The Rake December 2020 - Issue 73

The refrain from one of my favourite songs, Where Eagles Dare, by the iconic Misfits, goes, “I ain’t no goddamn son of a bitch, you better think about it, baby”. Increasingly, I think it would be a fitting epithet on my tombstone. I’m joking, of course — I have no intention of being buried, but rather immolated on a Viking pyre with my Patek Philippe 5970 on my wrist, clad in Cifonelli and alligator cowboy boots, Cazal MC Hammer shades clamped to my lifeless eyes, a Negroni in one hand, a pair of nunchakus in the other, a Behike 56 wedged into my jaw, and my Les Baer 1911 tucked in my waistband. In which case, I’ll leave instructions for my progeny to blast this anthem in time to the…

Mahler said that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. The holiday spirit comes in different styles and strengths, but its destination is invariable. Mankind rallies to the hearth and table. Knives flash, corkscrews clear for action, assuagement reigns, and the wassailing of carols is synchronised the world over in glad tidings harkening all, both rich and poor. In the U.K., plum-pudding country, Christmas brings a craze of arson, both rum and brandy being set alight. Presumptuously enough, we have also appropriated the Americans’ bird, the turkey. He gobbles with a British accent in Shropshire and Sussex, only then to be gobbled up as the centrepiece of the Christmas table-top tradition — and in Britain, the heftier the tradition, the stronger the hold it lays upon…

Kathryn Boyd Brolin is a photographer, designer and business owner based in Los Angeles and Atlanta, Georgia. She studied photojournalism at the University of Georgia’s prestigious Grady College of Journalism in Athens, Georgia, and photography at the Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence before graduating in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from UGA. Shortly thereafter, she began working in Atlanta’s growing film industry before moving permanently to L.A., where her creative talents would eventually collide, resulting in the genesis of her business, Midheaven Denim, for which she serves as founder, head designer and photographer. While running her business, she continues to pursue her photography. She lives with her husband, Josh, whom she shot for this issue’s cover, and their baby girl, Westlyn. They are expecting another girl…

In Thomas Pynchon’s debut novel, V, published in 1963, the anti-hero, a discharged and feckless U.S. navy sailor named Benny Profane, is watching an unspecified Randolph Scott western and comparing himself unfavourably to its square-jawed, morally righteous hero: “He was cool, imperturbable, keeping his trap shut and only talking when he had to — and then saying the right things and not running off haphazard and inefficient at the mouth.” Profane’s admiring analysis was shared by a generation of postsecond- world-war moviegoers: though Scott never won an Oscar, his lanky, laconic cowboy archetypes — reticent but resolute, diffident but dauntless, potent but private — made him one of the top box-office stars of the late 1940s and early fifties. In the 39 westerns in which he starred, from 1946’s Badman’s Territory…

He was an ordinary second-generation British kid of Kenyan descent, growing up in a modest street in an anonymous town around 20 miles north of central London. Then one day, Abubakar Salim picked up a games console controller, and a love of narrative — the more phantasmagorical and outlandish the better — gripped his imagination. Fondness for fiction became fondness for acting in his teens, and small parts in British T.V. shows soon arrived — 24: Live Another Day in 2014; Charlie Brooker’s disarmingly intelligent dystopian drama Black Mirror in 2016; Jamestown, a period drama about English settlers in America, in 2017; and voice work in gaming (namely, releases in the Assassin’s Creed and World of Warcraft franchises). Most recently, a bolt from the blue: the chance of a leading role in…

In January 1977, the Los Angeles Times dispatched a reporter to Almería in southern Spain, where an actor whose career was threatening to make an indentation in the U.S. market was shooting a Foreign Legion drama called March or Die. After spending some time on set, the reporter noted his subject’s good looks and easy charm. “This dashing rogue,” he wrote, “is a former watersports champion who keeps a complete gymnastics unit in the barn next to his home in the Massachusetts Berkshires and insists on doing all his own stunts.” On the question of personality, though, the Times — ironically or otherwise — decided to hedge its bets. “If he is going to be a big American star,” the story read, “he will have to stop fraternising with the…