The Red Bulletin_1010_NZ

www.redbulletin.com

an almost independent monthly magazine / October 2010

Deep Breaths

Bahamas: the NZ diver plunging to 100m on one lungful of air

Parcel Force

New York City: 24 hours with the world’s fastest bike courier

One Giant Leap

The Moon: exclusive Neil Armstrong chat

Greatest Of All Time

Fifty years ago, Ali threw his first pro punch.

We celebrate sport’s most remarkable career

Experience

Print 2.0

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BullHorn

Time For Greatness Few things mark the passage of time as starkly as our cultural and sporting memories. You see a favourite movie on TV, and realise, wow, it’s five, 10, 20 or more years since you saw it when it came out. Archive footage of a goal, a pass, a medal-winning run, jump or throw takes you right back to when you leapt out of your seat watching it live. And then you think, ‘Has it really been that long?’ You can stake out the days of your lives with the actions of your heroes.

There are no superlatives left for Muhammad Ali. As time marches on, his achievements in and out of the ring, as amazing as they were at the time, gain greater significance as they take on the weight of history.

His story is the story of sport and celebrity, racial struggle and money, personal politics and public tragedy in the latter half of the 20th century, and we mark it this month ( page 44) because it is 50 years since the boxer formerly known as Cassius Clay made his professional debut in the ring.

It’s important to look back every now and then, as it reaffirms the vividness of what’s happening now, and what may happen in the future.

Flimmaker Werner Herzog, he of Grizzly Man and the remake of Bad Lieutenant, is making a 3D film of the world’s oldest cave paintings – our newest art from illuminating one of the most ancient ( page 40). Neil Armstrong outlines mankind’s next giant leap ( page 82), and back down on Earth, we find the world’s fastest cycle courier weaving through the yellow taxis in New York City ( page 52).

Greatness, you see, comes in many forms.

Good enough for ‘The Greatest’ The stunning Muhammad Ali pictures featured in this month’s magazine are taken from a new edition of the definitive book on his life, Greatest Of All Time.

Published this month by Taschen, this latest release contains a complete record of Ali’s career, essays by leading writers and hundreds more remarkable images. It’s all the Ali you need.

Cover Photography: Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos

Your editorial team

In the back of beyond Welcome to Lofoten: Alex Lisetz (left) and Philipp Horak (right) on either side of former windsurf world champion Jan Wanggaard.

For the full story see page 64.

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Your Red Bulletin can do more than you think Movies, sounds, animation 10

14 Print 2.0 – the extra dimension in your Red Bulletin. In this issue you’ll find it with the following stories:

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Print 2.0

The new multi-media experience.

Wherever you see the bull’s eye!

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How to get started: turn to page 9 or enter nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 in your web browser

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Contents

welcome to the world of Red Bull Inside your globetrotting Red Bulletin this month

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Bullevard

10 pictures of the month

16 now and next What to see and where to be in the worlds of culture and sport 20 kit bag Still the dream toy of every wannabe racer, remote-controlled model cars have advanced almost as far as the man-sized motors on which they’re based 22 where’s your head at?

From pop to movies, Justin Timberlake has pushed his career outside the box.

But what does he keep inside it?

24 winning formula When it comes to a wheel-bending bike crash, there’s a science to the shapeshifting

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52

27 me and my body Mariana Pajon, Colombia’s 13-time world BMX champ, has been riding ever since she could walk. That equates to a near-lifetime of breaks and bruises

58 xx

28 lucky numbers The Earth’s northern and southern extremes have long attracted humans with aims that are poles apart. Here’s how it all adds up

Heroes

32 diplo From favela funk to Trinidadian Soca, the style-swapping, bass-loving DJ, producer and label owner never fails to get the dancefloor pulsating 36 william trubridge The record-breaking freediver always sets out to reach new depths 40 werner herzog No one busts genres like master movie maker Herzog. In this rare interview he explains (a bit) what makes him tick 44 muhammad ali The greatest, the best, the most unbeatable – the man who could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee”. This is how it all began 06

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contents

Action

52 world’s fastest courier Even in the fast-paced city of New York, this bike courier extraordinaire has the speediest wheels of all 58 KTM: Kings of motocross They’re minnows of world bike manufacture, yet KTM take on and crush the best in their field. Why so?

Racers make the best motorbikes 64 islands of the mind Former windsurfing champion Jan Wanggaard left everything behind to live in a remote part of northern Europe.

Now it’s just him and his art

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64

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Photography: Thomas Hoeffgen, Thomas Butler, Rex Features, Richard Robinson, Jahn M/KTM, Carl Fischer/GOAT/Taschen, Meenophoto, Juergen Skarwan, Philipp Horack

74 japanese baseball It’s big business in Japan. We follow champions Yomiuri Giants and young star Hayato Sakamoto into their world

More Body & Mind

82 neil armstrong The first man on the moon touches down at Hangar-7 for this exclusive interview 84 get the gear Everything you’ll ever need to bike from A to B in one of the world’s busiest cities 86 travel guru Where to see Japanese baseball 88 listings Worldwide, day and night, our guide to the ultimate month-long weekend 90 nightlife A DJ’s eye view of MedellÍn, a Swiss beehive of a bar, The Very Best in Croatia and an exclusive New York club 98 russell brown On the explosion of new, and old, media

the red Bulletin Print 2.0 Movies, sounds and animation wherever you see this sign in your Red Bulletin 1

nz.redbulletin.com/ print2.0 In your browser window you’ll see the magazine cover. Just click at ‘Start Bull’s Eye’

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Switch on your webcam If a webcam activation window opens, just click ‘activate’

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Hold your Red Bulletin up to the webcam You’ll see all the multimedia content in this month’s mag – movies, sound and animation

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illustration: dietmar kainrath

K a i n r at h

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ogilvy_RS2782

Bullevard

Photography: Christophe Margot/Red Bull Photofiles

Tales of strength, speed and ingenuity from around the globe

Print 2.0

nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 See the athletes tackle the ultrademanding cross-country rowing race

C e n t r a l Sw i tz e r l a n d

Field Crew They’re not lost, they’re just at the crucial stage of a most unusual race. Red Bull XRow saw eight coxed crews traverse a wet-and-dry course that began at the top of Lake Zug and ended, three rows, two runs and a sprint later, in Lucerne. The teams of nine first rowed the 10km from Zug to Immensee across Lake Zug, then hauled their boats out of the water and ran with them for the best part of 4km, to Küssnacht on Lake Lucerne.

Another 6km row, then 3km across the fields between Meggen and Wartenfluh, before a final boat trip of 3km and a 600m dash (if you can call it that after all the rowing and the carrying) to the finish at Lucerne. The winning team, Marcel Hacker All Star, headed by the eponymous German former world single sculls champ, came home in 2 hours 3 minutes and 50 seconds.

Carry on your understanding at en.redbulletin.com/xrow

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Photography: Mattias Fredriksson

H a fj e l l (N o rway )

Biggest Air Tom Cruise gets enough grief as it is, so, Tom, if you’re reading this: ANTI Days Of Thunder has nothing to do with your 1990 film about the peaks and troughs of NASCAR racing. No: it’s the Norwegian mountain bike crew ANTI, and their Days Of Thunder event. This six-day freeriding feast of downhill racing, slopestyle and dirt jumping was held to celebrate the enjoyment of the sport as much as its competitive elements: a noble idea, which was made flesh in spectacular style. A documentary film crew and a bunch of photographers were there to record the action, and this shot of Niels Windfeldt, taken by the Swedish snapper Mattias Fedriksson, made it to the final round of the global action and adventure photography contest, Red Bull Illume.

Event film: www.watch26.tv. Rival images: www.redbullillume.com

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Photography: Alberto Lessman/Red Bull Photofiles

St r a i t s o f G i b r a lta r

Ferry Good Gisela Pulido is 16 and has won the world kiteboarding championship six times. If you were to win your sport’s highest honour two months before your 11th birthday, and then hold onto it, with no sign of letting it go, then you might also need a new challenge now and then. So when the Spaniard kept on looking out of the windows of her house, watching the boats cross the Straits of Gibraltar from Tarifa to Tangiers and back, she had an idea. Last month, her notion became real, and she took on the 40,000hp of one of the ferries in a race from Spain to Morocco. Despite the lead apparent in this photograph, the girl and the massive watercraft completed the 17km race in a tie, each recording a time of 35 minutes.

Read the diary of a teenage world champ at giselapulido.es

Print 2.0

nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 A teenager on a kitesurfing board takes on one of Spain’s fastest ferries

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Krazy for Kimi

When the Iceman cometh to Finland a whole crowd of blueand-white-clad fans go wild

There’s a river running down the main street in Jyväskylä and it isn’t made of water.

The streets are awash with Räikkönen rules at home beer, wine, vodka and other unmentionable fluids.

Finland’s rally-mad motorsport fans party hard when the World Rally Championship comes to Jyväskylä, as it does once a year. And this year, they had more reason than normal to celebrate.

Their superhero, Kimi Räikkönen, 2007 Formula One World Champion, now driving in the WRC with the Red Bull Citroën junior team, was competing in his homeland and for the first time at world championship level.

Throughout his F1 career, Finnish fans had never been able to show their support for The Iceman at a home Grand Prix, as Finland has never had one. So this year they weren’t going to miss their chance.

This is a learning year for Kimi, so he had no hope of winning the event, but did the fans care? Not a bit. “We’re here because we love him and we want to show that we’ll always support him whatever he’s driving,” said 27-year-old Lillan Pihlajamaa.

Fanatical about Kimi? Visit www.kimiraikkonen.com

Dress code: Fans both young and old colour co-ordinated their outfits to show their support for Kimi

PICTURES OF THE MONTH

every shot on target Email your pictures with a Red Bull flavour to letters@redbulletin.com. Every one we print wins a pair of adidas Sennheiser PMX 680 Sports headphones. With a Kevlar-reinforced, two-part cable (it can be short when running with a music player on your arm, or extended with a built-in volume control), reflective yellow headband stripe and fully sweat- and water-resistant parts, they’re perfect for sports. Visit: www.sennheiser.co.uk Email: letters@redbulletin.com

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Danzig

Czech BMXer Michael Beran wows the crowd at the Baltic Games 2010 Wojtek Antonow

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Hunt wins British cliffdiver takes 2010 world title

Words: Anthony Rowlinson, Ruth Morgan. Photography: REd Bull Photofiles (14), McKlein/Red Bull Photofiles (1), GEPA pictures/Red Bull Photofiles (1) Romina Amato/Red Bull Photofiles (1)

Gary Hunt was crowned Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series winner at an action-packed sixth and final round held in Hawaii, the sport’s birthplace.

With wins at all but one of the previous stops on the tour, the Brit needed only one point to take the title, but still went all out for the win, against the stunning backdrop of the Kawainui Falls in Hilo.

After the first dives, the 26-year-old was in eighth place, but then performed his trademark triple quad dive – the most difficult ever attempted in the series – almost perfectly to take him up into second position. Though he eventually lost the tour’s last leg to nine-times world champion, and last year’s series winner, Orlando Duque of Colombia, he took the title by a comfortable margin of 15 points.

“It’s great,” said Hunt afterwards. “I’m speechless. I only had to do one dive to get the title. Now it’s really starting to sink in.”

Dive in at www.redbullcliffdiving.com

Although Kimi didn't score points, he finished the rally, giving fans plenty of viewing oppotunities

Teahupo’o

French surfer Michael Bourez Salzburg The Red Bull Skydiving Team use a waits for the perfect wave at the Billabong Pro Tahiti tandem of a different kind to go on a sightseeing trip Brian Bielmann David Hasengschwandtner

Izu Red Bull Music Academy Bass Camp gave young musicians the opportunity to learn from leading Japanese artists Osamu Matsuba 17

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Gee Atherton rides in the Utah event for the third time

zine scene

desert storm

The return of the wildest mountain bike race in the West

There are few landscapes more brutal than the Utah desert. It’s a fitting venue for Red Bull Rampage, one of the cycling world’s toughest challenges. The freeride contest, which first took place in 2001, is a downhill race of tremendous speed and difficulty. The drop in vertical height is around 1,500 feet. Even the toughest racers think twice about this one.

“I definitely get nervous,” says World Cup-winning downhiller Gee Atherton,

a Rampage veteran taking part in this year’s race, which ends on October 3.

“Hardcore is the only word to describe it.”

The 25 invited riders devise a course route before racing. During the run they’re marked on line, technique and complexity of tricks. “Everyone taking part is from different mountain bike backgrounds,” says Atherton. “We’re out of our comfort zones, but it’s awesome.”

Get downhill at www.redbullrampage.com

“When people think of zines, they probably think of really badly photocopied pages with vegan recipes or an interview with a punk band or some radical promoting anarchist ideals,” says Tessa Stubbing, an organiser of this summer’s Auckland Zinefest. “But it’s not like that anymore. I guess that is what attracts people to it.”

These small-circulation ‘fan mags’ tend to feature music and pop culture, but, says Stubbing, “it is up to you. With zines you can do whatever you want.”

Presence, one of New Zealand’s largest zines, features lesser-known artists, writers and musicians.

You will find the latest issue, and many other zines like it, at the Wellington Zinefest in November.

Wellington Zinefest, November 20: www.wellingtonzinefest.blogspot.com

Words: Paul Wilson, Robert Tighe. photography: Ian Hylands/Red Bull Photofiles, Greta Gotlieb

Underground publishing is back in the spotlight

Congratulations to our special ladies

Finalists - Best Female Solo Artist Award.

Proudly sponsored by Mazda.

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Hard & fast

Words: Paul Wilson. Photography: Action Images, Glen Delman, Janos Schmidt/ITU, Samo Vidic/Red Bull Photofiles

Top performers and winning ways from across the globe

At the women’s single race at the Canoe World Championships in Slovenia, Jana Dukatova of Slovakia (centre) took gold ahead of two Aussies: Leanne Guinea (left, silver) and Jessica Fox.

The Queen of Pain, aka American athlete Rebecca Rusch, won her second consecutive Leadville 100 (ride 50 miles uphill, then back down again) mountain bike race.

On their home turf in Lausanne, Sven Riederer and his three Swiss teammates defended the ITU Team Triathlon World Championships crown.

smiles US photographer Chris Burkard the ned crow g bein r afte era for the cam Illume photo overall winner of the Red Bull was competition. His champion shot Chile. a surf photo taken in Buchupero,

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Kit Evolution

Model Behaviour

From battery-powered tin toys to rev-hungry rockets, remote-controlled cars are still fulfilling the dreams of wannabe racers both young and not-so-young

In 1960, Peugeot introduced the 404, a medium-sized, rear-wheel-drive car which you could buy as a saloon, a coupé, an estate or a convertible. All forms gained a loyal and appreciative following, initially because the standard features were numerous and advanced for cars of the 20

time. Then, over the years, the cars’ reliability and longevity made them a staple of the used market; brand-new 404s rolled off a production line in Kenya as late as 1991.

This remote-controlled tin miniature, in 1:30 scale, was made by the French company Joustra. It can go forwards, backwards,

left and right, thanks to impressively sensitive front wheels; the ‘driver’ can also open the sliding roof if the weather’s nice and admire the faithfully reproduced dash with its speedo, ashtray and radio.

The car runs on a 4.5-volt battery. www.heller.fr

Words: Werner Jessner

Cable Car Peugeot 404, c 1965

Print 2.0

nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 BMX pro Senad Grosic swaps two wheels for four in a test of control

photography: Kurt Keinrath

Radio Activity Citroën C4 WRC, 2008 From Jyväskylä to Auckland, this particular iteration of the compact Citroën C4 is immediately identifiable as the workplace of Sébastien Loeb, world championship rally driving’s most successful exponent.

(Across-the-ages link: Peugeot and Citroën have been part of the same company since

1974, when the former saved the latter with a buy-out.) The 1:9 radio-controlled model made by Kyosho of Japan is almost as nippy as the 300bhp original. Under the light plastic bodywork, decorated with its Red Bull logos and red-and-white Citroën Sport team colours, there is an aluminium

chassis with a combustion engine, fourwheel drive and adjustable suspension with individual mounting and three differential gears. Basic functions can be fine-tuned via the radio-control unit. Just don’t let its makers hear you call it a toy. www.kyosho.com

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Where’s Your Head At?

Justin timberlake He’s the child star turned pop star who this month enjoys his breakout movie star role.

Career-wise, he’s thinking outside the box… but what does he keep inside it?

Cry Me A River, Bu t Avoi d Th e Water Hazard On Th e 12th Later

Justin Time

If you’re born in Memphis, Tennessee, and your father is a choirmaster, then it’s hardly surprising to find yourself – and we mean you, Justin Timberlake – aged 11, on a US TV talent show, wearing a cowboy hat and checked shirt, belting out a foot-tappin’ countr y song. That was 1993, and though the talent show judges weren’t particularly impressed, a career had been embarked upon.

this month, the third ann ual Justin Timberlake Shriners Hos pital For Children open golf tournament tak es place at the TPC Summerlin course at Las Vegas. This is a proper PGA Tour eve nt, with a $4.3m purse, hosted, yes, by a celebrity, but one with a single-figure han dicap.

“For me,” he told Golf Dig est, “golf is one of those things where you go out and forget abo ut everything else.”

Of Mice And Boys

DIAB

Only months after his talent show disappointment, li’l’ Just was gainfully employed in the business we call show, singing and dancing on TV in The All-New Mickey Mouse Club. Alongside him, doing comedy sketches and covering hit records of the day, were other future stars of music (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera) and movies (Ryan Gosling). JT would famously go out with one of them.

In 2006, Timberlake released his second solo album, FutureSe x/ LoveSounds, and also starred in what is his greatest on-scree n role to date: a 1990s pop balladeer with a very special Christmas gift for his girlfriend. Having first aired on TV show Saturday Night Live , the parody music video for ‘Dic k In A Box’ went on to be a YouTub e smash. Justin even performed the song at one of his gigs in 200 7.

The Ex Files

There’s No ‘I’ In Our Bandname

In 1995, Timberlake was teamed with fellow Mouseketeer JC Chasez, and three other ones, to make the boyband ’N Sync. The quintet were phenomenally popular, selling 56 million records. However, Timberlake, who sang lead with Chavez, began working on his debut solo album before the band had officially split, and when Justified came out in the summer of 2002,’N Sync were sunk.

Profile Update

The Trouser snake

Justin acquired a nickname, when, after breaking up with girlfriend Britney Spears in 2002, he was linked to famous beauties, such as Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas, as well as other, less noted and less discreet female admirers.

(More body part controversy occurred in 2004, during the Superbowl halftime show, when a live TV audience glimpsed JT partly exposing Janet Jackson’s right breast: thanks to Justin, it was just out.) He is said to be currently stepping out with the actress Jessica Biel.

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Not Just A Pretty Face That first year solo was a good one: Justified was, rightly, considered very good by people other than young girls, not least because of the super vocals. Kudos was also forthcoming after his appearance on the hidden-camera prank show Punk’d in early 2003. As he tearily watched ‘tax operatives’ repossess his stuff, including his dogs, with the co-operation of his mother, we laughed and sympathised. His classy response on learning it was all a joke meant, This Guy’s Alright.

In The Social Network, the Facebook biopic directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) due for release this month, Timberlake plays Sean Parker, the co-founder of music sharing service Napster who also had his finger in the Facebook pie during its early days, becoming the firm’s president.

Parker now jointly heads a US investment fund that has raised over $500m in the past five years. Ker, and indeed, ching.

Watch the trailer for The Social Network at www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com

Words: Paul Wilson. Illustration: Lie-Ins and Tigers

In the last couple of years, Timberlake’s fledgling movie career has fledged somewhat. A couple of Shrek voiceovers, and smart turns in Alpha Dog, opposite Bruce Willis, and Black Snake Moan, with Samuel L Jackson, have led him to starring roles. Due for release next year, Bad Teacher stars Timberlake as a pedagogue pursued by the extreme educator of the title – played by none other than his former girlfriend of three-and-a-bit years, Cameron Diaz.

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Winning Formula

The Wheel Thing

Mark Cavendish thought he would win a cycle sprint in the final straight, but he lost it on a bend – the 45-degree bend in his front wheel. How could that happen?

It’s The Doc “The racers were sprinting at 72kph (20m/s) when the crash occurred,” says physicist Professor Thomas Schrefl of the University of Sheffield, England, and St Pölten University, Austria. “Cavendish’s wheel buckles and there is no chance to avoid a fall.

“Whereas the body retains some forward motion after impact, the vertical motion stops within a few milliseconds. It’s the change of the body’s downward momentum that causes most of the impact force.

“The potential energy before the fall, mgh, will be converted in kinetic energy, mv²/2. Equating the two energies gives a downward velocity of 4m/s before impact. Newton’s Second Law says that impact force times impact time equals change in momentum. The impact duration depends on an object’s stiffness. Protective gear, such as a helmet, increases the impact, and thus reduces the forces.

With a mass, m, of 60kg and an impact duration of 0.1s, the force on the human body during impact will be 2,400 Newtons. This corresponds to about four times the acceleration due to gravity.

“Yet how can the wheel bend so far and return to its original shape? Well, spokes on wheels pull inward, creating a compression in the rim; colliding with the neighbouring bike increases tension in the spokes. The circumferential force in the carbon-fibre rim becomes too high and the wheel changes shape.

Buckling is an elastic deformation, and the wheel will resume its shape if the spoke tension is reduced.”

Catch Cav if you can: www.markcavendish.co.uk

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Words: Anthony Rowlinson, professor Thomas Schrefl. photography: Christian Hartmann/Reuters

Words; Hits The Deck “I wasn’t solely to blame for this collision,” says Mark Cavendish, of his accident at the climax of Stage 4 of this year’s Tour de Suisse. “I altered my line, but I didn’t switch. I’m not going to say I was sprinting in a straight line or that I was faultless, but I don’t believe that I was the only one at fault.

“There was a bit of a protest the day after the accident, but it wasn’t the whole peloton. The Cervélo team and three others riders said they weren’t going to start until I went home. But Cervélo and the guys who wanted to protest changed their tune and protested for just two minutes.

“You know, crashes happen in sprinting. I got up, crossed the line and went straight back to my bus. I’m just glad I wasn’t injured and I’m sorry for the people who were.” [Cavendish in fact suffered road rash and was extensively bruised, but broke no bones.]

Bend of the race: Mark Cavendish’s front wheel ‘disappears’ during his crash at the 2010 Tour De Suisse

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speed freaks

Dressing up is part of the fun of singlespeed

The winner gets a tattoo, whether they want one or not. The 40km course on the mountain bike trails of the Whakarewarewa Forest in Rotorua includes shortcuts for sculling a beer.

Some riders wear Speedos and Santa Claus outfits, while others sport leotards and lion suits. Welcome to the wild, wacky world of singlespeed.

The first world championship for single-gear bike enthusiasts was held in California in 1995. This year, more than 900 riders from 30 countries will compete for the title on the North Island.

Along with some of New Zealand’s best cyclists, the field includes pro riders from the US, including Travis Brown, Olympic mountain biker and the 1999 and 2002 world singlespeed champ. However, elite riders are far outnumbered by the amateurs, whose goal is simply to have a good time.

“I tend to take the social side more seriously than the riding,” says local rider Vicki Butterworth. “It’s about having a laugh at yourself and doing something you wouldn’t normally do like getting dressed up on a bike.”

Butterworth plans to ride the course on a tandem with her partner: she’ll be Marilyn Monroe, he’ll be her chauffeur. At last year’s event in Durango, Colorado, USA, Butterworth made it to the first beer tent before retiring from the race, but she was on a greater and more serious mission: to secure, along with Kiwi singlespeed freak John McCartney, this year’s event for New Zealand. McCartney’s impression of Freddie Mercury in the karaoke eliminator led to an NZ v Italy basketball game to decide hosting rights.

The Singlespeed World Championships, Rotorua, October 23: www.sswc10nz.com

get gnarly in bali

low fares aT flYPaCIfICBlUe.CoM

Words: Robert Tighe. Photography: Mike Breen

Two-wheeled madness at the Singlespeed World Championships

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me and my body

mariana pajon

Colombia’s 13-time world BMX champ has been riding ever since she could walk.

But it’s a tough calling: bruises, broken bones and burgers are necessary evils

Bon es Of Contention

I was four years old when I started racing so, though I’m only 18 now, I’ve been in the saddle a long time.

In this sport, crashing is almost an everyday thing, and I’ve pretty much broken my whole body over the years. The worst was in 2007, when I broke my left wrist during practice.

Bone came through the skin. The scaphoid and the radius split into eight parts. I had nine screws put in to fix it: a big, painful operation. All the tendons and ligaments were damaged, and my doctor said I could never ride a bike again. I was back on the bike after six months – and then I broke the same wrist again a year later, and raced in the world championships with my scaphoid fractured in three places. It hurt, but I had to do it, I didn’t want to miss the competition, which I won.

Fry Girl

I try to stick to a healthy diet, but to tell the truth, I’m not very good at it. I eat low-fat food, not too much sugar, about six small meals a day.

But I love sweets and hamburgers – all the bad stuff. I have days when I eat fried food, and icecream or sweets. You need to have a balance.

Words: Ruth Morgan. Photography: Camilo Rozo

Best Foot Forward

Ankle fractures are common in BMX. I’ve broken both, the right one twice. It usually happens when I jump and come off the bike in midair – it’s difficult to land well after that.

The first time is a bit hazy as I was seven years old; then the second time was in a world cup in Spain this year. I was really going for it and crashed with an American girl in the air. I landed awkwardly and when I stood I just couldn’t walk, then I had a month out in a cast.

It’s difficult to get back in the saddle after an injury like that, as you need to be really physically fit to ride. I still went to the gym a lot when I was injured. I find it really difficult to be immobile.

Shou ld erin g

Th e Blam e I’ve broken both my collarb ones. The first one was the right one, when I was five years old at my second BM X competition. I raced the main event, and I was so happy about it that I went back to the track afterwards and I crashed. Then when I was 10, I was practising for the Latin American Games, came over my bike on a triple jump and broke the other one. You always try and avoid injury, but you have to put the risks out of your min d and go for it. Sometimes, whe n I’m looking at a big dou ble jump, I think, “If I crash I’m going to hur t everything.”

But I’ll still do it. I really don ’t care if I have more bro ken bones to come, I just wan t to be biking. I’ll never sto p.

Fam ily Affair

my I started racing because my dad and , aged brother did. I started training with them leave four, six days a week – I didn’t want to first the track. I was nine when I won my quit I when was h whic hip, pions world cham doing go-karts and gymnastics and started ing BMX exclusively. Now I train every morn gym, from 9-12.30, and then 5-8 at night: ing, weights, sprinting or velodrome train with technique training on track in the afternoon. Now BMX is an Olympic spor t, preparation like this is essential.

Winning that gold medal is my dream.

Mind Games I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t covered in bruises.

Being a BMX athlete means pain every day. I get a bad back, because I weakened it training in gymnastics when I was younger, so I do a lot of strength training to build it up. When my friends watch me they get scared, but I don’t often get scared myself. I mainly race two categories – with guys and elite women. When I race boys, I crash a lot.

I’m the only girl competing with them, and I normally come in the top three, winning sometimes, and that can annoy them.

Mariana on family, bikes and crashes: en.redbulletin.com/pajon

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B u l l e va r d

Lucky Numbers

The Poles of Cold 18:59.56

Toes missing on the feet of the ‘first’ man to reach the North Pole. American Robert Peary spent 20 years exploring the Arctic, and it was on April 6, 1909, during his final expedition – on which he retained his two remaining piggies – that he made a claim on history which is disputed to this day.

His journey time was thought to be too fast; his navigation skills and records were lacking. In 2005, using Peary-era sleds and dogs, the British explorer Tom Avery and team recreated the outward portion of the 1909 trip – and shaved almost five hours off the total time.

PEARY

DONOVAN

2,173

Kilometres travelled during the longest unsupported polar expedition. From November 9, 1992, to February 11, 1993, Dr Mike Stroud and Sir Ranulph Fiennes traversed Antarctica at its thinnest span, from Gould Bay on the north coast to the Ross Ice Shelf on the south. During their journey, Dr Stroud calculated that each day, the two were expending around 10,000 calories in energy. In 2003, the durable duo completed seven marathons on seven continents in seven days (the Falkland Islands counted as Antarctica). A Christmas 2010 attempt to set a new record of 4,828km, by the PolarIce team, using snow kites, was postponed due to lack of funds.

37

Classification number of the current ‘drifting station’ at the North Pole. The South Pole is a point on the Antarctic landmass, and permanent ice bases have been established in the area, including the US-run Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. You can only be at the North Pole by camping out on the ice that covers much of the Arctic Ocean. That ice moves, hence the term ‘drifting station’ applied to the semi-permanent camps set on it. The Russians send one out regularly, and North Pole 37, commanded

by Sergei Lesenkov, unsurprisingly had the effects of climate change on its things-to-monitor list.

FIENNES

-89.2

45

Ranking of the Siberian Husky in The Intelligence of Dogs, a 1994 book by psychology professor Stanley Coren. If ever a list of the toughness of dogs is compiled, then the Husky will be at the top. Indeed, Roald Amundsen would never have led the first successful expedition to the South Pole without the help of 52 Greenland dogs (a Husky-type canine), 24 of which were killed for food partway through the journey. (The smartest dog on Coren’s scale is the Border Collie.)

28

Winning time posted, in hours, minutes and seconds, at the 2009 Antarctic Ice 100k race. Richard Donovan of Ireland came home four seconds shy of 19 hours, well ahead of GBR’s Mark Fell in second place. The race, consisting of four 25km laps, has, since 2006, taken place alongside the men’s and women’s Antarctic Ice Marathon. Miles Cudmore of Great Britain set the fastest southern Polar marathon time of 4:36.53 in winning the 2008 race. Donovan’s compatriot Thomas Maguire ran the fastest North Pole marathon in 2006 (3:36.10). The regular marathon world mark of 2:03.59 was set, without leggings and a Thermos of coffee,

by Haile Gebrselassie in Berlin in 2008.

Lowest temperature, in degrees Celsius, ever recorded on Earth. Scientists at the then Soviet-controlled Vostok Station in Antarctica, had to wear an extra pair of socks on July 21, 1983, when the platinum resistance thermometer they used to chart coldness flashed up the most remarkable reading. In the week leading up to this extreme moment, there had been a cloudless sky and almost no wind. The equipment was checked the next day to ensure there wasn’t an error; all was well.

Last year, scientists found an Antarctic ice shelf with a theoretical lower average temp, but, funnily enough, no one has been there to see if this is the case.

AMUNDSEN

HUSKIES

See what’s happening at the South Pole right now: www.usap.gov

Words: Paul Wilson. photography: getty images (3), rex features (1)

8

South and North: these extremes of Earth attract explorers, scientists, runners and the hardest dogs of all. Here’s how it all adds up

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Heroes Men who don’t back down from a challenge

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32 diplo 36 william Trubridge 40 werner herzog 44 muhammad ali

Legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog has created some amazing movies, like Fitzcarraldo, pictured, in which a steamship is hauled over a hill. More on page 40

Heroes

diplo

From favela funk to dubstep and on to unadulterated US pop, there are few genres producer Wesley Pentz hasn’t grabbed and mashed up in his talented hands

Name Wesley Pentz Artist name Diplo Born November 10, 1978 Occupation Songwriter, producer and DJ Mega hit ‘Paper Planes’ by M.I.A., which he cowrote and co-produced Label maven Founded Mad Decent records in 2005. It now boasts 25 artists Web www.myspace.com/ diplo

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The well-regarded and animated beat maker known as Diplo is sat crunched up in front of a little table, big headphones on, beavering away on a laptop covered in stickers, moving his head in time to whatever he’s playing through them like moorhens do when they’re swimming. It’s backstage at the Red Bull Music Academy party at the Notting Hill Carnival, London’s annual megaparty in honour of the West Indian immigrants who lived in Notting Hill long before Hugh Grant arrived.

In 15 minutes, he is due to hit the decks with Switch, the other half of his electro dancehall project Major Lazer, in front of a pumped, whooping crowd who are dancing so much, and so close together, that they appear to be one fluid being.

Cutting a fine figure in a tight-fitting black shirt with a gold tie, Diplo abandons his laptop for only 30 seconds to extend his hand to dub legend Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, who is due to make an appearance later in the set, and with whom he had been in the Red Bull Studio two days previous.

It’s a long, affectionate handshake. A few moments later, after dashing to the side of the stage to get a snapshot of the crowd with his laptop photo booth, he steps up to the decks with Switch to give the crowd what they’ve been waiting six hours for.

Against the backdrop of colourful Major Lazer cartoon artwork, the pair start dropping everything from hard dubstep, old school jungle, Ayia Napa dance anthems and dancehall, to fast hip-hop and throbbing electronica – all united by one thing: a bassline so heavy, you can feel it in your femurs.

There is a lithe, extraordinarily flexible female dancer doing her thing in front of the pair, but all eyes are on Diplo, as he gees up the crowd with plenty of ‘How you doiiiiiiing, carnivaaaaal?’ It only takes minutes before members of the crowd start throwing CDs at him – demos of their music – hoping that he might hit them up as his next protégé.

Given the American’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for new beats and genres, their enterprise isn’t

totally misplaced. Diplo has travelled the world DJing, producing and making music for the likes of Roots Manuva, Kanye West, Daft Punk, Radiohead, Gwen Stefani, Santigold, and Spank Rock and Madonna (really only scratching the surface of an exhaustive CV), and is never not in demand. This November, he’ll hole up in a studio in Jamaica with Switch to work on the second Major Lazer album.

For a lot of artists, he is the conduit between the sub-terrain and proper musical success – which is, no doubt, why people are lobbing their music at him while he plays. His status may have been elevated by his relationship with M.I.A. (both working and romantic), but Diplo’s success is all his own, his ascent tied to an undying curiosity – of places and people and the sounds they produce.

“It’s a matter of being creative,” he says, rolling his drink around, his closely-cropped hair wet at the ends with sweat. “You have to take bits from everything you do and apply them to different things. I love doing the pop thing, but always try and do something cool with it, bring edgier stuff in that people might not have heard before.”

Born Wesley Pentz in Mississippi 31 years ago, Diplo (an abbreviation of Diplodocus – referencing his childhood fascination with dinosaurs) spent his formative years in Florida fixating on alligators, sea creatures, and, indeed, dinosaurs. Though hoping to become a palaeontologist, he ended up studying film at Temple University in Philadelphia instead.

He took up a number of jobs to support himself after graduating – everything from after-school teaching (where, legend has it, Diplo was introduced to both Baltimore club music and Crunk by a student) to working in cinemas to, eventually, DJing.

With a burning passion for beat-making, Diplo pooled resources with DJ Low Budget to start the now quietly legendary Hollertronix. What began as a fun club night soon bloomed into fully fledged underground subculture, drawing in punters from up and down the East Coast and pricking the ears

photography: lickerish

Words: Eleanor Morgan

Diplo unzipped: the prolific, high-energy DJ, film and documentary maker is on a roll

Taking it to the streets: Major Lazer (top) get the Notting Hill crowd dancing; Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry (above) joins in the set later

34

of DJs across the pond. Using the Hollertronix moniker, Diplo and Budget released a mixtape called Never Scared, which the New York Times named as one of their top albums of 2003. The Diplo sound, which skates over every genre of dance music imaginable – Dirty South hip-hop to ’80s pop dancefloor mashup – was born.

The year after, Diplo’s solo debut, Florida, was released on Big Dada records to ecstatic acclaim.

Featuring wildly varying vocals from the likes of trip-hop vocalist Martina Topley Bird (who made her name back in the day with Massive Attack and Tricky), to dancehall’s notorious Vybz Cartel, it illustrated the breadth of Diplo’s imagination, and how deep his influences went. But it would be Piracy Funds Terrorism, the 2004 mixtape collaboration with M.I.A. that caused the most ripples, introducing M.I.A. – who was already becoming successful in the UK – to American shores. The two were romantically involved for some time and, despite contributing significantly to one another’s careers at various stages – Diplo DJ’d her 2005 ‘Arular’ Tour, and produced a number of tracks on 2007’s Kala – are not on such amicable terms now. Speaking to music website Pitchfork in July, after The New York Times’ Lynn Hirschberg took M.I.A. to task over what she deemed her increasingly nonsensical politics, Diplo said, “…it’s dangerous when you keep putting out the politics, because she doesn’t really stand for anything at the end of the day.”

The two shared a yearning to produce more worldly, exotic music, however. When Diplo turned his attention to the Carioca, or Baile Funk, sound of Rio de Janeiro, he found the catalyst that pushed him out of the underground and in front of a wider audience. After the critical acclaim of his Baile Funk mixes, which sounded like a more stripped-down

version of Miami bass paired with Brazilian rap and vocals, Diplo produced a documentary on the music, Favela on Blast (2008).

In 2005, he signed the funk Carioca group Bonde do Rolê to his new record label, Mad Decent.

Already an internationally recognised artist and taste-maker proper, the signing signified Diplo’s now unparalleled knack for finding new music and, more than anything, his genuine enthusiasm for it.

And the crowds he attracts seem to share it.

The reaction from the throngs at Carnival certainly borders on rock-star territory.

“The kids here have such an appetite for underground music, and support it,” he says in the backstage area ahead of his high-energy set.

“It seems like an exciting new artist emerges each week, and that’s amazing to me. The major labels end up signing some of them, and the pace is right.

It’s fast. The subterranean stuff reaches the masses so much quicker than in America.” He delivers the lines with breath smelling not-so-subtly of hard liquor and rarely breaks eye contact. People warn you that Diplo can talk – really talk. They’re not wrong. He’s clearly on a roll now. “In America, the major labels don’t know what to do anymore,” he continues. “It’s harder for amazing kids there making underground music to scrabble out of where they are, because everything is so cheesy – you have to make so much more effort. And that’s also why I like to do pop stuff, to mess up the overall sound that’s reaching people.”

Talking to Diplo is riveting, and unpredictable.

To some questions, he gives rapid-fire, one-line answers that leave no room for expansion. To others, he takes you on a winding road of conversation, taking lots of wild turns before saying what he really means. Ferry Gouw, the artist who created the cartoonish illustrations for the Guns Don’t Kill People: Lazers Do album, calls it ‘idea Tourettes’.

“He’s a funny guy,” Gouw says. “And immensely likeable. He can reel off amazing ideas one after the other, like it’s a fun game, and his output is so vast. Ultimately, I think he’s interested in whatever’s going on – he wants to be involved in everything.”

As the Major Lazer set draws to a close, Diplo disappears under the decks for a couple of minutes – picking up some of those CDs, perhaps, ready to discover something incredible.

Check out Major Lazer at Notting Hill Carnival on redbullmusicacademyradio.com

photography: Fabrice Bourgelle-Pyres/Red Bull UK

The reaction from the throngs at Carnival certainly borders on rock star territory

Heroes

william Trubridge Testing the limits of what the human body is capable of drives one of the world’s best freedivers to keep breaking records. And feeling at one with the ocean is second nature to this passionate and committed athlete Words: Robert Tighe

36

in an idyllic lagoon. This is his playground, his office, his classroom, and in December it will be the venue for Project Hector, his latest and greatest freediving feat.

Two judges from the sport’s governing body, the International Association for Development of Apnea – apnea means without breathing – will carefully measure out 100m of a zero-stretch line and secure it to a white plate that will be lowered into Dean’s Blue Hole. Attached to the plate will be a black Velcro tag that Trubridge has to bring back to the surface. To prepare for the dive Trubridge will spend three or four hours on relaxation exercises, stretching his arms, his legs, his lungs and pretty much every other body part you care to mention.

Then when he feels ready, he’ll signal to the judges and his safety crew, take several deep breaths (using his mouth like a pump to expand his ribcage, diaphragm and his lungs), duck-dive under the water and begin his descent using a long, languid breaststroke. As he descends his body will start to lose buoyancy as Trubridge loses himself in the dive.

“Some people call freediving a meditation under water. You have your eyes closed for most of the dive so you have no visual stimuli. You don’t hear anything. Feeling is reduced because there is no gravity. It is like a journey within yourself.

“Sportspeople talk about getting into the zone or a state of flow,” he continues. “In freediving that happens as well, but it happens a lot quicker. Within 20 seconds of leaving the surface, you can be in a state where your thoughts are completely slowed down and there is more unthought than thought.”

Trubridge will have to spend over four minutes under water with his own ‘unthoughts’ if he wants to reach his destination depth of 100m and set his 11th freediving world record.

His first world record, a dive to 81m in April 2007, was eclipsed just two days later when he added another metre to the mark. A few months later, Herbert Nitsch reclaimed the record with

Name William Trubridge Born May 24, 1980 England Marital status Married to yoga instructor Brittany Vanacore Kiwi connection Lived in Hawkes Bay until the age of 21, now based in the Bahamas Record breaker Has set 11 freediving world records, eight in the constant weight without fins discipline (unassisted freediving) and three in free immersion (with the aid of a rope on descent and ascent) Brain box Being a chess champion, a former Mensa member and obtaining a degree in physiology and genetics makes Trubridge smarter than your average athlete

photography: richard robinson

Most of us don’t have a moment when our destiny is revealed to us, when we know with absolute certainty that “this is it, this is what I’ve been looking for”. If you have been lucky enough to experience a moment when you knew instinctively what your true calling in life was, chances are it wasn’t as spectacular as William Trubridge’s eureka moment. Trubridge was on a rock off the Sardinian coast when he decided to dedicate his life to freediving.

“This rock was a place I would often go to do yoga and meditate,” Trubridge recalls. “There was a strong breeze blowing and I stood there thinking I would do everything I could to turn myself into the ultimate freediver, to adapt my body to this way of existence. I decided to go down this rabbit hole as far as it would take me. I committed myself to this journey of discovery to find out what I was capable of. I committed myself to this quest for depth.”

In December, Trubridge’s quest for depth will see him attempt to freedive to 100m or one hectometer, on a single breath. Project Hector, if successful, will break the current unassisted freediving world record of 95m, set by Trubridge earlier this year.

“When I first heard about freediving, I thought 60m without fins sounded like an impossible depth,” says Trubridge. “Hopefully people might think the same about 100m.”

In 2003, when Trubridge discovered freediving, the world record of 50m belonged to Austria’s Herbert Nitsch. After two years of intensive training with one of the world’s best divers, Trubridge descended to 38m, but blacked out on reaching the surface. Now he stands on the precipice of doing for freediving what English athlete Roger Bannister did for the mile: breaking a barrier previously considered beyond the realms of possibility. To come so far, or rather go so deep, in such a short space of time is testimony to Trubridge’s commitment to the sport.

Home is in the Bahamas just five minutes from Dean’s Blue Hole, a 203m underwater chamber set

“I committed myself to this journey of discovery to find out what I was capable of. I committed myself to this quest for depth�

William Trubridge

Heroes

an 83m effort. The following year Trubridge set a new standard of 86m and since then he’s been competing against himself.

“A world record is a comparison with someone else, but discovering what the human body is capable of inspires me more,” says Trubridge. “Freediving is the ultimate puzzle and the puzzle is your own mind. You have to convince yourself you are capable of doing something no one has ever done before.”

Trubridge found freediving by doing something most Kiwis do when they finish college. He went on his OE (overseas experience). He worked in a hotel for a year but dreamed of the Caribbean. When a friend arrived in London via Thailand and told him about freediving, Trubridge was hooked on the idea.

He headed to Honduras in 2003 and spent months diving on his own for hours on end. From there he headed to Sardinia to do a course with the legendary Umberto Pelizzari, who set new standards for the sport in the 1990’s. He worked at Pelizzari’s Apnea Academy, translating the training manuals from Italian into English and training his body to cope with the mental and physical strains of freediving.

In 2005 he felt confident enough to go out on his own.

“I changed to a training regime that was a lot more gruelling, but ultimately got results quicker,” he explains. “I did a higher volume of harder work in the pool and took my body to the limit.”

A typical pool session for Trubridge involves swimming 30 x 25m lengths under the water.

“I’ll give myself 30 seconds to swim a 25m lap and recover before I swim the next lap. It takes me 22 or 23 seconds to do a length and that gives me a few seconds to grab a few quick breaths before I dive back under. That builds up your breath hold as well as your technique and fitness.”

Some freedivers, like Nitsch, are blessed with a bigger than average lung capacity. Nitsch claims to have a lung capacity of 15 litres, more than twice that of an average Joe. Trubridge, at eight litres, is far from the physiological freak you might expect.

“There are plenty of people who have larger lung capacities than me, but it is more about technique and your ability to completely surrender to the water. You need to stay completely calm and relaxed while you have a huge column of water above you.”

Water has been a constant in Trubridge’s life.

When he was 18 months old his parents sold the family home on the Scotland-England border and set sail on a four-year adventure. The family – David and Linda and their two boys, William and his older brother Sam – crossed the Atlantic and spent two years in the Caribbean before getting back in their boat and heading for the Pacific Islands. They spent a year in Tahiti before landing in New Zealand. The Trubridges settled in Hawkes Bay where William lived until he went on his OE at the age of 21.

“For those first four years of my life we were constantly travelling and on the water. I feel like it’s completely natural for me to be in the water.

There is no fear of depth or being underwater. It is definitely ingrained in me, the liquid element.”

Trubridge snorkelled and swam as a youngster and while he did compete in a few swimming 38

Heroes

photography: Richard Robinson (1), Frederic Buyle/nektos.net (2)

Finding new depths: Trubridge trains at Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas (far left) and describes how the journey to the depths becomes a ‘journey within yourself’ (left).

At the Vertical Blue competition 2009 (right) Trubridge attained the world record for diving without fins

galas, “even back then I spent longer than necessary under the water and that slowed me down.”

His passion was chess. He rowed at university, but the brutal, basic nature of the sport failed to stimulate him mentally.

“It wasn’t enough of a challenge. Then I found freediving and it offered the best of both worlds.

You have to be strong mentally as well as physically.

It is a holistic, complete challenge.”

Just three years after he started in the sport, Trubridge made his first world record attempts in Egypt in 2006. He blacked out both times. On his first attempt he retrieved the tag at 81m, but because he blacked out at the surface, the attempt was null and void. Second time around he was 12m from the surface when he lost consciousness and his safety divers had to rescue him. Trubridge is remarkably blasé about the blackouts.

“There is a reflex where your mouth clamps closed so water doesn’t get into your lungs. There is still quite a lot of time after you black out before any long-term damage starts to occur. Blackouts don’t have to be dangerous at all.”

He recently read Touching the Void, the story of two climbers who came close to death in the Peruvian Andes, and he identified with the mountaineers’ willingness to take risks for what he describes as “the otherworldliness of it”.

“I do sometimes think of freediving in terms of, not so much a dice with death, but stepping across that boundary between life and death. You are taking as big a step as you dare into the unknown.

Your willpower on the ascent has to match how far you’ve dared to go across that line. Just before

I dive, often a voice comes out of nowhere and says, “You are going to die on this dive.” Every time you overcome it, it builds your confidence.”

He has confidence, too, in the systems in place for competitive freediving. For Project Hector there will be two judges, two safety divers on the surface and two underwater trying to keep out of the way of the four or five video operators trying to capture the dive for posterity. Trubridge admits it can be a dangerous sport but he reminds you there has never been a death in an AIDA-accredited competition.

“As far as competitive freediving goes, I can’t even think of anyone who has suffered a serious injury in training. The only deaths have been in a discipline called “no limits” where you put yourself completely out of the safety zone because you dive down with a sled.”

The record for “no limits” freediving is 214m, held

by Nitsch. Trubridge regards it with with disdain.

“It’s more of a stunt than a discipline and shouldn’t be a part of AIDA freediving. It is basically dunking a teabag. There is no sporting element to it.”

On the contrary he is convinced the constant weight without fins discipline he dominates is “the purest expression of human potential underwater.

“The fastest man in the world is Usain Bolt, not somebody on a bicycle or in a car. It is man by himself. And it is the same underwater. The purest expression of freediving is man unencumbered.”

And this man unencumbered has set himself no limits. “Rather than having another depth after Project Hector, it’s more like a continuum of how far I can take it. How deep can I get?”

Discover more on William Trubridge at www.verticalblue.net

39

Heroes

Werner Herzog The veteran filmmaker is no fly on the wall, let alone one in the soup: he’s the hornet that stings Words: Herbert Völker Photography: Jürgen Skarwan

Name Werner Herzog Born September 5, 1942 Munich, Germany Occupation Filmmaker, writer, actor Awards Best Director at Cannes in 1982 for Fitzcarraldo Web www.wernerherzog. com

40

A day in the life of Werner Herzog could take place anywhere in the world. On this particular one, we find ourselves in a harsh region of southern France, having climbed up above a seething whitewater river to a vertical rock face.

Herzog pauses for a moment and then points down below, at the people who lived here 30,000 years ago. Back then, the locals had a strong sense of the drama that this landscape conveyed; it has remained immediately evident to all. Around the Pont D’Arc, the awe-inspiring natural stone bridge over the Ardèche river, those people lived in caves, a number of which remain.

Unique among these is the Chauvet Cave, a Stone Age place covered by a rockslide and rediscovered only in 1994, when it was measured, photographed and closed off again. It was too important and fragile to allow public access. Now, a dozen cameras and audio sensors monitor any movement. A door half a metre thick at the entrance separates the outside world from the ancient world. Behind that, a rocky track leads 10m downwards through a narrow tunnel, where it’s easy to imagine a pair of crouching sabre-toothed tigers, stomachs rumbling with the hunger of tens of thousands of years.

The security measures protect the oldest known cave paintings in the world, a truly priceless trove.

The rockslide has afforded an unparalleled state of conservation, not only of the art on the walls. “For starters,” says Herzog, “the footprint of an eightyear-old boy was found, and next to it the traces of a wolf, as if it had been his companion.”

After this splendid isolation, the cave system with its four caverns is under threat from all sorts of outside influences, starting with carbon dioxide and moisture in the air. Irretrievable damage is risked every time a person enters the cave.

Why, then, did the French Ministry of Culture give permission for of all people a German-born American resident to capture on film one of their country’s, if not the world’s, unique art treasures? It

can’t have been that he only took a humble director’s fee of one Euro, because no other great filmmakers would have asked for more.

Herzog, a sporty 68-year-old, has played on the precipice between fiction and documentary his whole life. As it is on film as it is in real life, sometimes it’s difficult keeping the two apart. When someone who cannot ride enters a rodeo in Mexico, as Herzog did aged 25, what do you make of it? He has often risked himself and his reputation when making films, which is one reason why it has been suggested that he has treated actors and crew rather harshly. From Fitzcarraldo in the Amazon to Cobra Verde in Ghana and points in between, his film sets have been as dramatic as the results. Yet among the actors from whom Herzog has brought the best are the nerve-crucifying Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale, in her flawless beauty.

Cave Of Forgotten Dreams is Herzog’s 10th feature film in the past 10 years, five of them documentaries.

Having made a further 18 of all kinds in the previous 32 years, this is a renaissance in terms of output, but Herzog films have never been out of favour. His earlier films have aged well, and his preeminent position in cinema history is also bolstered by his recent refinement of the non-fiction film.

Herzog has narrated eight of his 10 documentary features, the sharp focus of his words contrasting perfectly with the monotonous-fatalistic tranquillity of his voice. Even over the cursing tirades of Klaus Kinski, for the film about their tempestuous working relationship, My Best Fiend, Herzog spoke of brotherly love. When you turn the sound up on Werner Herzog, he still stays softly spoken.

Red Bulletin: Let’s start with a statement: ‘Feature film is fiction, documentary is truth.’

Werner Herzog: That’s not a start because it leads nowhere. Documentary filmmakers still have this idea that fact alone would depict truth. But it doesn’t. Otherwise, the Manhattan telephone

Walk on the wild side: Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams has been filmed in 3D to show the awe-inspiring beauty of the ancient cave paintings

directory would be the book of all books. Four million entries, all correct, all verifiable – that doesn’t enlighten, it doesn’t tell the truth. We don’t know who these 35 pages of ‘Smiths’ are. Do they dream at night, do they cry into their pillows, how do they live, how do they think? We don’t know any of this. I believe we have to turn away from pure fact as if it was the content of everything.

The mute observer is called the fly on the wall, but is it fair to say you’re one of the fly-in-thesoup filmmakers, because you get involved?

I always thought we have to intervene, create; we are film directors after all. At a conference in Amsterdam with 500 documentary filmmakers, the topic was so hashed to death that I crumbled.

I grabbed the microphone and said, “You cretins, we mustn’t be the flies on the wall, I want to be the hornet that stings!” There was an uproar and again I snatched the mike: “Happy New Year, Losers!”

There was nothing more to say. Behind this, we’re now seeing dramatic changes in the relationship to reality, with reality TV, virtual reality and Photoshop. Everything can be created artificially and reality has be newly perceived, defined and understood – that is one of the tasks for filmmakers.

How can you capture reality when making a film about 30,000-year-old Stone Age artwork?

Do you need to project a kind of mysticism in order to bring to life this truth on the wall?

I’m not the slightest bit interested in mysticism. That would be a huge danger with this topic. There is this hideous pseudo-philosophy, you shouldn’t even use the word philosophy for it, because it is of such hideousness: New Age lunatics, periodic maniacs 42

that want to get their hands on this cave and drivel on about some Palaeolithic mystic. I don’t do that.

Why did you make the film in 3D? Inside the cave it’s simply wonderful, because many of the nooks and crannies have been used for the paintings: a horse comes forth, or a mighty hump of the bison. Veil-like curtains of stalactites and stalagmites hang everywhere, and bones and skulls of bears. In 3D it looks magnificent. You’ll never see this place in this way again.

Which is your favourite animal painting in the cave?

The most famous, and arguably the most beautiful, are the horses. They move us because from the first moment when human art revealed itself – about 32,000 years ago – it was fully developed. It didn’t start with primitive scribblings. You have to imagine that no one had been into these caves for at least 25,000 years, and then there you are standing in front of these pictures. Lions, lionesses stalking their prey. Then there are things that you don’t expect.

They had woolly rhinoceros, and mammoths.

The Stone Age people were nomads, always on the move, although some must have settled in the area of the caves for some time. Settling down versus moving on – this is a theme that runs through your films, your life.

Stone Age people did keep moving, and probably the bison went with them. The dog accompanies man on his journey. Only with the pig did disaster begin, and now strikes back.

The poor swine!

Well, OK, it’s not the pig’s fault. It simply signalled the start of settling down. Towns were founded

photography: ImageForum/AFP (4)

Animal magic: The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994 in the Ardèche and was found to contain hundreds of paintings and fossils – these are now considered to be the oldest cave paintings discovered to date. They show a range of animals such as bison, mammoths and horses

Heroes

The Wide World of Werner Herzog The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974, short) Werner Herzog: “This is the story of the fabulous Swiss ski-jumper Walter Steiner, who was the best in the world in the mid-’70s. Here’s someone who rebels against the laws of gravity, all of a sudden flies, without any real equipment – the ski is only needed to accelerate and land. In Steiner was total ecstasy. He hovered like a frisbee; we haven’t seen his like since. Back then, it was much more difficult to fly because the skis were parallel, the jumps much too dangerous, with an abrupt change from the slope to the flat section if you flew too far. And Steiner flew too far; he almost flew to his death four times. Since Steiner, they have rebuilt the jumps.”

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

History man: Filming paintings inside the remote cave was not an easy task for Herzog and the crew

If you only see one Werner Herzog movie, make it this one. Klaus Kinski, in a remarkable performance, is a plantation owner who wants to build an opera house in the Amazon jungle. Ill-advised and increasingly desperate business decisions lead him to have a steamship hauled up and over a hill, from one river to another. Herzog filmed this, at length, for real, causing injury to cast and crew. His journal of the making of the film, published as Conquest of the Useless, is the gateway drug for the entire Herzog cosmos.

photography: jürgen skarwan (1), Mauritius images (1), Mary Evans/picturedesk.com (1), werner herzog film gmbh (3)

The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984, TV doc) where today cities stand, where technology obviously plays a role. I’m not the only person who believes that it will all not go well in the long run. We are too fragile to maintain life on this planet long-term. That’s why you should think again about settling down, even for your very own living space.

Bruce Chatwin, one of the most noted wanderers of our time, wrote wonderfully about the nomadism of modern people, but he died when he was 48. You knew him…

He gave me his leather rucksack: what a treasure! My 1987 film Cobra Verde was based on one of his novels. A little while later, he wanted to see a film that I’d shot in the southern Sahara [Fata Morgana, 1971]. When I took it to him so he could see it, he was already in the midst of passing away. He could only watch about 10 minutes of the film at a time before he fell back into delirium.

You are well known for testing yourself. For example, in 1974, you walked from Munich to Paris, because you felt doing so would save the life of your friend, Lotte Eisner, who was gravely ill in France [she lived until 1983]. Would you do this again? Are you still a fanatical walker?

Fanatic, you must never let that word cross your lips in reference to me. I’m a professional man, but for things that mean a great deal existentially, I would do extraordinary things, today as well.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and will reach cinemas in 2011. Visit his site at www.wernerherzog.com

Werner Herzog: “It was initially supposed to be a test for a feature film. The story setting should have been K2, but during filming it quickly became clear that it’s inconceivable to operate cameras and take actors up to 7,500 or 8,000m above sea level. There would have been deaths. The moment I saw K2 over the glacier, I knew it wouldn’t work. But it was still a fascination for me to film on the Gasherbrum [the world’s 11th highest mountain; in the same range as K2] with Hans Kammerlander and Reinhold Messner, who achieved something exceptional. However, I’m always very careful about the unhealthy desire for records that often go with that. I feel very close to this film because I grew up in the mountains, and because Messner is simply such an extraordinary character in the entire theatre of mountaineering.”

Cobra Verde (1987) The last and most overlooked of Herzog’s five collaborations with Kinski follows the wild ride of a Brazilian slave trader gone rogue. The German actor also played the lead in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck and Nosferatu (both 1979). Their relationship was volatile; proof is in Burden Of Dreams (1982), the Fitzcarraldo making-of documentary.

My Best Fiend (1999, doc) Werner Herzog: “My work with Klaus Kinski had dramatic elements, where you could really see how the creation of film was driven to the last, and at the same time, dangerous, pinnacle. The film itself is neither about Kinski nor me, but about two men, who, even in their clash, managed to achieve something extraordinary in an amicable friendship, to put it carefully. It was a beautiful and also a difficult time. Luckily, the film was finished after Kinski’s death. By that time perspectives had slowly mellowed. Life went on after all. There were always films before Kinski, during Kinski and many films after Kinski. All at once, the view was warm-hearted, humorous. There was a lot of laughter coming from the audience when they saw the film. Crazy. Today, I can laugh about it too. I experience this with a great deal of warmth and humour.”

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Heroes

MuhammaD ali On the 50th anniversary of Cassius Clay’s first pro fight, a former boxing referee and TV commentator, who has been watching since 1960, unpicks the greatness in The Greatest Words: Werner Schneyder

Clay boxed first as a light heavyweight and later, before his long and enforced hiatus, as a heavyweight in the style of a welterweight. His footwork, punch rate, variety of punches and, most remarkably, his evading movements were unlike anything anyone had ever seen in heavyweight boxing. He turned professional as soon as he’d won his gold medal, as is the American tradition, then made a fool of a host of sparring partners, announced in what round a bout would end and developed a one-two PR tactic of complaining and megalomania, which those close to his action knew was all shtick and virtuoso humour. Clay created a character, a role for himself. Some people were provoked by it, others amused. He made himself a media bestseller. The way Clay taunted his opponents was also forgivable, as they themselves must have known it was all part of the act.

Sonny Liston was the first person experts could conceive of silencing the man who told us proudly that he could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Sonny Liston, “the big, ugly bear”, lost twice. I remember well that I felt in at least one bout that Liston had given up, that things weren’t all above board. I couldn’t work out which punch was meant to have ended things. Forty years later, during the making of a three-hour 44

TV film about Ali, I saw the punch very plainly.

It had all been too quick when shown live.

There was a time when masses of European sports fans would get up in the middle of the night and totter to their TVs to watch the fights. Even after those he only won on points, he was lauded as the best, the most unbeatable boxer: The Greatest.

But this man wasn’t just an ingenious boxer and virtuoso clown. He was a political animal too, and the decisions he made began to make his fate interesting far beyond the reaches of sport.

He understood he was descended from slaves. He began to see Cassius Clay as his ‘slave name’; for him, Christ was the God of the white master race. In 1964, after beating Liston to become heavyweight champion of the world for the first time, he announced to the world that he was a Muslim, and changed his name to Muhammad Ali. He was a member of the Nation of Islam, campaigning and raising money on its behalf. This association with ‘the Brothers’ made him even more of a pariah in white America. (Ali would go on to leave the Nation, converting to Sunni Islam in 1975, and since 2005 has practised a third Islamic tradition, Sufism.)

In 1967 Ali refused to take up arms for America in the Vietnam War. You have to try to imagine what that meant for one of the most visible of America’s young men. To some, he was a hero; to many more, this was unpatriotic and criminal behaviour. By dodging the draft, he was stripped of his word title, arrested and given a five-year prison sentence. He was released immediately on appeal, and by 1970 he was fighting again, eight months before his conviction was overturned in the Supreme Court in June 1971.

Boxing had becoming boring in the champion’s absence. Regardless of how fans may have felt about his politics, they all wanted to know how a heavyweight new to the scene would fare against Muhammad Ali. And yet, at the same time as those running the sport came to realise they could no

Name Muhammad Ali (born Cassius M Clay) Born January 17, 1942 Louisville, Kentucky Conversion Beginning in 1964, became a member of the Nation of Islam and gave up his ‘slave name’, Cassius Clay Profession Heavyweight boxer Achievements Olympic champion (light heavyweight division) in 1960; Heavyweight champion (twice) in 1974, and ’78

photography: David King/Taschen

I know for a fact I was 23 years old in 1960, and that there was a bout at the Olympics in Rome where a cruiserweight boxer, a black American called Cassius Clay, won the gold medal with ease.

What I don’t know is whether I saw the final bout on TV back then, or whether I saw footage of the fight much later and have imagined ever since that I saw it live. But what I also know is after 1960, there wasn’t a single fight of Cassius Clay’s, and later Muhammad Ali’s, that I missed a single round of if it was shown on TV. That can’t only have been for sporting reasons. It must have had something to do with fascination, entertainment and, in the end, pity.

Print 2.0

nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Images of a boxing legend

Mouthing off: Ali dubbed his 1974 fight against George Foreman “Little armageddon�

Heroes

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photography: AP Photo, Bob Gomel/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Golden boy: On October 29, 1960, Ali – then Cassius Clay – won his first professional fight against Tunney Hunsaker (above) in six rounds on points. In February 1964, we see him celebrating his first victory over Sonny Liston together with Malcolm X, head of the black Muslim movement in the US

longer afford to do so without him, so the public and political feeling about Vietnam was moving more towards Ali’s stance.

And yet, time away from the sport had taken its toll. His fighting style had lost its dance-like, virtuoso qualities. Ali had to endure exchanges of blows with the best boxers – the only kind of fighter he was now facing. He lost to Joe Frazier and had his jaw broken by Ken Norton, but he came back strong each time. Some said he boxed like the others, but by using what was left of his exceptional talent, he managed to box better than them, as he proved at the infamous Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974 In 1975, he got his revenge over Frazier at the Thrilla in Manila, watched on TV by 700 million people in 66 countries. Frazier didn’t get up for the 15th round. If he hadn’t thrown in the towel then, Ali probably would have. I think Frazier talked later of being close to death.

Around that time, although I can’t remember exactly when, Muhammad Ali was a guest on Sportstudio on ZDF, the German public television channel. The presenter was Hajo Friedrichs, a legend on German TV; a Dutch TV crew was in on the broadcast, too. Ali answered Friedrichs’ questions very seriously, with none of his trademark bluster. Someone from the Dutch TV crew interrupted the exchange and asked Ali why he wasn’t giving any funny, silly answers. Ali replied: 47

“Ask me stupid questions and I’ll give you stupid answers. I’ll answer serious questions seriously.”

In February 1978, 24-year-old Leon Spinks demolished the 36-year-old Ali over 15 excruciating rounds. Seven months later, Ali secured his third world heavyweight title against the same opponent, and then retired in June 1979 only to throw down the gauntlet to Larry Holmes and fight him in Las Vegas in October 1980. Ali called his penultimate opponent a “talentless schoolboy” and made jokes about his “stupid face”. Holmes gave him the beating of his life. In hindsight, people have said Ali’s helplessness that day could have been due to the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. Ferdie Pacheco was Ali’s doctor for 15 years, until he left the champ’s employ in 1977, three years before the Holmes fight.

Pacheco’s diagnosis of his main patient, including 48

The greatest of the Greatest: After Cleveland Williams kissed the floor four times, he was counted out in round three (1966, Houston Astrodome).

Five men, whose legacy will live on: the Fab Four and The Greatest

photography: Keystone/Getty Images, Neil Leifer/TASCHEN

Heroes

photography: Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images, Santi Visalli Inc./Getty Images

Ali: brilliant boxer, consumate clown and important political figure

Black power: Muhammad Ali was a true hero for the black movement in the US. Together with other popular figures such as James Brown (pictured above, in 1966) he fought for civil rights and equality. Even ahead of his fight with Argentinian Oscar Bonavena in Madison Square Garden, New York City, in December 1970, his Black Power Salute shows his conviction

a suggestion that his reflexes were not what they once were, was not heeded. None of us, Pacheco included, can say for sure that boxing caused the illness that has robbed Ali of his articulacy and physical grace, but many would argue strongly that his continuing to box worsened it. After his final fight, when a wreck of a former champion lost to Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas, Ali is said to have said to his daughter, who was bawling in his dressing room, “Don’t cry. It could have been much worse.”

A man who can barely walk and can no longer talk is still welcomed and honoured at important, global occasions, where nobody can fail to register his charisma. I don’t know how he’s doing at the moment, but I wish him a long life of security and dignity.

More great photos at nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Watch Ali’s 1960 Olympic gold medal bout at www.ali.com

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Action

Turn the page and hold on tight for the ride of your life

photography: KTM/Ray Archer

52 Austin Horse pedals through New York 58 Behind the scenes at KTM 64 visit jan Wanggaard’s wonderful world 74 japanese baseball

Newly crowned 2010 MX1 World Champion Antonio Cairoli took the title on a KTM bike. Step into the factory where winning machines are created on page 58

Action

a man called horse New York’s bike messengers live life at warp speed.

And one man is speediest of all: Austin Horse Words: Anthony Rowlinson Photography: Thomas Hoeffgen

“ When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” HG Wells HE arrives like a lightning bolt. Bam! He’s right beside me. Note to self: better reset my notions of ‘now’, ‘in a minute’ and ‘pretty fast’.

Austin Horse – ‘the world’s fastest bike courier’ – does time differently from you and me. His sense of how long things take is compressed, heightened, intensified. He lives life on permanent fast-forward. Two, maybe three, minutes ago we had spoken to fix a meeting point. “I’ll be with you real soon,” he closed, from an unspecified nearby New York spot where he’d just completed his latest delivery. Enough time, I figure, to buy and drink a coffee.

Buy, yes; drink, no. By the time I’d purchased said beverage and walked outside NYC’s Grand Central Station, to meet beneath the Park Avenue overpass, Austin has arrived, skidding to a perfectly positioned halt a couple of feet from my feet. He hops off gracefully, unclipping his clip-in shoes and trotting the last couple of steps towards me in a single fluid movement.

He looks the part in such an unshowily cool way it’s hard to stifle a smile: a workhorse street-beaten fixed-gear bike; courier trousers (‘pants’), that look like regular jeans, but with threads of stretchy Lycra interlaced and a reflective strip inside the turnup; a discreet black cycling cap and, of course, a massive bag, containing who knows what, strapped to his shoulders. The kit’s all there and it’s all pukka stuff – but if you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d miss it. He’s no Lycra-Nazi ‘roadie’, but a street-hip road warrior, prepared for pretty much anything this endlessly exciting metropolis can throw at him. In squarerimmed black Ray-Bans, there’s a whiff of Clark Kent to his style and he’s a twist of nervy energy, with a quick smile, handshake and a glint in the eye that’s always saying, “C’mon, let’s go.”

Our scheduled liaison, when it comes, has been fast – as most things are around Austin. But getting to this point has been far from easy. He’s a very, very busy chap and fitting

H e rInotheefast s lane: Print 2.0

nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Take a ride with Austin Horse

Austin Horse weaves through New York’s streets on his way to his next job

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Life in motion: Austin can cover up to 160km through New York City’s traffic each working day

media time into a life lived under constant dispatch deadline pressure is somewhat tricky. Meeting up with The Red Bulletin is one of maybe 20 to 30 requests he’ll field on this hot, working Friday in the concrete-steel forest that is New York City. His mind has to spin as fast as his cranks to shuffle constant conflicts of time, geography and logistics. Meeting us at Grand Central Station is fine if he’s in, say, Times Square and needs to deliver to the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue. But to go via central Manhattan if he’s already in the East Village and needs to get to SoHo would be nuts. So we fit with his schedule, go with his flow – the importance of which quality soon becomes apparent.

A day earlier, Austin had stopped by to drop off a spare bike that would allow us to ride the city with him. The machine was in storage a couple of blocks away and Austin’s means of getting Bulletin to bike was – obviously – to park this journalist in the well of his cargo bicycle (those 3m-long low-loader things that look incredibly unwieldy, but which, Austin assured, are benign to ride) and weave through the traffic to the storage unit. This was, for a New York street virgin, a relatively terrifying experience: never before – in any city, let alone car-choked New York – have I looked at a taxi face-to-fender. Yet while this experience was unsettling for me, for Austin it was no more than a supremely logical – and fast – solution to a minor logistical problem: A to B through NYC? Just stick the hack in the hold and off we go.

Time is money for Austin, as it is for any bike messenger, and working for a six-man profit-share co-operative, Samurai Messengers (“Definitely the best messenger service in New York!”), the team ethos is strong. “We’re a co-op, so if I take a day off I’d be concerned about my fellow employees. In any one day, five

“ You don’t want to be contentious, you want to read the flow, feel the flow, use the flow” 54

of us will be on the road and one of us will run the dispatch.

So it’s in all our interests to work as efficiently as possible.”

What that means for a hard-grindin’ courier is a life of perpetual motion. The demands and discipline of this life – all weathers, all hours, between 80 and 160km each day, no job too big, none too small, regularly with a 20kg load – have honed Austin over the past five years into a lean, dense figure; a powerpacked but not bulky 27-year-old; mentally sharp and constantly operating in the ‘now’ while always tuned to the future. He’s the courier equivalent of a Duracell bunny – still drumming when all the rest have ground to a halt. And when he wants to move, man can he go. Everyone who has ever breathed city air knows how couriers operate: a cool-looking bike running reds, hopping on and off the pavement, treating ‘One Way’ signs as mere street decoration. All true… but never, ever like this. This city Horse, a one-time mountain bike racer, appears able to bend the infinitely mutable New York streetscape to his will. To follow him is to receive a masterclass in bike handling, economy of movement and the courier mindset. Routinely – because it is the fastest way – he’ll ride head-on at traffic, only to pitch the bike hard left or right down a side-street or into an access passage.

He’ll pass through a gap at unabated speed with barely three inches to spare on either side. Sometimes, because it helps his balance or a cornering line, he’ll brush gently against a bus or lorry to ease himself from left to right, like a ball bouncing at a shallow angle off a wall. Maybe he’ll spot a car running at a perfect pace to give him a ‘tow’ in its draft. A dozing driver sticking their car’s bonnet too far into the line of traffic may get a cautionary stroke of the hand as Austin slices by, but the message isn’t confrontational or aggressive: just a reminder that faster, smaller vehicles are working these streets, too, and however agile they may be, they also need some space.

A virtuoso courier’s through-traffic passage can be beautiful and elegant, yet it lacks the hauteur of grand bicycle road racing, as epitomised by a Coppi, a Merckx, an Indurain or an Armstrong.

That’s classical; this is punk: street riding that’s loud, fast, dirty, sweaty, in-yer-face, ruthlessly direct and sometimes over almost before it has begun. The quickest courier drops may mean only

CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC There’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ day for a New York bike courier. But the first few hours of a shift usually look something like this for Austin Horse: 1. 8am start, Brooklyn 2. From home in Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge to SoHo. Often a ‘triple rush’ here – our most urgent clients.

Could be very busy.

Sometimes on standby.

3. Madison Square Park – our biggest client, a PR agency.

Could easily be here four times a day with various items: adverts, editorial, post-production, proofs, randoms.

4. Upper Midtown, just below Central Park. Lots of media companies here.

86th Street

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Union City

5. 86th Street – our furthest regular client 6. West Side: 601 West Houston 7. Down the West Side: workshop in Chinatown 8. Back to SoHo, often for another triple 9. East Village bike shop (if I’m lucky and I have time) 10. Avenue B between 12-13 Street 11. Coffee: my favourite coffee shop on 29th between Broadway and 6th 12. RBNY office to top up with Red Bull Cola 13. Time’s Up offices: 9 South 6th Street

Hells kitchen

4

Upper Midtown

11

3

West Side 6

SoHo 2

8

9

10

East Village

12 Little Italy

Chinatown

7

Tribecca

13

Brooklyn Brooklyn Naval Yard

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Road warrior: A c t“When ion you get a good day on the road there’s a sense of connection,” says Austin

a 90-second or two-minute hop between addresses (even the longest are unlikely more than 15 minutes apart), yet those vivid segues will be cranked out at near-sprint pace and always, always, through the teeth of some of the world’s gnarliest gridlock.

Austin talks about feeling and using ‘The Flow’ of urban movement and of how to go against it spells peril: “If you ride you get to be in the flow,” he explains, “You don’t want to be contentious, you want to read the flow, feel the flow and use the flow.”

A courier colleague Josh Godar (aka ‘Sweets’) echoes: “You get a good day on the road and there’s a sense of connection, of everything being around you, like a fish in water. There’s a sense of flow, it’s true. It’s like cooking; don’t force it, just relax. There’s a natural pace to it. You have to let go of your ego on the road.”

Lest this sound like some tree-hugger babble, you only have to witness these guys in close-up action to understand the truth of what they say. Austin is a dizzyingly fast rider, who’s able to blend outright speed with a fine-tuned pocketful of skills that allows him to, for example, bunny-hop up and down pavements as if they’re not there; to track-stand (hold the bike motionless, standing on the pedals) until he gets bored and to skid-stop his steed to a perfectly-judged halt, using only the strength in his thighs for slow-down. His confidence is such that during one brief moment of traffic-free riding, he’s able to grab his BlackBerry, turn round, photograph me in vain pursuit, then Tweet live that he’s “spending the day riding with The Red Bulletin”. If it weren’t so easy for him, it would almost be showing off.

“The times,” he says, “when I’m going really fast through tight traffic and you see how depressing it is for people in their cars going just a foot every minute, with no idea of whether it’s getting better or worse… Just a combination of factors coming together that’s making them unable to move or do anything about their situation… I realise I don’t have any of that. Instead I feel responsible and in control of everything that’s happening to me. I make decisions and go between the cars. It’s my decision 56

to speed up and make it through a gap. It’s nice to be in control.”

The lyrical quality of his sentiments shows the light, romantic, almost spiritual dimension attached to courier riding through a capital of wonder and magic and it’s obvious that Austin enjoys an intense relationship with this most storied city.

“Sure, New York is an amazing place with incredible opportunities. One of the things I love is that in a way it’s the centre of the universe. Things begin here and they end here.

And if they don’t come from here they come through here and I’m able to participate in that because I have a job and a mode of transport that unlocks so many of the closed doors. It allows you to do so much – for example being up on the Park Avenue overpass and looking at the amazing view from Grand Central: you can’t walk on it and it’s nothing like as good from a car.”

He’s keen to share his unique perspective on this unique place and hammering down Broadway towards Union Square and the Flatiron District (keep up, keep up), weaving and flicking to avoid the cracks, ruts and potholes, he points out this week’s cultural treat. Artist Anthony Gormley has dressed a scattering of New York’s high-rise blocks with life-sized figures of himself perched precariously on the lip of their concrete or brick or steel edifices. For the city forever scarred by 9/11, the resonance of these ‘jumpers’ is as unsettling as it is needless to explain.

Moments like these – free, fleeting, but recurring and constantly renewing – take Austin’s work life way beyond a job: “A good day,” he says, “is when you go to a lot of unique places and I feel challenged by a diverse amount of work. All these different places that everything has to go – it keeps you thinking and moving.”

There is, however, darkness and it’s never far away. Only weeks earlier Austin was knocked from his bike and his ankles driven over – remarkably without fracture – and more recently a Samurai colleague was targeted by a hostile New York cab driver in a callous hit-and-run. The Samurais’ entertaining blog (http://samuraimessenger.blogspot.com/) takes up the story:

action

“The seasonal bully, early spring, teasing bike messengers with the promise of the summer’s warmth, only to repeatedly smack us across the face with cold rain, near freezing nights, and this year, a glut of road-rage focused at cyclists. One of our founding partners, Dan G, was sideswiped on Bleeker St on his way home from dinner. The cab hit him, tried to drive away before our friend Bill successfully chased him down, got in front of the car, and called the cops. Dan’s wrist is broken.

Really broken. Surgical-repair-required broken.”

This is what a courier’s life can be like. Police, Authority, The Man, while lenient more often than not and usually too busy to worry about the blatant illegality of a biker blazing through ‘Stop’ signs, are less cuddly when – if – confrontation comes: “Cops generally just ignore messengers. I think they understand we perform a role in corporate life and that most of the time what we’re doing is deliberate and careful. But if we do get to the point of interacting with a cop, they’re probably not going to judge us too favourably.”

And danger, let’s not fudge this, is ever-present, coming in many forms for a speed merchant on two skinny wheels. Oil, manhole covers, cars-buses-trams-pedestrians in a constant swarm, all around… It would fry your mind if you allowed in the fear. The warrior-courier, however, simply doesn’t.

“Do I get scared?” Austin reflects after a long pause, “No. Not even when I started. I just feel really comfortable in traffic, so I never really got scared. I’m lucky: I’ve never had someone deliberately chasing me and trying to hit me with their vehicle – and that does happen. It depends a bit on the road. If it’s quite open then you’re more exposed. I just kinda trust people not to be psychopaths. If you really think about it, then of course, when you’re going into a gap between two stopped cars… they could see you and think ‘fuck this guy’ and hit you…”

Accidents are an unavoidable hazard. Like athletes in any highrisk sporting venture, a courier can only believe their number will never come up. “You need to develop an amazing level of awareness and personal responsibility for your safety,” says Austin.

“I’ll see situations where somebody does a U-turn right in front of me when I’m coming towards them at a fast pace and without your reaction you’d be severely hurt or dead. You escape serious injury or death by inches and all because of the action you take.”

There is, too, the risk of mundanity. Without the mental and physical engagement of the man on the machine, bike messengering can be reduced to humdrum essentials: delivering packages from one office to another. Today, for Austin, those packages include feathers, to a boutique fashion designer, a series of design sketches, and confidential documents.

“On a really basic level it’s not that complicated,” he says, “but there are all sorts of things you can do to save time and energy and make your day flow better: a better way to position your strap, a better way to pack your bag. Or a way to sneak into a building instead of taking a time-consuming service entrance.”

Indeed, for a courier with the wit and spirit to explore the wider parameters of his existential position, there’s true satisfaction.

As we chat, Austin points out a particularly outré courier, who rolls by casually, dressed in a scarlet boiler suit and building site

“ I feel responsible and in control of everything that’s happening to me”

hard hat. “That’s Sarge,” he explains. “He’s cool. He has differentcoloured hats for different days. I don’t know if he has a system.”

So there’s comedy, too, for those with eyes and minds open.

There’s also a uniquely invigorating urban-outdoor lifestyle.

Josh Godar again: “There’s a definite reason why I do this. It’s not because I’m crazy and I like to ride my bike. There’s a real sense of freedom and accomplishment to it. A lot of us are college educated and could choose more conventional jobs, but this is what we want to do. I think the tourists like us, too. London, Tokyo, Berlin… we’re part of the scene, man,” he twinkles.

There are 2,000 bike messengers daily dissecting New York, 24/365, and an unspoken ‘bond of the road’ gives rise to a loose camaraderie. Austin, though, is swift to dismiss notions of the courier collective being any kind of select ‘brotherhood’: “It’s not like we’re some exclusive club. Maybe being a messenger isn’t even a huge part of your identity because so many people do it. There is a small group – and I’m in it – where being a bike courier is a big part of who you are. [Austin jokes that his girlfriend is “very good” at making sure time away from the bike is just that – away from the bike.] But there are guys for whom music is much more important and this is just their job.

And that’s cool. If they just want to make enough to live, that’s fine. There are plenty of guys who go nose to the grindstone, working every waking moment every day of the week.”

That kind of dash for cash is only one of many competitive threads shot through the fabric of courier life. There’s beating your best time to a regular delivery. There’s being the highestearning rider in a crew (see above); there’s spontaneous streetburning: “That’s real fun,” Austin grins. “Sometimes when two of you are in traffic and you’re both feeling it – maybe you’ve raced before – you just go jamming through the cars.”

There is also racing of a much more organised kind. Austin has twice won outright the North American Cycle Courier Championships and was disqualified on a technicality after finishing first at the Worlds, in Ireland, in 2007.

Satisfying as these accolades may be, they’re a spin-off from, not the purpose of courier riding. Part work, part adrenalin-fix, part lifestyle choice, courier riding is also a calling with a sociopolitical dimension. Austin’s bikes carry “One Less Prius” stickers and his weekends are taken up corralling ‘fun’ rides he has spent much of his free time organising: one such was a recent 30-mile round-trip from Manhattan to the new Red Bull New York football stadium in Harrison, New Jersey.

These events, he believes, constitute a valuable community service as well as helping edge America (and the wider world) towards becoming a society less dependent on motor vehicles: “I’m active with one of New York’s green organisations [www. times-up.org], and we’re trying to create new cyclists in New York. The US is on the cusp of a sea-change in the way we consider urban transportation. For most of the last century the country was built on a motor vehicle model and that’s no longer sustainable. Finally, the policy of US transportation is shifting to one that relies more on bikes.”

It’s during this pause for coffee and saddle philosophy, that Austin, at last, reveals the courier’s secret – the trick, if you like, to surviving, then thriving, on some of the world’s meanest streets. “You don’t have to do everything as fast as you can,” he says. “If a job has a two-hour delivery then why do it in 20 minutes and give the client a rush tariff for nothing? The best thing you can learn in this job is patience.”

Or as another, somewhat more famous, cycle racer once put it, it’s not about the bike.

Get on your bike with Austin at nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 More on the Cycle Messenger World Championships at www.messmedia.org

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The competition is bigger, has more money and is based in Japan. Yet KTM is set to win nine out of 11 Motocross World Championship titles in 2010. And there’s one simple reason: racers make the best motorbikes Words: Robert Sperl Photography: Paul Kranzler

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champion Production Line It’s not easy strutting through the KTM factory buildings after Heinz Kinigadner. This tall man from the Tyrol strides along briskly. He knows all the ins and outs of the assembly line, the manufacturing bays and test benches. ‘Kini’ has a slightly stiff gait but his arms dangle from the sleeves of his checked shirt as if he were some Wild West sheriff. But Kini carries no Colt, and those stiff hips are a throwback to his former life as a motocross and rally-raid racer. Heinz Kinigadner was twice Motocross World Champion, in 1984 and 1985, and later proved one of the best and most fearless racers in endurance epics such as the Paris-Dakar rally. The miles covered and falls taken have exacted their price on his body, yet Kini is proud never to have taken the easy option: “You’ve got to be ready to put up with a bit of blood in motocross.”

Another challenge of our tour, apart from Kini’s pace, is that people constantly come to talk to him. A quick “hello” here, a barbed sentence or two there, the odd handshake.

You’re wandering around with someone who’s appreciated by everybody and without whom none of this would work. But Kinigadner doesn’t have an official title at KTM. Nor does he have one of the chip-cards that all other KTM employees need to walk through the turnstiles at the entrance to the factory in the small Austrian town of Mattighofen. He is, nevertheless, the undisputed right-hand man of CEO Stefan Pierer.

Pierer attracted Kini to the then near-bankrupt KTM almost 20 years ago, at the same time bringing in financial syndicate Cross Industries AG to help fix their finances, thus starting KTM’s ascent to the top of the motocross world…

Win on Sunday, sell on Monday: KTM’s mantra is to humble its opponents in off-road competitions right from the outset, and that includes Japan’s two-wheeled giants. The first Six Days factory team came about as early as 1964 when the company was still being run by the founding Trunkenpolz family (the 58

KTM boss Stefan Pierer, on the factory floor. A company-wide racing vibe and a willingness to take risks has brought success

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nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Motocross with the world champs

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The factory guys Six of the best who make a difference

STEFAN Pierer CEO KTM POWER SPORTS AG “We’re faster, more innovative and more daring, but always with an eye on the competition”

Heinz Kinigadner KTM LEGEND Member of the KTM works team from 1983 to 2003 and as team manager nine-times winner of the Rally Dakar

Gerald Kiska KTM DESIGNER Trendsetter who makes KTM bikes attractive in form and colour. He’s the man responsible for the bikes’ unique look and identity Bernie Plazotta SUSPENSION guy “The only thing the engineers lack is a test route at work.

Otherwise the factory is ideal for building winners”

Josef Sperl Chief mechanic “The workshop travels to the races.

And we take a beer keg at the end of the season if we’ve won a world title”

Pit Beirer sporting director Only employs people who are better than him. “When we look back, we’ll be amazed at what we’ve achieved”

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‘T’ in KTM). In 1973 they won their first Motocross World Championship title, thanks to Gennady Moiseev of the USSR. By the end of 2009 they had won 173 motocross and Enduro titles; by the end of this year they’ll add another 15 or 16.

Following bankruptcy and instability triggered by management with little interest in motorsport, the motorbike division of KTM Sportmotorcycle GmbH was set up in 1992 under Pierer’s leadership. KTM became a public limited company in 1994, manufacturing scramblers and road bikes under the motto “Ready to Race” (producing about 66,000 units in the 2009/2010 financial year).

The company is now called KTM Power Sports AG and even if Pierer has never been a top sportsman, his philosophy is to live and breathe competition every day. He can pack in 48 hours-worth of work, if the job requires it.

Doesn’t the knowledge that KTM would be dead if it weren’t for its sporting success (60 per cent of sales are racing models) make work seem like a relentless pursuit as part of the rat race?

Pierer agrees, but adds that the rat race is good training. And the results back him up: in the competitive Enduro area, KTM are world market leaders with more than 50 per cent market share. They’re not quite there yet in motocross, but with the new 350 they’ve practically reinvented the sport. Their Japanese competitors still dominate the overall market, but as a premium brand, KTM makes more per unit. For Pierer, nothing beats beating the Japanese.

He has already laid the groundwork for KTM’s future so that their sporting ventures will have a solid foundation to build on. Cross Industries AG, which has a controlling stake in KTM, has focused its other investments on the automotive industry – companies such as Pankl, the specialists for the inner components of racing engines. Formula One would have to shut its doors were it not for Pankl and as KTM engines are now technically just smaller F1 motors, its closeness to Pankl gives an invaluable competitive edge.

Meanwhile the Freeride, based on a motocross 125 model, will herald the start of electric motocross bike production next spring. It’s intended as a “feel-good recreational vehicle” for areas whose wintersports infrastructure goes unused in summer – ski resorts in other words.

“A lift valley station is an ideal charging point,” Pierer confirms. Alternative power with a sporting touch. Very KTM. A partnership with Indian bike giant Bajaj (2.5 million motorbikes are

manufactured each year) is the starting point for a further image and technological overhaul. Having had to withdraw from road racing in 2008 due to the global economic crisis, KTM would like to move back into the Moto3 category in 2012. Moto3 uses 250cc, single-cylinder, four-stroke engines – home from home for KTM, which wants to become the driving force behind a fully faired Bajaj motorbike.

Then there’s the Dakar Rally, in South America in January 2011. It could be just the shot in the arm KTM needs; a 10th successive victory would be pretty good PR for its soon-to-be-established Brazilian subsidiary. (Brazil’s bike market is one and a half times the size of Europe’s at 1.4 million units per year.)

KTM’s director of sport, Pit Beirer, is an important bridgehead towards sporting success. The German former world-class motocrosser started at KTM in 2003, “on the sidelines,” as he puts it.

He is paraplegic and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since a racing accident in 2002. Beirer was robust in his criticism of some of KTM’s ways from the outset. Such as the engineers’ arrogance in failing to listen to the riders when they complained of shortcomings.

In 2004, Beirer took charge of Sports Management and with Kinigadner’s help was able to set up new structures.

Beirer’s opening gambit was taking on Belgium’s former World Champion Stefan Everts as off-road racing director.

A former Yamaha man, Everts had been cast aside after retiring in 2006 having won his fifth title for Yamaha (he won 10 in all). One handshake later and Everts – a good friend of Beirer’s – was on board, bringing with him a wealth of money-can’t-buy experience.

Beirer’s latest catch is Roger De Coster. The 66-year-old Belgian was a five-times motocross champion before moving to the USA where he headed the Honda and Suzuki teams. De Coster also successfully guided the US team through the Motocross of Nations, the unofficial team World Championship. Under his guidance, the USA has won the event 20 times out of 29 since 1981. Like Everts, De Coster was also unhappy with his former employers for refusing to guarantee long-term prospects.

Beirer won De Coster over by promising to provide the perfect conditions for the development of a KTM team in the USA. Beirer explains, “You don’t get people like Roger with money. You get them by providing the ideal environment.” With De Coster’s help, KTM would like to

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“REady to race� is the ktm mantra, and while any win is a good win, beating bigger rivals from japan is always the best kick

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Wheels on fire

KTM’s 2010 was the most memorable season of MX

Antonio cairoli (ITA) MX1 World champion Cairoli won the top-flight motocross title in his very first year with KTM – a first in the company’s history

Marvin Musquin (FRA) MX2 World Champion Only 20, Musquin successfully defended the title he won last year, with 14 wins in 30 World Championship races

Stephanie Laier (GER) World Champion Even a crash while training for the final race of the year in Italy didn’t knock the 2009 female World Champ off her stride

Tomorrow’s winnerS Rookie World Champion 65/85/125cc Jordi Tixier (FRA, 125cc, centre, with Joey Savatgy, USA, who also placed, and Pascal Rauchenecker, AUT). Also on form for KTM were Henry Jacobi (GER, 85cc) and Jake Pinhancos (USA, 65cc)

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gain a foothold in AMA Supercross, the US’s popular indoor series. Beirer continues, “With the narrow circuits, jumps, special surface and sprint distances, indoor races demand a particular strategy. Roger knows all the tricks.”

While other manufacturers rely on five-year plans, KTM invests in the shortterm. And it only takes two years for an idea to become a successful motorbike.

That was the time-scale with the 350, with which Antonio Cairoli won KTM’s first MX1 – the premier league of the MX World Championship – in 2010.

(Ideally a prototype should be ready for its first tests within two months.)

The first framework for the Italian’s 350 was conceived inside the head of Swiss amateur crosser Michael Achleitner.

No design drawing. No computers.

Which brings us on nicely to KTM’s next plus point: several current or former sportsmen work in the research and development department which increases efficiency immensely.

Then there’s having the courage to take an unorthodox approach, which Pierer always encourages in his colleagues. For instance, Kinigadner and his team had known for some time that the lap times for the MX2 (a maximum of 250cc and 40bhp) were often better than those for the more powerful MX1 (a maximum of 450cc and 65bhp).

Less power meant fewer disruptive load changes and better driveability, “because physically it makes quite a difference if you haven’t got a traction engine constantly on the go underneath you”, as Kinigadner puts it. So they pursued the idea of reducing the MX2 by 100cc and 10bhp and testing it against a 350.

The project started in April 2007, just after Stefan Everts, who had always been the best driver technically in his day and always took the cleanest cornering lines, had joined KTM. He was the perfect test driver for the 350 venture.

The result of this voluntary loss of power was a World Championship title for Cairoli. And a conceptual head-start which the competition will only be able to rival in two years’ time as the crisis in the bike market has also worn away at the development budgets of the big four: Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki.

The icing on KTM’s development cake is entering prototypes in national championships and long-term tests on World Championship-style circuits in Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy and Sardinia. Bernhard Plazotta, the man in charge of the chassis, initiates little expeditions for the occasions with

mobile garages where the chassis can be reconstructed with welding equipment, if need be. Such efforts and the quality they produce place KTM in a favourable position; whereas in the past you had to attract stars to your factory team with a lot of money, they now come of their own accord and beg for a test-drive.

KTM also has a sophisticated scouting system. Jointly responsible for that is Stefan Everts’ father Harry, another former five-time World Champion and owner of a motocross school in Spain. This year also saw the start of a new talent scheme, the Champions Academy. The best youths (aged up to 14) will secure a place on a World Championship team.

The motorbikes are also subject to the scrutiny of their designer Gerald Kiska.

He entered a KTM design competition over 20 years ago because as a fan – “I had a KTM bicycle when I was a child” – he felt that the brand had little to offer beyond the sexiness of its performance.

“If they don’t do something, they’ll never get anywhere.” He won the competition but his design was never brought to life.

The basic tenet of Kiska’s designs is to lay bare the company’s roots, “…and KTM has a thorny old history.” And to bring the brand motto to life. “Ready to race, that’s what our products should unapologetically embody.” Kiska is right, that KTM’s motorbikes have an aggressive look about them. “They’re competitive machines. And KTM is a tiny player in a huge world market.

No one will ever pay us any attention if we don’t stand out from the crowd.”

One of the most important design decisions Kiska ever made was choosing orange as their corporate colour. The unpopular hue was hardly used in the mid-1990s, so KTM has stood out ever since. Will orange age well? Kiska replies, “Does red get old? Ferrari are happy to be red every day. I embrace orange as our corporate colour.”

Kiska involves the racers in the design process. The guys come to try things out, up to 10 times sometimes, and then they complain down to the last millimetre. They don’t really care about the shape. All they care about is how functional it is. Kiska says that only rarely is he praised. For example, Stefan Everts once said with astonishment, “And it looks good, too.”

Kiska continues, “For some reason, he seems to have been surprised.”

See videos of the 2010 champions at nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Find out more about motocross and the world of KTM racing at www.ktm.com

photography: ktm (4)

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JAN’S WORLD Jan Wanggaard was once the windsurfing World Champion.

Now he’s the master of his own world and creates art in the northernmost reaches of Europe. Here’s the story of a man who got away from it all Words: Alexander Lisetz Photography: Philipp Horak

Meet Jan. He swapped a life of central heating, flat-screen TVs and pension schemes for one without rental agreements, stress or an indoor loo. The picture on the left is how he always looks when he’s got a Tuesday morning appointment. It doesn’t matter if he’s a bit late for it either

All of a sudden there’s a tornado. First it hovers undecidedly over the sea, then it prances this way and that and finally, it heads straight for us. Jan Wanggaard hurls himself down into the wet grass, a freshly caught trout in one hand and the knife he’d been planning to gut it with in the other. The vortex passes over him, tugging angrily at his flapping sleeves.

For a couple of seconds, the slapping of the waves and the screeching of the seagulls stop. And then the mini tornado evaporates somewhere on the mountainside.

“That one was harmless,” Wanggaard explains as he gets back up onto his feet. “If we have a big one, we normally get a couple of houses flying round the place.”

His face is deadly serious as he says it. An unmistakable sign of Lofoten humour.

The point of Lofoten humour is to make fun of that whole namby-pamby section of humanity that didn’t have the good grace to be born on this Norwegian archipelago, well inside the Arctic Circle. The most frequent targets are the southern Norwegian tourists, ie those delicate compatriots of the Lofoten inhabitants who are used to July days that have an average temperature of 14ºC, and who can expect four to 65

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Some people who are dissatisfied with the world turn to crime.

I built myself a hut

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If Wanggaard runs out of supplies or wants to meet friends, he has to walk for three hours over a mountain ridge to reach the nearest place where boats can land. In the winter he has a snowboard at hand. “You also need crampons because the wind packs the snow until it’s rock hard. But the downhill parts are fantastic”

five hours of sunlight a day during the winter months. Here, the weather conditions aren’t nearly so Mediterranean.

But there are other attractions.

“I can breathe here,” he explains.

Jan Wanggaard is a playful youth trapped in the sinewy, wiry body of a 52-year-old. He used to be a top sportsman, a surfing World Champion in the 1980s, competing against the indomitable Hawaiian Robby Naish. “Robby was the man of the moment and I beat him in Hawaii the first time we competed against each other,” he recalls. Wanggaard stopped enjoying surfing at the peak of his career. Because he couldn’t breathe any more. “I used to surf because I had fun doing it, was good at it and it stretched me physically. But the more success I had, the more obligations there were. All of a sudden, there were a thousand aspects of my job that I had no interest in.”

Wanggaard is very consistent in his attitude to things of no interest to him: he doesn’t do them. At the moment, he’s interested in one thing only: the firewood for this evening’s dinner. He’s already fetched it from the beach: logs in all shapes and sizes washed ashore by the Gulf Stream. He chops them into chunks. It’s our first day in the hut that Wanggaard built himself and it’s bitterly cold. The nearest sign of human civilisation would be a three-hour yomp away. There’s no electricity, no clean crockery and no running water. Wanggaard thinks it’s funny that the people who are always complaining for lack of something are the ones with the most: people with money, houses, big cars. He doesn’t want for anything up here.

It’s raining and there’s a storm brewing out at sea. The hut huddles beneath a rock-face which protects it from the wind

Name Jan Wanggaard Born February 16, 1958 Asker/Norway Places of residence Reine, Oslo (Norway) Occupation Freelance artist Achievements 1981 Windsurfing World Champion Film Panta Rei documents Jan’s most ambitious art project, a model of our solar system

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and a wall of earth and grass keeps out the cold. The oven crackles. It creates enough heat to make spending the night in a sleeping bag perfectly comfortable.

The next morning, Wanggaard bakes bread. He’s fetched water from the sea and has kneaded flour and salt into a sturdy dough which he then makes into pan-sized pieces of flat bread. We sit in semi-darkness in the hut, even though it never gets dark outside. We watch the waves crashing against the beach outside the window. We wave to a sea lion that appears among the rocks. And we talk about our jobs, our dreams, our friendships. We ask Wanggaard how you do it, how you get away from it all, and feel like adventure-seeking tourists at an Everest base camp as we do so.

But Wanggaard was never really in it all. Once his surfing career had come to an end, he studied industrial design, lived from odd jobs and made a name for himself as an artist. He built a house in the fishing village of Reine and then, two years ago, built this hut in a remote valley.

As the wind increases in strength, it whistles through the gaps in the beams he sawed out of driftwood two years ago and wedged into position as the outside walls. Wanggaard grabs a sack of hay and plugs the gaps until the candle flames are pointing straight up again. He lets his mind wander as he does so. He thinks a lot of people dream of getting away from it all.

But as for actually putting it into practice, only very few actually go so far as to do that. “A lot of people want to make a fresh start in life because they feel a deep sense of dissatisfaction,” he opines. “So they change job or find a new wife. But that doesn’t solve the problem.” You have to live in harmony with yourself from your youth onwards, he claims.

To follow your own nature and rid yourself of fears and constraints, both your own and those imposed by others.

To live, rather than just watch life happening to you.

Sometimes Wanggaard repairs fishing nets for his neighbours in the village. At times like those, he refrains from holding forth with his little pieces of wisdom. Runhild, who used to babysit his now adult daughter, explains people are sceptical enough of him as it is. She lives in Reine and has known Wanggaard for many years. “For some in the village, he has mythological status, for others, he’s an oddball,” she says. “But the women all agree on one thing: he’s hot.”

Wanggaard has an ex-wife and an Italian girlfriend who’s

Wanggaard struck a sort of deal with nature: he puts in the man-hours and gets fresh fish and driftwood for heating in return.

This cashless system of payments is highly efficient: two or three days’ work every couple of months will cover any other eventualities

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Every morning I collect the things the sea has washed up and think what I can make out of them

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Anyone can do anything and become whatever they want to be. You just have to free yourself of all constraints

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Wanggaard has never held down a regular job. But he’s used to hard work. Among other projects he has built is a scale reproduction of our solar system (large picture left: Saturn), a selection of historical boats (like the kayak in the picture below) and a hut on the Reine fjord (bottom)

a free spirit like him. “Don’t be afraid of being on your own and don’t stay together if you’ve grown apart, because society says you should” – these, Wanggaard says, are the cornerstones of a successful relationship.

The bread is now ready. He slaps a blob of butter onto the brown crust and shoves a new bit of dough in the oven.

As we eat, we try very hard not to watch life just happening to us. And unwashed and unshaven as we have been for four days now, that’s probably no bad thing.

The next day, we cross a fjord by boat and hike to Saturn.

You can do that on Lofoten, you see, because Wanggaard’s most remarkable work of art (which also appears in his documentary, Panta Rei [Everything Flows]) is a scale reproduction of our solar system. To be able to demonstrate the huge dimensions of the planets’ orbits correctly, he reduced the distances to a scale of 200 million to one and located stone models of the planets around the Lofoten Islands. “I have to visualise things I can’t understand,” Wanggaard explains.

He had the 725kg sphere that represents Saturn flown to the beach at Bunes by helicopter and placed on a plinth in the rocks there. His mock-up of the skies is still only half-complete; his model of Earth will eventually be right in front of his hut and the sun, which will be 7m in diameter, will be a couple of hundred metres further away.

Wanggaard is in no hurry to finish the project. He won’t have his working hours dictated to him, either by others’ schedules or his own ambition. And then there are so many other ideas that he wants to bring to fruition. Wood and stone sculptures. Historical boats which he wants to build with the same materials and tools that the Vikings once used.

Or the organ he wants to make out of driftwood and have ring out over the whole valley. “…and then there’s this idea for an installation I’ve got floating around in my head: my best friend Björn will be naked on a cross on a rock face for a whole day alongside a hiking path that tourists use…”

Yeah, like we’re still going to fall for the Lofoten humour after a week in Wanggaard’s company.

Wanggaard has his own relationship with money: they steer clear of each other. “Of course I could’ve been rich,” he says. “Getting rich is easy. But I couldn’t see the point.” To earn the small amount of money that he does need, he does jobs where he can practise the skills that will come in handy

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Midnight sun on the Lofoten Islands. After a couple of days, you stop caring what time it is: you eat when you’re hungry and sleep when you’re tired. Or go down to the beach at two in the morning to watch the waves

for his artwork. He’s recently made a patio out of natural stone.

That will get him by for a while.

Wanggaard is not the first person to have stumbled into this remote valley without a penny to his name. “People have been coming over the mountains to seek refuge here for centuries,” he explains, because on the other side of the ridge there was a bailiff who squeezed the last øre out of every fisherman’s family every year. His youngest descendant may not have the same power his forefather once wielded, but he still has his own seat in the church. Up until 50 years ago, Wanggaard reveals, one family lived here all year round. Their youngest daughter didn’t leave the valley once until she was six. Back in Wanggaard’s hut, we try to imagine what her life must have been like: a world which ended with the sea on her left and the mountains on her right. A world that knew nothing of cars, skyscrapers and beach weather and beyond whose borders lived weird trolls and ravenous spirits. (Or so said the parents to keep their children’s inquiring minds in check.) It must have been worst in winter, when the polar night must have seemed never-ending. Or was that perhaps the nicest time of year?

When evening comes, we saw firewood, get drinking water from the sea and wash the dishes. We’ve stopped asking journalistic questions and have begun to understand Wanggaard’s answers. Trout’s on the menu, the first we’ve caught ourselves.

And we’ve cooked it over a fire we’ve made with our own fair hands. The few charred bits taste of peace and space. Of wind.

Of the midnight sun. And that’s not the Lofoten humour talking.

See more of Jan’s life and work by logging on to www.wanggaard.com

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HOMERUN Think baseball, think USA, right? Well think again: Baseball is massive in Japan, and none of its stars is bigger than Hayato Sakamoto, lead bat and lynchpin for Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants Words: Werner Jessner Photography: Thomas Butler

A few facts about Japanese baseball: the season begins in March and ends in November. There are matches almost every day (Mondays being rest days), making roughly 144 matches per team, per year. Every game (or at least the highlights), is broadcast on TV and every child in Japan knows the players. The smallest stadium holds 20,000 spectators while the largest, the Tokyo Dome, has room for 55,000 max. It’s usually sold out.

Japan is a world-beater at the sport as well, with the national team winning the two World Baseball Classic tournaments to date, where they were up against the entire NBA elite. And then there was that film with Tom Selleck (Mr. Baseball) in which the legendary moustache proves himself in the Japanese baseball league, playing with the Chunichi Dragons. But what does all of that really tell us about Japanese baseball?

Time for a fact-finding mission.

From Tokyo we take the Shinkansen to Nagoya, travelling at 260kph to arrive (exactly on time, naturally) in the host city of today’s away match: Selleck’s ex-team Chunichi Dragons (Nagoya) against the Yomiuri Giants (Tokyo) in the Nagoya Dome. This is a key game in the Central League; with one win the home team could force record-holding champions the Giants out of second place in the table. The current leaders, 74

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nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 Get close to the action in the Tokyo Dome

Hitting it for six: Hayato Sakamoto, the Yomiuri Giants No 6, at the batting box. The 21-year-old shortstop is – together with Venezuelan Alex Ramirez and catcher Shinnosuke Abe – one of the stars at the oldest and most popular baseball club in Japan

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the Hanshin Tigers, are only two wins away, while the Yakult Swallows are coming up from behind. The battle for the playoffs, called Climax Series, is heating up, with the regular season ending on September 26. The league championship leader is already in the Climax Series while their opponent will be determined by a duel between the second- and third-place holders. The Central League champion plays off against the head of the Pacific League in a best-of-seven tournament called the Nihon Series, which means Japan Series, to decide the national champion of the year.

“The Dragons are one of my favourite opponents,” says Hayato Sakamoto, who at just 21 years of age is not just the Giants’ lynchpin, but also the crowd favourite. The tall No 6 is playing only his fourth year in the NPB (Nippon Pro Baseball) and is already the champions’ starting batter, having scored 18 home runs in the last season and notched up a strike rate of 0.306 – only just behind the league record of 0.322 set by his teammate Alex Ramirez. “The Dragons are known for their good pitchers. I enjoy it most when we play against the best,” he notes.

Hayato in defence in his position as a shortstop between second and third base

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“ I can still remember how I used to throw my older brother’s baseball against the walls of our house over and over” The fans are also enjoying themselves in the Nagoya Dome. Basically, it goes like this: top fans sit behind the catcher, and the further out the seat is, the more fanatical the fan. There, where the home run balls land, is where you’ll see the team colours: to the right, blue for the Dragons and to the left, orange for the Giants. The split is about 70 to 30 in the home team’s favour, but nonetheless says Hayato Sakamoto: “The Giants have so much tradition. The club has been around since 1934, longer than any other. Even for away games there are always a lot of Giants fans there. It doesn’t matter where we go, we’re never alone. That’s the great thing.” He knows what he’s talking about: the fans try to get close to him, all over the country he receives presents – “The

best is when you get expensive chocolate.”

Sakamoto merchandising flies off the shelves; opponents fear him. Tigers fans, known for being particularly passionate, once threw a PET bottle on to the pitch to stop him, an unheard-of act among the normally peaceful fan community.

Sakamoto himself, born in Itami near Osaka, was, however, a Tigers fan as a child. “That only changed when I was drafted by the Giants,” he grins today.

It all began normally, just like it does in so many families all over the world: “My father played baseball for fun, and so did my older brother. I can still remember, as a kid, how I used to throw my brother’s ball against the wall, over and over.” It was obvious the younger boy had more talent than his big brother, but he took some convincing before he put his talents to work: “In fifth class I wanted to give up baseball and switch to football. My parents and my coach convinced me to stick with baseball.”

It was a good decision considering all high school championship baseball tournament finals are broadcast on TV and are of national importance. The order of most popular sports in Japan goes: baseball, then nothing. Under “nothing”, football (the J-League) has forced sumo to number-two spot.

Fact is, baseball in Japan gets a lot of things right – it’s the blueprint for a successful sport. When the odd thrown bottle is as raucous as it gets, the whole family can enjoy the sport. Couples, the elderly, children: you’d rarely see a European stadium with a crowd as diverse as it is here. Neither will you hear any swearing: insulting opponents is frowned upon. When their own team is defending, the fans relax, nibble from their bento boxes, snack on delicious green soya beans or beckon the colourfully clothed drink girls who cart beverages around for the whole match – which can easily reach four hours – gaining a good deal of altitude throughout. What’s more, they bow every time they start their climb at the bottom row and kneel while they pour drinks. It’s these subtleties which make Japan so exceptional among the usual silliness like overexcited team mascots in full costume doing somersaults on the pitch.

When their own team is on the offensive, the scene, or rather the pitch, changes: the singing starts, with each batter cheered on with their own personal chant. Even here there are distinctions, as the Giants’ shortstop explains: “Normally at away games giants’ fans yell ‘Let’s go Sakamoto’ whereas in Nagoya they call me by my

Hero worship: A sold-out Tokyo Dome during a standard regularseason match against underdogs Hiroshima Carp is a kind of madhouse. Sakamoto is the fans’ favourite and they know how to express their love for the lanky batter.

Currently two fanzines feature him as a cover boy

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Home’s a dome: Tokyo Dome in Bunkyo prefecture, homebase of talented Sakamoto, is often referred to as ‘Big Egg’. You need to take a lift to the 43rd floor of the neighbouring skycraper to get an idea of how big it really is (the Ferris wheel certainly looks tiny in comparison)

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first name, Hayato. That’s why I like to play there so much.” Only the best earn the honour of being addressed by their first names, the most famous example being Ichiro Suzuki, known by the entire MLB simply as Ichiro and entered in numerous records under that name. And there’s another peculiarity: while supporters of every other team bring all types of horns, from trumpets to an opening fanfare, Giants’ supporters are the only ones who restrict themselves to drums. Giants are different, and it’s a difference you can not only see but hear as well. For the past few years, however, one quirk has been sadly missing: the fans used to be renowned for blowing up balloons and then letting them off as whirring rockets. They didn’t just spread good vibes, they also spread a whole lot of germs. One of the larger flu waves put an end to this noble tradition.

Despite the ruckus from the crowd, the Giants are having a hard time today against the brilliant Dragons, who for their part are exasperated by the Giants’ class. Two great teams are cancelling each other out. Somehow the Dragons finally score the first point. In the next innings our man Sakamoto is standing at the batting box. The pitcher’s second ball is fast, veering slightly to the right. Sakamoto hits the ball precisely and with full power; the Dragons’ outfielders don’t have a ghost of a chance. Home run, equaliser, thank you very much! The lanky young man in No 6 trots around the bases, waving, and in the dugout behind the home plate his teammates are already standing up to give him a high five. It will be the Giants’ only point today; the Dragons win 3:1 and move up to second place in the table.

We travel at 260kph back to Tokyo (again with the Shinkansen, and again exactly on time; this is how public transport should be) to get a crash-course in history. But first the riddle of urban transit; it’s no coincidence that you can get the Tokyo subway map also as a jigsaw puzzle. We’re heading to the north of the 13-million-strong metropolis, to the Tokyo Dome, with its air-supported roof. Meaning, the roof holds its shape purely because air is constantly pumped in, typical of technology-crazed Japan. The Tokyo Dome is situated in an amusement park with Ferris wheel, rollercoasters and so on.

The Dome’s catacombs host the Hall of Fame; 171 members have been inducted so far. Number one was Matsutaro Shoriki, media mogul, founder of pro baseball in Japan and father of the Giants. Hiroshi Hiraoka established the first club: he’s number two in the Hall of Fame. The

“ While the other teams’ fans bring loads of wind instruments, the Giants’ supporters restrict themselves to deafening drums” Simbashi Athletic Club was the factory team of a subway line, and today there is still a league for factory teams, from Hitachi to Mitsubishi and Honda. Horace Wilson is one of four non-Japanese in this sanctum, but to earn his place he had to do no less than bring baseball to Japan (that was in 1872). And then there’s Sadaharu Oh, whose 868 home runs will probably never be beaten. His batting was harder and faster than anyone else’s, which might have had something to do with his training method: he sliced falling sheets of paper with a samurai sword (which also says something for the sharpness of the sword, but it wasn’t just that). Even when the names don’t mean much (which would apply to most non-Japanese), you get a real sense of the significance of the sport for this country, while above you all hell is already breaking loose.

The merchandising stands in front of the Dome outdo each other with original orange-and-black devotional objects, while the queues in front of the large fan shop are so long that they need their own stewards (and this in spite of Japan’s famously disciplined queues). The mascot for the Hiroshima Carp, our opponents today (did I really just write “our”?), is what looks to be a dinosaur, now striking coquettish poses for the fans as ever more people stream out of the subway. Ever seen 55,000 people in a sports hall?

But there’s still time before the match, and we spend it in a baseball simulator. You can select from four animated Giants pitchers, who pitch balls at 80, 100, 120 or 140kph at the amateur fan, who tries to hit them with the bat. You get 22 balls, and unless you grew up in the North of England, you’ve got almost no chance of hitting into the doublefigures. But just hitting the ball is only half the battle; you should if at all possible

aim it so it’s not caught by the fielding team. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit it; if the opponents catch the ball, you’re out.

Right in the first innings, Sakamoto demonstrates how important it is to use your head in baseball. With one smart strike he makes it to first base; in short he has achieved exactly what one expects from a starting batter. His teammates do likewise, and soon the score is 3:0.

Sakamoto will score twice more today, the first when he very shrewdly lets a ball simply bounce, thus sacrificing himself, but giving two of his teammates the chance to get to next base, the second giving him a very painful body blow; the scoreboard shows 143kph for the pitch which hit his little finger. Nonetheless, tonight Sakamoto is overshadowed by his teammate Alex Ramirez, a Venezuelan in his 10th season with the Japanese Professional Baseball League. “Let’s go, let’s go Ramirez! Let’s go, let’s go Ramirez!” chant the capacity Tokyo Dome crowd with almost South American intensity.

Ramirez, a stocky gentleman at the prime baseballer’s age of 36, offers thanks with a home run and two more spectacular efforts which give the Giants five of the 11 points they will score today.

The match against the underdogs from the south of Japan’s main island ends at 11:6 for the Giants, and so the playoff place looks ever more assured.

What does a career have in store for someone like Hayato Sakamoto?

Realistically Sakamoto has 15 more years at the highest level in front of him, optimistically it could be 20 years or more.

The cult of youth is completely unknown in baseball. Is “big in Japan” big enough for the world?

Japanese players who sign up for the NPB are obligated to the regulation called FA (Free Agency) System which requires all the players to stay with the league for nine years. Sakamoto is in only his fourth year, so the question is academic at the moment anyway: “The American game is more about power, here we probably need to focus more attention on technique. Generally I believe that as a Japanese player you can succeed in MLB.” Has Sakamoto ever regretted not becoming a footballer? He laughs: “No. The only things I have to give up in my life as a baseball pro are bowling, surfing and skiing. And I can live with that.”

Match action: nz.redbulletin.com/print2.0 More info on the team: www.giants.jp

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BEYOND THE ORDINARY THE RED BULLETIN

More Body&Mind Gen up with the info behind the action

Photography: getty images

82 neil armstrong visits hangar-7 84 Get the gear 86 the inside line on Japanese baseball 88 listings 90 nightlife 98 Mind’s eye

The contender: Red Bull Racing driver Mark Webber heads to Japan on October 10 in his quest to be crowned the 2010 F1 world champ. Race details on page 88

Hangar-7 Interview

Neil Armstrong Now 80 years old, the first man to walk on the moon rarely gives interviews, but he entered The Red Bulletin’s orbit to talk about in-flight nerves (none) and out-of-this-world experiences (many) Red Bulletin: What was going through your mind on that July day in 1969 when you landed on the moon?

Neil Armstrong: “Well, the first thing I was surprised at was the fact that we had landed. And it was a feeling of great satisfaction, because about 400,000 people had worked for a decade to put us in this spot we were in, and I felt a great sense of appreciation for all those people who had made it possible for me to be there.”

So you weren’t worried at all?

“I think what occurred to me more than anything else was that this would be a very poor time to make a mistake. We knew that going into space was going to be accompanied by some risks, and we accepted that – that was part of the price of progress. And so, I think we 82

were not afraid of the risk we were taking, rather we were afraid of failure.

We were afraid of making mistakes, but there was nobody who was concerned about the risks in my recollection. We concentrated on trying to do the perfect job. The question was, is the possible increase in human knowledge worth the investment that includes a certain amount of risk and I thought, ‘Yeah, this could lead to real increases in knowledge and benefit all humanity.’

It was worth the investment of all our effort, perhaps our lives.”

How special do you feel, having done what you’ve done?

“It was nice to have the accolades of the public. First it was in the news, then it was in the science departments of the

schools, and now it’s in the history department. It’s nice to be able to look back and see all that’s been accomplished in the years since we were flying.”

Why did you retreat so far from the spotlight on your return?

“It was a conscious decision. I would not have been successful in show business.”

Were you ever tempted to sneak a piece of moon rock back as a memento?

“As I said, around 400,000 people were involved in building the craft and getting us in the position, and millions more contributed money through taxes. My feeling was that all those people had made that possible; I just happened to be the lucky one who got to be on the point of the arrow and I didn’t feel that entitled me to a souvenir any more than any of those thousands and millions of people.”

It was an unprecedented collaborative effort, wasn’t it?

“The phrase ‘end of the decade’: that was around us all the time. It was echoing off the walls. That’s what kept our flight schedule so compact, condensed with flights coming very quickly, one after another. Each one asked the maximum amount of questions and tried as many new techniques as possible, so that we could arrive at the landing in the fewest number of flights.

If we didn’t do it by [Apollo] 12 or 13,

Words: Robert Sperl

Science fact: Neil Armstrong experienced the moon’s gravity

Photography: Corbis, ServusTV/Carolin Burrer, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

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we wouldn’t make the end of the decade, so the pressure was there. When we would get into discussions – let’s call them discussions where people didn’t agree on every point and there was a bit of arguing going on – someone would stand up and say, ‘And what is it that we’re trying to do here?’ And someone would say, ‘End of the decade.’

And that usually ended the arguing.”

Was beating the Russians a motivating factor, too?

“We were very aware of the level of competition. The Soviets had made remarkable progress in unmanned craft, interplanetary probes and human spaceflight: the Americans were well behind. But we were challenged to try to catch up and we did so aggressively, and over the years we narrowed the gap.

It really wasn’t until the actual lunar competition that we turned even and finally we were fortunate enough to get a landing before Alexei [Leonov, the first man to walk in space and the leading Russian astronaut of his time].

It was a great competition and we had great respect for each other. Then after the first lunar landings we worked together, during the Cold War. There were a few things done in the arts, but I think the most significant approaches to peace between our countries was our combined efforts in space.”

Six years after your landing, in July 1975, a Russian and an American spacecraft docked in orbit…

“I believe that handshake between Alexei, commanding the Soyuz, and Tom Stafford, commanding the Apollo, was one of the most important benefits of the space age and a historical highlight that will never be exceeded.

I congratulate them both.”

What did it actually feel like when you were on the lunar surface?

“Lunar gravity is much nicer than Earth’s gravity. You feel very light, very comfortable; it’s very easy to walk.

You can jump very high. If you had a house there, you wouldn’t need to have stairs in it because you could just hop from one floor up to the next. The temperature is over 100°C, though, so you need an air-conditioned suit.”

Do you think mankind should walk in your footsteps?

“I believe that we should go back to the moon. I’d like us to go back. We’ve gone to six places on the surface on the moon, and there is about 14 million square miles we haven’t touched yet. There is a lot to be learned there. Going to the moon has all the aspects of going to

“We’ve gone to six places on the moon and there is about 14 million square miles we haven’t touched yet” distant space, but it’s close enough that you can communicate with Earth.”

So we could use it as a springboard to go further?

“Mars distances are more problematic. I do favour going to Mars, and I believe more flights in the lunar region will increase our technological capability to enable us to go to Mars safely and efficiently.”

Making history: The July 25, 1969, cover of Life magazine pictured Armstrong, as commander of Apollo 11, heading out to the rocket’s launch pad

How do you feel about the possibility of life on other planets?

“Well, my view has certainly changed.

I think it’s primarily a broadening of my appreciation for the life on Earth and potential life beyond it. It’s of interest to all of us to know whether we’re alone in the universe or that there are other societies on other planets surrounding other stars. Perhaps some time – in our lifetime or in the life of our grandchildren – we’ll know the answer to the question.

There are two possible answers: the first is that there are other societies in other places in the universe, and the second is that we are alone in the universe. Either one of those is equally remarkable and almost beyond our understanding.”

Were you ever a fan of science fiction?

“It was very important to me. I enjoyed particularly the early tales of spaceflight and was motivated by them. And, actually, when in my studies I would get a little bit lethargic and was not very focused, I would sometimes read a little science fiction to motivate me to study.”

Sorry to ask this, but we have to, because some people think what you did was science fiction. Did you really walk on the moon?

“Definitely, definitely, definitely!”

It’s one small step for man – or a lady – to watch Armstrong’s seminal stroll: just go to www.nasa.gov

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Get the Gear

Austin Horse’s Essentials

Words: Ruth morgan. photography: jamie james medina, thomas hoeffgen

The bike’s a must, but here’s the rest of the kit that gets NYC’s top cycle courier moving Clockwise from top left: Adidas Brooklyn Machine Works trainers www.adidas.com “These are a reissue of an Eddy Merckx shoe from about 30 years ago. They’re truly comfortable and they look pretty nice too.”

Rapha Stowaway Jacket www.rapha.cc “This jacket is great as it’s light and good the whole year until winter. It’s a total essential.”

Continental Gatorskin Tyres www.conti-online.com “These are my preferred tyres. They’re flat resistant, and have a nice feel on the road and when you skid on them.”

Black Red Bull hat “Keeps the sun and the rain off – useful as I spend most of my life outside.”

Freight Baggage Rolltop backpack freightbaggage.org “We carry a lot of heavy stuff, so a good twostrap backpack is healthiest for your back.

This one fits a good amount of stuff.”

Brooklyn Machine Works Gangsta Trak bike www.brooklynmachineworks.com “First and foremost it’s a tool. Not like it’s some sacred object, but you like certain tools because they’re reliable. It’s perfect for riding all day.”

Cog Magazine “This is a scene magazine. I get it to see if I’m in it – no, I’m joking. It’s got good art, beautiful pictures and a fresh approach to stories.”

The Shock Doctrine

by Naomi Klein “This is a book on economics.

I read a lot, but it’s rare I get to read for a long time during the day.”

Keep up with Austin Horse on Twitter at twitter.com/austinhorse

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Baseball Bases

Got a yen to watch a Japanese baseball game for real? Here’s where you can…

11 SAPPORO

1. Chunichi Dragons (Nagoya)

4. Yakult Swallows (Tokio)

2. Hanshin Tigers 3. Hiroshima Carp (Nishinomiya) (Hiroshima)

SENDAI

5. Yokohama BayStars (Yokohama)

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6 4

TOKyO 6. Yomiuri Giants (Tokio) HIROSHIMA 3

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2

1 NAGOYA

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5

OSAKA

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7. Chiba Lotte Marines (Chiba)

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FUKUOKA 8. Orix Buffaloes (Osaka / Kobe)

11. Hokkaido Nippon10. Fukuoka Ham Fighters SoftBank Hawks Pacific League (Sapporo) (Fukuoka) The league The Japanese professional baseball league, the NPB [Nippon Professional Baseball], consists of two leagues of six teams. Most teams play matches within their own league. Every year from midMay to mid-June, teams from one league play teams from the other (known as ‘Interleague’). The team with the most points plays the winner of a secondand third-place playoff in a final, for the title of League Champions.

They play a best-of-six series. The team who performed best throughout the season has a one-point advantage. The two league champions then go head-tohead in the best-of-seven Japan Series. The 86

9. Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles (Sendai)

12. Saitama Seibu Lions (Tokorozawa)

division into a Central and Pacific League is not geographical. Though both based in Tokyo, the Giants and Swallows play in different leagues. Even Sapporo Ham Fighters from the northern Island of Hokkaido play some of their home matches in the Tokyo Dome. The Lions, BayStars and Marines are also close to the city, so it’s easier for tourists visiting Japan. Each team has its urban legends. The Tigers are considered wild; Hiroshima Carp are the underdogs and the Giants are like Japanese baseball’s answer to Real Madrid.

The Schedule You can find the current schedule on the league’s website at: www.npb.or.jp/eng

Preparation Get to know the basic rules before you go to a game. It might be difficult to find someone to explain the subtleties of the rules or how the scoreboard works once you’re already there. You can find details of how the league works on the informative and well-run homepage www.JapanBall.com. The annual Japan Pro Baseball Fan Handbook & Media Guide comes from the same source. It’s an extensive and basically indispensable reference work in both English and Japanese which you can pick up for under $3 at www.JapanBall.com.

Tickets Depending on the team and venue, tickets cost anywhere between 1,000 yen (about $16) and 12,000 yen ($190).

You can either buy tickets at the venue (though there’s the risk that the game will be sold out) or online (at least four days before the game, on sites such as www.japanballtickets.com).

International hotels will usually help you reserve tickets.

Getting there As long as you find the right subway stop, you’ll be delivered to the stadium entrance. The fearless can attempt to go by car; venues have their own (expensive) car-parks. The earlier you get there, the more fun you can have with the fans’ antics. Diehard fans arrive four hours before a game starts.

They start letting people in two hours in advance. And specific to Japan: even when there are 50,000 spectators coming through the turnstiles, there’s never a crush. No idea how they manage it.

At the Stadium Sit back and relax. As a game can easily go on for four hours or more, the tiny seats can begin to take their toll on a European behind after a while. The only thing to do is go to the buffet. We can recommend noodles with scraps of meat, whole Bento boxes or a bowl of green soya beans to nibble on (they look like pea pods). If you can’t speak Japanese, all you have to do is point at what you want. There should still be a bit of adventure left in foreign travel, after all.

The official site is www.npb.or.jp

words: werner jessner

Central League

new zealand

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Red Bull all girls ride 01.11.10 Two of the best female motocross riders, Ashley Fiolek (left) and Tarah Geiger, host an all-girls ride day during the largest amateur motocross event, the Mini Olympics Motocross Championships.

Gainesville, USA

hot SPOTS

photography: Craig Kolesky/Red Bull Photofiles, Damiano Levati/Red Bull Photofiles, Garth Milan/Red Bull Photofiles, Olaf Pignataro/Red Bull Photofiles

Whether your favourite sport is on legs, wheels or waves, we’ve got it covered FIM Supermoto of Nations 03.10.10

Red Bull Soapbox Race 10.10.10

Teams of three top supermoto riders from 17 countries battle it out on track for the coveted crown. The German team, including former European champion Bernd Hiemer, hope to defend last year’s victory.

Cahors, France

The usual city-centre traffic will make way for a very different type of transport when the Red Bull Soap Box Race comes to town. Two hundred participants will aim to make it down the Boulevard Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in their home-made creations in the fastest time possible.

Lyon, France

Carolina Hurricanes v Minnesota Wild 07.10.10 For the first time since 2007, the NHL is opening its season in Europe, with three games, including the above, taking place outside the USA. Hartwall Arena, Helsinki, Finland

V8 Supercars – Bathurst Supercheap Auto 1000 07 – 10.10.10 Known as The Great Race, this is one of Australia’s most important motorsport events, now run exclusively for V8 Supercars. The historic Mount Panorama circuit features Hell Corner and Forest Elbow, and touring car driver Rick Kelly will be among those hoping to take victory on home tarmac.

Bathurst, Australia

ASP World Tour 07 – 18.10.10 As the 2010 competition enters its final stages, defending champion Mick Fanning has it all to do, as world-class surfers including Jordy Smith and Kelly Slater fight him for his crown.

Peniche, Portugal

Extreme Sailing Series 09 – 12.10.10 The highly anticipated final of the world’s most high-octane racing series plays out in front of Almeria’s packed shores.

Almeria, Spain

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Red Bull Flugtag 10.10.10 More than 20,000 spectators are set to gather on one of Hong Kong’s most picturesque beaches to witness the first Red Bull Flugtag ever to take place in the country. And with 40 teams entering their handbuilt flying contraptions, it’s guaranteed to be a unique and entertaining experience.

West Kowloon Heliport, Hong Kong

Formula One Japanese Grand Prix 10.10.10 Sebastian Vettel is hoping to repeat last year’s victory at the Suzuka circuit as the 2010 season enters the final few races in a championship that is still wide open.

Suzuka International Circuit, Japan

The Weston Beach Race 15 – 17.10.10 The mass-start dirtbike beach race takes to the sand for the 28th time and this year it promises to be bigger and better than ever.

Pros and amateurs alike fight for their line, battling challenging flats and dunes along the way, and there’s a new side-by-side race as well.

Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset, England

Red Bull Toe to Toe 30.10.10 Contenders battle it out in one-on-one football matches.

The winners get the chance to progress to the grand final, in San José next month.

Alajuela, Costa Rica

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Ale Hits Your Spot 29.10.10 BMX star Alessandro Barbero, or Ale as he’s known on the circuit, returns to his home country for a new challenge: BMX fans invite him to come to their ‘spot’ and take them on performing their best trick.

Rome, Italy

MotoGP Australian Grand Prix 17.10.10

Formula one Korean Grand Prix 23 – 24.10.10

Spaniard Dani Pedrosa arrives Down Under determined to keep up his winning form. But close title rivals including Jorge Lorenzo and Andrea Dovizioso won’t go down without a fight.

Phillip Island, Australia

The 17th round of 2010 is the first Grand Prix in South Korea.

Though for the drivers, thoughts will be less on location and more on the action.

Korean International Circuit, South Korea

DTM 17.10.10

NASCAR Sprint Cup Series 24.10.10

The world’s most popular touring car championship returns to Hockenheim, where world-class drivers including Mattias Ekström, David Coulthard and Ralf Schumacher will do battle before heading to next month’s Shanghai final.

Hockenheim, Germany

O’Neill Coldwater Classic 19 – 24.10.10 The series that boasts the most northern, southern, wildest, coldest and classic stops going reaches its final destination. Riders have battled some of the most challenging surf conditions and the final will be no exception.

But in the end, there can only be one king of the waves.

Santa Cruz, California, USA

WRC Rally Spain 22 – 24.10.10 Time is running out for drivers to beat six-time world champion Sébastien Loeb who leads the championship in his Citroën once again.

Salou, Spain

Red Bull Metallicross 23.10.10 Some of the world’s best bikers, including David Knight and Travis Pastrana, have been designing their dream track ready for a race day with a difference. Now 40,000 fans will pack into the California Pala racetrack to watch the ultimate bike battle.

Pala Raceway, California, USA

SA Supermoto Championship Series 30.10.10 The seventh and final round of the 2010 series plays out in Vereeniging with defending champion Brian Capper hoping to retain his crown.

Gauteng, South Africa

FIS World Cup Skiing 23 – 24.10.10 As the word cup season gets underway, male and female contenders arrive in one of Europe’s most renowned ski resorts to do battle in the discipline of giant slalom.

Sölden, Austria

Scott Speed and new Red Bull signing Kasey Kahne keep the wheels spinning as the Sprint Cup Series arrives in Indiana for more high-octane action.

Martinsville, USA

FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour 26 – 31.10.10 This season’s penultimate event sees third-placed Chinese duo Xue Chen and Zhang Xi hoping to beat tour leaders Larissa Franca and Juliana Felisberta Silva of Brazil on home sand.

Sanya, China,

IFSC Climbing World Cup 29 – 30.10.10 The world’s premier climbers, including David Lama and Angie Eiter, take each other on in lead and speed disciplines.

Huaiji, China

Formula BMW Pacific 29 – 31.10.10 The 15-race series nurtures young driving talent from all corners of the globe, including Carlos Sainz Jnr, son of the Spanish rally legend.

Okayama International Circuit, Japan

US Endurocross Championship 30.10.10 Polish KTM rider and last years’ champion, Taddy Blazusiak, rides into Denver safe in the knowledge that he’s unbeaten in 2010 and, with only the Las Vegas final to come, that means he’s almost home and dry.

Colorado, USA

MotoGP Grande premio de Portugal 31.10.10 At the penultimate race of 2010, Spain’s Dani Pedrosa hopes to continue the form that has made him a firm title contender.

Estoril, Portugal

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more body & mind Noah Tepperberg The well-known impresario of New York has added a new club to his portfolio, and Avenue is already drawing in the chicest New York City crowds, see page 96.

New York City, USA

night spots We source the best parties and festivals the world over Mark Ronson 03.10.10

Dis-patch Festival 07 – 17.10.10

Many thought the cover-version king wouldn’t be able to top his 2007 triple platinum-selling album Version, but he’s back with a new album and UK tour to give it a damn good try.

Recorded under the name Mark Ronson & The Business Intl, his third album, Record Collection, has already brought him a top-10 hit. Looks like he’s back with a ‘Bang Bang Bang’.

O2 Academy, Leeds, England

Cutting-edge music meets modern art and photography at the ninth edition of this forward-thinking festival, this year given the tagline ROCKET NUMBER 9! Austria’s Dorian Concept joins an eclectic mix of talent including French horror synth outfit Zombie Zombie and German producer Atom TM. Various locations, Belgrade, Serbia

Photography: Getty Images (1), Yev Kazannik (2), www.hiveclub.ch (1)

Run Vie Festival 05 – 10.10.10

Plastician 08.10.10

The festival celebrating all things hip-hop returns for a second time to showcase a mix of eight national and 25 international artists, with graphic and street art exhibitions, and an eclectic soundtrack courtesy of top talents including DJ Buzz and Dorian Concept, all housed in a range of different and unexpected locations.

Various venues, Vienna, Austria

Dublin club night Hertz-U has hosted bass music heavyweights such as Andy C, Fabio and DJ Storm since it began in 2009, so now, quite rightly, its first birthday is being celebrated in style.

Top-class dubstepper Plastician is in town to take to the stage alongside producer-of-the-moment S.P.Y to ensure it’s a night that lives up to the name.

The Twisted Pepper, Dublin, Ireland

Red Bull Thre3style national finals 06 – 22.10.10

Rocking The Daisies Festival 08 – 10.10.10

Qualifiers for this test of DJ versatility take place throughout France, Spain and Switzerland, with seven events scheduled. Contenders have 15 minutes to seamlessly play three different styles of music, with the best going through to the international finals in Paris in December.

6.10: Madrid, Spain 7.10: Barcelona, Spain 8.10: Bern, Switzerland 9.10: Lille, France 9.10: Lausanne,Switzerland 14.10: Barcelona, Spain 15.10: Paris, France 16.10: Bordeaux, France 22.10: Lyon, France

For the fifth year running, the green-minded musical gathering (their motto is Play Hard, Tread Lightly) invites a whole host of local and international talent and thousands of party lovers to rock the picturesque Cloof Wine Estate in the Darling region, north of Cape Town for a music-filled three days.

Acts including New Young Pony Club join a packed line-up. Killer Robot, Haezer, Nastie Ed and Selekta Soul, and Spekta will all be showing off their skills on The Red Bull Studio Live stage.

Cloof Wine Estate, Darling, South Africa

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ISA GT Tourists are no longer scared to visit Medellin, and with good reason: music, dance and a vibrant street life abound. DJ Isa GT shows us her city on page 95.

Medellín, Columbia

more body & mind HIVE It’s a hive somewhere between techno and house: this is the club which gets the city of Zurich dancing.

Read more on page 94.

Zurich, Switzerland

Austin City Limits Festival 8 – 10.10.10 Thousands party in the name of parkland, raising money for Austin’s green spaces courtesy of a stellar line-up including The Eagles, Muse, M.I.A., The Flaming Lips, LCD Soundsystem, Deadmau5, The XX and many more.

Zilker Park, Austin, USA

Sassy J meets TY 09.10.10 London hip-hop innovator TY takes the MC skills that have won him mic time alongside De La Soul and Talib Kweili to Bern, to guest at Patchwork, club night of Red Bull Music Academy alumni Sassy J, to perform with a full live band.

Dachstock Reithalle, Bern, Switzerland

felabration 11 – 18.10.10 Afrobeat was a ’70s protest movement against colonialism and Nigeria’s dictatorial military regime, and now Fela Kuti, the initiator of this sweaty blend of American funk rhythms and African percussion, is being remembered in his hometown. Red Bull Music Academy presents Kings To Many People is a bridge between the musical past and future, featuring performances from Kuti’s former drummer Tony Allen and younger fans – deep-house icon Theo Parrish and the hip-hop master Madlib.

Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria

Doomsday 13.10.10 Fans of car park carnage look no further: everyone’s favourite underground party project is back with a fittingly stellar line-up, including DOOM, Hudson Mohawke, Jamie xx and Illum:Sphere.

The Warehouse Project, Manchester, England

Iceland Airwaves 13 – 17.10.10

The Very Best Stop Making Sense is more beach party than festival, and The Very Best add their Afro-Euro dance music for a summer vibe. See page 92.

Petrcane, Croatia

Since 1999, the festival has been offering music fans the chance to see ‘the next big thing’ against a backdrop of stunning natural beauty. This year Bombay Bicycle Club, Hercules and Love Affair and Bang Gang are on the bill.

Various venues, Reykjavik, Iceland

Switch 14.10.10 There isn’t much this UK music man can’t do. The DJ, songwriter, record producer, label owner and sound engineer has been keeping dancefloors busy with his brand of fidget house for years. He is also half the team behind animated renegade Major Lazer, alongside DJ Diplo, who he met through M.I.A. He has produced tracks for Santigold and Christina Aguilera, and as a remixer can count The Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx and P Diddy among his clients. It’s amazing he’s found time to make it to Seattle. seesoundlounge, Seattle, USA

Four Tet 14.10.10 The purveyor of ‘folktronica’ also brings in jazz, hip-hop and anything else he has lying around to make up his improvisational sounds. And when not performing his own material, the Londoner, real name Keiran Hebden, can be found remixing for the likes of Bloc Party, Badly Drawn Boy, Radiohead and Beth Orton.

Metro, Chicago, USA

Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry 15.10.10 The veteran reggae and dub producer is a legend in his home country of Jamaica and beyond, having been a pioneer of both genres, with a career spanning decades. He’s worked with and influenced an eclectic range of musical heavyweights over the years including Bob Marley and The Wailers, The Heptones, the Beastie Boys and Moby. He is almost as well known for his, er, eccentric character, which makes watching him live an unpredictable undertaking.

The Plug, Sheffield, England

Japan Fashion Week 15 – 24.10.10 Since 2005, Tokyo has hosted two annual fashion week events showcasing the best creative talent the nation has to offer.

Now in the land of the rising sun, all eyes are on what’s hot for when spring and summer come around, courtesy of designers including Naoshi Sawayanagi and Shida Tatsuya.

Midtown Hall, Tokyo, Japan

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THE VERY BEST PETRCANE Green Room

Croatian Kitsch Florian Obkircher discovers a festival halfway between the romance of Robinson Crusoe and the camp of Barbarella. The perfect venue for London’s hippest Afro-European dance music act, The Very Best Johan Karlberg and Esau Mwamwaya are slouched on cushioned sun-loungers.

A glorious sunset is shaping up on the horizon. The sea roars before them, while muffled bass sounds emanate from the small pine forest behind. Cardboard signs with ‘Massage’ writ large in marker pen are propped up against both loungers. On this warm September evening, it’s a service both musicians would happily avail themselves of. But a masseur is nowhere to be seen.

“We got to Petrcane yesterday,” Mwamwaya says with a blink and a shrug. “Last night we went straight to the festival warm-up party.

It was wonderful. We danced ’til 3am.”

For Mwamwaya’s band to be entertained rather than do the entertaining has been a rarity this summer. The Very Best have played more than 20 gigs at festivals around Europe in recent weeks and this one at Stop Making Sense will be the last for a while. You could hardly imagine a more idyllic end to 92

summer. This three-day beach party takes place on a headland the size of a football pitch near Petrcane in southern Croatia.

It’s normally a favourite holiday spot for the elderly and families, but this weekend, young Brits have descended and occupied the Barbarella beach club. The place lives up to its name: circular dancefloors, orange and brown wallpaper and lava lamps meet ramshackle little bamboo huts in among the pine trees. The DJs’ console, right by the sea, is covered in palm leaves.

It’s somewhere between the romance of Robinson Crusoe and dated ’60s ‘modern’ – a place that will play host to electronic acts such as Carl Craig, Theo Parrish, Optimo, Friendly Fires and The Very Best for the next three nights.

The Very Best is a band made up of Mwamwaya and London DJ duo Radioclit: Karlberg, from Sweden, and Etienne Tron, originally from France. “Esau had a small

furniture store in East London five years ago.

And it was on the same street as the Radioclit recording studio,” Karlberg explains. “One day Etienne went in to buy a bike for his girlfriend. He and Esau hit it off so we invited him to the studio.” The exiled Malawian was originally only meant to play percussion on a single Radioclit track, but it was Mwamwaya’s voice that eventually led to them forming a band. The trio have been The Very Best ever since, an international trio who’ve taken the hippy angle out of World Music and have married elements of African pop with digital beats. Like M.I.A. and Vampire Weekend, both of whom sang on their 2009 debut album, Warm Heart of Africa.

Mwamwaya stands up to look for the masseur. “We came to Croatia as Radioclit once,” Karlberg explains in the meantime, “and were promptly arrested. We flew into Slovenia that time and wanted to drive to Zagreb. But we only made it as far as the border and then we were locked up because of a bit of weed that Etienne had in his bag.

They were threatening Etienne with prison, saying he was going to have to go to court.

We were at our wits’ end. But thankfully they let us go after six hours.”

There have been no such incidents this time, Karlberg explains with a grin before making his way with Mwamwaya to the stage on the beach. Etienne Tron is already at the DJ console. Though they might both

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Treasure Island Music Festival 16 -17.10.10 Festivalgoers with a green conscience fear not, organisers offer a zero-emission shuttle bus to the festival grounds. And it’s just as well they do, as parking on the idyllic island in the San Francisco bay is strictly limited.

The line-up contrasts between indie rock (Belle and Sebastian, The National), punk funk (LCD Soundsystem) and there are some club sounds too (Deadmau5).

Treasure Island, San Francisco, USA

Red Bull Checkmate 16.10.10

Photography: Yev Kazannik

Heat wave: DJ Etienne Tron (in white T-shirt) heads down to mix with the crowds dancing to The Very Best, he had DJ’d during the afternoon with Radioclit at the beach stage

be tense, at least they haven’t got the Croatian police breathing down their necks.

“We share the work. Etienne will do the Radioclit numbers and I’ll do The Very Best’s,” Karlberg explains, surrounded by people dancing in bikinis and swimming trunks at the DJ console decked out like a Tiki bar.

Tron’s mix of African highlife guitar, tropical house beats and Balearic disco sounds is the perfect backdrop to the sunset.

While Mwamwaya pops back to the hotel to change his T-shirt, Karlberg sits at the bar and orders a beer. There’s no backstage area at the Stop Making Sense Festival and the security staff are incredibly laidback, which explains why Karlberg is soon surrounded by London friends and fans wanting to know more about the band.

“Esau and I worked on our new album at my place in Sweden over the summer. It should be out in the spring,” he explains. “But first we’re going on a long tour of the US with Vampire Weekend in two weeks’ time.”

No sooner is the beer finished than Mwamwaya and Karlberg enter the main stage. Mwamwaya grabs the microphone, Karlberg gets busy with his laptop and synthesiser. The Very Best are complemented live by two female dancers and British MC Molaudi Lauds. Hands are in the air as they play their first song, ‘Chalo’. The optimism and exuberance of the band’s music immediately captivate the crowd. The

songs, based on well-known Michael Jackson, M.I.A. and Architecture In Helsinki samples, do the rest. Some festivalgoers are splashing about in the small, round paddling pool on the edge of the dancefloor; it looks like they’ve taken MC Molaudi’s words, “Wanna lose your shit,” a little too literally. During the last song, ‘Warm Heart of Africa’ Mwamwaya invites the crowd onto the stage for a grand finale: a sea of people dancing euphorically with the singer like a preacher setting the tone. “The show was tough but great,” he says after the concert, still breathless. “Tomorrow I’m really going to need a good massage.”

The Very Best’s album, The Very Best Remixes Of The Very Best (Moshi Moshi) came out in August. www.myspace.com/theverybestmyspace

What do breaking and chess have in common? You wouldn’t think much at first glance. But that will change this month with a new B-Boy competition inspired by the game of chess. Eight international B-Boy crews battle for the first Red Bull Checkmate title.

Odeon Theatre, Vienna, Austria

Unsound Festival 17 – 24.10.10 After a trip to New York in February, the renowned music festival returns home in order to unite electronic sounds old and new. Prominent participants include Italian horror master Goblin, Detroit-House newcomer Kyle Hall and Polish techno veteran Jacek Sienkiewicz.

Kraków, Poland

Amsterdam Dance Event 20 – 23.10.10 In 1996 there was a mini music conference with 30 DJs. Now, 14 years later, this is the most important melting pot for electronic music in Europe, with 90,000 visitors, 44 venues and more than 700 DJs, from Kevin Saunderson to Tensnake to Flying Lotus. For a touch of glamour, there are the International Golden Gnome Awards.

Various locations, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Elevate Festival 21 – 26.10.10

L-r: MC Molaudi, Karlberg and Mwamwaya, with female friends

Glasgow newcomer Jack Masters said after his guest performance here last year, “This is the coolest location I’ve ever played at!” It’s fair to say the cathedral in the mountain, a giant bunker in Graz, alone justifies the price of a ticket.

Among the exciting line-up of electro talent are Pursuit Grooves and Electro Guzzi.

Schlossberg, Graz, Austria

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FABRICLIVE 22.10.10 A night with British reggae and dancehall DJ David Rodigan is never a bad thing, especially when he is joined by Portuguese roots DJ and Buraka Som Sistema member J-Wow featuring poet and MC Kalaf.

Shy FX and grime star Toddla T also squeeze into Room one, while D&B royalty Adam F and Dillinja keep the bass heavy in Room two.

Fabric, London, England

Red Bull Street Kings 23.10.10 The Claiborne Overpass was built in the 1950s, and it’s unique acoustics have attracted brass bands to play under it ever since. This month, four of New Orleans’ best brass bands meet for a day of friendly rivalry.

Clairborne Overpass, New Orleans, USA

Reggae fanatics and chill-out fans meet to listen to eight hours of New Zealand’s dub acts, including some of the best in the country: Black Seeds, DJ Staylo and Ddub.

Mystery Creek Events Centre, Hamilton, New Zealand

Movement Festival 28 – 31.10.10 The legendary Detroit techno festival is popping over to Italy for a change, bringing a whole host of sounds courtesy of Motor City hero Derrick May, Anthony Shakir and Kyle Hall, while MCDE, Dixon and Ellen Allien represent for Europe.

PalaOlimpico, Turin, Italy

Shift Festival 28 – 31.10.10 Swiss electronic music pioneer Bruno Spoerri is special guest.

Since the ’60s he has been at the forefront of media technology, composing and performing music, advertising clips and film scores.

Today his music is courtesy of Andy Votel’s Finders Keepers label, and other guests like Dorian Concept are getting in on the action.

Basel, Switzerland

Salzburg Jazz Festival 28.10 – 07.11.10 The cool alternative to festival madness – jazz musicians from around the world take part, such as the Terrance Blanchard Quintet and Roy Hargrove. Free-admission cinema screenings of the series Jazz in the Movies pay tribute to jazz legends.

Various locations, Salzburg, Austria

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World’s Best Clubs

All Abuzz From hunting lodge to designer space, Zurich’s top club is inspired, says Florian Obkircher A beehive is made of honeycombs and teems with bees crawling from one cell to another. Not all that different, actually, from a club, says Anatol Gschwind. Which is why his is also called the Hive, a project Gschwind opened almost five years ago with three friends. “At first, we used to call the three rooms honeycombs because they’re open plan and guests can pop in and out of them in a number of places,” he says.

The two-storey complex in the flourishing industrial district of Zurich-West already has quite an eventful history as a night-spot.

The first illegal raves were held here in the ’90s and after that it became a hip-hop club. At one point, the former machine factory even hosted a dance hall. And that’s how it is again now. “Although we did a lot of reconstruction, we wanted to leave the charming dance hall as close to its original state as possible, with the mirrors on the wall and the large windows,” says Gschwind.

It’s where the parties now relocate to when morning beckons. While huge techno and electro DJs like Paul Kalkbrenner, Busy P and Ellen Allien and bands such as London’s New Young Pony Club and Denmark’s WhoMadeWho, play on the large main floor, at 4am the party crowd start streaming upstairs to greet the sun under a disco

ball. The third honeycomb is called the Atelier. Gschwind describes it as a haven on the first floor, with comfortable sofas, great cocktails and an ever-changing look.

“The décor changes almost every month.

Sometimes the Atelier looks like a hunting lodge with green wallpaper, stuffed animals and old cartwheels. Then a few weeks later it might be a hyper-modern designer space,” he says. It’s constantly on the move, trying something new. Atelier gets what Gschwind calls the ‘smallest-big-club-in-Zurich’ concept across particularly well.

The club has recently launched its own vinyl dance label – Hive Audio – and Gschwind explains that the forecourt has been turned into a “…surreal urban garden landscape”. And why not, especially if the Hive wants to hang onto its reputation as the city’s most innovative club? It seems that the hundreds who swarm to its honeycombs every weekend are grateful for it.

Hive club, Geroldstrasse 5, 8005 Zurich, Switzerland www.hiveclub.ch

Buzzing: The only constant is change, and the crowd seem fine with that

credit Photography: www.hiveclub.ch

Shiverdown Festival 23.10.10

hive zUrich

Photography: Yev Kazannik (1), Getty Images (2). Illustration: Mandy Fischer

DJ and producer Isa GT transforms traditional Cumbia music for the 21st century. The Colombian takes us on a foray into the black markets and late nights of her home town “Papaya puesta, papaya partida”: a Colombian saying you should commit to memory before visiting Medellín. It means, “If papaya’s on offer, we’ll eat it.” Or, in other words, if you’re going downtown, you’re better off leaving your jewellery at home. And don’t be surprised if you lose it if you don’t.

But you shouldn’t be afraid either; my home city’s not nearly as dangerous as it once was. Ten years ago, nobody wanted to come to Medellín because they were afraid they’d be kidnapped. That’s when I got myself a second home in London. But for a while now I’ve noticed that the longer I stay, the safer and more international the city is becoming, thanks to burgeoning tourism.

The best thing about Medellín is the ubiquitous love of music that you find on every street corner. Cumbia is a music genre that was born in Colombia and has just been rediscovered by my generation. It’s also had new life breathed into it with electronic beats. There’s salsa, which you can carouse to every night at El Tíbiri (2). Or tango. It’s particularly popular in Medellín because Carlos Gardel [the legendary Argentinian tango crooner] died here. The Casa Gardeliana, a museum and bar with Gardel memorabilia on Carrera 45, was opened in his honour. But you’ll find tango trios on every street corner. Music is usually played outdoors here. The club scene is really snobby, but I can recommend El Cuchitril (1), a small place where I often perform and that lives up to its name (it means the dive) in the most charming way possible.

Lots of Medellín streets shut down at weekends. People play football, cook sancocho – a soup made with sweetcorn, potatoes and plantain – in huge pots, and play music. It might be vallenato, merengue or salsa… Or they go to the park in El

Isa GT made her name with a new take on traditional music

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34 The Gardeliana Museum (top); the best city views are from Las Palmas

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1 El Cuchitril, Detrás de la Virgen 2 El Tibiri, Carrera 70/Calle 44 3 Mondongo’s, Carretera 70 N C3-43 4 Bar Los Saldarriaga, El Poblado Park 5 El Hueco, Carrera 53/Ayacucho

1. El Cuchitril 2. El Tibiri 3. Mondongo’s 4. Bar Los Saldarr 5. El Hueco

Poblado. It’s nothing special, just a big square with trees. But it’s where youngsters in Medellín get together at night. In one corner there’s a bar called Los Saldarriaga (4), named after the family that lives in the house it’s in. They just used to sell cans of beer out the window, but now you can hang out on the terrace till the early hours.

On the way home, we go for a snack at one of the food stalls in El Poblado park: a hot dog. But this is a Colombian hot dog with crisps and pineapple. Colombians love sweet and sour. Another traditional dish I love is mondongo and the best is served at a restaurant of the same name (3). It’s a meat soup with coriander and lots of vegetables.

You get the best view of Medellín from a viewing platform in Las Palmas on a hill in the south of the city. It’s wonderful, especially at sunset. You look at the

mountains all around you and the valley in among them with the city at your feet. It’s where the video for my song ‘Pela’o’ was shot.

I make a lot of the clothes I wear for my gigs myself. When I studied fashion in Medellín, I spent a lot of time at El Hueco (5) [the hollow]. It’s a huge street market where I used to buy materials. San Andresito is another market, where fake brands are smuggled to the mainland.

There’ll always be dodgy businesses.

I’m amazed at the showy cars and flashy shopping centres downtown. There’s a mall on Avenida El Poblado, the most expensive real estate in the city, which is a building site because the Mafioso who wanted it built ended up in prison. But no one dares demolish the building site. That’s Medellín for you.

Isa GT: Pa´Chikirri (Man Recordings); currently touring Europe with the Girlcore DJ collective

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The bar at Avenue

Master of his domain: Noah Tepperberg’s Marquee Club is one of the most exclusive in Manhattan

In Profile

The Maven of Manhattan

NOAh Tepperberg NEW YORK

Siobhan O’Connor sneaks past the velvet rope at New York’s Avenue to catch up with the chess player, NYC native and nightlife impresario It’s 12.30 in the morning on a Thursday and the doorman outside the hottest club in New York is smiling. That’s not to say the people on the wrong side of the velvet rope are getting in, but it’s a nice gesture – which shouldn’t be mistaken for encouraging.

Thursday is the night at Avenue, and the door is tight. It’s that way by design.

“Exclusivity is part of the goal,” says Noah Tepperberg, the businessman and nightlife impresario behind the Chelsea night box. After making a name for himself 96

with New York’s Marquee club and Lavo, at The Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas, Tepperberg opened Avenue last year. It was popular even before the doors opened and has remained so – no small feat in New York’s fickle nightlife scene. Part of the reason is keeping the mystique alive. “The clientele we attract appreciate the place more and tend to have more fun when they know they are somewhere not everyone can go to.”

That’s probably true, and if the crowd tonight is any indication, Tepperberg is

onto something. Past the rope, lanky, leggy brunettes drip off white leather ottomans, well-dressed guys in blue shirts cup glasses of whisky, and the runway rug to the bar at the back is packed (but not too packed) with attractive 20- and 30-somethings. The bottles-and-models crowd is dancing to Top 10 hip-hop hits past and present. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the room was old enough to have been at a club the first time J-Kwon’s ‘Tipsy’ was in rotation, but tonight, everyone knows the words. Above them, sculptural

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Photography: Jacqueline Di Milia (1), Matthew Salacuse (1), Corbis (2), Rex Features (1)

Lavo at the Las Vegas Palazzo Hotel (top) ; Kid Cudi (above) is a true crowd pleaser at the club

Avenue (centre) and Tepperberg’s second stylish New York club, Marquee (above)

chandeliers cast a yellowish, forgiving glow, four-storey-high ceilings, wood everything, and the music is loud (but not too loud). The details are just right thanks in large part to Tepperberg, who at just 35, already has 20 years’ experience indulging the in crowd.

The native New Yorker and a friend began by throwing parties for friends in high school. Even then, there was an air of exclusivity about it – he would hand-pick guests for club nights, pack parties with his socialite friends, and often had his own guy working the door to make sure his invitees got in hassle-free. “This experience gave me a great eye for design and style,” he says.

All those years of research (and partying) culminated with Avenue, which Tepperberg calls “a quintessential NY lounge”.

Tepperberg treats nightclub ownership the same way he would any business venture – and he has a few of those. In addition to his various restaurant and nightlife projects, he’s co-founder of a marketing outfit called Strategic Group, which since 2001 has thrown events and promotions for swishy brands like Mercedes-Benz and Coca-Cola.

As his company name might suggest, Tepperberg calculates every move. He grew up playing chess competitively, and still tries to get in a game every few weeks. “Chess is my one true hobby,” he says. But from the sounds of it, he doesn’t have an awful lot of time for hobbies. He works all day, and spends six nights a week “minimum” in restaurants, hotels, clubs, and bars. It sounds fun, but as much as Tepperberg loves going out, it’s all part of the job. “This is why I do what I do, and do it well,” he says.

“There is no such thing as off-duty Noah,” he says. “I am always working.”

That might explain how he’s able to have so many balls in the air at one time.

And as if he didn’t have enough on the go, Tepperberg opened a sister location to his Vegas resto-club in September and later in the year, will launch Artichoke Basille’s Pizza & Bar, right next door to Avenue. “We are also working on a new 63,000sq ft nightclub and pool that will open in the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas on New Years,” he says.

All his ventures get the same attention to detail—a formula that hasn’t changed all that much from his teenage years at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.

Now, he says, the scale is obviously different, but the principles of a good party remain. “My motto on parties is the same: it’s all about the details and the guest experience starts at the rope.”

If Avenue is any indication, he’s got that part down pat.

Avenue, 116 10th Street, New York, New York, 10011; www.avenue-newyork.com

Red Bull Soundclash 29.10.10 It may not be at high noon, but in Antwerp two bands are taking part in a musical duel.

A DJ plays referee and, after four challenging rounds, the crowd will decide who lives to play another day.

Petrol Club, Antwerp, Belgium

The Turnaround 29.10.10 Legendary New Zealand DJs Submariner, Cian and Manuel Bundy have rocked the clubs in their hometown of Auckland for eight years. Always on the last Friday of the month, and always under the title The Turnaround.

Whether it be hip-hop tracks, Brazilian ballads or reggae classics, the trio stays true to its philosophy: constantly turnaround your musical direction or life can get dull.

Bacco Room, Auckland, New Zealand

Electric Wonderland 30.10.10 Instead of Alice or the Cheshire Cat, this wonderland contains trapeze artists and acrobats to amaze the ravers. Pounding house beats come courtesy of DJs such as ATB, Lexy & K-Paul, Sidney Samson and The Disco Boys do the rest to help the 7,500 dance lovers find their way in.

Kongresshalle, Schwerin, Germany

Red Bull Mapa De Los Muertos 30.10.10 A programme of music and art events had been put together for the Dia de los Muertos – the Mexican counterpart to festival of Halloween. As is traditional, there will be celebration instead of mourning as revellers are treated to a series of special sights and sounds taking place all over their city.

Phoenix and Los Angeles, USA

Hard Haunted Mansion 30 – 31.10.10 Bloody Beetroots, Mr Oizo, Busy P, Brodinski, Rusko and more top electronic acts come together for one evening of terrifyingly good music, for a truly hard Halloween. Good thing the Red Bull Music Academy is there with recording equipment, should anything go bump in the night.

The Shrine Expo Hall, Los Angeles, USA

97

E

ver since the internet entered ordinary people’s lives in the early 1990s, pundits have been predicting the demise of television. Try Googling ‘television is dead’ and you’ll see how the last rites have been read repeatedly over the years.

But if television is really dying, it’s taking its sweet time to pass away.

The independent British media regulator Ofcom recently published its yearly Communications Market Report, which found that Britons now spend around 45 per cent of their daily leisure time watching television. Viewing of TV as it is broadcast in the evenings remains stable, while the use of digital video recorders grows, and nearly a third of households are watching catch-up TV programming via the internet.

At the same time, the sending of texts via mobiles has quadrupled since 2004, total British internet traffic increased by 69 per cent in 2009, the average person is said to now spend a quarter of their time on social networking sites, the number of radio listeners has increased… even old-fashioned phone calls were up 1.6 per cent. All this in the midst of the worst recession the country has seen in decades.

The average Briton now consumes eight hours and 45 minutes of electronic media daily – and he or she does it in seven hours. Say what? Yes, really.

Welcome to the age of media multitasking.

The youngest group in the Ofcom survey – those aged 16-24 – crammed nineand-a-half hours of media use into an average of six-and-a-half hours daily by, for example, using a laptop or mobile device while watching TV. The picture was much the same in an American study of media use by eight-18 year olds published earlier this year. On average, in 2009, subjects spent more than seven and a half hours a day consuming media – an increase of more than an hour since a similar study was conducted in 1999. But total media exposure rose in those 10 years from

Mind’s Eye

Outside the Box Russell Brown finds, with more than 24 hours in day, TV’s reach is growing seven and a half hours to 10 hours and 45 minutes. Nearly a third of the subjects’ media consumption was multitasking.

Broadcast television viewing didn’t fall away in the face of an array of distractions – computers, game consoles, mobile phones, portable music players, and so on – it increased.

This does not, of course, say anything about the creative vitality of television programming. You may argue, rightly or wrongly, that TV is sick. All those facts and figures don’t say whether we’re becoming better citizens. But the picture is clear: when it comes to electronic media, we’re all doing more of nearly everything.

My own media consumption (which is already ridiculous, but I have an excuse: I’m a pundit) recently took another jump when I got myself an iPad. Apple’s highly touted device has many shortcomings, but, especially if it’s on a 3G mobile connection, it makes media snacking instant, anywhere. It takes

seconds for the iPad to wake up, or for individual apps to launch.

Magazines, a media sector that has struggled to adapt to the web, seem far more at home on the iPad, where page layouts and rich display advertising fit better than they do in a browser.

And one app in particular, Flipboard, is erasing the distinctions between media forms. Flipboard takes my social media, Facebook and Twitter, and literally compiles their contents into a magazine whose virtual pages I can ‘turn’ with a flick of my fingers.

Apps have been creeping into TV sets themselves over the past year – it’s not unusual for new sets in the US to ship with support for YouTube and the video rental company Netflix, both of which were born on the web – but a bigger shift has likely just been set in motion. Although the new Apple TV device is focused mainly on movies and music, this slim box (running the same operating system as the iPhone and iPad) is capable of delivering games, interactive news apps, video-on-demand and other services that will no doubt be available soon. Google, which announced its Google TV platform earlier in the year, is working on a similar system.

Both companies are working with TV channels and networks to deliver programmes. Meanwhile, the US pay-TV industry has just reported its first-ever decline in subscriber numbers.

How all this will change things in New Zealand is an open question. I’ve spoken to senior TV executives here, who insist that the numbers will never be right for big content providers to bypass them and deliver directly to New Zealanders. But it seems certain that we’ll all have even more media at our fingertips. And the evidence suggests that we’ll make the time to devour as much as we possibly can – and then more.

Russell Brown is a media commentator and blogger and lives in Auckland

New Zealand, ISSN 2079-4274: The Red Bulletin is published by Red Bulletin GMBH Editor-In-Chief Robert Sperl Editorial Office Anthony Rowlinson (Executive Editor), Stefan Wagner Associate Editor Paul Wilson Contributing Editor Andreas Tzortzis Chief Sub-editor Nancy James Production Editor Grant Smyth Photo Editors Susie Forman (Chief), Fritz Schuster Deputy Photo Editors Markus Kucera, Valerie Rosenburg, Catherine Shaw Design Erik Turek (Art Director), Miles English, Judit Fortelny, Markus Kietreiber, Esther Straganz Staff Writers Werner Jessner, Uschi Korda, Ruth Morgan Contributors Russell Brown, Alexander Lisetz, Eleanor Morgan, Florian Obkircher, Siobhan O’Connor, Olivia Rosen, Werner Schneyder, Thomas Schrefl, Robert Tighe, Herbert Völker Production Managers Michael Bergmeister, Wolfgang Stecher, Walter Omar Sádaba Repro Managers Christian Graf-Simpson, Clemens Ragotzky Augmented Reality Christoph Rietner, Martin Herz, www.imagination.at General Managers Karl Abentheuer, Rudolf Theierl International Project Management Jan Cremer, Bernd Fisa Finance Siegmar Hofstetter. The Red Bulletin is published simultaneously in Austria, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Poland, South Africa and New Zealand. Website www.redbulletin.com. UK office: 155-171 Tooley Street, London SE1 2JP, +44 (0)20 3117 2100. Austrian office: Heinrich-Collin-Strasse 1, A-1140 Vienna, +43 1 90221 28800.

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The next issue of the Red Bulletin is out on November 2, 2010

Illustration: Albert Exergian

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