Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, December 23rd 2011

It's snowing in the Rockies. A bit. They're still waiting for the "big dump" that sets the resorts up for the whole season. Vail is the largest single mountain ski resort in America, and in Vail Village the trees are covered in Christmas lights, there are gas fires in the street and the pavements are steaming as the snow lands on them - they are heated from underneath.

Our hotel in Beaver Creek has an outdoor pool and five hot tubs, all exhaling moist warmth into the freezing air, uncovered during the day and mostly unused until après-ski time. There are patio heaters outside restaurants, heated underground car parks, and of course the ski lifts churning away all day and the piste-bashers grooming all night... It's all a stark reminder that downhill skiing holidays are high energy as well as high altitude.
 
In our room, though, there is a slice of a tree with the word "CONSERVE" scorched into it, ranch style. We are invited to participate in "helping preserve and protect natural resources" by placing this sign on our rumpled bed in the morning. If we do so, the staff "will prepare it using [our] existing linen". That is to say, they won't change the sheets. For a night, anyway: "a full refresh of all linens and towels will be provided after the second night". A snowflake in a snowdrift, you might say.

Rebecca Willis is Intelligent Life's associate editor, and a former travel editor of Vogue

“Rio Breaks” is a documentary that explores two unlikely worlds: surfing and slum-life in Rio de Janeiro. Neither “Blue Crush” nor “City of God”, but a charming tale of two boys on the cusp of adolescence, it refreshingly debunks any related stereotypes. 

The film follows a year in the lives of two best friends, Fabio and Naama. They live in “Vietnam”, a particularly violent part of one of Rio's largest slums, riddled with poverty and controlled by the armed drug-gangs of the Red Command. Naama (pictured below) is 12, button-nosed, bright and cheeky. Fabio is a year older, brash and complex. His mother is on the streets; his father was murdered when he tried to leave his gang. For the two young boys there isn’t much to do besides play marbles on concrete, fly kites, catch mice or worse.

So every morning they burn down the hill to Arpoador beach, where they kick sand, angle to borrow a board and dream of becoming professional surfers. They are encouraged by Rogerio, who also grew up in the favela but has made a career out of surfing. He opened the Favela Surf Club, a non-profit organisation that offers guidance and boards to the favela kids in an effort to deter violence. Rogerio offers a rare alternative to the spiral of gang life: the salvation of surfing.  read more »

Every year hundreds of buildings in London open their doors to the public for one weekend in September, allowing visitors a glimpse under the skin of the city’s architecture. Open House London, which takes place this weekend (September 17th and 18th), will grant access to over 700 offices, homes and civic monuments. The entirely free event also includes dozens of neighbourhood walks, boat and cycle tours, talks and debates all over London. Giovanna Dunmall offers her top-five picks for where to go:

1. The former Commonwealth Institute building (pictured above), a Grade II-listed structure on High Street Kensington, is renowned for its curvaceous green copper roof. The Institute is a prime example of 20th-century modernism, designed by Lord Cunliffe in 1958. It is about to be renovated by John Pawson and Rem Koolhaas, so this is the last chance for the public to see the original project before it re-opens as the new Design Museum in 2014.

2. Make a trip to the Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping for a glimpse of what it is like to live on the water. HCM provides berths for historic vessels that have all been painstakingly restored and converted into homes. These boats now make up a permanent moored community, but the boats are navigable and can explore other waters. There is also a Pier House, a floating space for local events.  read more »

Somewhere in Tom Scocca’s new book, "Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future", the author finds himself touring the city’s glittering jewel: the Bird’s Nest stadium, built for the Olympics in 2008. As he walks the grounds he sees an exposed portion of pillar; he runs his finger across it and discovers some concrete dust. But weren’t stadium’s tresses made of steel? During his time in Beijing—the years leading up to the Games—Scocca is never quite sure if he is seeing the curtain or peering behind it.

Scocca is a journalist­­—known to most as a Slate blogger and former New York Observer columnist—who travelled between America and China for the better part of a decade. He observed the capital city ratchet up huge changes—cosmetic and social—to become an international civic showcase. His book on the subject is funny, strange and sharply reported. More Intelligent Life spoke to Scocca about the book and what he thought the Olympics accomplished for Beijing.

How did you come to write "Beijing Welcomes You"?

My wife was living in Beijing and I was in New York, and one of us was going to end up in the same city as the other. The more I was going back and forth to Beijing the more it seemed to me that it was a great place to be a reporter. There was this amazing story unfolding in the way that the city was transforming. As someone who wasn’t a China specialist, it made me a better audience. It was sort of aimed at me, especially as a member of the foreign press.

Was censorship an issue?  read more »

When performing live, Galactic makes playing funk music look easy. It isn't. Delivering precise, tight funk is hard work, but this five-piece New Orleans band seems to power through their shows as if they could keep it all going endlessly. Their most recent album, "The Other Side of Midnight: Live in New Orleans", captures that energy and plenty of the flavour of the Big Easy. It was recorded during a sold-out show at Tipitinas, a legendary local club, and features some well-known local musicians such as Cyril Neville and Trombone Shorty.  read more »

J.M. Ledgard is that rare writer who elevates hard reporting with unexpected language. Of the tallest building in the world, he observes that it is like a "glorious hypodermic needle". About ants, he muses, "As primitives we ate them, they were our crunch, and now they are lodged in our subconscious." As for exploring the depths of the sea, he suggests that unlike space travel, which "offers a sighted journey towards infinity", ocean descent involves "a blind journey towards finitude".

Based in Nairobi as The Economist's East Africa correspondent, he is also a regular contributor to Intelligent Life magazine, with features about Africa's digital revolution (for which he recently won a Diageo Africa business reporting award), ants and E.O. Wilson, and the ocean's eerily remote floor, among others. Given his affection for the unique turn of phrase, It is perhaps unsurprising that he is also a novelist. "Submergence", his second novel, now out from Jonathan Cape, is a story about a British secret agent who is held hostage by jihadist fighters in Somalia; a woman who has become a leading researcher of ocean life; and their brief love affair, memorable and remote. This is a thrilling work, written with a literary, Sebaldian flair.  read more »

It is the crunching of tectonic plates, not of credit, that makes Iceland so photogenic. As many travellers learnt under the ash cloud last year, it sits on the boundary between the North American and the Eurasian plates. This armadillo-scaled rock at Svartifoss (Black Fall) in Skaftafell National Park is a close relation of the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland. The hexagonal basalt columns formed inside a lava flow which cooled slowly and allowed crystallisation. In geological terms Iceland is very young, still being formed and changed by fire and ice—hence its popularity with human adolescents, who flock here on school field trips to see their textbooks on volcanic activity brought to life (not least in the Geysir after which all other geysers are named).  read more »

The Moloko Bar sits halfway down a shaded alley a short walk from Minsk's Victory Square. You know you're on the right road when you see the avant-garde mural, a mash-up of Renaissance-era paintings and graffiti, that runs along the pavement, ending at a matte white building with a black "?" by the door, the name of the attached art gallery. Such venues are around every corner in European cities like Berlin and Barcelona. But in the drab Belarusian capital, they are very much an exception.

Maria, a 29-year-old poet and journalist, told me over a milkshake that the bar/gallery complex is one of a handful of places in Minsk where brash, open-minded intellectuals can let off steam. Not too loudly, though: plain-clothes agents of the KGB (as the security agency is still called here) are known to stop by and eavesdrop. In their case, however, less plain would help. “Their clothes,” she says, “tell us who they are as soon as they walk through the door.”

The first time Maria and I met, "Casablanca" was playing silently on a flat-screen television mounted to the wall. In the smoky bowels of Rick’s Café Americain the Nazi Major Strasser was confronting Victor Laszlo, the Czech dissident. Coincidence? I couldn’t be sure. But the film was replayed as soon as it ended. As another activist would later assert, everything in Belarus is political when the context is understood.  read more »

Though Anne Müller has performed as a cellist with various symphonies in Berlin, it is her most recent musical collaboration—with Nils Frahm, a pianist, producer and fellow Berliner (interviewed here)—that has earned her the most attention. Their album, "7fingers", is a work of subtle but often startling chamber music, full of unexpected electronic flourishes and glitches, her fluid cello central throughout. It is a welcome addition to the rapidly growing neo-classical scene.
 
Now 32, Müller started cello lessons when she was six, and culminated her studies at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts under Michael Sanderling, a renowned conductor. She has maintained her ties with the classical world, thanks to her work with the Wolf-Ferrari-Ensemble, while also lending her talents to a number of contemporary bands in Berlin. She performs regularly with Silke Lange, an accordionist, and Phillip Boa, a singer-songwriter. She’s also spent much of the last year touring the world accompanying Agnes Obel, an award-winning Danish singer-songwriter.
 
What drew you to the cello?
   read more »

It is quite an experience to walk into the Museum of Modern Art on a carefree summer’s day and be confronted with Boris Mikhailov's photographs. Nineteen larger-than-life pictures surround the viewer. A man lies sleeping, possibly passed out, a striking figure in a black coat against the white snow. Another man faces away from the lens, his bare back revealing blood gathering in the sores. A thin young girl with sallow, translucent skin, shorn hair and a pink shirt, is captured in an odd, distant gaze.

Born in Ukraine, Mr Mikhailov shot these photographs in Kharkov in 1997 and 1998. He visited this industrial Ukrainian city after the fall of the Soviet Union and found that many people, including those who were previously middle class, had been displaced and were now homeless. Mr Mikhailov was disturbed that despite the “shiny wrapper” of Western modernity, people were starving, suffering from disease and resorting to prostitution. He spent a year taking the pictures that would eventually become “Case History", a 400-photograph series and book. The MoMA show is the first time these pictures have been exhibited in the America. Some of the series, shown at a much smaller size, are also on view at the Tate Modern in the show  “Photography: New Documentary Forms” until March 2012.  read more »