Keith Tamkei Design & Writing by Skeeferoo

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LAYOUT The Dandy Man can Photography Hector Mediavilla, Bruce Tuck, Harness Harmse Words Lin Sampson

Sunday Times Combined Metros 1 - 27/08/2014 03:47:06 PM - Plate:

INSIDE: Travel, Food, Fashion, Home weeklies plus Television

August 31 2014

THE DANDY MAN CAN Why threads count

{ ON THE COVER } HÉCTOR MEDIAVILLA

The dandy is back in style — though he never doubted it. Lin Sampson talks to two dapper gents who believe dressing well is a beautiful revenge Photographs: Bruce Tuck, Harness Hamese and Héctor Mediavilla

RADLEY Bordiss, a businessman and academic, is a selfconfessed dandy. Today he looks like a piece of natural mountainside, tricked out in a brown and olive-green cashmere/wool threepiece suit and carrying a matching umbrella. Great dandies never forget that moment in life when their true vocation was revealed. “When I was six I had to go to a wedding and my mother bought me a suit. As soon as I put it on I felt a different person, confident and powerful,” he says. He insists his dressing is just a case of encouraging refinement and class. “My wife Odile [who comes from the Congo] dresses in designer labels so why should I not look good? It fits my fantasy and makes me feel myself.” Do people laugh at you? “At a conference in Dar es Salaam, a very earnest English banker said, ‘Why are you wearing a suit in 120° heat?’ I said to him, ‘Because I am a ponce.’ There was a pause and then he said, ‘Does ponce mean in South Africa what it means in England?’” Although he goes for “ton”, that fugitive French word employed only by the very smart, he believes one should not be seen to be pretentious. “One should

UPSTAIRS MEN: Right, Severin Mouyengo, who has been a ‘sapeur ’ since the ’70s, outside his family home in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo. Below, Bradley Bordiss, a Capetonian dandy who gave his tailor some fabric and a ‘Downton Abbey’ DVD for inspiration. BRUCE TUCK

SUITS AMOUR OF

always be able to laugh at oneself.” Bordiss has a wild laugh and slaps his thighs at the same time. In South Africa, where neon leisurewear rules, finding the right clothes takes sweat and a tailor. “See this jacket I am wearing? The fabric comes from Bbellamy and bbellamy in Muizenberg.

It was the last roll from a local factory that closed down. “I took the fabric to my tailor in Jarvis Street and gave it to him along with a Downton Abbey DVD and said, ‘I want you to watch the video and pay special attention to what Lord Grantham wears during the day. I want

you to make one exactly the same.’ And voila, this is what I got.” He opens his jacket to show a plaid, five-button waistcoat, then lifts his waistcoat to reveal braces that match his tie. “The braces must match the tie, of course. Double cuffs go without saying.” He always accompanies his outfits with a suitable hat — homburg, fedora or boater. Being a dandy is not without its hazards. “I was driving up the N2 the other day, wearing cream pants, pale blue blazer, silk handkerchief and boater. It took a while but I slowly realised there was a poo protest up ahead, my God, and I was in an open car. I did a U-turn and drove straight across the middle island.” When Bordiss was 40 he thought he would wear hats. “At 50 I am going for cravats and then at 60 it will be walking sticks.” The dandy’s enemy is casualisation. They dream of picketing dress-down Fridays. Their clothes are often a statement against shopping-mall aesthetics, sloppy T-shirts and baggy shorts. Bordiss’s particular loathing is K-Way

{ ON THE COVER } HARNESS HAMESE

KOFIFI COUTURE: The Joburg-based Khumbula fashion collective use clothes to tell the African story from ‘our own perspective’.

“adventure” clothes. “Those cargo pants with zips and pockets and hidden pouches — you’re doing the shopping, not climbing the Matterhorn! They are unforgivable in a sophisticated urban environment.” Dandyism is misunderstood. The dandy mujahedeen is small but vociferous. The idea is not to look like a gay sorcerer’s apprentice but to be seriously well upholstered in good fabrics. Beau Brummel invented the suit in the early 19th century to get away from regency foppishess — embroidered coats, lace ruffles and silk stockings. He was rigid, not extravagant; he loved well-made dark cloth and perfect linen, and took extreme effort to always look immaculate. As Bordiss says, “Temperament and attitude to life are as important as what you wear.” The dandy’s badge item is the three-piece suit. “When I was last in England,” Bordiss tells me, “I ran into a group of people who were parading a placard that read, ‘Give the three-piece suit a chance.’ ” Fernand Blanchard is a car guard at Bayview Centre in Tableview. He takes his job very seriously and is proud to call himself a car guard. He is also an award-winning sapeur (African Nations Cup 2013) — a member of the global Congolese fashion cult known as La Sape, with its complex history of war and displacement. La Sape arose from the disenchantment and loss felt by soldiers who returned to Congo after fighting for France in the First World War. Years ago I interviewed Congolese singer Papa Wemba, who is worshipped as the king of La Sape. In the grey of a London day he shone like the setting sun in a plumage of fashionable labels and Jean-Paul Gaulti-

HÉCTOR MEDIAVILLA

HÉCTOR MEDIAVILLA/PT/SPLASH/SPLASH NEWS/CORBIS

BRUCE TUCK

SPIFFING: Andre Nkolo, above, a ‘sapeur ’ who lives in France. He has more than 30 pairs of shoes, including this crocodile-skin quartet, top left. Left, Congolese car guard Fernand Blanchard, who lives in Cape Town & stretches his chain-store look with pricey accessories.

er sunglasses, a man who epitomised the movement’s reliance on image. It is Blanchard’s day off and he has made the trip to town dressed immaculately for a day in the city and spiced with Givenchy Pour Homme. He lives in one room with his girlfriend and five-year-old son. His income is small and, although many sapeurs wear signature labels, he stretches his chic look and chain-store clothes with pricey accessories like ostrich leather shoes and a Versace checked scarf. “It is not just about ’ow you dress, it is ’ow you are as a person, it is fantastique, this sapeur. I am very proud of this distinction. I cannot understand these South African men, they are looking so bad. It is not, ’ow do you say, it is not dignified. And they are rich. They ’ave the money.”

He lifts his trouser leg with the accomplished ease of a runway model to show a silk sock. “It is secret for me, very expensive socks but only I know.” A sapeur may add a silk or embroidered lining to a jacket that only he knows about. For Blanchard, it all started in 1979 in his home town of Brazzaville, Congo. “You know, there was war all around between the north and south and there is no more soccer and the clothes, they make me feel better. My friends are doing it and I also. It is the most important thing for me to look good. “There are clubs for les sapeurs and if you go there you must dress good and if you look nice you can get many compliments — and even girls. I ’ave one suit in orange and one suit in pink.” LS

LAYOUT Depth of Feel Photography Paul Ash, Miklas Manneke, Alexi Portokallis, Gareth Pon Words Paul Ash

Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine April 17 2016

DEPTH OF FEEL Instagrammers see light in the darkroom

INSIDE: fashion, food,

television & travel

PAGE 8

{ ON THE COVER }

APRIL 17 2016

EMEMBER Cujo, huh, do ya? The rabid, slick-with-drool, angry St Bernard in the Stephen King novel who traps a family in their broken-down car and tries to kill them by biting the car to pieces? That Cujo.

You can meet Cujo any time. It walks among us. Just go on any of the photography forums that litter the ’Net and say something like “Film is better than digital” then sit back and wait for the fury, the hate, as Cujos from both camps rip into each other in furious bellows and bitter snarls. I know, because I was one of them. I am a child of the ’60s. I grew up with film. I salivated over magazine ads for glossy black Nikon F and Pentax Spotmatic and Olympus OM-1 cameras. There was a darkroom at my school, a time machine out of which the hours would spool like a ribbon and I would emerge blinking into the twilight, wondering where the day had gone. I am not a good photographer but I get by, shooting travel for work. One day I had the money to buy a Nikon FM2 — the camera of my childish dreams — and a fast 35mm lens (“A beautiful piece of glass,” said the camera shop owner and just like that he got me). The Nikon and I became firm friends. We travelled the world and I shot roll after roll of film, loving the smooth action as the shutter cocked, the heavy “thunk” as it released, the sound of the film spooling over the sprockets . . . Who would not love a machine like that? I stuck with film long after my colleagues had abandoned that rusty freighter and swum over to digital’s shiny new ocean liner. I was the only one trekking to the lab with rolls of Kodak Portra, my editor’s cries ringing in my ears, “Developed? What the f*** do you mean?” Then I gave in to the tide. I bought a digital SLR. The FM2 went into the back of a dark cupboard. Oooh, I loved the shiny new Nikon, even if none of the old manual glass worked properly on it, even if it was plastic and ugly and didn’t shout “use me!”. But, as happens in the digital age, it wasn’t enough. Not fast enough. Not enough megapixels. Not enough bells. Too few whistles. I bought another camera with a big, fat, fast zoom. It’s a beast. It has bells and whistles to shame a circus.

SHUTTER SPEED Photographers from the digital age get their hands on film, darkroom trays and developing tanks. By Paul Ash

Picture: Paul Ash

Now I work in Photoshop and talk about “workflow” and “histograms” and “RAW”. And here’s the thing: I hate it. This game, this love of cameras, this hunting for what that genius, Henri Cartier-Bresson, called the “defining moment” — gone, debased by a thousand badly shot shitty frames, a million lousy JPEGs. Who came up with JPEG as a term for a photograph anyway? That acronym alone says everything about the shallowness of digital photography. See? Cujo. You just got mauled. Or did I bite myself?

HE tetanus shot, if you could call it that, came the week I planned to drop my cameras off at the camera dealer and be done with photography. There was a weekend workshop on black and white printmaking at the Alternative Print Workshop in Joburg — would I like to do it? In truth, I expected little. The workshop was small, just five people, a diverse group which included two of South Africa’s biggest Instagrammers. But it would be conducted by

Dennis da Silva, who is to black and white photography what Neil Armstrong is to space travel, and his colleague, photographer and “chemist” Janus Boshoff. I dusted off the FM2 and the last remaining Nikon lens and went to Parktown. Working from a darkroom which occupies an annex in what, from the outside, is an unprepossessing house, Da Silva makes prints for photographers such as Roger Ballen. He does only black and white work. Swimming against the tide. If Da Silva is the wizard, Boshoff is the sorcerer’s apprentice. For years I had heard mutterings about “some young guy from Potch” who was mixing darkroom chemicals in his own back yard — film and print developers to rival Kodak’s D-76 and Ilford’s ID-11, the scents of which will be lodged deep in the sensory memory of anyone who’s ever truly worked with black and white film. The softly spoken Boshoff took one of my favourite pictures ever — a black and white

shot of a huge Afrikander bull with great, curving horns that make it look like a escapee from the time of mammoths. When I saw it hanging on the wall of the Silvertone darkroom, I felt a Flickr of happiness. Maybe there was life in the old dog yet.

APRIL 17 2016

PAGE 9

{ ON THE COVER }

E meet at the house on a Saturday morning: me, a marketing executive named Michael-Giles Coyle, a young business consultant named Mira Atanasova and the two Instagrammers, Gareth Pon and Alexi Portokallis. As it turns out, I am the only one who has ever worked with film before. Pon, named South Africa’s biggest Instagrammer in 2014 and 2015, is shooting with his uncle’s Leicaflex SLR (in the world of film cameras that’s like driving a Mercedes 280SL — classic, and refined if not quite buttery smooth). “I was born into a digital world,” says Pon. “I had never shot on a film camera until six months ago and even then it was only one roll of film and I didn’t know what I was doing.” We are each given a roll of 400ASA black and white film and let loose in the artist’s house. Other than the rough-and-tumble staffies and a cat with devil eyes, it’s mostly a still-life experience. “Remember,” says Da Silva, “this is film, not digital. Expose for the shadows.” I shoot slowly. The dogs argue with a KONG toy. The cat watches from under a bush. There’s a scary preacher statue and a pair of film cameras on a table. These are not great pictures but the heft of the Nikon in my hands, the feel of the film-advance lever and the thunk of the shutter are deeply satisfying. We mill around the house,

WHAT A RUSH The Alternative Print Workshop and young South African photographers replicated the old work flow of press photography by shooting images at SA Fashion Week and developing and printing overnight for display the next day. Michael-Giles Coyle gives a timeline of this demanding collaborative effort.

Picture: Alexi Portokallis

18h00 Start shooting behind-thescenes shots

18h30 Shows start 21h30 Wrap up the evening and head to the Alternative Print Workshop

Picture: Gareth Pon

Picture: Alexi Portokallis

looking for light, for shapes, looking for our defining moments. For people used to blitzing off a thousand pictures on their phone in a couple of hours, the notion of having just 36 exposures is like a lightning bolt. “It made me slow down,” Portokallis says later. “I had to be more patient, shoot with intent. Being an Instagrammer, taking your phone out, taking a photo, it’s not as intentional as it is with film.” In the afternoon we head to the darkroom where Da Silva and Boshoff show us how to load the film — in black, velvet darkness — into developing tanks. “Everything in black and white film developing is about being consistent,” says Da Silva. The water temperature. How many times you agitate the tank and how often. How long you develop the film for. It’s a good life lesson. We work quietly, watching the clock. The chemicals gurgle in the tanks. Developer. Water. Fixer to render the film insensitive to light. Wash. All done to the clock. The anticipation hangs in the air. Will the dogs come out? Will the cat’s devil eyes be sharp? “It’s quite daunting,” says Atanasova who, until today, has never shot film. “You can’t review your photos. There’s this anticipation and suspense until you can get in the darkroom and see what you have.” The films are washed and pulled from the tanks and Boshoff hangs them in the drying cabinet. They are barely dry before we have them

gingerly in our fingertips, holding them up to the light and . . . there . . . the raw material of our images, shadows and shapes on celluloid, the magic of light on silver halide crystals. We are shown how the enlargers work, and print contact sheets from which we will choose our prints. The process is the same: expose, develop, wash, fix. Only now we slide photographic paper into developing trays under the soft glow of red lights. It is cool and quiet and the only sound is the slosh of chemicals and the soft thud of trays in the tin sinks. The dogs turn out great — nice blacks, lots of detail in their muzzles — but devil-eye cat, frankly, looks insane. We are back at 8.30am on the Sunday for more. We make test strips to get the exposure right, then make our prints. Then, in the red glow, we slip the pictures into the developing trays and watch the images appear on the paper. “You see it happening in front of your eyes,” says Coyle. “It’s like witchcraft.” After each picture, the lights go on so Da Silva and Boshoff can guide us. Expose more there. Burn that bit. Dodge that. Lights off, back in the red glow. We try again. Time slips away. By the end of the day we have each done five prints. Five. Well, Pon has done four. “And that took two days of getting my hands dirty,” he says. “That versus shooting 1 000 pictures in an hour and getting 30 or 60 from that 1 000.” He pauses. “People are very trigger-happy nowadays. This,” he says, holding up one of his prints, “is about feeling the photo.” We have spent the day on our feet yet everyone looks blissed out, as if they’ve had an all-day spa treatment. Pon and Portokallis have no intention of putting down their digital cameras but the ground has clearly shifted. “Shooting on black and white film is not an excuse, it’s a reason,” says Pon. “From today, I’m a black and white convert,” says Portokallis. “I’m actually going to look at all my black and white digital pictures in a different way. Dammit.” The digital and film worlds collided and no one got bitten. The only fighting dogs were the ones in my picture. We’ve made something with our hands. And that feels good. LS The Alternative Print Workshop runs courses on black and white photography, printmaking, pinhole cameras and linocuts. The next Black & White Darkroom Foundation Workshop is on May 7 and 8 and costs R2 600. Visit alternativeprintworkshop.co.za

22h17 Start developing 22h50 the film Muchneeded 23h40 pizza Films are out of the 00h30 dryer Contact sheets are done and we start to make 01h30 selections for First prints completed printing 06h00 We continue making 50 prints from a selection of 23 images

Picture: Miklas Manneke

13h00 Prints are rushed to Hyde Park

14h00 Prints are hung in the reception of SA Fashion Week

Picture: Andile Buka

Picture: Miklas Manneke

LAYOUT NY to SA Photography Gareth Smit Words Anneke Rautenbach

Sunday Times Combined Metros 1 - 26/08/2015 03:48:55 PM - Plate:

INSIDE: Travel, Fashion, Home, plus Television

Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine including Food Weekly August 30 2015

PAGE 12

August 30 2015

{ ON THE COVER }

BIG APPLE, SMALL SPACE: Andrew Orkin at his Williamsburg home preparing for a gig in the East Village

DREAM COME TRUE: Shariffa Ali near the theatre district, Times Square, Manhattan

‘I

FELT like I was in a scene from Rent,” says Shariffa Ali, of the first night she spent in New York, in a draughty warehouse in Brooklyn. A friend of a friend had put her up in his communal home — a converted industrial space in Bushwick — for the night. “It was early spring, still cold. I remember feeling not quite scared, just very ready.” A University of Cape Town theatre graduate, Ali was over the moon to be invited to collaborate on a two-week project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. America was, after all, a dream come true. But shortly after she arrived, the project lost its funding. She set off for New York, found a new collaborator, and when no rehearsal space was available, they used rooftops and cemeteries. It’s two years later and the longlimbed 24-year-old sits across from me in The Library, a dusky bar at the theatre where she now works in Manhattan’s East Village. Gilded volumes line the walls, and brass lamps cast a rosy glow. “Still came about at the time of the Trayvon Martin verdict,” says Ali of her first show, referring to the black youth who was shot dead in Florida in 2012 by neighbourhood watch member George Zimmerman. A year later, Zimmerman was acquitted of murder. With a professional dancer she met in New York, Ali had co-written

and produced Still, which debuted at the Alchemical Theatre Laboratory in the West Village. “The timing was right. It was the story of an unborn black man surveying the state of the world he is about to enter, and it struck a nerve with audiences. There were tears in the room.” She was soon introduced to Cynthia Nixon — best known for her role as Miranda in Sex and the City — by a friend who knew Nixon’s partner. Nixon was so taken with the young talent that she recommended her for a paid internship at the Public Theatre, an acclaimed

‘I felt out of my depth until I learnt to trust my unique perspective as a South African‘ company that presents Shakespeare in the Park and much else besides. “Growing up, I was always surrounded by strong, powerful women like my mother and her friends. Cynthia has been a similar kind of mentor to me here.” Ali is not the only young African artist of her generation to roll the dice in New York City’s creative game. The stakes are high: with living expenses amounting to a minimum of $2 000 a month (about R27 000) and university fees approaching $40 000 a year, New

York is one of the world’s priciest cities. But while it’s universally recognised as a place that chews up and spits out its young, it’s also a place where — with a strong dose of talent and a bit of luck — you just might win big.

HEN jazz singer Vuyo Sotashe was growing up in Butterworth, Eastern Cape, the odds stacked against a career in New York seemed insurmountable. Sotashe is a slender young man in horn-rimmed spectacles. One of five children, he was raised by his mother, a schoolteacher. “I don’t know how she did it. She instilled a crazy work ethic in us from a young age.” The 25-year-old has mastered each challenge that came his way, from winning a string of singing competitions to acquiring a Bachelor of Music at UCT despite having no formal music education. His biggest triumph was the Fulbright Scholarship for postgraduate study in the US. With the legendary Manhattan School of Music in mind, Sotashe applied — and won. “My scholarship didn’t place me in New York but at the William Paterson University in New Jersey — still close enough to intern at the Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts.” The Fulbright was a huge break, but it didn’t mean a cushy life. “My first year in the States involved a lot of instant noodles.”

IF THEY CAN MAKE IT THERE For artists, it’s the centre of the world. Young South Africans are making New York their own. By Anneke Rautenbach Photographs: Gareth Smit

Film-scorer Andrew Orkin, 27, also a Fulbright scholar, had a rough landing in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “The room I was staying in was about my height square, in a pretty dingy area,” he says from beneath a floppy blond fringe. “Coming from leafy Parkview in Joburg, I’d never lived in a city centre before. I found I could be surrounded by people at all hours, yet still feel utterly alone.”

OR actress Phumzile Sitole, 25, it was a tougher ride to New York, and didn’t get any easier upon arrival. Having received from scholarship partial a Columbia University, she had to find ways to supplement the remaining cost. “Before leaving home, I enlisted a bunch of friends to fundraise at a traffic intersection in Fourways, Johannesburg. We made about R10.” She giggles, flashing a wide, gap-toothed smile.

She received a grant from the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and donations from a few family members, but it was only enough to keep her afloat for the first year of her three-year MA in acting. On top of her financial uncertainty, Sitole suffered the heartache of her father dying in a car accident last year. “It’s the hardest thing to be far away when all you want is to be around your loved ones. I managed to go home for two weeks, but then had to go straight back to school.” A classmate, Folami Williams, came to her rescue. “Her family effectively took me in and we now share a room in the brownstone where her mom grew up in Brooklyn. It’s really thanks to this family that I’m still in the States.” Sitole has also caught the attention of Tony Award-winning director Gregory Mosher (Anything Goes; Our Town), who cast her as the lead in his production, Antigone in the

AUGUST 30 2015

PAGE 13

{ ON THE COVER }

LONG WAY FROM BUTTERWORTH: Vuyo Sotashe performs at Liberty House restaurant in New Jersey, with Manhattan in the background

CLASS ACT: Phumzile Sitole, 25, in the home where she stays in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn

World. Sitole was delighted to visit home when the production toured South Africa and Kenya.

FTER sleeping on a couch in New Rochelle for longer than she cares to remember and sharing beds with friends in Newark and in Brooklyn, Ali has earned her artist’s visa. She is working alongside Nixon as assistant director on a one-woman show featuring the spoken-word poet, Staceyann Chin. Sotashe has turned his internship into a job at Jazz at Lincoln Centre, and has performed at the venue as well as on National Public Radio. Orkin, with an MA under his belt, landed a job at the production company Fall on Your Sword, where he has worked on the soundtracks of two documentaries by Academy Award-winning director Alex Gibney, including Steve Jobs: The Man

in the Machine. Orkin says the biggest lesson he’s learnt in New York is that “you can’t beat people at their own game”. “I felt totally out of my depth at New York University’s music school, until I learnt to trust my unique perspective as a South African. My adviser sat me down and said, ‘You’re bringing something totally new to the table.’” Similarly, Sotashe pays homage to his Xhosa roots in his composition, something he says sets him apart from those coming out of the US music college system. “In this town, being South African is a gift.” Sitole says: “I keep telling myself that money is just printed paper. It might be special paper. You might not have a lot of it, but if you’re talented enough there will be someone who wants to invest in you.” And every barbecue-flavoured instant noodle becomes worth it. LS

HE UK’s Daily Mail once praised one of Bradley Shelver’s performances as “a tour de force of technique and control”. “I blushed when I read that,” says the East London-born prodigy. Shelver was just 16 when he was snatched up by The Ailey School, the Manhattan institute of the world-renowned Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. “When they called out my name after the audition, I cried.” Of the three dancers awarded scholarships, he was the only one still in high school. “Two weeks after I graduated, I moved to New York.” He has lived there ever since. On the phone from the US, he has to shout above the sound of police sirens. “I’m downtown,” he says, “on my way to a rehearsal”. Shelver says the most challenging thing about his career has been the loneliness, “especially in the beginning, moving to New York at 18 and not knowing anyone”. Add to that a gruelling curriculum spanning everything from West African dance to Tap, alongside cherry-picked, ambitious young dancers. “Training was intense — about nine hours a day. I got terrible blisters, but didn’t say anything because I was afraid they would make me sit out.” He still calls his old teacher “Ms Jefferson”. Now he’s paying it forward, as a teacher at The Ailey School in New York. He also dances with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, in between his other roles as artistic director of contemporary dance company Steps Repertory Ensemble, and producer of New York’s REVERBdance Festival. “So, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that,” he says. Does he have a hobby? “What’s that?” No, he isn’t in a relationship. “I have a Labrador by default. He’s my roommate’s. My life has been consumed by dance. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a sad thing. I never learnt how to ride a bicycle, or whistle. It sounds trivial, but now that I’m older I wonder what it would be like to do that.” Perhaps if he hadn’t shown up at The Ailey School audition in 1996 he may have become a lawyer, like his grandfather. “I was considering it because the state of dance [in SA] was a mess when apartheid ended.” It was his father, an ex-drummer who worked in insurance, who pushed him to pursue his talent. “That’s rare because most fathers want their sons to do something else. I have a lot of friends in New York whose parents still ask them, ‘When are you going to get a real job?’” Shelver’s been dancing since he was four. “I still remember putting on my first pair of tap shoes.” You get the sense that he’s dedicated his life to turning his body into a finely calibrated machine. Now 35, his CV is a show-stopper. Some of his highlights include performing in José Limón’s Chaconne at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2008; meeting Fidel Castro after a sold-out performance in Havana (where Shelver passed out during the encore “due to bottled-water restrictions”), and sitting in Patrick Swayze’s hot tub. “Patrick used to take dance class with us and invited us to his ranch. I’d been inspired after seeing him in Dirty Dancing. And here I was sitting next to him as he barbecued for us while he explained how he prepares chicken. I still have a photo of the two of us.” In an American accent pep-

Picture: WALTER KURTZ

BODY OF WORK South African dancer Bradley Shelver wowed international judges at 16. Now his New York students dazzle global audiences, writes Leigh-Anne Hunter pered with “ja’s”, Shelver says he still feels very South African. He’s just finished working on a piece that will show at the Dance Umbrella in Johannesburg in March 2016. “I’ve often felt South Africa has turned its back on me as far as the dance world goes. So it’s been nice to be appreciated.” But he has no plans to perform or live in South Africa again. “New York’s creative network has no rival. I still pinch myself when I

‘In New York, you either sink or swim. I can’t relax. It’s not in my nature’ think that I’ve performed at one of the world’s most famous opera houses for the last seven seasons. “In New York, you either sink or swim. I can’t relax. It’s not in my nature, and I think that is why I have managed to stay paddling for so long.” In 2010, an injury kept him off the dance floor for six months. “I got depressed.” In the vortex that is New York (and his mind), dance is his therapy. “As artists, we tend to be self-absorbed. I have a terrible time staying present. When I’m on stage, that’s not an option.” His toughest performance yet? “Every one after 30. You have to monitor your diet more closely, especially when your boss says

you’ll be wearing nothing but a loincloth this season.” There are upsides to being older. “I’ve got to a point in my career, in my life, where I don’t feel I have to prove anything anymore.” That doesn’t mean he’s slowing down. He had to perform on the day his mother died. “I have never felt so alone.” His work has taken him to stages around the world. “You don’t need to speak other languages or have a degree to appreciate the humanity in movement, or the beauty of the body. So many other artists in New York have to work as waiters. I’ve been lucky.” Working in Israel, in particular, was life-changing. “My classes were packed with soldiers who had to get permission to dance. Their guns were lined up against the wall. “I always tell my dancers, ‘Relax, we aren’t saving the world’. Although in this instance, I think there were about 40 kids who might have felt differently. The idea of having to take four years out of my life away from dance and join the army (and there are some cultures where dancing is against the law) has made me that much more thankful for what I have and where I’ve come from.” LS ý Catch the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater on tour from September 3-13 at The Teatro at Montecasino, Joburg, and September 16-20 at Artscape, Cape Town. Book at Computicket.

LAYOUT Culoe & The Gang Photography Cover: Kevin Sutherland Spread: Supplied Words Leigh-Anne Hunter

Sunday Times Combined Metros 1 - 05/03/2014 03:53:07 PM - Plate:

March 9 2014

CULOE & THE

GANG

SA's house heroes are grooving the globe

INSIDE TRAVEL, FOOD, FASHION & HOME WEEKLIES PLUS TELEVISION

10 I

COVER STORY

9 MARCH 2014

E S U

G N O I S I R H F THE O

I S N A MZ

ISCO died on a baseball pitch in Illinois — or so they thought at the time. Three decades after its mutant offspring, house music, rose from the ashes of the hustle in a Chicago warehouse the sensual thump is still alive. And nowhere is it thumping deeper than in Alex, half a planet from the Great Lakes, where scooters and Lamborghinis are mounting pavements outside Joe’s chesa nyama. Come Sundays, it’s a haven for househeads. You could argue that South Africa has hijacked what Frankie Knuckles began with two turntables and a razor blade. Because today in the US, hip-hop reigns — but here, house is king. Ours is a unique territory, where a sound that hasn’t left the garages in many countries is as mainstream as pop: where a house album can outsell Coldplay or Beyoncé. It isn’t just club music for us, one kid tells me. “Here, house is our daily bread.” Sniffing the scent, the Ultra Music Festival, a mega dance event, came to our shores last month, hot on the heels of international house artists — German DJ Ralf Gum even immigrated. They make a lot more dosh and get more gigs, says Allan Nicoll, a suit at local house label Soul Candi when he’s not DJing as Kid Fonque. But we have our own superstars — Mi Casa’s latest album, Su Casa, went platinum within three months. Enough for Soul Candi, which began as a record store that sold only 5% local music, to overhaul its business. We’re routinely on the top 10 on global download portal, Traxsource. “South African house music is a huge international success, OK?” top DJ Louie Vega tells me from New York. “You hear it in clubs everywhere.” We’re sizzling in Mediterranean climes — hotspots for house chills — particularly Greece and Portugal. But then there’s also London, Paris, Tokyo. Ask George Mothiba, who formed Revolution more than a decade ago with his twin, Joseph: “Our crowds are multicultural,” he says. “The house boys never cared about beefs. We don’t beIf 30 000 have like hooligans.” people are You hear the critics now. House music? dancing to That vacuous mumbo-jumbo? George your music, guffaws. “If 30 000 then you people are dancing to your music, then you gotta keep gotta keep your your mouth mouth shut.” While our flavours shut run the gamut from Durban’s punchy grooves to the pianosweet melodies you’ll hear in Pretoria’s House 22, from deep house to vocal house and our very own tribal cocktail “Afro house”, our signature is that raw African drum and heavy bass that throbs in the soles of your feet. When you hear our house, you know it. “Other producers want to make those types of beats,” says Vega, who adds that Daft Punk’s Grammy coup with the soulful Get Lucky showed an industry trend towards our “warm” summerday groove. Many credit Black Coffee’s meteoric rise overseas, fast-tracked by Superman with local R&B

South African house artists Culoe De Song and Black Coffee are grooving the globe, from Miami cabs to Paris clubs. By LeighAnne Hunter

CHICAGO HOUSE Mid-’80s, Chicago, spread to North and South America, Europe and later Australia.

lass Bucie, for ushering in a new wave of lethal young things, from Nastee Nev to Shimza and Uhuru. I meet Culoe De Song — who scooped Best Male Artist at the Metro FM Awards last Saturday DEEP HOUSE — at a Joburg studio. A girl in teeny shorts 1985, Chicago. rattles off his schedule. “Cape Town next week, then Paris, then Amsterdam . . .” GARAGE HOUSE As a kid, he tuned into late-night From Paradise Garage. Developed alongside shows with a radio he found on a dump. Chicago House. Early Now Culoe (born Culolethu Zulu) pulls ’80s, New York and huge crowds here and in Europe — a New Jersey. quandary easily solved by spending half the year abroad. If he’s not playing his tracks, someone else is. “It’s impossible to keep up with every DJ in the world who plays my music.” German label Innervisions snapped him up and he had releases in Japan, all before his 24th birthday. No doubt his mentor, Coffee, gave him some pointers on world domination. Culoe found his sweet spot by fusing electronic beats with the soundtrack of his KwaZulu-Natal upbringing — from Shembe church chants to maskandi. “The mids ACID HOUSE Mid-’80s, and the treble must sound fat, yeah,” he says, punching Chicago. keys on his iPad. In Webaba, Busi Mhlongo’s voice explodes around us in a highveld electric storm of violas, and it’s haunting and beautiful and you don’t know whether to weep or dance. Our house hits that sample heavyweights like Jimmy Dludlu, Thandiswa Mazwai and Philip Tabane showed it was possible to recast our musical armory as club music. Fresh acts like Black Motion, who rose to fame mixing beats in a Soshanguve mkhukhu, use traditional

LD R O EW

TH F A SOUND O

LATIN HOUSE Late ’80s, New York and Chicago.

USA DETROIT TECHNO Late ’80s.

ECOUTEZ MOI: French deep house DJ, Bob Sinclar

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COVER STORY

9 MARCH 2014

FLOOR FILLERS: Clockwise from right: DJ and producer Culoe De Song, Black Coffee, Mi Casa

AN INVINCIBLE PULSE At disco’s zenith in the late ‘70s, there was one place to be on a Saturday night in Chicago’s south-side: the Warehouse. Here legendary DJ Frankie Knuckles ruled behind the decks. When middle America lashed out at the mainly gay, black club, detonating disco records on Disco Demolition Night, the dance groove was forced underground as fast as you can say “cigarette pants”. But haters only spurred Knuckles to get creative with old tunes. His 4/4 rhythm from The Warehouse — abbreviated to “house” – morphed into hypnotic deep house and “squelch” acid house and spread to the UK, the party island of Ibiza, the rest of Europe, and South Africa. After the death of apartheid, our DJs injected imported Chicago sounds with African spice, creating kwaito, our own little monster that would leap, six-legged, from Mzansi in the new guise of South African house music.

KWAITO Early ’90s, South Africa.

TH U SO

AFRICA AFRO HOUSE 2000s, South Africa.

FIDGET HOUSE Sub-genre of Electro House.

ELECTRO HOUSE Late ’90s, worldwide.

PROGRESSIVE HOUSE Led to Swedish Progressive House in the 2000s. Early ’90s, the UK.

HARD HOUSE Early ’90s, The UK.

AMBIENT HOUSE Late ’80s, the UK.

instruments in “a new wave” that turns the DJ set into a performance. There’s influence from forebears, but Culoe says he’s part of a whole new era. “I’m from the ‘bedroom-producer generation’. They probably don’t know who Beethoven was and don’t care. We love making beats from a computer.” They’re hurtling forward, putting this stuff “on steroids”. “What we started is evolving,” says Oskido who, luckily, was lousy at making hotdogs and better at making music. He was a godfather of the sound, along with people like Vinny Da Vinci and DJ Christos. Back in the early ’90s, the boerie-roll-seller-turned-musicmogul snuck into Hillbrow’s Club Razzmatazz, slowing down international house records. “In Europe, they’re kinda doing aerobics on the dance floor. Here people like to get down,” says Christos. And so kwaito — in some ways a precursor of SA house — was born. “When Chris Hani was killed, I was playing in Tembisa and someone said, maybe it’s not a good idea for you to go there as a white person. I said ‘bullshit’.” In a coffee shop, Oskido adjusts his cap and orders a side of honey. “In ’94, we realised we couldn’t sing political songs anymore. People wanted to forget that. So we wrote about things in the townships, but using tsotsitaal with a party beat so you wouldn’t get bored.” It was music for the people. “They held it and said: ‘This is ours.’” Barring Bra Hugh, who said, “OK ja no fine,”

E P O R U E BALEARIC HOUSE Mid-’80s, Ibiza, Balearic Islands.

DUTCH HOUSE Late 2000s , the Netherlands.

DECK DIVA: Progressive house DJ Maeva Carter

ITALO HOUSE Late ’80s, Italy.

when asked to blow the trumpet on ZabalWe had the power now.” aza, traditional artists turned up their noses. Another pioneer, Greg “They told us: ‘You guys are vulgar.’” After Maloka, tells me: “We one sexy Boom Shaka rendition, he got saw the trend that to be called into the principal’s office. “Madiba big at home you have to gave us a tongue-lashing. ‘You can’t mess be big elsewhere. So we with the national anthem.’ We didn’t unthought, no problem. derstand. We were young people expressing Let’s go make it big.” ourselves.” No, no, you can’t sell kwaito overseas, they He knocked on the door of every said. People won’t understand the lanrecord label. They said: What are you guage. “I said: ‘We’ve been singing to FRENCH smoking, pal? Kwaito died in a boardFrench and Latin songs all our lives’. HOUSE room in Jozi. Or so they thought. You had to drag them kicking and Late ’90s, Oskido took to selling cassettes screaming.” France from his car boot at taxi ranks and From sneaking into Miami pentcampuses. “That’s when the fire starthouse parties because they didn’t have ed.” By the time the labels sent him roses, passes, they were “the kings” when Mafikit was too late. “I said: ‘What do you want?’ izolo’s Loot got traction from the Sunshine

State to the Big Apple. “Everyone went mad. I saw French girls, Japanese girls, jumping around. That’s when I thought we can conquer the world musically, you know?” Now the South African parties are the biggest in Miami, he says. The others are kinda dead. “How you know you’ve made it in the States is when your cab driver says: ‘Ay man, you from South Africa? You guys are big here. Listen, listen.’ And he plays you a song.” How house music went commercial here in a way that defied global trends also has to do with a law school drop-out. It was arguably the first regular house feature on prime-time radio in the country, says DJ Fresh of his YFM slot, The Mad Half Hour, which, like Chicago’s Hot Mix 5 in the ’80s, had house DJs battling on air. When YFM launched in ’97, few stations played house here — and then only as a side order to soul and R&B. Yet it was booming in the township. “We weren’t a bunch of kids from China trying to programme a radio station in Alaska. We were Gauteng kids doing a station for Gauteng,” says Maloka, then the GM. They wanted to break certain myths. For one: “House isn’t the devil’s music that only plays at night. It’s the most spiritual, inspiring music ever. Some of the most beautiful love songs are house songs.” They threw huge parties in upmarket spots. “Stuff that had never been done for black youth before. It wasn’t about a trend, but about freedom. That’s what created a loyalty second to none.” At six months, they were on more than one million listeners. “People started demanding the music, and we realised there was a gap in the market,” says Fresh, now a regular at Ibiza where our music gets as much love from other DJs. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined people dancing to Heavy-K in Ibiza as they would to any other song.” Without a doubt, radio’s support explains why the genre has thrived here, he says. “Across stations, more house music is played than any other genre in the country, and on Top 40 radio, which is something to brag about. In many countries, you only hear it on specialist shows.” Vega, on his first of many trips here, was gobsmacked. “You’re telling me you play house music on the radio?” He tells me: “I love the way house is seen in South Africa. I wish it was like that around the world. I couldn’t believe it when I first went there and the kids were, like, 16 to 20. Anything that has youth appeal, forget it. It goes mainstream.” By contrast, house listeners in the States, the birthplace of the genre, are middle-aged, says Maloka. “We’d changed that because we made it a very cool sound.” Ask any township kid what they want to be when they grow up and they’ll say: a DJ. Another Culoe. When top dogs from Lagos to the States phone you to do a collaboration, that’s big, says Maloka, who, in his swish corner office, props his shoe on the boardroom table to tie his shoelace. “It’s a South African success story. The first were the Hughs and Miriams. And then there was nothing. And then there was house.”

LAYOUT In This Blue Shade Photography Gallo/Getty Images Illustration Keith Tamkei Words Carlos Amato

Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine April 24 2016

INSIDE:

fashion, food, home television & travel

In this blue shade Amy, five years on

PAGE 10

{ ON THE COVER }

EW York, 2007. She’s in the booth, recording the final verse of Back to Black. We only said goodbye with words/ I died a hundred times / You go back to her / And I go back to . . . blaaack. She waits a bit, then repeats the last word, recalibrating the bar graph of her inflection almost imperceptibly. Deepening the gloom by a few photons. Then a third rendition, with a rusty knife-twist in the middle. Blaa-aack. She looks down at her feet. Then lifts her gaze to Mark Ronson, the producer. “Ooh, that’s quite upsetting, that ending, isn’t it?” Then she clowns for him. “Grrrrr! Bom-bom-bom!” Then that lavish, ribald grin. She seems uncharacteristically in command of herself: laughing at the slowly cooling artefact of her sadness. That’s the way creative catharsis should work. You dump your fucked-up heart like a corpse on a crowded pavement, and then you walk away from it. Let them deal with it. Not your problem anymore. It’s out there in the song now, not in you. Bring on the royalties, bitches. And when the misery returns, repeat as required. But Amy Winehouse couldn’t master the trick. Her songs couldn’t drain away her unhappiness fast enough. There weren’t enough songs, and there wasn’t enough time.

SIF Kapadia’s documentary about the singer, Amy, which screens in South Africa at the European Film Festival next month, is a supremely attentive study of addiction and the cruelties of fame. Kapadia shuns gratuitous judgment and cheap sentimentality. The film consists almost entirely of public and private video clips of her life, with no editorialising or talkinghead interviews. The only new footage is a thread of slow aerial pans over London and New York cityscapes, an analogue for the urbane grandeur of her spirit. Much of the previously unseen footage was supplied to Kapadia by people who were close to Amy, including those who aided and abetted her decline into abjection: her opportunistic, foolish father Mitchell, her insufferable paramour

Blake Fielder-Civil, her exploitative manager Raye Cosbert. Kapadia lets us find them guilty or innocent; he says nothing. All the while, some other suspects shuffle into the dock alongside her intimate enablers: you and me. Our prurient gaze is the bloodied weapon. Kapadia is repulsed by the sadism of postmillennial celebrity culture — a pathology that emerged in parallel with Amy’s career. If we read and talk and laugh about unravelling stars, then we’re at the rearguard of a lynch mob propelled and financed by our clicks and views and shares. Some of the bleakest scenes in the film show Amy stumbling, horrified, into a limelit hell of paparazzi flashes. In one sequence, she arrives at a prison to visit Fielder-Civil, who has been jailed for defeating the ends of justice. She’s a corporeal ghost, unmoored and barely conscious, and you can sense a shudder of self-loathing in the assembled pack of reporters. But they’re still there, still shooting, still asking stupid questions. By documenting the hunting of Amy, even in good faith, does Kapadia nonetheless join that hunt, after the fact? And do we not also — by consuming the spectacle yet again, wearing the thin camouflage of remembrance?

HE long arc of Amy’s descent is leavened with some hilarious interview clips in which she savages the idiocies of the commercial music machine. In a 2003 interview on a Dutch radio show, she disses a producer who added some fake strings to Take the Box without her consent. “I would never have done that, ever, ever.” The interviewer, his journalistic wits dulled by the studied blandness of most starlets in publicity interviews, has no clue how to respond, scrambling for his next question. She helps him out. “Sorry, I went really bitter there, I went really upset. Because I hate that guy who did that.” The Dutchman is still befuddled. “Oh. Oh. OK. OK.”

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g lon or t l no und f r, l i t e o :s ied my’, b r ang d se ry ‘A se fo u o u a h ine ment of ca W my docu plenty A e b inc super n and s sed the latio ato s a p m so nd ave ss. A o con rlos A i h s o a ke ear the l fers n tes C Tam y th i i t e f e K fiv ccep ay, o wr on: y l rati t r s a a M Illu Ne gh to ns in u e eno al scre loc

N I F

APRIL 24 2016

{ ON THE COVER } And animal aggression is my downfall I don’t care about what you got, I want it all It’s bricked up in my head, it’s shoved under my bed And I question myself again ‘What is it ’bout men?’ My destructive side has grown a mile wide And I question myself again ‘What is it ’bout men? ‘What is it ’bout men?’

TED T R EPOISTAN L E ET ED F SH O TH XY O JAZZ A INT GAL TURY HIS N G -CE LAYIN AND D I M Y P RDS OR B CO G F RE LLIN OLS FA IS ID H

Winehouse and her father Mitchell

PAGE 11

Another lame interviewer likens her emotional lyrics to those of Dido, the bloodless, mawkish chart-topper of the time. Amy reacts by fiddling scornfully with her lip stud, her face doing all the talking with a fusillade of eye-rolls and sneers. Jonathan Ross was more of a match for her. When she appeared on his show, he asked whether her industry handlers had tried to mould her into something she wasn’t. “Yeah,” she said, quick as a flash, “one of them tried to mould me into a big triangle shape, but I went ‘Nooo!’ ” That night, that year, was Amy’s apex. She was 21. Gloriously voluptuous, clear-eyed, whip-smart, sceptical, provisionally accepting the adulation. The emotional carnage of her lyrics still seemed to be a posture, an aesthetic instinct awaiting practical application. Of course she was far from undamaged, and she knew it: she had been clinically depressed as an adolescent, and was well versed in the arts of promiscuity and betrayal. In What is it About Men? off her debut album, Frank, she attributes her sexual misdeeds to Mitchell’s adultery and his exit from the home when she was 11: Understand, once he was a family man So surely I would never, ever go through it first-hand Emulate all the shit my mother hates I can’t help but demonstrate my Freudian fate My alibi for taking your guy History repeats itself, it fails to die

UT it took one man, Fielding-Civil, to pull her deep into the black. At moments in the film, he elicits a bit of sympathy: he’s a sad, selfharming man-whore, the son of a broken home, assuaging his insecurities by “keeping his dick wet”, as she tautly puts it in Back to Black. A sleazy Antony to her trashy Cleopatra. As the story unspools, though, he becomes a prat in a hat — and a villainous one at that. First he leaves Amy for his “old safe bet”. Then he goes back to her when the triumph of Back to Black makes her rich enough to bankroll globe-trotting debauchery. Then he introduces her to crack and heroin. And finally, he leaves her again when he’s finally clean — and she is still in mortal danger. Apparently unburdened by talent or wit or generosity, Fielding-Civil seems ludicrously inferior to her. Why on earth would the writer of Stronger than Me — a dry complaint about the neediness of another beta male (“Feel like a lady, and you my ladyboy”) — accept this asymmetry, and even crave it? It’s a mystery. Somehow she mistook Fielding-Civil’s treachery for strength, and his hedonism for courage.

ER near-unshakeable faith in her dad is just as mystifying. Mitchell famously let her dodge a rehab programme for alcohol abuse when it might have worked, well before the crisis of fame. And later, together with her manager Cosbert, he proceeded to bully her into touring when she was deep in an addiction crisis, and exploited her success to make his own reality show about being her dad. At one point, he rocks up with a cameraman in tow, to disrupt her fragile recovery on a Caribbean island. Let’s leave speculation about an Electra complex to the shrinks. But Mitchell’s authority over Amy may have partly been secured by her awareness of a priceless intangible inheritance: his musical sensibility. He was a taxi driver by trade, but as a kid she teleported into the distant galaxy of mid-century jazz by playing his records and falling for his idols: Tony Bennett, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holliday, Dinah Washington. The lurid sadness of Amy’s life and death can obscure her musical importance as the reinventor of that monumental tradition. Amy was a bona fide genius, who exceeded most of the great jazz vocalists by writing her own songs — and by expanding and dirtying the canon with infusions of hip-hop, reggae and indie rock. Anthony Lane, writing in the New Yorker, has pointed out that the film doesn’t do as much as it

could have done to honour Amy’s extraordinary musical force and craft. The early club shows are presented in enticing shards, leaving you jonesing for the whole performance. As with any great songwriter, the full brilliance of Amy’s lyrics — which are consistently lucid, uncluttered, funny and brutal — doesn’t quite transmit on the page. The rhymes and conceits are like windows and walls, and her voice is the “five-storey fire”. Even so, verses like these blaze even on paper . . . Though I battled blind Love is a fate resigned Memories mar my mind Love is a fate resigned Over futile odds And laughed at by the gods And now the final frame Love is a losing game

NE of the tenderest observers of Amy’s life is Yasiin Bey, aka Mos Def, who met her in 2004. “She didn’t have any airs. She was real. We hit it off and became fast friends. She was just a charmer. Sweet lady. I had a bit of a crush on her, to be honest. She was raw . . . fast with a blue joke. Could drink anybody under the table. Wasn’t afraid to roll a smoke. Had a big, giant laugh. She was just a sweetheart, you know.” Five years later in a Miami hotel, he saw the shadow to that radiant decadence. She had just swept the Grammys. “Very late at night she knocks on the door. Comes in and just sits on the couch. I remember feeling very happy for her, and very concerned. She really didn’t know how to be that thing she had been pushed to become. Then she pulled out this aluminium foil. She said, ‘Does this bother you?’ “I said, ‘Amy, I love you. I don’t mind that you get high. But I mind that you get high.’ And I was like: this is someone who is trying to disappear.”

Bey’s dilemma is familiar to every functioning user who is close to a dysfunctional user. Who was he to judge a friend and artist for escaping a labyrinth? The conventional psychiatric wisdom is that creativity has no direct link to substance abuse: instead, a genetic deficiency drives both behaviours. People born with a lowfunctioning dopamine system are more likely to be compulsive seekers of novelty and risk. They need more intense experiences to compensate for their shortage of pleasure in ordinary experience. The dopamine-deprived are therefore more likely to be both creative and addicted. But the addiction doesn’t support their creativity — it harms it. That’s the theory. But it all seems a bit messier than that. Some great artists somehow stay happily and productively addicted for decades — by picking the right drug, and by striking a fine balance between self-control and selfmedication. Some other great artists find a sober voice that is just as inspired as the addicted voice. It’s hard to imagine Amy taking either of those roads. And it’s probably too easy to blame her demise on those close to her, and on the fame culture that consumed her. Hindsight is infinitely sharper than foresight. But she deserved better treatment, in every sense of the word. And if she had lived a long life and never recorded another song, we would have had no cause for complaint. LS ‘Amy’ will be screened at the European Film Festival at Cinema Nouveau in Joburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban, from May 8 to 16. For dates and bookings, go to eurofilmfest.co.za, cinemanouveau.co.za, sterkinekor.mobi, or call 0861 668 437.

Amy Winehouse and Blake Fielder-Civil

AN ME, M O ING EN H Y M AR ROK IES B H LF F A B URIT ’ E S T , AD ON O INSEC K WE S IS DIC ’S A E S HE E, TH ING H HIS OR UAG PING H W ASS ’KEE

LAYOUT Green Dreams Photography Cover: Gallo/Getty Images Spread: Lundhagem, Freedomsky, Econohome Illustration Keith Tamkei Words Thomas Falkiner

Sunday Times Combined Metros 1 - 09/03/2016 04:31:43 PM - Plate:

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Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine March 13 2016

GREEN

DREAMS How to join the off-grid revolution

• Lounge gardening • Sexy pumpkins

PAGE 8

MARCH 13 2016

{ ON THE COVER }

HERE COMES

THE SUN

SPLENDID ISOLATION: Pietro Russo, founder of Ecomo, a South African firm that builds sustainable, prefabricated homes, lives with his family in this modular off-grid house near Vanwyksdorp in the Klein Karoo. The house’s water comes from a nearby spring and the clouds, and its power from the sun. ‘Being off grid is also a mindset; being more aware of usage of electricity, washing dishes by hand and switching off appliances we don’t use,’ says Russo. To find out more, go to www.ecomohome.com

Going off-grid is getting savvier by the day. But finding your place in the sun-powered world is not simple. Thomas Falkiner talked details with two pioneers

O you want to go off the grid? Perhaps you’re an eco-warrior inspired by Elon Musk and looking to make a difference. Or a survivalist banking on being the last one standing when modern society goes tits up in the not-too-distant future. Hell, maybe you’re just sick and tired of load-shedding leaving you in the dark every other winter night. No matter your motivation, you’ve realised that the time has come to pull the plug and invest in your own mini power station: a sustainable bastion of joules and amps and watts that will meet all your energy needs, whatever happens. It’s a wonderful idea on paper — but where on Earth do you begin? And what options exist to meet your needs? In the complex game of farming power, there are three main players: solar, wind and micro-hydro. Unless you live next to a stream or river, the latter is not an option. Wind is great if you live at the coast or in a consistently blustery area. But if you don’t, well, it’s not going to do much. So what we’re left with, then, is solar: a resource we have in abundance thanks to our warm, dry climate. The sun’s rays pack up to 2 400kWh of light energy per square metre; a solar panel con-

verts this to electrical energy. It’s a simple enough principle, but in practice I’m sure it’s far more complicated. Which is why I’ve just pulled into the driveway belonging to a chap named Greg Ball. The director of Climatron Projects and MD of Airco, Ball has a sizeable home juiced without any input from Eskom. In a sea of resource-sucking houses, his abode is an island of self-sufficiency. “I’m interested in technology,” he says over an espresso. “And the fact that you can actually live free of oil companies and large power utilities.” He’s a man who understands the art of engineering, and his place is an example of an off-the-grid installation done right. The pitch of the roof is sympathetic with the horizon, to ensure solar panels receive more sun more of the time. Then there’s a temperature-controlled annexe in the corner of the garage that houses a vital component of any off-grid setup: the battery bank that stores all excess electricity generated by the panels. “I’m currently running 36 locally produced lead acid batteries. They’re much cheaper than going the lithium-ion route. You’re looking at around R1 100 for one. And as long as you keep them at a steady temperature, between 20 to 25°C, they should actually give you a reasonable life — six to 10 years. Look,

MUCHBOX: A prefabricated, modular energy-efficient house designed by the Czech firm FREEDOMKY Visit freedomky.cz/

occasionally you’ll have to replace one now and again, but that’s par for the course.” Then you get the inverter, the third and final piece of this equipment puzzle, that converts and distributes the direct current (DC) stored in the batteries into the alternating current (AC) needed to feed your appliances and lights. A solar set-up powers a lot. LED lights, televisions, PlayStations. fridges, washing machines, tumble dryers and heat pumps. Everything in Ball’s house runs off the sun — even his cars. He and his wife were among the first local buyers of the all-electric Nissan Leaf, which is charged at home. “The two of them cost less than one Land Cruiser and they save us R8 000 a month in fuel — that’s what we were paying to run a Volvo

and Toyota Prado. Neither of them has ever been to a petrol station unless it’s to buy bread or milk. I even pump the tyres myself because I’ve got a compressor in the garage. So I’m totally self-sufficient when it comes to cars.” But what about road trips out of town, far from viable charging points? “Well then you just hire a 4x4, fully kitted and drive it to wherever you want to go.” A clever approach, especially considering the savings on services, tyres and insurance. “If you combine your motoring in with the solar solution there’s a very big case for it. But having said that, even if you charge a Leaf on normal mains power it’ll still use two-fifths of bugger all — because to do 2 200km in a Leaf is like R250 to R260.” All well and good, but what hap-

R36 666

Mini House Kit

Two 255W solar panels + one 3kVa inverter + two 100Ah deep-cycle batteries

MARCH 13 2016

pens when the clouds decide to gather for a day or two or three? With the sun trapped behind pesky layers of vapour, and no generator in Ball’s house, surely he would have to switch back to the grid? “Yes,” he admits. “But it would take quite a serious ‘perfect storm’ to put us out of power because we have quite a big battery bank.” Ball has calculated that, on average, his household operates on around 40kWh of power a day. At any given time his batteries hold about 80kWh, which should provide a 48-hour window — possibly more if you implement a bit of internal ‘load-shedding’ (not charging both cars, for example). “Remember, cloud cover on its own doesn’t mean you’re not producing any power. You can have cloud cover and these things are still producing 50% power because there are still UV rays present. But thick cloud cover partnered with rain — think English weather — and you’re down to 5% of your production capability. Then, yes, you will have to resort back to the grid.” You could get around this by supplementing your setup with either a petrol or diesel-powered generator. The downsides: a) they can be very noisy and b) burning fuel, they’re not eco-friendly. A good generator is also expensive. But if you are considering solar at all, then best you start preparing to part with some serious money.

ALL is the first person to admit that solar power remains pretty much the preserve of the wealthy — for the time being, anyway. “For a family of four you can start talking at R180 000. Now, this won’t take your pool off the grid but it’s going to take your fridge, alarms, garage, gates, water heating, computers and TVs — all of that off the grid. “Look, you could also build it up over time. You could put in an invertor and 10 batteries, which would act as an uninterrupted power supply when the power goes out. This scalable solution would cost about R80 000. Then when you are ready you can add in the panels and bolt in some extra batteries.” These numbers will scare away many potential sun farmers. But there’s always an exception to the rule — and one South African has gone solar for a song. Director and actor Warrick Grier owns a two-bedroom cottage in the Western Cape hamlet of Suurbraak. “The property I bought was just a piece of POWER PLAYER: Billionaire Elon Musk, whose firm Tesla created the Powerwall kit battery

THE PRICE OF POWER We unpack the costs of four unique home solar systems NOTE: Quotes include cabling, mounting structures and earthing kits. All quotes supplied by Dako Power in Strijdom Park, Johannesburg (dako.co.za)

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NICE NICHE : This eco-cabin in Norway, named Knapphullet, is set into a rock crevice, and was designed by architecture firm Lund Hagem Visit lundhagem.no/

forest on a river, which lent itself completely to an experiment with being off the grid entirely,” he says. Unlike Ball’s house, which still has a municipal electricity connection, something that’s tricky to avoid in urban areas, Grier’s is totally detached from the powers that be. “I had the option of getting the services provided by the local municipality but I rejected them. I felt I could do without them [Eskom] and I didn’t want any real involvement with them on that front. “A friend and I created a solar system consisting of six 600-watt panels, eight batteries and an inverter. I think I paid about R35 000 for it, which is really very good. If you nose around, shop around — and if it is a system like mine that is not connected to the grid — then it’s actually very reasonable. And that is what we managed to put together, sourcing different things from different people, coming up with a package that came in at that price, which was really terrific.” Grier has never put it to the test, but he speculates that his battery bank is good for about three days of reserve energy. He uses super lowvoltage lights and doesn’t

R77 371

Medium House Kit

Six 255W solar panels + one 5kVa inverter + four 200Ah deep-cycle batteries

Small house

R223 212

Tesla Powerwall Kit

R146 569

Twelve 255W solar panels + one SolarEdge 5Kw inverter + one 7kWh Tesla Powerwall

waste any power on heatPremium House Kit ing water. “I use gas,” he Twelve 255W solar panels + Standard explains. “I put a 48kg botHouse one 5kVa inverter + Twelve tle outside and that has 200Ah deep-cycle batteries lasted me nine months — in fact it’s still going. One of Medium these bottles will cost you House about R800, so you’re paying under R100 a month.” In a true stand of sovereignty, Grier’s off-grid living uses wild water as well as wild sunshine. “I take water from the nearby waterfall that comes into my house directly through a pipe that I laid up the mountain.” But what about contamination? “The water is very clean to start with. It’s slightly brown, but I have a basic agriculture filter system before it hits the house. I use it for showering and washing up. And then the tank on the other side of house is white water, rainwater from the The Powerwall might not be that mindset is perhaps the most crucial roof, that’s got a more refined filter. That’s more for drinking, although beneficial to a family of four, but it thing needed when contemplating I get most of my drinking water can meet the simpler needs of flat the shift to solar. Going off-grid requires investing from the nearby pass — spring wa- dwellers: a group of urbanites for ter leaks out of the mountain so I whom the installation of solar pan- money in the short term in order to els and battery banks and bulky in- save money (and the planet) in the just fill up 25-litre cans with that.” This way of life is something of a verters is a pipe dream. During long term. The time it takes to renovelty, one that very nearly load-shedding or outages due to coup your investment will vary eclipses the hype of the new Tesla faults, the Powerwall’s 7kWh capac- widely with consumption, but a Powerwall, soon be unleashed on ity can keep your home essentials rough range is between three and five years. And given that Eskom our shores: a sleek, liquid- powered. tariffs have risen six times faster cooled, lithium-ion battery pack that can be bolted to ET owning a house than overall inflation since 2007 your wall and hold 7kWh of doesn’t really give you li- (by 300.7% as against 45.1%), with backup power. Some have cence to be smug. Even if no sign of relief, it could be a very been quick to sing its praises you’ve got the capital to savvy financial decision. But if you have some money, the as the mainstream saviour of sink into a legitimate off-the-grid sustainability. Others are not solar installation, your humble chances are good that you’d rather quite sold. abode may simply not be suited to spend it on other things — espeit. It may be facing south instead of cially in a consumerist society such north, or have a steeply raked roof, as ours. Given the choice, most Says Ball: “I think Elon or be too close to tall trees or other well-to-do citizens would buy two Musk is a very clever guy… shade-casting obstacles. All of these Range Rover Sports over a Nissan Leaf or a BMW i3. but the power storage he’s factors come into play. In South Africa, appearances are A home optimised for solar talking about is very small for should look very different to a ‘nor- everything, and consumption, staSouth Africans. “I would still use lead acid mal” house — it would more close- tus and conformity continue to batteries. I understand why ly resemble a small office building. overshadow sustainability. We desperately need to rearrange they’re using lithium-ion be- “Green houses don’t always appeal cause it obviously cuts down to a lot of people from a visual point our priorities and accept that on weight but then you don’t of view,” says Ball. “So if you want wealth, perhaps now more than evhave a weight issue in the do- to go green, you need to change er, needs to be used responsibly. Only when that happens will mestic situation. Yes, in a car, your perceptions.” Apart from having some capital more of us, like Greg Ball and Warlike the Tesla Model S, it in the bank, a rejigging of one’s rick Grier, flip the switch. LS makes sense.”

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NEW AUDI RS7 IS

A REAL BLAST

â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

The utterly bonkers new Audi RS7 Sportback is the fastest, meanest and most powerful model in A7 Sportback lineup. It also happens to be the most potent RS model within the entire Audi range. Yup, not even the mighty R8 V10 Plus CoupĂŠ can hold a steroid-filled syringe to this machineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s enviable on-paper power and torque credentials. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the daddy.

Subtly aggressive. Like a brawny Schwarzenegger-sized bodyguard wearing a subdued charcoal suit, the RS7 doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t make that great a fuss about its supercar-rivaling performance. Park it next to its less powerful TDI BiTurbo sibling and youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll notice muted cosmetic upgrades, such as a new front apron peppered

with no less than four gloss-black honeycomb grilles. The one nearest the spoiler lip has been emblazoned with contrasting white â&#x20AC;&#x153;quattroâ&#x20AC;? lettering. Handsome five-blade, 21-inch, alloy wheels dominate the profile view. The rear looms large with a bespoke air-diffuser, flanked by two huge bazooka-sized exhaust outlets. Those of you looking to make more of a visual statement might be interested in shelling out an extra R108 000 for the sinisterly beautiful Daytona Grey Matt paintwork treatment. Combined with the standard matt aluminium finish applied to the front grille surrounds and side mirrors, it makes the RS7 Sportback look like some ion-powered war machine from the Galactic Empire. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tear my eyes away from it. Inside, youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll find the impeccably

built interior native to all A7 models. Except here, it benefits from a flat-bottomed RS steering wheel, carbon fibre dashboard inlays and supportive leather/Alcantara seats (full leather optional). The latter feature diamond-quilted centre sections that look particular fetching in a Bentley-esque kind of way. Other RS7-specific features include a revised Driver Information System that displays boost pressure and oil temperature. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also a lap timer should you attend a track day. Opening the taps on the RS7 Sportback is akin to being blasted through the barrel of a cannon: your peripheral vision blurs and the asphalt in front of you narrows into an infinite black arrowhead. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a special experience, an overthe-top pageant of speed that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve

only experienced in cars such as the McLaren 12C and Porsche 911 Turbo. And it makes you feel like a god of the road: an all-conquering monarch to which no gap is too small, no convoy of trucks too long to overtake. Regardless of what gear youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re in or where you might be in the rev range, the power delivery is savage

YOUR PERIPHERAL VISION BLURS AND THE ASPHALT IN FRONT OF YOU NARROWS and absolute. In the wild 412kW RS7, velocity is king. Now, you certainly wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expect such a gross hunk of muscle to

handle with any great prowess. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t. Yet after flinging it up and down the infamous Franschhoek pass two or three times, the RS7 proved to be an extremely capable steer. Unlike the BMW M6, it disguises its weight well and flows through corners with a nimbleness of a smaller saloon car. As to be expected, mechanical grip levels are, courtesy those 21inch ContiSportContacts and quattro all wheel-drive system, extremely high. This not only massages your confidence through sweeping high-speed bends, but also allows you to get back on the power sooner after initial turn in. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a surprising amount of feedback, too, which further serves to pour more sugar into the dynamic mix. I guess what Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m saying here is that the RS7 is a surprisingly agile bit of kit. One that, coincidentally, handles better than

FRIDAY JULY 4 2014

DStv Channel 189

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IGNITIONLIVE

THE COMPETITION BMW M6 Gran Coupe

Engine: 3 993cc V8 BiTurbo Power: 412kW at 5 700rpm Torque: 700Nm at 1 750rpm Top Speed: 250km/h (limited); 305km/h with Dynamic Package Plus 0-100km/h: 3.9 seconds (claimed) Fuel consumption: 9.8l/100km (claimed combined) CO2: 229g/kmPricing: From R1 450 500 Mercedes CLS 63 AMG

SPACE TO SPARE: With a generous boot, the RS7 is ideal for weekend getaways and, right, passengers relax on comfortable seats which feature diamond-quilted centre sections

SPECS Engine: 3 993cc V8 BiTurbo Power: 412kW at 5 700rpm Torque: 700Nm at 1 750rpm Top Speed: 250km/h (limited); 305km/h with Dynamic Package Plus 0-100km/h: 3.9 seconds (claimed) Fuel consumption: 9.8l/100km (claimed combined) CO2: 229g/km Pricing: From R1 450 500 Rating:

most Aston Martins Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve driven. Ride quality is equally top-drawer. Whether youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re riding on the standard air suspension system, or the optional coilsprung setup that forms part of the Dynamic Package Plus package, this Audi seldom feels flustered over choppy tarmac. The only niggle I could find was with the staying power of the braking system. Push the RS7 to its limits and that middle pedal soon starts sinking closer and closer to the firewall. The optional carbon fibre ceramic brake package (also part of Dynamic Package Plus) helps in this regard but, even then, I noticed some fade

Being the flagship model of the Audi RS range, the RS7 comes loaded to the hilt with gadgets and gizmos. Full LED headlamps; MMI 3G Navigation; sunroof; heads-up driving display; night vision with pedestrian assist; dynamic steering and a quattro sports differential ship as standard equipment. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also Bluetooth telephony and audio streaming but, alas, no dedicated USB ports. Guess you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have it all. Another cool feature is the Cylinder on Demand system that, at low to medium loads and engine speeds, automatically deactivates four of the eight cylinders to save fuel. Good thing because this car has a thirst. Definitely. Considering how much performance youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re getting here â&#x20AC;&#x201D; not to mention a considerable amount of comfort and practicality â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the RS7 Sportback is something of a bargain. Starting from R1 450 500, it also undercuts two of its nearest rivals, the Mercedes-Benz CLS 63 AMG S (R1 527 300) and BMW M6 Gran CoupĂŠ (R1 590 500). With the money you save you could then specify the optional Dynamic Package Plus package (R128 400) that bolts on those all-important carbon fibre ceramic brakes. In my opinion, though, these anchors should actually feature as standard fare, considering the extreme velocities this Audi is capable of reaching.

Nissan GTR

CONTRIBUTOR QUIPS You're far less likely to get it sideways unless you've gone in fast. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Majic Mike

But I'm not sure the balance of lateral grip to power is as delicate as on the standard car â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Don Juan

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GRID

RACI NE

@gridraccine007

he GT86 was always going to be a magnet for tuners and tweakers. And Toyota actively encourages it. Even before its launch, Toyota showed Japanese tuner companies the GT86 blueprints so they could get cracking on an ecosystem of boltons. Most carmakers would like to hog the aftermarket to themselves, but Tetsuya Tada, the car's chief engineer, convinced his bosses it was in Toyota's interest to let outsiders in, because it would ramp up the general buzz and sell more cars. That said, Toyota isn't stepping away from the action: its Toyota Racing Development (TRD) arm is launching a series of hop-up bits too. Beginning in March, the TRD parts will sell as a trim level on new cars, and if that goes well, they'll later be offered for cars already on the road. To be honest, the difference the package makes over the standard car is subtle, so in the interest of not talking cobblers, I was glad I was driving the two of them back-to-back. The pack consists of a four-exit exhaust for a noticeably fruitier noise and a barely noticeable 34bhp. Bigger wheels carry 225/40R18 tyres, of stickier compound. For comparison, standard are 215/45R17 - actually Prius tyres, made for durability and low rolling resistance, not grip. A carbon-fibre strut brace stiffens the shell. An aero kit is effective but not too brash. Out on a track, the TRD car has a neutral-to-oversteer steady-state cornering balance, as does the

We take toyota's gt 86 to the track and road

BIG FROM JAPAN standard car. on a track, the TRD car has a But there's a whole lot more grip. And it runs out less gradually, less transparently. Which is perhaps less fun. Mind you, the car I drove had optional adjustable dampers and stiffer front anti-roll bar. Still, the extra precision is nice. Out on a track, the TRD car has a neutral-to-oversteer

THE COMPETITION Alfa Romeo 4C Price: From R465 900

steady-state cornering balance, as does the standard car. But there's a whole lot more grip. And it runs out less gradually, less transparently. Which is perhaps less fun. lateral grip to power is as delicate as on the standard car (Tada is working on a lower-ratio rear diff, which would help). The playability is hing that makes the base car so unique.

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Porshe Cayman Price: From R895 900

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Audi TT Price: From R425 000

Nissan 370z Price: From R355 000

SPECS Engine: 1.6-litre 4-cylinders Power: 86kW at 6 000rpm Torque: 156Nm at 4 400rpm Top speed: 195km/h Fuel consumption: 5.8l/ 100km CO2: 136g/km Price: From R265 900 Rating:

CONTRIBUTOR QUIPS You're far less likely to get it sideways unless you've gone in fast. — Majic Mike But I'm not sure the balance of lateral grip to power is as delicate as on the standard car — Don Juan The playability is eroded, and with it the thing thatyou've gone in fast. — Toothy Grin

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THE COMPETITION

Honda Civic Price: From R225 000

SPECS

A flawless cut

Engine: 1.6-litre 4-cylinders Power: 86kW at 6 000rpm Torque: 156Nm at 4 400rpm Top speed: 195km/h Fuel consumption: 5.8l/ 100km CO2: 136g/km Price: From R265 900 Rating:

Hyundai Accenta Price: From R325 000

fter completing a long distance test of Kia's new Cerato -- the popular sleek sedan which has also been joined by a hatchback in this country -- it was a case of the more I drove it, the more I loved it. Related CoverageimageKia Cerato Si sedan reviewimageKia Cerato Koup Turbo review | first driveimageKia Cerato SLi hatch reviewimageKia Cerato 2004 2013 review | usedimageKia Cerato S 1.8-litre petrol four-door sedan reviewMore on KIA Cerato prices start at a sharp $19,990 for the 1.8-litre S, you will pay $23,990 for the better performing 2.0-litre Si, which is the pick of the range. The top-of-theline SLi tips the $30,000 barrier by the time you add satellite navigation. It sells for $30,990. The S is well packaged with three adjustments for steering wheel effort, keyless entry, sixway adjustable driver's seat, heated door mirrors, LCD instrument cluster, MP3 compatible audio with CD, radio and six speakers, iPod connection, Bluetooth and air conditioning. Jump up to the Si and you add

alloy wheels, an excellent rearview camera, dusk sensing headlamps, push button starting, folding door mirrors when you park (a neat trick), a premium steering wheel complete with audio and cruise controls, carbon-look to the dashboard, touch LCD colour screen and air vents for back seat passengers, which is a welcome move in the small car pack. Go the whole hog and the SLi adds bigger 17-inch alloy wheels, auto-dimming rear view mirror, LED daytime running lights, HID headlamps, leather trim, eightway adjustable driver's seat with two memory settings, powered sunroof, paddle shifters, dualzone climate-controlled air conditioning, heated and vented driver's seat and cooling system for the glovebox to keep the kids' lollies chilled. All models come with a sensible full-sized spare. We drove the SLi, which gets Kia's 2.0-litre all-alloy petrol direct injection engine. It delivers 129kW (at 6500 rpm) and 209Nm of torque (4700 rpm) and is mated to a six-speed manual or auto transmission. The beauty of this engine is it packs a reasonable

Mazda 3 Price: From R275 500

punch and excellent fuel economy. Thanks to a tall set of top gears in the auto, the Cerato consistently returned 7.3l/100km for the 1700km journey, but we saw a low of 6.8l/100km. Kia claims a combined consumption of 7.4l/100km. When required for rapid overtaking the mid-range response is surprisingly good for a 2.0-litre engine. The auto allows manual shifting when required with rapid sequential up or down changes. What is remarkable about the Cerato is how quiet it is, with only tyre noise making a presence in the cabin. Kia has made a huge effort to improve sound deadening over the previous

model and it's noticeable. Designed in America but having a Euro look, the Cerato is classy and good looking with a sporty edge. Kia describes it has having an "emotional appeal" and they are right. This latest model is lower, sleeker, longer and wider. The lower hip height of the seats may not suit those less nimble but the offset is a gain in legroom. The sloping coupe-like roofline looks like it would compromise rear head room but it doesn't, and the 421litre boot space is generous for this class. The driving position is comfortable, even over long distances, thanks to its eight-way adjustment and lumber control.

VW Jetta Price: From R475 500

Nissan Sentra Price: From R675 700

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BMW i8 vs Porsche 911 Carrera twin test review. Michael du Champ takes both for a spin

AND Rover Range Rover Sport is quite a mouthful, but the lengthy moniker hasn’t disadvantaged the British luxury sport-utility in the marketplace. In fact, the Range Rover Sport was Land Rover’s top seller in the U.S. last year, finding more Yankee buyers than any of its other four models (Evoque, LR2, LR4, and Range Rover) by significant margins. In fact, the Range Rover Sport single-handedly outsold the entire Jaguar brand in the U.S. in both 2011 and 2012. This is perhaps even more significant because, until now, the Range Rover Sport was a Range Rover in name only. Since its introduction for 2006, the Sport was based on the Land Rover LR3/LR4, with its heavy, steel ladder frame and beefier mechanicals. Although the Sport adopted much of the flagship Range Rover’s exterior appearance and interior appointments, it was still, underneath it all, a stalwart LR4. The 2014 Range Rover Sport also debuts with a new base engine, a supercharged 340-hp 3.0-liter V-6 that also sees duty under the hoods of the Jaguar XJ and XF sedans. (The six also will be offered in the big Range Rover.) Land Rover estimates the V-6 Sport will accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 6.9 seconds, 0.3 second quicker than last year’s more corpulent model with the 375-hp naturally aspirated V-8. Another supercharged mill, this one a 510-hp 5.0-liter V-8, carries over from last year’s Range Rover Sport. Land Rover estimates the

Birmingham have had their grotesque booms and sad busts Sport with the blown V-8 will sprint to 60 in 5.0 seconds, nearly a second better than it predicted for the heavier, six-cog utility with the same supercharged engine. (We recorded a 5.1-second time for the old supercharged V-8 model.) No word yet on official fuel-economy estimates, but with the reduced mass, electric steering, eight-speed tranny, and an engine stop-start feature that will be standard on all 2014 Range Rover Sports, we expect a noticeable improvement. Another benefit of switching to the Range Rover platform is technology sharing. For 2014, the Range Rover Sport will be available with the new Terrain Response 2 allwheel-drive system that analyzes the terrain ahead and automatically determines which of the five settings (general, grass/grav-

el/snow, mud/ruts, sand, or rock crawl) is appropriate. A next-generation air-suspension system provides four different ride heights, and other systems such as active roll control, a dynamic active rearlocking differential, and torque vectoring by braking will aim to enhance control and agility. Even with the 800-pound weight reduction, the 2014 Range Rover Sport is longer, lower, and wider than the 2013 model. The Sport makes good use of the extra seven inches of wheelbase, packaging an optional plus-two third-row seat for children and occasional adult use. The formula changes for 2014, with the new Sport switching over to the all-aluminum unitized body construction of the Range Rover flagship. In the bargain, the “Sport” loses around 800 pounds of mass, while gaining the eight-speed automatic transmission, independent suspension, massive ventilated four-wheel disc brakes, and electric-assisted rack-and-pinion steering from the range-topper.You do not see Maine lobsters dragging themselves dumbly across the Sahara. This, we suspect, is because

A lobster in the desert is just too pathetic a thing to consider lobsters secrete urine from their heads and so they might become mired in the sand they just turned into mud. Also, a -lobster in the desert is just too pathetic a thing to consider. Similarly, you won’t see a cougar -paddling around the deep ocean gathering up cheeks full of krill for Sunday brunch. The point here (other than to inform you that lobsters urinate out of their heads) is that creatures evolve to suit their habitats. Have a look at the lovable—positively huggable!—-little buggers pictured on these pages. The Audi Q5, BMW X3, and Land Rover Range Rover Evoque have been unnaturally selected by intelligent designers to thrive in their environment. And that environment is Birmingham, Michigan. Nothing whatsoever like its industry-heavy British namesake, the Michigan version is five square miles of faux 19th-century Parisian buildings, some built about five years ago. There are two Starbucks just 0.3 mile apart, specialized boutiques of various sorts, large homes both gracious and gaudy, and a median household income more than twice the state

QUICK SPECS: PORSCHE 911 Engine: Intercooled Turbo Premium Unleaded I-4, 2.0 L Fuel Economy: 9.5km/litre Horsepower @ RPM: 240 @ 5500 SNet Torque @ RPM: 250 @ 1750 Price: R 560 000

QUICK SPECS: BMW i8 Engine: Intercooled Turbo Premium Unleaded I-4, 2.0 L Fuel Economy: 9.5km/litre Horsepower @ RPM: 240 @ 5500 SNet Torque @ RPM: 250 @ 1750 Price: R 560 000

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MARK NEW CAR SMELL: The interiors of the BMW i8 coupe and Porsche 911 Carerra average. And yes, there are a few -cougars prowling town, too. To keep the residents well stocked, there are Land Rover and Audi dealerships right downtown. To get their BMW fix, residents must drive four whole miles to even wealthier Bloomfield Hills. This is a hardship many are willing to endure. SUVs and places such as Birmingham have had their grotesque booms and sad busts. And both are, for the most part, back to a certain level of success, albeit one that is less ostentatious than before. And so we’ve gathered these three modest luxury utes, each powered by a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine, an automatic transmission with two-to-four more gears than the engines have cylinders, allwheel drive, a modicum of practicality, and essentially no off-road

pretensions. Audi was an early adopter of the formula, bolting the corporate direct-injected and turbocharged 2.0liter into the Q5 for the 2011 model year. The only Audi that outsells this adorable ute in the U.S. is the A4, and not by much. For 2013, the

Porsche was at the high end of the scale with this model Q5 received the most minor of face lifts to subtly bring it in line with the company’s new and almost imperceptibly different grille design. Audi also added a hybrid model and swapped the torque-light V-6 for a supercharged V-6. New multimedia options and electric-assist power

steering are the only other additions of interest. Land Rover was early to the premium-brand, small-SUV market, but not with a vehicle that anyone appeared to want. That changed for 2012 with the introduction of the Range Rover Evoque, a vehicle so self-conscious and unusual-looking that the company couldn’t bring itself to spell the word “evoke” properly. Whether in the five-door or the bonkers three-door “Coupe” model, this Rover is powered solely by a 240-hp version of Ford’s turbocharged and direct-injected 2.0liter four. Like most other major carmakers, BMW has gone batty over turbocharging, so much so that it killed its sacred cow. The price of entry, even for these most modest of luxury wagons, is about $40,000; $50,000 for a well-

Pictures: HOTRODS equipped version. The Audi, with the Premium Plus suite of luxury goodies, has the lowest list price in the test at $45,120. If you want a more expensive Q5, you’ll have to order the bigger engine or the hybrid. The X3, loaded with five option packages costing more than $1000 each, came in at $52,345; the Evoque was at the high end of the scale with a semi-shocking price of $56,795 for this Prestige Premium package example. There are other choices in this -segment, including entries from Cadillac and Mercedes, but none of them hews to our new-age-powertrain requirement. Pricey fashion accessories they might be, but we expect. ■ Tell us what you think Email: opinion@ignition.co.za Twitter: @igntionST

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29 MARCH 2015

MARCH 6 2015 IGNITION LIVE

MOVERS & SHAKERS

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DAPPER MAN: Ralph Lauren in his secret garage

WHEELS OF FASHION

Ralph Lauren’s passion for cars is reflected in his collection, one of the world’s greatest. He shares his personal favorites with Mike Bissely

ALPH Lauren keeps one of the most valuable collections of cars in the world inside a secret garage less than an hour’s drive from his Fifth Avenue duplex in Manhattan — but he steers clear of it most of the time. While most New Yorkers battle for parking spots on city streets, the billionaire clothing mogul and known gearhead keeps about 60 rare roadsters — from a 1958 Ferrari Testarossa to a 1938 Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia to a 1929 Bentley Blower — in an unassuming office park-like building in Bedford Hills. But he only visits the spot for about 25 to 30 hours out of the year, according to his lawyers. The fashionista's team of legal eagles revealed the short amount of time spent at the garage in court papers last year in response to a lawsuit accusing Lauren of stiffing a Westchester contractor out of nearly $300,000. The lawyers were trying to prove that the contractor, William Scherer, couldn’t sue Lauren for not being fully paid to renovate the garage because Lauren didn’t live on the property and doesn’t own the building. D.A.D. Auto Storage, a holding company controlled by Lauren, is the title-holder to the building and the only entity that can be sued, the lawyers argued. While Lauren rarely stops by the garage, he pays car curator Mark Reinwald to watch over the building, maintain the vehicles and take each of his vintage rides for a spin every once in a while, according to court papers. On the few occasions Lauren shows up at the garage, he usually spends his time

talking shop with Reinwald. “In fact when Mr. Lauren is at the premises, his normal activities include walking through the building and looking at the automobiles stored therein, as well as discussing individual vehicles and automobiles shows and museum tours with Reinwald,” his lawyers wrote in a legal filing. “Occasionally, a guest will accompany Mr. Lauren to view the automobiles.” Scherer sued Lauren in Westchester Supreme Court, claiming he was never paid $297,367 for nearly $1.7 million in repairs and improvements his contracting firm performed on the building starting in 2007. The case was sent to arbitration, but it was dismissed last year when Scherer couldn’t come up with $12,000 to cover his share of upfront payments to the arbitrators. A source said that Scherer is currently contemplating taking further legal action to recover the money. Lauren's D.A.D. Auto Storage has owned the mega-garage since 2007. The Polo shirt purveyor has tried to keep its location hidden ever since. Lauren’s given only one interview about the garage, allowing a Vanity Fair writer and a photographer to tour the facility in 2011. The magazine’s story is purposely coy about saying where the garage is located, only that it’s in Westchester County. “Within it are 60 or so of the rarest and most valuable cars in the world, including a 1938 Bugatti coupe, a 1938 Alfa Romeo Mille Miglia roadster, and a 1930 Mercedes-Benz SSK ‘Count Trossi’ roadster, only one of which was manufactured,” Vanity Fair article says. The lawsuit reveals that the garage is located on a street right off an exit on Saw Mill River Parkway. The gated facility is next to a strip mall. Its windows have been blocked out so no one can peek in. Lauren replaced stairs with ramps so that cars could easily be moved from one floor to the next, according to Vanity Fair article. It has a conference room decorated with trophies Lauren’s cars won at auto shows and a workshop that “looks more like a laboratory than an automotive bay,” the article says. ■

RED: Lauren’s 1938 Alfa Romeo 8c and his 1958 Ferrari, top.

Picture: RALPH LAUREN

PAGE 12

MARCH 6 2015

CLASSICS

29 MARCH 2015

IGNITION LIVE

I Stuart Johnston

OLD SCHOOL

THE 1939 BMW 328 ROADSTER. PAVING THE WAY FOR MODERN SPEEDSTERS SEND US YOUR OPINION Letters@STignition.co.za

N the mid-1930s, production roadsters and competition cars were still very similar in technical terms – and motorsport was still the ideal place to prove the performance and reliability of a production car. But to keep up with the competition, BMW soon had to build cars with more power and muscle. So BMW’s engineers looked for ways and means to significantly increase engine output without increasing engine size. And they found the solution – the M328, the engine powering the legendary BMW 328 sports car in 1936. Right from the start in its debut at Nürburgring on 14 June 1936, BMW’s new roadster literally pulverized even the most powerful supercharged competitors. This outstanding success was attributable to the well-balanced combination of superior engine power and cutting-edge suspension technology characteristic of BMW roadsters to this day – 80 hp in the regular version and low weight of just 1830 lbs gave this elegant roadster superior performance still impressive today. With the BMW 328 Roadster initially being restricted to motorsport as of mid-1936, production of the series model started in spring 1937. And so this high-performance sports car was driven not only by BMW’s works drivers, but also by private customers since, over and above racing, it was very well suited for everyday use. And with its top speed of 96 mph, this was indeed one of the fastest cars on the road back then. But again, the BMW 328 Roadster remained a very rare bird, with only 464 units of this classic roadster being built up to 1940. The extreme open-topped two-seater is

designed to commemorate the 75th birthday of the BMW 328 racing car, which still holds the highest average speed around the classic Mille Miglia circuit. “With the BMW 328 Hommage, we wish to pay homage to the passion and inventiveness of the fathers of the BMW 328,” said BMW Group Classic CEO Karl Baumer. “They created an icon which is considered a milestone in the history of the automobile.” The 3.0-litre straight six-powered concept makes extensive use of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic, a material already used by BMW in the M6 and M3, and one that’s likely to feature in its forthcoming range of i eco-models. Indeed, the show car’s bodywork uses the carbon weave pattern as a design cue; it’s not covered up by any paint, a move that also fits with the 328’s ethos of light weight.

double kidney grille - but there are also strong overtones from the car’s bodywork. Other design cues include a slightly asymmetric windscreen - a nod to early racing machinery - and four leather straps which run

across the bonnet, disappearing at the top of the side panels and then ing at the bottom of each flank. VISIT OUR WEBSITE www.ignitionlive.co.za

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FILM you should never count Cruise out”. But while the critics might have been ready to accept his return, audiences clearly weren’t. The past four years haven’t been kind to him from the much-spoofed displays of affection, the increased passion for Scientology and his rant about Brooke Shields using anti-depressants. Cruise’s star power is now barely visible. It’s not just Cruise who is struggling, however. His Knight & Day co-star, Cameron Diaz, has also seen her star on the descendent in recent years. Back in 2003, Diaz became the third actress ever to earn a $20-million pay cheque (for her role in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle). Yet, recently, she’s proved to be a less bankable commodity. The Box and My Sister’s Keeper both majorly underperformed while the only commercial success she’s seen of late has been as a voice in Shrek Forever After, a film that would have proved popular with or without her name attached. Franchises that rely on the product, rather than those involved, have become a danger to the star system. Just examine the continued success of the James Bond franchise. The reboot, exchanging Pierce Brosnan for the lesser known Daniel Craig, has proved financially lucrative. The most recent, Quantum of Solace, became the highest-grossing Bond flick ever, despite possessing no other recognisable stars. While some actors do become an integral part of a franchise and the makers count on their involvement, they can often flounder when taken away from their comfort zone. So, while Robert Pattinson may have helped New Moon make over $700million worldwide, his starring role in this year’s romantic drama Remember Me couldn’t even make it to $60million internationally. Sure, he attracts devoted Facebook fans and screaming premiere crowds, but the allimportant question is: “Can he open a film?” So far, we can’t answer. The problems facing Pattinson and his generation are also relatable to their overexposure in mediums outside of the cinema. The younger fanbase are often more interested to see candid pictures of their idols or read about their romantic liaisons than they would be to actually pay money to see their latest films. The space between us and them has been gradually eroded, with increased tabloid access and the ability to get “closer” via Twitter. Paying money to go and watch them play a role is almost … alienating. The more we know about their private lives, the harder it is to disassociate this from their onscreen persona. So, as Mel Gibson’s aggressive side is leaked over the Internet and Lindsay Lohan’s inability to remain sober lands her in jail, their film careers appear to be dead in the water. It looks like maintaining a normal, nonscandalous private life can help stars wanting to keep their position at the top. It certainly benefits self-proclaimed family men like Will Smith and Johnny Depp, who are relative strangers to bad publicity. Smith is smart at playing to his strengths and when he combines action and comedy (which he often does), the box office is reliably enormous. Depp’s later career has

been reliant on other elements, but his popular and wide-ranging appeal has undoubtedly added to their profits. Both actors have also achieved Oscar nominations on top of their commercial success. Looking to the future, they’re playing it safe. Smith has Men In Black III on the cards and Depp is shooting the fourth Pirates instalment. A total lack of scandal helps them to remain familyfriendly leading men and their good behaviour is rewarded by hefty pay cheques. But they are exceptions and the traditional star system as a whole is shifting, but what is it shifting towards? We’ve recently seen Avatar, a movie mainly populated by CG characters, gross more money than any other title in history, suggesting that the future might be looking a bit like a video game. With every other film now being released with a third dimension, the onus is on spectacle and production over acting. Avatar’s lead, Sam Worthington, is being pushed as a new star and his work in Terminator: Salvation and Clash of the Titans has helped to solidify this, but his presence is yet to count as a reason for going to see a film. On the other end, lo-fi successes such as Paranormal Activity prove that even without blinding special effects, a simple idea can render recognisable stars unnecessary. With all these problems threatening their future employment, it’s decision time for the A-list. After Cruise’s Knight & Day misfire, he’s decided to follow what has worked for him recently. His cameo in Tropic Thunder as the obnoxious, overweight studio head Les Grossman was a big hit at the MTV Movie Awards, and the character is getting his own spinoff movie. It’s an important tactic for an actor who has been publicly seen as serious and selfimportant to satirise not only himself but the industry at large. Julia Roberts, who failed to see big numbers for Duplicity or Charlie Wilson’s War is now relying on her most loyal fanbase: women. A small role in the $100million-plus hit Valentine’s Day is being followed up by an adaptation of bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, a sure-fire return to form if ever there was one. Diaz is “doing a Paltrow” by taking on a smaller role as the love interest in Seth Rogen’s superhero flick The Green Hornet, while Harrison Ford is abandoning his streak of dramatic roles by starring in next summer’s pretty self-explanatory blockbuster Cowboys & Aliens. Our relationship to the stars we love or love to hate has had a massive effect on what we decide to spend our money on. Decreased privacy and increased people power, thanks to the Internet, has given us more control than ever before on who is made or broken in Hollywood. While this can lead to an awful amount of pandering to the majority, it also ensures substantial consequences for those stars who push our limits. As the backers of Gibson’s latest film, The Beaver, are sent into an understandable panic, we can remain confident in our position as judge, jury and executioner.

DECREASED PRIVACY, INCREASED PEOPLE POWER AND THE INTERNET, HAS GIVEN US MORE CONTROL OVER WHO IS MADE OR BROKEN IN HOLLYWOOD

FEELINGBOXEDIN? Tom Cruise is still shooting blanks, Robert Pattinson is starting to suck. Seems that being the face of a film franchise or the summer blockbuster is a star destroyer. By Benjamin Lee

IT SHOULD’VE BEEN a home-run. Two major Hollywood stars, a familiar yet fun actioncomedy set-up and a prime release date. Yet, as Knight & Day stumbles towards a US gross that resembles around half of its initial budget, the bigwigs at Fox will find themselves asking serious questions about their priorities. Admittedly, centering a blockbuster around Tom Cruise may not have been the most reliable way to spend $117-million. King of Midas turned Kiss

of Death, Cruise’s off-screen exploits have turned him into a cinematic pariah. Yet, after a couple of “experiments” (Lions For Lambs, Valkyrie), this was the first attempt to recreate the magic of Cruise’s heyday since he got together with Katie Holmes. The film itself received some decent notices. The LA Times called it “the most entertaining made-for-adults studio movie of the summer”, and Time magazine suggested it was “proof that

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COVER FEATURE

THE SWEET HEREAFTER Fifty years on, La Dolce Vita remains one of the most potent cinematic films of all time. Barry Ronge looks back at Federico Fellini’s iconic masterpiece IT’S A SAFE bet that you have, at some time in the past month, seen a sign or object bearing the words “la dolce vita” (the sweet life). It’s an even safer bet that in the past week you would have heard, read or even spoken the word “paparazzi”. Both those terms leaped into the global vocabulary in 1960 when Federico Fellini used them in his most important film — La Dolce Vita, which won an Oscar and scooped the top awards at Cannes, two Italian film festivals and in New York. It took a war to make Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences pay attention to the filmmakers of Europe. The Oscars, which were first presented in 1929, were a uniquely American institution, honouring only the US’ s best films. It was only after US troops fought with

their European allies all over the world during World War Two that the Academy considered acknowledging Europe. Between 1947 and 1955 they introduced a Special Honorary Award to foreign language films, and in 1956 created the Best Foreign Film award. The first winner that year was Fellini for La Strada. He won again in 1957 for Le Notti di Cabiria. When Fellini won his third Oscar for La Dolce Vita in 1960, he consolidated his position as one of the world’s top directors. But what made him and his films so uniquely powerful and influential? The first thing was that he did not rely on words and dialogue to make his points. He was a vivid and skilled visual communicator and that skill is shown, at its best, in the first five minutes of the film. A helicopter is flying over Rome, carrying

Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). Suspended from the helicopter is a huge white marble statue of Christ with his arms outstretched in blessing. The statue floats over the ancient pagan Roman ruins as well as over the ruined buildings and tenements left by World War Two. It flies over sacred sites and a modern tower block where a bunch of girls in skimpy bikinis are sunbathing on a penthouse terrace. When they realise that Marcello is in the helicopter, they flash their boobs at him. It’s not Jesus who gets them excited; it’s Marcello, the gossip columnist, who could give them their 15 minutes of fame. It’s an unforgettable screen metaphor, in which no significant dialogue is spoken. It’s pure visual communication because the figure of the Christ, dangling aloft to bestow a stony

benediction in which no one in the streets below participates, sets a tone of extravagant, hedonistic despair. The irony is precise. At the heart of Rome sits the Vatican, one of the most influential spiritual powers in Europe. It is not far from the relics of the pagan Roman age, or from the squalid tenements that Mussolini and his henchmen built for the poor. Did any of them make a change? And what kind of salvation can you expect from a petrified Christ who does not appear in a cloud of an angelic glory, but dangles from a helicopter in which sits a reporter, looking for a story? That opening is a mini-movie, all on its own and it leads to a journey through the highs and lows of Rome, as Marcello combs the streets for scandal and sensation. He says, “Rome is simply marvelous. A

kind of jungle — humid and beautiful, loud at times, peaceful at others. It’s a place where you can hide behind the foliage.” At a trendy night club he meets a bored heiress, Maddalena (played superbly by Anouk Aimée), and has casual sex with her. Then he goes to see his fiancée, Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), who has attempted suicide and, while he is waiting to hear her fate in the hospital, he phones Maddalena to flirt with her. He’s callous, amoral and profoundly selfish. It’s all about him and as a “papparazo” he is like a bird of prey looking for human misery to feed off. Perhaps the most famous and most immediately recognised section of the film is his encounter with US movie star Sylvia (Anita Ekberg, playing a version of herself). He sweeps her off her plane and takes her to St Peter’s where she dons a cardinal’s hat and climbs to the top of the dome. Later on, after a wild party, he takes her to the Trevi fountain where she wades in the water wearing a costly ball gown, and so it goes from one vapid excess to another.

“HE IS LIKE A BIRD OF PREY LOOKING FOR HUMAN MISERY TO FEED OFF” The core of the film, in my opinion, comes when Marcello goes to visit a famous, wealthy intellectual, Steiner (Alain Cuny), who speaks of “a burnt-out existence” that has rendered his life useless. He has withdrawn from reality to the point that he fills his house with recorded sounds of winds and birdsong, because he finds actual nature “disappointing”. He says this to Marcello: “Sometimes at night the darkness and silence frightens me. Peace frightens me. I feel it’s only a facade, hiding the face of hell.” He then commits suicide. This character, like many others in the film, is based on a real person, Cesare

Pavese, the Italian novelist whose overintellectualism made his life seem so sterile that he could hardly bear to stay alive and, in the end, took his own life. That episode of a loss of faith is counterbalanced by a chaotic overflow of misplaced faith in which devout Christians who flock to the site of an alleged appearance of the Virgin Mary. In the religious hysteria that follows, a child who was brought to be healed is trampled to death. All this is fodder for Marcello, and he churns out that sensationalist prose that has made him a star in his own right. The film ends with Marcello and a crowd of revellers on a beach at dawn, where they are walking after a night-long party and they see a hideous sea-creature that has washed up on the beach. There it lies, dead and rotting, and Fellini clearly used this monstrous creature as a reflection of the inner life of

Marcello and his hangers-on, but in their evening dress at dawn, they look at it, fail to connect, and drift off to an empty new day. La Dolce Vita had a vast and visceral impact. The Peroni beer ads from a year or two ago, used a paparazzo meeting a blonde actress, along with the helicopter with the dangling statue and a dip in Trevi to evoke the luxurious delight of this beverage. It has morphed into pop music with references in Bob Dylan’s Motorpsycho Nitemare and in the rock band Blondie’s Pretty Baby from their outstanding album Parallel Lines. In the end, it is Steiner’s words that best describe the essence of Fellini’s mind: “Don’t be like me. Salvation doesn’t lie within four walls. I’m too serious to be a dilettante and too much a dabbler to be a professional. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organised society where everything is calculated and perfect.”

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COVER STORY

THE GREAT TREK After four decades of The Starship Enterprise, JJ Abrams brings the crew back to life. By Barry Ronge

Illustration: INFILTRATEMEDIA

riter-director JJ Abrams is exactly the same age as the Star Trek legend. He was born on June 27 1966, three months before the first episode of the TV series was broadcast. When it closed in 1969, Abrams was just three years old, but the Starship Enterprise and its crew have always been part of his visual imagination, so the task of creating another Trek adventure at the age of 43 was less a decision than a seduction. “I was initially asked only to produce, but then I became intrigued by it all. When I read the final script, I knew I would be jealous of anyone who directed it because it’s a funny, emotional story with massive action and a fast pace — and that’s what inspires me to make movies,” says Abrams. But anyone who takes on a Star Trek project will have to deal with a vast, protective fan-base — the Trekkies — who will scrutinise everything to ensure that nothing disrespects their sacrosanct idols. It’s worth reading Josh Tyler’s tirade, Open Letter to ‘Star Trek’ Director JJ Abrams, at www.cinemablend.com to see just how deep these feelings run. In response, Abrams says: “I know the purists are going to be annoyed if they see things that aren’t what they want to see. But I can’t make this movie for people who are only concerned with what the ship’s engines look like. It’s still deeply true to what [Eugene] Roddenberry created and what those amazing actors did in the ’60s. At the same time, I think it’s going to blow people’s minds because it’s a completely different experience. “Honestly, I was not a huge fan of Star Trek,” he continues. “But I think that was a plus because I came into this as someone who wasn’t an insane fanatic. “It was never my intention to try to ignore or outdo the legacy because that’s a no-win situation. Those movies are so extraordinary that the only way in was to go from the inside out, to be true to the characters and build a story that makes them as real and as exciting as possible.” Abrams’ smartest move was to return to the origins of the story, when the characters were still young and inexperienced. “When the world met them in 1966, they were already seasoned veterans. In my film,” says Abrams, “they are cadets with youthful anxieties, arrogance and ambition, a disparate group of misfits and neophytes, just forming their lives. I loved that as the film starts, none of them had been tested in any way, especially Kirk. “We all know that he will end up being the captain, but how did he do it? He starts out misguided, a young man who has not found his way, and that struck a chord in me. Then there is Spock, who is

half-human and half-Vulcan. He is always fighting with the notion that he is not able to fit in. I had never really thought about his sense of alienation from the others, and that growing-up process of discovering who we are and where we belong defines what we eventually become. Issues like friendship and teamwork are not easy, but those were never dealt with in the series. “By the end of our story, having gone through this adventure together, they have put their lives in each other’s hands and are victorious because of their combined power. That’s exactly what all my favourite films do — combine emotion and character with unbelievable visuals and great action.” Abrams insists that he was not handcuffed to these mature characters. “They are all still very young here,” he says. “Of course, they come pre-loaded with the traits that audiences already know, but at this stage of their lives, most of them have not yet discovered those in themselves. “They have no history together and this first adventure is something they could never have anticipated. These first experiences define their later relationships, and that aspect has never been explored in any previous Star Trek story.” The 43-year gap between the series launch and the new film also raised questions about the racial profile of the crew. The original creator, Roddenberry, held a groundbreaking belief that the crew should include African-Americans, Asians and other minority actors. It made a huge impact in 1966 and the first interracial kiss ever seen on US network TV occurred in the Star Trek episode entitled Plato’s Stepchildren (1968), when Captain Kirk (William Shatner) kissed Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols). Several stations, especially in the South, refused to air it. Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, Abrams had to consider how to portray that non-racial concept for a very different audience. “I never considered changing it,” he says, “because I think it’s an admirable by-product of the times, reminding us that this is the way the world looks. It’s no longer groundbreaking, and it won’t have the same impact as the ’60s kiss, but it does have a reaffirming, positive message to send to an audience hungry for diversity. It is consistent with the optimism that Star Trek represents.” The official budget figure is $150-million (about R1.3-billion), a huge investment in a film that does not have a single major star in the cast. Abrams and his team are gambling on the idea that the legacy will be attractive enough to pull in the crowds, but they did explore different options. “I approached Matt Damon and we had several discussions, but we decided it would be a better move to cast the movie with unknowns because it is fun to discover the stars of tomorrow,” the director explains. “Look at the first Star Wars film — you didn’t know who those people were when you saw the movie. You believed that guy was Luke Skywalker. It is a slippery slope when you cast half famous faces and half unknown because it can throw an audience.” It did, however, seem like a no-brainer

that at some stage Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would make, at the very least, a cameo performance. Nimoy agreed at once and he makes a brief appearance as a character called “Old Spock”. Shatner, who has stayed prominent in movies and TV shows, was a different proposition. “We did meet with him at the beginning and pitch him the story,” says Abrams. “He made it clear that he didn’t want to just do a cameo and so the alternative was to really change the story. We tried to figure out a way to put him in because we thought fans would love that, but every version we produced felt like some stupid, trumped-up attempt to just slot him in.” So there will be no appearance by Shatner. The only other well-known cast member is Eric Bana, who plays the villainous hero, Nero. ý Star Trek 11 is currently on circuit.

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FILM Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, shot for more than R7-million in 1960, caused a huge sensation and set a new precedent for cinema. By Kevin Maher

PSYCHOTIC

extraordinarily powerful. And I knew that it was a tour de force that was going to change moviegoing. I later got to know Hitch well and knew him for 20 years, and never once got to see a dark side to the man. He said that Psycho was made with a lot of humour. And the film is certainly a circus. It’s a sensation. Brilliantly made. But demonic in its brilliance.

PAUL VERHOEVEN THE SET-UP IS simple enough. A woman (Janet Leigh) steals $40 000 from her boss, hides out in a secluded motel and is murdered in the shower by a young crossdressing psychopath (Anthony Perkins). Her sister (Vera Miles) investigates and the killer is arrested. And yet the realisation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was devastating. It was a scandalous cause célèbre and a box-office sensation that changed everything — from the horror movie landscape to cultural concepts of sex and violence to the Freudian terrain of mothers and sons, lust and loathing. Nothing was the same after Psycho. With its 50th anniversary, five directors and one writer talk about its allure and disturbing power.

JOHN CARPENTER (Director of Halloween, The Fog and Christine) I first saw the film with my parents, and it was scandalous. It opened with a shot of Janet Leigh in her underwear. Then there was the shot of a flushing toilet, which just wasn’t done in American movies in those days. And there was the whole “man dressing up in woman’s clothes and embalming mother” idea. It all added to a sense of “What the hell am I seeing?” It was really the first modern horror film. Before it, horror had generally been lots of castles, cobwebs and creatures. But Psycho brought it into modern times. It shocked a lot of people, but it also shocked a lot of money out of them too. And Hollywood took notice of that. It opened Hollywood’s eyes to the fact that there was a lot of money to be made from explicit violence. Halloween had a little of Psycho in it, only we kicked our villain up into the stratosphere and tried to make him a force of evil rather than a person, like Norman Bates. But then every modern horror film owes a lot to Psycho. Every single one of them.

PETER BOGDANOVICH

(Director of Basic Instinct) I am a big fan of Hitchcock and I’d argue that Vertigo and North by Northwest are better movies than Psycho. But I think that the first hour is superb filmmaking by a master artist at the height of his powers. I saw it first in Holland, where I was living at the time, and there was no scandal there. People thought it was shocking, yes, but pleasurably so. It was only scandalous in America because of their puritanical streak, where you go to jail for showing a naked breast, whereas in Holland we could see that Norman looking through the peephole at Marion getting undressed was very natural and normal. A lot of people would do that. I would do the same. Hitchcock had an enormous interest in sex, but was living in an era when he couldn’t do much about it, or couldn’t show it. But it came through in the movies nonetheless. I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant, but I’ve always felt that Basic Instinct was the film that Hitchcock would have made if he had lived at that time. I don’t know how to point it out precisely, but Hitchcock is protruding to a certain degree in all my work.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Alfred Hitchcock gives direction to actress Janet Leigh for her infamous shower scene

(Director of The Last Picture Show and author of The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock) I saw the very first showing of Psycho for the critics and the public together in the DeMille theatre in New York at 10am on the morning of 16 June, 1960. It was an extraordinary event. There were about 1 000 people sitting in the stalls below and the press were 500-strong upstairs. The picture started, and everyone thought that it was a movie about a woman who stole some money. And then, about 45 minutes in, came the shower scene. I’ve never heard such screaming — sustained screaming — from the audience. You couldn’t hear the soundtrack. It was unprecedented, and it really was the first time that going to the movies was not a safe experience. I came out of the theatre at noon and walked down Broadway and Times Square feeling as though I’d been raped. I hated the picture, but I thought that it was

WES CRAVEN (Director of A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream franchise) I remember my mother and a neighbour talking about Psycho when it first came out, saying how disgusting it was and how they would never let their children see it. Which, of course, made me interested. And I think it’s easy to forget that it was almost pornographic in the way it

C SONS AND MOTHERS: Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, is horrified by the actions of his late "mother"

impacted upon people at the time. Just showing a woman naked and a knife against her flesh and blood going down the drain. It was very visceral. I found it fascinating to watch because of how Hitchcock was deconstructing expectations and building up a central character and then killing her before he was supposed to. He was totally in command and completely free to break the rules. And, obviously, Scream began like that. You think the film is going to be about Drew Barrymore because no one’s going to kill Drew Barrymore, and then, bang, she’s dead. When you’re directing a horror film, the first monster you have to frighten the audience with is yourself. They have to feel unsafe in your presence so that they don’t know what you’re going to do next, or that you will cross boundaries. And that all goes back to Hitchcock.

DAVID THOMSON (Author of The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder) I think that the first 40 minutes of the film is a very sexy passage. Marion is being examined and cross-examined and grilled. There’s a way that you feel for her, but also that you want to possess her too. You want to do something to her, which is exactly what the film then does. There’s no doubt about it, Hitchcock wants us to identify with the killer as well as the victim. I think this is where he was heading to all along. His use of suspense and murder and violence was all getting to this point, where there’s part of

EPISODE

us that is thrilled to be the victim but another part that is really thrilled to be the killer too. This was the film that brought to the surface Hitchcock’s unspoken suggestion: “Wouldn’t you like to kill?” There was a sadistic side to Hitchcock. He once said that what he wanted to do was to “put the audience through it”. He wants to give them an ordeal. And Psycho is playful in parts, but it’s also nasty in parts too. And they, ultimately, were the two sides to the man.

NEIL LABUTE (Director of In the Company of Men and Lakeview Terrace) The power of Psycho, and the key to the film, is that it creates characters that we care about and are interested in. The killer, Norman, is so extraordinary here. He really cares about Marion, his victim. And that care drives him, and drives the side of him that wants to kill her. It’s just a phenomenal portrait of a deranged mind. So much so that you could remove the murders and you’d still have a fascinating movie. And indeed there are relatively few murders, and they happen extremely quickly. Hitchcock understands how to set things up with character — and then turns the screws. And you get the sense with Norman that he could’ve been a great guy, but by chance turned out to be a murderer instead. And that’s what makes it scary. I still have a slight aversion to the shower. The clearer the shower curtain, the less I like it. And it’s not because someone’s going to peek in and say: “My, you remind me of Gérard Depardieu!” It’s because, thanks to Psycho, I imagine they could be holding a butcher’s knife. That’s a testament to the power of that movie. — © The Times, London

SCREAMISH: (Clockwise from left) Janet Leigh as Marion Crane keeps abreast of the situation, while her sister Lila Crane (Vera Miles) lets out a yelp

LAYOUT Screen Queens Photography Cover: Gallo/Getty Images Spread: Gallo/Getty Images Words Tim Robey

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INSIDE:

fashion, food, home, television & travel pull-out

Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine February 28 2016

SCREEN GRABBERS Alicia Vikander and the new Oscar wave

The dangerous art of the acceptance speech What will Chris Rock say tonight?

Biggest magazine event! catch Justin Bonello at the Game stand.

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FEBRUARY 28 2016

{ OSCARS }

HE envelope has been opened, the winner is at the microphone, and the world is watching. It’s amazing how terribly wrong the next three or four minutes at Oscar ceremonies can go, and remarkable how often actors — paid to sound convincing when reciting other people’s words — can seem disastrously fake when delivering their lines, or forget who they’re meant to thank, or just don’t know when to stop. The sheer duration of these monologues has become such an issue that a new ruling requires nominees to list who they wish to thank in advance, so that the winner’s list of names will scroll up on screen rather than using up valuable stage time. Finding the right formula to sail through, and not be the one everyone cringes at on YouTube the next day, has defeated many a beloved celebrity, but by no means all of them. Here we present our guide to the dos and don’ts of Oscar acceptance speeches.

Do Self-deprecate winningly

Sandra Bullock, Best Actress, 2010 The film was The Blind Side, a fairly gross critical punch-bag. Bullock, riding a season of “we love Sandra Bullock in general” momentum, knew how to turn the situation around on stage. “Did I really earn this, or did I just wear y’all down?” were her first, perfectly chosen words; the day before, she’d also had the wit to show up at the Razzies, collecting her worst actress award for All About Steve and pretending to be mighty cross about it. There was warmth and sincerity to the speech, too. “This is a once-in-alifetime experience, I know,” she said, and had sweet things to say about mothers, especially her own, Helga — a mention bringing her right to the brink of Gwynethstyle waterworks, but she fought them off.

Spontaneously make out with Halle Berry

Adrien Brody, Best Actor, 2003 Brody might be the only one on this list who delivered a legitimate shock on the night: prior to him

SHORT AND SWEET: Elizabeth Taylor with her Oscar for best actress in 'BUtterfield 8' in 1961 Picture: GETTY IMAGES

How to give the perfect Oscar acceptance speech Sincerity and wit make for happy podium moments, but ego, incipient hysteria and guff serve only to keep YouTube fired up the next day. By Tim Robey fuel the following year, when he was handing the best actress trophy to Charlize Theron: before opening the envelope he whipped out a breath-freshener spray.

Show them some class

Colin Firth, Best Actor, 2011 “I have a feeling my career’s just peaked,” announced Firth, cupping the award for The King’s Speech. If you ever need lessons in how to downplay a moment of great professional achievement, barely looking any more ruffled than someone at a supermarket checkout, Firth’s your man. Pausing often for dramatic effect, he spoke of “stirrings in the upper abdominals, threatening to form winning, discussion was all about Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt or Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. There was no doubting Brody’s own delight — the 29year-old bounded on stage like an elated puppy, and planted a big smackeroo right on the lips of a very sporting Halle Berry. This had the instant effect of eclipsing anything he actually said. It was the kind of goofy, off-the-cuff moment the Oscars always needs more of, and it gave Brody great

themselves into dance moves”, while standing just as stock-still as Firth always does. Add his checklist of thank-yous to everyone who’d ushered him to this point — including a gracious nod to A Single Man’s director Tom Ford, who’d got him nominated the year before — and it was a masterclass in suave humility.

Steer clear of politics

John Wayne, collecting for Gary Cooper, 1953 The shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witchhunts hung over the 1953 ceremony. Cooper wasn’t present to accept his second best actor Oscar, for playing the beleaguered sheriff in High Noon, so his old buddy Wayne stepped up to collect, despite his public dislike for the film, written by avowed communist (and blacklistee) Carl Foreman. In private, Wayne thought High Noon was “the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life”. To his eternal credit, he ducked away from point-scoring on stage and delivered a very dry address about envy. “I’m gonna go back and find my business manager, and agent,

and producer, and three-name writer,” he said, “and find out why I didn’t get High Noon instead of Cooper. Cause I can’t fire any of these very expensive fellows, but I can at least run my 1930s Chevrolet into one of their big black new Cadillacs.”

Be Elizabeth Taylor

Elizabeth Taylor, Best Actress 1961 A near-fatal brush with pneumonia, an emergency tracheotomy weeks before the ceremony, a town on tenterhooks: the story of Taylor’s ill-health in the lead-up to her first best actress win is more legendary than anything in the film she won for, BUtterfield 8, the tragic tale of a Manhattan call-girl. And Taylor’s tremulous acceptance was an even better performance than the one she turned in for the film, convincing everyone in the crowd they’d done absolutely the right thing to give her the prize, and it had the all-important virtue of brevity. “I don’t really know how to express my gratitude for this and for everything,” she began. “I guess all I can do is say thank you. Thank you with all my heart.” And walked off.

Deadpan unbeatably through your best joke

Daniel Day-Lewis, Best Actor, 2013 Day-Lewis, the most feted male film actor of his generation, could have kept things very simple for his third best actor win, in Spielberg’s Lincoln, but he had

one delightful riff concealed perfectly up his sleeve. He was receiving the award from Meryl Streep, best actress the year before for The Iron Lady, and started with earnest thanks, even a hint of moisture behind the eyes. “It’s a strange thing,” he went on, turning slightly in Streep’s direction, “because three years ago, before we decided to do a straight swap, I had actually

FEBRUARY 28 2016

ROCK HARD

How will Chris Rock deal with the Oscar whiteout? WHEN Chris Rock hosted the 77th Academy Awards there were five black nominees — Jamie Foxx (nominated twice), Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo — prompting Rock to call the show the “Def Oscar Jam”. Wonder what he will call tonight’s all-white-nominees event? Rock had other targets back in 2005, including “Spider-Man” star Tobey Maguire (“Clint Eastwood is a star, OK? Tobey Maguire is just a boy in tights.”) and the been committed to play Margaret Thatcher.” No one saw it coming, least of all Streep, and everyone laughed, most of all Streep. Trust us, it’s plain sailing through the rest of your speech after a coup like that. There’s a reason DayLewis has three Oscars, after all.

Don’t Offer everyone surprise sex

Robert Benigni, Best Foreign Film and Best Actor 1998 Loving your fellow man is all very well, but it’s grim when Oscar winners assume their coronation was the result of some global popularity contest. Benigni clambered over half the rows in the auditorium when Sophia Loren read out his name for Life Is Beautiful, performed a ridiculous series of frog-jumps up the steps, and wore us all out before he’d even uttered a word — and that was even before he won for best actor as well. “I want to be rocketed by the waves of your beauty,” he told Loren, before going even more Italian with the metaphorical overload — was it an ocean or a hailstorm of generosity before him? Was everyone’s love really a mountain of snow? He declared he wanted to “be Jupiter, kidnap everyone and make love to you all” — a bit much, no, Roberto? Infectious enthusiasm is one thing, but let’s not convert it into an STD.

{ OSCARS } prolific Jude Law (“He’s in everything. Even the movies he’s not acting in.”). His long-winded rumination on “The Passion of the Christ”, culminating in a lame punchline about Jude Law being able to get into clubs more easily than Mel Gibson or Jesus, horrified Oprah Winfrey, and Time magazine named Rock one of the top 10 worst awards-show hosts to date. Hopefully he will be funnier this time, but it is unlikely he will be more diplomatic. Rock has not given away any of the subjects at which he will be taking aim tonight, but he did tweet a photograph of himself in a white Nasa spacesuit, captioned: “Getting my outfit ready.” LS the Kevin Kline comedy In & Out (1997).

Go overboard with the hubris

James Cameron, Best Director, 1998 Everything was going just fine in the early moments of Cameron’s speech — you wouldn’t exactly call it inspired, but he ticked off all the necessary thank-yous to cast and crew members, gave a hearty shout-out to his parents, and even got a laugh gesturing sheepishly out of the auditorium to wherever Leonardo DiCaprio was stewing over his lack of a nomination. In a trice, it all came crashing down with Cameron’s closing gambit — you can almost see it in his eyes, the knowledge that he’s about to make an almighty fool of himself, but nothing was stopping him now. “I’m the king of the world!” he yelped out, Leo-style, compounding a painful lack of grace with the fratboy whooping sounds afterwards, as he thrust his Oscar skywards. Rewatching now, it’s a peek-through-yourhands moment of purest hilarious, cringing horror.

TWENTY-SOMEBODIES The dust-storm swirling around the Academy Awards has not dimmed the glow of Hollywood’s newest ingénues, all hoping for gold tonight. Sue de Groot introduces the three young graces

Alicia Vikander

Brie Larson

The dark-eyed Swede on our cover, now 27 and dating Michael Fassbender, planned to become a ballet dancer but won her first best actress award (Sweden’s equivalent to the Oscar, a beetle statuette called a Guldbagge) for Pure in 2009. Since then she has played Anna Karenina (after the part was turned down by Saoirse Ronan), mastered Danish to play Queen Caroline Mathilde in A Royal Affair, become a robot in Ex Machina and a half-witch in Seventh Son. She is nominated for best supporting actress for her role as painter Gerda Wegener in The Danish Girl, although the “supporting” bit is mystifying given that her fiery performance almost eclipsed co-star Eddie Redmayne’s.

Larson is the youngest student to date to have attended the American Conservatory Theatre school in San Francisco (she was six). Now 26, Larson has notched up a long string of acting credits while simultaneously pursuing a music career — she won her first recording contract with Universal Records on the strength of a demo tape at the age of 13. She is the odds-on favourite to win this year’s best actress Oscar for her wrenching performance as escaped captive Joy Newsome in Room (see review on page 52).

Crumple entirely for four minutes

Gwyneth Paltrow, Best Actress, 1999 Paltrow is credited with bringing pink back into fashion with her Ralph Lauren taffeta gown, but one thing she did not bring back into fashion was crying like a

Saoirse Ronan

She is 21 and her name is pronounced “Seersha”. She was born in the Bronx in New York, grew up in County Carlow, Ireland, and received her first Oscar nomination at the age of 13 for her role as Briony Tallis in the 2007 film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement. Punters predict a close race between Ronan and Brie Larson for tonight’s best actress Oscar. Ronan is nominated for playing Irish immigrant Ellis (pronounced “Ay-lish”) Lacey in the film adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s love story Brooklyn.

Out your old drama teacher

Tom Hanks, Best Actor, 1994 Anyone who thought Philadelphia was a wee bit overwritten needs to get a load of Hanks’s first best actor speech, which makes the film’s script sound like Hemingway. “The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels,” he declared at the end about those lost to Aids, before gilding the lily with some guff about the “healing embrace that cools their fevers, clears their skin”, and the “simple, selfevident, common-sense truth made manifest by the benevolent creator of us all”. It was a textbook example of trying too hard. He’d already gone off the deep end by celebrating his old teacher, Rawley Farnsworth, as one of the “finest gay Americans” he’d ever known — a surprise to everyone in Farnsworth’s home town of Oakland, from which he’d concealed his sexuality for years. This unplanned outing inspired

PAGE 9

baby right the way through one’s Oscar moment. In all fairness to the overcome star, who has got a lot of stick for this speech over the years, she seems humbled and truly grateful, and it’s touching at times to watch her so helplessly overpowered by emotion — the tears start the moment her name is read out, and continue as she lists every last member of the Paltrow clan, including her late cousin. It’s just cumulatively a bit exasperating that she couldn’t have pulled it together a little more. No one looks their best when blubbing quite this unstoppably. — © The Daily Telegraph, London

SA’S HOPE (SORT OF)

WITH its jaw-dropping battle scenes, “Mad Max: Fury Road” is tipped to sweep the technical Oscars tonight. And its director, George Miller, credits his wife, South African-born editor Margaret Sixel, pictured, for its success. Sixel, who grew up and studied in Australia, is up for best achievement in film editing, after already winning a slew of awards including a Bafta and a Critics Choice. Miller, who is up for best director for the movie, says Sixel brought a distinctive eye to the film. Sixel and Miller developed a working

relationship (as well as a personal one) after meeting on the set of an Australian miniseries. She edited his previous films “Happy Feet” and “Babe”. For “Mad Max: Fury Road", Sixel was given 470 hours of footage to edit, which she worked on for two years to distil from them the film’s 120 minutes of mayhem. Miller says Sixel’s role was amplified by the lack of dialogue to drive the story: “The film was like a massive Rubik’s Cube to put together, and she was able to pull it off.” — Nadia Neophytou

W Keith Tamkei WRITING

WRITING Face Off Photography Greg Anderson Words Keith Tamkei Layout Keith Tamkei

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November 24 2013

16 I

COVER

24 NOVEMBER 2013

‘S

HAVING is for men who want to look more like women,” says Phil Olsen, captain of Beard Team USA. OK, but “bearding”? A sport? Yes — and a noble one at that. “It’s a sport because we have judges,” says Olsen. “We have controversy, we sing the national anthem at the start of the competition, and we compete against each other to see who is the best. That to me is what a sport is. It is a major commitment.” Give men a competition and we bloom like a field of daisies. Beating chests and fluffing plumage, wielding wooden bats and maiming with studs is what we do. The sports industry has tapped into this instinct, using its heroes as dandies of lucrative endorsement — whacking balls to flog Breitlings and tight underwear. Very few modern sports are untouched. There are pockets of amateur purity, where competition is fierce, but the only sponsors of your magnificent prowess are tall tales and cold beers. Bearding is one of them. Olsen is the HIRSUTE: Phil Olsen promoter-in-chief of bearding in the US, where it is increasingly popular. His team has just returned from the World Beard and Moustache Championships, held in the German town of Leinfelden-Echterdingen, with a clutch of 15 out of the 54 trophies. On the phone from the US, Olsen tells me that pure coincidence and curiosity led him to his first competition in 1999 in Sweden. “I noticed two things there. Although it was called the world championships, it was limited to a small number of countries, almost exclusively in northern Europe, with Germany clearly the dominant country. The other thing was that America was completely under-represented.” He returned home with a mission to cultivate bearding in the US. Since then, the Americans have held four national championships and are a constant threat to German domination at the international meet. South Africa has never been represented. Heading to the competition, Olsen was confident of his team’s chances. “It is going to be tough to beat the Germans on their own turf but we’ve got a really strong squad. We’ve got some serious facial hair representing America.” According to worldbeardchampionships.com, there is an Italian claim to the sport of bearding. But the world championships in its current form

Olsen concedes the training regimen is less than punishing has its roots in Germany, when the First Höfener Beard Club hosted the event in 1990. Olsen believes this heritage is the reason for their dominance; Germans have long refined preening, twisting and growing into an art. He also blames Teutonic organisational prowess for the country’s beard-superpower status. In the competition, there are 18 judging categories. The “English”-styled moustache is slender and ends in slightly raised tips — but Lord Kitchener’s facial thatch, were he to enter the competition, would be classified as the fuller Hungarian type, adopted from the 16th-century Hussars. This year, for the first time, the medal in this category went to a Hungarian. Beards are divided into three categories: full, partial and trend, which are further subdivided. Olsen, whose beard is wide and rounded at the bottom, competes in the Garibaldi section. One of the most outlandish categories is freestyle, in which participants can spend up to three hours styling their beards. Olsen concedes that the training regimen is less than punishing. “This is the ultimate sport for the couch potato. After you’ve done nothing for a few months, you’ll have a pretty good beard.” As in all sports, the beard world championships is not without strife. Controversy usually centres on the judging process and the clarity of requirements — and, according to Olsen, reflects the difference between the German and US philosophies.

BEARD &

WONDERFUL A global whisker-growing war has broken out. Keith Tamkei talks to the American beardsman who hopes to end the reign of the German hairticulturists Photographs: Greg Anderson

I 17

24 NOVEMBER 2013 STORY

GROW WEST: Phil Olsen announces a winner at this year’s Annual Beard and Moustache Championships in New Orleans

“The Germans view the competition as being about getting their beards or moustaches to conform to a defined standard, whereas Americans think of facial hair as a means of self-expression and individuality.” Other US grievances include the struggle to get the Germans to fully recognise sideburns, and the use of rubber bands as styling aids. Olsen says: “Someone inevitably shows up with Budweiser cans in his beard. Germans are against this.” But in spite of these differences in approach, Olsen emphasises that the competition is all about camaraderie and friendship. How can it not be, when the dietary common denominator among most contestants can be sourced from the local pub? “If there is a performance-enhancing substance in this sport, it is beer.” Facial hair, particularly full beard growth, is on point when it comes to fashion. Local trend analyst Dion Chang says: “The trend now is a return to the late 19th century. We should expect more beards in advertising, especially for fashion brands.” Olsen has seen the signs, and is worried. “It’s making us wonder whether we want to continue to have our beards, because a lot of us wanted to have them so as not to be mainstream. It’s a dilemma for most.” Flaky pastries and ice-cream cones — not soup — are a continuous hazard, but Olsen says he will keep his, despite the risk of becoming unwillingly trendy. Olsen, who tells me the correct term for a beard grower is “beardsman”, thinks actor Jake Gyllenhaal would wear a beard well. He believes a face full of foliage has a fortifying effect, and cites as evidence one of the biggest rivalries in US sport. “The New York Yankees

SNAPPING BEARDS

Photographer Greg Anderson

Las Vegas resident Greg Anderson shot this compelling portrait series of the competition in New Orleans. He spent two days shooting the 165 competitors: “One of the crazier moments had to be when a gentleman from New Jersey pounded a nail into his nose with a Rubik’s cube. The next day he followed it up with snapping a mouse trap on his tongue about 10 times till I got the shot I wanted. He was a good sport.” Anderson is publishing a calendar of images from the event, with proceeds going to prostate cancer research. Visit www.gregandersonphoto.com/2014Year-of-the-Beard-Calendar.

‘Someone inevitably shows up with Budweiser cans in his beard. Germans are against this’ prohibit their players from growing beards; the Boston Red Sox have all grown beards and they have some spectacular ones. “This year, the Red Sox have had a great season, while the Yankees have had a terrible one.” Since our interview, the Red Sox went on to win the baseball World Series. For anyone looking to participate, Olsen offers sage advice after the obvious first step of growing a beard: “The second thing you must do is buy a plane ticket to Portland, Oregon, for next year’s world championships. And the third would be to get your friends together to come too.” For most South Africans, the lure of fierce competition, camaraderie and, most importantly, flowing beer, is tantalising. Perhaps one day Olsen and Team USA will come to rue having planted the idea of a Springbok team.

WRITING Blue Eden SUNDAY TIMES TRAVEL WEEKLY

EAT LOVE PLAY SUNDAY TIMES FOOD WEEKLY

Shepard Fairey SUNDAY TIMES LIFESTYLE Etiquette School SUNDAY TIMES LIFESTYLE 3D Printing SUNDAY TIMES LIFESTYLE

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SEYCHELLES: A BLUE EDEN

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10 ❘ THE BIG READ: SEYCHELLES

FEBRUAR

and ea, and uits

Keith Tamkei discovers a tropical Eden perfect for boardroom meetings

HE clamour of haggling, sales holler and the flickflicking of tatty rupee notes . . . Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke Market in Victoria, the capital on Mahé in the Seychelles, is a place of vibrant commotion far removed from the pictures of tranquility in brochures promoting this tiny archipelago state. Here, the senses are stormed. The views from your hammock of Indian Ocean cerulean are replaced with inflamed reds, ochre and vibrant greens of spices, chillies and exotic plants. Their fragrances mix with the odours of close-quarter browsing, clinging humidity and whiffs of the daily catch. A performance in Creole allegro is taking place in a corner of the market. In the rolling vernacular, Chris, a fishmonger, rouses and presses potential customers. His best price is two large silvery fish, each one the length of his forearm, for 125 rupees (about R100). Customers eagerly take his deal. Chris can spare little time for conversation but a lull means we can chat in another common tongue — soccer. As he splashes water on some of the catch to make them glisten, he reveals that Lionel Messi is his favourite but Luis Suárez is a close second because he can, well, bite. Here from 5am to 5pm, six days a week for the past 20 years, Chris says business at the market is good. The abundance of customers lining up attests to this and yet, he tells me, this Friday morning’s busy trade is nothing compared to the madness of a Saturday, when it really picks up. Under the canopy of umbrellas in the courtyard of the market, tourists hunt for fish and spices — things such as cinnamon and pepper, which, three centuries ago, were valued more highly than precious metals. Today, these items play only a small role in the economy; the Seychelles’ primary money maker is tourism. But the activity of business, in another sense, is set to contribute a significantly

greater share to the economy. Five kilometres northeast of Victoria and 6km from the international airport, a sophisticated hotel, seemingly plucked out of a busy city, has just opened its doors off the coast of Mahé, on the 56ha private residential marina of Eden Island. Built on land “reclaimed” from the sea, Eden Island is joined to the mainland by a bridge and is sculpted with broad strokes of exclusivity. The 578 luxury apartments, duplex maisons and villas are interspaced between gardens, private beaches and waterways. Residents and holidaymakers loll on verandas, park their yachts and cruise around in golf carts while struggling to maintain even tans. If there is a care in the world, it certainly is not here. It seems almost absurd, then, that a three-storey, 87-room hotel with topclass business facilities and conference rooms exists in a place where people go to escape their

LAID-BACK BUSTLE: A busy walkway in Vic

TRAVEL WEEKLY

RY 22 2015

BUSINESS AS USUAL:

Fishmonger Chris holds up some specimens for sale at the Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke market in Victoria, MahĂŠ, far eft. Above is the Eden Bleu Hotel Marina on Eden Island

Pictures: KEITH TAMKEI

boardroom concerns. But, according to South African developer Craig Heeger, this is part of the 12-year master plan plotted back in 2002 in partnership with the Seychelles government. Heegerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s determined vision and R5billion worth of investment now accounts for a whopping 4% of the gross domestic product of the Seychelles and makes up 9% of the total foreign direct investment into the country. The idea was always to reinvest into the Seychelles. More than 500 Seychellois â&#x20AC;&#x201D; out of the total population of 90 000 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are employed

IF YOU GO . . .

ctoria, the capital

GETTING THERE: Air Seychelles operates return flights between MahĂŠ and Johannesburg on Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. Flights to MahĂŠ depart at 12.25pm, arriving at 7.20pm local time. Fares start at R6 010, including taxes. See airseychelles.com. WHERE TO STAY: Rates at Eden Bleu start at

on the island. Their building with ecological-sustainability considerations has also meant the return of bird life and sea-bed flora. The hotel, styled in slick, modern minimalism, is Heegersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; game changer in the region. Leveraging off the Seychelles as a prime holiday destination and the backdrop of its natural beauty, Eden Bleu Hotel presents an attractive option for conferences and business getaways, in turn encouraging more tourism. On board a catamaran bound for reefs close to MahĂŠ, Francis Algae, the

US$385 (R4 504) per night for a single deluxe room, US$425 (R4 972.50) per night in a double room. Lower corporate rates are also on offer. For more information, e-mail info@edenbleu.com, phone 248 439 9100 or see edenbleu.com. NEED TO KNOW: There are 116 islands in the Seychelles archipelago, most uninhabited nature reserves. The republicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land area is 455kmÂ˛ but covers an economic zone of 1.4kmÂ˛.

captain of the vessel, tells me he used to be a professional musician but inconsistent work led him to a tourism company, where heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been a guide and captain for 10 years. His flair for entertaining remains, however. To the delight of the passengers, he croons songs of the islands in a rum-smooth voice. As I swim among the small zebra fish darting through the coral of the reef, Algaeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s calypso tune, Take me back to the Seychelles, replays in my head. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a friendly ballad that personifies the Seychelloisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; understanding that their fortunes lie in the allure of the Indian Ocean and beauty of their nation; and a reminder that when one bids farewell to a visitor to the island, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Au revoirâ&#x20AC;? is never goodbye, but â&#x20AC;&#x153;Come back and bring friendsâ&#x20AC;?. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Tamkei was a guest of Eden Bleu Hotel Ă˝ For information, e-mail info@edenbleu.com or call +24 84 399 100

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8 JUNE 2014

STAR

THIS WE KEITH TAMKEI

EAT, LOVE, PLAY

SEAN CALITZ

My father, not o conventionality, Father’s Day was commercial clap the day passed l my sister and I f In celebration of Sunday, we’ve go licking rib recipe veg curry that w any day. JLF DESIGN/SPARX

oy-store owners. If children could choose a career for their parents, a high percentage would certainly set their fantasies on mom and pop being toystore owners, and dad nearly resembling Santa Claus. It’s the winning card in parent boasting. Statisticians, epidemiologists, chief execs, step aside. If dad has a jangling set of keys to unlock shelves of fluffy joy, castles, hotrods and hours of fun, he might as well be the Saint Peter of the playground crowd. My dad didn’t own a toy store. But he did rank up there with pilot, fireman, and Jacques Cousteau. He was a chef — one with real business savvy, too. Avoiding the staff issues and high costs of running a restaurant, his takeaway shop plugged into a busy shopping centre and had a till that rang like a Vegas casino. Money didn’t give me lofty jungle-gym status; what did was the fact that for lunch I could have anything from that shop. And “anything” meant slap chips loaded with salt, vinegar and tomato sauce; battered and deep-fried chicken; sweet-and-sour noodles; and thick spring rolls, the oilier and crunchier the better. In the humdrum lunchtime world of dry sandwiches, a drenched bag of slap chips and a couple of Cokes was high-value currency. How much this influenced friendships or the affections of giggly groupies, in spite of my knock-kneed awkwardness, I’ll never know. All I do know is that a dad’s career choice can help make you more popular than chocolate milk. For hours after school, I watched my father labour away in his shop. Beads of sweat rolled down his brow as he took charge in

the heat of the kitchen, doing the actual cooking or barking orders to the frantic staff. For me, the picture of him in his dirty apron, wielding a spatula and sucking on a Berkeley cigarette — he was a chain smoker — symbolises what it is to be a hardworking family provider. Open affection in our home was typical of the Asian family — minimal. But while love wasn’t demonstrated with hugs, my father revealed his devotion in another language: he cooked. He did what he knew best to look after us. At the dinner table, love was ladled and heaped high, and my dad enjoyed the rewards of seeing the family banter, laugh, and — most of all — eat.

Parenting hardly gets more rewarding than when the kids show their appreciation of your baked beans on toast cuisine with a messy face. This became clear when I became a dad myself. It’s what my father knew. We do not own shares in Mattel or Lego. And our kids will not be able to boast privileged access to Hamleys or FAO Schwarz. But what they can have is our cooking; be it a bowl of pap, or bowls of encouragement, time and attention, or my baked beans on toast, possibly slightly burnt. I’m no chef like my dad, but I don’t have to be. Made with enough care, seasoned with commitment, even the simplest meal can offer the taste of devotion.

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NEXT WEEK If pasta comes a-gnocching on your door, put down your penne and answer, fusilli billy. We bring you robust recipes from two eye-catching Italians who know their orecchiette from their farfalle, plus the best new Italian restaurant in Joburg.

Do you still bake the wi chocolate-strawberry ca People keep asking for it so many different ways. I a giant cupcake and som for the cake in the shape with big boobs. An auditor winning a ch competition; has it chan It made me realise how I dreams and make somet baking. It has made me e

Sunday Times Combined Metros 4 - 08/10/2014 04:19:17 PM - Plate:

PAGE 4

OCTOBER 12 2014

{ ART }

Pull here. Think now. Bearing a bottle of cognac & a big can of purple, Shepard Fairey has given Joburg a touch of his graphic myth-making. By Keith Tamkei Picture: GAVIN ELDER

HE look value of Jozi’s inner city has just gone up. Jostling with the billboard clutter is a new mural of Madiba, spanning the full seven storeys of its apartment-block canvas. If there is a stylistic familiarity to the clean lino-cut and pattern motifs, glued together with simple worded directives, there’s no copycat at work. The renowned street artist Shepard Fairey has come to Braamfontein to stamp his latest proclamation. We meet in the building that he’s transforming. A vast window commands a grand view of the Nelson Mandela Bridge, illuminated against the Joburg skyline. This is one of the world’s “ten most influential cities” chosen by cognac brand Hennessy in which to promote a very special Limited Edition label designed by the artist. Hennessy’s marketing brains have made their own clever blend of the eau-de-vie of street culture and luxury. Fairey, a ubiquitous conqueror

BRIGHTS & RIGHTS: Shepard Fairey working on the wall mural in Braamfontein. Right, the Obama ’Hope’ poster and the sticker that sparked his fame

of walls and T-shirts, now colonises fine liquor collections. Tonight, the key ingredient wearily shuffles to get comfortable on a hard chair. Unwashed hands and paint-splattered jeans signal the end of a long day. Fairey has just flown in

from Berlin; next is Toronto. Between travelling, there are personal projects (he’s working on a Rolling Stones poster later that night), bottle signings, social functions and more interviews. It’s a heavy price tag for this 44-year-old father of two daughters. But the tiredness lifts as he reveals his excitement at being in Joburg. Since an old friend fired his interest in South Africa during the “purple people” protests of 1989, it was always his intention to come here. Scheduling and finances held him back, until the Hennessy gig came about. His mural draws on that memorable moment when riot police’s purple dye — sprayed on opstokers (troublemakers) to mark them for arrest — became a badge of defiance. In Fairey’s image, a smiling Madiba is set against a King Protea motif. His raised fist, and a verbal twist on the Freedom Charter demand — “The Purple Shall Govern” — pop against a black shirt. At first glance, the image could

be read as an indulgently syrupy shot of borrowed sentimentality — until one appreciates Fairey’s selfcaution against imperious messaging. “As opposed to more sinister propaganda, where others like their work to be the end of the conversation, I like my propaganda to be the start of the conversation,” he says. Fairey has come less to raise his own banner than to gong a national call to remain vigilant. “I get to do my spin on this portrait to remind us that sometimes it is a few courageous people that end up helping to achieve critical mass for a movement. Stooping to the petty quarrels of humanity, you will never achieve anything. You sometimes have to wait patiently for many years, maintaining a philosophy that eventually people will stand behind.” Fairey started provoking 25 years ago with a sticker campaign featuring the massive wrestler Andre Roussimoff, paired with the words “Andre the Giant has a Posse”. It was spontaneous fun, but soon evolved into an experiment on the public responses to a nonsensical message. Some appreciated the art, others tore it down, and some feared it as an anti-establishment threat. These days the message is presented in more refined forms: statements intended to unlock rather than to confuse. “The greatest thing about street art is that it exists where people live. Anyone can engage with it. And that democracy is incredible; it means there is dialogue,” says Fairey. He mentions the therapeutic process of tuning out the “white noise” in messages that surround us. “I lose track of time, the CD ends and I don’t even notice because I am immersed in what I’m doing. This is the beauty of art.” Whether it is a Juxtapoz magazine cover or a protest poster, much of Fairey’s process transfers to the audience: the graphical elements seem to offer a loosened thread for us to pull. This quality has made him one of the most influential popular art commentators, alongside the likes of Banksy and Barbara Kruger. In his famous “Hope” poster, created independently during the 2008 US elections, he paired Barack Obama’s image with bold type and

racially indeterminate, non-partisan hues. “I thought one of the biggest challenges Obama faced was racism. Even though I’m someone who, like Bob Marley, thinks that ‘the colour of a man or woman’s skin should be of no more significance than the colour of their eyes’, that’s not the way all Americans think. To me the idea of illustrating him in a more patriotic palette, that reduced the race factor, was important in levelling the playing field.” Was his iconisation of Obama misplaced in light of the president’s flagging popularity? Fairey is pragmatic. “My opinions about Obama are different to 2008, because he had yet to take office then and be presented with the challenges of office. There are things I’ve disagreed with him about, and there have been lots of efforts to sabotage him. I think there was no way for Obama to live up to what a lot of people hoped for, including me.” Such inevitable disappointments have far from worn down Fairey’s resolve to provoke through his art. If anything, they have emboldened him. “When people complain about politics in America, I say, ‘Well, are you voting? Are you using all the tools at your disposal to push the conversation in the right direction? And if you’re not, you should probably be quiet.’” Fairey is pushing in his own way. Tirelessly campaigning with the seemingly irrational charge to “obey giant” — the current evolution of his first work. He’s an evangelist against apathy and cynicism — which he fears “will give the most leverage for the people with the most power to gain even more”. He wants unremitting effort to be part of his legacy. “What I hope to leave is the idea that it doesn’t require virtuosity; it requires stamina, persistence and a work ethic.” The interview ends too soon. Will he spend some time at local nightspots? No: after a quick dinner, he will return to his hotel and carry on working. While I’m ushered away, he graciously thanks me with a handshake, and — with a sudden proselytising impulse — offers me a stack of stickers. LS

Sunday Times Combined Metros 3 - 04/09/2012 03:52:14 PM - Plate:

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HEY move in uniformed parcels. Heels clatter, little wheels on tight, dimension-approved bags squeak. Chins up, thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s an undeniable spectator quality to the parade of an airlineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s air crew prancing to a boarding gate. The captains, magnificently tall with clear eyes set for horizons, lead the way. Next in line are the flight attendants, or rather, hostesses, no, priestesses gliding in shimmering blue, maroon or fawn. With headgear always a two-finger space from anywhere on that perfect poster-face of a proud carrier. For the carried â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the haggard gargoyles of economy lounges â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the strutting parade momentarily interrupts the vacant gaze, forming an ovation of lowered books and newspapers, and skirting eyeballs. But like all parades, after too much, it gets tired. One float of two politicians in a compromising pose looks like the next. Soon, scuffed shoes glare conspicuously and a wayward tuft of hair morphs into a disheveled mess, while the clattering of heels start to jackhammer the head. Five days in airport transit will do this to you. Anyone fortunate to have a close relative or spouse employed by an international airline will understand the benefit of the rebate ticket. Rewarded to the employee and their close kin, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a fraction of a costly full-price ticket. With certain conditions: depending on your place within company hierarchy, you will be on standby, and provided there is space, those with a higher grading get a seat before you. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a chance, but the savings are substantial. And a gauntlet my wife, employed by one of these airlines, and I decided to run â&#x20AC;&#x201D; towing our two-year-old to the city of New York. The first bad sign of our gamble, though, was the offer of the crew jump seat for me en route to JFK as the only available space on board. The jump seat is cabin purgatory. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neither the cramped hell of economy, where you enjoy your bento box of airline food in the company of other hemmed-in folk; nor is it the vast Icelandic heaven of business class, where passengers nod at

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Â â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Â? Â Â Â? Â? Â? each other approvingly, sipping free champagne. In the jump seat you are in isolation. There is no in-flight entertainment, not even a safety card to count letters on. And, worst of all, no designated food. A stray dog, I was fed a mix of scraps, from luxurious businessclass fare to e-class rubber dessert. I even had a plastic fork and stainless-steel knife in either hand at one stage. But, I knew the risks, and we arrived. New York was everything and more than I expected. Journeying back, any afterglow of our Manhattan dream was rudely rubbed off. We were informed, while in transit in Amsterdamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Schiphol airport, that the connecting flight was fully booked. According to a smug ground-crew member, it was â&#x20AC;&#x153;high travel-season in the northern hemisphereâ&#x20AC;?. Fear began to rise, and scenes of Spielbergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s The Terminal began playing in my mind as we tried to find the cheapest, closest hotel in a wet

and gloomy Amsterdam. The next days, checking in, wading through customs, queuing and further waiting proved fruitless, something about my wifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Z grade position meaning that a trolley porterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distant aunt could get in before we could. Dragging our bags and daughter, we trudged back to customs, made sure our luggage didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fly without us, got stamped, purchased a few supplies and found reasonable accommodation. Three days of the same arduous routine later, wearing the same clothes in which we arrived, we had had enough. KLM had some space flying to Nairobi and from there we took the next available flight to Johannesburg. Never has economy-class food tasted better; never have the seats felt wider; never have fellow passengers been so friendly. And, on arrival, never has the â&#x20AC;&#x153;welcome homeâ&#x20AC;? of a customs official sounded sweeter. We paid the full fare for that.

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EDITOR: Andrew Unsworth DEPUTY EDITOR: Paul Ash CONTACT: Tel: 011 280 5121. e-mail: travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za DESIGNER: Vernice Shaw SUBEDITORS: Elizabeth Sleith, Anton Ferreira and Yvonne Fontyn PICTURE SOURCING: Aubrey Paton COVER: Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia PICTURE: The Biggerpicture/Alamy COVER DESIGN: Matthys Moss ADVERTISING: Ian Shiffman, Business Manager. Tel 021 488 1924. Cell: 082 718 8714. e-mail: shiffmani@sundaytimes.co.za and Debbie Thompson, CSO Hospitality, Travel and Leisure: Tel 011 280 3555. Cell 082 900 9965. e-mail thompsond@avusa.co.za. SUBSCRIBER HOTLINE: 0860 52 52 00

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14 I

COVER ST

22 SEPTEMBER 2013

HOW DO YOU DO? No laws protect us from people who tweet through dinner, but South Africans are flocking to etiquette classes. Politeness may yet prevail

“S

OUP! Salad! Fish! Mains!” Sharon Carey chimes across the marble floor of her Sandhurst chateau. There’s a cacophony of frenzied clinking as we arrange our cutlery. Sharon, who runs the School of Etiquette in Johannesburg with her daughter, Courtenay, says: “A lot of etiquette is based on common sense.” We’re told never to use a fork as a shovel. Don’t blow your nose at the table (“delicate dabbing” is permitted). “Enter and exit” your chair from the right. And if you’re sick, “never tell people”. Sharon quizzes our social intelligence, which she calls “SQ”. For instance, when your boss eats your bread roll, do you: a. Snatch it back; b. Keep quiet, or c. Take the roll from someone else’s plate? “How can you be trusted to handle a company or a contract when you can’t handle a simple knife and fork?” says Courtenay. It's enough to cause an executive, one of several on the course, who manages a billionrand investment portfolio, to break into a cold sweat. Luckily for him, we cover “clammy-hand control” (apply antiperspirant on palms the night before), along with “how to make people like you” and smalltalk topics. “We don’t do sex, politics or religion,” says Sharon. “Napkin awareness” (how to fold and flick) takes half an hour. It’s all in the wrist. I thought etiquette meant balancing an encyclopaedia on your head, but Courtenay says she only assigns this task to clients who slouch — and then only with paperbacks. “The book was put on the head to create good posture, which works just as well now as in the ’50s.” Courtenay, 25, is the picture of perfection, from blonde bun to manicured nails. She attended etiquette “makeover courses” in the US after working as a marketing manager. The rest, she says, she learnt from her mom. In her day, says Sharon, being well-mannered meant enunciating one’s vowels and playing a gentle game of croquet before lunch. But, she says: “Etiquette isn’t old-fashioned: it has kept up with the times.” Today, the pair tell me, it’s as much about handwritten thank-you letters as it is about knowing how to wield chopsticks on transatlantic business trips (we practise with popcorn). “Etiquette became a bad word,” says Courtenay. “People thought it was reserved for the upper crust. But it has little to do with fine china. It’s the art of getting along with people.” It’s just as relevant today, she says, because technology and “hurry syndrome” have eroded our social skills. “So often I think, ‘Is this person even listening to me?’ I want to teach people to treat each other in a more loving way.” She says people worldwide are “rushing in droves” to finishing schools, which are popping up everywhere and are not just

for daughters of well-to-do families in Switzerland. “People are realising we need manners, not just technical skills, to get top jobs.” She tells me that in China, people are paying up to $16 000 for a two-week crash course in manners. The Careys’ corporate courses range from about R4 000 for a full day. The room erupts in “How do you dos?” as we shake hands in our “enhance your mingling proficiency” exercise, introducing people with considered details. “This is Bob. He plays golf and is a pescetarian.” Courtenay says Bill Gates is notorious for shaking hands with his other hand in his pocket — a social outrage. I wonder aloud, as I exit my chair to the right, if all this doesn’t increase social anxiety instead of diminishing it. Courtenay says etiquette isn’t about making people feel stupid; it’s about putting them at ease. Legend has it that Queen Victoria, not wanting to offend a guest drinking out of a finger bowl, followed suit. Sharon decided to start the school after observing etiquette blunders at high-profile functions. Many attendees are sent by their companies. I’m told they often receive queries from moms wanting to send their sons on the “How to be a gentleman” course. As Sharon says, topping up my tea: “Good manners will never go out of fashion.” Visit etischool.co.za — Leigh-Anne Hunter

WE DON’T DO SEX OR RELIGION

HANNON Burnett’s long hair, psychedelic silk kaftan and casual nature would be at home in a yoga class, but she’s an etiquette tutor for children. My expectations are rattled. In her farmstead home near Johannesburg, there is vintage furniture, but instead of gleaming silverware atop a lacquered mahogany console, I find some tea and shortbread standing ready in polka-dot china next to a jukebox. Since when has etiquette shared space with eclectic? Burnett addresses my initial bewilderment forthrightly. “I describe etiquette as ‘the art of using good manners in different situations.’ It’s not that high-falutin’, pinkie up when you’re drinking tea. You have to step away from that rubbish to be completely honest.” Retrenchment forced Burnett to turn to skills she had learnt in the hospitality industry, working at Disney World’s Disney Academy, where employees are trained in various skills. A strict upbringing by her airline-employed parents and constant travelling as a child gave her confidence and a set of social skills, making her a natural etiquette mentor. In her work as a luxury tour guide, she was dismayed how little fundamental knowledge of etiquette there was, even among the affluent and educated. Describing guests at a Rovos Rail black-tie dinner, she says sadly: “Some girls came in pant-suits.” With this background, and needing an

income, she imported a curriculum from the US that teaches etiquette for children (4 to 13 years) as well as teens and young adults (13 to 18 years), and opened her school, Etiquette Renaissance. Her courses run over eight weeks and start at R2 500, with various payment options. They include topics such as greetings, table manners, communication and bullying. Etiquette is not reserved for the privileged, she insists. “That [idea] is something I am trying to break, that etiquette comes with a social class.” Her near-fanaticism about erasing the stigma of etiquette as classist is manifest in her sensitivity to the diversity of local cultures in her teaching. Not content with simply adopting US or European standards, she has reworked the imported material with a local standard in mind. “We had to create something unique to and open to South Africans. We are warm people — the second time we meet someone, we embrace them. This doesn’t happen overseas”. Her approach may not meet European expectations of an etiquette school, but Burnett has bridged many gaps. Members of an emergent black middle and upper class with their own heritage of social norms ask her for help with Western norms. “I find that I am doing a lot of one-onones with parents, to keep their African heritage while helping their children to socialise in a Western way.” Etiquette tutoring remains within the reach of only those who can afford it, but Burnett is determined to develop a local standard that is culturally sensitive and available to most South Africans. She

maintains that etiquette is relevant to society, referencing the evolution of the industry in the US. “Of course it has had to have a revolution for it to stay relevant, because it really is the teaching of good manners. The day we throw away good manners is the day we should be running wild with the wolves.” Part of her training includes “netiquette” and “mobiquette” courses, which teach children about telephone manners and the hazards of modern social media. She is alarmed at the access children have to smartphones and tablets. “Kids are more savvy on social media than parents are. Parents need to update themselves to monitor their children.” The involvement of parents is integral to Burnett’s courses for children. “The first thing I tell parents is, ‘I’m not a miracle worker.’ It falls upon the parents to help with the homework I give their children.” She candidly shares stories about difficult cases, such as the 9-year-old who, at their first meeting, said “I’m going to f**k you up.” But Burnett says the worst part of these horror stories is the lack of surprise some parents display when hearing about their child’s bad behaviour. She also has her favourite moments: seeing the positive change in families, or the teenager whose bolstered confidence replaces social awkwardness. The school has been running for two years and Burnett admits there are many challenges. But, she says, “I’m young and funky”. Hers is a progressive brand of etiquette, one that has a firm handle on the realities of today’s world and doesn’t care whether your pinkie is up or down. Visit etiquetterenaissance.co.za — Keith Tamkei

I’M NOT A MIRACLE WORKER

MANNERS FOR MINORS: Shannon Burnett of Etiquette Renaissance

WALDO SWIEGERS

10 I

COVER

9 JUNE 2013

MAGIC MUSHROOMS: ‘The lampshades nest together into a wall,” says designer Frederik Roijé. The design is inspired by shapes found in nature

SPACE OD Macedoni divider cre sintering a material

PRINT MINE

WITH FRIES, PLEASE

It might sound like walking on the moon, but soon we’ll be able to print shoes, body parts, sex toys and possibly even food in the comfort of our homes. Keith Tamkei investigates the wild frontier of 3D technology in South Africa

HERE’S a boyish energy in Bernhard Vogt’s voice. Like an eight-year-old showing off his Airfix collection, the founder of South Africa’s largest distributor of 3D printers and consumables enthusiastically presents the machines in his company’s display room. One of them, roughly the size of a home cake mixer, buzzes as it lays rows of melted plastic that, after a few hours, will be a life-sized model of a hand. There is every reason for Vogt’s exuberance. Over the past three years, media attention on 3D technology has grown from simmering interest in décor items, clothing and jewellery, to boiling point when recent headlines announced that American law student Cody Wilson had successfully designed and printed a working hand gun and was distributing the blueprints freely online. Spurring website shut-downs and a fearful response from US Homeland Security. Not that Vogt approves of Wilson’s actions. He is alarmed, primarily from a safety point of view: “Those things can blow up in people’s faces.” But suddenly, 3D printing technology and its capabilities

are invading our personal domain. In Japan, you can enter a photo booth, get scanned and receive a miniature, full-colour figurine of yourself. In Amsterdam, architects are planning to print a house and furnishings using plastic and wood fibres. This has become much more than a manufacturing utility. The ability to design and physically create an object is turning dining rooms into mini prototyping labs. According to Vogt, 90% of his sales in SA are home printers. Even more remarkably, since he was offered the distribution licence by US manufacturer 3D Systems three years ago, sales have doubled every year. This year, he has already sold more than 800 units. As printers become cheaper (the current base price is around R15 000) and reach major retailers, the future looks gleaming for Vogt’s company. I’m barely grasping the process of printing something physical rather than text on a piece of paper when Vogt starts leading me into a terminology and acronym minefield: digital light projection, selective laser sintering … I have to ask him to explain slowly. First, he says, 3D printing is a misnomer.

“It should be called ‘additive manufacturing’.” Meaning that various kinds of material are added one layer at a time to build an object. The blueprint for this object is designed via computer-aided design software, or by using a handheld 3D scanner. The 3D printers available in retail stores will be plastic jet printers, which feed a reel of thin plastic through a heated tube and moving nozzle. Jewellers and certain medical technical practitioners use a different technique, where a

LIKE AN ONION: A 3D plastic jet printer at work

I 11 PICTURES: FREEDOMOFCREATION.COM. DITA VON TEESE DRESS: ALBERT SANCHEZ PHOTOGRAPHY

9 JUNE 2013 STORY

CHOKED UP: A Pekka necklace from freedomofcreation.com

DDITY: A ia office eated by a powdered

BRAVE NEW WORLD: An architectural model printed in 3D

SNAP, CRACKLE, POP: Custom jewellery from cubify.com

PRESENT PERFECT: Clockwise from left. Dita Von Teese wears an articulated 3D printed dress that expands to the contours of the body. Created by Michael Schmidt and Francis Bitonti, the garment was lacquered in black and adorned with 12 000 black Swarovski crystals; a miniature human based on 3D scans and printed by Japanese company Omote 3D Shashin Kan; Robohand, designed by Richard Van As, and a 3D printed shoe

projection hardens a bowl of light-sensitive liquid resin in layers to build a flexible earpiece or ring mould. Other printers used for prototyping in the manufacturing industry, or to create high-end designer products (such as the dress worn by burlesque vixen Dita Von Teese) use a laser to sinter or weld layers of anything that can be turned into a powder, from ceramic to metals. Bouncing around from machines that fit on a desk to some the size of a dishwasher, Vogt says one of the advantages of 3D printing, especially in the medical field, is the ability to customise shapes and sizes, such as an earpiece or a titanium hip joint tailored to the patient’s femur. When master woodworker Richard van As sliced off four fingers working a machine in 2011, he was back in his workshop a week later trying to create a mechanical attachment to replace his lost digits. He found Ivan Owen, a robotic film effects designer from the US, and together they created prototypes using machines donated by 3D printer manufacturer MakerBot. In his tool-strewn workshop, Van As shows me the final metal product attached to his hand. “It took five hours to print a prototype, as opposed to 40 hours making it manually,” he says. His digital digits have since been modified and labelled “Robohand”. So far, this has changed the lives of about 80 children born with Amniotic Band Syndrome (constricted fingers, or no fingers at all) by enabling them to pick up objects. The designs are available from MakerBot’s open-source website thingiverse.com, ready to print and assemble. Van As rejects being called a hero. “This started for my own selfish need,” he says. “Robohand is almost a fluke, but I’m glad I’ve done my bit for humanity.” As 3D printing technology heads towards finer accuracy and broader accessibility, product engineering secrecy will be difficult to maintain. Ownership is a roaring debate in the 3D furnace. Brendan Copestake, art consultant and head of 3D solution company Parts & Labour, shows me a printed model of what appears to be a Jeff Koons balloon-dog sculpture.

According to Copestake, Koons — an American artist known for his hyper-real sculptures of everyday items — made his name by taking public objects and labelling them as his own. By rendering a 3D image similar to a Koons artwork and turning it into a sellable product, Copestake says he has turned Koons’s art philosophy on its head. Will 3D printing spark innovation and invention in South Africa? Professor Deon de Beer of Vaal Tech University, who introduced 3D printing to the local market in 1993 and is a major proponent of the technology, says it already has. “We have caught up with the rest of the world and in some places even surpassed them.” De Beer runs the Idea2product Lab, which guides inventors from idea to prototype to manufacture. About to fly to a US university to speak about this model, he uses Tugo Toys as one of the lab’s success stories. Based on modular building blocks similar to Lego, the inventor initially created these for his own child, and used 3D printing to prototype the product, that is now backed by a major retailer. In the meantime, opensource designs and blueprints mushroom on the internet. Vogt says private schools in SA have purchased his printers and introduced 3D rendering and design in their syllabi. Children can log on to cubify.com to customise and print out ready-designed jewellery or, if they have R80 000, buy a designer 3D-printed table from freedomofcreation.com. Soon a generation will be as familiar with 3D software as we are with Microsoft Windows. Vogt and Copestake agree that artisan skills will be casualties of 3D printing. “It could transform entire industries,” says Vogt. “What happens to Mattel when you can print your own toys? But it’s exciting. It’s like being in the ’80s when the first personal computers were introduced.” According to a Nasa report, the term “designer food” could soon be redefined -— a research company has recently received a grant to create a food synthesiser based on 3D printing technology, using longer-lasting powdered food sources for extended space journeys. Who knows, soon we could be ordering 3D burgers and fries to go.

WHAT HAPPENS TO MATTEL WHEN YOU CAN PRINT YOUR OWN TOYS?

Keith Tamkei Contact: +27 83 4143909 Email: ktamkei@gmail.com