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ISSUE 05

S P E C TAT O R L I F E

A photographic album

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E DI T OR ’S L E T T E R

‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning —’ Gatsby’s optimism about the future makes him the ultimate American literary hero and, since in the spring issue of Spectator Life we’re doing some stargazing of our own, an ideal subject for us too. In an interview with the Australian director Baz Luhrmann (Count Von Groovy to his friends) we find out what to expect in his new film of The Great Gatsby, which will open this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Elsewhere in the issue, we ask if burgeoning sexual freedom in the Arab world is a myth and wonder whether ebooks might save libraries. In ‘Geek gods’ our online editor Sebastian Payne made a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley to get better acquainted with where the world changed. On our cover I’m delighted to have another Palo Alto export, James Franco, who is in cinemas this month in Oz the Great and Powerful and Harmony Korine’s disturbing morality tale Spring Breakers. As a poet and a professor as well as a producer, he’s perhaps the perfect Spectator Life pin-up. He’s not just a film star but, according to his friend Danny Boyle, a ‘stellar burst’. Enjoy the issue.

Spectator Life www.spectatorlife.com Supplied free with 30 March 2013 issue of The Spectator 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP Telephone 020 7961 0200 www.spectator.co.uk ISSN: 2050-2192 Chairman Andrew Neil Editor Olivia Cole Deputy Editor Danielle Wall Sub-editors Peter Robins, Victoria Lane, Clarke Hayes Design & Art Direction Steve Fenn, Design by St – www.designbyst.com Features Assistant Will Gore Client services director Melissa McAdden: melissa@spectator.co.uk Client services execuitve Emily Glazebrook: emilyg@spectator.co.uk Original design Kuchar Swara, DKW&R Cover Image Francesco Carrozzini / Trunk Archive

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C ON T R I B U T OR S Sam Neill’s career as an actor spans over four decades. He is known for his roles in The Piano, Dead Calm and Jurassic Park. He recently finished filming BBC gangster saga Peaky Blinder and will be seen in the features A Long Way Down and Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box.

Terence Conran is one of the world’s best-known designers, restaurateurs and retailers.

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Chrissy Iley is a prolific interviewer of stars. Based between London and LA, she would love to review a spa.

Bryan Adams divides his time between music and photography. He has photographed for magazines including Interview, i-D, and British and German Vogue. In 2006 Adams was honoured with a German Lead Award for his series of photographs of Mickey Rourke. Adams’s photographic exhibitions include those held at the Saatchi Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery.

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CONTENTS

17 47 35 59 C U LT U R E

STYLE

LIFE

T R AV E L

14. The Index Where to go and what to see in April, May and June

45. Investment Christopher Silvester on autograph-hunting

17. Photography rocks Musician and photographer Bryan Adams talks to Olivia Cole

47. The other Windsor David Blackburn takes interior design notes at the Weston family’s Florida compound

22. Veiled desire John R. Bradley on Shereen El Feki’s Sex and the Citadel

50. Re-inventing the wheel Peter Robins on bikes that break with convention

24. Interview: Baz Luhrmann Tom Teodorczuk talks Gatsby with the Australian director

52. Motoring Olivia Cole boards the Marrakesh Express for the exotic launch of the new Range Rover

26. Visiting West Egg Harry Mount in Long Island in search of the Fitzgeralds

54. The Wish List Watches of the future

30. Interview: James Franco Chrissy Iley meets Hollywood’s most literary leading man

59. Bermuda Lindsay Johns makes it back from the Bermuda Triangle

35. Castles in the air Stephen Bayley on architecture’s most overrated stars

62. Geek odyssey Sebastian Payne goes looking for his entrepreneurial heroes in Silicon Valley

39. Wine Sam Neill on his love of Pinot Noir – just don’t call it ‘passion’

64. Globe trotting St Barths, China, Berlin and martinis at Dukes

40. Save the borrowers Sam Leith explains why e-books aren’t always evil; Christopher Platt on the New York Public Library’s brave new digital world

66. One to Watch Terence Conran on Anton Alvarez 13

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C oac he l l a Festiva l California, 12-14 April and 19-21 April Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Blur, the Stone Roses and many others, in glorious West Coast sunshine.

APR

Br itish S e a P owe r Various venues, from 4 April The indie eccentrics have a new record to promote (Machineries of Joy) and a strong live reputation. What’s not to like?

Bac h M a r atho n Royal Albert Hall, 1 April Prepare to enter a fugue state at this eight-hour celebration of the composer’s life and work, curated and led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Performers include the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and violinist Viktoria Mullova.

T he Rite o f S p r ing a nd P et rush k a Sadler’s Wells, 11-13 April Innovative company Fabulous Beast pair their acclaimed re-imagining of The Rite of Spring with a fresh version of another Stravinsky classic.

MAY

THE INDEX

Jac k Dee Various venues, from 7 May Will Dee crack a smile? Probably not, but he can still be relied upon to keep his audiences happy. Othe l l o National Theatre, from 16 April Rory Kinnear is Iago; Adrian Lester is the Moor; Nicholas Hytner directs. What more do you need to know?

Udde r be l ly Festiva l Southbank Centre, from 12 April There is such a thing as silent stand-up comedy — perhaps its most feted practitioner is Sam Wills, better known as The Boy With Tape on His Face. He’s part of an excellent programme that also features Ardal O’Hanlon, Richard Herring and Tony Law.

Wor l d Bo ok N ight 23 April Try to look like you don’t normally read, and some kind soul might give you Casino Royale, Treasure Island or The Reader. Expect lots of interesting literary events.

Depe c he Mode Various venues, from 7 May They’re still packing out arenas after all these years, although nostalgics should be warned that they’re also still releasing new albums. Ange l a Ge orghiou Royal Festival Hall, 10 May The star soprano performs arias from operas including La Bohème and Don Carlos with a little help from the Royal Philharmonic.

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L S O a nd Si r C ol i n Dav i s The Barbican, 18 June The programme for this season-closing concert includes Mendelssohn and Schubert.

JUN

A Wa l k T h rough Br i t i s h Art Tate Britain, from 14 May They’re taking a fresh look at the permanent collection, with a chronological rehanging of works by Turner, Gainsborough and Reynolds and others. Worth you taking a fresh look, too.

British Sea Power: Redferns; Rite of Spring: Johan Persson & ENO; Gatsby: Warner Bros. Pictures; Gaugin: The Courtauld Gallery, London

T h e Gre at Gatsby Various cinemas, from 17 May Baz Luhrmann’s take on Fitzgerald has Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and, astonishingly, 3D. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into your face.

Hough ton R e v i si ted Houghton Hall, Norfolk, from 17 May In 1779, Britain’s first and perhaps still most corrupt prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, sold his suspiciously glorious collection of Old Master paintings to Catherine the Great. This is the first time they’ve been reunited at his old home in more than 200 years. W e a re f st v l Damyns Hall Aerodrome, 25 May An all-new festival brings together some of the world’s leading club names and DJs.

M acbet h The Globe, from 22 June Award-winning actor Eve Best braves the Scottish play for her directorial debut.

C ollect i ng Gaugu i n The Courtauld, from 20 June Following on from Tate Modern’s blockbuster a couple of years ago, the Courtauld shows off its impressive collection of works by the master of post-impressionism.

C h a rl i e a nd t h e C hocol ate Factory London Palladium, from 23 June How do you follow Skyfall? If you’re Sam Mendes, the answer’s obvious: a Roald Dahl musical. The songs are by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, who made sweet music out of Hairspray.

World Wa r Z Various cinemas, from 21 June Brad Pitt’s long-awaited zombie epic could be a great disaster movie or — after a troubled production period — just a great big disaster. It’s coming for you either way.

Gl a stonbu ry Worthy Farm, 26-30 June After lying fallow for a year, Britain’s biggest and sometimes muddiest music festival returns with U2, Coldplay, Beyoncé, and a legion of not very much smaller acts.

T h e Br i t i s h L ions Australia, from 1 June These three tests are the hottest tickets in world rugby, if you were lucky enough to snag one. They sold out within 15 minutes of going on sale. T h e C r i pple o f In i s h m a a n Noel Coward Theatre, from 8 June Daniel Radcliffe continues his tour of roles that definitely aren’t Harry Potter in Martin McDonagh’s black comedy of rural Irish life. N e i l You ng Various venues, from 10 June Expect new material and plenty of hits. 15

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Bryan Adams tells Spectator Life about how he lost his heart to photography Olivia Cole

ÂŠ 2013 Bryan Adams, courtesy Steidl

A T HOU SA N D WOR D S

Above: Billy Idol, Los Angeles, 2008

CULTURE BRYAN ADAMS_Spectator Life Mar 13_Spectator Supplements 210x260_

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CULTURE What is your idea of a great portrait photograph? Something that makes you stop for a second and look again. And what qualities do you most value in a subject? Naturalness. You started exploring photography through selfportraiture... Yes I actually started in the 1990s with the worst possible subject — me — doing my album covers. A photographer friend of mine said I shouldn’t do it and I should let others do it, which made me suspicious and want to do it even more. Who are the photographers you most admire and who may have been an influence? Herb Ritts was one — he was a gentleman and very generous to me in the beginning. He let me work at his studio and his assistants are still my friends today. From your work it’s clear that you are very good at persuading people to lose their inhibitions in front of the camera. In what ways do you think your own

EXPOSED is a retrospective of Adams’s photography and features portraits of his friends and colleagues in the art, entertainment and fashion industries.

Below: Lindsay Lohan, March 2007; below right: Dustin Hoffman, June 2006; far right: Mick Jagger, February 2008

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experience as a performer helps in that regard? I think music and photos are intertwined. I recently met up with another photographer, David LaChapelle, who before dinner did a fantastic impromptu dance/mime of Etta James singing ‘Groove Me’. Afterwards I sat there thinking David is more of a rock star than most rock stars, yet he’s a photographer. If it’s rude to pick favourites, who have been three favourite subjects and why? Couldn’t possibly say even if I wanted to. I recently worked with some wonderful subjects like Sergei Polunin (ballet dancer), Dizzee Rascal (rapper), Anne V (model) to name a few, all very different, all very inspiring. The people you’ve had the opportunity to shoot make for an astonishing list. Are there others who has so far eluded you? Oh yes, too many to mention. For a time I chased old-school Hollywood and didn’t get far, mostly because they weren’t around any more. Your portrait of the Queen has an almost casual atmosphere. Did she mind the wellies being in shot? I think she liked the wellies in the shot, it’s what made her smile. You’ve said that photography feeds into your music — could you tell us a little bit more about that? Actually what I said was one feeds the other, it was in reference to taking a break from one to do the other. It helps to come back to things refreshed. To what extent can you design and plan for how 19

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CULTURE

I started in the 1990s with the worst possible subject – me – doing my own album covers

things go on a shoot, and to what extent to you enjoy improvising or happy accidents? Being open for things to, and making things happen are the most crucial things to being a photographer. Both improvising and happy accidents are imperative. From Instagram to Twitter, Facebook photography and visual language on the one hand seems to be becoming more and more a part of everyday life. And yet some of the most familiar features of the landscape from Kodak to Jessups to the manual camera are disappearing. When photography is your medium, how do those changes make you feel? I’m OK with it, and I embraced the digital world rather late. What kind of camera do you use? I use a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III. A nd what k ind of c a mera do you have a nostalgia for? The thing I miss most is my Rolleiflex, I wish it was a digi-camera…. When you are known very widely in one artistic sphere, how hard is it to establish yourself in a wholly different creative medium? It’s always hard to do one thing while the other thing is happening, but as long as your work is strong and you don’t care what people say about you, you’ll be OK.

Above: Sir Ben Kingsley, January 2010

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CULTURE

A meeting with Shereen El Feki, author of Sex and the Citadel, a book exploring sexual mores in the modern Arab world John R. Bradley

VEI LED DE S I R E Concentrating on sexual intercourse in isolation, wrote the notoriously celibate Henry James, leads to creative failure, for the act ‘finds its extension and consummation only in the rest of life’. What happens in the bedroom matters, then, because it relates to how we navigate shifting boundaries between tradition, convention, religion and morality — the stuff of James’s fiction. The caricaturist Max Beerbohm parodied James’s remarks by drawing the portly author kneeling, transfixed, outside a room in a ‘promiscuous hotel’, next to a pair of women’s shoes and men’s boots. The marketing blurb for Shereen El Feki’s Sex and the Citadel reminded me of this caricature. ‘If you really want to know a people, start by looking inside their bedrooms,’ we are told, before being assured that this ‘is no peep show’. Both statements are true. ‘Sexual attitudes and behaviour are intimately bound up in religion, tradition, culture, politics and economics,’ El Feki writes, in a way that seems to paraphrase James. ‘They are part and parcel of sexuality — that is, the act and all that goes with it.’ El Feki was born in the West to an Egyptian family, and spent childhood holidays visiting relatives in Egypt. After years covering health and science issues for the Economist, she briefly joined Al-Jazeera English in 2007 as a presenter, then switched careers to research HIV in the Arab world for the UN. Now she is mainly based in Cairo — at a time of Islamist ascendancy when women are suffering

unprecedented sexual harassment on Cairo’s streets. Nevertheless, she tackles her subject frankly, and explores how the Arab Spring upheavals are, to her mind, challenging entrenched taboos. The book is heavily focused on Egypt, and is born of her most recent fieldwork. But it is a very literary narrative: each section opens with personal anecdotes and interviews, backed up or contradicted by scholarly articles, and rounded off with El Feki’s hope for a better future. She cautions that any change will be a long time coming. Everything depends on whether the ideals of the secular revolutionaries triumph, or if they are supplanted by radical Islamism. Sex and the Citadel covers prostitution, heterosexual anal sex, female genital mutilation, impotence, people living with HIV, and the various forms of ‘temporary marriages’ allowed by Islam. Then there is the particularly prickly issue of homosexuality. As elsewhere, El Feki is sensitive enough to present both perspectives: the tiny group of gay-identified men who yearn for for greater acceptance, as well as the much larger group who engage in same-sex relations but reject western ‘gay’ identity politics. Even the crackpot Islamists get ample opportunity to air their views, which are faithfully transcribed — although I suspect El Feki had to bite her tongue as she listened to their nonsense. Thankfully, Sex and the Citadel is not another treatise by an activist out to publicise her ‘rescue’ of thirdworld women languishing in despair. ‘The Arabs have had enough of being told what to do, and I don’t want to be another person issuing instructions,’ El Feki tells me, responding to a question about how she felt as both an outsider and insider. Her Arabic is, by her own admission, not perfect (she didn’t speak it while growing up); and she shuns the veil. ‘I feel like a born-again Arab,’ she beams. ‘This book has connected me with the region in a way I couldn’t have imagined.’ When she started it, the intention was to offer Westerners a glimpse into Arab sexual mores; but as it progressed, she explains, she realised that it would be an important tool, too, for young Arabs — who are, to judge by her account, also woefully ignorant about their history. I remind her, rather insensitively, that a young, unveiled Libyan woman, Magdulien Abaida, had recently been granted asylum in Britain after being detained and threatened with execution by members of a Libyan Islamist militia, for the crime of promoting women’s rights. El Feki scribbles the details in her notebook, uncharacteristically distracted. She admits that Arabs have boxed themselves in by embracing ultraconservative Islam exported by Saudi Arabia since the 1970s. They have consequently forgotten the remarkably broad discourse about sex and sexuality that was once common in the Muslim world. If change is to come, she correctly points out, it will because Arabs

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re-embrace their own hidden liberal Islamic traditions, rather than by mimicking alien western models. Sex and the Citadel is thus peppered with examples from the more tolerant past: reminders that there does indeed exist a progressive Islamic inheritance that values personal liberty and emphasises the importance of sexual intimacy — for both men and women. El Feki is a vibrant, elegant, impressively selfassured individual. But she strikes me as out of touch with the grim reality of the contemporary Arab world. The trouble is her central argument. It seems far more likely that the Arab world is going to end up with Islamist theocracies, not secular democracies. Her interview subjects, too, are overwhelmingly drawn from the middle and upper-middle classes so beloved of western media pundits but shunned by the Arab masses. She protests that working-class voices are included, but partly concedes my point: ‘One of the reasons one hears quite a lot from intellectuals, activists, lawyers and bloggers is that I didn’t just want to talk about the problems,’ she says. ‘I’m interested in looking at solutions, which are mostly coming from pioneers. These tend not to be ordinary people.’ Which demands another question: are the Arab masses, scraping a living amid their imploding economies, interested in reassessing their sexual identities?

She sees ‘small signs of pushback, not just the dramatic protests. People are talking about things now that were impossible to talk about under the Mubarak regime — not just the elite, but ordinary women in the working-class neighbourhoods I visit.’ We agree to disagree, but make a pact. If, in five years, the Islamists have been consigned to history and El Feki is still able to walk around Cairo unveiled, I will buy her lunch. If the Islamists have consolidated their power, lunch is on her. She agrees and, with a giggle that perhaps reveals as much about her naivity as her bravery, mimes covering herself with a veil. During our chat, news has broken that Chokri Belaid, Tunisia’s most prominant secular critic of Salafism, has been shot dead outside his home.

John R. Bradley has been covering the Arab world for almost two decades, and also writes for the Daily Mail and the Jewish Chronicle. His books include Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (2008), Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East (2010) and After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts (2012).

If progress is to be made, it will be through Arabs re-embracing their own hidden liberal Islamic traditions, rather than by mimicking alien western models

They certainly don’t seem interested in democracy and pluralism. In Egypt’s recent referendum on an Islamist-leaning constitution — the most important in the country’s 5,000-year history — a paltry 32 per cent cast a vote. It passed. But El Feki insists that the Muslim Brotherhood are screwing things up so badly, especially with regard to the economy, that the masses will eventually reject them. On the contrary, I counter: the activists, whose cause she champions, are alienating, not galvanising, the masses, who increasingly associate democracy with lawlessness and hunger. Hence the dwindling voter turnout, and the fact that the Islamists have won every election so far. The brief opening up of Egyptian society, and the opportunities to discuss issues about sex, will just as quickly be closed down. But she insists that recent events ‘suggest that’s not going to happen’.

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CULTURE

GAM B L I N G ON GAT SB Y

Right: Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan in The Great Gatsby. Far right: Baz Luhrmann directs Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes in Romeo and Juliet

Baz Luhrmann talks about filming Fitzgerald’s classic Tom Teodorczuk

Aside from a talent for spending money and throwing parties, Baz Luhrmann and Jay Gatsby, the tragic hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, have little in common. But after a customary six-month release delay, this May we finally get to see the flamboyant Australian’s $125 million Warner Brothers adaptation of the classic novel. So while, in the novel, Gatsby’s guests waft dreamily about his blue gardens, Baz says: ‘Great parties are like chemical equations that explode.’ The film’s fusing of American lyricism and Lurhmann’s visual fireworks has already inspired both controversy and expectation. Nobody but Luhrmann’s circle and a handful of studio executives has yet seen the film, but that hasn’t stopped the media from weighing in (the Daily News: ‘How Baz Luhrmann will ruin The Great Gatsby’; the New York Times: ‘A Pre-defense of Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby’). While the sceptics flag up the expensive six-month delay in the film’s release and the fact that the hip-hop star Jay-Z is scoring much of the film’s soundtrack, Luhrmann optimists savour the prospect of the director’s creative spectacle meeting the book’s ‘epic grandeur’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s description). The bigger question is whether Luhrmann’s version, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan and Tobey Maguire as narrator Nick Carraway, can improve upon Jack Clayton’s 1974 take starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Although it was neither a critical nor commercial success, it remains a cultural and style reference. When I met Luhrmann in a stylishly subterranean basement in the Ace Hotel in downtown Manhattan, he was keen to stress that he was drawn to the project because of an appreciation for the book. ‘Universally, Gatsby’s a bit like Gone With The Wind and like Titanic. People vaguely know it and some people who are Fitzgerald nuts know it very well. It’s amazing how many people know the Redford film but therefore

don’t know the book because they’re poles apart. . . The novel is exquisite. You learn the history of Gatsby, everything about his life during the journey and telling. You know where he’s come from, you know who he was and you know what he is.’ It could end up being the role of a lifetime for Leonardo DiCaprio, whose more recent screen outings have not always matched the subtlety of his performances in early cult classics (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries and, of course, Luhrmann’s own 1997 Romeo+Juliet opposite Claire Danes). DiCaprio was 22 when he first teamed up with Luhrmann. ‘Leo was a prince when we made Romeo+Juliet. Now he’s a king. Any time I’ve spent with him, he’s only ever had one focus in his life and that’s acting and the quality of it.’ For his own part, the director divides critics with films that include Moulin Rouge and Australia. He has a reputation within the industry as a perfectionist who haemorrhages money in pursuit of the ideal. In a navyblue suit and with salt-and-pepper hair, on the surface Luhrmann resembles another commuter leaving Grand Central Station. In person, he sweeps you into his world with a gale force of charm — he is among the most charismatic men I’ve ever encountered. His powers of persuasion are legendary — whether it’s persuading the Fitzgerald estate to buy the rights to The Great Gatsby, or schmoozing the biggest musical artists of our time to let him use their songs in Moulin Rouge. While blazing a trail in the Australian theatre scene, hich included directing La Bohème at the Sydney Opera House in 1990, Luhrmann acquired the nickname of Count Von Groovy. These days the world is his fiefdom. ‘I have a philosophy — I dream in Paris, I have fun in London, I like to live in New York and I like to dance in Brazil. LA for work and Sydney is home.’ ‘I love to affect culture,’ he says with typical understatement. Luhrmann may not be shy in highlighting 24

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to begrudge a new generation the chance to fall in love with another classic. There’s talk among his creative team that Luhrmann’s plans include another Shakespeare movie mash-up. ‘My problem is death. I have more things in my cupboard I want to make. There’s the Shakespeare canon, there are cinematic musicals, there are edgy psychological works.’ He even hints he’d like a shot at directing 007. ‘Sometimes having a brand is a burden,’ he says, ‘because sometimes I’d like to be a shooter and knock off a movie just for the fun of making someone else’s script or a Bond film.’ Should his colourful depiction of 1920s Long Island find favour with audiences and critics, Luhrmann will be able to do whatever project he chooses. But whatever the outcome of the Gatsby gamble, the celebrations promoting the film will be legendary. ‘Gatsby was someone who liked parties. So look out for that!’

Warner Bros. Pictures; 20th Century Fox / The Kobal Collection

his role as a trendsetter, but his esoteric cinematic recipes have resulted in mainstream cultural menus being transformed. ‘When I started with Strictly Ballroom, everybody kept saying ballroom dancing will not be popular in America. Strictly Come Dancing came directly from Strictly Ballroom. The graphics and clothes from Moulin Rouge have been absorbed by other cultures. They’re still doing bordello clips in pop. Every week there’s a new nightclub opening saying it’s Moulin Rouge-ish.’ Romeo+Juliet was loathed by many critics but won him powerful friends in Britain: ‘Some people said it was MTV Shakespeare. But Lord Puttnam said it’s done more for Shakespeare education [than anything else].’ And while Fitzgerald purists may flinch, as Shakespeare purists did with Romeo+Juliet, it’s hard

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CULTURE

F OL L OW I NG I N T H E F I T Z GE R A L D S’ F O O T S T E P S Harry Mount

Below: Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby, 1974

End — a thwacking great white house with a Doric porch, built in 1902 by the classical architect Stanford White for the editor of the New York World, Herbert Bayard Swope. Lands End was demolished in 2011 — big money has migrated to Westchester and the Hamptons. But Fitzgerald’s old house survives — no. 6 Gateway Drive, a double-fronted house with balustraded extensions and a twin garage. These days, it looks awfully respectable. The hedges are neatly trimmed. Little badges, thrust into the lawn, advertise ADT, a security firm. When Fitzgerald lived here, it was fashionable, heavy-drinking land — Cirrhosis-on-Sea. Among his neighbours were Groucho Marx, Basil Rathbone and the writer Ring Lardner. For the two hours I wandered the neighbourhood, I didn’t meet another pedestrian. Occasionally an orange-striped Nassau County police car slowed down to check me out. The great, the good and the freeloading descended on Fitzgerald for the weekend, ignoring his jokey house rules: ‘Visitors are requested not to break down

Everett Collection / Rex Features

Stand on the north shore of Long Island, in the little town of Great Neck, and — with a little imagination and a few Martinis — you drift right back to the world of The Great Gatsby. Great Neck, 15 miles east of Manhattan, is where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived in the early 1920s. The town inspired West Egg, where Jay Gatsby stared across the bay to the green light on the dock at East Egg — in fact the town of Manhasset — where the object of his obsession, Daisy Buchanan, lived. Manhasset was old money; where the Astors, Guggenheims and Pulitzers had their summer homes. Great Neck was home to new money, and to Gatsby’s party mansion, where the ‘men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars’. Alcoholic moths are thin on the ground these days in Great Neck. It’s now a dormitory town for commuters on the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station, Manhattan — the train Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby’s narrator, took to his dreary bond-selling job. The inspiration for Gatsby’s house was Lands

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CULTURE

doors in search of liquor, even when authorised to do so by the host and hostess.’ One evening in May 1923, Fitzgerald and Lardner heard that Joseph Conrad was staying at the nearby house of the publisher Nelson Doubleday. They performed a merry dance on Doubleday’s lawn to honour the revered writer. Conrad didn’t notice them, but the caretaker did — he threw them out. Great Neck is good for Italian and Jewish food, at La Gioconda restaurant and the Kensington Kosher Deli. If it’s Jazz Age thrills you’re after, take the Long Island Rail Road to Manhattan. Or drive the Great Gatsby death trail to town — past the spot where Myrtle Wilson is cut down by Daisy driving Gatsby’s car, beneath the hoarding of Dr T.J. Eckleburg’s giant spectactles. Called the valley of ashes by Fitzgerald, the recovered wasteland is now home to Flushing Meadows Park, host to the US Open tennis championships. Manhattan witnessed Fitzgerald’s high youthful triumphs and his sad steep descent. At Princeton, he took the train to Broadway to take in shows such as The Little Millionaire and The Quaker Girl. Just like

Nick Carraway, he had a brief spell in a dull Manhattan job — for 90 dollars a month, at the Barron Collier Advertising Agency, while he rented a cheap room in Morningside Heights. When the writing took off, so did the drinking — Manhattan is sprinkled with his watering spots. There’s the Knickerbocker Hotel, the Beaux-Arts building with the mansard roof on Times Square, where Fitzgerald went on a three-day bender in 1919 with his Princeton pals. Or the old Biltmore Hotel on Madison Avenue — where the Fitzgeralds passed a boozy honeymoon in room 2109; Scott liked to walk down the halls on his hands. The high jinks continued through the 1920s — Scott stripped naked while watching a Broadway musical; a nude Zelda dived into the fountain outside the Plaza Hotel. The Plaza, on the southern edge of Central Park, is where Gatsby confesses that he has loved Daisy for five years. Re-enact the scene over a mint julep, Daisy’s favourite, at the champagne bar. For a more melancholy real-life episode, head to the Algonquin Hotel. It was at the Algonquin that an ageing Fitzgerald met the comic writer James Thurber, who thought him ‘witty, forlorn, pathetic, romantic, worried, hopeful and despondent’. In the mid-1930s, Fitzgerald had a brief, sad affair with the Guinevere of the Algonquin Round Table, Dorothy Parker. Better to remember the early days, when the Fitz geralds married in 1919 at nearby St Patrick’s Cathedral. To get there, take a cab up Fifth Avenue. You don’t have to travel on the bonnet and the roof, as the Fitzgeralds liked to, when the wind was in their sails.

Above left: F. Scott Fitzgerald with his wife Zelda, c.1930s

CSU Archives / Everett Collection / Rex Features

When the writing took off, so did the drinking. Manhattan is sprinkled with Fitzgerald’s watering spots

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• Magazine: Spectator Life (GB) • Language: English • Issue: 30.3.2013 •

20/3/13 16:42:09

CULTURE

James Franco – actor, director, producer, writer, teacher, artist – doesn’t understand the concept of ‘doing nothing’ Chrissy Iley

THE F RAN C O FILE S

James Franco’s mood can shift from wary to jokey in a heartbeat. This I find particularly charming. As well as his faded grey and white check shirt, distinctive cheekbones and eyes that dart. On film, his latest roles highlight this versatility — he can be seen this month in both Spring Breakers and Oz the Great and Powerful. He has an incredible nine movies in development as an actor or producer. He is also a multimedia artist, a Playboy columnist and an author. He has become an eternal student studying for his PhD at Yale while also a teacher to students at NYU and UCLA. On film he was Sean Penn’s boyfriend in Milk and Peter Parker’s ex-best friend in Spider-Man, as well as the confessional poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl. He is perhaps best known, though, for Danny Boyle’s 2010 film 127 Hours, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. He played the climber Aron Ralston, who was trapped in a canyon in Utah, and cut off his own arm to survive. Between takes Franco (who is just as method as Daniel Day-Lewis) elected to stay trapped, nose in a book, rather than get out from his claustrophobic hole. He takes his literary side extremely seriously. His 2011 collection of short stories, Palo Alto, was praised by critics. The book was set in the town where he grew up with his maths teacher father and poet/writer mother. He asked her not to read it. It referenced his teenage years where he got into trouble for drinking, shoplifting and graffiti-ing. He said at the time, ‘I think I was running. I didn’t know how to focus my energy because I was scared of failure.’ Perhaps that is where his tumultuous drive originates. He is still determined not to fail. Franco talks very energetically, very enthusiastically. He doesn’t come over as a person who lives on catnaps. But how does he fit it all in, the teaching, the writing, the acting, the preparation. Does he sleep? ‘I sleep on airplanes a lot. I do sleep at night. I do a lot of things but I collaborate with a lot of people so I’m able to work on one project while another is being developed. I never do noth-

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Contour by Getty Images

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CULTURE ing. People always ask me do I relax? I DA N N Y guess that means sitting on a beach and reading a book or watching television. I do all of that. I don’t know what nothing is. If it means going to a bar and just getting drunk I don’t want to do that... when I’m working I’m happy and I don’t really need a break in the same way that somebody who hates his job might. I work with all my friends and people I love so work is also my social life.’ He excels at performing delinquency, hurt, rejection and heart. His portrayal of James Dean in a 2001 biopic won him a Golden Globe and put him on the map though not necessarily for the kind of work he wanted. He called a halt on what he has since termed his ‘young leading man in bad movies phase’ when he enrolled in UCLA in 2006. He’d always regretted dropping out of college to go to acting school, paid for by a job at McDonald’s. In Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers he plays Alien, a sometimes sweet, sometimes crazy gangsta rapper. Korine, whose credits include the screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids, is an agent provocateur director. It shows the mythic dimensions of the traditional American college spring break — boobs jiggling, beer swilling, cocaine sniffing. It’s all shot in anamorphic widescreen and burns and dazes with its fluorescent colours. Alien is as far away as Franco can get from academia and his previous career as a matinee idol: with a mouthful of silver teeth and crazy cornrows, he is wild and abandoned. Did he draw any of those qualities from his Palo Alto teenage years? ‘Alien came from a lot of different sources. As an actor I look for things I can relate to, so yes I’ve been to parties and I understand that in a liberated state people just let loose. That’s one of the reasons people go. I can relate to Alien in that he’s a teacher, a mentor, albeit a very dark one. He’s a mentor in the ways of the underworld. I am a teacher and I teach students the same ages as the characters in the movie but I try to teach them things other than how to be criminals.’ He once told me that he used to feel like an outsider when he was growing up. ‘In high school they don’t pay attention to the arts, so if you’re interested in those things you do feel an outsider.’ Perhaps that’s why he now likes to surround himself with like-minded people. His production company is called Rabbit Bandini after a struggling would-be writer in John Fante’s novels. It’s as if he sees himself as a person who is still struggling. He has had a history of playing gay men, which has caused lots of gossip. As well as Ginsberg there was Hart Crane in The Broken Tower. What is that attracts him or fascinates him? Long pause. ‘There are some coincidences and some deliberateness to those choices. I think as a creative person there are many

BOY L E O N F R A NC O

James is fiercely intelligent and acting can get very frustrating. A lot of acting is very repetitive and I have to be careful what I say... but it’s like a boredom threshold. There’s a famous expression about filmmaking: Martin Amis visited the set of Robocop 2 and described filming as ‘a series of repetitions interrupted by delays’. Some actors go into their trailer and sleep – for James all his other interests and thinking about other projects are a way of staying fresh. I admire him for it. People who’ve never met him might think he’s not interested or not involved but actors do all sorts of things to keep fresh. It wasn’t like he was elsewhere. He’d put the book down and he’s ready for a take. He’s a wonderful actor and ambitious like anyone – he wants to stretch his talents but in more of a stellar burst way. He’s pretty much a one-off.

things that I am attracted to. I like artistic characters, creative characters. So a lot of people whose work I am attracted to happen to be gay. ‘Allen Ginsberg and Hart Crane were both gay. It doesn’t mean I enjoy their poetry any more or any less because they are gay. It was incidental for my love of those two characters. But in addition to that I’m also an artist who is attracted to things that are anti-normative, that are against the flow, or are projects for people who create fissures in our accepted way of life, so I think there are sometimes gay scenes, or perhaps you’d call it queer scenes, that are a good way to step outside of normative ways of life and ask the kind of questions I want to ask.’ Recently he has co-directed a short movie called Interior. Leather Bar. where he plays the leading character called James. It has been called a cruising movie, an exploration of sexual freedom. What is fascinating is the way he juxtaposes the overly gay with the over-the-top heterosexual — as well as Alien later this year he will be seen in Lovelace as Hugh Hefner, the ultimate heterosexual playboy. Is it his intention to express extremes? ‘I have a lot of different interests and there are a lot of different sides to me and sometimes different sides come out at once.’ He says this shyly, but he is right. It is as if he is constantly looking at himself in a fairground mirror, each time finding a new side, a new route to becoming a potentially great artist, and certainly a prolific one. Spring Breakers is released on 5 April.

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Illustration by Mitch Blunt

KNO CK ’EM A L L D OW N It’s time the older generation of big-name architects were consigned to history — skyscraper egos and all Stephen Bayley

Few things look more grim than once pellucid glass turned opaque by the pitiless progress of urban grunge. Alas, concrete weathers in a fashion that most find less sympathetic than the patina acquired by pietra serena. The dynamic modernist dream may not have turned to stagnant dust, but is temporarily stalled. ‘Il faut être absolument moderne! ’ was Rimbaud’s dictate, or one of them. But that’s a 19th-century view. Right now, ‘modern’ seems old-fashioned. Clean lines, hard edges and moral certainties as rigid as angle-iron are becoming things of the past. All my instincts are modernist. The world needs more technology, not less. I enjoy purist shapes and deplore clutter. I believe the world can be improved through design. My problem is a grumbling disenchantment with the ageing generation of architects who still dominate perceptions of what buildings should be. Smiling serenely, confidently tanned, assertively bald (and, I am guessing, moisturised), Norman Foster, a sort of architectural Rambo, recently appeared on the cover of a journal devoted to ‘intelligent life’. True, a younger Foster had once designed buildings of thrilling

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LIFE

Above: A design from the new generation — FAT’s ‘Community in a cube’, CIAC, Middlesbrough

technical ingenuity and impressive philosophical consistency, but he now seems the ageing herald of a future that’s no brighter than a sheet of old Gyproc. Among Foster’s recent designs is the Hearst Tower, New York’s first skyscraper after 9/11. It has several admirable energy-efficient features, but the conceit everyone notices in this 46-storey Columbus Circle building is the criss-crossing framework that creates huge, deep, convex, glazed lozenges. These the architects refer to as a ‘bird’s mouth’ — though Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, authors of modernism’s ancient scripture, make no references to avian beaks as suitable inspirational sources. Unfortunately, these windows proved impossible to clean in the normal way and a special rig was required. This, the New Yorker reported, took three years to build and cost $3 million. If this is architectural intelligence, then maybe it is less valuable than we first thought. Consider for a moment the Harmon Tower in Las Vegas, a Foster design that is being demolished (at a cost of $400 million) before it is finished. A government inspector found construction flaws and work was halted. There was the usual blame and accusation. The architect was guilty only of executing a brief that the New York Times described as ‘a symbol of overconfidence’, but a building demolished before completion is an unforgettable metaphor of failure. The arc of achievement traces a cruel path. Braque

Architects are specially afflicted in the matter of celebrity. Something about the calling, to do with monumental erections and death-defying presence, tempts vaingloriousness

said of Picasso that he was once a brilliant artist, but then declined into a tiresome role-playing ‘genius’. Architects too are specially afflicted in the matter of celebrity: something about the calling, something which Ayn Rand recognised, something to do with monumental erections and death-defying presence, tempts vaingloriousness and big gestures. And then there are the facts that the arduous training takes so long, the rewards are uncertain and a major building takes so many years to complete. The apogee of an architect’s fame occurs just when old fartdom is inevitable. This can be a toxic combination. In architecture, reputation is to a disturbing degree a function of media profile. And it follows that the number of life-saving commissions is related to volume of soul-destroying celebrity. The late Ada Louise Huxtable, America’s greatest architectural critic, deplored the loss of idealism inevitable in this proc-

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Above: The Writer’s House in London, designed by FAT

FAT; Rob Parrish

ess. A craving for media recognition made civic dignity less important than a showy profile that photographs well. The process encourages small ideas to be writ very large: a ‘bird’s mouth’, for example. The distortions of fame bring absurdities. Renzo Piano, a Freedom Pass contemporary of Foster’s and the architect of London’s Shard, has recently finished the Astrup Fearnley Gallery on Oslo’s waterfront. It’s by all accounts a fine building, but there are perhaps 50,000, maybe 100,000, young architects who could have designed something at least as good. Their problem is that none was called Renzo Piano. His is not a special architectural talent. He’s very well known, so he gets the jobs. It is true, as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr explained, that in architecture, unlike mathematics, there is no correlation between seniority and creativity. It may even work the other way. Still, you look at Foster, Rogers, Piano or Frank Gehry and the youngest of this multinational group is 75. Zaha Hadid, at 62, alone drops the average age of the stars. As a young architect called Eddie Blake recently complained in Vice, parish magazine of edgy youth, it’s as if Cliff Richard and Acker Bilk dominated the Top Ten. Significantly, a new generation of architects — Norway’s Snohetta, London’s FAT and Glasgow’s Nord for example — prefer a group identity to the vanity of an individual name-check. At the same time, this new

generation is less doctrinaire than the old modernists and more likely to find different ways of answering the same question. Flexibility is more attractive than monumentality. The belief is: you don’t finish buildings, you start them. So what will we remember of the old modernists as they put away their shiny medals and gongs? There is Richard Rogers, whose insistence on hanging the plumbing of buildings on their exterior now seems an eccentric whim with bad implications for the comfort of pigeons and the maintenance budget. And Rogers’s admirable protests about the democratic sanctity of public space sounded hoarse when he put his name to No. 1 Hyde Park, an obscenely dense and heavyhanded over-development for the vulgarly rich, a platinum card’s distance from Harvey Nichols. Or Foster himself, still maintaining a loopy reverence for that old phony Buckminster Fuller, the windy prophet of lightweight design who never actually designed anything that worked properly. Take Terry Farrell. The designer of the vulgarly clumsy MI6 building (surely the most outrageous look-at-me spectacle ever occupied by a ‘secret’ service) is now master-planning vast swaths of the south-east. Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid make a fine pair, united in a magnificent denial of usefulness. Because a computer says you can do something does not mean you necessarily should. It sometimes feels as if Gehry believes confrontational difficulty, aggressive shapemaking, defiance of sense, are actually tests for quality. Actually, I’d be much more impressed to see Gehry’s best ideas for low-cost housing. His genius is undisturbed by this utilitarian challenge. Meanwhile, Hadid’s new modern art gallery in Rome does not have flat ‘walls’ to hang pictures. Against this, Renzo Piano’s Shard seems the distillation of calm rationality — although, oppressive and inflexible, it is the last big clunker of the 20th century, not the first important building of the 21st. Just across the river is Rafael Vinoly’s apocalyptically crass No. 20 Fenchurch Street, nicknamed the Walkie-Talkie. But the most curious case of demented modernism is the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, routinely blackclad. After a global career that hinted at his belief that the entire globe should be made new after his own fashion, Koolhaas is now proposing a rediscovery of ‘national identity’. This reversal — some might call it hypocrisy — is perhaps a sign of a business-like awareness of new possibilities. Architecture is at its most wonderful when the names of the architects are least well-known. Jobbing builders created enduring Georgian marvels and anonymous masons built the cathedrals. Real modernists believe in change. The big change coming up is that skyscraper architectural egos are heading for the builder’s skip of history.

STEPHEN BAYLEY_Spectator Life Mar 13_Spectator Supplements 210x260_

21/3/13 12:57:10

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FR OM BU R G U N DY TO BA S TA R D Y

world, in Central Otago. This may have looked like an exercise in economy, since good Burgundy had become by any measure exorbitant. It was not. Owning a vineyard is the best fun you can have, but as an investment it is hilariously rash. And if you wonder why a good bottle of pinot is a tad pricier than some, consider this — it is the most labour-intensive wine imaginable. These days, anything can be made on the cheap, but not good pinot. When I return to my vineyards from abroad, from some film set God knows where, I understand why ‘passion’ is quite the wrong word to describe how I feel. There is far too much contentment involved. My life there resonates to the seasons, to compost and cows, orchards and saffron.

My adventures in pinot noir Sam Neill

In the world of wine, a word I deplore because of its overuse is ‘passion’. As in ‘a passion for pinot’. In my view, passion is a term that should be reserved for the sort of heightened emotional state that can result in trousers being discarded. You may lose your shirt producing pinot noir, but you are unlikely to lose your trousers. I am recently recovered, just, from ‘Pinot 2013’: a four-day event in Wellington, New Zealand, that attracts pinot noir fans, critics, tragics, drunks, writers, sommeliers, wits, idiots savant and bon vivants from around the world — as well as humble pinot producers like myself. The show was, as they say here, a ball-tearer. What other grape induces such fanaticism? Merlot? Hardly... Rashly, I agreed to speak at the opening. I followed the erudite and eloquent wine writer Matt Kramer. It was a tad daunting, since my wife had already somewhat unkindly pointed out that I would be speaking about wine to an audience of some 600 people, 99 per cent of whom would know more about wine than me. I said I thought that was a bit harsh — it would be more like 97 per cent. In a hall full of distinguished New Zealand pinot makers, Matt quickly ruffled a few feathers by suggesting that, good as we are, we may never quite attain the excellence of Burgundy, because of a somewhat mystical mathematical property there: in Burgundy ‘two plus two equals five’. I asked, in reply, that if that was the case, why do I so often get sold a three? True,

I have drunk one or two fives from Burgundy, but they had cost (someone else) the price of a modest car. Burgundy: never far from our thoughts. I suggested that we might be seen as the ‘Bastards of Pinot’. We come from a tradition in Europe that is possibly thousands of years old. Our pinot clones are from Burgundy. Our viticulture, our wine making: these things we inherit from a very rich, very profound and very old culture. Nevertheless we are the Bastards of Pinot — unwanted, unacknowledged, illegitimate. We live outside the Old House, the House of Burgundy. And like the best bastards anywhere (bear in mind that in these southern climes, ‘bastard’ is often a term of affection), we don’t care! We take what we need from that old culture; but we discard the obsolete and are free to innovate. It’s good to be bastards! It’s even better to be good bastards! This is the kind of rhetorical flourish that goes down well with Antipodean audiences, and a satisfactory cheer was the response. Bastard or not, my own long standing and torrid affair with pinot began with Burgundy. In 1979, my friend and mentor James Mason ordered a bottle of something incredible at Charlie Chaplin’s favourite restaurant near Lausanne. Up until then, most wine I had drunk came from a cardboard box. But this was something else altogether. ‘Burgundy,’ James said, ‘And don’t forget it.’ I never have; I was hooked. Fourteen years later I planted my own pinot noir vines at the other end of the

Life at the vineyards resonates to the seasons, to compost and cows, orchards and saffron

We talk of bud burst and tractors. My pigs greet me as one of their own. I measure last week’s rainfall. My shirt is still intact, just. I am a happy peasant... And then last night, unbidden, a rather wealthy friend opened two bottles of DRC Richebourg 1999, an indisputably great Burgundy. I was gobsmacked. The wine was remarkable, naturally. At 50 quid a sip, it should be. This morning, slightly worse for wear, I thought that, in the egregious spirit of modern wine criticism, I might actually score it. So here goes: wine — 8/10, value for money — 1/10. But later, in a moment of compassion, I felt rather sorry for the great producers of Burgundy, those legitimates in the Old House. It must be maddening to see your lovely wine become some kind of bizarre commodity, like copper futures. I go to bed a bastard, but content in the knowledge that someone had a good time tonight, at a fair price, with my pinot. Whatever my friend Matt says, two plus two actually does make four. Sam Neill is a stay-at-home vigneron at Two Paddocks Vineyards. His wine is available through Haynes Hanson & Clark in London.

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LIFE

Public libraries are not just repositories of books – they are sacred spaces Sam Leith

S AV E THE B OR R OWE R S In the disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, a group of survivors shelters from an abrupt new ice age in the New York Public Library. They burn books to keep warm. It’s a cute joke. It makes one feel more warmly towards not only libraries but, oddly, ice ages. I grew up in suburban Surrey, and if ever civilisation vanishes in a giant snowstorm, I like to think Dorking library is where I’d take shelter. I’d be selective about what I burned. Library excitement never leaves you: the smell of the plastic-coated books, their unceasing novelty and seemingly limitless numbers, and the promise of being able to take a whole armload away and read them. . . In no other area of life was an eight-year-old offered such abundance. Every bookish adult in this country, pretty much, will have a similar story. For some, the library was a ladder — the means by which kids from deprived backgrounds were able to get their hands on the books that transformed their prospects. For the more privileged, like me, a public library

didn’t represent the difference between placement at a call centre and a Cambridge college. But it shaped the experience of books, and enabled wide and greedy reading, in a way no other institution could. You’d have to be very privileged indeed to have parents who could afford to buy new the three, four, five or more books that a thirsty child can go through every week; or whose home would contain enough books to anything like supply the thirst. My house now is full of books — stuffed with them. My three- and one-year-olds are well supplied at home. But still, our local library in north London is a resource we can’t begin to match. The arguments that all this must come to an end are getting louder, though, and they come not single spies. Libraries are a luxury we can’t afford, some say — that’s an argument, effectively, made by the many local councils whose response to funding cuts from central government has been to cut provision or close libraries altogether. Another argument, less often heard

but propounded last month by the Horrible Histories author Terry Deary, is that the very idea behind public libraries — ‘an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers’ — is actively pernicious. He professes himself baffled at the many published authors who campaign against library closures, ‘when libraries are cutting their throats and slashing their purses’. Still another is that in an age when books can be stored and transmitted digitally, it’s simply eccentric to invest time and money maintaining great barns of perishable physical books in order for perishable physical humans to pick them up, take them away and bring them back again. It would be obtuse to pretend that none of these cases has any merit. The digital era has huge implications for both public and research libraries, and publishers and authors are entitled to make a living. But we can concede the diagnosis without agreeing that the cure is the steady or abrupt disappearance of the library as an institution. We know that publishers are suffering. But the problems facing publishers and the problems facing libraries aren’t the same ones. The idea that the book is an object that can be reproduced and shared an infinite number of times for next to no cost, for instance, is kryptonite to publishers (and authors). For librarians and library users, though, it’s bliss. An extreme statement of the position would have it that a single copyright library (i.e. one like the British Library, which by law gets a copy of every book printed), fully digitised, could also be every single lending library in the country. That is, I admit, to shelve the unanswerable point that anything bad for publishers is bad for libraries in the long run: but it does point to some real room for manoeuvre. It’s also worth noting that libraries have always been both physical and virtual spaces. What is a footnote, after all, but a sort of hyperlink — a wormhole between one text and another? What is Google but a superfast descendent of the card catalogue or a Dewey Decimal filing system — a way of organising information? In some ways, you could see libraries as pre-adapted to the digital age. There are already mechanisms by which

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Illustration by Mitch Blunt

ebooks can be borrowed — though there are headache-inducing inconsistencies, too. At present, Public Lending Right, which ensures that authors get a fee when their books are borrowed, doesn’t apply to ebooks. Nor does the leading e-lending mechanism, OverDrive, serve certain platforms such as Kindle. Take-up is patchy — the number of public libraries lending, or planning to be lending, ebooks by the end of the year is less than three quarters, and figures even in established schemes are still tiny compared with the number borrowing deadtree books. Some publishers simply won’t play; others want to be paid. Some ebook lending schemes — Amazon last autumn launched its Kindle owners’ lending library for premium users — bypass public libraries altogether. And to confuse things further, Amazon has applied to patent a technology that allows people to sell secondhand ebooks (get your head around the implications of that, if you will). But we needn’t fold our tents yet. Some

It’s not simply as repositories of books to be borrowed by individuals that libraries have their value. They matter as physical places too

or all of these issues will, one way and another, shake out — not all, probably, to advantage; but as the ground firms it’ll be easier to see a path forward. The culture minister, Ed Vaizey, has ordered a review of issues around e-lending. And we are not without models. The New York Public Library — which is both a high-end research library and an ordinary public lending institution — has a whole programme of digital engagement and — mirabile dictu — actually turns a profit; as its librarian Christopher Platt’s piece (adjacent) explains. As one admiring recent report has it, ‘The New York Public Library is a social network with three million active users.’ That emphasis on communality seems to me to go to the heart of it. It’s not simply as repositories of books to be borrowed by individuals that libraries have their value. They matter as physical places too: the process of going to a library and coming back, checking books out and checking them back in, makes a habitual connection

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LIFE with what they represent. They aren’t just a place for tramps to keep warm in winter and kids who’ve been grounded to get access to videogames. Libraries are our cultural memory. To have a relationship with one is to have a relationship with the culture itself — and to feel, in its (relative) orderliness and calm, something of what it is to inhabit a civic space. That includes the paying of fines. Here is a child’s first encounter with the social contract: the idea that a communal good is made available to you, but

FUTURE S H E LV E S Christopher Platt

A quiet revolution has been taking place in public libraries in the United States. The adoption of ebooks has raised questions about the future of publishing, booksellers and libraries. Yet for many libraries here, the future in question began years ago. Rather than waiting to be rendered obsolete, we are recognising opportunities to engage with readers in new ways. The New York Public Library, where I work, has offered popular downloadable ebooks since 2004, years before Amazon launched the Kindle, which influenced so much growth in e-reading. What began as a boutique service to a few dedicated online users has grown eightfold in just the past five years. In 2012 we exceeded 875,000 checkouts, from a 95,000-volume collection. While this represents only a tiny percentage of our total 28 million annual checkouts, it is one of the three mostused collections in all of our 90 libraries in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island. Our collection has grown to serve the needs of a diverse community. Fifty Shades of Grey can be found alongside ebooks on science fair projects, civil service exams and how-to guides for new parents. For our users,

To have a relationship with a library is to have a relationship with the culture itself – and to feel something of what it is to inhabit a civic space

that certain obligations (taking care of the books, returning them in a timely way and so on) are expected in return. Yes, pace Terry Deary, books are a form of entertainment — and there are few enough forms of entertainment that we expect the state to connive in giving away for free. But they are more than just entertainment: they are the pith of our culture and the incubator of its future. It is not too much to see them as sacred spaces. In a chilly world, more simply put, the library is a very good place to keep warm.

ebooks are no longer a boutique service. It is partly for this reason that the president of the library, Dr Tony Marx, has charged the institution with examining how best to serve library users in the digital age and how to develop the ‘virtual library’ of the future. This strategy aims to determine what we offer online, what expertise is needed, how we incorporate a social media presence; essentially, we are designing an effective set of services of the sort every public library should be offering to online users in years to come. While the task is complicated, especially for a library that offers both popular and specialist research collections, it has become obvious that, as with the internet generally, much of the value for users is to be found in the users themselves. Last year we had more than 30 million visits to our website; our social media following grew from under half a million to 1.2 million followers. The first step was to improve our catalogue, which gave us the means to invite these users to engage with us and with each other. In the old days of card catalogues, it would have been anathema for a library user to pull out a card and jot ‘I loved this book!’ on it for others to see. Today, we invite them to do just that and more. Nypl.bibliocommons.com lets users rate, tag, share, comment, insert favourite quotes, and upload video content right into the title display. Furthermore, it lets users create and share lists of favourite books. As a true online forum, New York Public Library users can engage with users at other Bibliocommons client libraries such as Boston and Seattle.

Our way forward is to develop this virtual experience into a truly indispensable ‘intellectual home’ for New Yorkers — a starting point for all things reading-related: browsing, recommendation, discussion, as well as purchase. For example, imagine you are online at home one evening, looking at a title by your favourite author in our catalogue, and you see a link in the display to a talk they gave at the library last month. As you take a few moments to watch a streamed recording of the event, you see other titles pop up that the author mentions, with links to check them out. You see an online discussion has begun about one of the titles, so you join the group, which introduces you to more users. The title you are most interested in has 50 people in the queue ahead of you, so rather than wait weeks to read it, you choose a ‘Buy Now’ link affiliated with the library — an e-tailer or local bookstore — which lets you download the title immediately. Now imagine that every public library offered a similar experience. As bookstores close, if more libraries were to develop robust intellectual websites for their willing and ready users, this would encourage a diverse and innovative reading environment, in which the library was integrated into everyday life and achieved its most fundamental goal: to connect good readers with good books. Christopher Platt is director of collections and circulation operations at the New York Public Library.

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S TAR SI GN S Collecting autographs can be lucrative – if you choose the right names Christopher Silvester

What should I go for? Remember the power of branding. For dead politicians that means Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and JFK in America, and Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and Churchill in Britain. Elvis Presley is the biggest brand in popular music, closely followed by the Beatles. Celebrities who die young often retain value. Among Hollywood stars, that means Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Greta Garbo lived to a ripe old age, but became a recluse and stopped signing, which is as good as dying prematurely. Heroes of the baby-boom generation, which has had the most spending power of any generation in modern times, do well. So, in addition to James Dean, Marilyn, Elvis, JFK and the Fab Four, Walt Disney's signature has been a reliable investment.

Where should one go to buy autographs? The autographs on eBay tend to be overpriced at the high end. Fraser’s Autographs, a subsidiary of the longestablished stamp dealer Stanley Gibbons, offer a lifetime guarantee of authenticity. For royal autographed items, the pre-eminent specialist is Argyll Etkin, based in St James’s. For most categories of celebrity, there is International Autograph Auctions. Adam Andrusier Autographs specialises in photographs or letters signed by artists, writers and other cultural figures of recognised historical importance. What about overseas? Markus Brandes Autographs, a German merchant, carries most categories, but specialises in Formula 1 drivers. And you could try Heritage Auctions, based in Houston, Texas, which is the world’s largest auctioneer of autographs and other collectibles. Any tips? Even 50 years after her death, Marilyn Monroe is unlikely to be topped as a female icon. It is worth paying good money for a premium Monroe item. Paul Fraser, of Paul Fraser Collectibles, believes that Muhammad Ali is massively undervalued and that when he dies the value of his autographs will surge.

‘ A D u l T I N T H E O N lY T R u E SENSE Of THE WORD’ Sunday Times

What sort of returns can one expect? Well, signed photos of Diana, Princess of Wales, rose by 19.6 per cent a year between 2000 and 2011. During the same period, items signed by JFK went up by 13.75 per cent, and items signed by all four Beatles went up by 14.3 per cent. But one of the best returns was on items signed by astronaut Neil Armstrong — 24.2 per cent a year. What makes one autograph more valuable than another of the same person? The most investment-worthy items are those with special content or attributes. For example, the signature of Hollywood star Clark Gable on a contract to play in one of his less well-known films has much less value than his signature on a contract to play in Gone With the Wind, which for many years held the record as the most successful film ever at the box office. A letter from the Queen Mother in which she comments patronisingly about Labour voters in 1945 (‘Everyone seems restless and disgruntled, I suppose that the high hopes of a socialist heaven on earth are beginning to fade a little — poor people, so many half-educated and bemused. I do love them’) is worth vastly more than a mere thank-you letter.

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A Florida estate that is part town, part country club David Blackburn

Jessica Klewicki Glynn

WI N D S OR WI T H OU T PA L A C E S

It was only 8.30 a.m., but already my shirt was catching on my dampening shoulders. That’s Florida for you, even in December. I felt a set of eyes on my back. I didn’t turn around; instead, with my trusty five-iron, I reached for another ball. I looked through the haze towards the palm trees some 400 yards distant at the end of the driving range. I began the rituals of my swing, superstitions to concentrate the mind: a shuffle of the feet, a cock of the wrists and a bend of the knees. I swung the club, more in hope than expectation by now. The pattern of the morning was repeated. As I raised the club above my head, my back went into a spasm which intensified as I reversed the action to hit the ball. The pain was so great that I could not strike the ball cleanly. I thrashed at it, yelping. The ball scurried off to the left and disappeared into the verge. I sensed those eyes again. I turned around. The eyes belonged to Ivan Lendl, the former tennis champion 47

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STYLE who now coaches Andy Murray. He smiled and I heard him say: ‘Bad back. Stop till it’s better.’ Then he drove off in his buggy. No nonsense, no sentiment; no wonder Murray’s much improved. I was dejected. This was a once in a lifetime’s chance to play the course designed by the legendary Bobbie Trent-Jones Jnr at the Windsor Estate, and I’d banjaxed my back on the flight from London. I returned to the clubhouse. Then the day began to look up. Windsor is paradisiacal. The estate occupies more than 400 acres near Vero Beach on a barrier island between the Atlantic and the Indian River. A late morning breeze that you can set your watch by dispels the humidity, creating a climate that’s so friendly you can swim in the sea in December. The grounds are split between the golf course, an equestrian centre and Floridian groves that have been drained of water and ’gators. Windsor was bought in 1989 by Galen and Hilary Weston (the owners, among many other things, of Selfridges). They wanted to challenge the standard American golf community (in which there is more golf than community). They also hoped to foster an architectural style in opposition to the suburban sprawl that has spread across parts of North America and western Europe since the second world war. They realised

Jessica Klewicki Glynn

Lendl smiled and I heard him say, ‘Bad back. Stop till it’s better.’ Then he drove off in his buggy. No nonsense, no sentiment; no wonder Murray’s much improved

these ambitions with ‘New Urbanism’, a movement that has adapted America’s colonial heritage for modern life. Privacy within the community is the aim. In suburbia, you meet your neighbours over the garden fence; at Windsor you climb onto the veranda and knock on the front door. Walk through a front door in Windsor and you’re invariably met by the work of a famous interior designer. They don’t have an easy job: using a limited space (these are not mansions) to accommodate three generations of the same family, while also being alive to the demands of hosting. The Westons’ Guest House, designed by Rod Mickley, balances these needs. The terracotta house is built around a partcloistered courtyard garden (landscaped by Deborah

Nevins), which provides a large entertaining space and somewhere for children to play. The rooms surrounding the courtyard contain an art collection that will surely wind up in a MoMA (Peter Doig and Alex Katz in the sitting room, and what appeared to be a Christo in the downstairs loo), yet they are welcoming rather than grand. The living room is dominated by softly upholstered sofas and an array of books spread across an enormous modern table. Along with smaller pieces of designer furniture there is a scattering of antiques, which are supplemented by features such as family heirlooms, memorabilia and flowers. The lighting is arranged to brighten the room as well as the pictures, which banishes any sense of being in a museum, and the calculated clutter stops the house feeling like a show home for the superrich. There are also fine examples of minimalism at Windsor. Rick Schaub commissioned his brother, the architect Clemens, to design his house. The brief was: build me an art gallery with furniture it. The dining table and chairs blend with the colour of the floor so as not to distract from the modern paintings and photographic series on the walls. Schaub’s prize sculpture, ‘The Walking Woman’ (an eight-foot Amazon who seems determined to walk from here to eternity) can be seen from any position in the house in a 180 degree arc from the entrance hall to the guest suites on the other side of the courtyard. It’s a masterstroke of design every bit as impressive as the Weston

Previous page: The Walking Woman, Fortnum Place Above: Five bedroom, Windsor Boulevard, $3,400,000

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Guest House. Schaub, though, is an ironist: ‘Maybe it’s too minimalist.’ The houses are serviced by a concierge, three restaurants, a shop, an art gallery, a town hall, tennis courts and a health centre. The golf course and equestrian facilities act as the ‘village green’, beyond which lies the beach club. Windsor is one third private members’ club, one third country club and one third planned town. It’s ingenious as much as it is beautiful. It is also expen-

Above right: Living room of 10620 Baron Court

sive. A four-bedroom house is priced in the local paper at $2,295,000. That’s one of the cheaper options; the most expensive is expected to fetch $15 million. Building plots are still available. Prices start at $300,000 for the site and finish at $4.3 million. And the costs continue long after completion. As of January this year, membership will set you back $80,000 and a further $11,750 a year (before sales taxes). If you want to play golf, you will have to fork out $200,000 and an annual fee of $19,600 (before sales taxes). See what I meant by ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’. If you do have this kind of money, be warned that Windsor is very particular about its denizens. The estate’s blurb announces that membership is by admission only and applicants must be sponsored by at least two members of ‘good standing’. The snooty tone makes Windsor sound like Pall Mall in the sun, which does a disservice to the residents and the way in which the estate is evolving. While the global art crowd was tearing around the living hell of Art Basel Miami, some 90 miles south of Windsor, Hilary Weston invited two artists, brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias, to exhibit in the village gallery. The show was the second of three collaborations with London’s Whitechapel Gallery, designed to bring art and culture to the Windsor community and not merely the collectors. The whole village was invited (just like it is in Lark Rise) to meet two guys who are too cool for Miami. 49

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The Tobias brothers’ work seems to owe something to their background. They are ethnic Germans who were born in Transylvania, Romania, in 1973. They were saved from the Ceausescu regime in 1985 by the West German government, which sponsored their migration to Cologne under an agreement in which ethnic Germans were purchased from the bankrupt communists. The Tobiases’ work hums with subtle hints at suffering, flight and migration. Headless beasts and mythical creatures fly across strange, often hypermodern textures and surfaces. It is as if the nightmares of the Black Forest had journeyed through time to invade Silicon Valley. Embroidery and heraldic signs are superimposed on modern backgrounds; and woodcuts are fronted with technicolour versions of beast fables. It’s weird and wonderful, exuding a sense of the past that is familiar but not recognisable, which makes you think. The exhibition transfers to the Whitechapel in April. The party after the show confirmed why Windsor works. It could have been the sort of shindig which you can’t wait to leave, especially with jet lag and a bad back; but the guests were so warm and generous, interesting and interested, that I stayed longer than was necessary or advisable. Windsor’s a good place to be.

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T h R E E WAY S TO Reinven t t h e w h ee l Most bikes have looked pretty much the same since the 1890s. That’s no reason yours should Peter Robins

In time trials at the Olympics and the Tour de France, the very best cyclists in the world push themselves to the limits of human capacity — and sometimes, it later turns out, beyond — to sustain speeds in excess of 30 mph. At the World HumanPowered Vehicle Championships, a rather less high-profile event which last year was held at a country park in Kent, riders who will never have occasion to converse with Oprah Winfrey complete time trials at around 35 mph, lying down. In fact, it’s partly because they’re lying down that the HPV riders have an advantage. Professional bike races test the prowess of riders, rather than designers. So bikes ridden in them have to stay within a regulated distance of the standard shape developed in the 1880s: biggish, equalsized wheels; a frame made up of two triangles; a rider sitting on top. This has many advantages, but aerodynamic performance isn’t one of them. HPV riders, on the other hand, are free to slash wind resistance by lying down with their pedals in front of them, and covering their bikes in aerodynamic bodywork. In the Tour de France, that’s cheating. But you and I aren’t in the Tour de France — or any other race, for that matter. We can cheat if we want to: for fun; for greater efficiency; even for greater everyday practicality. I recently tried out three contrasting ways to break with the norm.

G O A L L T H E WAY: R ec u m be n ts If you really want to chase the HPV dream, you’ll need a recumbent bike — rider leaning back, pedals in front, for better aerodynamics and power distribution (pedalling harder pushes you into the seat, rather than lifting you out of it). But you’ll also need to forget much of what you know about riding a bicycle. I had my first encounter at London Recumbents, based in Dulwich Park, south-east London: the HP Velotechnik Spirit, a ‘semi-recumbent’ that looks like the offspring of a Brompton and a high-end office chair. Once in motion, it was a joy, deck-chair comfortable and deceptively fast, but getting started — hitching my feet up to those high pedals — made me remem50

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T H I N K SM A LL : MOU LT ON S When Dr Alex Moulton, who died last year, rethought the bicycle, he didn’t mess with the riding position. But he found chances for greater efficiency almost everywhere else. The bikes made by his family firm have small wheels (stronger, lighter, tighter steering) on a ‘space frame’ that uses thin steel struts to make something much stiffer than the conventional design, with discreet suspension to stop all that stiffness transmitting every bump in the road to the rider. Trying several models on the test track at the Moulton manor house in Bradfordon-Avon, Wiltshire, the appeal was clear immediately: they combine the swiftness and responsiveness of a road bike with the comfort of something much more sedate.

ber what it was like to ride a bike for the first time. Every stop meant a dozen abortive, swerving attempts to restart. Threeyear-olds on stabilisers whizzed past me. The other option is to skip the learning curve and try something even odderlooking: a recumbent trike, like the Hase Kettweisel. It has the riding position of a go-kart, and similar entertainment value. With such a low centre of gravity, it feels incredibly secure, and the turning circle is super-tight. They’re very popular with disabled cyclists — you can go hard and fast even with balance problems, and they adapt well for riders without working legs. But they might not be the most practical option around town: I couldn’t help noticing that even the recumbent expert arrived at work on a regular ‘upright’ bike.

Above left: Moulton Speed, £7,950 (more basic models start from £950). Left: HP Velotechnik Spirit

Above: Paper Bicycle, from £670 (with two-tone finish and dynamo lights, as pictured, from £800)

It takes concentration to notice that you’re riding over rutted tarmac. And they’re all-British, too: basic models are manufactured under licence in Stratford-on-Avon, while the more finely finished frames are still made in the grounds of the house at Bradford, with more money buying you less weight and more highly evolved suspension. It looks like English eccentricity, but it works, and has an international cult following to show for it: four out of five are exported to Asia.

R I DE C L E A N : T H E PA P E R BIC YC L E The Paper Bicycle, created by the Scottish designer Nick Lobnitz, is not in fact a paper bicycle, but a steel one, and it seems at first rather traditional: a streamlined version of an old-fashioned ladies’ bike, with stately

swept handlebars and a straight-backed riding position. Then you notice what isn’t there. Two of the tubes from the traditional design are gone, replaced with a pair of steel loops stretching from the pedals to the hub of the rear wheel. One encloses the chain, keeping it and your clothes clean; the other serves as a carrying handle, and extends elegantly into a kickstand. All the conveniences that more macho designs strip away are built right into the structure. And it’s a quicker, nippier ride than its regal bearing would suggest — those frame loops also give it a low centre of gravity. This is not a bike designed to break records; but it might make a trip to the shops more fun. And that’s a future I can believe in.

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FREE RAN GE

Our trip began at Farnborough, an almost eerily zen airport. A small girl of about five was being ushered through by her parents. I couldn’t help imagining the distress she’d experience if in the future she ever had to get a commercial flight. On touchdown in Marrakech, under the palm trees, was a fleet of Range Rovers. Why send four cars when you can deploy 16? At the new Delano hotel, we were handed an enormous glass of champagne and told that our luggage was in our rooms. In the morning our view was of the city’s famous pink minaret and I couldn’t quite remember where I was, or why. Welcome to the full-scale production that is the launch of a major new car. No expense spared. For the launch of the ‘All New’ Jaguar Land Rover (owned by Indian money but still producing cars in Northamptonshire) decided to return to Morocco, where in 1969 the first Range Rover was road-tested.

An amazing invitation to Morocco to try out a new all-terrain car Olivia Cole

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Like a designer handbag, this is a product sold on preorders. There are streets in Chelsea where all of the cars are gradually being replaced by this one. China provides the second biggest market after the UK. After breakfast, there was to be a ‘safety briefing’, which I thought might go on a bit. A cheery team leader stood up: ‘We’d like them back. . . Have a great day!’ was the extent of it. Outside in the sunshine were well over a million pounds worth of the gleaming cars ready for hung-over guests to drive over rough terrain with next to no instruction. Nobody in the street paid much attention. Over six weeks, a rolling stream of 7,000 guests from 53 countries had made their way to the city to to do a test drive, broom-brooming off up into the Atlas mountains. What better way to advertise your product than to invite journalists with dubious driving skills to do their worst? And not turn a hair while you do it? Less than an hour later, water was sloshing over the bonnet as we rocked and rolled our way up a vast ravine. While the drivers gasped and swore, the cars took it in their stride, like a herd of mechanical elephants heading majestically for a bath. While my boyfriend marvelled at the technological ingenuity of his new toy, I concentrated wholesale on Moroccan daydreams. Much of The English

While the drivers and passengers gasped and swore, the cars took the rocky road in their stride, like a herd of mechanical elephants heading majestically for a bath

Above: Off road between the towns of Tahnaout and Asni

Patient, for example, though set in Cairo in 1939, was filmed near here. ‘Let me tell you about the winds. . . ’ Remember the scene with a sandstorm, Count Almasy and Katherine Clifton marooned in their Land Rover in the dunes? ‘This is going to be amazing. We’re going to get stuck in the desert in a Range Rover!’ I enthused. As Jimmy pointed out, the whole point is that this is the vehicle in which you will not get stuck in the desert. It didn’t stop us from naming our shiny khakigreen car ‘Ralph’, which seemed to suit it very well — emphatically English, dependable, elegant. Every moment of our road trip had been designed for pure spectacle: that staggering ravine; lunch at a Berber encampment (complete with an elegant bathroom tent) at the highest point for miles; and finally the newly opened Palais Namasker, where we washed off the desert dust in our private swimming 53

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pool before having dinner. The only problem was that we had to give Ralph back. A DJ had been flown in from Paris to help us get over it. It was like being part of a vast film production. In fact, the latest Bond film, Skyfall, was loaned 40-odd Range Rovers for the shoot. All of them were returned save for the one used in the opening chase scene: Naomie Harris was such a terrible driver that they had to cut the car in half and sit Stig on top, to do the steering. Perhaps the definition of a liberated modern Bond girl is the ability to say ‘Thanks but no’ to doing your own dangerous stunts. Just as on a film, technicians were dotted along the route, popping up to check our tyres. In our car, we had everything we needed, right down to packets of Werther’s Originals — we sucked them for the altitude and gave them to local kids who knew Range Rovers meant bonbons. The only thing that could possibly go wrong with a million-pound Range Rover convoy through mountain villages is a crowd of exuberant nine-year-olds throwing things. In providing Jaguar Land Rover with this exotic backdrop, liberal King Mohammed VI negotiated for the area to receive a massive cash injection. Plainly the vertiginous mountain roads had been resurfaced. You can make an educated guess about who paid for that.

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Photography by Arthur Woodcroft Set Design by Kerry Hughes 55

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I SL AND OF T H E BL E S SE D

I see no reason to lie, so I will confess. I first fell in love with Bermuda as a teenager, when I watched that classic 1970s film The Deep, starring Robert Shaw, a heavily moustachioed Nick Nolte, and the ever sultry Jacqueline Bisset. As she emerged from the ocean gasping for breath, triumphantly holding aloft the medallion, a thin, soaking white T-shirt emphasising her Rubenesque allure, I was transfixed. I have wanted to visit this island ever since, if for no other reason that to pay homage to Jacqueline Bisset’s Circean charms and to see for myself where that image — the stuff of teenage fantasies — was captured. More than 20 years later, I can replace

Bermuda is at its best for straightforward, unashamed indulgence Lindsay Johns

my teenage fantasies with more recherché adult ones. Today, Bermuda is an island brazenly devoted to refined elegance and sophisticated indulgence, with a well-earned reputation as a lotus land for i ndustrious British expats working in finance and law, with golf courses whose greens would put any Oxford college quad to shame, and tax laws that also make it a favourite for American plutocrats and their deeply tanned trophy wives. For a week in November, when I was in dire need of some shamelessly gratifying R&R, it was a combination that suited me perfectly. Discovered in 1505 by the Spanish navigator Juan de Bermudez, Bermuda was

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T R AV E L

The 18th hole of the Port Royal golf course

Elbow Beach

brought under British jurisdiction in 1609 by Sir George Somers, in circumstances which many believe provided the inspiration for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and it remains a self-governing British territory. With its racially variegated population, strong African and Portuguese influences and subtle pigmentocracy, it has the look of a Caribbean island, and with its turquoise waters, verdant palms and delightfully clement weather, the feel of one. In fact, though, it’s caressed by the Atlantic Gulf Stream, 640 miles off the coast of North Carolina. A smiling portrait of the Queen greeted me in the airport lounge after landing. All that was needed for the colonial-era, Bacardi-advert idyll to be complete, I thought, would be for a man to turn up wearing Bermuda shorts — and there he was, strolling casually, curiously dapper in long, pulled-

up socks. I felt at home already. From Michael Douglas to Ross Perot, and from Michael Bloomberg to Silvio Berlusconi, Bermuda is home to a roll call of the rich and famous. Most live in Castle Point, Tuckers Town, near the Mid Ocean golf club — by far the most exclusive and salubrious enclave on the island. This was where, in December 1953, Churchill met Eisenhower and the French prime minister, Joseph Laniel, for a summit. My first impression was that, in fact, the whole island is a salubrious enclave. It’s obsessively clean, with beautifully sanitised public spaces and great roads (not a pothole in sight). Quaint, pastel-coloured houses dot the picturesque landscape, all fluffy mauves and soothing ochres. The Reefs resort, where I stayed, felt worth the journey on its own: intoxicating ocean views, an opulent but sedate atmos-

phere, and a strategically placed hot tub overlooking the infinity pool — the perfect place to sip on the island’s trademark tipple, the ‘dark and stormy’ (rum and ginger beer) and watch the sunset. It has fine dining and delightfully high-end spa treatments, too. My first morning was spent horse-riding along the south coast’s pristine Horseshoe Bay, through Jobson’s Cove and other craggy inlets. It was a gloriously stress-free way to unwind, communing with nature along what is acknowledged to be the prettiest stretch of coastal scenery the island has to offer. That afternoon, I made a brief visit to the capital, Hamilton, with its elegant waterfront, its neo-Gothic cathedral and its town crier (clad, despite the heat, in traditional 19th-century apparel — one job I wouldn’t like to have). It is indolent and

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later, after performing the downward dogs in the sand, with my energy lines flowing freely and having greatly increased my suppleness, I felt at peace in both body and mind as I watched the sun rise. Later, a visit to the Royal Navy Dockyard felt immensely worthwhile, both for the historical and artistic insights it afforded. Built by prisoners, the dockyard was completed in 1842 and only closed in 1951, but nowadays it functions as a shopping complex. A highlight is the prepossessing, grandiose Commissioner’s House, now housing the National Museum of Bermuda, in which local artist Graham Foster has painted a dazzling mural depicting five centuries of the island’s history. Dazzling and vast: 1,000 square feet over two storeys. The town of St George’s, a Unesco World Heritage Site, with its famously unfinished church, is an equally historic spot, perfect for a lunch stop while exploring this side of the island. From there, I found the Crystal Cave (discovered in 1905 by two boys who were trying to retrieve their cricket ball). It is a compelling attraction. You descend into the depths and in near total darkness follow a walkway across the underground lake (the guide carried the torch), to be finally rewarded by a stunning array of stalagmites and stalactites all around. In Bermuda, culture and cosseted pampering seem to be easy bedfellows, if not the very best of friends. Weary from my peregrinations, I retreated with alacrity to the Elbow Beach Hotel, where after a delectable fried calamari and shrimp linguine at the beachfront restaurant, I headed to their Mandarin Oriental spa to be further ensconced in luxury. Sheer bliss can be hard to describe, but I have decided that one-and-a-half hours of being gently and expertly rubbed and kneaded by a professional while gazing at the shimmering sea is perhaps the closest that I will legally come in my lifetime to the fulfilment of my fantasies. As her hands edge down my lower back, I can only agree with Mark Twain’s opinion, after a visit to the island in the 1860s: ‘You can go to heaven if you want. I’d rather stay in Bermuda.’ As a holiday destination, Bermuda excels at guilt-free indulgence of the highest quality. It perhaps lacks the ‘charac-

has a curious metropolitan-meets-rustic chic, but Panama City or Port-au-Prince this certainly isn’t. That night, I dined at the 350-year-old Waterlot Inn: lobster, cracked crab and an exquisitely tender trio of rib-eye, filet mignon and striploin steaks. Half expecting birds to fly out of dishes and, truth to tell, somewhat disappointed when they didn’t, I was as impressed by the cooking as by the impeccably refined ambience and intelligently considerate service. The next morning, brimming with brio, I endeavoured to be virtuous. I was a little reluctant to try dawn yoga on the beach at the Fairmont Southampton hotel, for fear that it might damage the aura of masculinity which (I am told) I radiate. In fact, I need not have worried: it was the perfect tonic for my muscles, weary from excessive gym training back home. An hour

In Bermuda, culture and cosseted pampering seem to be easy bedfellows, if not the very best of friends

ter’ (i.e. poverty) of other islands, but it more than compensates for its alleged lack of ‘soul’ (i.e. blaring music, belligerent beach vendors and crime) with safety, superb infrastructure and all-round affability. There’s no menace, no mess, only high-end tranquillity and relaxation. As Baudelaire put it in ‘L’Invitation au Voyage’, here, all is ‘ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté’. Now all I need to do is find Jacqueline and I’ll be truly set. Prestige Holidays offer seven nights at The Reefs for £1,817pp, based on two adults staying in a poolside room on B&B, departing on 9 April 2013, including BA return flights from Gatwick and private transfers. For reservations visit prestigeholidays.co.uk/ bermuda or call 01425 480400. Package subject to availability. For more information, visit www.gotobermuda.co.uk

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T R AV E L

GE E K G OD S A technology worshipper goes on a pilgrimage to Silicon Valley Sebastian Payne

Most children grow up worshipping footballers or pop stars. My idol was Robert X. Cringley — a four-eyed alpha nerd, driving a red 1950s Ford T-Bird with a Macintosh computer resting on the passenger seat. This was the opening scene from Triumph of the Nerds, the TV series that changed my life. Cringley was a debonair US technology columnist, who in 1996 took viewers on a journey through the history of the personal computer. His was a world with a new god — technology — and a new holy land. As an eager seven-year-old, I dreamt of Silicon Valley, and living there. It was where the nerds from Cringley’s series — cheap haircuts, ill-fitting clothes and all — seemed to inherit the earth. It was a place where college dropouts started the world’s largest companies, where empires were built in a few years by sweat and a determination, where nerds, dreamers and riskaddict investors with open chequebooks collided and changed the future. So last month when I touched down in America for the first time, I was keen to discover what is unique about the Valley. I began in San Francisco, which bears lit-

tle relation to its technological neighbour, but there are points of reference. I made first for the South of the Market district, where the vast Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Gardens exemplify Steve Jobs’s much-imitated philosophy of design — that simplicity is the ultimate elegance. My second mission was to find some nerds in their natural habitat. Sightglass Coffee is a hip entrepreneurial gossiping shop owned by Twitter billionaire Jack Dorsey. People drink strong lattes (ordered using iPads, naturally) while boastfully discussing ‘where our next million will come from’. The techies here — all skinny red trousers and lopsided haircuts — could be from east London, although in Shoreditch this kind of talk would be pure fantasy, fuelled by seven pints. In California, these conversations are actually serious. ‘I don’t even know what it does, but it’s something to do with HTML5,’ said one gaggle of bores. ‘But it’s only a matter of time before Google show up and we’re set for life.’ Silicon Valley is south of the city, north of San José, in a place which was once apple orchards. My first stop is the Computer History Museum in Moun-

t a i n View. L a rgely f u nded by one of the world’s most successful nerds, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the building is home to thousands of objects, from a dotcom-boom Ask Jeeves inflatable to a replica of Charles Babbage’s 1830s Difference Engine. I arrived just in time for a demonstration, and the machine was a steampunk feast, although the lecture on how it is powered stretched even my enthusiasm. Some things are too nerdy even for nerds. Just around the corner from the museum is the intergalactic headquarters of Google. Known as the Googleplex, after an extremely large number, the googolplex (10 10 100 ), this 26-acre campus is a wonder. Pasty geniuses go between the brightly coloured buildings on Google bicycles. They even have a 22,000-seat outdoor amphitheatre. No wonder the company receives 1,000 job applications for every position. Next was Palo Alto. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary sleepy town: bare trees, deserted sidewalks and tidy houses. But this is the nerve centre of Silicon Valley. On the salubrious University Avenue, you find organic food stores and antiquarian bookshops alongside one of the first

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Illustration by Mitch Blunt

Apple stores. Steve Jobs lived here. Mark Zuckerberg still does. More importantly, Palo Alto is home to Stanford University. As a student guide led me through the vast campus, I recalled from Cringley that Stanford was where it all began. In the mid1930s, Professor Frederick Terman advised two students, David Hewlett and Bill Packard, to build their own electronics firm instead of signing up to a life of conformity. They did just that, setting up shop in a garage on Pacific Avenue. The green and brown shack has been lovingly restored by the HP Corporation and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Over a locked gate, I gazed at it in awe. Nearby, I found another Palo Alto landmark. La Jennifer Way is where Facebook came of age. Remember the bungalow Zuckerberg and Sean Parker of Napster shared in The Social Network? It still has the swimming pool and the broken chimney, but now it is inhabited by a new set of entrepreneurs busy developing interactive technology for political campaigning. Heading out of town, I spotted a cluster of unassuming offices on Coyote Hill Road. To the sophisticated nerd, the com-

plex is instantly recognisable as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center — or PARC. Here, everything we recognise about modern computing was invented. Graphical interfaces, networked computers, email inboxes, laser printers and mice were all nurtured at PARC. Some of the world’s top scientists still live on site. Unfortunately for Xerox, Microsoft and Apple borrowed all of their innovations. My visit to Silicon Valley would not be complete without seeing the two homes of Apple. The drive to Infinite Loop in Cupertino was burnt into my mind from endless replays of Cringley’s programme. Down Interstate 280, exit at De Anza Boulevard, a sharp right onto the Apple campus. The buildings may lack the distinctiveness of Google or Stanford, but seeing my favourite company’s mothership brought home to me just how unique it is. The place has an incredible atmosphere; you sense that the people who work here are fiercely proud of Apple and are determined to continue innovating. In the window of the top-secret design lab in Infinite Loop 2 are mysterious new devices. Are those chairs being carried out

of Infinite Loop 3? Or are they some new iChair? I became a little overexcited and had to calm down in the Company Store, where I bought an Apple mug and hoodie. After the giddiness of Cupertino, Crist Drive in Los Altos looked rather dull. No: 2066 on this typical American street is the childhood home of Steve Jobs, the annex was Apple’s first office in 1976. No doubt Ashton Kutcher will be visiting Crist Drive in his upcoming film jOBS, which comes out later this year. A sign (designed, I saw, in Microsoft Publisher) warned me not to get too close. Wearing my Ray-Ban glasses, driving a 2013 Toyota Corolla, and with an iPad Mini lying on the passenger seat, I headed back to San Francisco for the last time. The sun was setting over the Santa Cruz mountains, and my Triumph of the Nerds odyssey was over. Yes, Silicon Valley had been everything I imagined, and more. Three nights in San Francisco including f lights with Virgin Atlantic and accommodation at Sheraton Fisherman’s Wharf starts from £ 899, based on two a d u l t s : w w w.vi rg i n h ol i d a y s . c o . u k , 0844 557 3859.

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O N E T O WA T C H

A N T ON A LVA R E Z

Creativity and innovation are the defining characteristics of a good designer, an ability to think laterally and create inspired solutions to the problems of contemporary life. I’ve always believed that the quality of design education in this country is the reason we are seen as the world’s leading creative nation and why students from all over the world are attracted by our art and design schools. One such student is Anton Alvarez, a Swedish-Chilean designer who divides his time between London and Stockholm and a recent graduate from our own magnificent Royal College of Art. Anton’s education encompassed fine art, cabinet-making, interior architecture, and craft and design, giving him a diverse skill set to build upon. Added to his inquisitive, playful mind and strong personality, I am sure he will enjoy a colourful career in design.

A Swedish-Chilean designer who applies traditional skills in exciting new ways

Paul Plews

Terence Conran

I first came across Anton last summer when a group of students from the RCA came to the workshops of my furniture factory Benchmark in a collaboration with the American Hardwoods Export Council in a sustainable design project. The students camped out in the garden while being challenged to make a functional, sustainable chair out of American Hardwoods. Anton carved a sturdy yet elegant bench from a single log, demonstrating an appreciation of craft, materials, tools and finishing. A few months later his ‘Thread Wrapping Machine’ (below) was part of the Digital Crystal exhibition at the Design Museum. His early work ‘out in the real world’ shows tremendous promise and maturity, applying traditional skills with new ways of looking at problems. Anton is starting to demonstrate with confidence the fine breadth of his talents.

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