12.1 mega-pixel sensor never misses a beat. 3 Mr Zogs Sex Wax There are some things you just can’t improve on. Mr Zogs Sex Wax has been around for ever, but without the wax you can’t stick to the board, and without this traction, you can’t control it. 4 Channel Island Surfboard Made by shaping legend Al Merrick, this 6ft 3in stick is my all-rounder. It’s 19in wide and 2.5in thick. I like a bit of volume in a board, especially in the nose, which helps me turn it in the air. 5 O’Neill Shirt I’ve been with O’Neill since the end of 2007. It’s a cool brand and one of the pioneers in the sport. This is one of my Jordy Smith Signature Shirts – there’s a whole range coming out soon. 6 Oakley Eyewear If there’s one sport that demands a good pair of sunnies, it’s surfing, and I wear them all the time. I signed with Oakley last year and these are my new Jordy Smith Signature Jupiter Squareds. They’ll be out next year. 7 On A Mission traction grip The grip is a key piece of equipment. It not only allows me snap the board into direction-changing turns, but it keeps me connected to it in big airs. This is my signature model.
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8 & 11 Channel Island Surfboard (6’2) These are my “grovel” boards for small, less powerful surf. They’re half an inch wider than my 6’3 and obviously shorter. They have the same thick rails, but they’re lighter, faster and looser than my bigger boards.
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9 On A Mission leash It’s not cool to be swimming around after your board all the time, so a good leash is important to keep it close. I’ll use a thinner, lightweight leash for smaller waves and a meatier one for bigger boards and waves. 10 Billabong Pro 2011 Trophy I’m very proud of this! It’s my Billabong Pro trophy I first won at Jeffrey’s Bay in the Eastern Cape. It was my first-ever ASP World Tour win and I defended my title there again in 2011. 12 O’Neill Wetsuit Psycho 4/3mm I love Cape Town, It’s where I live when I’m not travelling. The surf’s great, but the water is freezing cold. A quality wetsuit is a no-brainer. 13 DHD surfboard (6’2) Another small wave board, this one was designed by Aussie shaper Darren Handley. It’s a great point break board and goes really well at Jeffreys Bay.
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14 Future Fins Another one of my sponsors – they’re always working on shapes for me. Without a good set of fins, your board is not going to function. These are from my signature series. 15 On A Mission Boardbag My boards and I spend a lot of time on planes, and while I can’t guarantee they’ll arrive when I do, at least I know they’re well protected. This 6’6 bag is perfect for all my travels around South Africa. www.jordysmith.com
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Board meeting: Jordy Smith lines up his equipment outside his house in Camps Bay
words: steve smith. PhotograPhy: KolesKy/NiKoN/lexar
1 Foam Roller Along with paddling fitness and core strength, flexibility and mobility are a key part of a pro surfer’s physical conditioning. This foam roller is for my back and spine alignment.
ESSENTIAL PRO KIT
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more body & mind
Training wiTh The pros
I don’t like Wednesdays LISA CARRINGTON Kayak professionals such as this sprint world champion enjoy some beautiful days on the water – but not without putting in a lot of hardcore gym work
Most people don’t look forward to Monday mornings. But for New Zealand kayaker Lisa Carrington, 22, it’s the Wednesday afternoon gym session that sucks. “We call it the murder session,” says Carrington, who in August of this year secured herself a place at London 2012 by winning the women’s K1 (one-person boat) 200m final at the Sprint World Championships in Lisa Carrington Hungary. “I can barely move my arms afterwards.” Carrington has learned to live with aching arms, blistered hands and, ahem, bum sores in her bid to win gold. “It’s about hurting yourself in training,” she adds. “It’s tough when you’re tired and run down and you’ve still got to train, but that’s part of the challenge.”
Crash course Lisa Carrington’s unusually high pain threshold may have something to do with what happened to her when she was 11 years old “I haven’t really had any major training injuries apart from the odd sprained ankle, but I was involved in a big car crash when I was 11,” explains the Bay Of Plenty paddler. “I broke my ankle in three places. I fractured my collarbone. I needed 48 stitches in my head and 12 stitches in my leg. I suffered from double vision for about five weeks after the accident, but I’m all good now.” In August of this year Carrington put in an impressive showing in Hungary’s Sprint World Championships to win her first world title in the K1 200m, and the good days on the water more than make up for the grind in the gym. “You get some beautiful days,” she says. “We call it a glass-off – when it’s calm, the water is pristine and the sun is shining. Those days are special.”
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Lisa Carrington’s every stroke is aimed at pulling her closer to winning gold at next year’s Olympics in London Monday Morning: 18km endurance paddle, low L2 effort. “L2 HR is an endurance pace, which is the optimal heart-rate range to improve fitness,” says Carrington. “We work on a fivelevel system: L1 – recovery; L2 – endurance; L3 – harder than endurance pace; L4 – anaerobic threshold; L5 – max. This session is set at a lower-paced endurance paddle to maintain fitness and improve technique.” Afternoon: Gym work. 10 x 3 bench press, bench pull and squats. “While the reps are low the sets are high to produce a greater rep max to increase strength.” Boat work: 8km paddle including 5 x 250m, 2 x 250m, 3 x ‘tennis balls’ (bungee cord with tennis balls clipped underneath the boat to create resistance). “Straight after the gym we get into our boats and do a shorter paddle session. The muscles are primed after the gym so this helps produce more paddling power.” Tuesday Morning: 12km paddle, including 3 x 2km TT (time trial) with 1-2km recovery. “This session is brutal, TT means I go as hard as possible. This session hurts.” Afternoon: Paddle and run. “The run is a just a casual 30-min jog at talking pace. This session is very important for recovery.” Wednesday Morning: 24km paddle. Firm pace but keeping within L2 HR. “This is another endurance paddle. With my training partner we do leads or ‘wash riding’. I take the lead for 5 mins then we swap and I jump on the wash while my partner leads. By doing it in pairs time goes a lot faster.”
Afternoon: Gym work – 32.5kg bench press x 250, 32.5kg bench pull x 250, 250 squats and then finish off with core exercises. Thursday Morning: 18km paddle with long threshold session. “This is high intensity but not to the max.” Afternoon: 6km paddle, easy float. “This is the session I most look forward to all week.” Friday Morning: 16km paddle including 10 x 1km on, 1 min off, then 34 max pressure. “34spm, or double strokes per minute, is the aim for this session. 34spm is a low rating, but putting on max pressure and pulling as hard as you can improves strength and technique.” Afternoon: Gym work – chin-ups, press-ups, single-arm dumbbell press and pull. Then core exercises. “This is a slightly easier session to make sure we’re ready for tomorrow morning’s key session.” Saturday Morning: Paddle – team boat session in the K2 (two-person kayak). 15km including 6 x 500m paddle backs in K2 going under 1 min 50 secs. “Repeat 500s are a killer. Muscles tighten and seize up, but you always seem to find a way through.” Afternoon: 10km paddle including 20 stroke starts. “A fast start in sprint kayaking is crucial as half a boat length can be gained or lost. The last session feels great after a hard week of training. Now it’s time to recover and chill out before training starts again on Monday.” Sunday Day off.
twitter.com/lisacarrington
WordS: roBert tIgHe. pHotogrApHy: BALINt VeKASSy, FereNC ISZA/AFp/getty IMAgeS
work out
Paddling hard
NEW ZEALAND
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6 BALLISTICS WAKE & SNOW Vew-Do has pioneered the sport of performance balance board riding and their boards are designed to meet the trick performance and durability needs of board sport enthusiasts around the globe. The Sk8 Model allows riders to push the envelope of what can be done on a balance board, while developing strength, co-ordination, balance and providing fun for any board sport enthusiast. Available at Ballistics Wake & Snow, 66 Barrys Point Rd, Takapuna. 09 4894074. www.ballistics.co.nz RRP $249.99 7 KIALOA METHANE & TORO HINANO Kialoa has become known for top-of-the-line, highperformance SUP paddles. The full carbon paddles are still the ones to have when only the best will do. Engineered with an ideal strength-to-weight ratio to perform for our top athletes, each paddle features an ovalised tapered carbon shaft, a carbon PowerARC™ blade design with a 10-degree bend, and a carbon Ergo-T. New for 2012 are two limited editions, the Methane Hinano, $589, and the Toro Hinano, $629 – available in NZ now at selected retail outlets. Or contact A’ND Distribution Ltd. www.gaastra.co.nz info@ gaastra.co.nz or Tel 021 14 22 830
PROMOTION
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From left: Karel Chabera, Ed Knowles, Callum Martin, Sven Pettersen and Jacob Moore
ACTS TO WATCH IN 2011 #11
Bouncing Checks A taste of the big time… only to be dumped by their record THE CHECKS
The Checks third album, Deadly Summer Sway, is out now
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Five years ago The Checks were living it large in London courtesy of their record label. Still in their teens, they’d already been hailed by New Zealand radio station bFM as the ‘future of rock ’n’ roll’, played support for R.E.M. and toured the UK with Maximo Park, The Rakes and The Cribs. It was a time when “nothing seemed normal” according to frontman Ed Knowles, when five kids from the posh waterfront suburb of Devonport in Auckland found themselves in the middle of some crazy parallel rock ’n’ roll universe. Knowles remembers asking the record label for singing lessons. He didn’t expect to be sent to the Royal Academy of Music. “I walked into the class and it was just me and this lady,” he says. “I told her ‘I’m a rock singer’ and she said, ‘That’s fine, I work
with some other bands.’ I asked her who and she said, ‘Just Chris Martin from Coldplay, that guy from Keane and you.’” As well as sharing a singing tutor with the stars, the band have shared a stage with some of the biggest names in music including R.E.M., Oasis, AC/DC, The Hives, The Killers, Muse and Florence and the Machine. Their current tour of New Zealand sees them back in more humble surroundings. They played Onewhero Rugby Club last weekend and the tour finishes in the YOT Club in Raglan next weekend. Surely it’s a bit different from opening for AC/DC in front of 60,000 people at Western Springs Stadium? “There’s no one handing you a fresh towel afterwards,” laughs Knowles, “but that’s where we
started, playing in rugby clubs or the pub. We’re in our element.” It’s the day after The Stone Roses announced their comeback and Knowles and lead guitarist Sven Pettersen are in the Theatre Café in K Road to talk about the second (or should that be third) coming of The Checks. “I watched old footage of us at the Masonic Tavern [in Devonport] and it was way rad,” says Knowles. “It was complete abandon. We still have that spirit, but I think we’re more focused now on writing melodies and good songs as opposed to acting like dickheads.” Or as Pettersen describes it in a YouTube clip about the history of the band, “We’ve got melody to match our energy now.” Pettersen, hiding behind a pair of stylish brown sunglasses, is almost a caricature of the chilled-
WORDS: ROBERT TIGHE
label. For Auckland’s The Checks, 2012 will be all about bouncing back
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PHOTOGRAPHY: AMANDA RATCLIFFE
“I think we’re more focused on writing good songs, rather than acting like dickheads”
out rock star, but he pitches in every now and then with some gems. “I like writing songs,” he says, “because I can get freaky at home,” or, “I reckon The Doors must be the sickest band ever… when they jammed, they never f**ked up… Ray Manzarek is just a metronome and Jim Morrison is like a butterfly flowing in and out of the track, but he nails it every time.” It’s Knowles who tackles most of the serious questions. Like where the band got what Pettersen calls their ‘unparalleled confidence’ from the time they first picked up their instruments. “We had that confidence before anyone ever heard us,” says Knowles. “There was no one to tell us we weren’t any good.” Their debut album Hunting Whales enhanced their reputation and then out of the blue they were dropped by Sony BMG at the end of 2007. Was that first rejection hard to take? “Not at all,” says Knowles. “It was just bad timing. Lots of bands were dumped around then. Their whole empire was collapsing. We have no hard feelings. We made a great record and we got some really nice guitars.” If the que sera, sera attitude is an act, it’s a convincing one. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that the oldest members of the band are just 25. A recent article in a US magazine suggested that because of the recession, this generation of 20-somethings were being forced to reassess their goals. Rather than ‘making a splash’ they were concerned with ‘keeping afloat’. Have The Checks’ goals changed? “It really depends on how you look at it,” says Pettersen. “Our splashes from here on have to come from our music. We’ve had
that fizz and it only lasts for so long. From now on we’ve got to back it up with some substance.” As a statement of intent, bringing in Grammy awardwinning producer ‘Bassy’ Bob Brockman to work on their new album, Deadly Summer Sway, was a masterstroke. Brockman has worked with some of the biggest names in hip-hop and R ’n’ B including Biggie Smalls, and there’s a soulful, mellow groove to the second half of the album that’s a stark contrast to the bluesy, ballsy rock numbers we’ve come to expect from The Checks. “The album is kind of a descent into madness,” says Knowles. “It starts out with these rocking tunes then gets a bit more demented.” Brockman describes Knowles as “one of the meanest rock singers of this generation. I’d compare Ed’s voice to Bono’s or Jim Morrison’s of The Doors,” he says. Big call Bob, but wait, there’s more. “These guys deserve to be heard all over the world,” says Brockman. “I feel it’s their time.” Does the band feel the same? “We’ve felt that way about all our albums,” says Knowles. “We’re ready whenever, but there’s no urgency. We’ve been through the mix already. We don’t mean any disrespect, but we only care about enjoying ourselves and our music. We’re all about the music, man.”
Need to know THE LINE-UP Ed Knowles – vocals Sven Pettersen – lead guitar Callum Martin – guitar Karel Chabera – bass Jacob Moore – drums DISCOGRAPHY Deadly Summer Sway (November 2011) Alice By The Moon (2009) Hunting Whales (2007)
The story so far The five members of the band all went to Takapuna Grammar School on Auckland’s North Shore where they started jamming together in music class. Their first gig was in 2002 at a friend’s birthday party, where they played cover versions of classic rock songs from their dads’ record collections. Frontman Ed Knowles described himself as “more of an actor than a singer” when the band first started. “I loved acting in school, so I pretended to be a singer and gradually became one,” he says. Knowles learned his moves from Mick Jagger watching a live concert DVD of The Rolling Stones. The Checks’ live shows earned them a fanatical local following and a phone call from Michael Stipe, who personally requested them to support R.E.M. on their New Zealand tour. British music magazine NME flew them to the UK for a New Music Tour and they were subsequently signed by Sony BMG and launched on the fast track to rock ’n’ roll stardom. Their debut album, Hunting Whales, was produced by Ian Broudie from The Lightning Seeds, but they were dropped by Sony in 2007. They released their second album, Alice By The Moon, on their own label, Pie Club Records, in 2009, which was nominated for the inaugural Taite Music Prize. Their third album, Deadly Summer Sway, was released on November 11, 2011. www.thechecks.net
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Café Caprice was first to go alfresco in the Cape Town resort
OUT NOW ESSENTIAL VIEWING
Funny like cancer
BEST CLUBS PARTY ALL OVER THE WORLD There’s a rocking vibe here all day and night
Cosmopolitan cocktail CAFÉ CAPRICE, CAPE TOWN It’s the perfect summer’s day: an afternoon on Camps Bay’s beautiful beach, then across the road for sundowners and a rocking party
We love running a venue in this town because… You can’t compare Cape Town and Camps Bay to anywhere else in South Africa. It’s just so cosmopolitan. It has the most incredible energy, especially in the summer months. When we started our cafe in 2001, our idea was to bring a beach bar to Cape Town. There weren’t really any true beach bars in South Africa and Camps Bay was ready for it. From outside our club looks… Like an old Greek building – the old arches are very prominent. As are the tables outside – we were the first to put tables on the pavement. We really get going at… It’s an all-day venue – some people come in at nine in the morning and stay all day. The best time is obviously around sunset, especially in the summertime. 92
Our regulars are… Creative, edgy, trendy – the typical Cape Town guy and girl, trying hard not to try too hard. Some of our regulars are Jordy Smith, Herschelle Gibbs, Lyndall Jarvis. When Leonardo Di Caprio was shooting in SA, this was his base – I think they feel like normal ‘guys at the bar’ here. I’d consider it packed if… There’s 300 people in here, that’s pretty much capacity. The craziest night was… Too many memorable ones! But one that comes to mind ended up with two European models asking me if they could take my barman home. Dave Raad, club owner Café Caprice 37 Victoria Road, Camps Bay Cape Town, South Africa +27 21 438 8315 www.cafecaprice.co.za
Did the subject Seth Rogen’s latest matter mean you film sees him could joke about playing the best anything? friend of a guy If it felt right for (Joseph Gordonsomething to be Levitt) diagnosed said, then we said with cancer. 50/50 it. We’re not out to is very funny, not Rogen stars offend… well, we at all sentimental, alongside Joseph definitely are out to and was written by Gordon-Levitt offend some people. Will Reiser, Rogen’s Is everything funny to you? friend and former I don’t try to find humour in colleague, who was situations, it just happens. diagnosed with cancer in I can’t tell you how many 2005 and has since fully times people are telling me recovered. As well as the idea for a movie, and scripting him the most I think it’s a comedy and it’s rounded role of his career not. ‘OK, so this guy gets hit thus far, Rogen also has by a car and has his leg cut Reiser to thank introducing off,’ and I tell them it sounds him to Laura Miller, his hilarious and they say it’s long-term girlfriend, who not funny at all [laughs]. became his wife in October. : Did you woo your wife by 50/50 is out soon. supporting your friend Watch the trailer at: www.50-50themovie.com when he was ill? : I’m not saying I specifically used it, but it didn’t hurt. It made me look like a compassionate friend, which I’m not [laughs]. How close is your part in 50/50 to the ‘real you’? I don’t talk to women like my character does. He’s ridiculous and in the movie that’s entertaining. I have never lied to a woman to get her into bed, which he does a lot. That’s why I never got laid [laughs]. Everything’s hilarious to Seth Rogen
WORDS: PAUL WILSON. PHOTOGRAPHY: KOLESKY/NIKON/LEXAR (2), REX FEATURES (1), JEFF VESPA/CONTOUR/GETTY IMAGES (1)
SETH ROGEN After making us believe nerds could make it with hot chicks (Knocked Up), the funnyman is making the impossible possible once again with a comedy about cancer
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Eddie Cochran – Greatest Hits In the 1980s I remember listening to this and being massively influenced by what it said about teenage rebellion – in particular that moment on C’Mon Everybody where he says, “Who Cares?” You know he’s been talking about having this party at his parents’ place and he knows he’s going to be made to pay, but he says, “Who Cares?” What a great moment. Magic. Eddie Cochran’s music had a massive connection to punk – it was the punk of its day.
Take Five The albums ThaT influenced The sTars
“Eddie Cochran’s music was the punk of its day”
WORDS: ANTHONY ROWLINSON. PHOTOGRAPHY: LR
Andy WAke Glasgow’s The Phantom Band are the brilliantly unclassifiable prog-electro-rock-indie five-piece, currently lapping up the critical rave for their second album, The Wants. Keyboard maestro Andy Wake (centre) talks us through five of the key albums that influenced their unique sound
It’s a fair old schlep from Glasgow to England’s sunny South Coast (Google Maps reckons 744km down the spine of Britain), but for a band surprised, nay, mystified, by the word-of-mouth buzz and critical rapture that has met their first two albums, a jaunt to Brighton – even on a night chilly enough to make beanies essential more than fashion accessories – to meet a vociferously welcoming crowd, feels like a deserved step into the bubble of success. Aware it may burst at any moment, given the non-commercial, yet brilliantly energised and diverse nature of their sound, The Phantom Band play live with the lunatic abandon of a band who were never interested in learning the rules and who know this trip could stop at a split-second’s notice. Theirs is a vibe of the here-and-now, a loose ’n’ loud blast of sonic fun that’s nevertheless sufficiently crafted to make multiple return listens not just appealing, but essential. If it sounds an uncommon mixture, that’s because it is, and a squint at their influences reveals why: Cochran via Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin, Beefheart and AC/DC. And did we mention the sea shanties? Can’t forget the sea shanties…
AC/DC – Who Made Who This was the first album I bought with my own money, so it has to go in my top five. When I was a kid, Angus and Malcolm Young made me want to play the guitar desperately. Between me and a mate we had every AC/DC record, but I was talentless even though I loved music. I guess that’s why I ended up messing around with synths and making sounds.
Kraftwerk – Computer World This was an amazing record and you can hear its influence on The Phantom Band. We have a Kraut rock element that’s straight from Kraftwerk. Computer World maybe isn’t quite so acclaimed as TransEurope Express or Autobahn, but there’s an amazing quality to the production. It’s a kind of pure, expensive sound.
Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band – Safe As Milk We have quite a wide-ranging set of influences in The Phantom Band, but all of us like things like Captain Beefheart and, if I had to pick one out, I’d nominate his first album, Safe As Milk. There’s a brilliant groove in there, quite repetitive, with a country element. That’s reminded me of something contemporary: Psychic Psummer by Cave. On record, Cave are very Kraut-y and hard, but watch them live and they’re a totally different band. I really like bands like that. It’s kind of like The Phantom Band: some people prefer you live, others prefer the studio sound.
Led Zeppelin III Another band who had a completely different thing going on live, compared to their studio sound. With Led Zeppelin III, I remember my brother bought it for me from the newsagent as a birthday gift – even though I didn’t even own a record player at the time. So I think he took it straight back off me as soon as I’d opened it. But anyway, I ended up making a casette copy of it so I could listen to it on my Hitachi super-woofer (and I eventually got back most of the other records he ‘bought’ for me). As for the record… Immigrant Song – it’s still unbelievable even now.
The Phantom Band host Phestive Phantomine festival on December 16 and 17 at Stereo in Glasgow: www.phantomband.co.uk
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World in Action December & January
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FROM BURNING RUBBER TO BREAKING BEATS, WE ROUND UP SOME OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS TAKING PLACE OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS
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08-20.12.11, OAHU, HAWAII, USA
ASP World Tour Hawaii is the spiritual home of surfing, so it’s a fitting setting for this year’s ASP World Tour finale. Surfing superstar Kelly Slater is the record-holder here at the Billabong Pipe Masters with six wins, and he has already secured an unprecedented 11th ASP World Tour title in San Francisco on the 2011 tour. But despite his dominance, the competition is still fierce here. Concentration will be essential as the huge waves have been the downfall of many a surfer.
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2010 winner: Robert Karlsson 08-11.12.11, JUMEIRAH GOLF ESTATES, DUBAI
Dubai World Championship, UAE event has marked the end of 1 This the PGA European Tour since 2009. With a total prize fund of US$7.5m, it’s the highest paid single golf tournament of the year (the FedEx Cup, awarded to the best-performing player from four play-off events after the PGA Tour, offers more, with a huge prize total of $35m). Only the season’s 60 top-ranked golfers are invited to take part in Dubai and last year, Sweden’s Robert Karlsson received the winner’s prize of $1.25m on the course that’s co-designed by Greg Norman. 94
The one to beat: Kelly Slater
01-15.01.2012, MAR DEL PLATA (ARG) TO LIMA (PER)
Dakar Rally The 33rd running of the world’s toughest off-road rally is taking place in South America for the fourth time, with the final four stages in Peru. Participants will cross the finish line in the Peruvian capital of Lima on January 15 after racing their way through Argentina and Chile, and it remains to be seen which car will follow in the tyre marks of VW, which won for last three consecutive events, but has now pulled out. Team KTM is a safe bet when it comes to the bikes: riders Cyril Despres (France) and Marc Coma (Spain) have been swapping crowns for the past six years.
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Dakar demon: Cyril Despres
Watch Now!
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EXCLUSIVE EVENTS, SHOWS, INTERVIEWS AND DOCUMENTARIES ONLINE AT WWW.REDBULL.T V
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LIVE STREAMS All the very best in sport, music and culture from the world of Red Bull
PHOTOGRAPHY: ACTION IMAGES, DANIEL GARCIA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, KELLY CESTARI/ZUMA PRESS/CORBIS, GARTH MILAN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL, SEAMUSMAKIM/THEPHLUIDITY.COM, MARK THOMPSON/GETTY IMAGES
LIVE!
3 NEW YEAR NO LIMITS JANUARY 1, FROM 5PM (NZDT) Robbie Maddison (motorbike, above) and Levi LaVallee (snowmobile) will line up side by side to attempt a 122m jump over water in San Diego, California. Watch this double world record attempt live at www.redbull.tv. 12-17.12.11, VANCOUVER, CANADA
Red Bull Thre3style World Finals The tools of the trade: two decks, a mixer and a bag of tempting tracks. The challenge: DJs are tasked with covering three music genres in one 15-minute set. Anything goes as long as the genres flow together elegantly and keep the dancefloor packed. At the Red Bull Thre3style World Finals, national champions from around the globe go head to head to see who can get the party rocking the most, much to the delight of the beat-loving crowd.
LIVE!
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10.12.11, SILOSO BEACH, SINGAPORE
ZoukOut If you happen to live far away from South-East Asia, you might as well skip reading the next few lines… or quickly go and buy yourself a plane ticket to Singapore. With summer temperatures and up to 26,000 people dancing on a beach, ZoukOut is the hottest dance music festival in this part of the world. Premier league DJs in attendance include Gui Boratto, Roger Sanchez, Simon Dunmore and Shovell.
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01.01.2012, THE DOMAIN, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
Field Day Celebrating New Year’s Eve is all well and good, but anyone who’s anyone will be partying the day after in 2012, too. Or, for the real hard nuts, two days running. Field Day is the world’s best New Year dance party, and at the 2012 event the likes of Moby, Justice, Tiga, Crystal Castles, Skream & Benga are just some of the acts who’ll be getting tens of thousands of hipsters in the dancing mood under the Sydney sky.
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IBA BODYBOARDING WORLD TOUR – GRAN CANARIA LIVE FROM DECEMBER 7 One of the most spectacular stops on the IBA Bodyboarding World Tour and the final of the Grand Slam Series at El Frontón on the island of Gran Canaria. Battle will commence just as soon as the waves are perfect for competition. Until December 17, live at www.redbull.tv.
LIVE STREAMS All the best shows ready for you to watch on-demand at www.redbull.tv
HERO’S JOURNEY We follow Formula One driver Mark Webber (above, middle) and many other sports stars, giving close-up insights into our sportsmen and women as they prepare for competition.
THE WINGMAN MEETS ... ...Red Bull Crashed Ice! In this episode, ‘Wingman’ Ed Leigh gives us the history and background to this youthful world championship, with some frenetic action guaranteed. YOUNG GUNS RISING A reality documentary series on the world’s best motorbike-racing youngsters and the dream that unites them: winning the Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup to guarantee their entry into the fascinating world of MotoGP.
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Save the Date
December 2011 ROUND OFF THE YEAR IN STYLE WITH SOME OF THE TOP EVENTS THESE SHORES HAVE TO OFFER
DECEMBER 29 – 31
Good time Gizzy
FROM DECEMBER 31
Teen dreams More than 200 of the world’s best young sailors will ring in the New Year in Napier ahead of the Optimist World Championships from January 1-9. The Optimist dinghy is the boat most youngsters learn to sail in, and the Opti world champs are open to boys and girls up to the age of 15. The class has produced countless Olympic, America’s Cup and match racing sailors. New Zealand’s last success was in 2007, when Chris Steele won the overall title, Alex Maloney was the first girl home and New Zealand won the team event. www.optiworldsnz.org.nz
2007 winner Chris Steele
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DECEMBER 13
Rock on On the band’s last visit to New Zealand in April, the Foo Fighters (above) raised $350,000 for the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal. This time, Dave Grohl and his fellow Foos return to New Zealand to play Western Springs Stadium, Auckland, where tracks from latest album, Wasting Light, will no doubt get an airing. If you’re not already dusting off your denims and leather, the support acts, F**ked Up and Tenacious D, featuring Jack Black, guarantee a night of mayhem and madness. Ticketholders better be on their best behaviour – at a recent UK gig, Grohl stopped in the middle of a song to kick out a fan who was trying to start a fight in the crowd. You have been warned. www.foofighters.com/nz
DECEMBER 11
Road warriors Forget ‘Boobs on Bikes’, the inaugural TelstraClear Challenge offers a unique opportunity for ‘Bikes on the Bridge’. This new event celebrates cycle culture in the Super City and the course will take riders over the Auckland Harbour Bridge (normally closed to bikes, of course) and along the Northern Busway. There are different course lengths, including 110km (that can be done solo or as part of a team), 50km and 15km. There are also two Bike the Busway challenges (8km and 2km) ideal for the kids. The finish line at Smales Farm will be a hub of family fun and activities including cycle skills workshops,
balance bike activities, obstacle courses, interactive BMX demos and ride-to-school programmes, so get on your bike. www.telstraclearchallenge.co.nz
WORDS: ROBERT TIGHE. PHOTOGRAPHY: PH©ROBERTOMARCI.COM, SONY BMG, CALLUM MCNAIR, ROBERT THIGHE
Gisborne (or Gizzy as it’s known) is where it’s at this New Year’s Eve with another stellar line-up for Rhythm And Vines. Pendulum and Cut Copy are just two of the big acts set to rock the Wai-O-Hika Estate, while the Red Bull Music Academy stage makes its debut. Another new initiative is Red Bull i-Battle, which gives aspiring DJs a shot at fame. DJs will be selected to play a 15-minute set at the BW Campground, based on the number of likes their proposed playlist receives on the BW Facebook page. Other NYE festivals worth a road trip include Highlife, Coromandel Gold and La De Da. www.facebook.com/BWcampgrounds
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Beyond the ordinary the red bulletin
I
n my column here, published just before rugby World Cup 2011, I contemplated past sporting tournaments in New Zealand, how we recall them now and the things we choose to forget. I speculated that there would be “at least one massive media cringe in response to foreign criticism of our restaurants or hotels”. As it happened, the only complaints around restaurants and hotels came from their owners, many of whom did not see the boom in custom they had been led to expect. As an exasperated taxi driver put it to me one night in the midst of the tournament: “Where are the foreigners?!” Off sightseeing in their campervans, it seemed. but we didn’t have to wait long for a national cringe: it happened in the wake of the opening day, when Auckland’s vestigial train service crumpled as it tried to carry tens of thousands of people in and out of the city’s waterfront precinct. The precinct itself was poorly configured for the hordes who turned up. While the foreign press barely noticed the failures, our own went briefly nuts looking for the next calamity. A fairly jolly pre-match street party in Kingsland was even described as an “apocalyptic” scene by one reporter. but – about the time, I like to think, that the lead headline on the New Zealand Herald’s website quietly changed from “City braces for World Cup chaos” to “City braces for World Cup party” – nerves were regained. This was really going OK. The problems were the pains of the sudden arrival of a new Auckland. No one was prepared for huge crowds on the city’s waterfront because that had not happened before – at least not since Queen Street ran out into the harbour as a pier. The rWC deadline drew together developments that had, in some cases, been planned for years. Wynyard Quarter appeared almost fully formed, offering the first public space on the water’s edge for decades. The revamped Auckland Art gallery opened its doors on a thoughtful, enlightened collection and the new
Mind’s Eye
Victory for Auckland The All Blacks weren’t the only winners from the 2011 Rugby World Cup, argues Russell Brown Q Theatre opened to full houses and warm reviews: not only for the rugbythemed play, Finding Murdoch, but for a festival of modern dance. Even the new bus routes introduced before the Cup kicked off seemed a raging success. In Wellington, the festival of culture fared less well – Te Papa’s Oceania expedition only got half the hoped-for attendance – but perhaps that told the story in itself. After years of unfavourable comparisons with Wellington, the city of culture and events, Auckland got its game on. We turned out in droves for the final festivities, then dragged our jaded selves back into town the next day for the victory parade. Thousands of us walked the “fan trail” to Eden park just for the fun of it. Somewhere along the line, we’d changed. And yet we were more Auckland than we’d ever been. The crowds on our streets reflected modern Auckland’s ethnic mix. We were the Tongans, whose flags were the key image of the opening week, and we were the Chinese New
Zealanders who stood to the left and right of me at the victory parade. So what now? Quay Street must be closed, sooner rather than later. It was depressing the day after the match to ride the strip on my bike and find the barriers gone and traffic roaring through like it used to. Diwali celebrations should be moved permanently to Aotea Square, with the food stalls lining a closed-off Queen Street, as they were this year. We should be more willing to close Queen Street itself, and develop new events to fill it full of Aucklanders, as it so gloriously was at midnight after the Cup final. Draft plans to allow multi-storey buildings to replace the new playground and loom over the wharf at Wynyard must be revisited. Yes, the plans do call for new public space to be cleared at the end of Wynyard Point, but we aren’t in a position to give up such small, early gains in shared space as we have recently won. Wynyard also needs a kiosk selling newspapers, drinks, iceblocks. The reclaimed point will need a significant cultural destination. Not everything was stellar. Work intended to ‘enhance’ the view from K road’s overbridge somehow completely obscured it. The controversial Waka Maori was underwhelming. While the police wisely let people have their fun, security at The Cloud sometimes seemed to take fright at the sight of people dancing. And the match-day power failure in Kingsland was like some cosmic joke. but by the end, the trains were running on time and there was a sense that we had all – not only officials and political leaders, but Aucklanders themselves – learned how to do this sort of thing. At the end of that pre-Cup column, I concluded that “history says we’ll forget whatever else troubled us at the time”, because that same history says “most of all, we remember who won”. I suspect there is no danger of any of us forgetting that. Russell Brown is a media commentator and blogger and lives in Auckland
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