The Rake

It takes a lot of heart to wait. It takes a kind of crazy, unwavering, blindly quixotic and bordering-on-irrational faith to wait. And that is the reason we are invariably moved by stories of individuals who have that kind of insane, beautiful heart. Take, for example, the story of Florentino Ariza in Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza when he spots her through an open window, but her father separates them and sees her married to someone else. That marriage lasts 50 years, and throughout it, Ariza remains faithful in his hope they will be reunited. He goes through opium addiction and sex addiction, and I imagine touches the bottom of the ocean in existential terms, but he is always…

I am resistant to change. It has always been that way. When I was young, I found myself quite badly maimed by a boat propeller; my brother and grandfather had only recently died, so my family’s life could be considered somewhat in flux — an annus horribilis of our own. From then on, a sense of security and certainty became a priority of mine, and I have dedicated myself to honing the art of hazard perception while keeping plans B and C ready to go, just in case. I mention this because, as it turns out, my approach to life has proved extremely useful in the job of editing The Rake, and now my distaste for change has stubbornly seen me to this, my 50th issue. In all honesty, when…

charlie gray Charlie is a London-based international fashion and portrait photographer known for his playful, cinematic and intimate images. He is inspired by past photography masters Richard Avedon and Terry O’Neill and filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann. In this issue, he teamed up with Angelica Zollo to shoot Michelle Yeoh for the cover. You will no doubt be accustomed to Charlie’s work in the magazine by now, and certainly this shoot benefits from his prodigious use of colour and natural light. See more of the images of Yeoh on page 72. angelica zollo Angelica Zollo is a writer, producer, director and musician. Her directorial debut — the award-winning feature film Trauma Is a Time Machine (2018) — played theatrically across the U.S. and is available on all streaming platforms. Her producing credits…

1. NEWLY SIGNED TO 20th CENTURY FOX, 1947 “A career is born in public — talent in privacy.” Marilyn Monroe may have died 61 years ago, but, like many old-school goddesses — Venus, say, or perhaps Voluptas — she remains omniscient. She’s one of the American Film Institute’s top 10 screen legends. She’s also a meme, a gif, a screensaver, a T-shirt, a tattoo, a myth, and an icon — literally so, in the case of Andy Warhol’s venerated screen prints. She’s rarely out of the news. Recently it was reported that a get-well note from her estranged father — “Dear Marylyn (sic)… lots of thoughts and wishes are with you every day” — sold for $31,000 at a Beverly Hills auction. Prior to that, the release of Andrew Dominik’s film Blonde,…

If you have a penchant for the excitement of live motorsport, or the accessibility of world-class tennis, chances are you’ve seen Immy Barclay around. Barclay is an acclaimed presenter, integral to the coverage of a number of the world’s most prestigious sporting events, including Wimbledon, MotoGP and, more recently, Formula One. She regularly interviews sporting titans — from Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to Valentino Rossi and Lewis Hamilton — with an easy charm that brings out the best in her subjects. Her warm demeanour helps, of course, but so do her language skills. A multilinguist, Barclay is comfortable in Italian and can turn to Spanish, French and Portuguese as well as her native English. It gives her another gear, allowing her to unlock doors that many of her contemporaries might…

“To call woman the weaker sex,” Mahatma Gandhi once said, is a libel; it is man’s injustice to woman.” Indeed, the phrase was a vapid platitude the moment it was coined. Exhibit A: the voids between the genders in terms of pain threshold and life expectancy — case closed. There are plenty more exhibits up the prosecution lawyer’s sleeve, too. (S)he might turn to the history books and cite the fearless exploits of Zenobia, Cleopatra, Lakshmibai, Theodora, Joan of Arc or Empress Dowager Cixi. (S)he might delve into the annals of popular music and point out how different its narrative would be without the exploits of Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, Siouxsie Sioux and Chrissie Hynde. Marilyn Monroe’s irresistible turn in Some Like It Hot (see page 144), in which she produced…