bazaar MARCH ISSUE

March 2012 - issue # 158 b a z a a r - m a g a z i n e . c om

ANO

OTAH

Intr

The bazaar team...

Boss Ahmed El-Adly

Operations Business Development

This issue of bazaar is absolutely full of exciting fresh content. On the cover we have a new masterpiece by the very talented Shurooq Amin who has a new exhibition that starts in March. You can read more about her and the date of her exhibition inside. We have quickly come to realize that there are more interesting people in this little Kuwait of ours than we’d ever previously thought – the problem is, they’re so wrapped up in doing something awesome with their lives that we literally have to hunt them down. Take Farah Al-Humaidhi, a young Kuwaiti artist, with not only a successful Interior Design career, but an endlessly creative personal project, Pieces By Farah, which showcases not only her smarts, but her wildly creative mind. There’s her brother, Aziz Al-Humaidhi , equally successful, equally creative whose love affair with architecture can also be found in this month’s pages.

M ai Jado

Communications Consultant Hala Y. Sharara

Design Sumaiya AL-Shar han

Staff Writer/Social Media Yasmine El Char if

Staff Writer Kevin Smith

Editor A. Al-Duaij

Contributing Writers Abdulaziz Al-Hashash B. Qureshi Bassam N. Shuhaibar, Ph. D Bibi Al-Falah Craig Loomis Dr. Juliet and Dr. Nisrine Jaye Sonia Lily K. Loaay Ahmed Meghan McCabe

While the people are apprehensive about the recent changes in the political arena, things like the recent Zain Flash Mob, which some of you were lucky to see live, remind us that it isn’t all doom and gloom – check out our interview with the folks at Cinemagic to find out all about what it took to bring the idea to life. Heard of the Live Theatre? Kuwait’s first comedy club, and we mean real comedy club. We managed to attend their most recent show, and for the first time felt like we were on a night out in NYC. We can’t have an issue without a few gluttonous food reviews to keep our bellies satisfied and our readers wellinformed. Munch has a new location; a hands down must-try, if not for the food alone, then for the whole experience. And the new buzz in town is all about Zee Brgr and we now know why.

Selim Savsar

On a final note, we are always on the lookout for new, interesting people to write about, new restaurants to review, new projects to examine, and new brands to explore. If you know of any of the above, please drop us an email at info@bazaar-magazine.com and we will do our best to cover them in upcoming issues. After all, bazaar is your magazine!

British Industries for Printing and Packaging

Strawberry Girl Sumayyah Meehan

Photographers Kevin Smith Othman Al Othman for Goji Sumaiya AL-Sharhan Waleed Shaalan

Printing

LA Times Daily Star USA Today MTC International MIT Review Travel Times Hollywood Watch Tribune Media Services

bazaar can be found at the following locations:

Yusra Ahmad

Driving to work today, I could still see remnants of the recent National Day celebrations all over the streets. Broken pieces of abandoned water guns combined with little bits and pieces of torn flags, and the occasional lonely balloon bouncing around. I’ve always found it rather sad that such a joyous occasion could lead to so much stress beforehand.

My friends (Kuwaitis and expats alike) were busy making military-like plans two weeks before the actual event. Some people were leaving the country for the 4 day weekend and declared that we were crazy to even contemplate staying. Others were heading to their chalets to escape the jam-packed roads and endless parades of young men dancing on top of their cars after making sure they completely blocked the roads, and the stealthy gangs of 14 year olds, each with their own canister of super foam running around looking for adventures. I happen to live on Gulf Road, so resigned myself to the fact that unless I got a last minute invite to a friend’s chalet to “escape”, I was going to spend the four days at home unable to go out, with nobody able to come visit. Trapped in my own house! At one point, I even contemplated buying my own supply of foam canisters and teaching my son how it’s done (if you can’t beat em, join em!), but luckily enough, the invite came through, and we were able to avoid much of the fracas.

Syndicates and Sources

Starbucks Coffee (65 branches) Cozmo - 4 branches Topshop Galleria Complex The Video Club Souk Sharq Energie Costa Café H&M Bredz Jacques Dessange Miss Sixty Airport Mall Häagen Dasz Virgin Megastore The One Café ACK (Australian College of Kuwait) AUK (American University of Kuwait) AUM (American University of Middle East) Boxhill College Marble Slab D’Lush Early Bird Café Harley Davidson Al-Kout Mall Centrepoint Café Johnny Rockets Pizza Express Al Corniche Club Kuwait Airways Oasis Club Shay W Nanaa Le PQ Cafe Boushahri Clinic Al Salam Hospital 4 x 4 Customs Ligne Roset Hard Rock Café Pilates & More Mowasat Hospital Camille Albane Dar Al Funoon I.O. Centers Cutting Edge Salon Dasman Diabetic Centre The Burger Hub Dunkin Donuts Waterlemon Café Supreme International Clinic Casper & Gambini’s Segafredo Cafe O Pao Cafe

The views expressed in bazaar magazine are those of the respective contributors and not necessarily shared by the magazine or its staff (but sometimes they are).

Happy Reading!

No one likes to be dumped;

recycle me, please.

Ahmed El-Adly

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tel. 24610017 - fax 24610018 info@bazaar-magazine.com www.bazaar-magazine.com

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INDEX MARCH ' 12

36

30

52

68

22

PIECES BY FARAH

ZEE BRGR

LET’S MUNCH

SHUROOQ AMIN

ZAIN FLASH MOB

Determination, reinforced by an endless pool of creative energy, meets functional design with Pieces by Farah. Meet the inspirational businesswoman and passionate designer responsible for it all in our up close and personal.

Inventive burger creations meet worldly contemporary gourmet delicacies at Zee Brgr. From fries with succulent Truffles, Fois Gras burgers and Brioche burger buns, experience taste that transcends all geographic borders, bringing the world to your plate..

Munch have consolidated their expansive culinary expertise at their newly opened restaurant in The Village. You’ll be spoilt for choice whether you stop by for coffee and dessert, homemade pasta or something from the grill.

An exemplary manifestation of artistic awakening arrives with talented artist ShurooqAmin’s latest series, It’s a Man’s World. If you wondered where the men were in Society Girls, Amin returns to unveil yet another hidden side of society.

The Avenues was home to Kuwait’s first Flash Mob in February. Whether seen live, on YouTube, or as a commercial on TV, everybody lived it and loved it. Check out how to get 75 people to sing and dance at the same time.

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48

A SPRING-FUL GOJI

ELIZABETH AYOUB

The refreshing scents of spring are just around the corner.

With fashionable accessories bursting with color and joy, embrace the new season with Goji Boutique’s Spring-ful Accessories lookbook. The best part, all the products are a mouse-click away!

Likened to Norah Jones and Fairuz, Elizabeth Ayoub is the talented promising voice among young Americans and Arabs alike. Meet the half Venezuelan, half Lebanese musical marvel, actor and storyteller and our artist of the month.

Pieces by farah, p. 36

34

32

26

KOMIC SUTRA

DESTINATION HAUTE

B AND D KUWAIT

GOODWILL CALENDAR

SLEEP THERAPY

Redefining the art of gift creations, sisters Maya and Zena Dabbous relieve you of the daunting task of tastefully wrapping your gifts, or even buying them, with their onestop online destination for finding the perfect gift!

Get ‘Haute’ style and beauty advice from bonafide fashion guru Marwa Morsi, the stylista behind HauteID.com. A real fashionista with real advice, Marwa talks style trends, beauty tips, product reviews and more based on real experiences.

Nancy D’Souza is genetically modified to blog about food. Find out how this notorious foodie started the fun, local, online culinary resource, B and D Kuwait, in this month’s Truth or Dare.

Fajer Qasem has created a space where goodwill seekers and goodwill causes can connect with ease through her online calendar; that way people wanting to volunteer can do so without wasting time struggling to find worthy causes.

Rediscover the art of sleep with specialist Dr. Christopher Herrera at the luxurious Six Senses Spa at Hotel Missoni. With lavish beds, cuisine, and expert sleep workshops, Hotel Missoni is our one-stop destination for fashionable relaxation.

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Breadz Burger Hub, Gulf Road Casper & Gambini, Kuwait City Chocolate Bar, Al Bida'a Crumbs, Shaab Dunkin Donuts, Salem Al-Mubarak Haagen Dazs - Souq Sharq, Arraya Hard Rock Café Jade Garden Restaurant, Gulf Hotel, Salmiya Johnny Rockets - Opposite Salhiya Complex, Salmiya, Alia & Ghalia Complex Living Room Lounge MILK, Sief Strip Opao Organica Fish & Chips, Jabriya P.Q. - The Palms Pizza Express - Dhahia, Bida'a Complex, Hilton Kuwait Resort Prime & Toast - Al Bida'a, Seif Strip The Early Bird - Fahaheel, Jabriya Starbucks Adeliya Airport Mall Al Ghanim Al Rai Al Mowasat Hospital Al Muhalab Al Shaya Head Office Aliya & Ghalia Complex AUK

Awtad Kuwait City Bairaq Mall Baitak Tower Behbehani Complex Bida’a Complex BMW Showroom Daiya Co-op Dar Al Awadi Fashion World Salmiya Hilton Resort Jabriya Jabriya Land Keifan Khalifa Resort Kout Mall Marina Crescent Marina Mall Mishref NBK Nuwaiseeb Nuzha Co-op Plaza Hawalli Rosa Castle Salhiya Salmiya, Salem Al-Mubarak Salmiya Co-op Salwa Co-op Scientific Center Seif Hospital Shaab Shamiya Co-op

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Sharq Co-op Sheikha Complex Souk Salmiya Souk Sharq The Avenues The Palms Hotel Zain Headquarters Clinics & Hospitals Al Safat American Hospital Boushahri Clinic Dasman Diabetes Institute Diet Care Center International Clinic Kaizen Seif Hospital Soor Clinic Hotels & Health Clubs Al Corniche Club Crowne Plaza, Farwaniya Flex Hilton Kuwait Resort & Spa Holiday Inn, Salmiya Pilates & More - Salmiya, Mahboula The Palms Beach Hotel Malls 360 Mall Dunkin Donuts Arraya Haagen Dazs Galleria

Marina Mall/Crescent Casper & Gambini Chocolate Bar Johnny Rockets P.Q. Paul Virgin Megastore Souq Sharq Starbucks Haagen Dazs Breadz The Avenues Johnny Rockets Paul Pizza Express Crumbs Haagen Dazs Starbucks Airport Mall Pizza Express Starbucks Dar Al Awadi I.O. Center Spoons Chocolate Bar Salhiya Complex Starbucks

Stand Alones 4 Boutique A.W.A.R.E. Center Alghanim Marine

Beautylicious Brush Salon Cozmo Bowling - Salmiya, Kaifan, Discovery Mall, Mahboula Dar Al Funoon Gallery Tilal Goji Boutique Jacques Dessange Salon, Shaab Karizma Kuwait 4X4 Landmark - Al Rai café, Fahaheel, Salmiya London Limos N Bar N Style Pink Moon Boutique Sultan Gallery THE One The Video Club TIES Center Schools & Universities American International School American University of Kuwait Australian College Kuwait Boxhill College Universal American School Kuwait University Starbucks Khaldiya Starbucks Adeliya Starbucks Jabriya Starbucks Shuwaikh

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20

KUWAIT’S FIRST FLASH MOB Celebrating national pride through dance By bazaar staff

If you were down at The Avenues on February 3—it was a Friday so I’d lay down money that most people in Kuwait were there—you may have witnessed something bizarre. For three minutes and twenty-one seconds, crowds of seemingly random people fell into sync with each other and danced. Not exactly an average Friday in a Kuwaiti shopping mall!

If you didn’t see it live then you may have seen shaky handheld mobile phone footage on YouTube in the following days or finally as a full-fledged Zain TV commercial celebrating Kuwait National Day. This was a flash mob – Kuwaiti style.

Flash mobs have been around since 2003 when Bill Wasik, then senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, anonymously organized one hundred and thirty people to simply gather in the rug department at Macy’s department store in New York. Fast-forward to present day and flash mobs are everywhere, especially dancing ones; The Sound of Music in Antwerp Central Station, Glee in Rome, and the megamix at Liverpool St Station in London and Dubai International Airport to name but a few on YouTube.

Now we can add Kuwait to the growing list.

Cinemagic was approached by JWT ad agency wanting to create something unique and different to celebrate National Day for Zain Kuwait. Cinemagic looked to the multitude of flash mobs on the internet for inspiration but didn’t want to ape anybody else’s 22

work. They wanted to create something totally Kuwaiti and something truly authentic.

Enter Mohammed Al Ehmly, a well-known local theater talent and choreographer. The key word here is local. Cinemagic had decided that they wanted their flash mob to utilze only Kuwaiti elements. This meant finding seventy-five performers from Kuwait to sing and dance, choreographing traditional Kuwaiti dances mixed with modern elements and finally developing a unique music track featuring traditional and contemporary Kuwaiti music. Local youth program LoYac helped out with the young talent and also provided a space for the dancers to practice, especially helpful when trying to synchronize such a large group of dancers. They rehearsed nearly every day for two months prior to the performance. In the final three days before the actual flash mob, they practiced after hours at The Avenues from midnight to seven in the morning to perfect their moves in the real performance environment!

On the day, fifteen cameras were employed to capture not only the dancers, but the public’s reaction to the spectacle. Three cinema cameras were hidden in ‘fake’ booths so as not to arouse suspicion before the event, and DSLRs were carried through the crowds, covering the performance from all angles.

The element of surprise was one which director Aziz Al Jasmi and producer Mohammed Younes felt was crucial to not lose authenticity and ensure the flash

mob did not look staged. This was an arduous project for all involved but seeing the positive public reaction made it all worthwhile.

To me there is something quite remarkable about the flash mob phenomenon; there is a beauty in seeing people come together in a uniform way and doing something as primal as dance. It seems to speak to the world without saying a single word. It can be taken as a metaphor that if we unite we can create something of true beauty – a fitting way to celebrate National Day in Kuwait.

Cinemagic Kuwait is a state-of-the-art boutique production house catering to all film, TV, and visual media needs. Visit them at www.cinemagics.com or call on +965 25720945 for more information.

what’s on?

SULTAN GALLERY

14th March, 10am - 4pm & 7 - 9 pm.

15th - 29th March, 10am - 4pm Take me to this place: I want to do the memories is a multimedia installation by Beirut-based collective Atfal Ahdath, comprised of Vartan Avakian, Hatem Imam, and Raed Yassin. The work lays out a constellation of forms and reproduction procedures around photographic studio practices in the digital age.

Artist: Reinaldo Sanguino (In collaboration with

Dean Project gallery, New York) Title of Exhibition: Reinaldo Sanguino: New Works

-New York City - Kuwait City Dates and Timing: 27th March - 12th April, 2012 Opening : 27th March 2012, 7- 9pm 28th January, 10am - 4pm & 7 - 9 pm 29th January – 12th April, 10am - 4 pm Based on the practice of using Meissen Porcelain as diplomatic exchange gifts by European Courts during the eighteenth century, this body of work is a contemporary and personalized reexamination of the diplomatic gift exchange tradition as form of relationship building. The exhibition highlights the role ceramics played in gift exchanges to form relationships, and Sanguino creates groups of ceramic works that range from utilitarian shapes—pitchers, bowls, plates, cups, containers, etc.—to decorative forms such as vessels, sculptures, and figurines.

Take me to this place explores and manipulates the techniques that have fashioned a culture of reproducibility and standardization and accelerated the Arab world’s fascination with fame.

Sultan Gallery is located in South Sabhan, Block 8, Street 105, Building No. 168. For more information please call 2471 4325 Ext. 110 or email sultangallery1969@gmail.com.

DAR AL FUNOON

Fine Arts, Alexandria University then received his Master's Degree in 1992.

Abou El Naga is currently the curator of Qatar Visual Art Center. Earlier in his career he taught at the faculty of Specific Education in Cairo University where he teaches painting using nontraditional techniques that integrate different materials with the imaging and printing methods.

Artist: Ali Omar Ermes Date: 19th - 29th March, 2012 Born in Libya in 1945 Ali Omar Ermes was educated both in Libya and England. He skillfully fuses Arabic Script and contemporary Art, in doing so he has created new aesthetics. The Arabic letter is his source of inspiration, he also paints inscriptions from Arabic Poetry. He describes the poems as the medium between the visible movement of his painting and the cultural space, where these lines were created.

With many publications and over 70 solo and group exhibitions worldwide his works have been acquired by both public and and private collectors in the Middle East, Europe, USA and the Far East.

Dar Al Funoon is located in Al-Watiah, Behbehani Compound, House No.28. For more information please call 2243 3138 or log onto www.daralfunoon-kw.com AL M. GALLERY

Artist: Atfal Ahdath - Vartan Avakian, Hatem

Imam and Raed Yassin Title of Exhibition: Take me to this place: I want to do

the memories.

Dates and Timing: 13th - 29th March 2012 Opening : 13th March 2012, 7- 9pm 24

Artist: Mohammed Abou El Naga Date: 5th - 16th March, 2012 Mohammed Abou El Naga is a multidisciplinary visual artist, art professor, curator and developer.

Throughout his colorful career, he created award winning art projects, fulfilled his responsibility towards his community and brought up new generation of young artists with his teaching, workshop and his multitude of practices.

Born in the Egyptian city of Tanta, Abou El Naga graduated with honor in 1983 from the Faculty of

Artist:

Shurooq AminExhibition

Title of Exhibition: It’s a Man’s World Dates and Timing: Opening on March 5, 2012 at 7-8pm. Exhibition ongoing until 1st of April, 2012.

Shurooq Amin an artist who needs no introduction, as in past few years she has established herself as the absolute leader of Kuwaiti art vanguard. In her previous show Society Girlz she unveiled scenes from a much-hidden aspect of society; the strength of which resonated quite strongly with the public. It’s a Man’s World explores many issues of society previously untouchable and undiscussable for their moral and social integrity - its focus is the Man, his habits, his lifestyle and his dreams.

Director – Architect Hamid A. M. Qabazard Director of Photography & Editor – Abdullah Awadh CAP Kuwait is a nonprofit venture, supported by an extensive private collection of modern and contemporary artwork. The Contemporary Art Platform is located in Industrial Shuwaikh Block 2, St. 28, Life Center, top floor (Across from the Shuwaikh Immigration Dept). For more information email info@capkuwait.com or call 2492 5637.

GALLERY TILAL

Al M. Gallery is located in Kuwait City, Salhia Complex, Mezanine 2, Gate 4, Place 16. For more information, log onto www.al-m-gallery.com or call 2299 6447.

Working Hours: Sunday – Thursday 10 am-3 pm and 5pm -9 pm. Saturday by appointment only.

Title of Exhibition: Tagreed H. Albagshi Date: 4th - 15th March 2012 In the words of Dr. Mohammed Fadhl, Saudi artist Tagreed al-Bagshi is one of the few artists who has made her way into the world of painting “with quiet confidence and unassuming determination.”

Standing out among her contemporaries, al-Bagshi depicts women beyond stereotype. With her vividly coloured backdrops and her abstracted portraits of women, al-Bagshi has won multiple awards and exhibited across the Gulf and the Arab world, Far East Asia, and Europe. Also a writer and art education supervisor, al-Bagshi has had works exhibited in the UAE 2010 Art Biennale, and also has exhibited at the Musée du Montparnasse in Paris.

CONTEMPORARY ART PLATFORM KUWAIT (CAP KUWAIT)

Title of Exhibition: Aram Chaled Date: 25 March – 5 April 2012

Let There Be Night - Film Screening Date: Wednesday, 14 March 2011 Time: 7pm Let There Be Night is a 15-minute documentary which narrates the change in Kuwaiti architecture following the discovery of oil and the consequential construction boom of the 1940’s - 70’s. The documentary also tackles the issue of “architectural eyesores”, which the country has been witnessing from the 90’s to date.

The documentary presents footage of Kuwait taken

by Qabazard’s late father. Let There Be Night, was produced and presented in October 2010 for NUQAT Foundation’s first conference “Visual Pollution in the Arab World”.

The screening at the Contemporary Art Platform is a part of the ongoing program showcasing Jafar Islah and his peers. Tours of the exhibition will be available before and after the Let There Be Night showing.

Old Footage of Kuwait (1948 - 1978) – by the late Mohammed Hussain Qabazard.

Gallery Tilal is located in Shuwaikh, Jahra Road, Tilal Complex, M3-M4. For more information please call: 222 56101 or email gallerygallery@hotmail.com.

You can also check out their facebook page.

“Light is the secret, the secret of life,” says Khalid al-Riz, otherwise known as Aram. It is also the secret of color, of passion, of darkness, as it is also his own secret, whereby he “disappears entirely in light.”

At the age of forty, Khalid al-Riz discovered that he truly loved himself. That discovery alone prompted him to realize that, up until that moment, he had forgotten to emerge from the stage of childhood; he had forgotten to grow up. In this period of discovery and understanding, moving between stages, al-Riz discovered what it meant to play with paint, and in experimenting with canvas, he explains that he found he meaning, the essence of light, the light that had drawn him in from the start, which he had longed to penetrate. In discovering what he describes simply as light, he distinguished between two approaches to painting, which is to depict simply what is in his mind that he intends to represent, and to take down, in the form of a visual text, what is in his soul, his convictions, and his philosophy. It is, to Aram, the vital but delicate line between “one who is simply rich, and wealth itself.”

Written & Narrated – by Architect Abdullah M. H. Qabazard 25

truth or dare

B AND D KUWAIT Nancy D’Souza: Genetically Modified Food Blogger By bazaar staff stream of terrific meals. My sister loves international cuisine as well, which also helped me in giving me an appetite for food blogging.”

Besides being a fun, go-to food guide, filled with yummy tips and reviews to satisfy every craving, Nancy sees a great opportunity with B and D, to introduce herself to other kinds of cuisines, she adds, “I never thought I would enjoy Thai food, now I love it. I'm very open to becoming an expert at tasting different cuisines. I love traveling and exploring foods. Amongst my friends, I introduced them to Japanese, Thai and even Middle Eastern cuisine.

Now if I can only make a living out of traveling and eating, then I’m pretty much set!”

As she dreams about that perfect life plan, Nancy is planning on expanding the blog, revitalizing its layout, changing its current domain to a dot com address, and adding more elements to further enhance the past time national hobby of ‘fooding’ in Kuwait.

How would your mother describe you in one word?

Outrageous.

How would you describe your mother in one word?

Strong.

Nancy D'Souza rightfully claims that she was born to be a food blogger; she doesn't gain weight, is immune to food poisoning, and has an eager palette ready to consume each and every kind of cuisine. As the co-founder of the fun, and absolutely resourceful food blog, B and D Kuwait (www.bndq8.blogspot.com), we came about Nancy's food haven while working on our annual dining guide.

Starting the blog with her friend “B”, Lester Pereira, her character is represented by “D”, the foodfriendly duo embarked on endless food trips, writing thorough reviews, and posting recommended dishes for readers. She comments, “We used to go out and eat, and eat, and eat some more. From our early start, I was fascinated by other food bloggers and their ability to portray their opinions and critiques so eloquently online.”

Born to a Sri Lankan mother, who happens to be a head Chef at a prominent hotel in Kuwait, and Goan Father, Nancy claims that loving food is nothing more than a genetic disposition that runs in her family. She jokes, “Come on, I’m born to do this!

My dad is a terrific cook as well, and that has a lot to do with the power of food in our household. A Sri Lankan mom and Indian father make for a continued 26

What is the most insane question you’ve ever been asked?

Do you spend all your money on food? (Yes off course, I pay my bills with food not money..arrgh!!)

Is it true that sausages are made out of minced bones?

Would you like to have some tortoise meat? (What the hell?).

What is the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?

Getting up around 3:30am in a strange town, totally hungry, finding out that my snacks had run out and getting out of the hotel (not knowing my way around) to find a restaurant or a grocery store.

love without power is sentimental and anemic” "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr What animal best describes the kind of partner you’d be interested in?

The intelligence, wisdom, power of breath, sound, love, joy and harmony of a Dolphin and the power, strength, and respect of a Lion (weird combination and rare to find. Right?).

What do you miss about your childhood?

Being carefree with no responsibilities.

If you could change your name, what would you change it to?

Even if I could, I would not since I love my name way too much to change it.

How would you describe your handshake in one word?

Confident/Firm.

What is the toughest part of your character?

I do not trust people that easily.

Who is your favorite historical figure?

For as long as I could remember, I have been fascinated

by Princess Diana as she was an exceptionally beautiful and gifted human being. I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others. Campaigns on AIDS, leprosy and the International ban on the use of landmines are some of her many humanitarian works. I still remember reading this, “HIV does not make people dangerous to know. You can shake their hands and give them a hug, heaven knows they need it."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: I wish that a little of him lived in all of us, then the world could be a better place.

What in the world do you least desire?

Violence and Ignorance.

What word in the English or Arabic language do you wish you had invented?

“Exactly” or “My life” I use them way too much.

What do you think is lacking in the world, which would make the world a better place?

Understanding and Acceptance.

Where would you like to live? / What is your dream retirement location?

I love countries with historical importance, for now it’s either Vienna or Florence...

Why do you think most girls/guys like you?

Can’t speak for others.

What is the first famous quote that comes to your mind?

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and

Finish this sentence: “Happiness is a thing called…”

FOOOOD (most of you must have guessed it already).

For more information, please visit: www.bndq8.blogspot.com.

we care

GOODWILLCALENDAR.ORG Doing good made easy By bazaar staff

If, like me, you’ve been thinking how it would feel good to volunteer some time and effort towards a good cause but don’t really know where to look, then Good Will Calendar is for you. From beach clean-ups and conservation dives to charity marathons and bake sales, goodwillcalendar.org is the place that brings worthwhile causes and people together.

The Good Will Calendar is the brainchild of Fajer Qasem, who noticed a lot of people doing great things around Kuwait but no real coordination.

“There’s such a feeling of good will, people really want to do something, they just don’t know where to direct their energies, they don’t know what they can do,” she tells me. So the main purpose of the calendar is to expose these things to people, but it works both ways, and so is a great way for causes to raise awareness and gain volunteers. The calendar should also allow the various organizations to coordinate their efforts and collaborate, Fajer lays this out simply; “Oh this guy’s planting trees, and there’s another group over there planting trees, so by combining their efforts and working together 28

they would produce a lot more, and be a lot more effective.” She sees it as a way we can all pull together in the same direction, making it easier for everyone.

No such hub currently exists in Kuwait to bring together all this kind of information, so the website will also serve as a directory that lists all the NGOs in Kuwait.

It will also highlight for profit companies that have Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs.

The idea came to Fajer about a year ago and she first approached a web design company to build a website to get the calendar up and running.

Unfortunately six months later she was out of pocket and far from being online, so she decided to go it alone. Armed with a single laptop and an internet connection she learned how to do it herself and within six months was online. This means she now has full aesthetic and functional control of the site, can work on it anytime, anywhere and keep costs to a minimum. That’s how to manage resources and reduce wasted effort and time!

When the calendar went live Fajer started noticing patterns of activity. There were bursts of events around November and December, and surrounding

Earth Day in April – events clustered around typical “good will” times of year. So she started to explore ways to keep people informed and interested all year round; this is how the Green Habits Campaign was born. Released through the website, “it’s a tip, a method of execution and shocking statistic that helps to wake people up,” Fajer tells me. She wants to raise awareness of environmental issues in Kuwait such as water wastage. Did you know that if you leave the tap running when you brush your teeth you waste between eight and ten liters of water?

February’s Green Habit addresses this; entitled ‘1Cuppa’, it encourages instead, filling a cup with water before you brush and then using only the water in the cup to brush your teeth with. The Green Habits are delivered via email as a newsletter and all the information is available on the website.

At the moment the goodwillcalendar.org is a part-time project for Fajer but her day job keeps her in the loop anyway - she works as a consultant for CSR strategies. She says, “I help companies create an infrastructure where they can do something good for their surroundings, their environment, their community, in a sustainable way.” This apparently is easy to do as most large companies have an allocated budget specifically for CSR projects. To Fajer, the motivation behind these programs – some say they are merely PR stunts – is not as important as the outcome. She believes corporate image and environmental improvement can go hand in hand and young people expect it: according to her website, sixty-four per cent of youths believe corporations cannot just give money; they must integrate good causes into business practices.

At the moment Fajer is doing most of the leg work, going out and actively finding the programs, but she hopes to become the first person people contact when looking for volunteers. She sees a hunger in people, especially the youth, here in Kuwait and doesn’t want to see this desire to do good go to waste.

So if you’re looking to help, keep informed or are looking for volunteers for a good cause then goodwillcalendar.org is your one-stop shop for all things environmental and humanitarian.

Log on to www.goodwillcalendar.org to view the calendar, sign up for the Green Habits Campaign newsletter, or if you have an event you’d like included.

ZEE BRGR Contemporary Gourmet at its finest By bazaar staff

As devout foodies, our gastronomic palates are trained to recognize culinary vision. When considering Zee Brgr, Kuwait’s latest contemporary concept and the brainchild of Maki founder Mr. 30

Mohamad Zeitoun, our curiosities were extremely piqued; how would the visionary of this renowned Japanese concept fare in the world of burgers and more? Eager to find out, we decided to meet with

Mr. Zeitoun at his latest concept located at the Palms Hotel in the Al Bida’a area.

The setting at Zee Brgr is transient, where the lounge-like venue easily emanates with modern relaxing charm during the day, only to be transformed into a lively, sociable hub by night. The sleek industrial design comes alive with vibrant colors elegantly decorating the indoor seating area, as well as highlighting the chic outdoor patio. Upon our arrival, we settled for the outdoor area, as the weather was beautiful, and the seats looked exceptionally inviting. Mr. Zeitoun was happy to announce that more items were added to the menu, which, to our surprise, we couldn’t find anywhere on the table. Mere seconds later, our friendly waiter came to our table grasping two iPads in his hands. He smiles and hands us the iPads, “Your menus ladies.” Creating a social application for the menu reflected Mr. Zeitoun’s desire to ‘stay with the times’, and offer customers the chance to have some fun when ordering their food, He adds, “It’s so much fun flipping through the images, we can include more items, bigger and better quality images, and we’re saving paper in the process.”

Deciding on a mixture of signature and new appetizers, we anxiously awaited the infamous ZEE Salad, a mixture of fresh herbs and vegetables with raspberry and peanut butter vinaigrette and the signature crispy mix. Mr. Zeitoun suggested we also try the Buffalo Chicken Wings, as well as the Chili Ebi Cone, whimsical dessert-like, yet curry-spiced cones concocted with a Tiger shrimp mixture and special avocado salsa. As we waited for our appetizers, Mr. Zeitoun further explained the Zee Brgr vision, “When we started with Maki, people thought we were crazy, as our sushi and Maki creations definitely deviated from the traditional. Now, Maki is a dining sensation because we offered gourmet Japanese food with a unique and creative twist. When we thought of a burger concept, we wished to apply the same fusion twist we did with Maki. Zee Brgr is more than just burgers, it is the culmination of gourmet creations that includes burgers, Maki specialties, and moreover, worldly recipes.” True to his words, the flavors from our appetizers transformed us to different places. The Zee Salad could only be described as a Lebanese Fatoush gone wild, the texture of the grilled veggies, crispy mix perfectly accompanied the tangy dressing, while the Chili Ebi Cones provided the right dose of Mexican flair, and the spiced wings effectively set the mood for the burger feast that ensued.

When considering Mr. Zeitoun’s burger vision, a worldly experience is concise, with internationallyinspired creations like the Italian style Tratufo burger, with succulent, saucy mushrooms, fresh basil, and parmesan crisp, and the juicy locall- inspired Essa burger drizzling with special garlic mayo sauce, topped with mozzarella cheese, caramelized onion & mushroom sauce, served on a moist, mouthwatering potato bun. For French food

lovers, the Fois Gras burger, served on a Brioche bread will surely please, and the signature Zee Brgr, a home-made beef patty with Zeebrgr sauce, is topped with tempura onion rings, grilled cherry tomato and American cheese, all tucked nicely into a brioche bun. Have your taste of the latter, and we guarantee instant Zee Brgr addiction.

A burger experience is most certainly never complete without fries. Also crossing all geographical boundaries, the fries at Zee Brgr are refreshingly different. From our tasting of the French Fries with Truffles, our palates are taken to new heights. The thicker cut potatoes, goldenfried to perfection, are seasoned with sea salt, truffle oil and Parmesan cheese, topped with roasted aromatic fresh herbs and Moroccan truffles. For the complete Zee experience, we also tried the American inspired Zee Fries, marinated in a spicy sauce, topped with a beef mixture with spicy tomato jam and mushroom sauce and melted cheddar cheese. To our surprise, the beef used with the Zee fries is surprisingly light and we could easily relate it to the delicious meat used in the homemade patties.

Because we like to try a bit of everything, we were also served with mini Zee Brgrs to try the different toppings, and we were extremely pleased to find out that some star dishes from the Japanese Maki are served here, as well. These include the juicy and infamous Essa Maki, the signature Maki Maki, the Crispy Salad, and the Salmon Avocado salad.

After the burger indulgence, we are convinced that we were done with our Zee Brgr experience, yet Mr. Zeitoun excitedly interjected, “You MUST try our steak, you can never leave Zee Brgr without trying the Zee Steak.” Before we could briefly argue, a platter of 180

grams of fillet excellence arrived at our table, with two sauces on the side, a creamy chive sauce, and mushroom sauce. Cooked medium well, the beef is extremely light and tender, and before we knew it, we were scraping the sauce off the plate with our leftover fries.

We can always confidently assert that dessert is, by far, the one part of a meal that we could never argue against, especially with Mr. Zeitoun. His suggestions, yet again, are faultless. We delved into his first recommendation of Holy Cannoli, a simple Cannoli roll stuffed with Mascarpone and Ricotta cheese that triggers a sinfully delicious reaction. It is always surprising to try a dish expecting a certain flavor, only to be delivered with a taste that completely surpasses the expectations. This statement absolutely applies to the Yuzu Crème Brule, aromatically flavored with Yuzu, a Japanese delicacy prepared from the rind of the rare Yuzu citrus fruit. One might expect the mix between cream and citrus to be jarring, yet the opposite holds true, it was truly delightful.

Saving the ultimate indulgence for last, we completely devoured the Light Orange Chocolate Brownie, which is also topped with Yuzu Crème Brule vanilla ice cream.

At Zee Brgr, our experience was different, in the sense that we truly entered a culinary world that combines original, non-traditional and international recipes with inimitable flair. Amazing service is delivered with a smile, and the atmosphere comes alive with the excitement incited by the flavorful dishes sampled.

Zee Brgr is located at The Palms Beach Hotel & Spa, Al Taawon St in Al Bida’a. For more information, please call 2561 2374, or visit www.zeebrgr.com. Connect with Zee Brgr on facebook by visiting www.facebook.com/zeebrgr and twitter, www.twitter.com/Zeebrgr.

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DESTINATION HAUTE Haute ID By bazaar staff

The Start With a naturally emanating fashion sense that oozes personal style and elegance, it is quite obvious that Marwa Morsi loved fashion since a young age.

The polymath also loves to write, research, and share her views. She’s that friend of yours who goes on Tripadvisor.com to write her travel reviews, the patient researcher and experienced customer. She states, “I spend hours on end web-surfing, reading magazines, blogs, looking up products, trends, and basically whatever happens to catch my attention.

When I’m interested in anything, I will conduct a fullfledged research mission to find the best offering on the product/service I want in terms of price.”

Over time, and definitely with the expected experience gained from trial and error, Marwa became the go-to gal for all things fashionable. Her friends would always rely on her for advice on fashion, travel, beauty and diet. Marwa states, “After a suggestion from my sister to catalogue all of my thoughts on fashion, style, beauty and lifestyle on a blog, I really liked the idea because it would allow me to combine all of my passions about fashion and beauty along with writing and research.” Taking almost a year to build up her courage to start blogging, Marwa took the time to organize herself, managing her time between work, and her social life, yet that didn’t help with the fear factor of putting her personal views out there in the blogsphere. However, once she did gather her wits and courage to start, Haute ID became her ultimate creative outlet, allowing her to reach an unlimited number of people with simply one click. She exclaims, “My ultimate satisfaction with blogging comes from 32

knowing that I was able to help others in some small way. I love it when I get the feedback from my readers about a post that they found helpful or useful in one way or another.”

The Haute Effect Haute ID isn’t simply about presenting fashion news and trends as they appear on the web, but looks to offer practical solutions to problems women face on a day to day basis. An age old dilemma many women share is finding that magically perfect pair of jeans to flatter their figure, and Marwa effectively endeavored to find the best pairs after compiling a list of over 100 styles, visiting each and every store to try them on herself in the process. Afterwards, she wrote the hit review on the best fitting jeans based on her opinion and experience. This is reflective of her nature at problem solving, as she works as a banker by day, “When I have any dilemma of sorts when it comes to style and beauty, I research and experiment until I find the best solutions, then I write about it.” One might be quick to quip that there are many sources on the internet for women to rely on, yet what clearly differentiates Haute ID is Marwa’s desire to personalize her post, covering only what she personally tests and conveying her message in an honest, genuine tone that easily emulates a quick gossip session between the average group of girlfriends.

Haute Highlights A one-stop online destination for everything related to fashion, style, shopping, beauty, and lifestyle. Based on Marwa’s empathetic understanding of the predicaments that beauty- and style-seeking women face daily, combined with the hectic tempo of

our modern lifestyles that bombard busy women with endless information about endless product offerings, Marwa’s main aim with Haute ID is to diarize her style journey in the hopes of simplifying things for her readers by providing the right short cuts.

Readers are presented with the latest style trends, beauty tips, product reviews, online sales and deals, health and diet tips, based on Marwa’s well-researched experience. Although Haute ID may cover highend brands, Marwa still caters to women on various budgets, Marwa states, “If it’s stylish and trendy, then you’ll find it on Haute ID, regardless of its price tag and label. At the end of the day, we all love getting our favorite brands (high end or not) for less, so I also provide shopping deals that achieve that fine balance of fashionably financial chic!”

When looking to the future, Marwa believes that she is still getting her feet wet at blogging, yet the humble fashionista has some exciting projects under her belt. She adds, “I just hope that Haute ID will remain interesting to my readers and followers in the long run, as I hope to build credibility. In this very moment, I’m so happy that I am fulfilling my passions, as Haute ID is now my favorite hobby, it’s my baby.

Get your Haute Style advice by logging on to www.hauteid.com.

COMEDY NIGHT AT LIVE THEATRE Laughing the night away with Indian stand-up Nitin Mirani at Kuwait’s first Comedy Club By bazaar staff

When you think about great comedy clubs, places where you can go and see stand-up comics waxing funny about everything from mother-in-laws to mixed heritage, you wouldn’t imagine anywhere in Kuwait being on the list. Well, cousins Jasem and Khalid Al Shaheen want to change that.

Like all great places, Live Theatre is tucked away in a place nobody would expect to find it. So when you discover it, you feel like part of an exclusive club, privy to something nobody else knows about – and there’s nothing cooler than that. The concept behind Live Theatre as explained to me by Jasem is “A place where people can be entertained away from their homes,” away from their TVs, away from their laptops, iPads, and all the other distractions that surround us every day - something that can be hard to find in the Kuwait of today. But most of all, they want it to be a place where you can laugh.

And that’s precisely what I did on my visit to the club. The show, named Komic Sutra Kuwait, was brought over from Dubai where Komic Sutra and its founder and headliner Nitin Mirani are based. He also brought Egyptian comedienne Lamya Tawfik with him to bring a woman’s perspective to the proceedings.

I arrived at the Discovery Mall not really believing I would find a comedy club within this kids’ retail heaven but sure enough, tucked away in a corner of the basement, there it was. Stepping up to the red brick façade, featuring an iconic neon light - that could only be cooler if it flickered occasionally – I was more than curious to discover what was awaiting me inside. I wasn’t disappointed.

They’ve put some serious thought and effort into 34

putting this place together. This isn’t just a room with a stage; it’s a full-fledged state-of-the-art theatre featuring a full light rig, HD projector and (very) big screen, and a sound system that could make some nightclubs blush.

All this technology is wrapped up in a cool yet cosy twohundred seat theater that feels enough like your living room to relax, but is decked-out coolly enough so you know that you’re really out for the night. We settled into one of the funky white sofas that make up the seating at Live Theatre - no flip-down-minimum-legroom-seating nonsense here - and appreciated the stepped down design of the seating, affording us a clear line of sight of the stage below. This great view is the same from all the seats in the house. Putting audience comfort first was one of the main priorities for the founders, “we want this to be a place where people feel special; we want to offer them a first-class experience in this first-of-its-kind venue in Kuwait.” But the cousins did enough research to know that the performer should also feel at ease when on stage. For this reason all the food served at Live Theatre is finger food to avoid the clang of cutlery taking away from the funny.

And nobody wants the comic turning their razor sharp wit on them for interrupting the routine by introducing fork to plate! They really do look out for everybody here.

The cousins’ original plan was to open a restaurant but when they really thought about it, they wanted to start something that didn’t already exist in Kuwait. They wanted to bring a new form of entertainment to the country and they wanted to make people happy. Drawing on inspiration from the comedy club institutions of the US and the UK, they set out to design the Live Theatre to the very highest of standards. The red brick design from the entrance continues inside wrapping around the auditorium and framing the ample stage beautifully.

The performers have plenty of room up there to flex their funny muscles, and can wander freely to all sections of the stage if they fancy a little bit of audience participation.

Bahraini stand up Imran Al Aradi was billed to perform but unfortunately couldn’t make it, but this gave up-and-coming Kuwaiti funny man Khalid Ahmed Yahya – Live Theatre’s in-house MC - a chance to get on stage and try out his material as he filled in (look out for his upcoming shows). Lamya got some big laughs, especially from the women, but it was Nitin Mirani who really

brought the funny. He talked about everything from the reaction to his name in Arabic-speaking countries (funny apparently…) to his dad being on Facebook and having only two friends -Nitin and his brother. He has the easy manner of a professional stand-up; delivering his routine like a friend telling a story, and his confidence in the material is evident when he is on stage. I was most impressed at his ability to deliver a clean performance without sacrificing humour - something not all comics are capable of.

Alongside the comedy nights, the venue is also available for corporate or private hire for four hundred and fifty Dinars per day and is the only commercial theatre in Kuwait, making it a truly unique location. With its fully equipped audio/visual set-up, comfortable seating and trendy décor it can cater to any need. Utilizing on their location they are also offering kid-friendly shows during the daytime such as Sponge Bob shows, so look out for something different for the kids, too.

I laughed harder than I have done in a long time and thoroughly enjoyed a fresh take on entertainment in Kuwait. Live Theatre is a great venue and the comedy nights are definitely worth checking out if you’ve been longing for a great night out and something a little different.

The Live Theatre is located in the Discovery Mall.

Follow them on Twitter @q8ComedyClub and find them at www.facebook.com/Kuwait.live.theatre.

For more information and booking call 50500019.

LABEL M/GIRL

up close and personal

'PIECES BY FARAH' Farah Al-Humaidhi By bazaar staff

Determination, reinforced by an endless pool of creative energy, meets functional design with Pieces by Farah. The emotional designs, visually organic, yet functional at heart, raise the age old saying of ‘less is more’; as interior designer and business owner Farah Al-Humaidhi premiered into the furniture design arena with bespoke designs and understated confidence, she makes her debut with inimitable elegance. Meeting the face behind this exciting brand truly revitalizes the creative mind, as Farah Al-Humaidhi’s design space is energizing yet soothing. As we settled in her little haven she calls her office, filled with design prototypes and rushed production managers, we were amazed at how such a young woman managed between operating her core design and construction firm, and Pieces by Farah.

When envisioning Pieces By Farah, Al-Humaidhi wished to create a functional mix of pieces that allowed the client to customize each piece to their own taste using a variety of color and textural palettes.

One might beg to differ with her surprising strategy, as most furniture designers utilize a one-design approach to commercially make an entrance into the market, yet Al-Humaidhi’s admiration and great devotion to detail proves otherwise. After completing her bachelor’s degree in interior art from the American University of Sharjah, she bravely ventured into the market and launched her design and construction firm, giving way for a breadth of experience in understanding her 36

customers and what the market requires. She states, “Although I've always worked on my own in terms of managing an interior design and construction firm since 2004, Pieces by Farah, alone, was scary as this reflects my own personal opinion and work rather than working on briefed projects and customers’ tastes.” Al-Humaidhi believes that starting her own furniture line is much more daunting than managing a full-fledged business, a decision she viewed as quite a natural progression upon graduation, she adds, “When I graduated in 2004, the business conditions in Kuwait were easier, as the economy was thriving, construction was booming, therefore my line of work was in demand and customers came frequently and willingly. Interior design is a line of work, which is considered a luxury service requested by many clients, and was wildly demanded at the time. Based on my existing family’s business in property construction, I had solid grounds to start and build my portfolio. I didn’t feel like it was a decision I had to make, it was rather made by nature.

Whereas Pieces by Farah was a decision I solely had to make from start to finish.”

“Unveiling one’s true vision is difficult,” Al-Humaidhi believes, as she went on to describe that her journey with Pieces by Farah started by simply sketching out her ideas over a long period of time, “In the back of my head, I always wanted to produce my own line, my mini gallery, a creative outlet for my design reflections which people could equally enjoy as much as I do.”

True to her determination, she embarked on this long

journey using the smallest of steps, only to arrive as an artist, designer, innovator, and business owner. She humbly comments, “Hey, I was really scared, and the first step was the hardest. I always talked about it but never had the guts to actually do it. I was very scared, from people's reactions, and the depression that could result from rejection. I didn’t want my pursuit to accomplish my vision to affect my personal life or my other line of business.”

Considering all things said and done, the feedback to Pieces By Farah was, and continues, to grow sensationally. We wished to spend more time in her premises to find out about a well-kept secret recipe for success, and she laughingly states, “It’s not magic, you put a plan for yourself, and baby steps to follow. At one point last year, I noticed I had accumulated a wealth of sketches viable to create a premier collection; I went on to participate with those at an exhibition last year. That alone was based on a plan I had for myself; transforming these sketches into reality was a lengthy process.”

In order for her to arrive at a final debut collection, Al-Humaidhi and her team of expert production assistants had to stretch their imagination and design skills to new levels. Each and every piece was fine-tuned, whereby she would execute at least four prototypes for every design. When examining the Floating Piece, a table featuring hardened lace and sleek wooden edges, Al-Humaidhi’s design might look simplistic, yet the design was technically one of the most challenging ideas she had to work with.

Hardening fabric is extremely difficult. The end result, however, with Pieces By Farah, is outstanding.

Feminine, yet functional, edgy treated fabric makes for vases, serving plates, lamp shades, bowls, or even stand alone display pieces that are stirringly unique.

She states, “I wanted feminine, light, yet functional; if it's a vase made out of fabric, it needs to be hard, yet flexible and waterproof. Once we were able to finetune that technique, the possibilities were endless.”

Al-Humaidhi proudly glances at the red lace vase sitting atop her office desk, and continues, “Once we start fine-tuning the process, I am there to monitor the work every step of the way to ensure that the design element remains intact while functionality, budgeting goals, as well as the timeliness of each piece's production remains feasible.”

A student of design and architecture, the training of prioritizing functionality is ingrained in Al-Humaidhi’s mind with every piece she designs.

She adds, "Every line has a purpose, this tool of understanding functionality makes for a piece a customer would like to own.” The Floating Piece, for instance, is very dear to her heart, yet including

THE ROSE ON TABLE PIECE

THE SHY PIECE

THE INTERLOCKED PIECE

THE EMBRACED BOWL PIECE

THE ONE STRIPE PIECE

functionality was equally integral in attaining the desired femininity she wished to portray through its design. Every piece is new, functional, innovative, and dear to the visionary’s heart, “The first time I thought of using fabric and realized my goal with it, the lamp shades and vases followed. The Interlocked Piece, for instance, was a product of many customers voicing their desire to have a coffee table that is visual yet functional. We always see coffee tables that are huge in size, with accompanying nesting pieces. With one piece that is made up of smaller compartments, the Interlocked Piece opens up into sleek nesting pieces.”

These are all but only some of the stories Al-Humaidhi has when describing her work, and she believes that the Floating Piece represents her the most, she adds, “The combination of the hard wood with the sensual femininity of the treated fabric, that juxtaposition of emotions, toughness and gentleness, is me. Like me, this is an emotionally charged piece, which reflects my attachment to work in general. My business is my home and my family, I’m attached to everything that happens here.”

Looking for inspiration varies from one artist to the other, and Al-Humaidhi stresses that role models and inspiration vary with the development of any given person according to their personal growth. At a younger age, she was a student of many schools of design, admiring the beauty and individual styles of the works of many. Nowadays, she looks for budding, new designers who design for the sake of creating

art rather than chasing after commercial prospects.

“Unknown designers are mostly passionately driven.

The change of your preference is a reflection of growth.

As designers, we are continuously changing in terms of preference. I am purely inspired by the passion behind any kind of design.” This is purely reflected in her collection of different pieces, Al-Humaidhi is neither modern nor simply classical, yet her work is rather a combination of different emotions through the employment of contrasting materials, evoking contrasting emotions.

Balancing between the creative efforts brought forward by Pieces By Farah, and the interior art and construction services, Al-Humaidhi claims is a product of time management and nurturing a team to work together efficiently. Since the start of her business, she believes that without having that work ethic, Pieces By Farah wouldn’t have materialized as a valued, viable addition to her existing company.

Utilizing her business sense, she has organized her time so that Pieces By Farah does not interfere with the other services offered at her firm, Al-Humaidhi states, “My collection is seasonal in every sense of the word. Launching two collections every year, I’m able to split my time overseeing each order in terms of its execution, following up with the customer, and ensuring its appropriate delivery. At the same time, this allows me to focus on my company. Whenever I’m free, I design items and leave them on the side, while working on new ideas with my carpenter. I ensure that I am never in a hurry, so that I allow my designs to take their course, fine-tuning and perfecting a final piece.”

What does Al-Humaidhi envision for Pieces by Farah? She replies, “To be honest, I never imagined I would garner this kind of praise for my debut collection. I'm enjoying this phase so much; it was like a dry patch of land, then it became nourished.

Before Pieces By Farah, running my business felt heavy on my heart. Yet when I started this new journey, I felt like I had a purpose once again.” Referring to the stringent market conditions presented by the recent economic crisis, Al-Humaidhi sought refuge in her creations, taking those ‘baby steps’ one at a time.

Perhaps, Al-Humaidhi’s work would be showcased internationally; she recounts a recent visit to the renowned Maison D’Objet in Paris. “I went to see the possibility of what I can do. Perhaps people will get to know the name and get used to the brand.

In Kuwait, my office is my show room for now. In essence, I want to stay true to ‘Pieces By Farah’, and my customers will always be able to order online.

Who knows, maybe we’ll resell at certain boutiques, concept stores, furniture stores.” continued on next page...

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THE TWO PUFF PIECE

THE NESTING-C PIECE

THE CONICAL VASE PIECE

THE NESTING-U PIECE

THE FLOATING PIECE

THE BUBBLE COFFEE PIECE

What is your greatest extravagance?

SHOES and traveling!

bazaar questionnaire: What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Knowing everything happens for a reason, a good one, and when we accept that truly, we can have perfect happiness because nothing can cause sadness anymore.

What is your greatest fear?

Heights and insects.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

My temper when I lose it, and my mood swings.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Deception.

Which living person do you most admire?

My parents.

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continued from previous page

Which words or phrases do you most overuse? ...‫ياهلل بسرعه‬ When were you happiest?

I’m the happiest when I’m fishing. The serenity I get in the middle of the sea is incomparable…I need it sometimes to just get things straight in my head.

Which talent would you most like to have?

I want to have a beautiful singing voice! Or, at least, sing without being shushed.

What would you consider your greatest achievement?

My career! My companies are my babies… and my latest Pieces By Farah.

Where would you most like to live?

I would want to live on an island… and run a snorkeling/ diving business!

For more information, please visit www.piecesbyfarah.com.

CASA MAROC Preserving the world of Moroccan crafts By bazaar staff

The ancient Moroccan arts and crafts scene flourishes in Kuwait at Casa Maroc, where this tiny boutique has captured our hearts and minds to take us to a faraway land and time, evocative of the warm, artful and gracious Moroccan hospitality. One can easily relive the charm of Marrakesh’s esoteric bazaars at Casa Maroc, and recreate the experience within the comforts of their own homes with rare, one-of-a-kind pieces.

As we arrived at this hidden gem at the Avenues to meet with the lovely owner and founder, Mrs. Fadwa Zeiton, to learn a thing or two about this forgotten art, we’re captured by every little detail inside this escape from the frenzied mall goers, crevices in the walls, the hanging wooden engravings, immaculately polished silver tables, contrasting colors; all of these details are the product of Fadwa’s passionate affinity for her home country’s traditional arts and crafts culture.

Originally an interior decorator, Fadwa’s business of selling Moroccan hand-crafted items, as well as furniture and antique items, started by total coincidence. She states, “I was visiting my family in Morocco and had some extra cash on hand, so I ventured into the old souks and picked up some beautiful pieces for my home. Upon my return to Kuwait, the arrival of my friends to visit me left me with absolutely nothing, they bought all of the pieces! The week after, I was back in Morocco to hunt for more unique pieces.” From there, Fadwa went on to enter exhibitions, and then opened her first store in Salmiya. Sixteen years later, Fadwa’s hobby of collecting handcrafted pieces, including furniture, antiques, decorative items, and jewelry and fashion accessories, 40

resulted in her little nook at the bustling Avenues.

An avid collector of antiques as a hobby, Fadwa also advises that she doesn’t sell original antiques anymore, “Customers need to know that antiques are almost nonexistent nowadays, at least when pertaining to Moroccan designs.” Fadwa currently sells artisanal items that are originally handcrafted from start to finish, and antique replicas. She adds, “These replicas are made to look like antiques, and in the rare occasions antiques are found, these are extremely hard to come by and are very expensive.”

Bridging the gap between local customers and Moroccan artisans, Fadwa strives to continuously widen her collection. She explains, “With time, I came about local Moroccan designers, who specialize in hand made crafts, and with my luck, I managed to secure collections that are exclusive to my store.” Such designers include modern arabesque style pottery by Miriam Murabet, or the fantastically whimsical creations by French Orientalist Maryline Bottero, we immediately notice that these Aladdin-meets-Alice-in-Wonderland designs are eagerly sought out by Fadwa. She simply makes it look effortless, yet she begs to differ, “It took me a while to learn how to find these creative designers. With time, I’ve learned to attend showcases like Maison D’objet to find these modern, oriental-inspired styles. A designer will spend a lengthy amount of time on any given piece of pottery, as it goes through several stages. So many details go into these handmade pieces, such as tea sets, pots, trays, centerpieces, and frames. Why I personally love them? Styling these pieces is easy on the eye, as it would fit perfectly in either a modern or classical setting.”

Signature pieces also include the fascinating works

of artists Denis Morel, known for his orientalist threedimensional paintings, and Hind Benjilany, whose work is focused on beautiful pottery pieces and paintings.

Although focused on handmade crafts and pieces from Morocco, Fadwa also likes to source handmade abayat or traditional dresses from Lebanon. However, her affinity for her country is apparent in the nostalgic tone dominating her voice whenever she speaks of her Morocco, "I like to go back to Morocco, even though I know my current home is Kuwait, these regular visits somehow make me feel more connected to my country.

In a way, I am giving back to a culture that has been forgotten, to support this art form in any way I can. In a way, the Moroccan handcrafts are one of a kind, and also a dying business. From handcrafted leather, wood, fabric, silver, pottery, glass, jewelry, the Moroccan touch is something I’ve never seen. You see a poor man working on a piece for hours on end, and the outcome of his work appear as if it is of international caliber.”

Fadwa hopes that people's appreciation for crafts will grow; she wishes that people understood the true art of handmade crafts. On a personal note, she feels that her journey with Casa Maroc is one filled with passion, and that the fiscal aspect of the business is simply a plus.

“I know for sure that I will keep going back to Morocco, and I get that amazing high every time I walk down the street in any of its plentiful bazaars.”

Visit Casa Maroc at Phase I of the Avenues, near the IKEA flagship store.

For more information, please call 2259 7117 or visit www.casamaroc.com.

THE ART OF SLEEP Hotel Missoni’s Six Senses Spa hosts sleep therapist Dr. Christopher Herrera By bazaar staff

Once upon a time, sleep was a natural part of my routine, where there was little I needed to do to invite this form of mental and physical rest.

Today, however, this simple routine comes as a daunting nightly visitor, filled with restless twists and turns. My once-a-upon-time came before work and responsibility, and with responsibility came useless home remedies that didn’t fend off the sleepless nights I endured. As a solution, I was given the opportunity to participate in a series of workshops led by renowned sleep therapist Dr. Christopher Herrera, at the illustrious Six Senses Spa at the Hotel Missoni.

The Six Senses Spa went above and beyond in presenting several flexible packages to choose from, and I decided to go all out with the two-day Retreat package. A promise of relaxation and luxury, the package includes a day of ultimate pampering at the Six Senses Spa, a night’s stay at one of Hotel Missoni’s stylish rooms, as well as a following day filled with informative workshops with Dr. Christopher Herrera.

Upon my check-in into one of the hotel’s fabulous rooms, I was eagerly anticipating my evening of pampering ahead. I couldn’t wait to slip into a world of utter relaxation at Six Senses Spa, booking fifty minutes of pure quiet. Paying close attention to creating unforgettably soothing experiences, the 42

massage services at Six Senses are tailored to suit one’s needs. From the spa consultation, the most suitable massage techniques are decided to suit your needs. Given that I was looking to de-stress, I received a treatment tailored, specifically, to that purpose; a full body massage using different techniques, firm pressure applied just to my liking, where the knots in my back were sure to disappear. After my massage, I was mentally prepared to retire to my room, yet opted

to dine at the ever-so-glitzy Luna Lounge, which was a Missoni Mediterranean delight. Upon retiring to my luxurious room, the stunning view of the Arabian Gulf

soothed my stressed out mind. Accented in a palette of gold, turquoise and beige, it is truly difficult to not relax in such a setting; I simply plugged in my iPod into the docking station, and slipped away into a sound night’s sleep.

Waking up the next day wasn’t even a problem as I slept so soundly! I thought to myself, “So this is what sleep therapy is about? A little TLC!” Thinking that I had all the answers, I headed to the first workshop, “Basics of Sleep”, armed with complete confidence that I solved my never-ending dilemma of not sleeping well.

Entering the pleasantly lit workshop room, an intimately cozy atmosphere made for a comfortable setting. The chairs quickly filled up, with day attendees who came specifically for the workshops taking place, and others, like myself, who chose the two-day retreat. Dr. Herrera truly looks as if he could be anyone in the audience. A man in his thirties with short brown hair, a t-shirt and jeans, he simply shows up with an iPad and connects it to a big screen. Laced with enticing pictures, Dr. Herrera’s presentation begins on an attractive note, and then he shocks us with a picture of the way he used to look, about 25 kilos heavier than he is now. Essentially, this initial conversation built trust with us as attendees.

I could completely relate to his rapport, the basic science of human behavior, and accepting one’s self, our surroundings and the importance of choosing happiness inside. Like the choices we make to stay

happy, eating healthy and staying fit, sleep is no different. Dr. Herrera first introduced us to the basics; sleep is simply as important as diet and exercise, as it is a journey of information and query on your own life.

At this point, I couldn’t help but ponder these words as they rang true to my experience of the day before. I chose to make time to relax, eat well, and was mindful of the effects of that on my night’s sleep. I found that the whole day of workshops, Basics of Sleep, Commit to Sleep Smart, and Optimize Sleep Schedule, was extremely helpful in educating me about the importance of sleep and the notion of Sleep Hygiene; a set of tools used to promote sleep by helping the body wind down. Before I demand a good night’s sleep, I needed to understand what sleep is, how my body’s natural sleep and wake process works, and I finally understood why and when feeling tired indicates a good time to sleep, and when it indicates fatigue.

After learning to understand how the body clock works, we learned about how the things we eat and the activity we follow, both social and physical, or lack of activity all together, impact our internal body clocks. I spotted my issues immediately, too much caffeine throughout the day, and a lack of regular exercise. Oddly enough, there is still very little we can do to encourage our bodies to sleep. There simply isn’t a magical pill to sleep, as sleeping well and waking up feeling refreshed is as simple as promoting healthy behaviors and rest throughout the day and early evening such that you allow sleep to happen naturally.

Day Workshop on the 24th of March 10% Discount on dinner in any outlet of your choice.

10% Discount in any other treatment of your choice during your stay 9am: Workshop: “Basics of Sleep” 10am: Workshop: “Commit to Sleep Smart 10:45-11am: Tea break; complimentary juice or tea at Six Senses Spa 11am: Workshop: “Optimize Sleep Schedule” 12pm: Optional Lunch 15KD Complimentary Six Senses Spa massage (50min)to be taken from 2pm onwards Complimentary access to facilities*

9am-1pm KD125

Retreat Package Two Day Workshop 23 and 24 March

2 Days + 1 night in Missoni Room KD199 (Single) or KD329 (Double)

Double occupancy 10% Discount on dinner in any outlet of your choice.

10% Discount in any other treatment of your choice during your stay 23rd Arrival & Check in to hotel (3-5pm) Complimentary Six Senses Spa massage(50min) Complimentary ginger tea Complimentary access to Six Senses Spa facilities 24th 9am: Workshop: “Basics of Sleep” 10am: Workshop: “Commit to Sleep Smart 10:45-11am: Tea break; complimentary juice or tea at Six Senses Spa 11am: Workshop: “Optimize Sleep Schedule” 12pm: Optional Lunch 15KD Complimentary access to facilities* The night can be switched to the 24th.

Each additional night 79KD single or double with breakfast

Private consultations with Dr. Christopher Herrera are available upon request and he will be giving private consultation sessions for the following week after the workshop. Bookings may be arranged directly at the spa.

For more information, please contact Six Senses Spa at Hotel Missoni Kuwait, Tel: 2577 0077, or visit: www.sixsenses.com.

43

ONE YEAR LATER…

By Jaye Sonia

It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing for bazaar magazine for a full year, without missing a beat.

In fact, it’s sort of ironic. You see I almost – almost –missed the deadline for this issue. I won’t go into details, but it involved an interview and a very cool new MMORPG – and it fell through at the last minute. Worse, because I have been so busy working with a game design studio in New York (and setting up my very own game design company, as well), I found myself overloaded on far more fronts than I’m accustomed to. I kept meaning to sit down and write something – and something kept coming up.

Then it hit me as I was looking through old issues of bazaar. I was looking for a common thread, that one thing that would bring a full year’s work altogether on a single page. But it wasn’t a topic I had covered or a game I had reviewed. It was the entirety of the process; it was realizing and recognizing my own dedication. Even if it meant burning the midnight oil (and it did), I’d get this article written.

I suppose this is a bit of an opinion piece in that regard; a reflection of sorts. You see, when I first started writing for bazaar, I never intended for it to become what it is today. No, I just wanted to talk about gaming with the general public and this was the best place to do it.

Between the Kuwaitis and expats here, gaming is a big 44

deal. So, I thought, “heck, why not.”

But I had no intention of writing a column.

Then one of the staff members asked me if I wanted to follow up the March issue (of 2011) with another piece in April. So I did.

Then a little magic happened. I found that I actually enjoyed the less technical side of writing a column.

You see, unlike a lot of my other writing (which is very structured and requires a certain level of technical skill), writing for bazaar had an entirely different feel. I had one of those moments (the aforementioned “magic”) that I think all writers lust after – a moment best described

by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as flow. The article just came together. All of you writers out there nodding your head up and down – yup, we know.

Of course, the more I thought about it, the more the idea of a column started to grow on me, too. Besides, bazaar and I had already been out on two successful dates. Why not go for three? Plus, I knew I’d get a chance to talk about the games I loved (and suspected a few of you loved, as well). So I stepped up and continued to write. It didn’t matter if it was about my new iPhone, some apps I was exploring, or how I was trying to maximize my time so I could write, game, and still hit the gym. I’d make this happen. And, I have.

There’s a certain pride in following a thing through

– whether that thing is finishing Zelda: Skyward Sword, running 5k, or completing an article. When we finish the things we love, its even better. I suppose that’s the part of it, too. You see, while bazaar isn’t the first magazine I’ve ever written for (shssss… she doesn’t like to hear about my exes), it’s definitely the one I’ve enjoyed the most. It’s also the first place I’ve ever had a regular column. I think that’s pretty cool, too.

So, what do I have planned for the next year?

Well, I have a lot, actually. I’ve a few games I’ll be playing, including the Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning that I suspect I’ll definitely want to chat about. I’ll also be looking at some consoles – including the PS4 (which isn’t slated to release this year – but some of the stuff I’ve seen suggests we may be pleasantly surprised). In the fall, I’ll be snooping around another major con (cough, Gen Con 2012, cough) – and this time I’m bringing people from Kuwait with me! I predict a freakish high level of geek, that’s for sure!

Well, I’m once again coming to the end of another article. Thanks for letting me celebrate a little and especially for reading. If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be writing this article!

Here’s to all you bazaar readers out there; wherever you are!

KURT GEIGER 'Everything but the dress' By bazaar staff

Mayfair heritage is a promise of elegance, the sublime representation of British style.

Since first opening its doors on Bond Street in 1963,the Kurt Geiger brand has far surpassed its continental home in becoming Europe’s foremost label in designer footwear. Synonymous with the timeless flair that is Mayfair heritage, Kurt Geiger’s international acclaim has garnered the adoration of trendsetting fashionistas and style seekers alike. With 63 Kurt Geiger stores worldwide, a broad retail distribution in London’s shopping havens such as Harrods, House of Fraser Selfridges amongst many others, this bazaar editor could not be more grateful for Kurt Geiger’s Kuwait boutique at the Avenues. Signing a franchise agreement with Landmark Group in 2008, the1200 sq feet haven, constructed out of an urban-inspired, contemporary glass and mirror design reflects the Kurt Geiger’s ultra chic appeal, and now holds the latest collection, 'Everything But the Dress' for every fashionista in Kuwait.

Known for designing trend-setting footwear that celebrates all that is startlingly stunning in 46

the female form, the design perspective conveys the power of the fairer sex with footwear that simply champions the spindle heeled stiletto and the powerful punch of a platform. In 2011, The Jones Group Inc, in a buyout from Graphite Capital, acquired Kurt Geiger to go on and launch a comprehensive accessories collection, ‘Everything but the Dress’, and a return to the brand’s Mayfair heritage with a new boutique on London’s Grafton Street, W1. A top-to-toe collection of accessories in the style of Kurt Geiger’s signature urban chic glamour, ‘Everything but the Dress’ epitomizes the brand’s dedication towards creating a lifestyle brand that includes more than just shoes. Shoes, once the sole stars of Kurt Geiger, shine alongside an irresistible array of handbags, small leather goods, chic technology accessories, scarves, gloves, and jewelry and hair accessories, with attitude.

For Spring/Summer 2012 the Kurt Geiger fashionista discovers her fascination with a rhinestone-studded California.

Collections of crystal-coated stilettos and pin-up mules sit comfortably in a paradise where the rich and famous mingle and Marilyn Monroe and the late

Elizabeth Taylor play out their glamorous guises amidst sun-drenched cityscapes. Creative Director, Rebecca Farrar-Hockley, states, “‘Everything but the Dress’ transforms for spring with a kaleidoscope of Dolly Mixture shades, whilst accents of scarlet and neon give pace to pretty pastels. Soft but not always sweet, the collection has a refined edgy undertone.” Fusing fragility and provocation, signature stilettos are fashioned in white and soft shades of turquoise, mint, lilac, lemon and pink.

From delicate heels to the highest elevations, accents of black, strong metallic details and Perspex add an edgy appeal. Patent leathers, seethrough Perspex and touch-me suede applied in fluro colored peep toe stilettos, cork wedges, high tops, belts, bags and pouches take poolside pinups to West Coast sports. A vision of a sexy surfer captured in the photographs of Glen Friedman, braided bracelets are the trinket of choice.

Get ‘Everything but the Dress’ at the Kurt Geiger boutique, located at Phase II of the Avenues. For more information, please call 2259 7659/60 or visit www.landmarkgroupme.com.

artist of the month

ELIZABETH AYOUB ‘Music is that magical air that lives in our space’ By bazaar staff

Music is that magical air that lives in our space. It knows no boundaries, carries no stigmas.

It is unconditional love expressed through one's energy. And like energy, music can neither be created nor destroyed - it is simply transformed, from one soul to the other.

May we all be the conduits of its magic. ~ Elizabeth Ayoub

A promising light among young American and Arab artists. She sings in various languages with conviction and full emotion. Her heartfelt songs are of folk quality and rhythm, with a jazz-blues bend (she is often compared to Norah Jones and Fairuz).

She has a beguiling voice and captivating talent.

With each song, she creates a rich tapestry of images, a journey for the listener to relish. She believes that music, like acting (as she is also a trained actress) must move the audience. A storyteller at heart, her lyrics give way to her personal history.

She was born in Caracas, Venezuela. Her parents emigrated from Lebanon to Venezuela before the civil war in search of a promising future. The youngest of seven siblings, she always knew she would become a singer. She was thrust into an environment where three different languages were freely spoken and where her musical influences ranged from Koranic verse and Fairuz, to Simon & Garfunkel and Barbra Streisand. She performed at a young age in various school musicals at the American Prep School in Caracas. There, she studied choral music and performed with the school choir for 48

a number of years. When she was 16, she performed at a Latin Rock music festival in Caracas with her school band. The band was so well received, that a talent scout approached them for a recording contract. However, the stars weren’t aligned for her and the band at that time and the deal fell through.

She then traveled to America to fulfill her family’s commitment in obtaining a university degree in marketing. But the stage was always in her heart. At the University of Miami, she studied Jazz voice and fell in love with Ella Fitzgerald. Soon, she began writing songs and playing them at folk festivals, open-mics and music industry showcases, one of which was for SONY execs.

After shopping a self-produced demo unsuccessfully, she dropped out of the music scene temporarily and fell in love with acting. She joined a theatre group and pursued acting for a few years. She took acting seriously and headed to NYC, where she trained intensively at the Atlantic Theatre Company, co-founded by Hollywood writer/director David Mamet and actor William H. Macy.

It was in theatre where she was reacquainted with the power of her voice to move an audience. During this

time, she met a fellow world-music enthusiast, Jose Elias. A Cuban-American of Lebanese decent, Jose and Elizabeth quickly formed a music alliance.

The achievement of their efforts led to a magnificent debut album, Prelude, where many different music styles (folk, jazz, latin) meld into one. Moreover, it reflects all her talents and gives the listener the unique opportunity to travel through her songs to different spaces. After the success of her first album, her music was discovered on Myspace and signed with a renowned Dutch-American world-music label, Times Square Records and went on to produce her sophmore album, Oceanos y Lunas, with the talented and sought-after Spanish producer Javier Limon (Paco de Lucia, Estrella Morente, Buika). The recording features musicians from Spain and Beirut and was received well among world music critics, including a soaring review on iTunes.

An activist for justice and peace, she carries the torch of tolerance and freedom wherever she performs.

How did your musical journey begin?

The minute I realized I loved singing and people asked for more. There was a connection between the listener and myself. I love that - making connections.

What/Who inspires you to compose your music?

Always difficult to answer. I draw inspiration from great film composers because I love film – I’d like my road to lead me there, composing for film. I love folk music and instruments – the Venezuelan cuatro, any primitive instrument with a string and someone singing along, the oud, the guitar, the timbre of the piano and the qanoun. The human voice; it carries experience and soul.

Anything and everything should inspire. It’s part of being a creative person – you need to keep the channels open to everything.

Is the final sound of a musical track an individual or group effort?

In the end, whoever the creator is, it’s their final decision. If it’s a collaborative effort, which I love and aspire for more of, all need to be on board with the sound.

Who/What in your early beginnings influenced your music?

I grew up in Venezuela and went to an American school. So you can imagine the range: Lebanese music, with salsa and merengue in the air, and American pop.

The singers and songwriters had a huge influence on me – Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, The Beatles, Barbra Streisand (yes, even Babs). Then Fairouz and Oum Kalthoum at home while the other Fairouz, my mom, was busy making kibbe, tabboule, black beans and sweet plantains for the family. Throw in some salsa and joropo, traditional folk music from the Venezuelan plains, that the house-help Maria would dance to while cleaning our home in Caracas, and you have quite a concoction. I’m so happy I grew up with all that. I wouldn’t change it for anything in this world.

In your opinion, what was the hardest challenge you faced in your musical career so far?

Touring and working with a record label; the loss of control in my work. I realized touring is not for everyone, especially for me because I come from a well-grounded background. There aren’t too many female artists of Arab heritage doing this, you know? It’s sort of a taboo, not really welcome by our families, especially Muslim like myself, though I’m mostly secular. It was a struggle within my own, even within myself. While I love giving concerts,

being on the road takes its toll if you crave a balanced life.

I think whomever you end up with as a partner, should embrace you for who you are. That said, I look forward to concerts and performances.

Was your acting career spurred on by the challenges you faced with your first selfproduced demo?

Yes, probably. Acting came as a savior. It was a Cuban theatre actress that introduced me to this craft and I got hooked. Went to NYC to train with the best. I was able to loosen-up and use my instincts. Ultimately, it liberated me and gave me the courage to find my own voice, which led to my self-released album. I thank acting for my courage in music and in life. Everyone should take acting classes.

If you had to choose between acting and singing, which would you choose and why?

I love them both dearly but if I had to choose, I it would be music. I have more control as an artist. Nobody telling you “you don’t look the part,” or “we need someone with less this and more that.” I don’t fit any mold. I make my own path as an artist, whether it’s music, writing or acting.

How has the Middle East influenced your sound?

God, so much! It’s the soul of my music and voice. I wish I could do more of it and be better at it. The quarter tones, the richness in the space between the white and black keys of the piano – that’s where there’s magic in music. In the spaces between the keys. You’ll find me there any day!

Has the Arab Spring moved your music in any way?

I actually want to compose something for my next album, would love for it to be a collaborative effort. It’s

just that there’s so much, you know? Anthony Shadid, an amazing journalist whose work I’ve admired and followed for years, died covering it the other day. Such a terrible loss. So much to tell, so much to say. Mohamad Bouazizi, the spark that lit the fire: that man’s story inspires me.

The youth of Egypt and how they’re fighting for their right to choose their destiny. It’s overwhelming. It’s like a giant is waking up from a long slumber. There are so many forces at play – good and evil. It almost needs to be a soundtrack. A song cheapens it.

Do you find similarities between Lebanon and Venezuela? And how has your multi-cultural upbringing influenced your identity and music?

Absolutely. Latins and Arabs should be first-cousins!

We’re fiery, passionate, we love family, are in love with life and can’t imagine life without some spice. I love Latin music – the beats, the percussion, the plaintive melodies.

There’s so much we share in common.

Do you feel that music should always serve a specific purpose?

Music’s sole purpose is to inspire passion and infuse you with life. Put an instrument in the hands of a poor child, without any pre-requisite, give him/her great training, and a miracle happens. That has been happening in Venezuela for over thirty years in classical music; it’s called El Sistema. Imagine that in the Arab world? Powerful stuff.

What are some of your favorite tracks, and why?

“YaOud.” I wish I could write more songs like that. I knew when I sang it and my recording engineers were moved to tears listening to it, that it was going to be special.

Can you pinpoint the one moment where you knew, ‘this is where I’m meant to be’?

Whenever I’m on stage and sing my heart out, or when I’m creating, be it music or film. I’ve completed a short film about a puppet ballerina. I brought her to life and am dying to introduce her to the world. She’s quite amazing!

Where was your very first live performance? And what was the experience like?

In high school, naturally. Musicals were fun, so when I got to sing the part of a mom in the Runaway Snowman, I nailed the opportunity.

What is your dream performance space and destination?

Easy. The ruins of Baalbak. It’s magical. Someday it’s going to happen.

What would you like to accomplish in the future?

Score for films and collaborate with great artists.

Will there be any Elizabeth Ayoub performances in the Middle East in the near future?

Oh, God, yes. I can’t wait! I’m open to sponsorships.

For more infromation on Elizabeth Ayoub, please visit www.elizabethayoub.com.

49

closet Bibi

SHOPPING FOR A CAUSE

By Bibi Al-Falah

Summer is coming up and you may be thinking of all the fun, colorful shirts you’re going to buy for weekends at the chalet or which woven new 50

beach bag will be “the one”. It’s always a rush to buy new things when the season starts to change again, but why don’t we also buy some things that

will actually make a difference? There are plenty of fashion lines out there that can make you look fabulous while supporting a worthy cause. Take the current “habba” or trend in Kuwait at the moment: TOMS shoes.

I’ve heard of TOMS being sold at random places in Kuwait, but beware!I noticed that the TOMS sold in Kuwait are either fake or overpriced. You can find the shoes on a few RANDOM Kuwait-based websites but the prices are nowhere near correct. I found one style on two local websites; one charged KD29 for it while the other charged KD32. On toms.com, the same exact pair are priced at $54, which is equivalent to KD15. Local retailers have essentially doubled the selling price. Another incredibly sad fact is that there are places in Kuwait that are selling fake TOMS. This defeats the ENTIRE purpose of the brand, which is to donate a pair of shoes to a child in need for each (original) pair that is purchased.

The brand TOMS has been raising awareness about children worldwide that don’t even have shoes to put on their feet each morning, and end up contracting diseases from soil and even missing out on school because they are required to have shoes to attend. Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS, got inspired after visiting Argentina and meeting with such children. Contrary to popular belief, the founder’s name is not Tom! The name is derived from a shorter version of the word “tomorrow” since the concept of the brand is that you buy a shoe today, and a child gets a free pair tomorrow. I personally love this brand, and the fact that you can look stylish while helping others in some way is a great feeling. For the first time I am happy to see Kuwaitis overdoing a trend because they are actually helping children by doing so.

In addition to shoes, TOMS launched a new line of sunglasses which help those in need of eye care.

The “One for One” concept is the same; one pair of sunglasses will give one person in need medical eye care. This includes prescription medicine, eyeglasses, and even corrective surgery. If you are a fan of this brand, I suggest you grab a pair on the website. They have also added T-shirts to the website, and the purchase of a T-shirt gives a child a pair of shoes.

If you aren’t much of a shopper, there is always food. We are all aware that dining out in Kuwait is just as fashionable as shopping, and we can be both stylish and help others by eating at establishments like locally owned 10-oh-8. This is a cute eatery, with a cause; they donate a percentage of proceeds to charity and the charity changes every three months.

So however you choose to spend your money this month, try to do some good while you’re at it. Enjoy the lovely weather…happy March!

bazaar goes dining

MUNCH Culinary creations for every palate By bazaar staff

Here at bazaar we’re always on the lookout for home-grown concepts. Munch Barbecue is a concept that’s been growing at people’s homes for a few years and no gathering or event is better than when the Munch Grill-Meisters are applying their grill expertise to the proceedings. Pair this with Munch’s first brick-and-mortar restaurant in Sharq and Munch is establishing itself as a major player in the competitive sport that is gastronomy in Kuwait.

You know even as I write this, the memory of MiniBurgers is still nestled warmly in my head. Just writing the word Mini-Burger has made my mouth water – I feel like one of Pavlov’s dogs! And I’m pretty sure some in the office here would kill to get their hands on the Chocolate Bread Pudding, but that’s another story…

But let’s start at the beginning. We arrived at the new Munch restaurant, located at The Village in Abu Hasseniya, with empty stomachs (we like to plan ahead 52

at bazaar) and monstrous appetites. Owner Dana Al Salem greeted us and told us how the new location is a culmination of the Munch Barbecue catering concept and deli elements from their first opening in Sharq.

Inside, the décor is simple, modern and cool. The oversized cutlery hanging down from the industrial design- influenced ceiling seems to be a nod to my appetite – giving me the go ahead to indulge – and wouldn’t look out of place in a modern art gallery.

Greeted and seated, our first tough decision of many is what to drink. The Energizer delivers on its titular promise, the blend of citrus, mint, basil and brown sugar packs a punch strong enough to invigorate even overdedicated culture vultures like ourselves. If it’s cleansing goodness you’re after then the Antioxidant is where it’s at. The combo of mixed berries and pomegranate can be felt delivering their payload ofvitamins and nutrients as you slurp it down. Who said healthy can’t be tasty?

Speaking of healthy, the salads are so light they hardly made a sound as they hit the table. We tuck into the Moroccan Couscous with gusto, loving the subtle flavors and crunch of the carrots and mixed peppers. Maybe it’s just me, but when a dish on any menu shares its name with the restaurant, I’m in and just have to have it. I campaigned to order the Munch Salad and am thrilled it lives up to its name the freshest rocca leaves serve as a bed for the divine marriage of goat cheese and home-grown dates. Pine nut crunch balances the texture of this must-eat salad.

As the appetizers arrive we are torn between our loyalties; to keep the faithful bazaarites informed on our Twitter feed, or to keep our appetites satisfied. Luckily there are a few of us so we divide responsibility, and I dive straight in. The Wagyu Bites melt in your mouth and are cooked to perfection. This is how beef should taste.

The vegetable root chips are a refreshing take on regular

potato chips, using sweet potato, pumpkin and beetroot instead and served with a delicious guacamole. Then I tuck half of one of those Mini-Burgers in my mouth and I am in love. I like simple pleasures and that’s what a burger should be to me. Freshly ground, quality beef topped with balsamic fried onions and cheddar. I manage two before I realize I probably should be sharing. Then I move onto the Quesadillas and their cheddar and jalapeno deliciousness. Served in flour tortillas and accompanied by salsa, sour cream and, more tasty guacamole.

When it comes to main courses, we first tuck into the Kobe Beef burger; juicy Australian Kobe beeftopped with Swiss, tomato, and lettuce, and the Italian Sirloin Sandwich, perfectly tender marinated steak, with rocca, parmesan, and divine sun-dried tomato mayo on a crisp French baguette. Both are served with perfectly crisp on the outside, fluffy on the inside fries presented in the coolest way I’d seen in a long time (you’ll have to pay them a visit to check it out yourself). The pasta at Munch

is all made in house, from scratch, and cooked al-dente to perfection. The Pumpkin and Sage Ravioli has a delicate yet authentic winter flavor that warms the soul. To say we fought over the Mushroom and Ricotta Tortellini might be going a bit far, but those handmade pasta parcels, covered in exquisite Alfredo sauce had us all going back for more.

As I stated the concept of this new Munch location is to marry the barbecue and restaurant concept. They cook most things over a flame grill in the kitchen to keep the barbecue element authentic and they want this to be a place where you come and get your munch on. But they also want it to be a place where you can come for coffee and a little something. That’s where the desserts come in and you’ll be spoiled for choice. The Milk Chocolate Fondant, warm, subtly flavoured and paired with vanilla ice cream, is served in a funky beaker that adds that extra touch to the experience. The Nutella Crepe, served with fresh banana and juicy strawberries, delivers as Nutella crepes always do. But dessert for us was all about that

Chocolate Bread Pudding. Now we may not have come to actual blows over the pasta but there are definitely crossed forks when it comes to this bread pudding. Served with a chocolate sauce, this gooey, spongy dessert is certainly what you would call delectable. We have just enough left in us to experience the Hot Chocolate with Marshmallows.

At Munch though they do this with a twist and serve it deconstructed - you add shaved chocolate to steamed milk, top with marshmallows and then simply enjoy.

That’s what we did at Munch. Enjoy. From delicious appetizers, to speciality grilled mains and homemade pastas, to sumptuous desserts, Munch can be anything you want it to be - and it won’t let you down whatever you drop in for.

Munch is located at The Village in Abu Hasseniya.

Follow them on Twitter @munchkuwait and like them on Facebook. For more info call 2232 2747 or visit www.munchkuwait.com.

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bazaar techno Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

SONY CYBER-SHOT TX200V WATERPROOF CAMERA Ruggedness and svelte design tend to be mutually exclusive features — but not in the Sony Cyber-Shot TX200V Waterproof Camera ($500). Measuring just 16mm deep, the TX200V is waterproof to five meters, dustproof, and freeze-proof, and doesn't skimp of the features, either, which include an 18.2 megapixel Exmor R CMOS sensor, 1080/60p video recording, a 3-inch LCD touchscreen, a 5x optical zoom lens, highspeed autofocus, the ability to shoot at full resolution at up to 10 fps, face detection technology, a built-in GPS and Compass, and optical image stabilization.

http://store.sony.com

SENNHEISER RS 220 WIRELESS HEADPHONES Think wireless headphones can't deliver the same sound as your beloved studio cans? Think again. Based on the company's revered HD 600 series, these Sennheiser RS 220 Wireless Headphones ($600) use an uncompressed digital signal sent over a 2.4 GHz connection to maintain fidelity up to 300 feet away, while analog, coaxial digital, and optical digital inputs in the included transmitter and recharging dock ensure that no matter the source, the RS 220s will play nice.

www.sennheiserusa.com

PARROT AR.DRONE 2.0 What's better than shooting missiles? Shooting HD video. The Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 ($300), the new version of the smartphone-controlled quadricopter, adds a new high-def camera, video recording (1280 x 720 res), flight data sharing, a new piloting mode, and increased stability. Like the original, the AR.Drone 2.0 is powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

www.ardrone.parrot.com

LIQUIPEL We'll go ahead and let you try it first, but the folks behind Liquipel ($59) claim their clear coating "protects every feature of your device with a revolutionary waterproof shield." The Liquipel permanently bonds on the molecular level to your device, both inside and out, and is said to keep your phone working even if you drop it in water (creek, bath tub, Kool-Aid, etc.). Certain iPhone, HTC, Samsung, and Motorola devices can take the Liquipel treatment and their subsequent plunges now.

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big boys toys

XAPPR We'll admit it: When we look at our iPhones, the phrase "boy, what this thing really needs is a gaming pistol addon" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Yet we're still drawn to the Xappr ($30). This gaming gun features a clamp-like mount to hold your device, which it communicates with via the headphone port, letting you exercise your itchy trigger finger in a variety of games (can you say iLazer Tag?). Holster not included.

www.xapprgun.com

BOB GRILLSON WOOD PELLET GRILL Who would have thought that the secret to great-tasting grilled food was electricity? The Bob Grillson Wood Pellet Grill ($TBA) makes a convincing case, using traditional power to burn up wooden pellets that give your food a signature flavor without the need to build an actual fire. It also sports an oiled bamboo tray for chopping, prepping, and beer-holding, a delightfully modern design, large golf caddy wheels for easy mobility, cast-iron, porcelain enameled grates, an electronic temperature control, and an integrated thermometer. What else would you expect from the only grill that has a first and last name?

www.grillson.com/en/

BULLETPROOF POLO SHIRT We'll pretend that you have a perfectly legitimate reason for wanting — or needing — this Bulletproof Polo Shirt ($3,500), and will instead simply say that it's available in one of three protective levels, and features a 100% cotton exterior for a normal look, a microfiber interior for comfort, and removable, ultra-lightweight anti-ballistic panels in between. If that doesn't convince you, surely the Steven Seagal endorsement will.

www.freshpolos.com

TAG HEUER FORMULA 1 STEALTH WATCH The pitch-black Tag Heuer Formula 1 Stealth Watch ($TBA) is just the wristwear needed for those who like to keep it dark. The 42mm-sized watch features a black face, black lume, black-gold hour markers, and a stainless steel case with an all-black titanium-carbide coating. The only hint of color comes from the redtipped chronograph hand.

www.tagheuer.com Bazaar 6X26-P.ai

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bazaar books Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. ~ Jessamyn West

source: www.amazon.com

THE UNOFFICIAL MAD MEN COOKBOOK by Judy Gelman, Peter Zheutlin Ever wish you could mix an Old Fashioned just the way Don Draper likes it? Or prepare Oysters Rockefeller the way they did fifty years ago at one of Roger Sterling’s favorite haunts, The Grand Central Oyster Bar? Ever wonder how Joan Harris manages to prepare a perfect crown roast in her tiny apartment kitchen? Or about the connection between Jackie Kennedy’s 1962 White House tour and Betty Draper’s Valentine’s Day room service order? The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook serves up more than 70 recipes to satisfy a Mad Men appetite! From the tables of Manhattan’s most legendary restaurants and bars to the Drapers’ Around the World dinner, this book is your entrée to the culinary world of Man Men-era New York.

A BAD IDEA I’M ABOUT TO DO by Chris Gethard Chris Gethard has often found himself in awkward situations most people, including you, probably would have safely avoided.

The good news is now, thanks to this book, you can enjoy the painfully funny consequences of his unfortunate decisions at a safe distance. A Bad Idea I'm About to Do invites readers to join Chris as he navigates an adolescence and adulthood mired in hilariously ill-fated nerdom, and to take comfort in the fact that—as his experiences often prove—things could always be much, much worse.

TOUGH SH*T by Kevin Smith Take one look at Kevin Smith: He's a balding fatty who wears a size XXL hockey jersey, shorts, and slippers year-round. Not a likely source for life advice. But take a second look at Kevin Smith: He changed filmmaking forever when he was twenty-four with the release of Clerks, and since then has gone on to make nine more profitable movies, runs his own production company, wrote a bestselling graphic novel, and has a beautiful wife and kids. So he must be doing something right. In early 2011, he began using his twitter platform to answer big questions from fans-like "What should I do with my life?"- and he discovered that he had a lot to say. Tough Sh*t distills his four decades of breaking all the rules down to direct and brutally honest advice.

MENTALPAUSE AND OTHER MIDLIFE LAUGHS by Laura Jensen Walker Do you often forget the words for common things, like "husband" or "sink"? Have you suddenly found subzero temperatures pleasant? Are your body parts starting to move south for the winter, spring, summer . . . ? Midlife and menopause can be . . . what was I going to say? Oh yeah, they can be challenging times. But there are plenty of reasons to be thankful, too. Laura Jensen Walker went into early menopause after her bout with breast cancer. In this book, she celebrates life and helps you laugh in the midst of hot flashes and memory lossLaura shares hilarious vignettes and words of wisdom from her experience and those of other women who have been there, are there, or are headed into "mentalpause." Don't worry when you suddenly see your mother's face in the mirror, turn down the air-conditioning and join Laura for a lot of laughs instead.

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bazaar music A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRUTH

by Van Halen

A Different Kind of Truth is Van Halen's first original studio album with singer David Lee Roth since the band's classic multi-platinum album 1984. Formed in Los Angeles in 1974, Van Halen changed the rock and roll landscape forever with the release of their self-titled, 1978 debut album displaying unparalleled stage presence, revolutionary musicianship, and extraordinary songwriting abilities. With more than 75 million albums sold worldwide, the band's record of achievement is hard to top. Presented with two Diamond Award RIAA Certified Status' for their albums Van Halen and 1984, the band has produced a repertoire of hits that remain some of the strongest and most influential rock songs ever written that fans will admire for decades to come.

WRECKING BALL

by Bruce Springsteen

Marking his 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball features 11 new Springsteen recordings and was produced by Ron Aniello with Bruce Springsteen and executive producer Jon Landau. Said long-time manager Jon Landau, "Bruce has dug down as deep as he can to come up with this vision of modern life. The lyrics tell a story you can't hear anywhere else and the music is his most innovative of recent years. The writing is some of the best of his career and both veteran fans and those who are new to Bruce will find much to love on 'Wrecking Ball.'"This special edition of Wrecking Ball includes two bonus tracks and exclusive artwork and photography.

SCARS & STORIES

by The Fray

Critically acclaimed Denver-based foursome The Fray are back with their third album, Scars & Stories. The album was recorded at the legendary Blackbird Studios in Nashville. The Fray was able to hone their sound with the help of producer Brendan O'Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, and Neil Young). On the new recording, the band transforms their real life experiences into a collection of songs that are reflective, but still maintain a pop sensibility. The making of Scars & Stories fostered the most evolution the band has ever experienced, both lyrically and musically.

TRESPASSING

by Adam Lambert

Global superstar Adam Lambert will release his highly anticipated second album TRESPASSING n March 20th, 2012. Lambert describes TRESPASSING, which he executive produced as "an exciting journey through the past two years of my life. It's been a transformative period and I really wanted to make music from what I've experienced. All these songs honestly explore the ups and downs of my reality."

In addition to co-writing many of the tracks, Lambert collaborated with an all star list of award winning artists, producers and songwriters including Pharrell Williams, Dr. Luke, Claude Kelly, Benny Blanco, Bonnie McKee, Nile Rogers, Sam Sparro, Bruno Mars, Nikka Costa and BC Jean. He is the first AMERICAN IDOL to ever tour the world in support of their debut album in the year following their IDOL season. source: www.amazon.com Bazaar 6X26-P.ai

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bazaar goes to cinema The latest from the big screen playing in cinemas across Kuwait in February

WE BOUGHT A ZOO Genre: Comedy, Drama, Family Cast: Matt Damon, Scarlett Johansson and Thomas Haden Church Synopsis: Set in Southern California, acclaimed filmmaker Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) directs an amazing and true story about a single dad who decides his family needs a fresh start, so he and his two children move to the most unlikely of places: a zoo. With the help of an eclectic staff, and with many misadventures along the way, the family works to return the dilapidated zoo to its former wonder and glory.

JOHN CARTER Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy Cast: Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins and Willem Dafoe Synopsis: From filmmaker Andrew Stanton comes John Carter, a sweeping action-adventure set on the mysterious and

exotic planet of Barsoom (Mars). John Carter is based on a classic novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose highly imaginative adventures served as inspiration for many filmmakers, both past and present. The film tells the story of war-weary, former military captain John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe) and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins). In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE Genre: Drama Cast: Thomas Horn, Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock Synopsis: Oskar (Thomas Horn) is convinced that his father (Tom Hanks), who died in the 9/11 attacks on the

World Trade Center, has left a final message for him hidden somewhere in the city. Feeling disconnected from his grieving mother (Sandra Bullock) and driven by a relentlessly active mind that refuses to believe in things that can't be observed, Oskar begins searching New York City for the lock that fits a mysterious key he found in his father's closet. His journey through the five boroughs takes him beyond his own loss to a greater understanding of the observable world around him.

WRATH OF THE TITANS Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy Cast: Sam Worthington, Liam Neeson and Rosamund Pike Synopsis: A decade after his heroic defeat of the monstrous Kraken, Perseus, the demigod son of Zeus, is attempting to live

a quieter life as a village fisherman and the sole parent to his 10-year old son, Helius. Meanwhile, a struggle for supremacy rages between the gods and the Titans. Dangerously weakened by humanity's lack of devotion, the gods are losing control of the imprisoned Titans and their ferocious leader, Kronos, father of the long-ruling brothers Zeus, Hades and Poseidon. The triumvirate had overthrown their powerful father long ago, leaving him to rot in the gloomy abyss of Tartarus, a dungeon that lies deep within the cavernous underworld. The Titans' strength grows stronger as Zeus' remaining godly powers are siphoned.

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For more details on movie timings and the cinema nearest you, log on to www.cinescape.com.kw

Fo Yo Mama

L’OCCITANE A graceful cherry tree celebrates the beauty of a princess.

Hortense de Beauharnais was the daughter of Empress Josephine. She was famous for her porcelain complexion and would blush in response to any compliment. As a tribute to her touching beauty, the name of this delicate French princess was given to one of the most graceful cherry trees. When its pure white petals give way to fruits, the branches of this cherry tree reveal rare red pearls that are crisp and juicy. They shine with a natural, beautiful glow – like the glow that once lit up the charming face of the princess…

This year, L’OCCITANE brings this cherry tree into blossom in a limited-edition collection with a fruity floral scent: Cherry Princess. All of the products in this collection contain a cherry extract from the Luberon.

L’OCCITANE is located in Al Kout – Tanagra, Arraya Center – Tanagra, The Avenues, Fanar – Tanagra Salhia Complex – Tanagra and the Airport – The Visitor

THE AWARD WINNING SIGNATURE SWEET PEA COLLECTION NOW IN STORES Remind yourself of Mediterranean breezes and the joy of spring with the award-winning Bath & Body Work’s Sweet Pea collection now in stores across the region. One of Bath and Body Works’ most popular Signature Collections, Sweet Pea, offers a full range of products to choose from, including, eau de toilette, fragrance mist, shimmer mist, bubble bath, shower gel, shower cream, body lotion, triple moisture body cream, and body butter. The collection also offers mini size products making it perfect for those who love to travel in fragrant style. If you are a firm believer in the emotionally uplifting effect that comes from surrounding yourself with the most fragrant smells and aromas, you will love the Signature Sweet Pea home fragrances. The collection carries a range of luxurious candles, home fragrance oils, Wallflowers® and room sprays. step in to the nearest Bath & Body Works store, to experience the products and fragrances that keep asking us for more!

BBW Locations in Kuwait: Marina Mall, The Avenues, and Al Fanar Mall.

SIX SENSES SPA MOTHER’S DAY MONTHLY PROMOTION Spoil your mum this month, bring her with you when are having your treatment and get 50% discount or her treatment. Thai Silk Facial: The Thai Silk Facial uses natural silk cocoon with sericin essential protein to firm and tone your skin. During the month of March, pay for a 50 minutes Thai Silk Facial and we will extend it to 80 minutes. The occasion for you to experience this unique Asian therapy with our Thai specialists! Duration 80 min/35 KD (instead of 45 KD). Spring Promotion: Spring is here and it is time to revitalize your skin! Book any 80 minutes massage and for an additional 5 KD, add a nourishing mask or a back exfoliation (worth 20 KD). Duration 110 min / from 45 KD. The above promotions cannot be used in conjunction with any other offers or discount (including spa packages).

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IT’S A MAN’S WORLD Challenging the mind with Shurooq Amin By bazaar staff

Premiering at the AL M. Gallery in Al-Salhiya complex, It’s a Man’s World marks yet another career milestone for celebrated artist and national treasure, Shurooq Amin. Between finalizing her last few pieces of her latest series, bazaar sits down with this enlightened artist for a heartfelt exploration of It’s a Man’s World.

Shurooq, tell us about your latest collection.

When I did Society Girlz, people questioned the absence of the man. In essence, the man is conspicuous by his absence in these paintings.

I think It’s a Man’s World was simply an organic gravitation towards dealing with the other side of society, the dominant one indeed, which are men.

I started working naturally based on events that actually happened or experiences I've witnessed on a first hand basis. This series explores issues in our society that touch on the juxtaposition of what is okay and what is not for men.

Are these issues hidden?

Not quite, these are issues people prefer to keep hidden. Everybody knows they exist in the society; for instance adultery, multiple wives, the separate life between life at home and the Diwaniya.

What should we expect?

These will be conceptually shocking paintings, yet portrayed via beautiful images. The viewer will enjoy the color and movement in them, yet, it's what you take out of it that is really crucial. Opening 68

a dialogue is expected and desired, as there is no way that you can look at them and NOT be moved or urged to discuss them. People shouldn’t expect these paintings to judge, as there is no right or wrong—what is definitely wrong is the hypocrisy that supports the portrayed subjects.

There’s always an evident, if not prominent, story with every series you present. What’s the story you wish to convey in It’s a Man’s World?

The best way I can describe this story is by recounting a movie I recently saw, Anonymous, which showed Shakespeare’s literary impact on society; how he was regularly arrested, his plays were attacked—Shakespeare was socially controversial and unacceptable. It's sad that we are in 2012, yet we are still living like that. Now we have the Internet, TV, passports to travel, we see what the world is like yet we impose shackles on people. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the woman needs her dad's permission to travel, and she can’t drive, when it’s acceptable for her to be in a car with a driver. These are Illogical rules that backfire, placed by society, or rather placed by these men. At the end, whether you are a man, or a woman, you are victimized. My series is not an attack on men whatsoever. Like Society Girlz, I’m attacking hypocrisy. In reality, I don't care about what any given women chooses to do, I won't judge her personally, yet my society will, due to the narrow-mindedness that is ingrained in our way of

life and education. I’m trying to push the envelope a little bit, and I will keep pushing it and see what I can get away with. Hopefully, I survive this show without the extremists announcing that my blood is halal, and that I should be killed!

You are repeatedly portrayed as a liberator of women, how would you respond to that statement?

I don’t understand where that comes from!

Would you say it’s a two dimensional interpretation of your work?

Yes, even though I choose to paint women, that doesn't mean that my work doesn’t go beyond that. The same applies to It’s a Man’s World, I'm not calling for the emancipation of women, I’m calling for the emancipation of the mind and society, men and women alike. If the men, who run our society, were emancipated from these backward shackles, the women would be fine. We may wish to think that women run the show, yet we have to face the facts, a lot of the big decisions that affect us are made by men.

Simply, consider why women were not reelected this year. A lot of them did not fight enough for certain causes or were not taken seriously in this society, and based on that, they lost their credibility, and the rights of women in Kuwait were ignored rather than fought for. People expected change, yet we regressed. Instead, people chose more pious government officials.

So there is no hope then?

People think this is the beginning of the end, yet I have hope for Kuwait. I think the next parliament will be different; people came out to speak for change. I see that power corrupts no matter how religious a person can be, even the Vatican, run by religious figures, is corrupt. When the people realize that, the people will step out once again and demand reformers, logical breeders of change.

Did you learn anything unexpected while working on It’s a Man’s world?

On a personal, and spiritual, level, yes. Sometimes, I feel like I’m possessed when I'm working. With this series, I've been working non-stop, I forget to eat, drink, and I even don't change my clothes sometimes!

I really have spoiled all of my clothes, and it's getting ridiculous! I don’t prepare to paint anymore; I am breathing and living this series. There are times my

hands are working so fast; my mind can't catch up with what's happening with my hands. I dreamt of these paintings, visualized them in my dreams, and truly obsessed with the destiny of each painting.

Where does that livid obsession come from?

I’m evolving as an artist, life has changed me and I am learning so much about myself. I stood on my own two feet, financially capable of raising my kids on my own, and I technically run a household based on my art, and my teaching career. I went through a year when I was devastated financially more than I was emotionally after my divorce, the practical aspects of life were so challenging. Now, I have a dream for myself.

Seeing me go through this process is a phenomenal feeling, like an out of body experience, surreal in its entirety. The journey, rather than finishing each collection, keeps me going. This series is the absolute zenith for me; artistically, technically, conceptually, I cannot believe how evolved I’ve become. I’m doing things I never thought I would be doing. The subject matter is much bigger, and I really want to make a difference, and I feel that this show will mark a new era in my personal development as an artist and as well by bridging the gap of understanding society from two different views, women and men alike.

What was technically challenging about this collection?

I am doing different things, for example, I'm printing my canvases straight on wood, heavy blocks of wood, rather than stretching the canvas like with Society Girlz. The colors are hugely different, and that just happened naturally. In Society Girlz, they are muted, heavy, dark, yet with the new series, they are bold, vibrant, and vivid, perhaps more beautiful to take away from the sting of the reality of the subject matter. The subject matter is far more controversial, considering alcoholism, sexuality, gender identity, religion, and politics, to a certain extent. I am different, as an artist, my process is different and yet it is all coming so easily. My work is physically challenging, I have chronic back pain now from the constant standing, bending, and using two hands to paint when creating these pieces. I’m going through physical changes in my body that could affect me when I'm older, but I don't really care because I love it; I'm on an adrenaline rush every day.

How do you decide how each painting looks like?

I have no clue; I guess it’s absolutely natural!

I didn't have an outline, or organized structure, or common technique. Besides mounting each picture on wood, every painting required a different technique based on its story, yet conceptually, they are unified. When I'm working on my paintings, I normally mount two or three next to each other, and then contemplate what to do next. I'm at my continued on next page...

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desk, I look at them, with my music on, and then I know exactly what each one requires. Each one calls for you to do something different, in terms of color, mood, even my music changes based on what I’m working on. The painting dictates to me what to do with it. Methodology doesn’t apply, I tried that with one piece and that didn't work. After trying the colors turquoise and red, it was a total fail. I had to literally get rid of everything on the surface; I even decided I would exclude it from the series. Two weeks later, the same painting came to me in a dream; it had to be deconstructed, and that’s how it should be, it was destroyed, to be reconstructed into something better, and that painting was ‘He loves me, he loves me not’.

Was it scarier to showcase Society Girlz, or is the upcoming It’s a Man’s World scarier?

This new series is much scarier, I've never cared for peoples’ reactions, critics’ reviews, or sales. This time, I'm very fearful, there is a sense of trepidation and apprehension. I worry that the owner gets 70

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in trouble, or that the gallery could decide not to show one or two pieces from my series. If that ever would happen, I would cancel the show, as I need to showcase the complete series. People know me well enough to know that my work isn’t for the faint hearted in Kuwait. Not allowing me to show my work is better than asking me to censor my work. Many people asked me why I chose the AL M. Gallery, and the gallery owner promised he wouldn’t censor any of my works. In previous shows, my work has been censored; I'm not having that any more. This is my work, take it or leave it. To be fair to the gallery, they are very supportive, they love my work, and the curator is very progressive as she sought me out. She believes I’m the foremost relevant artist in Kuwait today, and I want to give her back that respect with showing my complete series. When she asked me to show with her, I could have never refused.

Finally, do you feel like you are going to be attacked, or hailed by men in Kuwait?

I think I’m going to be attacked by everyone!

There are women who would attack me, as well. You see, it's a natural reaction to attack because people resist change and facing facts. Those who relate will feel under the spot light, and I’m pretty sure they won’t be happy about it. Those who can’t relate will be offended. Either way, it will move people and touch them in some way. Beyond the initial shock of ‘Oh my god!’‘3aib,’ and ‘7aram,’ they will realize that it is actually quite amazing that there is a Kuwaiti artist who is exploring society in a way that nobody ever dared. I've made peace with that, and I know men, or any persons, who have a vision for progress will be one of those who ‘hail’ me, as you said.

Shurooq Amin’s, It's a Man's World, will be showing at the Al M. Gallery, located in Salhiya Complex, Mezzanine 2, starting from the 5th of March, 2012.

For more information about the artist, please visit www.shurooqamin.com.

ABDULLA ANI LOST 40KG WITH LOFAT!

By Lofat

As many of us know, the battle to lose weight is not an easy one and comes with many obstacles to overcome. There are many lurking temptations that make the journey even harder to pursue, however, with strong will power and support it is possible to succeed. This was the case with Abdulla Ani, a 15 year old who had been suffering with obesity from the age of 12. One day he decided to start taking control of his life and health, and with the support of both his parents and Lofat Junior, he was able to shed an alarming 40Kg! Abdulla is an inspiration to both teenagers and adults alike, and he was kind enough to share his story with us in the interview below.

When did you become unhappy with your weight?

Since I was young; 12 years old.

What made you decide to lose weight?

I was never comfortable in my own skin. Last summer, when I came back from holiday, I was bigger than I had ever been. My weight was 108Kg. I remember looking in 72

the mirror and just thinking to myself, how did I let this happen to myself, and I decided to lose weight.

Why did you choose Lofat?

I remember once trying the Lofat restaurant and the food was amazing compared to other diet companies/ foods I had tried before. It tasted like ‘real’ food. So I took the brochure, called Lofat and set an appointment - I didn’t even have to decide between other companies.

Also, Lofat is the only company in Kuwait that actually has a section dedicated to children and teenagers up to age 16. This was another factor that pleased my mother when joining a diet company.

How long did it take for you to reach your current weight?

I joined Lofat in September 2010 my weight was 108Kg. It has been one year and four months since I have started my diet and I lost 40Kg. How has your life changed now that you've lost weight?

My life has changed drastically now that I have lost weight. The best thing is simply how I feel. Inside, I just feel better, healthier. It is a feeling I hadn’t experienced before my weight loss.

Everything I do is easier and less stressful now that I have lost weight.

How did Lofat help you reach your weight loss goals?

Having a weekly consultation motivated me to want to lose weight every week. My dietitian at Lofat, Tanya, made sure that I followed my diet regularly, and gave me advice, which I found very helpful. Also the variety and selection of the meals offered by Lofat made it easy.

How would you describe your health condition before you started your weight loss journey?

My weight was 108Kg. I never played any sports, and I would run out of breath by just walking up stairs.

After doing a blood test, my results showed that I had high lipids and cholesterol in my blood. It was scary to think that I, at 15, would have high cholesterol.

How did you do it? What's your secret?

Honestly there really isn’t a secret. I followed the Lofat diet set out for me by my dietitian Tanya, and I just exercised regularly.

How is your health after losing the weight?

I participate in many sports, regularly. I run an average of 6Km, 4 times a week, as well as swim.

I feel better than I have ever been.

Do you have any advice for others who would like to lose weight?

No matter what you think, nothing is impossible. If you really want something and with the great support from Lofat, you can achieve your goals. Good luck to anyone like me who is trying to lose weight!

AZIZ AL-HUMAIDHI – ARCHITECT High-rising yet grounded and smiling By bazaar staff

The first thing Aziz Al-Humaidhi does when he strolls into the bazaar office is survey his surroundings. It takes me a minute to realize what he’s doing. “When I’m sitting anywhere the first thing I do is notice how things are connected”, he tells me with a smile,“how did they treat that, how does that close, is that good is that bad? It becomes a habit.” This ever-analysing, always-learning, constantly-questioning theme runs through our whole interview – that, and the smiling.

Thirty-three year old Aziz Al-Humaidhi is Principal in Charge at NHE Consultants, an international architectural and engineering design firm based in Kuwait, with offices in Cairo and affiliate studios in Turkey and Australia. Some may find the scope of responsibility that comes with this role intimidating but the smile Aziz wears through most of our interview suggests he certainly seems to be taking it in his stride.

Perhaps this has something to do with the modern approach to the workplace he brought with him to the company. He likes his employees to know they’re part of the process. That they are working towards a goal as a team– a collaborative effort as opposed to a top-down approach, meaning that he likes to delegate to others.

He relies on people he trusts and knows can deliver what he needs.He says of his management style; “I don’t 74

know if it’s a good or bad thing, maybe it cuts both ways, the fact that I never really worked anywhere else.

A lot of people come with that experience and are able to implement what they learned. I didn’t. I don’t know if that informed me or detracted from my methods but I’m trying to bring a new design sensibility to the office”.

Aziz drew a lot as a child and had artistic aspirations but chose wisely when applying for university, not wanting to be a struggling artist, he opted for a fine arts degree with a major in architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design – one of the most liberal schools in the country and consistently ranked as the number one fine arts college in the United States. “It was a bit of a culture shock at the beginning, but in hindsight you look back on those years and they really informed you, how openminded everybody is, how experimental”, he says. This wasn’t necessarily easy coming from Kuwait and he had to adjust to the way of life. When he returned to Kuwait he then had to readjust and is still working on blending these two ways of life, these two ways of thinking, to bring the best to his work and NHEC in turn.

Where he perhaps struggles most is the cultural differences within the office itself. “You come from a culture in the States where employees expect to be part of the decision making process, whereas here people have a sense of waiting to be told what to do”. Even when

he convinces them to take the ball, it can be difficult to get them to run with it, but Aziz is always there to offer encouragement and help them reach the end zone. For Aziz though this isn’t an all-encompassing ethos that he’s forcing on the firm. His approach is a very organic one that developed as he took the reins from his father and one that truly seems to be working.

Like many of his generation Aziz has become accustomed to instant gratification. We want our news in bite-sized portions, we want our entertainment fast and we want constant updates. This is how we live in the social media era. Architecture doesn’t exactly fit in with this – it doesn’t offer rewards quickly and this can sometimes be a test of patience for Aziz. Being forced to wait though can be massively satisfying at the end of the project and it is this satisfaction that powers Aziz into the next project. Besides, he uses his hobbies, such as music production and photography, to get his rewards in the short term. They also, in turn, inform his disciplines towards architecture and whilst he feels they don’t directly inspire him, the processes that he goes through can be translated to the bigger picture and larger time frame of designing and completing a building.

This doesn’t seem to be just a job for Aziz, there’s more to it than that. “What is the true nature of what

you’re doing?” he asks himself during our interview. The question, in relation to his curiosity of whether people really notice what he does, seems to occupy him, “is it worth it, does anyone care, does anyone even notice sitting in a wooden hut versus a high-scale, high-end building?” Personally I like that he asks himself these questions, always analysing what he does and why he does it. He’s more than simply an architect for hire.

His priority is to give the client what they want, but he also informs and educates them so that they can make decisions on things they might not have thought of originally; “there are things that we’re not really cognitive of” he tells me, “you don’t know why you feel good in a space, [why] you like this object or that thing.” This kind of collaboration with his clients reflects the way he operates in the office. This can mean taking

them to spaces he’s previously worked on and exposing them to concepts that cannot be explained fully with words. He also tries to utilise socially responsible or eco-friendly ideas when he can, again working together with clients to find the best solution for their needs.

Even though he likes the possibilities that are afforded him when working on multi-million dollar projects such as working with cutting-edge materials and state-of-the-art processes – things that can’t always be implemented in smaller projects, like houses, due to budget or market constraints – I get the feeling he enjoys personal, simple projects more, perhaps for the emotional satisfaction it brings. This is clear when he talks about a memorial he created for young victims of road fatalities at his alma mater in Bayan. It was for a foundation his sister started to raise awareness of the

dangers of the road. The reaction of the parents to this piece rewarded him in a way that stays with him today still. His pride when he speaks about the memorial shines through.

When asked about his goals for NHEC and where he sees himself in the future, Aziz smiles some more. He paraphrases Robert Burns and talks of how plans can often run amok, so it’s best to hold on to them loosely he feels. When pushed he offers a reluctant metaphor, “You never know what a building is going to look before it’s done…” he says. Then he smiles some more.

For more information on Najeeb Al-Humaidhi Engineering Consultancy please email: info@nhec.com.kw or call 1822333.

75

‫هواية الطائرات‬ ‫بقلم‪Strawberry Girl :‬‬

‫في العام ‪ 1970‬كان هناك ‪ 10‬أشخاص فقط في الكويت مسجلين في قسم الطيران في‬ ‫النادي العلمي‪ ،‬و هم هواة الطائرات الالسلكية‪ .‬فلم تكن هواية بناء طائرة السلكية و جعلها‬ ‫تطير منتشرة كثيرا‪ ،‬لكنها كانت هواية مثيرة و شيقة مألت وقت الفراغ عندما لم يكن هناك‬ ‫انترنت أو وسائل التواصل االجتماعي‪.‬‬ ‫سمير الحمر هو أحد هواة الطائرات الالسلكية و قد بدأ في ممارسة هوايته منذ‬ ‫السبعينات من القرن الماضي مع أصدقائه من أعضاء النادي العلمي الكويتي‪ .‬و يعلق‬ ‫سمير قائال‪" :‬نحن نستمتع بهذه الهواية‪ ،‬و قد كنا نتنافس في بناء طائراتنا و التي كانت‬ ‫تستغرق أيام و أحيانا حتى أسابيع‪ ،‬بينما اليوم فإن الشركات قد سهلت عملية البناء‬ ‫من خالل طرح قطع جاهزة للبناء و التي ال تحتاج إلى أكثر من ساعتين لبناء الطائرة‬ ‫الالسلكية"‪.‬‬ ‫و يشرح سمير كيف كانوا يبنون الطائرات الالسلكية من خشب البلسا‪ ،‬و هو نوع من‬ ‫الخشب الخفيف حتى ال تكون الطائرة ثقيلة‪ .‬بعدها كانوا يشترون المكائن أو المحرك‬ ‫من محالت معينة تبيعها حتى يكملوا طائراتهم‪ .‬و يرى أن هناك فرق كبير بن الطائرات‬ ‫الالسلكية و طائرات اليوم‪ ،‬مثل جهاز التحكم (الرموت كنترول) و الذي أصبح اليوم مبرمج‬ ‫و به حركات أكثر بينما في السابق كان يمكن تحريك الطائرة إلى اليمين و اليسار فقط‪.‬‬ ‫يملك سميرالحمر محال و ورشة للطائرات الالسلكية في منطقة الشويخ منذ العام‬ ‫‪" .1980‬هنا أنا أبيع كل أنواع الطائرات الالسلكية‪ ،‬و األسعار تتراوح بين ‪ 40‬د‪.‬ك و ‪ 10‬آالف‬ ‫د‪.‬ك‪ .‬إال أن الطائرة األغلى في محلي قيمتها ‪ 2000‬د‪.‬ك‪ .‬و إن كانت الطئرة مزودة بمحرك‬ ‫جت فإن سرعتها تصل إلى ‪ 500‬كم في الساعة‪ .‬كما أنني أوفر خدمة ما بعد البيع‪ ،‬و أعطي‬ ‫النصيحة و التعلمات للهواة و خاصة الجدد منهم‪ ،‬حيث أنهم ال يعرفون كيفية بناء الطائرة‬ ‫الالسلكية‪ .‬ففي العادة الهواة الجدد يتعلمون من الهواة القدامى"‪.‬‬

‫ال يوجد عمر معين لممارسة هذد الهواية‪ ،‬إال أن سمير يرى أنه من األفضل أن يكون‬ ‫ممارس هذه الهواية فوق الرابعة عشر حتى ال يؤذي نفسه أو اآلخرين إذا فقد السيطرة‬ ‫على الطائرة‪ .‬و يوضح قائال‪" :‬يجب أن يعرف الهاوي كيفية اإلقالع بالطائرة حتى ال يتلف‬ ‫الطائرة حيث أن سعرها غالي‪ .‬في الوقت الحالي يمكن للمبتدئين أن يتعلموا عن طريق‬ ‫األقراص المدمجة على الشاشة و المتصلة بالروموت كونترول‪ .‬و يمكن أيضا ممارسة‬ ‫هذا النوع من الطيران عبر الكمبيوتر عندما يكون الجو حارا أو ممطر و يتعذر ممارسة‬ ‫هذه الهواية في الهواء الطلق"‪.‬‬ ‫لقد اشتهرت هذه الهواية في الوقت الحالي بشكل أكبر‪ .‬و أشار سمير أن هواية‬ ‫الطائرات الالسلكية منتشرة بشكل أكبر من الشرق األوسط في أوربا و اليابان و الواليات‬ ‫المتحدة‪ .‬كذلك لعب االنترنت دورا مهما في انتشار هذه الهواية و جعلها معروفة‪ ،‬حيث‬ ‫أن الناس تقرأ أو تتعلم على االنترنت‪ .‬كما أن انخفاض األسعار جعل هذه الهواية ممكنة‬ ‫االقتناء للهواة و يمكن لمزيد من الناس ممارستها‪.‬‬ ‫في السابق كان هناك أماكن مختلفة لممارسة هذه الهواية‪ .‬و يوضح سمير أن أشهر‬ ‫األماكن لممارسة هواية الطائرات الالسلكية كان بر مشرف‪ ،‬و التي اختفت بعد أن تم بناء‬ ‫البيوت و الهيئات العامة علي هذه الرقعة من األرض‪" .‬أما المكان اآلخر الذي كنا نمارس‬ ‫فيه هوايتنا كان مطار األحمدي القديم‪ ،‬و الذي تم بناؤه خالل الحرب العالمية الثانية و‬ ‫كان به مدرج طائرات و كان خارج الخدمة في ذلك الوقت"‪.‬‬ ‫و يحرص سمير على المشاركة في بعض المسابقات العالمية للطائرات الالسلكية‬ ‫مع هواة آخرين سنويا‪ .‬و يحتوي محله أيضا السيارات و السفن الالسلكية باإلضافة‬ ‫إلى الهليكوبتر‪ .‬و يرى أن الطلب على السيارات هو األكثر نظرا إلى سهولة قيادتها و‬ ‫استعمالها‪ ،‬بينما تحتاج الطائرات إلى التدريب و الممارسة في البداية‪.‬‬ ‫‪76‬‬

LET’S TAKE A WALK NBK Walkathon 2012 By bazaar staff

The 24th of March 2012 will mark the National Bank of Kuwait’s (NBK), 18th annual Walkathon, which has been part of its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program initiative for 17 years. The idea promotes the importance of a healthy environment and lifestyle. Seventeen years ago, “A Healthy Life with Every Step” was the slogan, and this is as true today as it ever was.

NBK has spent over KD 30 Million in contribution to CSR activities in the past 3 years. One of the most well known activities is the Walkathon; Last year’s event attracted more than 12,000 participants and 50 NBK staff members volunteered their time to help put together this event. At the end, the group effort and time put into this project was well worth it.

Want to know what you’re in for this year? This is how an NBK volunteer describes what happened at last year’s event: 5:30 a.m. – Really? My brain was capable of only one thought; can I sleep for another 5 minutes? The night before Kuwait had experienced one of its worst sandstorms ever, the thought that maybe it would affect today’s Walkathon came to mind. Just as I was about to doze off with that idea in mind, I got a phone call - the Walkathon was on, the weather was great.

I had 30 minutes to get up, get ready and be at the Green Island.

6:05 a.m. –This was it; the culmination of a month-and-a-half ’s work at the Walkathon registration center would start to unfold. I arrived at the Island, still half asleep, and realized the amount of work that had to be done - chairs to be set up, flags to be placed, finish lines to be drawn and preparation of the Zeina Walkathon race track all needed to be finished in less than 3 hours.

8:20 a.m. – Time flew! Over a thousand children had showed up in a little over two hours and were now running around in search for their colored posts, the NBK Zeina race is organized according to age, and each age group is associated with a color. Standing at each post, volunteers welcomed the Zeina contestants, singing, warming up and getting ready to set their energy loose with the 78

sound of the whistle.

11:50 a.m. – By now the last Zeina race was over. Children had gathered in the multicolored Romanian theater (located in Green Island). Were they watched a magic show, and a spectacular animal show and finally the awarding of the winners of each Zeina group. Zeina Walkathon is aimed at all children and is also open to non-NBK account holders so everyone can enjoy this event.

1:00 p.m. – At this point the preparation for the 6k and 8k walk was almost done. Signs were placed on the Gulf Road so participants knew the remaining distance as they raced. The men’s race started at the Walkathon registration center, while the women took off from Marina Crescent. The women, brimming with joy and competitive spirit, walking in their colored teams made the Gulf Road a vibrant sight to behold. It truly ended up being a group community activity.

6:35 p.m. – Ten hours after the children’s race, the main event was just about to get started. Each year NBK ends the Walkathon with a celebration at Green Island, with great giveaways and special hosts to present the show. Prizes were being awarded to the top 10 winners of each age group and in a few minutes the lucky winners of the grand car prize as well as the winner of Al Jawhara would be announced, live in front of the entire crowd that was anxiously waiting.

7:20 p.m. – The grand draw of Al Jawhara for KD 125,000 was announced. The lucky winner of the 2012 Al Jawhara draw will get a chance to win KD 250,000. In fact, the 2012 Walkathon event will include more exceptional surprises as this year marks NBK’s 60th anniversary; the first quarterly draw of KD 250,000 for Al Jawhara, and for the first time NBK will be giving away two convertible, Mazda and Peugeot 2012 model cars for the grand draw of the Walkathon.

9:00 p.m. –NBK volunteers stood on the grand stage, next to the brand new car, holding the key, and calling the winner on the phone as he had left fifteen minutes prior to the draw announcement.

The crowd grew silent as they waited for him to answer. All of a sudden, the winner picks up, to

the voice of 12,000 people yelling in unison, “YOU WON!” Stunned, his only reply was “I just left, I never win. I never expected to win, actually. I won the car!”

This year two lucky contestants will experience the unexpected. See you there!

Quick Facts Registration times 9 a.m – 1 p.m 4 p.m – 9 p.m Groups • Zaina Friends Club Race Red 5-6 years 1 km Yellow 7-8 years 1 km Green 9-11 years 1 km Blue 12-14 years 2 km

• Women’s Race ( 6 km) Light blue Age 15 – 20 Yellow Age 21 – 35 Red Age 36 – 49 Pink Age 50 and above

• Men’s Race ( 8 km) Dark blue Age 15 – 20 White Age 21 – 35 Green Age 36 – 49 Burgundy Age 50 and above Registration requirements: - Civil ID - A free checkup performed at registration by the Red Crescent to confirm eligibility - Race number and hat issued on day of registration

For more information, please visit www.nbk.com.

To connect with NBK, find them on facebook by visiting www.facebook.com/NBK.fans and twitter by following www.twitter.com/NBKPage and Instagram @nbkpage.

Spring-Ful Accessories

Mark the end of dark winter days, embrace the sun, inject some fun, and brighten up your wardrobe in the stylings of the online shopping haven, Goji Boutique.

Indoor or outdoors, spring will always be in your heart as long as you have the right accessories!

Models: Feda' Al Awadhi,

Joumana Soufi Styled by: Hawazen Al Buaijan Photographer: Othman Al Othman

top,Tucker necklace, Medina bib necklace from Dannijo left hand cuff, Daniela Zagnolli rings, GRIN by Anne Gedeon 80

Left: red top, Lauren Moshi necklace, Dannijo Galapagos right hand bracelets, GRIN by Anne Gedeon ring, GRIN by Anne Gedeon left hand stacked bracelets, Monserat de Lucca ring, GRIN by Anne Gedeon bag, Navago Onie Messenger from CC SKYE Right: top, E.VIL pants, Rachel Pally right hand bracelets(in order), Misfit from Haute Betts, Benj cuff, Maui bracelets, Benj cuff from Dannijo, Misfit from Haute Betts 81

blouse, Poca & Poca head piece, styled necklace by Shourouk bangles: All by GRIN by Anne Gedeon 82

green dress, Rachel Pally necklace, Katerina Psoma right hand stacked lanyard bracelets, nOir Jewelry left hand bracelets, Bakara from Shourouk scarf, Lemlem bag, Caravan Serail All pieces are available at: www.gojiboutique.com 83

MY CRAIG’S LIST MISADVENTURE

By Sumayyah Meehan

“I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror.” ~Edgar Allan Poe

Our world keeps getting smaller and smaller as the force of the Internet continues to erase boundaries, thus “shrinking” the globe to the size of a small village. Among other things, the Internet allows us to network, chat and play games.

However, the biggest draw of the Internet has to be shopping. Retailers, small business owners and even people selling their used wares have found a very comfortable selling niche online.

The bad news is that criminality is surging behind the scenes of some of the most popular e-commerce sites around. It’s no secret that some people routinely use eBay to sell stolen goods. And the frequency of Craig’s List being used to rob, maim and murder people is alarming to say the least. Most recently, the FBI linked a string of murders to a lone serial killer who uses Craig’s List to find his victims. It beguiles me that people still use Craig’s List to buy products and services. What’s most disturbing is that I took a chance and used it myself this past summer as I visited my family in the States. I narrowly escaped a sticky situation that could have only ended in two ways… a stint in the slammer or a slab in the morgue.

It all started when I had trouble renting a car without insurance. In frustration, I went to Craig’s List and found a gem of a car for the fraction of what 84

everyone else was offering. I called the phone number and a woman with a thick accent answered, “eellloo”?

In a matter of minutes I was on my way to her house, in the pitch-black darkness of the night, with only my elderly aunt as back up. I knew something was off when I saw the woman, who I have since named “Chiquita” due to her larger than life hair and stilettos that made her walk like she was dancing a mambo, come out of her home. She walked down a large driveway and backed the car I was interested in up near my aunt’s car. The first thing I noticed was that there was not a license plate. Could it be stolen I wondered?

I asked her why and she came up with some cockamamie story that she bought it for her daughter but never had time to get it registered. When I asked how many people owned it previously she came up with yet another story that was clearly made up and did not identify past owners. She also could not produce a bill of sale or title and the VIN number was nowhere to be found. I went on to inspect the vehicle, which was in great condition, until I got to the trunk.

Upon opening it, I was greeted by the stench of Clorox.

I pulled back the carpeting and it was sopping wet.

The worst was yet to come. I shone my cell phone light on the interior sides of the trunk, and the left one was riddle with dents. Kind of like dents that would be

made by someone stuffed in the trunk and left kicking for their life.

I slowly began backing up towards my aunt’s car as visions from Chainsaw Massacre popped into my head. Meanwhile, my aunt had fallen asleep and was completely oblivious to my impending demise.

Chiquita was hot on my heels encouraging me to come into her apartment where she would “look” for the title. I hopped in the car and promised to call her the next day.

The peeling of the tires cut through the increasingly dark night like a knife as my heart beat faster. I weaved through traffic and then it hit me. Not only did Chiquita have my phone number, but also had my address since I stupidly had mentioned the name of our condominium complex on the phone. I fully imagined her sneaking in at night and hacking me to pieces.

The minute I got home I called the state police and the detective I spoke with did not think my story was as ridiculous as I expected. I gave him Chiquita’s real name to which he only replied, “I know your girl.

We’ll handle it.” I have no idea what happened to Chiquita or if a crime was committed in that car. I do, however, chalk the experience up to a lesson learned about online safety. And while Craig’s List is available in Kuwait, I am thankful it is not as popular as it is back home.

BY ANY OTHER NAME: On naming baby

By B. Qureshi

After months of calling it “Baby Q,” I waited at the clinic to find out the sex of my first child. The baby squirmed near the placenta—showing us its head, its backside—refusing to open its legs. The doctor put down her scope and said that the baby would “probably be a girl.”

Probably a girl? But we already had three successive girls born into my husband’s family in the past two years. “I know you won’t be bothering me about changing diapers now,” my husband said.

I called my mother and asked her to return the dinosaur rompers and the corduroy pantsuits she had bought for what we hoped would be a boy, and asked her to err on the side of caution and buy ecru or yellow yarn to knit hats and booties. After that, I set down to the task we had waited these long months for, the supposedly fun search of an otherwise smooth second trimester: naming Baby Q. I had two pets in my entire life: a chick named Claudius and a Siamese fighting fish who died unnamed. I don’t have a gift for naming things, but it would seem easy enough: look online or through reliable books of Muslim names to find something that (a) reflects our cultural heritage, (b) sounds easy on the ear, (c) has either a meaning 86

we can live with, and (d) doesn’t suggest animals, because (my husband’s suggestion) humans are the supreme creation and shouldn’t be equated with beasts. Sounds easy enough, but this comes with lots of challenges. Let me show you why. Our conversation about the matter went something like this: He says: “I want the grandparents of both sides to have an equal right to naming the baby.”

I don’t. “My parents don’t want to name our baby.” What I don’t say: We’re having enough trouble coming to an agreement between the two of us without taking a community consensus. My mother named her first three children. My sister named my youngest sister. My cousins or my cousin’s wives named their own kids. Yet here is my husband, mired in the dust of empires with his old-fashioned thoughts, wanting to involve the old guard. In this way our latest niece spent the first three weeks of her life nameless. His family struggled through a slow debate, his mother suggesting the names of my sisters, which is only slightly better than my penchant for driving around Kuwait and calling out names written on beauty salon signboards. I mean, really.

“I like Safa.”

“I have a first cousin once removed named Safa. Besides, I thought we decided against S or T.” (My own silly superstition.)

“I don’t care.”

“Then why not Nadia?” (His cousin’s name.)

“Because I hate that name.”

“Rasha is nice and seems popular in Kuwait.”

“It means come here, singular, in Pashto.” This rules out Dana, Reem, Behnaz, and Abeer as names that sound bad in either Pashto, Urdu, or English. And let’s not go into the possible pronunciations of Shefaq.

Add this to the slew of parental preferences we have developed, to be appended to the above list of challenges: I prefer female names that are not derivatives of male names.

I also don’t want to name a baby after previous lovers—not mine or my husband’s, but anyone’s in our extended family, so as not to displease an uncle. We both like the old religious standards but think they’ve become common, so are willing to relegate them to a middle name. Also, no names of previous relatives, living or dead. New humans get new names.

In the argument of poetics versus meaning, both of us seem to prefer a pleasantsounding name with a neutral meaning, rather than a great yet discordant name. Since neither of us understands Persian, nor Arabic, nor Turkish, we don’t live with these words in our daily lives, so they seem foreign and unused to the ear. We repeat names until we get used to them. Every name sounds weird at first. Then, when you see the person it belongs to, it takes on a different connotation. A person makes his own name in this case, not, as my husband believes, that a strong meaning imputes its qualities onto a person.

I also know a lot of cousins who decided to borrow trendy names with deep meanings from their visits to Dubai, only to find out years later that they’ve been pronouncing their children’s names wrong altogether.

On the other hand, some names sound lovely, but we won’t be using them. “Little slave,” “slender body,” and “best flirt,” were a few of the translations of mellifluous names we came across. Hardly appropriate for daddy’s little girl.

In the end, I wished we could just name her Alif for first child, or look out the window and name her after the first thing I saw after the delivery (moonlight, two cats fighting), as I heard they used to do in some cultures.

In an interview, Jhumpa Lahiri, author of The Namesake, referred to the act of naming a child as the only immutable thing parents give their children. “But with $500 you can change your name to whatever you want,” my mother corrected me on the phone. And “Jhumpa Lahiri” itself is a penname. So there, I assured myself. Nothing is permanent.

Baby Q (or, as we now call her, Aysel-Fatima-Iraj-Iman-Jabeen) can fix matters herself if she wants, when she’s old enough.

But after all this, I’m going to laugh if Baby Q opens her legs and reveals she’s a boy.

bazaar psych

By Dr. Juliet and Dr. Nisrine

Do you have questions for a psychologist? Are you afraid or embarrassed to see one?

Well, we may have the answers you need! Now you can ask Dr. Juliet and Dr. Nisrine for psychological and social advice for free!

Dr. Nisrine

Dr. Juliet

Q. If a baby was born with a birth defect and he can't hear clearly without a hearing aid, will that lead to him being a slow learner?

A. If the hearing difficulty is not detected early, the child will undoubtedly experience difficulties with speech as well, as a child needs to hear the sounds of words, and how they are pronounced and articulated, so that he/she can produce them. Furthermore, if the hearing difficulty is not detected prior to the child attending school, he/she will experience learning difficulties given that he/she will be unable to hear and understand all of the information. Undetected hearing difficulties will also have a psychological impact on a child, as the child will feel disconnected, experience low self-esteem given the minimal information they have, and may have a strong negative reaction to school. Since it has been determined that your child was born with a hearing difficulty and requires a hearing aid, it is essential that he/she be using the hearing aid so as not to experience academic and emotional difficulties. It is also advisable that you consult on a routine basis with the physician and ENT specialist/ consultant to ensure that you have all the updated information and options for your child.

Q. What is the reason behind the increasing percentage of people with psychological illnesses nowadays?

A. It is important to remember that 20 years ago, people did not talk about psychological illnesses, and if an illness existed, people hid it from the public in fear of having others label and judge them. Today, we are more educated about psychological disorders and the shame that people once felt about being mentally stressed is significantly decreasing. It is also important to understand that there is a difference between psychological illnesses and psychological symptoms.

We all experience psychological symptoms in reaction to our surroundings and the stressors within our lives, however, we don’t all develop a psychological illness. In addition, each individual reacts differently, depending on their gender, biological makeup and life experiences. In our time and age, there is undoubtedly an increase in psychological symptoms in the form of depression, anxiety, and identity struggles, due to the growing global and regional difficulties. We

are bombarded with news from around the world given the advances in media technology and social networking.

In addition, people now are more stressed with making sense of what is happening around them, coupled with their own individual familial and societal concerns.

Q. How can someone overcome selfdestructive habits, as when a person starts hurting themselves psychologically by putting themselves down and punishing themselves for small mistakes?

It's like I have a perfectionist syndrome.

A. Perfectionist people have a hard time dealing with things that are not seen in their eyes as perfect.

They expect a lot of themselves and others. They are also often disappointed with themselves and will self-destruct because they believe they deserve it. Individuals who are very hard on themselves and constantly put themselves down have likely learned such behavior at home where parents put them down, make fun of them, criticize them, and/or emotionally or physically abuse them. These individuals learn to hate themselves because they felt they were hated at home and by the closest people to them.

Not all individuals who experience difficulties in their upbringing and within their surroundings will necessarily develop self-destructive patterns. However, everyone is in need of a good support system. Sometimes when we lack support, positive people around us, and we also experience external stressors, we find ourselves helpless and may start blaming ourselves for the problems we are experiencing. It is healthy to sit with ourselves and try to fix mistakes we have made, but it is quite self-destructive to constantly blame ourselves and bring ourselves down. Being perfectionistic and self-destructive is very psychologically damaging and individuals who suffer from this need to seek support and help.

Q. Does the unconscious mind have memories we don't want to remember, like there's a reason we can't remember a specific event or trauma?

A. Our mind is set up in a way to help us make sense of our world as it organizes information and stores it in different places, eventually assisting us in retrieving it when we need it. However, sometimes when we experience something very traumatic, our mind, in an effort to protect us in the moment, pushes the

experience far back into our unconscious storage area.

The traumatic event, however, needs to be dealt with and discussed because the trauma eventually will find its way into our conscious awareness and significantly impact our functioning. Some people seem to think that recovering an old and forgotten memory can be achieved through hypnotherapy. It is impossible to recover memory, especially one that involves trauma, through hypnotherapy. You can try to recover your unconscious memory by talking about the trauma and understanding the reasons behind your feelings, but sometimes the brain protects us against fear and resists any memory that may cause us pain that we can't handle.

Q. How does sleep affect our daily activity?

A. Sleep is a key factor that affects our daily activities. We need sleep to rest our body and brain so that we are able to function effectively. Difficulties with sleep lead to problems in concentration, attention, energy level, and mood. It also takes a toll on the physical functioning of our body, as it may impact oxygen levels and blood flow.

Q. If you have a friend with a drug addiction but they don't know or care about it, how can you help them realize that they have a problem?

A. As a good friend, the best that you can do is talk with your friend about your realizations and express to him/her that you care about them and would like them to get help. You can also provide them with referral sources for the problem and let them know that you are willing to support them during the process of therapy and rehabilitation. You have to understand, however, that many drug addicts will deny their problem and undermine it. Remember, all you can do is be a good friend and you can’t fix the problem or make you friend quit his/her addiction.

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For psychological advice, send your questions to dr.jdinkha@kaizen-kw.com. Please note that not all questions can be published. Dr. Juliet and Dr. Nisrine are bilingual and bicultural expert psychologists on various personal and social issues.

Visit www.kaizen-ke.com. or follow them on www.facebook.com/kaizen2q8.

bazaar fiction

THE STALLED WATER TRUCK And other impatience

By Craig Loomis

If they had decided to stop their conversation long enough to turn around and look out the coffee shop window, they would have seen one of those bulky water trucks slowing, and now edging towards the side of the road, and finally grinding to a halt; and if they had looked they would have seen cars lined up unhappily behind it, honking, flashing their lights. They would have seen the water truck driver throwing open his door, jumping out and scurrying to look at all four wheels. Of course the drivers waiting behind him care nothing for things like that, and so the honking continues. The truck driver is motioning that he can only do so much, raising both hands to beg for a little patience. “Sabr, sabr.” Now, done with the wheels, he climbs up to check the engine. Meanwhile, back at the coffee shop.

“Did I hear you right?”

“What?”

“That last part about him being married.”

“Yes, he is married.”

“Married?”

“Yes.” “And how about that other part?”

“What other part?”

“How he won’t divorce?”

“They’re separated, and have been for three years.

They might as well be divorced.”

“And he won’t divorce?”

“It’s complicated.”

“He won’t divorce, even though he loves you? He has said this to you, yes? ‘I love you? I want to share my life with you?’ If I remember right, people in love say things like this, yes?”

“Yes. But it’s complicated.”

The stalled water truck driver is motioning for the cars to go around, to stop honking and gesturing and rolling down their windows to yell at him, but to go around. It is very simple. And if the two of them had

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stopped talking long enough to listen, to push open the coffee shop window, they would have heard him saying, “Baseta, baseta.” It’s simple.”

“And you are ok with this: him not divorcing?”

“Yes.” “In essence you will be his second wife?”

“In essence.”

“His second wife.”

“They have been separated for years, I tell you.

She lives in Jordan, he is here. She has her own job, apartment, her parents are there. He can see the children anytime he wants, and in the summer they stay with him for two, three weeks. His two daughters are very cute. I have seen their photos. Very cute. It’s all set.”

“And you will be his second wife?”

“Yes, but I tell you it will be like his only wife, because he doesn’t talk to her except when it has something to do with the kids, and that is almost never.”

“All of this he has told you?”

“Yes, and I believe him. Why shouldn’t I? I have known him for years, even before he married.”

“Why not insist that he divorce? If he loves you, divorce is nothing. Start off fresh and new. Give yourself a chance.”

“But what if it doesn’t work?”

“What?”

“What if I insist he divorce and he does because he loves me and I love him and then, after we marry, it doesn’t work between us; in one or two years everything goes wrong and we separate, even divorce.

I would feel terrible because I was the one who insisted he divorce in the first place. Terrible.”

The stalled water truck driver is not a big man, and when he leans into the engine to see what the problem is, he looks even smaller, as if the truck, if it wanted to, could consume him in one watery truck gulp.

“You’re serious? What you just said, You’re serious?”

“Taba’an. Of course.”

“If he loves you, he should divorce. If I loved someone this is what I would do, say, but maybe he’s different.”

“No, he has said as much. But he has the two children.”

“Yes?” “What about them?”

“They live with their mother?”

“Yes.” “Whether divorced or not, seeing children does not change, does it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

You’re confusing everything.”

The water truck driver has stepped away from the engine and suddenly he is carrying a bucket and moving to the rear of the truck. And if the coffee shop window were still open, they would have heard the drivers behind him yelling, cursing. But the truck driver no longer cares because he is at the rear of the truck and there is a valve that he turns and water comes gushing out. He fills the bucket. Once it is full, he closes the valve and heads back to the engine.

“Everything was perfect until you started talking.”

“Sorry.”

“People like you don’t understand. Second wives are nothing in this part of the world. Nothing. Your one wife thinking is for another world, another culture.

It’s not the same here. Doesn’t have to be the same. If you love someone, other wives mean nothing. Being a daraya to someone else is nothing. You see? Nothing.”

Once he puts water in the truck’s radiator, the bucket disappears and he gets back into the truck.

He puts the water truck in gear and lurches back into traffic, almost hitting a car that is trying to get around him. One last time he sticks his hand out the window, and screams, “Sabr, habibi, sabr.”

“No, I don’t see.”

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POSITIVE FANTASIES HURT REAL-WORLD SUCCESS

By Robert Pagliarini

Be careful what you wish for. New research shows that if you dream of a better life for yourself, the more you fantasize about it, the less likely you are to actually achieve it.

I love it when an ironclad rule of pop psychology gets, well, popped. As in it gets proven wrong. When real researchers conduct experiments using the scientific method, they often find that what we've taken for the truth is actually dead wrong. Psychologists Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen recently published "Positive 92

Fantasies About Idealized Futures Sap Energy" in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Their conclusion? The more you visualize having accomplished a wonderful goal, the less likely you are to achieve it. Pop! Self-help books and goal-setting websites are flush with advice that the best way to achieve a

desired future is to first imagine it. Have a compelling goal? Visualize yourself having achieved it. See, touch and taste your success in this idealized future, and you will be more likely to do what it takes succeed. But researchers say this isn't what happens at all. In fact, the more you fantasize about having reached a goal, the less likely you are to do so. But how is this possible?

The problem is that you get an immediate benefit from this fantasy that you've created. You do such a good job visualizing it that it really feels as if you've achieved it. You get the bang without needing the buck.

When you come back to reality, in order to accomplish your goal, you have to put forth a lot of work, time and energy, but for what? To experience the joy of success?

Forget that - you've already experienced the joy and you didn't have to do anything for it.

So what's going on behind the scenes? According to Kappes and Oettingen, energy plays a key role in allowing us to pursue and achieve our desired futures.

When we are in fantasy land, we aren't visualizing the work involved. Think about it: What's your weight loss fantasy? Do you see yourself looking great in a swimsuit? Maybe having friends gush over how slim you look? Or possibly having someone flirt with you?

These make sense. There probably aren't too many of us that would rather fantasize about waking up before the sun rises to run in the cold or about the ache in our stomach from having cut out 25 percent of our calories.

"Positive fantasies allow people to mentally experience a desired future in the here and now, and such fantasies may deter people from mobilizing the energy that is needed to bring about their desired future," the researchers report.

Should you always avoid positive fantasies? No. If you don't want to achieve a goal, but simply want to feel good - a feeling of relaxation or contentment then positive fantasies work quite well. They provide a sense of satisfaction and euphoria that can temporarily elevate your mood.

If you want to increase your chances of reaching your goals, the best form of fantasy is a less idealized or less painless fantasy. Researchers suggest fantasies that are less positive. "Fantasies that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems and setbacks should be more beneficial for mustering the energy to attain actual success," the psychologists write.

In other words, to increase your chances of reaching your goals, fantasize more about the effort and less about the results. You may not get the temporary "high" from your fantasies, but you'll accomplish a lot more.

Š 2012 Distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.

CREATING AN OUTFIT WITH "VISUAL INTEREST"

By Megan K. Collins

I recently spotted a man wearing a floorlength black leather overcoat, black cowboy boots, and toting a beat-up, black leather briefcase. I had my own issues with the jacket - the man was exiting a subway in midtown Manhattan at 10 a.m., not working as Nicolas Cage's stunt double in Ghost Rider 2. He didn't need a black leather duster. No one does. But most importantly, he certainly didn't need to wear it with the briefcase and boots. All black leather everything - not a good look.

Have you ever heard the phrase " visual interest?" Perhaps an ar t museum guide used it to describe an abstract Picasso. Maybe a Realtor dropped the term when listing the features of a prospective home. Visual interest isn' t just for ar t and architecture, though. Guys should aim for visual interest on a much smaller scale - their wardrobes.

What does a visually interesting outfit look like? Don't get intimidated, I'm not suggesting you sport a blazer made of a Magic Eye painting, or pants covered in Astroturf. Neon lighting piped through the seams of your sweatshirt? Not quite.

Luckily, finding visual interest in your closet isn't as difficult as mastering Picasso's brushstrokes or appreciating the finer points of American Colonial style. It's actually pretty simple - the most compelling outfits are those that incorporate fabrics with different textures and colors. Just like eating the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day gets boring fast, so does wearing the same kind of clothes head to toe.

A visually interesting outfit could mean almost any mix of colors, prints and patterns. A corduroy sportscoat layered over a wool sweater, layered over an oxford cotton button-down shirt. A striped shirt with a pin-point tie. Bright red socks peeking out from between brown brogues and gray trousers. Even if you want to wear one color all over, you can still switch up the fabrics - like grey wool slacks with a charcoal cashmere sweater over a heather grey cotton T-shirt.

So the next time you get dressed, consider adding a few new elements to your outfit - like a shirt and tie combo in complementary colors or patterns. Even a new pocket square will shake things up. It might not be Picasso, but you'll have people studying your style in no time. Š 2012 Distributed by MCT Information Services.

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TOTALLY GLEEKING IT UP: Don’t judge me until you’ve tried it!

By Lily K

As much as I tried to fight or deny it, I have officially become a ‘Gleek’. A Gleek is a person that watches and enjoys the very popular American TV show, Glee. It feels good to finally admit it to myself, out loud, and in print. Not good enough to make me divulge my real name or anything, but it’s a start.

I know my love for Glee developed a little late, seeing that the show is in the middle of its third season, but this was due to my diehard aversion to anything Glee.

I wouldn’t watch the show or listen to their music on YouTube; I would even get annoyed with its mention in commercials. I went as far as to judge those who watched Glee and even pondered ending a few friendships because of it. But when a good friend of mine forced me to watch the first episode, I was instantly hooked.

This show has all the components for a successful TV musical: It is overly optimistic, it has loads of sappy 96

situations and dialogue and, of course, a lot of happy music and hyper choreography. But Glee offers so much more; it is funny and witty and tackles touchy issues with careless abandon. No topic is off limits, from racism, gender inequality to OCD. I am totally hooked and obsessed with these fictional characters and have to know what happens in their scripted lives. Will Rachel and Finn stay together? Does Britney still believe in Santa Clause and Leprechauns?

Will Mr. Schuester and Ms. Pillsbury finally get married and of course will the glee team make it to Nationals?

This show should start with a warning: Watching this show is highly addictive and may cause unexpected cheerfulness and dancing. Watching multiple episodes will cause a noticeable change in your mood and lead to the belief in ‘where there is a will, there is a way’. Also an overdose of optimism might cause you to trust that the

world is a great place where dreams come true.

So what if I like hearing their ‘mash-up’ of Madonna or their tribute to Michael Jackson? So what if I get fashion tips from the show and download their music to my iPod? I like Glee and I’m not afraid to show it (still not going to divulge my real name though).

Even when I was watching the show as a skeptic I couldn’t help but sing along to the music and secretly root for the Glee team. The overly basic life lessons like ‘let’s all get along’ and ‘we are all equal’ are simplistic in nature, but need to be reiterated every once in a while.

I was the biggest Glee hater around, but I have been converted and have become a missionary; spreading the Glee message of joy, singing, hopefulness and dance. Glee has helped me see the bright, entertaining, optimistic light, and maybe it can do the same for you.

Watch Glee!

NUCLEAR STRESS

By Bassam N. Shuhaibar, Ph.D.

Radioactivity is the epitomical boogeyman.

You can’t see, smell, taste or touch it. It could be lurking literally anywhere. And for most people, the idea of it scares the living daylights out of them.

What most people don’t realize is that, like the boogeyman, those fears are founded on perpetuated myths and fierce exaggerations. Moreover, the main participants in its propagation cannot be specifically singled-out as they range from politicians to nongovernmental organizations to (especially) the mass media. The perfect and most recent example of this is the frenzy that followed in the wake of the unprecedented natural disasters that befell Japan earlier last year.

On March 11th 2011, the northeastern coast of Japan was subjected to a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a resulting 14 meter tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of people were affected; lands were inundated; livelihoods were lost. However, and in spite of all these catastrophic consequences, the focus of the world shifted to Fukushima Daiichi, a six-unit nuclear power plant located along the affected coastline. Reports of power losses to the plant coupled with a hydrogen-fueled 98

explosion at one of the units prompted the mass media outlets of the word to scramble for ratings-worthy images and reports. Adjectives such as “catastrophe” and “crisis” were repeated ad nauseam. It was Chernobyl 2.0, a sequel 25 years in the making.

Never mind the tens of thousands dead or missing as a result of mother nature’s deadly one-two punch; Fukushima Daiichi and all its horrors was where it was at.

However, the reality surrounding the accident started to become apparent long before the dust began to settle: avoidable plant design issues, ignored previous warnings and severely underestimated risks are but a few examples. Unavoidably, and not to mention naturally, emotions overrode rationale, and fears were seized upon by “vindicated” environmental groups and political parties alike. The global fallout was as swift as it was intensive, bolstering the nuclear community into action. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had several high-level meetings throughout the year. Many of its Member States who actually employ nuclear power in their energy mix called for blanket safety reviews, or “stress tests,” of their fleets. Several

countries, most notably Germany, even went as far as to scrap their existing or planned nuclear programs altogether. Fukushima had coughed, and the rest of the world was contracting pneumonia.

Kuwait was not immune to this pandemic. Caught between a rock (the volatile political environment) and a hard place (the Fukushima Daiichi accident), the Kuwait National Nuclear Energy Committee (KNNEC) was dissolved a few months after the accident. Formed by an Amiri Decree in early 2009, and spurred on by the looming energy crisis that had manifested itself in the form of load-shedding summertime blackouts, KNNEC had been tasked with exploring the potential of adding nuclear to the energy mix of Kuwait. Such a project was not without its critics, of course, and in this case their voices outmatched those who saw the benefits that Kuwait could reap from its introduction.

Almost one year post-Fukushima Daiichi, the hype surrounding the accident has been tempered, but the re-ignited skepticism surrounding nuclear energy safety has not. Heated debates and animated discussions pertaining to the entire industry continue

with much fervor and intensity throughout Kuwait, especially during the ongoing and politically-charged electoral climate. That being said, there are a number of arguments or talking points that are repeatedly brought up by nuclear power skeptics in the country, each with its own rational and factual response as presented below: • Kuwait is an oil-producing country. Why on Earth would we need any other energy source when we have one immediately and readily available?

It is precisely because of the abovementioned reason, and not in spite of it, that an alternative such as nuclear power should be considered. Oil exports represent more than 90% of the generated revenue of Kuwait. Quite simply, it is the country’s bloodline.

Of the three million barrels or so being produced

by Kuwait today (under OPEC quota regulations), approximately 12% of it is being used domestically for energy generation and water desalination. This value is projected to rise to 20% by 2030. In other words, one out of every five barrels produced will be consumed within Kuwait to meet its energy demands, potential revenue literally going up in smoke. Why would we consciously carry out such an exercise instead of trying to conserve this precious resource for as long as humanly possible?

The average price of oil will most probably increase over time for the foreseeable future, and it is our moral and ethical responsibility to exploit this fact so that future generations can benefit from the same quality of life that ours enjoyed.

• Kuwait is a country that is practically basking in the sun year-round. Why would we even consider nuclear when renewable energy sources like solar are available?

It is very easy to see why this argument is one of the first to be made when discussing the different possible sources of energy generation for the country. Kuwait’s geographical location and desert climate automatically invoke images of endless sunlight beating down on sand dunes and coastline alike. It is therefore only logical that solar energy be harnessed in order to solve the country’s looming energy issues, right?

Wrong. What most people tend to overlook is the one persistent problem that plagues the country virtually all year long: dust. In order for solar energy technology to be most effective, it must exploit the maximum amount of incident sunlight. Once there is any form of obstruction to that light, be it cloud cover, suspended dust particles or a film of sand covering a solar panel, the energy conversion efficiency is drastically reduced. This is in addition to the monetary costs accrued through the related maintenance and clean-up.

There are many other factors to bear in mind as well: land area availability; problems of power storage; already-low efficiency of existing technology; and daytime-only utilization are but a few examples.

Even the most optimistic estimates state that it will be at least ten years before solar power technology is

economically feasible enough to be competitive with other energy sources. What do we do to bridge that gap in the meantime? If anything, wind has shown much more promise as an alternative energy source for Kuwait, but even then it would only supplement the current supply during the summer months. What happens when demand grows to the point where substantial supplementation is no longer possible?

Most importantly, how does one manage the power supply on gray, overcast, windless days?

• A major nuclear accident befell Japan, one of the world’s most advanced nations and its third largest economy. If it happened to a country like that, who are we to attempt such a thing?

There is no denying that the Fukushima Daiichi accident was the worst nuclear emergency since Chernobyl 25 years earlier. Whilst the latter was much more far-reaching and impactful than the former, the underlying reasons for both lie firmly in the flaws of human error. In the case of Chernobyl, negligent operators and an “open-top” nuclear reactor facility were the ingredients for disaster, which was ultimately the result.

Fukushima Daiichi, on the other hand, had a string of unfortunate historical gaffes associated with it that eventually constituted the perfect storm. Its 30+ years of age aside, and amongst a plethora of other issues, several investigations have revealed that historical data pertaining to potential tsunami wave heights had been ignored. This caused the sea wall protecting the facility to be severely under-designed; in fact, its height was less than half of the actual incoming tidal wave. This allowed water to flood the basement which housed the back-up diesel generators responsible for sustaining the critical cooling water required to keep the reactor at safe temperatures. So even though the facility had withstood the earthquake and its electricity supply had been restored post-automatic shutdown, cost-cutting ended up being the main culprit in its final undoing.

Today, the facts are such that the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima Daiichi could never be replayed in the same way. Advances in technology mean that the industry is no longer employing units of the type seen at either of those facilities (dubbed “Generation II”). Rather, the state-of-the art has reached Generation III+ (Gen III+), with research into Generation IV types already firmly underway. Gen III+ technical specifications include the ability to withstand direct impacts from commercial airliners, “passive” cooling capabilities that utilize gravity as opposed to electricity, and sophisticated shutdown systems, amongst a multitude of other safety features. These advances in technology coupled with the lessons learned from either accident mean drastically reduced safety risks for future nuclear power plants. Put another way, the technological advancements are analogous to a Cessna-style aircraft vs. an Airbus A380: which would you rather fly on?

• What about other major countries like Germany, who have practically scrapped their nuclear power

program altogether?

As with any other overtly sensitive topic, nuclear power and its potential risks can be highly politicized.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where opposition government parties and environmental organizations alike have plunged head-first into the wake of Fukushima Daiichi.

In the world of politics, this was a major blow to Chancellor Merkel and her already tenuous coalition government, who had pledged commitment to nuclear power throughout her campaign. Practically speaking, however, this is a major gamble being taken by the Germans: success would ensure that renewable energy technology (RET) can be a huge winner on a national scale, prompting the mass export of locally developed and manufactured RET systems and components. Failure, on the other hand, would strengthen the case for nuclear energy across the international spectrum, in turn vindicating global pro-nuclear government officials and lobbyists alike: this could greatly lessen future German credibility and influence within all aspects the energy industry.

What many people tend to hear very little about is how Germany is planning to make up the energy demand shortfall that will be created once nuclear power is finally taken off the grid. Part of it involves constructing more conventional coal-run power plants, thus contributing additional pollutants to an already overstressed environment. The other part involves importing energy from France, a country which meets 80% of its energy demands using – wait for it – nuclear power.

What’s wrong with this picture?

• How would the wastes generated be ultimately disposed of?

Most nuclear facilities have on-site waste storage facilities for what are termed “low level waste (LLW)” and “intermediate level waste (ILW)” as classified by the IAEA. However, high level waste (HLW) and spent fuel would have to be ultimately disposed of, probably by burial in underground geological repositories. All these issues can be sorted out by bilateral and multilateral international agreements. Given that spent fuel requires decades of storage on-site before it can be transported, a very well-studied and executed solution can be reached within that timeframe.

Irrespective of the above, the fact remains that Kuwait has an energy demand that is only getting larger by the year. Alternatives must be sought in order to ensure that it is met, unless we plan on exhausting our precious natural resources that much sooner. The emphasis today is on clean, competitive and accessible energy sources. Nuclear energy meets those criteria and more, whilst allowing Kuwait to continue enjoying its much envied standard of living for several generations to come. When our grandchildren are old enough, will we be able to look them in the eye and tell them we did everything we could to ensure the same applied to them? Not at this rate.

It’s very hard to do that when you’re sitting in the dark.

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desert vents

LOVE/HATE STREET

By Selim Savsar

There is no denying that Kuwait has (or had) a well planned out road system. The fact that it cannot sustain the amount of traffic we are experiencing nowadays only speaks to the lack of infrastructural development, but that doesn't detract from the fact that the roads have been laid out in a meticulously organized manner. Just look out the airplane window when arriving (especially at night), you will be in awe of the stark contrast between the glow of a man made system and the dark back drop of the desert. The endlessly straight roads, cut in perfect right angles and tied together with circular 'ring' roads, all of them adorned with perfectly spaced out shimmery street lights, are both visually and geometrically appealing.

The roads, to me, are more than just means of transportation or tarred manifestations of civil work.

Getting us from point A to point B may be their true purpose and functionality but I always seek out experiences along the way. I can, unabashedly, make the statement 'I love to cruise' (and come to think of it, maybe even have it printed out on a shirt with the 'I heart NY' design). There is one road, however, whose regulars would probably flip that statement to 'I cruise to love'. I'm talking, of course, about the second ring road, infamously known as Love Street. Westerners with an interest in the acid music genre and a yearning for another Summer of Love will be reminded of the 100

song with the same name by The Doors but, sadly, the images aren't as surreal and the dialogues taking place aren't as poetic. The youth of Kuwait (a very vaguely defined demographic) flock to this road, especially on weekends, to impress the ladies with their lavish cars and try their luck at striking up conversations.

Culturally speaking, there are conflicting opinions on the acceptability of premarital relationships but the trouble doesn't lie in such debatable matters.

The issues that do bother me, and anyone who has traversed this road will nod their heads in agreement, are as follows. To start off with, the reckless driving that results from such hormone induced adventures puts everyone at risk of traffic accidents. I wouldn't want my eulogy to read 'died caught in the crossfire of a romance-to-be' and neither would anyone who happened to have been using the road for its one and only purpose. Putting aside the chances of death or suffering injuries (hard to do really), the discomfort that comes from falling under the curious inspection of the guys around me (and the disappointed glare that follows once my masculinity has been confirmed) becomes harder to bear with every passing car. Keeping in mind that some come in groups, the simultaneous, almost orchestrated look of disapproval gives off the feeling of having let down an audience! I do, however, have it easier than members of the fairer

sex. When I actually do catch a glimpse of these boys in action, I have mixed feelings of confusion and anger. Bafflement and resentment. Feelings that can be summed up in the following question/statement: Since when was it ok to throw snide remarks at women in hopes of catching their attention and maybe even their hearts? I thought poking fun and diagnosing girls with contagious diseases conjured up by our wild imagination would've faded upon completion of elementary school. Past immaturity, some of the remarks I hear are derogatory, abusive, and sometimes even threatening! I become even more confused when I actually see girls dolled up and making the rounds themselves.

To isolate myself from the confusion and to sigh a deep breath of conscience relief I will sum up my advice to the perpetrators (categorized by gender) as: Ladies: Do yourself and your gender a favor and take the nearest exit and try your utmost best to avoid this jungle, especially on weekends.

Men: Use the abundance of energy (and gasoline) elsewhere. Expend the energy on a business venture, a charity, self-development, or even exercise. Maybe run along Love Street and you might, with the mental clarity exercise provides, fall in love with an idea that pops to mind and turn it into a lifelong passion. The impression you leave on the ladies is ephemeral, but the legacy you leave behind is eternal.

two cents

Loaay’s Two Cents Got business problems or challenges at work? With his Two Cents column, Loaay Ahmed shares his expertise in strategic management consulting to help managers, employees and entrepreneurs thrive.

Q

Our company has recently released a new service without giving any instructions or guidance to customers, which caused a lot of confusion. What's the best way to regain the confidence of our customers while fixing the problem?

LA: Would Brazil have won most of the World Cup championships in history if management and players didn’t work together? Would home-garage startup Apple have grown to be one of the largest listed companies on the NASDAQ if they didn’t communicate with their teams and excite their customers? Not possible. The key to prevent or minimize negative experiences for customers is to communicate with them as soon as possible. Naturally, instructions, demos, FAQ’s and How-To material should’ve been prepared ahead of the service release date not to spike calls to the Call Center or the customer care lines or generate needless negative word of mouth. Having said that, don’t faint and lose hope.

Here’s an actual story that you can learn from to improve your customers’ experience. Keep reading.

A few years ago, on a beautiful sunny busy Monday, the Piccadilly Line at the London Tube Gloucester Road Station was not operating. As a responsible organization that appreciates and values the time of the public, TFL (Transport for London) have a clear policy on communication and that’s to keep it immediate and honest. So, near the elevator a large poster displayed a letter from the station manager explaining how a sudden technical failure occurred and that urgent maintenance was required. The most interesting part about that letter is that it started and ended with a sincere apology and in the middle it had a full explanation, alternative temporary routes and taking full responsibility for the incident.

When the damage is done you can’t take it back, but you can show customers respect by honoring their pain and fixing the problem…and that’s just my two cents.

Q

Firing is a lot of drama in our company. Employees are in shock. The fired person throws a fit. Some managers badmouth the ex-employee and exit interviews are too theoretical to handle such a mess.

What are the best ways to manage the firing nightmare?

LA: Firing is not fun unless you are Donald Trump in The Apprentice.

The best way to get out of any problem is to avoid getting into it in the first place. I’m not saying don’t fire anyone ever, but rather set the policies and processes you need to avoid soap opera episodes or at least reduce them. Let’s start with the ‘fired employees being shocked’ part. Unless your company is doing mass layoffs, employees’ shock when they’re fired is an indication that there isn’t much guidance, coaching and constructive dialog going on between managers and their staff. If you never told an employee what’s wrong in their performance or worked with them on how

to fix it, and then give them a hidden ninja punch (i.e. fire them), shock is an understatement. The fit is also a spontaneous defensive reaction to save their image among colleagues, which is provoked by the sneakiness of the manager’s kiss of death.

To minimize the firing fiasco hire better people that fit well within your brand’s culture in terms or personality and behavior. Chances are you’ll have to fire less of that bunch that already is a good match for your business. As for the managers, badmouthing ex-employees this is an ethically wrong and professionally stupid action. Current employees will not be happy about that because they will assume their managers are saying similar things about them to other employees or managers. It is a stupid move for the manager’s own reputation to be unprofessional. One day, an employee of his might end up as his boss in a future job somewhere or even a client. Rule of mouth is never talk about someone unless you’re about to say something positive, true and important…and that’s just my two cents.

Q

We're dealers for a photographic cameras brand.

Because our sales volumes are much smaller compared to the US dealers our prices are not as attractive. While many customers still purchase from us, some visit us but then decide to buy online. The Internet is killing our business. What can we do when our cost is higher than online selling prices?

LA: Price is what you pay for something. Value is what you receive from your purchase. Instead of focusing on price, let’s talk value.

There are some obvious benefits that you can highlight. For example, customers who purchase online won’t enjoy the local warranty in many cases. The convenience of walking away immediately with the camera is an advantage over waiting a week or two to use it. However, on a deeper level, offering a free or discounted local photography club membership with certain benefits and tips for local purchasers of the brand might be exciting enough to attract some. Maybe offering an automated monthly installment for three to ten months with no interest on the higher-end models can be a winning factor for others since they have to pay 100% upfront online before their camera is shipped.

You can also negotiate with dealers in neighboring countries to make collective orders to lower the cost of all your products or at least some of your most commonly ordered items. As customers have a choice so do you. Instead of competing on price, which is a losing battle, compete on other grounds to win the war…and that’s just my two cents.

For Loaay Ahmed's advice on business or work matters, send a short email to loaay@knightscapital.com. Please note that only the questions chosen for publishing will be answered.

Loaay Ahmed is a management consultant and strategic expert. To learn more about Loaay and his consulting service, strategic business therapy, visit www.knightscapital.com.

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SILK ROAD Friday brunch at The Regency By bazaar staff

Let me start by telling you, this is a buffet brunch unlike any other. Inspired by the trade route that led from Europe through Africa and Asia, this magnificent smorgasbord of amazing dishes from around the world will leave you impressed and very satisfied.

Held every Friday afternoon from 12:30pm until 2:30pm at the Regency Hotel, this brunch event is not to be missed. In fact, it can easily become a regular place to meet with family and friends over a delicious and leisurely meal. The selection of food is impressive, the service is perfect and it is clear that every small detail has been carefully thought through and considered.

Upon arrival, guests are greeted with a glass of sparkling apple juice, to be followed by a selection of cocktails from the top-notch bar. Feeling like you can conquer the world? The Bloody Mary (with green chili galore) is the drink not to miss.

An extensive seafood buffet that includes sashimi and sushi, and poached, cured and smoked salmon, among a variety of other delights, greets you as you enter. Or you can start at the US-style salad bar - pick your items, select your dressing, and ask the salad chef to toss it for you. Craving some Middle Eastern salads? The selection here comes highly recommended! Top up your plate with a side of fresh bread or focaccia from the extensive variety on display, and head back to your table to enjoy the start of your meal.

If you liked a particular sushi dish, or are craving something specific, walk up to the sushi station and ask the chef to create something especially for you.

Brunching with young children? Don’t worry about taking turns supervising the kids while your partner gets their food. The highly considerate people at Silk Road have brought in high chairs on wheels that swivel across the marble floors with such ease, so that all members of the family, with kids in tow, can enjoy their buffet experience together.

Moving onto the barbeque selection, the rib eye and the tenderloin are two cuts that simply must be tried. The flavor and perfection of these cuts can rival the best steak house in town any day.

The traditional qouzi prepared at the Silk Road is fresh, and full of aromatic spices. Try it out, and then move onto the Egyptian koshari station. Rice, lentils and pasta, topped with tomato sauce and just the right amount of toppings… bliss!

Now it’s time to move onto the hot plate section, where you can enjoy over a dozen carefully prepared dishes to your heart’s content. Our favorite, hands down, was the aubergine cannelloni in saffron sauce.

Yes, it was that good. Chapeau, Chef Austen, for your recommendations as well as for the love and care that have obviously gone into each and every dish.

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While you enjoy your dessert, whether it’s from the Italian / western section or from the Middle Eastern desserts, you will most definitely not be disappointed either way, the in-house magician will make rounds to your table to show a few tricks and offer up-close and personal entertainment. Once you’re done with your meal, a henna artist and face painter will also pass by to check on the children and offer their services.

What an amazing experience. We visited this restaurant as a family, and we were not disappointed.

In fact, we’re still talking to our friends about how great the food was, and how hospitable and welcoming the staff is. We can’t wait until next Friday!

Silk Road is located at The Regency. For more information or to make a reservation please call 2576 6666 or log onto www.theregencykuwait.com.

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‫�أو�سكار كويتي‬ ‫بقلم‪ :‬عبدالعزيز الحشاش‬

‫هل نحن بحاجة إلى جائزة رفيعة المستوى ذات شأن كبير‬ ‫في مجال الفن في دولة الكويت ؟ الجواب بكل بساطة ‪ :‬نعم ‪..‬‬ ‫إننا في أمس الحاجة في هذا الزمن الراهن لتكون‬ ‫لدينا جائزة رفيعة المستوى في مجال الفنون و السينما‬ ‫و الدراما التلفزيونية لتقدم ألولئك الذين يسعون لتغيير‬ ‫مسار الفن في دولة الكويت ‪.‬‬ ‫كانت الكويت وال تزال رائدة في مجال الدراما والمسرح‬ ‫و اإلذاعة ‪ ..‬و المستقبل يبشر بالخير‪ ،‬فقريبا سنسمع عن‬ ‫أفالم سينمائية تحرك المياه الراكدة ‪ .‬إذا لماذا ال يكون‬ ‫لدينا جهة معنية تتبنى جائزة رفيعة المستوى على غرار‬ ‫جوائز األوسكار و تقدم ألولئك المبدعين و الفنانين ؟‬ ‫تعالوا نتعرف معا على جائزة األوسكار ‪:‬‬ ‫الجهة المانحة للجائزة هي أكاديمية فنون وعلوم‬ ‫الصور المتحركة التي تعد أكاديمية فخرية وليست‬ ‫تعليمية تأسست في ‪ 11‬مايو ‪ 1927‬في كاليفورنيا وتضم‬ ‫هذه األكاديمية أكثر من ‪ 6000‬عضو مختص بالفنون‬ ‫السينمائية منهم لجنة تصويت ضخمة تتكون من ‪5,816‬‬ ‫ممثل وممثلة ومختصون في السينما منهم ‪ 1311‬ممثلون‬ ‫وممثالت‪ .‬وتنظم األكاديمية إضافة إلى تنظيم مسابقات‬ ‫جوائز األوسكار السنوية مسابقات سنوية للطالب‬ ‫غير المتخرجين بعد من الجامعات المختصة بالفنون‬ ‫السينمائية‪ .‬كان المهرجان الذي أقيم في ‪ 5‬مارس ‪2006‬‬ ‫المهرجان الثامن والسبعين في تاريخ األكاديمية‪ .‬وتنافس‬

‫في ذلك المهرجان الفيلم الفلسطيني الجنة اآلن مع ‪5‬‬ ‫افالم أخرى للحصول على جائزة أفضل فيلم غير أمريكي‪.‬‬ ‫لم يتفق المؤرخون على أصل كلمة "أوسكار" غير أنه‬ ‫يشاع أن امينة مكتبة األكاديمية مارغريت هاريك قالت‬ ‫عندما شاهدت التمثال الول مره عام ‪" : 1928‬انه يشبه‬ ‫عمي اوسكار"‪ .‬البعض يقول أن الممثلة الراحلة بيت‬ ‫ديفيس اطلقت االسم نسبة إلى زوجها األول‪.‬‬ ‫لكي يرشح الفيلم في هذا المهرجان يجب أن يكون‬ ‫الفيلم قد تم عرضه في صاالت السينما في كاليفورنيا‬ ‫في السنة السابقة من ‪ 1‬يناير إلى ‪ 31‬ديسمبر ويجب أن‬ ‫يكون طول الفيلم اليقل عن ‪ 40‬دقيقة لكي يتنافس على‬ ‫جائزة األفالم الطويلة واال فسوف يصنف كفيلم قصير‬ ‫ويجب كذلك ان يكون حجم الفيلم الذي صور عليه العمل‬ ‫السينمائي اما ‪ 35‬ملمتر أو ‪ 70‬ملمتر‪ .‬تصدر الترشيحات‬ ‫عادة أوئل شهر فبراير من كل عام‪ ,‬وهذه الترشيحات‬ ‫تصدر لجوائز السنة‪.‬‬ ‫ينظم عادة مهرجان توزيع األوسكار سنويا في شهر‬ ‫مارس في صالة مسرح كوداك في مدينة لوس انجلوس‬ ‫‪,‬كالفورنيا‪ .‬ويعتبر هذا الحدث من األحداث التي تحظى‬ ‫بتغطية اعالمية واسعة ومشاركة الكثير من الشركات‬ ‫الكبرى التي تحاول استخدام ليلة المهرجان لترويج‬ ‫منتجاتها من المالبس والزينة وفي بعض األحيان يستخدم‬ ‫المهرجان للتعبير عن أراء سياسية مثيرة للجدل من قبل‬

‫الحائزين على األوسكار‪ .‬مثل رفض الممثل الشهير مارلون‬ ‫براندو الحصول علي جائزة أفضل ممثل بسبب موقف‬ ‫حكومة الواليات المتحدة من الهنود الحمر [‪ .]1‬وأيضا‬ ‫أثناء حفل توزيع الجوائز عام ‪ 2003‬حينما ندد العديد من‬ ‫الفائزين بالحرب علي العراق السيما المخرج مايكل مور‬ ‫الذي حاز علي جائزة أفضل فيلم وثائقي ‪.‬‬ ‫هذا االهتمام بالفن و تقديره و هذه االستعدادات و‬ ‫هذا االمتداد التاريخي لهذه الجائزة يجعلنا نتسائل متى‬ ‫يكون في الكويت جائزة رفيعة المستوى على غرار جائزة‬ ‫األوسكار لتقدير الفن الكويتي و تشجيع فنانين الكويت‬ ‫وكل مبدع فيها في مجال الفنون سواء الدراما التلفزيونية‬ ‫أو السينما ‪.‬‬ ‫لدينا في الكويت مهرجان مسرحي أو ربما أكثر ‪ ..‬و‬ ‫لكننا نفتقد لمهرجان تلفزيوني على غرار جوائز الجرامي‬ ‫و جوائز ‪People choice awards‬‬ ‫نحن بحاجة لتقدير الفن ‪ ..‬و تحفيز الطاقات و المبدعين‬ ‫و أصحاب المواهب التي تتميز فيها بلدنا الكويت ‪.‬‬ ‫و بانتظار ذلك اليوم ‪..‬‬ ‫للتواصل مع عبد العزيز الحشاش على موقع تويتر‪:‬‬

‫‪@aziz_alhashash‬‬

‫‪106‬‬

THIS YEAR'S KILLER APP Pen and paper

By Mark W. Smith

The surging smartphone has succeeded in rendering many other gadgets obsolete. The alarm clock? Who needs one? The GPS navigation system? Why pay for one when you can get turnby-turn for free? But there's something big that the smartphone, try as it might, has not been able to stare down into oblivion: pen and paper.

Even as we scramble to replace our daily activities with simplified digital solutions, there's still nothing quite like writing something down.

Mobile interfaces, even for the agile-thumbed, can be cumbersome. Devices like the Apple iPad are popping up in more boardrooms, but anyone who tries to take notes or manage a calendar on one quickly runs into problems. The novelty factor quickly fades as men and women in suits struggle to thumb in notes during important meetings.

Still, one of the most competitive app categories today is productivity and task management. It seems every week there's a hot new app that promises to streamline our digital lives, linking things like to-do lists and calendars to help keep us focused. Apple's Siri digital personal assistant, baked into the iPhone 4S, includes a much-hyped feature to help add reminders to a calendar. In fact, that's where this column began a list of the best apps to help you stay on task.

But even this tech columnist, who spends an embarrassing amount of time each day perched behind screens of all sizes, quickly came to a realization.

There's still nothing better than paper.

BEST TOOL FOR THE JOB The pen and paper have found an unlikely ally in Detroit-based designer and developer David Klawitter. Even as he works to create innovative digital interfaces for the Web and mobile devices, his process is decidedly analog.

His designs begin as a sketch on paper, many of which are often spread across his desk in the newly

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renovated Detroit Labs offices inside the M@dison - a Dan Gilbert-owned building.

Only after Klawitter's ideas are fleshed out does he begin building app interfaces on a computer. For Klawitter, paper is the only way to ensure he's allowing himself to sketch freely, without the constraints that come with a computer mouse or tablet screen. "You don't focus on the details," he says. "Just put the bulk of the work down." And as someone who designs interfaces for mobile devices, Klawitter realizes that he's asking people to do something cumbersome. "The input of information is still a little strange," Klawitter says. "It doesn't feel right."

POCKET-SIZED CHARM This friction is not lost on Field Notes, a brand of notebooks - we're talking about actual, paper notebooks here - that has seen its sales increase steadily the last few years, even as the legion of

smartphone owners also grows.

There's a charm to Field Notes - my favorite notebook. They're modeled after promotional notebooks once given to farmers by seed companies in the 1930s and '40s, says brand manager Michele Seiler. "Everything has become so digitized, that this is sort of deliciously analog," Seiler says. "You can hold it in your hand and write it down and it fits in your back pocket. I think people like the nostalgia of that."

That pocket-sized charm has propelled Field Notes to a darling status of sorts in the movement to push back on some of the digital intrusions in our lives.

So it's OK - join the steady numbers of people reaching for the pen and paper. Reports of their demise - death by app, apparently - have been greatly exaggerated. Š Distributed by MCT Information Services.

bazaar around town PORSCHE CENTRE KUWAIT CELEBRATES THE ARRIVAL OF THE NEW 911 CARRERA Highly anticipated new Porsche 911 makes its national debut with exclusive evening gala Porsche Centre Kuwait, Behbehani Motors Company, celebrated the arrival of the new 911 Carrera and Carrera S Coupé with a thrilling reveal show at Arraya Ballroom. The icon, highly anticipated by sports car aficionados and now available in its seventh generation, has undergone a complete re-design. Approximately 800 guests were invited to be part of the exclusive gala event and see live the new 911 generation reveal. With an incredible 3D show demonstrating the 48-year history of the 911 series, the involvement of regional racing heroes from the Porsche owned GT3 Cup Challenge Middle East, a high-tech product presentation and a virtual tour on the famous Nordschleife of the Nürburgring, the audience’s emotions rose high before the cars appeared surprisingly from literally beneath all guests.

The new 911 Carrera, many said could never be bettered, features now a flatter, stretched silhouette, exciting contours and precisely designed details. Its wheelbase is now 100 millimetres longer, sits lower to the ground and consequently offers even better handling dynamics for more driving pleasure of 911 connoisseurs. But not only on the outside, has the iconic sports car been transformed. Porsche’s Design team from Weissach created a completely new interior based on cues from the Porsche Carrera GT. The driver is now even more closely integrated with the cockpit thanks to the centre console rising up to the front with the high-mounted shift lever located especially close to the steering wheel in typical motor sport fashion. With the new 911 Carrera the span of apparently contradictory attributes that have typified the Porsche 911, such as performance and efficiency, sportiness and everyday practicality has been even further extended.

First deliveries of the new Porsche 911 Carrera and Carrera S Coupé started in February 2012. Basic retail prices in Kuwait are as follows: 911 Carrera Coupé 26,900 Kuwaiti Dinar 911 Carrera S Coupé 31,900 Kuwaiti Dinar

KROMOZONE FROM YUSUF A. ALGHANIM & SONS sponsors the 8th Kuwait Bike Show KromOzone, one of Kuwait’s leading automotive accessories stores from Yusuf A. Alghanim & Sons, was a main sponsor of the 8th Kuwait Bike Show that took place on Friday January 27th, 2012 in Marina Crescent. Although the Kuwait Bike Shows mainly focuses on bikes, one vehicle stood out from the crowd: the debut of the special edition, and long awaited Trans Am that was presented by KromOzone. Another addition by KromOzone included the Harley Davidson Silverado that was especially designed for the event. Apart from giving out gift vouchers to the 15 winners of the bike show contest, KromOzone’s presence was further highlighted with its special booth that displayed its best-selling accessories such as airbrushed motorcycle helmets, and airbrushed hoods. KromOzone from Yusuf A. Alghanim & Sons is every car enthusiast’s destination for quality GM and aftermarket car accessories in Kuwait. KromOzone has been supplying drivers in Kuwait with genuine interior and exterior car accessories as well as everything from light to sound, custom paints to car styling, chrome to crystal, and entertainment systems.

KromOzone offers certified products, warranties, and competitive prices and lives up to its credo, “Pimp Your Ride and Live Your Life!” with 2 boutiques located in Safat Alghanim and Shuwaikh.

STARBUCKS ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF THE STARBUCKS CARD New card offers customer convenience and free Wi-Fi access in store Starbucks stores in Kuwait celebrated the launch of The Starbucks Card, a more convenient way for customers to enjoy the various aromas of coffee, light snacks, and other favorite treats that can be found at Starbucks stores throughout the country. Available for the first time in the Middle East, The Starbucks Card is the ideal way to make purchases in store.

Customers can simply top up a card to the value of their choice, and then use it to make any purchases at their convenience without the hassle of carrying change in their pockets.

The Starbucks Card is also the perfect gift for treating friends and loved ones. As an additional benefit, anyone using The Starbucks Card at stores displaying the Wi-Fi sign, can enjoy free Wi-Fi for one hour. To benefit customers simply have to make a purchase with The Starbucks Card and the barista will give them a voucher valid for one hour of free Wi-Fi.

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CENTREPOINT UNVEILS ITS SPRING SUMMER 2012 COLLECTION Centrepoint, the popular shopping destination in Kuwait celebrates Spring Summer this year with a wonderful collection of products across Juniors, Splash, Shoe Mart and Lifestyle. Be it fashion clothing, shoes or accessories, kidswear or toys, or products that you’ll love to adorn your home with; Centrepoint has it all!

The new Spring Summer collection from Juniors seems to exude energy. The collection comprises cotton yarn dyed shirts, melange inserts, denim bottoms, cotton spandex hoodies, and convertible capris.

Taking cues from the best of catwalks, the Splash collection explores the choicest of trends coupled with the choicest of shape that are classic yet bold and edgy, vivid prints, colors and designs. Men wear the same trend in material like linen or silk, smooth or printed cotton in crumpled finishes with over-dyed effects and textured knit.

Shoe Mart’s Spring Summer ’12 collection brings an assortment of styles for all who are inspired by the on screen trend setters, symbolizing science fiction, urban fixtures and holiday inspired trends.

Centrepoint once again has it all this season to surprise you and yet fulfill all your shopping needs! So stop by at any of our stores located at Al Rai, Hawally, Salmiya, Kuwait City, Fahaheel, Fintas and Jahra.

LA SENZA ANNOUNCES STORE OPENING IN KUWAIT MARINA MALL La Senza, the ultimate global fashion destination for the young, fun and flirty, opened on February 22nd in Kuwait Marina Mall in partnership with Liwa Trading Enterprises LLC. The Marina Mall store is the first new-look La Senza store to open in Kuwait, and the company plans to roll out the new concept across the region over the coming months.

Customers were invited to attend the grand opening event on 22nd February at the Marina Mall store, where La Senza treated its visitors with an in-store DJ, live La Senza models, themed La Senza sweet treats, and special grand opening event promotions. The first hundred La Senza customers also received a cheeky free gift.

Set to impress, the new Marina Mall store comes with a complete fresh store design and layout that is characterized by flirty feminine and fun polka-dots, pin –ups and sassy in store artwork that reflects La Senza’s Fashion loving customers. And while the look is always changing, the company’s renowned customer service remains, with friendly, knowledgeable staff and expert bra fittings available as always.

ADOLFO DOMINGUEZ Adolfo Dominguez, a designer, or brand, has covered a long journey since 1973 from a family tailoring shop in Spain to clothing giant and was introduced to Kuwait by GFC, opening one of the largest stores in the region in Avenues Mall. The AD store in Kuwait offers dynamic men and women’s collections, which evolves each season in keeping with customer demand. The brand comprises collections for AD men and women characterized by sober lines that lend an austere and elegance-seeking beauty; U line – a collection for young boys and girls; as well as a range for kids and fashion accessories.

AD is popular for its European, urbane, functional, casual and eminently comfortable styles making use of loose, natural fabrics. It is also well known for structured gowns which are cut so beautifully that they drape any silhouette with such elegance. The designer believes in merging beauty and sobriety for dresses, and skirts with drapes, knots and pleats, marked waists and asymmetric necklines.

The store also offers a wide range of accessories from bags, shoes to jewelry. Expect a variety of formal & casual shoes for men. For women, the shoes vary from lace stilettos to the classic leather wedges. With bags, there are sturdy day bags and chic evening clutches.

Adolfo Dominguez outlet is a place where the designer puts the art of fashion and style together with his exquisite choice as he rightly says……… “My Clothes do not mark a difference in status but rather a difference in spirit & intellect. I dress the overwhelming minority.”

Adolfo Dominguez is located in the Avenues Mall (Phase II). For more information please call 22597836.

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SABAIDEE The real deal

By Meghan McCabe

I’ve been to many of the Thai restaurants in Kuwait; present and former. Not many have really impressed me. I don’t want to go to a restaurant where the food is “seasoned down” to blandness to appease what owners believe their target audience might want. I seek the real deal and I have often been disappointed in the local market. I recently found a hole-in-the wall Thai place that has set the standard for the rest to follow.

Sabaidee is a small Thai restaurant with two small locations: Fintas and Mahboula.

Both locations are only large enough to accommodate approximately 7 tables.

Both have overworked wait staff… and both have some of the best Thai food I’ve experienced anywhere.

The first time I visited, it was late and I was really hungry. By the time the food arrived, I was in a bad mood; grumbling about how long I had to wait to receive the meal. But that minimal frustration led to a fantastic dinner. The chicken satay starter was tender and moist, nicely complimented by peanut sauce they had made in-house.

The spring rolls were crisp and contained a large amount of shrimp. I’m a picky padThai person and I was not at all disappointed. All the food was fresh and we left nothing behind.

The second time I visited, I anticipated a wait for something wonderful and I wasn’t in such a bad mood. Obviously, greatness sometimes experiences growing 112

pains and Sabaidee is on their way up in the world (“start small and expand”), so patience is required. I shared a large bowl of Tom Kha seafood soup with my friend.

We usually fight over the shrimp; this time we didn’t have to as Sabaidee generously delivers quite a few shrimp in the soup. We followed with shrimp paste fried rice (Khao Klook Kapi) and steamed whole fish with fresh lime and ginger (Pla Pae Sa). The slightly sweet taste of the rice was a great compliment to the ginger taste of the fish.

The only item missing was my personal Thai dessert favorite, mango with sticky rice.

The owners have taken obvious pride in presentation: from opulent signage, quality menus on quality paper, to simple yet elegant surroundings. I am also impressed by Sabaidee’s menus. If you’re an expat in Kuwait, you certainly must have had a chuckle or two over menu misspellings and funny names. There will be nothing to add to your funny menu collection at Sabaidee’s , and they have pictures! There are so many choices that I am very glad that I picked up a “to go” menu which will allow me to study before my next visit.

Sabaidee offers catering and delivery and are open from 11am to 11pm.

Phones: 65925355 or 97784648. Web: www.q8sbd.com. The group also owns a spa in Salmiya.

FOR GEORGE PELECANOS, D.C. MA

By Carol Memmott

George Pelecanos, gearhead, movie buff and crime novelist, is rolling through Silver Spring, Md., in his 2008 Bullitt-replica Mustang.

The Highland Green fastback, one of only 7,700 built by Ford, was snagged by guys who love the iconic 114

1968 film starring Steve McQueen. In his role as police Lt. Frank Bullitt, the Mustang-driving "King of Cool" pursues a Tuxedo Black Dodge Charger through San Francisco in one of the greatest car-chase sequences in movie history.

"It's kind of corny, but I bought my own Bullitt Mustang," says Pelecanos, 54, who says the McQueen movie was one of his favorites growing up. "I sort of had to have it." He points out, with obvious delight, that his was No. 28 off the line.

"I have a great love of films," he says. "I went from being a movie freak to being a novelist, and it was very influential in my work."

The author of 17 crime novels set in the gritty, "other" Washington and a writer/producer for HBO's critically acclaimed series The Wire and now Treme steers the Mustang over the D.C. line toward his destination: a church parking lot that he says "is a good place to kill a guy."

Pelecanos has been here several times before, either on his Trek bike or on foot. It's how he scouts locations for scenes in his books. The Cut adds a new protagonist - a young Iraq War vet turned P.I. named Spero Lucas - to the stable of detectives, cops, criminals and honest everyday folk of all colors who people his novels. The Cut went is now on sale.

While he drives, Pelecanos points out a house where he imagines Lucas lives and the local Safeway where one of his characters buys his morning coffee.

"I'm always out on my bike," says Pelecanos, who lives in Silver Spring, not far from the nation's capital. "I found Lucas' house. I found the house he breaks into. I did the walk from his house to the church one night. I wanted to see what it feels like to be walking at night in these places where there are not many people. I wanted to make sure you could kill a guy a half-block from the 4th District police station."

This coplike knowledge of the streets gives his novels authenticity. They are, he says, "a combination of just being out there, being engaged with the city, because I'm not a person who has a huge imagination.

I can't sit in an office and make my stories up or dream up my characters - I have to go out there and find them. I'm just a firm believer in breathing the air and feeling the dirt between your fingers."

Pelecanos' 'What It Was' What It Was, a George Pelecanos novel that Little, Brown Scribner is publishing in January, brings back P.I. Derek Strange, the protagonist in four of Pelecanos' hard-boiled crime novels: Right as Rain, Hell to Pay, Soul Circus and Hard Revolution.

The novel is set in 1972. Strange, one of D.C.'s first African-American police officers, is working as a private investigator.

"He's 26, it's his first case after he's just left the police force," Pelecanos says. "My favorite movies are Westerns and crime films from the '70s, and my idea was to write a crime film from the '70s in book form. It's in the tradition of ‘The French Connection’, ‘The SevenUps’ and ‘The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3’."

What It Was, Pelecanos says, is inspired by a real-

KES 'THE CUT' life crime spree. "Many Washingtonians will remember a guy named Cadillac Smith. I took a newspaper article I read about him and fictionalized everything."

The novel stars a guy named Red Fury because of his looks and the car his girlfriend drives. "In life and in the book, the guy pissed off the Mob. He took some money that belonged to the Mob, and the Mob sent some people down from New York to find him."

Meanwhile, says Pelecanos, "Strange is hired by a woman who wants him to find a stolen ring. The job puts Strange in this guy's orbit."

It also brings back Strange's former police partner, Frank "Hound Dog" Vaughn.

For Pelecanos, his fascination with street life began more than 40 years ago in the tumultuous summer of 1968.

"I was 11," he recalls, "and that summer had the biggest impact on me. In retrospect, it made me want to become a writer, and it also gave me the road map of what I was going to write about."

That summer, he worked in his father's diner. He remembers traveling by city bus from the Maryland suburbs to the diner after the riots and "going through these neighborhoods that had burned down, riding with working-class Washingtonians and listening to people talk and watching and observing, which is what I still do."

Plots inspired by life The scene at the diner was just as influential.

"It was my dad and I, Greek-Americans, and his allblack crew and the white professionals on the other side of the counter. It just had a huge impact on me.

There's a reason I've written about race and class my entire career."

Pelecanos published his first novel, A Firing Offense, in 1992. Though his books have hit best-seller lists, they've never made USA TODAY's - a fact that doesn't change how his publisher feels about him.

"He does sell. He has an audience, and he grows with every book," says Reagan Arthur, whose Little, Brown imprint publishes Pelecanos' books.

"Sometimes it takes time to spread the word. We consider George to be one of our greatest living writers. Cormac McCarthy's first book came out in 1965, but he couldn't get arrested until All the Pretty Horses (1992), and suddenly everybody was aware of who he was.

"All we want to do is keep publishing him and making sure that with every book his audience grows."

Standing in the parking lot of the Emory United Methodist Church on a hot August afternoon, Pelecanos talks about Lucas, also a Greek-American, and the plot on which he hangs the Iraq veteran's story.

Lucas comes from a Pelecanos short story, "Chosen," about a husband and wife who decide to build their family through adoption. (Pelecanos and

his wife, Emily, adopted their two sons from Brazil and their daughter from Guatemala.) "Chosen" is included with the e-book version of The Cut. "It's just something I started writing one day. I wasn't going to sell it or anything," he says. "It's about these parents, and at the end of the story, because I don't outline or anything - I just write - there were just a couple of lines about Spero Lucas being a Marine who fought in Fallujah and his brother Leo, who was a schoolteacher in Washington. That's when I got the idea that maybe I should write something with these guys."

While doing what he calls "gathering string" for his novel, he heard about some Iraq War veterans who were working as investigators for D.C. attorneys.

"The attorneys I talked to said 'these are the best investigators I ever had,'" Pelecanos recalls. "These guys were eager, they like the action, and they don't want a desk job. They're not sure what they're going to do with their life, but for now, they're very satisfied with doing something similar to what they were doing before, and that was to have a mission."

So Lucas evolved from a Marine to a war vet turned investigator, but Pelecanos still needed a plot device on which to hang his story. That turned out to be media reports that chronicled how dealers move their "packages" by having them shipped to residences whose occupants are typically not home during the day. The dealers track the package deliveries online and then pick them up before the homeowners return at night.

"I have contacts too on that side of things," Pelecanos says, referring to dealers who are among countless people he has interviewed since he started writing books. "I talked to those guys to figure out how it's done."

A novel idea grows Stories in the media, Pelecanos says, "quoted somebody as saying the dealers write off lost packages, that it's no big deal, but that's not true. It's a lot of money to lose, so I had the plot device to get me in the story."

In The Cut, a dealer hires Lucas to find out who's stealing his packages. It's a job that has him facing off against some very nasty guys.

It's in this parking lot that Lucas confronts one of them. "He's going to get into a physical confrontation with somebody, and it's going to end in death, let's say," Pelecanos says, leaning on the Mustang. "And he could get away with it right here. In fact, to my right is the 4th District police station, just about 100 yards from where we're standing, and you could kill somebody in this parking lot and never be caught because even though the station is there, they don't have sight lines to this lot. It's the perfect place."

A "perfect place" also describes where

Pelecanos is in his career.

The Cut is getting rave reviews. His fans are a veritable Who's Who. In 2009, Pelecanos' The Way Home was on President Obama's reading list. Several years ago, Stephen King wrote in Entertainment Weekly that Pelecanos is "perhaps the greatest living American crime writer."

He has the same rap in the world of TV. In October he'll head to New Orleans, where he'll take on his new role as executive producer of HBO's post-Katrina, Big Easy-set series, Treme, which is going into its third season of production.

David Simon, creator of The Wire and one of the creators of Treme, and a longtime Pelecanos friend, is a huge fan of his books and his TV writing chops.

"It's common knowledge at this point that beginning with Season 1 of ‘The Wire’, I've tried to get George to write the penultimate episodes of various seasons, when the dramatic climax to so many arcs usually requires the death of a central character. Why? Read any of his novels. Watch how carefully the tension builds and how thoughtful, yet cinematic, George can be in using and then releasing that tension. His prose is great, but what is clear as well is how much George understands film and its possibilities."

Pelecanos wrote the Emmy-nominated teleplay for one of the most talked-about episodes in The Wire, the third season's "Middle Ground," in which some of the characters are stylized like classic movie gunfighters.

It's an homage to his love of the Western film genre.

Future projects unfolding More television work is bubbling up. He has had several offers to bring Spero Lucas to television, but he has made no commitments. "I don't want to make it a case of the week for Spero Lucas. I have to figure out how to make it more credible and have more weight.

One of the reasons I like ‘The Wire’ and ‘Treme’ is that they are structured as novels. Episodic TV, personally, just doesn't work for me."

For now, working on Treme and writing novels he's also publishing one titled What It Was in January - are perfect complements.

"One of the things I like about producing television is that after working (on his novels) in my office for five or six months, alone in that solitude, I get to go out and do this job producing where all of a sudden I'm around a hundred people."

In some ways, he says, it's like writing a novel.

"When you watch the finished product, you just feel like you've accomplished something in the same way you write a book, and you hold it in your hands. A television show is the same kind of fruit of your labor.

Something you can watch and feel viscerally. Yeah, I like doing both."

Copyright © 2011, USA TODAY International.

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HACKETT LONDON Dress for the season of summer sporting events with Hackett’s Spring/Summer collection By bazaar staff

Hackett London is the home of Essential British Kit with a worldwide reputation for quality, luxury designer clothing for men and ever popular Little Britons Clothing Collection for children, including a range of quality accessories.

When it comes to men’s style, Jeremy Hackett is known to be somewhat of an authority. Not only is he the creator of the Hackett London brand but he also shares his thoughts and ideas about fashion and life through his blog, and regular newspaper column for the Independent on Sunday. In 2007 he published the book Mr Classic; an anecdotal, incisive, critique of men’s style.

Hackett opened their first shop in 1983 at the wrong end (as their bank manager observed) of the New Kings Road in Parson’s Green, London. Then in 1987 Hackett became involved in the sport of polo. Approached by two army officers looking for sponsorship, the Hackett Polo Team was formed and plays out of Guards Polo Club - this was the beginning of the now iconic Hackett polo shirt. In 2005 Hackett became Official Partner to the GT1 works Aston Martin Racing team, providing official team clothing and selling a range of licensed clothing and accessories.

Kuwait was honored to be Hackett’s first location in the Middle East when they opened their Avenues Mall store in 2009. The brand proved so popular, they opened a second store at 360 Mall in August last year and Hackett continues to thrive among stylish Kuwaiti men.

The Spring/Summer Collection has landed at Hackett stores in time for the season of summer sporting events, kicking off in March with the British 116

Polo Day in Dubai, for which the Dubai Camel Polo Cup polo shirt is a must-have, and Aston Martin Racing’s return to GT Racing celebrated through Hackett’s Aston Martin Racing collection, featuring Polo shirts, luggage, cuff links, key chains and even racing helmets.

April is all about river racing in England, beginning with the Head of the River Race. Hackett has proudly been the official clothing supplier to the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race since 2009, which also takes place in April. Hackett features a variety of inspired designs such as The London Rowing Club Polo shirt.

For those weekends away or days at the beach club, Hackett duffle bags and weekend bags make the perfect accompaniment and are stylish, too. Also check out Hackett’s lighter weight fabrics used in the Classic numbered Polo Shirts. The Sash National Polo Shirts are available in the following editions; Great Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, and Japan. Look out for the Kuwait edition coming towards the end of June! The Diamond and Split colored Polo Shirts are also featured in the Hackett Spring/Summer collection.

For those looking for something a little more dressy, check out the button down Brompton, featuring a variety of logos, or the Formal Mayfair Slim for the more formal events this season. As always you can find ties, belts and underwear in the permanent collection.

We are proud to announce that KUWAIT Hackett stores are one of the worldwide chosen stores to run a great Aston Martin promotion from Feb 20 to April 15 The promotion contains 4 purchase levels to win; 90, 150, 200 and a top level of 275 KWD, each of which qualifies the purchaser to be eligible for an

additional level of prizes: 1. Level 1 prize 50 x Aston Martin Racing merchandise at 90 KWD spend 2. Level 2 prize 15 x Aston Martin Experiences (visit to Aston Martin factory, meeting with the Head Designer of Aston Martin , drive in Aston Martin, travel and overnight stay in typical English country house hotel) at 150 KWD spend level 3. Level 3 prize 2 x Le Mans VIP trips for two people (full Aston Martin hospitality, chateau accommodation, travel) at 200 KWD spend level 4. 1 x Aston Martin V8 Vantage coupe (limited edition Hackett version) at the 275 KWD spends level.

At the lowest level, a customer can only win from the AMR products but at the 275 KWD levels the customer could potentially win any of the pyramid of prizes.

For more information log on to the Hackett Aston Martin website: www.hackettastonmartin.com.

Hackett is located at The Avenues Mall Phase II, Tel: 22597909 and 360 Mall, Tel: 25309737.

PREDICTING DESIRE

By Christina Chaey

These tech wizards say they know what you want before you do. Here, they share the challenges of mapping human preference.

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Tom Conrad CTO and Executive VP of Product / Pandora Goal: Use the "musical DNA" of songs to create

personal playlists.

"Hundreds of musical attributes are used to describe songs. Twenty-six alone describe vocal performance: how breathy or gravelly it is, how much falsetto is used, and more. That's too much nuance for software on its own. So we hired humans--specifically, professional musicians with four-year degrees in music. Every day, they come into the office, put on headphones, and listen to every song that will ultimately play on Pandora, listing as many as 450 different attributes a pop.

When combined with users' past listening habits, those detailed fingerprints enable our algorithms to discern, for example, that when you say you like the Beatles, you're talking about their earlier sound and not their later one."

Kimberly Dillon Founder and CEO / House of Mikko Goal: Streamline a site that recommends beauty products to women.

"There are so many factors to consider when picking beauty products: age, ethnicity, color shade, hair type, whether you have dry or oily skin.

It can be a very difficult, very personal process, especially for ethnic women. So the House of Mikko recommendation service is built around connecting people. Once a user fills out a comprehensive beauty profile--focused mostly on hair care, for now--we give her recommendations based on the best products used by like-featured women, so she can see which ones they buy and how well they've worked. We're powered by real women, and there's a real efficiency component in that."

Mark Johnson CEO / Zite Goal: Curate web content into an iPad "magazine" whose stories are tailored to your taste the more you use it.

"Users can tell Zite a lot about the news articles they know they like to read: topics, authors, publications. In order to help them expand their minds, though, we build serendipity into our algorithm. Even though we base our suggestions on relevant factors--what kinds of articles users are sharing on social-media sites, what others like them are reading--we still often show people stories we're not 100% sure they'll like. That can lead to an article popping up about aardvarks migrating to Washington, D.C., which happened in my Zite, or to us getting emails complaining that someone's politics section is too conservative or too liberal. I always halfheartedly joke that if people only ever 'thumbs-up' the articles we show them, then we've failed, because we're not letting them experience anything new."

Alexa Andrzejewski CEO / Foodspotting Goal: Help smartphone users discover specific dishes at local restaurants.

"When you recommend a restaurant dish, you're asking people to commit time and money to actually trying it. So there's a risk they will get mad at you if they don't like it. We get that. That's why, instead of telling users to eat one thing from one restaurant, our Foodspotting app gives them options, and we're transparent about our process.

We explain, very clearly, why Foodspotting is showing each food to them--maybe a critic they like recommended the dish, maybe the flavor profile is similar to another dish they often eat--but what to eat is totally up to them. Eventually, we may be able to offer up single recommendations. But you have to wonder if people would even trust us. Maybe, with food especially, they like to have choices."

Shiva Rajaraman Group Product Manager / YouTube

Goal: Build multivideo "channels" that hold users' attention.

"On YouTube, our top queries are 'funny videos,' 'LOL,' and 'make me laugh.' They fall into this vague land of 'Entertain me!' So based on that, how do we help people discover fresh, fun content--without just sifting through the 48 hours of video that are uploaded every minute? We're still trying to figure that out fully, but we're starting by building out our channels.

When users search for something broad, we want a more curated experience to appear, so 'funny videos' would bring up a landing page with humor clips from BuzzFeed, Fail Blog, Funny Or Die, and more. That way, they can fill a steady 15, 20, 30 minutes with us, instead of making new decisions every two minutes." Š 2012, Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

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snap

Title: Buying Time

Photographed by: Waleed Shalaan

Location: Al Qurayat, Oman Discription: I wish I could buy time... At least remember not to waste it... Tick tock tick tock.

The beauty of photography is that it is left open for the viewer’s interpretation. It is an art form in which the artist sees and captures a moment in time for us to forever contemplate. Instead of saying “this is how I saw it” a photo asks the viewer to simply “see”.e For your snap submissions, please send an email including the photo with its title, location, and description to snap@bazaar-magazine.com. Give us something to see.

freedom to express 120

bazaar checks it out SERVICE HERO Abdul Rahman Albisher & Zaid Alkazemi Co. Mercedes-Benz is the Best in Car Sales Customer Satisfaction in Kuwait For the second year in a row, Abdul Rahman Albisher & Zaid Alkazemi Co., Authorized General Distributor of Mercedes-Benz in Kuwait has won the First place in ‘Service Hero Customer Satisfaction Award’ for the best New Car buying experience beating out 35 other automotive brands and thereby re-affirming the superior customer experience of Mercedes-Benz buyers from Albisher & Alkazemi Co. Service Hero provided a platform for customers to voice their satisfaction about the quality of services they receive via a three-month voting drive through an online-based survey. Customers were asked to rank their expected satisfaction level in each dimension before receiving a service and their actual satisfaction level after experiencing the service.

In a red carpet awards ceremony held on 07 February, 2012 by Service Hero for the winners of the Service Hero awards for 2011, Albisher & Alkazemi Co. Mercedes-Benz Kuwait was chosen for the second time by the people of Kuwait as the best in new car buying experience in the country.

Mr. Michael Ruehle, General Manager along with Mr. Ashraf Tamim, Senior Manager for Sales & Operations, at Albisher & Alkazemi Company were on stage to receive the award from the Service Hero Team at the event.

For more information on Mercedes-Benz products and services in Kuwait, please visit us online at www.mercedes-benz.com.kw or become a friend on Facebook: www. facebook.com/MercedesBenzKuwait or follow us on twitter at: @MercedesBenzKWT You can also download the iPhone application for Abdul Rahman Albisher & Zaid Alkazemi Co. by searching for ‘MBKuwait‘ in the Apple app store.

LET LITTLE ONES SHINE THIS SPRING WITH MAMAS & PAPAS There is so much to choose from this season to ensure that little ones are looking super cute, just in time for sunny days out. Mamas and Papas special Limited Edition collection is truly unique and offers something different. The fashion collections are full of bright, eye-catching pieces, perfect for layering and don’t forget our Signature Welcome to the World Collection, and our Pink and Blue range, which make perfect gifts for any new parents and baby. Limited Edition; this catwalk inspired collection is truly unique and totally trendy and perfect for little fashionistas who want to look like mummy and daddy.

With Quirky designs and interesting shapes, tiny tots are sure to stand out from the crowd in Limited Edition. Fashion Collections; Watercolour Dreams is a super pretty collection which mixes vibrant pinks and purples with blue denim to create a romantic, feminine feel. Little Westerner is the perfect choice of attire for little cowboys this spring! A colourful mix of blue, white and red is combined with authentic denim to create a Wild West theme, mixed with cute character graphics this collection is sure to make your little one stand out. Whatever the occasion, there’s something for everyone at Mamas & Papas.

RUG STAR The Persia Collection After the successful 2010 launch of Rug Star in Kuwait at Samovar Carpets & Antiques, I (Jürgen Dahlmanns) spent a few days in Kuwait taking in the culture and feel of the beautiful country. During my stay, I noticed that a dear friend kept pushing the idea of the antique Persian rug into my head and it is his confidence in me that gave birth to the Persia Collection. He explained how the Kuwaiti people loved the modern look and were always up to date with the latest fashion and trend but at the same time still kept a deep respect to their traditions and values. The Persia Collection by RUG STAR is a bridge to unite the beauty of the antique Persian rug with the needs of our modern living. The Persia Collection is a poem or a tender quotation towards the elegant and perfect use of pattern and material which we can find in the Persian rug. It is a tender homage with the will to create true classics. I think this is the way we are walking now with this collection.

I dedicate my Persia Collection to those dear friends and to the people of Kuwait, you inspired me.

–Jürgen Dahlmanns Designer and creator of Rug Star

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‫‪MAKI WINS GOLD AT HORECA KUWAIT, 2012‬‬ ‫‪Organizing numerous tradeshows and venues, Horeca (Hotel/Restaurant/Café) has been a staple,‬‬ ‫‪leading culinary authority in Europe and the Middle East for years. Horeca’s venue for 2012 in‬‬ ‫‪Kuwait took place at the Arraya Ballroom in the Courtyard, Marriot Hotel. Visitors, exhibitors, and‬‬ ‫‪journalists from around the world in general, and from the Middle East in particular, made certain‬‬ ‫‪to partake in this gastronomic and hospitality “festival” and it was deemed a great success.‬‬ ‫‪Founded by “viosionary” Mohamad Zeitoun and brothers Oussama, and Amer, Maki group has‬‬ ‫‪been a leader in contemporary fusion cuisine since 2002. The doors to Maki’s first restaurant were‬‬ ‫‪opened in Kuwait’s Salmiya to cues of fusion cuisine lovers. With multiple locations in the Middle‬‬ ‫‪East, it was high time for Maki to take part in the Horeca competition and present to food lovers the‬‬ ‫‪unique cuisine that this culinary establishment had to offer.‬‬ ‫‪Participating in several competitions with its talented chefs, Maki group “wowed” the audience and‬‬ ‫‪judges with the wonderful, tasteful, and attractive presentations of its finished food products in‬‬ ‫‪more than one category. Chef Louis Kenji Huang and his assistant chefs Jaya and Ranjan participated‬‬ ‫‪in the live sushi competition, while Chef Michael Rajapakse took part in the chocolate showpiece‬‬ ‫‪portion of the venue. With more than 100 participants, Maki group’s chefs names were mentioned‬‬ ‫!‪not once, or twice, but five times‬‬ ‫‪Maki chefs’ awards included one gold and two silver medals in the live sushi competition, a bronze‬‬ ‫‪medal in the chocolate showpiece competition, and last but not least, Maki’s chefs were awarded‬‬ ‫‪the “Boeker” food hygiene and safety award. Thus, Maki’s debut at Horeca not only proved how this‬‬ ‫‪leading culinary institution has grown by leaps and bounds, but has also done so by maintaining‬‬ ‫‪high standards in food safety and hygiene.‬‬ ‫!‪Congratulations to all the winners‬‬

‫‪For Delivery and reservation please log onto www.olivermaki.com. Reservation is HIGHLY‬‬ ‫‪recommended. Maki is almost fully booked everyday. Follow Maki/Zeebrgr on Facebook and twitter‬‬ ‫‪@ZeeBrgr/@Makirest.‬‬

‫ملتقى أسرار تسويق الرعايات – الثاني‬ ‫هل أنت مستعد لتعلم أسرار تسويق الرعايات خطوة بخطوة من بلورة األفكار وإعداد العروض إلى إنهاء الصفقات؟ إذا فأنت على موعد مع منتدى أسرار تسويق الرعايات‬ ‫‪ !2‬فبعد أن حقق المنتدى األول نجاح تجاوز كل التوقعات‪ ،‬وبناءاً على الطلب المتزايد عليه‪ ،‬فقد تقرر إعادة طرح هذا المنتدى بمضمونه الجديد؛ حيث سيتم التطرق لكيفية‬ ‫إعداد عروض ال تقاوم للرعاة وتأثير الـ ‪ Branding‬عليها‪ ،‬وأساسيات التواصل وتحضير العروض التقديمية ‪ Presentations‬وتقديم اإلجتماعات‪ ،‬فض ً‬ ‫ال عن كيفية التفاوض‬ ‫على تلك العروض وبيعها وإنهاء الصفقات‪.‬‬ ‫وقال منظم المنتدى‪ ،‬المؤسس والرئيس التنفيذي لمؤسسة ‪ ،THE EMERALD EVENTS‬محمد حارث البدر‪ ،‬انه سيشارك في تقديم المنتدى مشاري المطوع‪ ،‬مؤسس‬ ‫مركز الحرير لألعمال ومنتج تلفزيوني وسينمائي في شركة براند العالمية‪ ،‬حيث سيتناول موضوع "تأثير البراندينج على تسويق الرعايات"‪ .‬كما وسيشارك م‪ .‬خالد الزنكي‪،‬‬ ‫المؤسس والرئيس التنفيذي لمؤسسة ‪ ،AlZanki Enterprises‬في تناول موضوع "جذب الرعايات"‪ .‬وسيشارك أيضا أ‪ .‬مشاري المفرّح‪ ،‬مدير عام مؤسسة ‪Al-Mufarreh‬‬ ‫‪ ،Training & Consultations‬لتناول موضوع "كيف تبيع فكرتك وتناقش العرض؟"‪.‬‬ ‫سيقام منتدى أسرار تسويق الرعايات في يوم اإلثنين‪ ،‬الموافق ‪ ،26/3/2012‬من الساعة ‪4:30‬م إلى ‪8:00‬م‪ ،‬في فندق هوليداي إن داون تاون – دسمان – دولة الكويت‪.‬‬ ‫للمزيد من المعلومات حول المنتدى ولإلشتراك‪ ،‬يرجى زيارة الصفحة اإللكترونية‪ www.TheEmeraldEvents.com/SMSF :‬أو اإلتصال على ‪96688955 +965‬‬

‫التجاري أطلق حملة "يا زين تراثنا"‬ ‫التجاري "أول فعاليات حملة "يازين تراثنا" في مول ‪ "360‬تحقق نجاحاً الفتاً ‪2011‬‬ ‫أطلق البنك التجاري الكويتي حملته الرامية إلى إحياء التراث الكويتي والمأثور الشعبي الكويتي القديم تحت عنوان "يا زين تراثنا" وتتمحور الحملة التراثية‪،‬‬ ‫التي سوف تستمر من ‪ 5‬فبراير إلى ‪ 5‬مايو ‪ 2012‬حول هدف أساسي وهو إحياء التراث الكويتي القديم والتذكير بأهمية العادات الكويتية وأنماط الحياة التي‬ ‫عاشها اآلباء واألجداد في الماضي حيث يرى البنك أن التراث الكويتي القديم‪ ،‬وإن تنوعت مظاهره‪ ،‬يعكس الكثير من حياة شعب الكويت واألجيال القديمة‬ ‫وهمومها وآمالها ومدى تأقلمها مع الحياة في الماضي‪ .‬وفي إطار فعاليات الحملة‪ ،‬كان البنك قد أقام معرضَا مصغراَ في مول ‪ 360‬على مدار ثالثة أيام بدأت‬ ‫من يوم الخميس ‪ 9‬فبراير وحتى يوم السبت ‪ 11‬فبراير‪ ،‬مما اتاح الحضور مشاهدة الحرف والصناعات اليدوية واألدوات التي صنعها الرعيل األول من أهل‬ ‫الكويت في ظل جو عام عكس عبق الماضي القديم حيث اكتست جدران المعرض صور من رزنامات التجاري التي لطالما عكست أنماط حية من العادات التراثية‬ ‫القديمة‪ .‬وبهذه المناسبة تم توزيع الهدايا على زائري المعرض والتي جاءت أيضُا منسجمة مع الحدث‪ .‬ومن الجدير بالذكر أنه يمكن للجمهور المشاركة في‬ ‫حملة "يازين تراثنا" عن طريق تقديم األعمال التراثية المختلفة سواء كانت مقاطع فيديو أو صور أو رسوم أو مقاطع موسيقية أو أي عمل ارتبط بالتراث‬ ‫والعادات الكويتية القديمة أما في المعارض والفعاليات التي سوف ينظمها التجاري ضمن الحملة أو بتحميلها على الصفحة المخصصة للحملة على شبكة االنترنت‬ ‫‪ .www.cbkturath.com‬وسوف يكون هناك لجنة تحكيمية مشكلة الختيار أفضل األعمال المشاركة ‪ ،‬حيث تم رصد عدد من الجوائز المالية القيمة للفائزين‪.‬‬

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EGYPTIANS MOVE TO RECLAIM CAIRO’S STREETS Through graffiti

The conflict between Egypt’s ruling military and pro-democracy protesters isn’t just on the streets of Cairo, it’s on the walls as well, as graffiti artists from each side duel it out with spray paint and stencils.

Early in February, supporters of the ruling generals painted over part of the largest and most famous antimilitary graffiti pieces in the capital.

The military’s supporters then made a 15-minute video using footage posted by two young men stenciling pro-revolution graffiti and wearing Guy Fawkes masks, the grinning face made famous by the movie V for Vendetta. In an attempt to mock the revolutionary street art, the military supporters declared in their video, “The police, military and people are one hand,” and, “The military is a red line.” They posted the video online, calling themselves the “Badr Battalion” and describing themselves as “distinguished Egyptian youth who are against the spies and traitors that burn Egypt.”

It was an ironic turnabout, with backers of the authorities picking up the renegade street art medium of revolutionary youth. During the regime of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt had almost no graffiti on the walls of its cities. But when the uprising against Mubarak’s rule erupted a year ago, there was an explosion of the art. Taking control of the streets was critical for the thousands of Egyptians who eventually overthrew the country’s authoritarian leader. The battle continues to be fought by graffiti artists who support the country’s military rulers and those who want them to relinquish power.

Since Mubarak’s fall on Feb. 11, graffiti is everywhere in Cairo and other cities, proclaiming the goals of the revolution and mocking the regime. Graffiti artists have 124

continued to work, using walls, buildings, bridges and sidewalks as a canvas to denounce the generals who took power after Mubarak as new dictators and to press the revolution’s demands.

Usually anti-military graffiti has a short lifetime before it is quickly painted over or defaced with black spray paint. And just as quickly the artists put up more.

The graffiti that pro-military supporters painted over had survived remarkably long. Mohammad Fahmy, known by his pseudonym Ganzeer, put his up in May under a bridge. It depicts a military tank with its turret aimed at a boy on his bike who balances on his head one of the wooden racks that are traditionally used to deliver bread – though instead of bread, he’s carrying a city. It was a symbolic reference to revolutionary youth who care for the nation, heading into a collision with the generals. Quickly after it was partially stenciled over, a new graffiti was up, depicting the country’s military leader as a large snake with a bloody corpse coming out of his mouth.

Graffiti has turned into perhaps the most fertile artistic expression of Egypt’s uprising, shifting rapidly to keep up with events. Faces of protesters killed or arrested in crackdowns are common subjects – and as soon as a new one falls, his face is ubiquitous nearly the next day.

The face of Khaled Said, a young man whose beating and death at the hands of police officers in 2010 helped fuel the anti-Mubarak uprising, even appeared briefly on the walls of the Interior Ministry, the daunting security headquarters that few would dare even approach in the past.

Other pieces mock members of the Supreme

Council of the Armed Forces, the council of generals that is now in power, or figures from Mubarak’s regime.

When a police officer was captured on an Internet video shooting at the eyes of protesters during clashes, his image immediately dotted walls, urging people to find the “Eye-Sniper.”

State television is another frequent target because it has become the mouthpiece for the military’s proclamations that protesters are vandals, thugs and part of a plot to throw Egypt into chaos. One graffito shows the word “Occupy” written in the shape of the State TV building. Stickers plastered on walls show the words “Go down to the street” emerging from a television set, a message to the so-called “Couch Party,” people who sit and watch the protests on TV. “It’s about a message in the street. It reaches the poor, the rich, the trash collector, the taxi driver,” graffiti artist Karim Gouda said. “Most of these people are away from the Internet and the social networking world so it’s a way to reach them.”

Not everyone is receptive. Gouda said he was accosted by residents as he put up posters depicting a rotting face with the words “open your eyes before it’s too late” in the impoverished Cairo district of Sayeda Zeinab.

They accused him of trying to create civil strife and of trying to encourage Egypt’s Christian minority to take over from the Muslim majority. Such accusations about activists were rife at the time after an October protest

by Christians in Cairo, which was crushed by soldiers, killing more than 20. The residents tore down Gouda’s posters and chased him out of the neighborhood.

Under Mubarak’s nearly 30-year rule, political expression on the streets was repressed by his powerful police forces. Once every five years, parliamentary elections would see the country littered with posters for elections that always favored the ruling party. Billboards advertising a lifestyle that only a privileged few could afford for companies whose owners were often closely affiliated with the regime towered over the sprawling slums of Cairo, a bustling city of some 18 million people.

“It’s liberating to see,” said Soraya Morayef, a blogger who documents graffiti. “The fear barrier was broken.”

TOASTMASTERS INTERNATIONAL Conquer your jitters

By Deepak Bindal

Are you afraid of getting up on stage and speaking in public? Do you need confidence in dealing with people? Then Toastmasters Club is the solution for you. I am confident in recommending this as I have benefited from joining Toastmasters Club and am now no longer afraid of public speaking or giving presentations in my workplace. Toastmasters International is a nonprofit educational organization that teaches public speaking and leadership skills through a worldwide network of clubs. Founded in October 1924, the organization currently has more than 270,000 members in 13,000 clubs in 116 countries. Each week, Toastmasters helps more than a quarter million people of every ethnicity, education and profession build their competence in communication so they can gain the confidence to lead others.

How Toastmasters Works At Toastmasters, members learn by speaking to groups and working with others in a supportive environment. A typical Toastmasters Club is made up of 20 to 30 people who meet once a week for approximately an hour. Each meeting gives everyone an opportunity to practice the following: Conducting meetings. Members learn how to plan and conduct meetings.

Giving impromptu speeches. Members present a one-to-two minute impromptu speech on an assigned topic.

Presenting prepared speeches. Members present speeches based on projects from manuals in Toastmasters’ proven communication and/or leadership programs.

Projects cover topics such as speaking, organization, vocal variety, language, gestures and persuasion.

Offering constructive evaluation. Every prepared speaker is assigned an evaluator who identifies speech strengths and offers suggestions for improvement.

The Tools Upon joining Toastmasters, each new member receives a variety of manuals and resources on how to become a better speaker and a more confident leader. Members also have access to other books and educational resources. In addition, they receive the award-winning Toastmaster, a monthly magazine that offers the latest insights on speaking and leadership techniques.

Toastmasters and Leadership Leadership cannot be learned in a day. It takes practice. In Toastmasters, members learn leadership skills by organizing and conducting meetings and by completing projects in the leadership manuals. Projects address skills such as listening, planning, motivation and team building and give members the opportunity to practice them. Just as Toastmasters members earn to speak by speaking, they learn leadership by leading.

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How you can join Kuwait Toastmasters Club (KTM) is the first club in Kuwait which conducts its meeting in Rumaithiya every first and third Tuesday of the month from 7 pm to 9 pm. You can attend the meetings as a guest any number of times and then decide to become a member. The fee is KD21 per six month period.

Speaking and Leadership Tips from Toastmasters International Feeling some nervousness before giving a speech is natural and even beneficial, but too much nervousness can be detrimental. Here are 10 proven tips from Toastmasters International on how to control your butterflies and give better presentations: 1. Know your material. Pick a topic you are interested in. Know more about it than you include in your speech. Use humor, personal stories and conversational language – that way you won’t easily forget what to say.

2. Practice. Practice. Practice! Rehearse out loud with all the equipment you plan on using. Revise as necessary. Work to control filler words; Practice, pause and breathe.

Practice with a timer and allow time for the unexpected.

3. Know your audience. Greet some of the audience members as they arrive. It’s easier to speak to a group of friends than to strangers.

4. Know the room. Arrive early, walk around the speaking area and practice using the microphone and any visual aids.

5. Relax. Begin by addressing the audience. It buys you time and calms your nerves. Pause, smile and count to three before saying anything. (One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand. Pause. Begin.) Transform nervous energy into enthusiasm.

6. Visualize yourself giving your speech. Imagine yourself speaking, your voice loud, clear and confident. Visualize the audience clapping – it will boost your confidence.

7. Realize that people want you to succeed. Audiences want you to be interesting, stimulating, informative and entertaining. They’re rooting for you.

8. Don’t apologize for any nervousness or problem – the audience probably never noticed it.

9. Concentrate on the message – not the medium. Focus your attention away from your own anxieties and concentrate on your message and your audience.

10. Gain experience. Mainly, your speech should represent you – as an authority and as a person. Experience builds confidence, which is the key to effective speaking. A Toastmasters club can provide the experience you need in a safe and friendly environment.

To become a member of KTM please contact Deepak Bindal - President, Kuwait Toastmasters Club at cell no. 66540189 or email deepakbindal@gmail.com. For information about Toastmasters organization, please visit www.toastmasters.org.

bazaar explores

G-STAR RAW by MARC NEWSON Since 2003, G-Star has collaborated with acclaimed industrial designer Marc Newson on a range of unique, luxury street-wear collections that fuses high-tech materials with advanced industrial design techniques.

The Spring/Summer 2012 collection features three distinct product lines for men. The first uses Marc’s rubberized ‘dot’ logo from his original G-Star Elwood design on a range of high-tech leisure-wear; while the second part of the collection incorporates styling influences from 1950s military wear and applies modern materials and digital camouflage prints, including the Army Jacket.

The third range within the G-Star by Marc Newson collection presents two Japanese selvedge denims and a selection of ‘Walking Star’ logo T’s, like the Walking Star Outline Sweat.

G-Star RAW. Just the Product.

A POP-UP COLLECTION WITH THE 90S FEELING AT H&M DIVIDED This season, H&M Divided is reviving its 90s name and logo: Impuls. The 90s-influenced pop-up collection consists of 13 fitted and draped pieces in shades of black, grey and metallic. Tops with corset detailing or racer backs create a vintage 90s feel, along with form-fitting dresses with shoulder cut-outs. There’s a grunge influence too, with oversized jumpers and long blouses, as well as a layered mesh maxi skirt to give some fluid contrast to the otherwise tight silhouette. The collection will be available in 130 H&M Divided departments worldwide, entering stores in the middle of February.

LA MARTINA, SPRING/SUMMER 2012 COLLECTION Let the perfection blossom, let the craftsmanship rule!

Saddles, a dusty Polo Sport and a masculine vibe is still what you get the minute you set foot in La Martina’s warm and welcoming store. But one look around the shelves, on the racks and all the clothes displayed with utter perfection you’ll sense the smell of spring blossoming around! It’s the great 2012 S/S collection of bright green, yellow, red, blue and white colors mingled with the smell of genuine leather from the leather boots, leather saddles and leather handbags. Detailed Craftsmanship, Style and Sporty Chic are the words that describe the luxury casual wear and La Martina’s pieces of clothing for this season. Bright Polo shirts, comfortable blazers, classy cotton shirts and trousers all crafted with straight lines, numeric logos and sharp edges. The same applies on La Martina’s accessories, from women’s handbags, travel luggage and shoes. It’s all a continuation of just the right touch of masculine appeal to suit the taste of every strong woman and everyday gentleman. It’s the formula fitted to score the goal, being crafted with great attention to details, just the right fit for those who accept nothing but perfect, nothing but edgy and nothing but the highest standards out there.

WATANIYA’S NEW PROMOTION WILL RECHARGE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Surprise Offer with Loads of Prizes for Prepaid Customers Wataniya is always looking for innovative ways to surprise its customers. Exciting incentives, valuable prizes and a wide variety of offers always give customers something new to look forward to. Very soon Wataniya is going to launch another promotion which is designed for prepaid customers. The new promotion promises to engage its customers with a wide range of prizes which they can benefit from. The surprise offer will entertain and engage prepaid customers with an interactive game and Wataniya aims to reward its customers with prizes worth thousands of dinars. This exclusive offer will be launched within a few short weeks and will last for two months. All prepaid customers will be able to participate and will be eligible to win prizes. Wataniya’s objective is to enrich customer experience and it will continue to find out-of-the-box ideas that exceed customer expectations. Presently Wataniya is offering a variety of Smartphone offers, BlackBerry plans and corporate solutions that are tailored to suit its wide customer base.

For more information please visit www.wataniya.com , or follow them on Twitter www.twitter.com/wataniyatelecom, or check latest updates on www.facebook.com/wataniya or check latest news blog www.wataniya.com/blog.

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EN.V ANNOUNCES THE REUSE 5.0 CREATIVE EXPOSITION IN KUWAIT TO PROMOTE ECO-FRIENDLY LIVING The en.v Initiative (en.v), an organization dedicated to social responsibility in the Arab world, announces the launch of the REUSE exposition in Kuwait. In its fifth year, REUSE 5.0 will be held on April 19 – 21st and Earth Day (22nd) from 5 to 9pm daily at the Australian College of Kuwait (ACK).

This year’s exhibit will feature internationally recognized artist Hassan Hajjaj and critically acclaimed graphic designer Tarek Atrissi. Zahed Sultan, the Managing Partner and CEO of en.v, has also written and released four songs as an EP (short album) to commemorate this year’s exhibit. The “Reuse Me – EP” is available for download on all major online music stores such as iTunes and Amazon.

Zain is the Preferred Partner for this year’s REUSE exposition. REUSE 5.0 is also supported by reputable companies such as Agility, MRC, Kharafi National, and UDC. Esteemed media partners for REUSE 5.0 include bazaar, Studentalk, THE TALK, and Ahlan magazine.

For more information on REUSE please visit the REUSE blog at www.projectreuseme.com.

NIKE INTRODUCES The Nike Lunar Eclipse The Nike Lunar Eclipse+ 2 offers runners the perfect customized fit with the introduction of Dynamic Fit technology. Created in Nike’s Innovation Kitchen and Sports Research Lab, Dynamic Fit eliminates the space between the foot and the shoe for unparalleled comfort, no matter foot size or shape.

Combined with ultra-soft Lunarlon cushioning, a supportive heel clip and the innovative Dynamic Support stability system, the Nike potential.

SHOEBOX NEW YORK The Heritage Since the 70’s, Shoebox New York® has been New York’s top multi-brand women’s retailer for luxury footwear, handbags, and accessories, mothering various brands such as BCBG Max Azria, Vince Camuto, Dolce Vita, Jessica Simpson, Kim Kardashian, Nicholai Hilton, among many others. Shoebox New York soon made a name for itself among women worldwide with its ability to understand her needs, her wants, her psyche. And this is where the story begins… There’s an emotional connection that a woman establishes with each pair of shoes she owns. An emotional comfort is born with each purchase, and so, a pair of shoes come to accessorize not an outfit, but a state of mind. Did she really need all those shoes? Probably not. But each pair, each purchase, tells a story. With over 40 years of understanding women, Shoebox New York fashions that story and has become a haven for every woman looking for emotional indulgence.The store offers every woman an exhilarating experience, taking her on a journey as she shops, where every step of the way is hers to seize. She, is the motivation. She, is the nucleus.She, is the reason behind Shoebox New York.

Shoebox New York is among many brands owned by Ali Abdulwahab Sons & Co.

LANDMARK GROUP SEES STRONG GROWTH WITH THE LAUNCH OF ITS 9TH MAX STORE IN KUWAIT AT FINTAS Re-iterating its commitment towards reaching out to its customers, Max, the Middle East’s largest value retail brand further strengthened its network with the launch of its 9th store in Kuwait. With the launch of this store Max has crossed more than 125 stores across all regions, and the brand has established firm footprints across the GCC, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and India. The outlet is located on the ground and mezanine floor of Al-Liwan Mall which covers more than 2000 sq. meters.

Every season, Max produces a collection that is unique and fits with its overall philosophy. There’s a wide variety of apparel to choose from; so do visit any of the stores located at Al Rai, Salmiya, Hawally (Al Bahar Center), Fahaheel, Khaitan (Awtad Mall), The Avenues, Jahra (Sahari Mall) , Al Jawhara Complex, Kuwait City and now Fintas (Al-Liwan Mall) to discover more!

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OPEN YOUR MOUTH AND SAY "AAH!"

By Adam Bluestein

Smartphones and tablets are transforming the future of health care. Can we really trust them to save our lives?

The average auto refractor--that clunky-looking device eye doctors use to pinpoint your prescription--weighs about 40 pounds, costs $10,000, and is virtually impossible to find in a rural village in the developing world. As a result, some half a billion people are living with vision problems, which make it tough to read and work.

Ramesh Raskar knew fixing this problem would be tricky. It required a new way of thinking about eye tests--and a new kind of device, one powerful enough to support high-resolution visuals, cheap enough to scale, and simple enough to be used by just about anyone. The MIT professor briefly toyed with stand-alone options, which were complicated and costly. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an unexpected savior: his iPhone.

"The displays had gotten so good, thanks to people wanting to watch episodes of Lost in high definition," Raskar recalls. "I was immediately energized."

By creating an app and attachment for the popular smartphone, Raskar could tap into a huge existing user base and skirt millions in distribution and manufacturing costs.

The result: a plastic clip-on eyepiece that uses an on-screen visual test to determine a patient's "refractive error" (a number doctors then use to dole out prescriptions). When his startup, EyeNetra, begins market testing later this year in Brazil, India, and Mexico-and eventually in the U.S.--its tech will deliver all the functionality of an optometrist's costly machine for less than $30.

This is the thrilling, disruptive potential of "mHealth," the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that's fast becoming ubiquitous--two in three people worldwide own a cell phone--a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it's cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile.

"It's like the human body has developed a new organ," says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they'll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson's disease, and even alerting you when it's prime time to make a baby.

At stake is the future of health care--and a share of the $273 billion medical-device industry, which is dominated by the likes of GE and Philips. Although today's mHealth market barely tops $2 billion, experts predict that number will skyrocket over the next decade as smartphones get smarter and patients lose, well, patience with the high costs and hassles of health care. "Why prescribe a $1,000 test in the hospital when all you need is a heart rate?" asks Leslie Saxon, a cardiologist who heads the University of Southern California's Center for Body Computing. With inexpensive new technology, she notes, "I could tell a patient to go to the drugstore and buy an ECG [electrocardiogram] sensor for her phone."

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But can we really trust our phones to dispense medical data? That's the question facing the FDA, which has spent the past year or so putting pioneering mHealth products through rigorous evaluations. "We had to show that our phone-computing platform and display quality were on par with existing devices," says Sailesh Chutani, CEO of Mobisante, whose ultrasound attachment was sanctioned in January--after about a year of costly back-and-forth. With this first wave of devices approved and a mobile-specific set of guidelines to be finalized later this year, the FDA expects to streamline its approval process, which should juice the mHealth market. "Regulatory clarity almost always drives investment--provided it's not a big, clear no," says Joseph Smith, who helps run the West Wireless Health Institute.

Whether these tools actually make us any healthier, however, will depend on how we use them. Given the ability to record our snacks, thoughts, naps, movements, and more, "we will be overwhelmed with data," warns John Moore, a lead researcher in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab. "We need a holistic vision to make it all meaningful and motivating." Among other advances, that vision will require a seamless flow of data across myriad devices and platforms--think how the MP3 format transformed the music industry--and a physicians' movement to adopt electronic medical records. (Right now, only a third of them have.) And even then, there's no guarantee these tools will change behavior. Will we stop eating sugary foods? Or, as Smith wonders, will we just be staring curiously at "phones that show glucose readings in three colors"?

Corporate titans are racing to find out. Johnson & Johnson, the world's largest medical-device maker, recently invested in sleep-monitoring technology from Zeo, a Massachusetts-based startup. Best Buy is funding earbuds that can monitor your heart rate. AT&T helped seed an employee-wellness program with WellDoc, whose apps help users manage diabetes, among other conditions. And Qualcomm, the renowned chipmaker, just launched a subsidiary that's helping to develop all kinds of mHealth devices. "Will this nascent technology attract consumers, health-care providers, and health-care payers?" says Don Jones, a VP at Qualcomm. "The entire world is keeping its fingers crossed." Š 2012 Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

DREW BARRYMORE Finds a 'Miracle' in Alaska

By Bryan Alexander

An Alaskan adventure usually conjures up images of snowmobiles, bears and crashing glaciers. But Drew Barrymore's three-month experience shooting Big Miracle was more like "Into the Zen" than Into the Wild.

"I'm a Cali-girl through and through, but it was just nice to not be in the busy rush of Los Angeles," Barrymore says of her stint in Anchorage, where she shunned Internet and e-mail in favor of letter-writing and reading.

Shooting for the film took place in the fall of 2010, and it could not have come at a better time for the now 36-yearold actress who has been a mainstay in pop culture for three decades.

"There's a book called ‘Slowing Down to the Speed of Life’, and there's something about that title that totally rang true about this experience," Barrymore says. "It's hard to check out of your life for three solid months. It's even harder when you get older. But I really did dive in."

Perhaps "dive out" would be a better term. In Big Miracle, a fictionalized retelling of the 1988 effort to rescue three gray whales trapped by ice near the Arctic Circle, Barrymore plays a Greenpeace activist. It is her first 132

big-screen acting project in two years and probably will be her last for a while: No other firm projects are lined up.

That's all just fine, she says. Barrymore is in no rush to find a new venture and is more content to focus on her personal life, which includes her fiance, 34-year-old art consultant Will Kopelman.

"I've done all of this for 35 years," Barrymore says of her career. "I think maybe it's OK to put the life first for a minute.

I don't really know this feeling. It's new and exciting."

After all, Barrymore began her entertainment career at age 11 months when she appeared in a dog food commercial. Since finding child stardom after 1982's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, she had a famously turbulent adolescence that eventually made way for an adult career that saw her move to rom-com queen (The Wedding Singer, 50 First Dates). She also is a successful producer, director and, lately, professional photographer.

While chatting at her Flower Films office, Barrymore buzzes from just viewing a photo spread she shot for the fashion glossy V featuring some of her favorite rock bands in a house party theme. A few minutes earlier,

the entire office had erupted in cheers after seeing the pictures in the magazine's current music issue.

"We just opened the magazine," she says. "You kind of don't believe it's going to happen until you see it and then it's real."

About that engagement Even more real is the effect of two new pieces of jewelry on what she calls her "everyday outfit" of blue jeans, worn boots and casual gray sweatshirt. The first is a two-heart pendant around her neck held together by a gold safety pin, a gift from Kopelman.

"These are these wonderful hearts my man has given me, but the chain broke so I put it on the safety pin," she explains.

The second is the 4-carat, radiant-cut diamond engagement ring Kopelman presented to her when he proposed in December, after the two had been dating for nearly a year.

"I am trying to get used to it," Barrymore says, beaming. (She had been linked romantically before to stars such as Justin Long and Luke Wilson and was

married twice, most recently to actor Tom Green, from whom she was divorced in 2002.)

When she took on Miracle in 2010, she had yet to meet Kopelman, and the biggest adjustment she was making was to a different kind of ice. Instead of shooting the film on a soundstage, director Ken Kwapis informed his star that the production would be filmed entirely in Alaska.

Kwapis reconstructed the ice fields in Anchorage and filmed there, rather than in Barrow, which is much closer to the Arctic Circle. But the surroundings still packed a weather punch as winter came on toward the end of the shoot in November and December.

"It was really cold, and that's an important thing to make the scenes look right," Kwapis says. "One of the more complicated things to create is visual breath. That was not a problem in Alaska. But Drew jumped right in."

Despite the conditions, Barrymore was pleased to work with three animatronic whales, created by the same New Zealand special-effects company that worked on 2002's Whale Rider.

"I didn't want to be playing acting," she says. "I needed a whale." Even if the whales were robotic, they helped her cope with the famously shortened days that came on as winter hit.

"That was the harder part for me - the lack of daylight," Barrymore says. "I'm a sunshine junkie. It was different, I'll put it that way."

Even packing was a chore for the Southern California born-and-bred Barrymore, who recalls that she toted a Fisher-Price light-up globe, Sorel boots and Uggs to Anchorage. "I didn't have anything (else) to offer. I lived at the (outdoor store) REI once I got there. That was

definitely helpful."

Barrymore found a kindred spirit in real-life Greenpeace activist Cindy Lowry, who was the basis of Barrymore's character. Lowry also had been unprepared when she first went to Alaska to aid the whale rescue.

Says Barrymore: "I feel like that we had that in common."

The two spent time together, before and during the shoot, and other shared traits surfaced.

"Ken (Kwapis) told me that my character fights for the right things but sometimes goes the wrong way about it," Barrymore says. "And that is a lot like me."

Back to 1988 Lowry says watching Barrymore shoot a scene in which she pulls a bullhorn out at a meeting about oil drilling rights, which actually happened, made her see the similarities.

"I was just smiling and thinking 'That is so me,'" Lowry says. "She just totally got me."

Barrymore's self-imposed Internet and e-mail ban meant she couldn't conduct business for her busy production company, which produced the highly successful Charlie's Angels films and the less-successful rebooted TV version on ABC in 2011.

"I shut down," she says. "I said, 'The work can wait.' I did it right up to the moment I left and said I would get back to it when I got back."

That disconnect helped her keep the feel of 1988 as she conducted letter-writing campaigns with friends using a period-appropriate IBM Selectric typewriter. ("Every week there were letters back, too," she says. "I loved it.") She immersed herself in books, including Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, and indulged

in a simple life.

"I went to work, did my hot yoga, and then I read. It was all very Zen." Still, there were lighter moments. Actors Ted Danson, Kristen Bell and John Krasinski, who plays Barrymore's TV reporter ex-boyfriend, had an entire floor of Anchorage's Captain Cook Hotel to themselves. Krasinki's red fox Labrador, Finn, and Barrymore's mutt, Douglas, were able to roam about at will.

At times, Krasinski and his visiting wife, actress Emily Blunt, would pull Barrymore out to a local restaurant away from her books. "It was like, 'Come on, you're going out to dinner with us,' " Barrymore says. The big dinners had an added benefit of keeping the body nourished in the Alaskan cold.

"You really do need more calories to exist in Alaska," Lowry says. "People who live there get used to the dry cold. But folks visiting need to acclimate."

Barrymore might have taken the advice too seriously with a pad thai dish at a local Thai place.

"I definitely did put on a layer of 5 to 8 pounds of protective blubber. You just couldn't tell under all of those clothes," she says. "When I got home to Los Angeles, I was like, 'Wow, Alaska. I really brought it home with me.'"

Despite returning to the bustle of the filmmaking capital, Barrymore maintains the low-key attitude about her life. With the future wide open, she's at peace with not having every step of the way planned - even her usually packed professional calendar. The balance of emphasis has shifted to her personal life.

"It's all sort of in reverse now," she says with a laugh. "Now I am dating a few work things. But I just haven't committed."

Though she has found "the one" personally, she is willing to wait for her next professional soul mate.

"I really love being in love. I am that girl who will sit outside your house in a car at night. And I mean that in a sort of good-committed way, not a psycho-irritant," she laughs. "When I'm in love, I really commit myself to things, whether it's work or a person.

"So when I find that new work love, I'll stalk it."

Š 2012, USA TODAY International.

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YOU CANNOT BE SIRI-OUS! Why we're still waiting for the perfect mobile interface

By Farhad Manjoo

Shor tly after the iPhone 4S went on sale this fall, its marquee feature, the Siri voice assistant, sparked a heated debate in the tech world: Was Siri a great computing inter face, or was it the greatest?

To many obser vers, Apple's software, which combines uncannily accurate voice recognition with an ar tificial-intelligence engine that's capable of understanding complex English-language requests, marked the realization of our sci-fi dreams. Soon we'd be controlling ever ything by voice - cars, fridges, toasters, and, crucially, our T Vs. 134

Both Google T V and Microsoft's Kinect let people control their televisions by voice; according to The New York Times, Apple's long-rumored entr y into manufacturing T Vs might rest on the same gimmick.

Lost in Siri's coronation is any hint of how strange the world would be if we all took up chattering with our machines. Siri-like inter faces are limited to private use; sure, you can tr y dictating an email on the subway or an airplane, but be sure to wear a mouth guard--and maybe even full body armor. Even issuing simple commands--"Remind me to buy Metamucil," "Play more Katy Perr y"-- could incite embarrassment.

And then there's the question of utility : Why tell your T V to turn up the volume when you could just hit a button on the clicker?

Voice control cer tainly has a place in the future of computing. But the rush to crown it as the Next Great Inter face, despite its obvious shor tcomings, illustrates a void in our conception of the future. As mobile machines keep getting more power ful, we're running into a fundamental technological hurdle: We need to find new, better ways of managing our phones and tablets in order to unleash their capabilities.

That's why we hail ever y inter face invention, from multitouch to motion control to voice, as the next holy grail. As promising as each of these technologies may be, none completely solves the mobile inter face dilemma. On our por table devices, it's still too difficult to input large piles of text, to work with complex graphics, or to other wise manipulate data as we're used to on our desktops. "In many ways, this is the grand challenge of computing," says Chris Harrison, an inter face researcher at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. " We won' t use mobile devices to their true potential until we break through this inter face bottleneck."

Harrison and his colleagues, not to mention dozens of researchers elsewhere in academia and the industr y, are constantly tr ying to crack this problem. Some ideas are incremental improvements on current inter faces. For instance, one of Har-rison's projects, called TapSense, would let your smar tphone determine how you tapped its screen in order to allow for more complex interactions; use your k nuck le instead of your finger tip and your phone might interpret the gesture as a right- click.

O ther projects imagine much greater flights of fanc y. OmniTouch imagines a mobile computer that doesn' t have a screen. Instead, you carr y around a wearable projector that would create a touch-screen inter face anywhere. Need to calculate a tip at lunch? Project a calculator on the table and punch at the projected keys. While Harrison has won commercial back ing for a few of his projects--he produced OmniTouch while work ing for Microsoft Research--none of his ideas is likely to solve the inter face dilemma.

Why? Because no single inter face will be the panacea. Until we somehow run our computers through thought--and, hey, let's not rule that out!--we're unlikely to settle on a single input method for all devices.

Computers of the future, like those today, will likely shift gracefully among a host of inter faces: voice in the car, a touch screen on the plane, a projected screen when you're collaborating with others, and probably some zany innovation to write your novel while you're just walk ing down the street. What will that new inter face look like? I can' t tell you--but trust me, don' t ask Siri. It doesn' t k now either.

Š 2012 Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

HOFFMAN, NOLTE Test their 'Luck' on HBO horse racing series

By Gary Levin

HBO's Luck, a sprawling drama with an impeccable pedigree set in the world of horse racing, was casting about for its lead role of a gambling operator newly released from prison.

Dustin Hoffman's name came up, though he'd done no real TV work except for an uncredited episode of The Simpsons.

So he asked the show's creator and head writer, David Milch. "I said, 'Tell me what luck is,' " Hoffman recalls."And he said, 'Waking up in the morning.' And I've never heard it said better."

In the new series Hoffman plays Chester "Ace" Bernstein, a gambling operator newly released from prison. He uses his driver and confidant (Dennis Farina) as a front to buy a horse at Santa Anita, the storied 77-year-old thoroughbred track in Arcadia, Calif., and sets his sights on buying a piece of the track.

Santa Anita is populated by a motley assortment of characters from all walks of life: a mysterious old man (Nick Nolte) with a horse of his own; an expert but secretive trainer (John Ortiz) and his veterinarian girlfriend (Jill Hennessy); a nervous agent (Richard Kind) representing an ambitious young jockey (Tom 136

Payne); and a gang of four self-described degenerate gamblers, played by actors including Jason Gedrick and Kevin Dunn, the team's wheelchair-riding ringleader.

Nolte's Walter Smith "has a past, and when you have a past that is that strong, it (messes) you up, and the old man is a glacier of the glimmer of his past," says Nolte, 70. "But he's working toward the right path, trying to do it the right way, and that's the horse's way.

It's the horse that decides to win, and the horse that decides to like you," not the other way around. "We corrupt that all the time because we don't know who we are; you get insecure."

Milch is fond of layered, sometimes similarly obtuse storytelling. With longtime partner Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), he created NYPD Blue and other network crime dramas. Then Milch moved on to HBO, where his dark Western Deadwood was a threeseason cult favorite, but 2007 surfer drama John From Cincinnati was a short-lived dud. (He recently signed a deal to adapt William Faulkner novels for the network.)

"I didn't know anything about David; I don't watch television," Hoffman says. But co-creator Michael

Mann, who coined a different kind of cop-show style with Miami Vice, "I've known since the '70s; we worked together on a thing involving convicts (1978's Straight Time)," the actor says. "They started talking to me the first day, and Michael just says, 'I haven't seen you be the bow that delivers the arrow.' He says, 'You're reactive.' I never thought of anything like that."

Milch grew up at the track Hoffman, 74, is known for roles from The Graduate to Rain Man, but he has rarely revisited those characters in sequels ("just because I haven't seen a good one").

Now he'll try his luck with an ongoing series that, in success, will tie him up for six years. "It's the closest to life I've ever had in terms of my work."

Mann elaborates: "Great actors are always in their best situation if they're on the frontier, doing something fresh and new, just like any other human being. It's a bit more challenging, it gets your blood running. What's wonderful about this character, and the idea of Dustin doing it, was that he is proactive, he's the man with the plan, the architect. He's the only guy who knows what's going to happen in advance. And we come to trust that Ace isn't telling

us everything, but Ace has a plan that's full of the near future. (But) we're left a lot in the dark about a lot of it as it's unfolding."

Horse racing is new to TV drama, but for Milch, the equine theme is no accident. He has had a life-long devotion to racing, and he liberally sprinkles the script with phrases that might puzzle many viewers: "Pick6," a single wager involving horses in each of six races, and "Bug Boy," an apprentice jockey.

"My dad took me out to the track when I was 5," and like him, the younger Milch had an "ambivalent relationship" with it. "He was compelled and fascinated by it, and at the same time, he regarded it as the antithesis of the way we were supposed to live. Milch has owned winners of several Breeders' Cup races, and he says even now that he has "been known to make the occasional wager."

Including on this series. He has been working on a script about a racetrack since the early 1970s. "These are characters at different levels of sophistication, all of whom are living (with) that conflict, and the fact that it's set at the racetrack is at once essential and almost irrelevant. I still have a feeling when I walk into a racetrack - and I've been around the game a long time - I say, 'Well, how are they going to beat me today?' " Says Hoffman: "If you can go to Santa Anita at 6 in the morning, which the degenerates do, it's one of the most extraordinary experiences."

'Quintessential' HBO series The horses were another matter. The "highly protected thoroughbreds" in the series' cinematic

racing scenes - "not $4 million thoroughbreds, but $100,000, $150,000 thoroughbreds," says Mann, who directed the pilot - needed TLC. "They can run a quarter or a third of a mile, then they have to stop for 20 minutes and rest." After two more sprints, they "go home to a massage. So to do a race with eight horses, we needed 40."

Nolte's enigmatic, gravel-voiced character is meant to connect with most viewers' understanding of the racing world. "He has a kind of idealized relationship with the track, but there's also a naivete in his attitude (of ) what it means to own and campaign to run a racehorse," Milch says, which isolates him from the others.

And that shady past? "He was present on a breeding farm when something bad happened to a stallion," Milch says. "He had no role in it, but he feels as if he did."

Does Nolte know what comes next? "Would you want to know how you're going to die? I wanted my horse to win."

Milch, who is notorious for last-minute rewrites and an obsessive attention to detail, took a back seat in production, conceding there was some tension with Mann, another strong-willed auteur. "Once I turned the script in, this became Michael's show to realize, and he did an extraordinary job," he says. "It's not at all the way I'm used to working, and it was a considerable adjustment. But I'm a big boy, and I went into this with my eyes wide open."

The first season consists of nine hour-long episodes, fewer than usual. (The first aired as a low-

rated Dec. 11 preview in a scheduling experiment that is unlikely to be repeated.)

HBO programming president Michael Lombardo says that while Luck may not be for everyone, it fits the channel's mold in dramas. Luck's "conversation between artistry and storytelling and big ideas makes this quintessentially an HBO show. Our greatest dramas have been shows that worked on a number of levels. There are people who watch ‘The Sopranos’ and think of it as the best Mob show of all time, and there are people who watch ‘The Sopranos’ and talk about the poetry in it, the essence of the family drama. And I think the same is true of ‘Luck’; it works on multiple levels."

Comparisons to that seminal series are hopeful.

HBO has been successful with recent dramas True Blood, Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire, but it faces intense competition. At this month's Golden Globe Awards, which it often dominates, Showtime shone brighter, with three awards: best drama for Homeland and acting awards for Claire Danes and Episodes' Matt LeBlanc.

"Fortunately, I'm not chasing audiences," Lombardo says. "What I'm chasing is enough of an audience to know that some people are being satisfied."

As for Milch, he's chasing those childhood memories. "There's a tremendous exhilaration and enthusiasm," he says, "that you feel for the mystery of the experience."

© 2012, USA TODAY International.

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MEET YOUR MAKER

By Rob Walker

Bre Pettis's MakerBot has attracted millions in financing and is selling its 3-D printers as fast as it can. So how big can his business get?

(And why does the world need more crap made out of plastic?)

Consider a random yet routine domestic minitragedy: The paper-towel holder in your kitchen is busted. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of making a trip to the mall or waiting for a delivery from an online retailer, you could simply produce a replacement, right at home, right now? For years, this idea hovered at the edge of plausibility.

Just as you transfer words and images from your computer screen onto a piece of paper, so-called 138

3-D printers promise to allow you to transform digital blueprints into physical objects, on the spot. So far, the number of people doing this in the real world has been modest--mostly techoriented artists and superimaginative hackers, engaged in experimental projects, and, really, goof-offs. Using homemade devices, they "print" everything from anthropomorphic coffee cups to plastic replicas of Duchamp urinals. In the lookwhat-these-zany-kids-are-up-to media coverage

that 3-D printing tends to attract, that's the stuff that gets attention. But MakerBot Industries is no art project. A young startup in Brooklyn, New York, it has emerged as the leading brand in the nascent consumer-oriented 3-D-printing realm and has recently closed a $10 million round of venturecapital funding. More than 6,000 MakerBot 3-D printers have been sold. That may not sound like a lot, but bear in mind that most sell in the form of a kit--the company's current flagship model is

the $1,300 Thing-O-Matic--that is ordered directly from MakerBot and requires 12 hours or more to assemble. Now that's customer dedication. In less than three years, MakerBot has gone from three tinkering guys to 50-plus employees and counting. "If I had 20 people outside the door who were perfect can-didates, I'd hire them all," says cofounder and chief executive officer Bre Pettis.

In a culture with no widespread experience of 3-D printing--and thus no real way to gauge its mass appeal--it is difficult to imagine how big MakerBot might get. But in recent months, Pettis's company began selling prebuilt printers and taking its first steps into traditional retail. "I think it's an enormous business," says Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group, a firm that led MakerBot's venture-capital round and has also invested in Zynga. Jeff Bezos's venture-capital vehicle put some money in too--after Pettis met the Amazon founder at a conference and Bezos proceeded to grill him about the MakerBot strategy for half an hour. For these investors, the bet is that 3-D printers will become as popular as laser printers are today. Feld insists it will happen within a decade.

If anything close to that comes true, somebody is going to make a lot of money. And MakerBot's strategy stands out for its mashup of entrepreneurial zeal and anticapitalist, opensource ethos. Pettis has a take-no-prisoners business rap about the current opportunity. "It's kind of like the early days of America: People came and just did things and found out if they worked or not," he says. "Empires were built." Yet he's equally evangelical about the competitive advantage of "sharing": His company not only makes public the full technical specs and details of its 3-D printers, but it also collects designs for MakerBottable objects on a site called Thingiverse, a completely free and open-source resource. Thingiverse is where you would go to get that paper-towelholder design so you could replace the one that broke. Thousands have contributed designs--edgy artist types, but also General Electric, which has its own Thingiverse account.

It all adds up to a revolution that might have puzzled Marx--the means of production, in every home! I ask Pettis: But if everybody can just produce their own stuff, with no limits, doesn't it completely alter the nature of capitalism? "Yeah," he replies, not missing a beat. "We are a disruptive, anticonsumerist company." One that just happens to be profitable too.

In the window of MakerBot Industries' office on Dean Street, there's a display of MakerBotted stuff, little plastic buildings and airplanes and monsters arranged in an unlikely diorama. This is the MakerBot workshop--aka the Botfarm. It's

an airy space lined with glass cabinets holding all manner of curiosities, from brightly colored 3-D-printed toys to the prototype of MakerBot's first consumer product, a 3-D printer known as the Cupcake. On a long table to the left, a row of MakerBot Thing-O-Matics whir away. During my visit, most were producing objects for a holiday window display at the New Museum in New York.

Even at MakerBot headquarters, it is hard to tell whether you are encountering a private company or an art collective. In a separate space beyond the Botfarm are desks where customerservice reps work; beyond that is Pettis's office and a closed-door R&D lab that I was somewhat theatrically denied access to. A work crew is banging away in an adjacent space that MakerBot is taking over, making room for even more staff.

Still, the place doesn't quite feel like a business, and Pettis doesn't quibble with that. At 39, with chunky horn-rimmed glasses and thick sweptback, gray-streaked hair, he could pass for Dad in a 1950s sitcom--or maybe someone spoofing such a figure in a Saturday Night Live sketch. "We've got something special going on," he tells me. "Not just with the hardware but with our approach to the community." Just recently, he says, MakerBot launched an effort called Project Shellter to solve the problem of hermit crabs facing a shortage of suitable shells. Working with an artist and a scientist, the company is prodding its customers to help come up with MakerBottable shell replacements. This explains the aquarium full of crabs in the back of the Botfarm.

Essentially, MakerBot's branding strategy boils down to making cool stuff and encouraging others in the technical and design vanguard to do the same--under the auspices of MakerBot. In February, the company started an artist-inresidence program, which essentially entails offering its resources, and some cash, to people like Kyle McDonald, a Brooklyn artist known for provocative uses of (often hacked) technology. McDonald paired a Thing-O-Matic with a Microsoft Kinect motion-control sensor to enable a kind of 3-D scan-and-print system. More recently, MakerBot brought on Michael Curry as a staff designer. Curry was working at the Kansas City, Missouri, architecture firm Populous when he bought a Cupcake printer two years ago and became an active user. MakerBot hired him--his actual title is "design superstar"--to dream up elaborate creations like the Turtle Shell Racer, which meshes multiple MakerBotted parts and some electronics components into a delightful robotic toy car that was a big hit at the most recent New York Maker Faire for do-it-yourself enthusiasts.

These are the kinds of one-off pieces MakerBot

creates for, say, Pettis's appearance on The Colbert Report. Or the representations the firm made of Laurie Anderson's dog for the famous performance artist to include in a recent exhibition. When I speak with MakerBot's Keith Ozar, he seems offended when I refer to such undertakings as "marketing." His background is in underground music promotion, and he joined MakerBot when the company advertised a "marketing experimenter" position in early 2011. MakerBot doesn't really market at all, he counters; it actively participates in the community the company seeks to both cultivate and create, involving "people who are creative, people with imaginations." That means a presence at Maker Faire-style events, where hardware hackers congregate, and more recently at comics conventions and the like. The strategy also guides its new retail experiments: The first two venues where someone can buy a MakerBot in person are the store at the New Museum and AC Gears, a gadget emporium in Manhattan. "We're kind of like the skateboarders of the technology world," Ozar tells me.

Pettis likes it that way. A "community"focused attitude, he says, informs the company's Thingiverse site--which is MakerBot's secret weapon as a business. As of late fall, there were designs for 11,500 printable objects on the site.

Some are geeky amusements: toys, gewgaws, and hard-to-categorize creations like the Springamathing, a flexible ring of accordioned plastic with no obvious functionality. Others are hyperspecific, unique parts to make other machines work. And some are useful: clamps, zippers, and, yes, a paper-towel holder. The common thread is that they are available to users at no cost whatsoever. What's more, if you modify a Thingiverse design to make it better, the idea is that you'll share that improvement--for free-on the website. And then someone else may improve your design even further. MakerBot and its employees routinely contribute Thingiverse designs. The upshot is that this free-for-all creates continuous, ever-growing value for the Thing-OMatic, the actual product MakerBot sells.

Pettis didn't exactly set out to run a tech company. Just a half-dozen years ago he was a schoolteacher in Seattle, spending summers trying to make a career as an artist. His big acrylic paintings and pinhole-camera photographs weren't really selling, though. Then, around 2005, a fellow teacher at Eckstein Middle School showed him the closet he'd filled with computer-operated machine tools. "That was my introduction, really, to digital manufacturing," Pettis recalls.

It wasn't really a diversion from his past. "I like to make things," he says. "It's been part of my identity since I was a kid." In the 1980s, his continued on next page...

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parents had a business selling software for Acorn, Apple, and Commodore computers; the business failed, but along the way it exposed him to teenage hacker-programmers. "Those guys were my heroes," he says. As a teacher, he tapped into online networks where instructors could share lesson plans. Later he discovered Flickr, and its active community inspired him to abandon the big physical prints he'd begun to sell in galleries.

He was also an early member of the fledgling, preYouTube, online video-blogging scene.

By 2006, he'd quit teaching and was making videos for a new publication, Make magazine, which emerged as the central voice for a generation of hands-on tinkerers doing inventive things with electronics. In 2007, he moved to New York and later began making videos for Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods. He missed one thing about Seattle: Hackerbot, a gathering of like-minded mechanical experimenters who had banded together to acquire and use some fairly serious industrial equipment. So he started a similar group in New York, rounding up participants who chipped in to buy a $20,000 laser cutter and gathered on Thursday nights in a former brewery near downtown Brooklyn to egg each other on to new feats of hackerdom. The space, and group, was named NYC Resistor.

One member was Zach Hoeken Smith. "What do you make?" Pettis asked him one night. "I make self-replicating machines," Smith told him. Smith was involved in something called the RepRap project, a not-for-profit effort to create a free 3-D printer that could print the parts necessary to make other 3-D printers. Pettis's reply to Smith:

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"How can I help?"

This was 2008, and Pettis's video work seemed on the brink of landing him a show, on the History Channel, remaking inventions from the past. But when the pilot wasn't picked up for a full season, Pettis and Smith started talking about a different approach to 3-D printers. The two wanted to create machines that used standard parts, an accessible platform, and could be put to a wide range of uses. "We wanted people to 3-D-print anything, not just more 3-D printers," Pettis says.

They enlisted a third friend, Adam Mayer, and raised $75,000 from two angel investors: Smith's old boss Jake Lodwick, a cofounder of Vimeo, and Adrian Bowyer, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Bath in England, who founded the RepRap project. The trio completed 20 kits and put them up for sale in early 2009. They sold out in two weeks. "There was a tangible sense of potential as we packed them up," Pettis recalls. "'We're giving people 3-D printers that they can afford. What are they gonna make?'" Pettis's crew made more and sold those; after 42 days, they'd brought in more money than they'd spent. And so they started hiring.

Today, around the corner from the Botfarm, in the space that used to be occupied by NYC Resistor (which has moved three flights up), is the Botcave. This feels like a business. Production

manager Marisol Murphy oversees a dozen or so workers assembling MakerBot kits, plucking parts from shelves stacked with boxes marked type k thermocouple and stepper motor driver v3.3. (In addition to the $1,300 base price, it costs an extra $1,200 to get one prebuilt.) The products stack up by the front door; about 300 kits go out every month. When I sound out Pettis about ways the company might grow over time--selling through Best Buy? stand-alone MakerBot stores?--he rules out nothing. "I see," he says, "a million MakerBots on the horizon."

But sooner or later, even the most besotted fan of desktop manufacturing notices that whatever the future may hold, the present is filled with plastic novelties that are amusing but mostly pointless. Pettis nods knowingly.

"One of the criticisms we get is, 'Does the world need more plastic crap?'" he says. "But you have to look beyond the plastic crap, to the design, to the experience, to the empowering nature of the MakerBot and the community." Partly he

means the share-friendly Thingiverse, the Maker Faire scene, the gatherings online and off where adventurous tinkerers find each other. But that makes the MakerBot idea sound vaguely like an eccentric subculture--and Pettis clearly believes there's something more significant going on.

When I point out that you can't exactly print an iPhone on a Thing-O-Matic, he counters that, in fact, there's almost nothing you can't build yourself in an increasingly "modular" economy that's taking shape. Tinker-friendly Arduino circuit boards have become a maker-crowd hit. Webbased retailers such as AdaFruit and SparkFun sell a variety of open-source hardware parts and kits; the TechShops chain of workshops is trying to turn the hackerspace idea into a business. In the makeit-yourself world, these are widely known names at the center of a new grassroots marketplace.

MakerBot is not the only outfit pushing 3-D printing and chasing a mass-fabrication future.

There are already industrial-grade prototyping machines--made by 3D Systems and Stratasys, among others--that can make bigger objects sharper and more quickly, and from more materials (including metals and ceramics), than the ThingO-Matic. Though such top-end machines are well beyond the financial reach of a typical hobbyist, many of these firms are now eyeing the consumer market. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, jumped into the desktop 3-D-printer business in 2010, with a model going for a reported $17,000.

Other rival printers include the Ultimaker and Shapercube, both with European roots, and Fab@ Home, an open-source project spun out of Cornell University. Still others--CloudFab, MakeMe, Ponoko, and Shapeways--are pursuing business models that involve users uploading a custom design that a company will print for them.

Pettis is breezily self-confident about potential competition. MakerBot, he argues, understands the new maker marketplace in ways that give it a distinct advantage. He points to the Thingiverse, which relies on the social-motive rewards of sharing rather than the profit-motive rewards one might assume are necessary to get thousands of people to contribute. He insists that his company's accessible, participatory approach taps into the direction our culture is moving: away from the mass-produced and toward the individually created. "When people have a MakerBot, they have a different mind-set from everybody else, who grew up as a consumer," he says. "Instead of thinking, I need to go buy that, they first think, Do I need to go buy that? I could just MakerBot that."

In Pettis's view, the Thing-O-Matic is a particularly potent example of a "meta tool"-a tool to make other tools. "It's like getting a superpower," he says. As such, it fits into the maker

movement's efforts to overcome an alienation from the gadgetry we depend on. (Do you really know how your computer works? Could you build a smartphone?) The Thing-O-Matic, as Pettis puts it, "is like a raw innovation machine. The cost of failure is low. The plastic is cheap. The time is robot time. So you can have an idea and you can fail as many times as you need to until you're satisfied."

This idea, he asserts, will be even more powerful when it reaches the constituency that interests him most: students. "That's my next big project--getting MakerBots into every high school in the United States," Pettis says. MakerBot currently has a 3-D-printing curriculum in a pilot program in a handful of New York City schools.

If more kids could learn the lesson of innovation through iteration that the Thing-O-Matic teaches, he contends, "we'd have a different world."

You can still hear the voice of the schoolteacher he once was. Too many people, he remarks, and maybe kids in particular, "are scared of failure, scared of innovating, scared of trying, because they're afraid that it won't work, and they don't know that if they keep trying, it will work." MakerBot, as Pettis sees it, is a symbol for being able to fail--and then push beyond failure. "Overcome adversity," as he puts it, "and make anything you want exist." And then he stops sounding like a schoolteacher and says something, well, unprintable. But the essence of it is: That's how MakerBot really messes with things.

Š 2012, Distributed by Tribune Media Services.

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bazaar scopes

ARIES

March 21 - April 19

TAU R U S

April 20 - May 20

GEMINI

May 21 - June 21

The home front could have you picking colors and fabrics for a redo.

This is an excellent time for home improvement projects, inside or out. Ideas seem to flow in during the last three weeks of the month. Be careful on the 12th not to neglect your career, as there could be some fallout there. A romantic partner could be giving you mixed signals all month. Be patient and wait this person out until the 24th. The reason for this flip-flop maneuvering will be revealed after that date.

CANCER

Your romantic life is going to be a whirlwind this month. Avoid a major confrontation on the 12th, but take notes for later. There may be clues all month that don’t set right and those hard questions may need to be asked of your lover before month’s end. Employment issues have you torn in two directions this month. After the 21st there could be some resolutions made in this area. Then the 24th will find complete closure on the matter.

June 22 - July 22

The job scene is popping with excitement this month. New challenges and opportunities could be right around the corner. If you have any suggestions, write them down and hand them in to the boss. They’ll be well received. A long-term relationship issue could require your attention this month, as well. Patience is the answer as you work through the problems. The pressure is relieved after the 24th.

LEO

Your committed relationship boat sails on quiet seas this month until the 12th. On that day you both become mirrors for each other’s behavior and you may not like the view. Personal changes may be necessary to maintain that relationship past that day. Strong ones will weather the storm, weak ones will not. This will be for the best. There could be major issues over jointly held assets as well, time to sharpen the pencils and get out the old calculator for some accounting. The urge to take a trip becomes overwhelming after the 24th, time to hit the open road.

July 23 - Aug 22

Jointly held assets are the center of attention for you this month.

Changes and decisions will require some deep thought and major commitment on your part. One thing will be assured; the 12th will have the truth about these assets revealed for better or worse.

These changes in fortune could have you looking for greener pastures at a distance. Some will appeal, some won’t. Best not to make any decision until after the 24th when Mars moves out of your House of Distant Matters and enters your House of Career; this could then be the deciding factor.

VIRGO

Nov 22 - Dec 21 Dec 22 - Jan 19 Jan 20 - Feb 18

Your vacation takes center stage this month. Try to go before the 11th or after the 13th when pressure could come from your employer to stay on the 12th. Your career and job will still be there when you get back. There could also be interesting news regarding your position when you do get back. That information will set the tone for the remainder of the month. Changes will test your resolve but also allow you to contribute to your future wherever you are employed.

Aug 23 - Sept 22

LIBRA

Sept 23 - Oct 22

S CO R P I O

Oct 23 - Nov 21

S A G I T TA R I U S C A P R I CO R N A Q UA R I U S PISCES

Feb 19 - March 20

what’s your sign?

Communications from friends and relatives stuff your mail boxes this month. Short trips can be fun and functional and you’ll make many. Try to avoid a confrontation with a sibling on the 12th. You’ll see your own worst habits in this person and you may not like what you see. Time to make some changes. A nagging home-problem will hang like a sword over your head until the 24th of the month.

Fixing the problem until then will only make it worse so wait until then to make a move on it.

Your cash situation looks so great this month. The money could be just pouring in. If there is a problem with this it will most likely occur on the 20th when a romantic interest or a child could make an outlandish demand for cash that you may well regret saying YES to. Also this month you may find yourself holding your tongue regarding something you know, but are afraid to say. After the 24th, someone may take the pressure off and you’ll be able to breathe easier then.

The Sun and Venus are in your 1st House of Self at this time giving you vitality and beauty to attract the opposite sex. Mercury will pass through this house as well this month and you’ll most likely hear about how great you look. Pay close attention on the 12th, when meaningful relationship issues may require you to make personal changes for your partner. Financial upheavals settled down after the 24th.

This is a month to slow down and just take it easy. Part of you will want to go and the other part will want to stay and be still. It’s a tough call; just remember not to over commit on the job or to your friends. You’ll feel more like socializing after the 24th. Avoid an argument this month with a sibling. Pay attention to your health cues all month. A romance on the job could be taxing you in ways you’re unaware of and it could bring you some upsets.

It could be safe to say that your friends could be planning ways to ruin your love life this month as a prank. Or it could be the other way around. Either way, be aware that there will be friction. You could also be feeling some restrictions that rub you the wrong way, too.

Patience is a virtue. Don’t go ballistic until you have all the facts. After the 24th, it would be a good time for you to find a solitary outlet for you energies. This will allow you the room you need to work out your problems away from distracting influences.

Much is happening in your career sector this month. You could be the shining employee of the month and it may surprise you. Look for ways to improve you current career situation and put those plans into action around the middle of March. Learning to say No, as well as Yes, to your friends will be the people exercise you learn this month. After the 21st the emphasis will be on you friendships and the things you want out of life. It’s an excellent time to focus on those issues.

source: www.horoscopessign.com 142

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