The Rake August 2017 - Issue 53

When people ask me how I got into dressing up, I tell them it was New York and the siren call of her nightlife. It was her bars and nightclubs like a Promethean arc sling-shotting me around the sun and down into the equally incandescent fluorescent neon underbelly that defined my teen years. While Springsteen conjured up “madman drummers bummers” in his paean to the omnipotence of adolescent onanism, when I think of being ‘blinded by the light’ I see the hyperkinetic lightshow projected onto countless graffiti-strewn walls and refracted through my corneas and directly and indelibly into my brain. I think of New York City. I think of Danceteria, the Mudd Club, the Peppermint Lounge. I think of Area, and how those of us in ninth grade at the…

As a Brit, the last few months have been spent in varying degrees of anxiety. The political landscape is such that we all have a stake in insecurity, and the future is about as clear as the Ganges. Within macro terms such as ‘millennial’, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘fake news’ and ‘vested interests’, we have tangible micro results that happen when everyone tries to solve the world’s problems in one fell swoop — ‘Grenfell’, ‘Manchester’, ‘London Bridge’, ‘Finsbury Park’. These are the events that test resolve and ideals — so we see liberals become more censorious, the diverse becoming more tribal, and everyone blaming everything but themselves. People I speak to in the industry feel worried. Brexit aside, political discourse is again creating a dividing line between the good and the rich. Nothing sums…

DAVID SMIEDT Writer, comedian and social commentator David Smiedt was born in South Africa, lives in Australia, but insists he is yet to grow up anywhere. He is the author of six books (including the wonderfully titled From Russia with Lunch: A Lithuanian Odyssey) and has penned jokepeppered features for international titles including GQ, Elle and Cosmopolitan. These days, dividing his time between writing and stand-up comedy, David is inordinately proud of having once forced an Australian television station to suspend broadcasting for an entire minute after telling a spicy Heather Mills joke live on air. In his capacity as a selfappointed style counsellor to all who will listen, he insists that polyester is mildly more heinous than genocide. As usual, David takes a look at the life and work of…

“He would construct those intricately rhyming narratives inside his formidable brain.” When the Coogi brand was founded in 1969, its trippy indigenous-influenced knitwear was designed to give wealthy American tourists the chance to drop a wad of Aussie dollars on a fair-dinkum kitsch souvenir of their trip ‘Down Under’. Little did its founders in the tony Melbourne enclave of Toorak suspect that — like many other symbols of brash upper-class affluence — their $500 creation would be co-opted as an aspirational symbol by the U.S. urban community. No one played a greater role in cementing Coogi gear’s status as playa-wear than Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. Critics at such respected organs as The Source, Billboard and Rolling Stone have held Biggie up as the greatest hip-hop M.C. of all time. He…

As cities go, New York is the girl at school who was good at everything, liked by everyone and irresistible to everyone who crossed her path. And I don’t even hate her for it. Her relentless energy is contagious, coursing through the city streets, casting light on up-and-comers in the worlds of art, music, food and theatre, and sparking conversations between neighbourhoods you haven’t even heard of yet. She’s impossible to keep up with, but one can’t help but get caught up in the drama and delights of her sprawling, skyscraper-lined chaos. Le Corbusier once wrote: “A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe.” With its own personal soundtrack, immortalised by the likes of Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen and Alicia…

The actor Mickey Rourke is a Hollywood myth incarnate, a beautiful man undone by a dependence on his own face, a saddle-soaped Dorian Gray. The smirking eyes, harsh frame and soft voice combined to subvert the eighties lead, a soulful minimalist to Michael Douglas’s greedy kitsch. Chiming with the era’s more quixotic auteurs, he abandoned his screen prime to box. Like Jean-Paul Belmondo (the subject of a previous Rake profile), Rourke was an undefeated amateur fighter, but by the time he wanted to act again, that face was a pulpy caricature of itself. For 15 years, Rourke was the heavyweight bruiser turned industry punchbag until a single film in 2009, one of the most potent life-art blurs in recent cinema history, revived him. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Born in Schenectady,…