The pop-up shop phenomenon

by Damian Barr

December 28, 2008

The Sunday Times (of London)

Pop-ups are the epitome of our high-speed, short-attention-span culture. They are restaurants, bars, clubs and shops that spring up in unexpected locations, cause a storm, and disappear just before the fashion crowd moves on to the next big thing. Comme des Garçons started the trend in 2004 with its guerrilla stores. Now London is totally pop-up-tastic. Following the success of the Reindeer restaurant, the Bistrotheque boys have now decamped (actually and aesthetically) from Bethnal Green to Burlington Gardens. Flash, their grown-up restaurant in the Royal Academy, will be over in just that. Tyler Brûlé has turned shopgirl in his design-led roving microstore for Monocle magazine. Blink and you’d have missed Mary Portas’s hyper-pop-up: open for just one hour to sell vintage clothes in Bishopsgate earlier this month. Then there’s the Foundry, flogging quirky homewares in different spaces around the capital; Atelier Moët on Bond Street, where you can customise champagne bottles (although its last day is today); and the Proud Gallery, which started off as merely a marquee over a car park.

It’s a perfect concept for our hype-heavy society. Nowhere can be the hottest place to be seen in for more than six months, so by pulling it down and starting again, businesses can be constantly reinvented. Because they are temporary, pop-ups can take risks. They don’t need as much polish, so they don’t need as much investment — perfect for recessionistas. And the latest and most daring is the Double Club.

Created by Carsten Höller — the artist who put the giant slides in Tate Modern — and produced by Fondazione Prada, it’s the first pop-up to boast a bar, restaurant and nightclub. It’s in a converted Victorian warehouse down a dodgy alley behind Angel Tube station — for six months only. Gareth Pugh and Jefferson Hack have already done DJ sets, and Zaha Hadid, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and Nicholas Serota have also found it — there’s no sign outside, but cashmere-clad security guards give it away.

The Double Club — as you might guess — is a dichotomy between two cultures: the West and the Congo. Yes, the Congo. The very heart of darkness. “It’s not a clash,” Höller says. “It’s a juxtaposing.” With the emphasis on posing. The single-level space is split into three areas, thematically divided.

“It’s like a Rothko painting,” he says. “Two fields of colour, contrasting but complementary. The West and the Congo have had terrible interaction for a long time. We’re bringing people together temporarily, using music, food and art. It’s very positive.” Profits from this venture go to the City of Joy charity, helping rape victims in the Congo.

“Kinshasa is amazing,” says Mourad Mazouz, of Sketch and Momo, who runs the bar and restaurant. “Yes, it can be dangerous, but so can London. It’s a risk.” But with the Double Club, the risk is paying off. It’s familiar but foreign — like you’ve somehow wandered into the coolest bar in the Congolese capital.

“It’s about interaction,” Höller says. “If you want to be all arty, you can. Or you can just have a night out.” Among the clientele are men in serious Saatchi-esque specs and women wearing barbaric jewellery, plus Versace-clad members of the Congolese Society of Buzz-Makers and Elegant People. “It’s a living installation,” says Mazouz.

One whole wall of the bar is a tiled mural of a futuristic flying city. Opposite is a colourful, billboard-style painting by Chéri Samba. The corrugated-iron Congolese side of the bar contrasts with the slick, copper West. Sadly, Congolese beer isn’t always available. “Problems back home, you know,” the barman sighs.

In the restaurant, Helford oysters, line-caught red mullet and partridge represent the West; fried plantains, giant spicy shrimps and lightly spiced goat stew top the Congolese choices.

“We built it all from scratch,” says Mazouz, tapping a temporary wall. The menu changes fortnightly. When it all stops in May, the moveable art returns to its donors. Structural features, such as the mural, will stay. The Double Club will be part of pop-up history.

“It’s neither a very long exhibition or a very short-term restaurant,” says Höller. “It’s both.” thedoubleclub.co.uk

TOP OF THE POP-UPS

Flash keeps tables back each night for walk-in hopefuls. Open until January 19; bookflashnow.com. Flash teapot, £68.51, wedgwood.com

The Foundry is presently in Covent Garden Piazza. Limited editions include the Wire Light, £145. Catch it while you can — the store moves every few months; foundryonline.co.uk

The Monocle Shop is filled with high design, such as Drakes scarves, £95 each, all sourced by its founder, Tyler Brûlé; monocle.com

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Diplomats Noted Canadian Mistrust Toward U.S.

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

New York Times, Dec. 2, 2010

WASHINGTON — In early 2008, American diplomats stationed in Ottawa turned on their television sets and were aghast: there was an “onslaught” of Canadian shows depicting “nefarious American officials carrying out equally nefarious deeds in Canada ,” from planning to bomb Quebec to stealing Canadian water supplies.

In a confidential diplomatic cable sent back to the State Department, the American Embassy warned of increasing mistrust of the United States by its northern neighbor, with which it shares some $500 billion in annual trade, the world’s longest unsecured border and a joint military mission in Afghanistan.

“The degree of comfort with which Canadian broadcast entities, including those financed by Canadian tax dollars, twist current events to feed longstanding negative images of the U.S. — and the extent to which the Canadian public seems willing to indulge in the feast — is noteworthy as an indication of the kind of insidious negative popular stereotyping we are increasingly up against in Canada,” the cable said.

A trove of diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, disclose a perception by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’ ”

But at the same time, some Canadian officials privately tried to make it clear to their American counterparts that they did not share their society’s persistent undercurrent of anti-Americanism.

In July 2008, Canada’s intelligence service director, James Judd, discussed a video showing a crying Omar Khadr , then a teenager and a Canadian detainee at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Mr. Judd “observed that the images would no doubt trigger ‘knee-jerk anti-Americanism’ and ‘paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty.’ ”

A cable that briefed President George W. Bush before a visit to Ottawa in late 2004 shed further light on the asymmetrical relationship with Canada — a country, the embassy wrote, that was engaged in “soul-searching” about its “decline from ‘middle power’ status to that of an ‘active observer’ of global affairs, a trend which some Canadians believe should be reversed.”

It also noted that Canadian officials worried that they were being excluded from a club of English-speaking countries as a result of their refusal to take part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States had created a channel for sharing intelligence related to Iraq operations with Britain and Australia, but Canada was not invited to join.

The Canadian government “has expressed concern at multiple levels that their exclusion from a traditional ‘four-eyes’ construct is ‘punishment’ for Canada’s nonparticipation in Iraq and they fear that the Iraq-related channel may evolve into a more permanent ‘three-eyes’ only structure,” the cable said.

Four years later, after President Obama’s election, the embassy reported that Canadian officials had a different potential irritant: Mr. Obama was far more popular in Canada than they were.

The embassy also said Mr. Obama’s decision to make Ottawa his first foreign trip as president would “do much to diminish — temporarily, at least — Canada’s habitual inferiority complex vis-à-vis the U.S. and its chronic but accurate complaint that the U.S. pays far less attention to Canada than Canada does to us.”

Still, just a few months earlier, during a national election in Canada, the embassy had marveled that “despite the overwhelming importance of the U.S. to Canada for its economy and security,” parliamentary candidates were rarely mentioning anything about relations with their southern neighbor.

“Ultimately, the U.S. is like the proverbial 900-pound gorilla in the midst of the Canadian federal election: overwhelming but too potentially menacing to acknowledge,” the cable said.

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Oh Britain, We Are Not Worthy

By ALEX BEAM

International Herald Tribune, Dec. 2, 2010

LONDON — For Americans seeking to indulge their inferiority complex, this is the place to come. Where “Yanks” are concerned, the British operate in one mode only: Condescend.

To U.K. residents of a certain stripe, we Americans will always be the bumptious cousins and the amusingly unlettered colonials. The Oxford American Dictionary has mockingly chosen Sarah Palin’s “refudiate” as their “word of the year.” Ouch!

We are the people without a history. Our glorious revolution rates barely a footnote in the history of Great Britain, stretching back as it does to the emperor Hadrian and long before. In their history books, ours is “the American war,” a trifle, a foreign adventure gone awry, but not such a loss, really, when you control much of the known world.

Suppose the British are right? Perhaps we Americans are inferior? If you look around, the evidence is everywhere.

They have real football, we have a grim, brutalist facsimile. They have the royal family, we have Ms. Malaprop, Palin & brood. They have John le Carré, we have James Patterson. They have an irresponsible, megalomaniac press lord, Rupert Murdoch, who seeks to monopolize public opinion and force-feed witless TV into millions of households. Come to think of it, we have him too — and he’s Australian.

I hail from Boston, which 200 years ago was the most important city in the United States. The real Boston in Lincolnshire supposedly dates back to 654 A.D., which would be one full millennium before the incipient Americans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As for the region I live in; couldn’t we come up with anything more original than New England?

New, of course, has a slightly different meaning in the British Isles. New College, Oxford, was founded in 1379, when tribes like the Wampanoag and the Abenaki roamed the Atlantic coast of North America, blissfully unaware of the fate in store for them.

I recently discovered the Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. How pathetic. An Episcopal minister from Tarrytown, New York, launched the American Poets’ Corner in the 1980s because his favorite poet, Washington Irving(!), didn’t merit a spot in the real Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

So the equation sits in front of you: Real poets=Westminster Abbey= Chaucer, Shakespeare and so on. Cheesy American poets=grotty Amsterdam Avenue in New York=Louise Bogan, Robert Hayden, etc. Two poets are in both corners, as it were: British-born W.H. Auden, who became an American citizen, and Missouri-born T.S. Eliot, who became English.

During a recent trip to England, I sat next to a fascinating librarian whose collection included a Gutenberg Bible. Hoping to score a point for my side, I said, “We have those in America, too.” Well, there are Gutenberg Bibles in America, he responded, politely. But the one in his care was in its original binding, which is extremely rare, and is signed by the binder, which is almost unique. I expected him to add: “Yes, Mr. Gutenberg brought it here himself — a most delightful chap.”

The British dwell comfortably in their nimbus of self-satisfaction, and they die well, too. Everyone envies the erudite British obituarists who sculpt many an elegant elegy from the rich clay of their deceased countrymen. The American academic Elaine Showalter once observed that “British newspapers have excelled at the journalism of death,” and it is true. But look what they get to work with!

A few years ago, I clipped the Times (of London) obituary of Edward Craven Walker, inventor of the lava lamp and a pioneer of nudist cinema. His 1961 movie “Travelling Light” featured a woman swimming underwater to the tune of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India,” and made so much money that Walker launched his own nudist colony. Physically fit all his life, he announced that “fat fogies” need not apply.

When Lancelot Ware, the co-founder of the smart people’s fraternity Mensa — headquarters in Britain, by the way — passed away, the Guardian noted that his colleague had hoped instead to launch a movement to encourage men to wear brighter clothes.

Picture it: Super-intelligent Brits wearing scarlet, chattering Shakespeare while riffling through their Gutenberg Bibles. It is true: We are not worthy.

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Mick Without Moss

By ZOE HELLER

December 3, 2010, NYT

On the top floor of a photography studio somewhere in Chelsea, Mick Jagger is capering about to a sleepy reggae cover of “Eleanor Rigby.” The photographer has requested “mischief,” and Jagger is gamely attempting to provide some — pouting, smirking, stomping his feet and shrugging his shoulders in a style that is part hipster frug, part Rumpelstiltskin tantrum. He is wearing clumpy black Nikes, electric green and black socks and drainpipe jeans in a Prince of Wales plaid. (Earlier, when he arrived at the studio, he had on a shiny, aubergine-colored John Pearse jacket with camouflage lining, but this, sadly, has now been replaced by a rather more subdued Alexander McQueen drape coat.)

Observing solemnly from the sidelines are a tailor (here to ensure that every garment fits Jagger’s elfin body correctly); Jagger’s hairdresser (flown in from England for the occasion); and Jagger’s girlfriend, the fashion designer L’Wren Scott. Scott stands six foot four in her laceless wingtips, and she is dressed from head to toe in black. With her long, pale face and mane of almost-waist-length, blue-black hair, she radiates the slightly alarming glamour of a Brothers Grimm sorceress.

A break is called, and Jagger shakes his head as he examines the most recent set of shots on the photographer’s computer screen. He’s been opening his mouth too wide, he says: he looks as if he were “at the dentist.” His hair is giving him agita.

Jagger turned 67 this year. He has been posing for photos — an activity he readily admits he finds “really awful, really boring” — for nearly half a century now. He has a knighthood, a fortune estimated at around $310 million and an assured place in the pantheon of rock gods. But none of this seems in any danger of making him complacent. On the contrary, he is as attentive to the nuances of his hairdo as any newly minted teen idol. “Public people put a lot of energy into what people think about them,” he tells me the following day. “Everyone does. I don’t care what they say. Everyone cares about it. You always want to control your image. I mean, you obviously can’t control it 100 percent. But if you’re a famous person, you obviously have a public personality that you try . . . that you want to project.” We are sitting in the Carlyle hotel’s Royal Suite, Jagger’s regular residence when he is in New York. A grand piano sits in the corner of the cathedral-like living room. A couple of guitars — an acoustic and a Gibson electric — are leaning against the sofa. Lying on the coffee table, alongside a bottle of Bobbi Brown Hydrating Face Tonic, is a copy of the new Diaghilev biography that Jagger has just purchased.

“Everyone’s vain,” he continues. “It just depends on how vain you are on the day. Everyone’s vain when they have their photo taken.”

He is right: everyone is vain. Everyone wants to look good in a picture. Few, though, can muster Jagger’s steely commitment to achieving that end. More, perhaps, than any other rock star of his generation, Jagger has made it his business to understand and control the mechanics of his own stardom. He manifests no tempery neurosis; he pulls no celebrity sulks. He just insists, calmly, on getting things done as he wants them. “I think of him as coming from the English tradition of the actor-manager,” says Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” “If you watch him get ready to put on a show, you’ll see that there is nothing that he is not aware of, that he is not intimately involved with, from lighting and design to how the curtain is going to hit the floor. There are very few people whose production skills impress me, but he’s one of them. He’s as good a showman and a producer as there is.”

“I got a powerful sense of his mastery of every detail of every aspect of the production,” says Martin Scorsese, who collaborated with Jagger on the Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light.” “And by that, I don’t just mean the music; he also has a sharp sense of cinema.” (As the documentary attests, Jagger even gave Scorsese his thoughts on where to place the cameras.) “You can delegate things to other people,” Jagger observes, “and you have to, to a certain extent, but if you’re not behind it and getting your knowledge and input into it, it’s not going to turn out as interestingly and probably it won’t be what you would like. It’ll be disappointing.”

It is not just in creative matters that Jagger insists on his “input.” His beady oversight of the Rolling Stones’ financial affairs has, famously, helped make the band one of the richest in rock ’n’ roll history. When he is on the road, he has been known to keep a map in his dressing room, indicating the city at which the tour will go into profit. “I’ve watched very carefully what he’s done,” says Jagger’s friend and occasional collaborator Lenny Kravitz, “how he’s turned the Rolling Stones into — I hate to use this word, but, you know — the brand it is today. The way he’s turned their music into something larger and yet always stayed in control of the whole thing — it’s been a real example to me.”

The rise of illegal file sharing and the correspondingly steep worldwide decline in CD sales have made these tough times for record companies and recording artists alike. But the Rolling Stones continue to do very nicely, thank you. This is partly because what remains of the market for CDs is dominated by baby boomers — the Stones’ demographic — and partly because Jagger, together with his recently retired financial adviser, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, has been exceptionally wily about exploiting other revenue streams. “There was a window in the 120 years of the record business where performers made loads and loads of money out of records,” Jagger says. “But it was a very small window — say, 15 years between 1975 and 1990.” Touring is now the most lucrative part of the band’s business. (The Bigger Bang tour, from 2005 to 2007, raked in $558 million, making it the highest-grossing tour of all time.) The band has also been ahead of the curve in recruiting sponsors, selling song rights and flogging merchandise. “The Stones carry no Woodstockesque, antibusiness baggage,” Andy Serwer noted approvingly back in 2002 in Fortune magazine. Indeed. Their most recent merchandising innovations include a range of “as worn by” apparel, replicating garments that individual band members sported back in the ’70s. (“It’s a very nice schmatte, actually,” Jagger comments.)

Not everyone, of course, is enchanted by Jagger’s business smarts. There are those who see the Stones’ transformation into a brand as an affront to the very spirit of rock ’n’ roll, a betrayal of the lawless, piratical impulse that once made them great. Such romantics are inclined to question whether a song like “Street Fighting Man”(“Hey! Said my name is called disturbance/I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants”) can still be plausibly sung by an elderly knight who does sponsorship and licensing deals with Microsoft and Sprint. “There is at the heart of this music,” wrote the great Stones chronicler Stanley Booth in 1984, “a deep strain of mysterious insurrection and the music dies without it.”

It is not clear, though, that Jagger was ever that serious about insurrection. Others may have seen the Stones’ music as a sacred repository of anti-establishment values, but for his part, Jagger has always seemed much more interested in rock ’n’ roll as theater, as performance — as show business. He didn’t actually mean it about killing the king, any more than he meant it about being born in a crossfire hurricane. Which is perhaps why he has never evidenced much against about being cast as a sellout: you cannot expect a man to feel guilty about reneging on principles to which he was never committed in the first place.

Nonetheless, the idea of Jagger having sold out some crucial part of his former self remains a widespread and potent one. And, oddly enough, one of its most effective promoters has been Jagger’s bandmate Keith Richards, who, for decades now, has been publicly grumbling about Jagger’s conceit, bossiness, social climbing and so on. Until recently, his criticisms were understood to be consistent with an odd, fractious but fundamentally sound friendship. “Keith and Mick are, in many ways, 180 degrees opposite of each other,” says Don Was, who produced the last three Stones albums. “Part of the charm of the band has always been the tension between them. The rubber band gets pulled real taut sometimes. On the other hand, there’s this genuine bond and commonality. And in the end, I think, they both understand that together, they are much bigger than the sum of their parts.” Earlier this year, however, when Richards released his autobiography, “Life,” the hostility reached unprecedented heights. The book attacks Jagger on any number of fronts, from the quality of his voice to the size of his member (a “tiny todger”), but the gist of Richards’s message is that while he has has stayed true to his free-wheeling, subversive roots, Jagger has become increasingly pretentious and power-mad, an uptight, scheming Apollo to Richards’s reckless, groovy Dionysus: “Sometimes I think: ‘I miss my friend,’ ” he writes. “I wonder: ‘where did he go?’ ”

Marianne Faithfull once claimed that of all Jagger’s relationships, the one with Richards was “the only one that really means anything to him.” But whatever hurt he feels at being so elaborately and publicly dissed by his old pal, he has kept to himself. In the past, he has responded to Richards’s gibes with a contained and rather stately snideness. (When Richards took him to task for accepting the “paltry honor” of a knighthood, he shrugged and suggested that Richards was suffering from jealousy and acting like a child: “It’s like being given an ice cream — one gets one and they all want one.”) His comeback to the latest attacks aims for a similarly frosty dignity. “Personally,” he says, closing his eyes and pressing his hand to his chest, “I think it’s really quite tedious raking over the past. Mostly, people only do it for the money.”

Jagger has in fact, contemplated writing an autobiography of his own once or twice, but he has always ended up abandoning the idea. (“You don’t want to end up like some old footballer in a pub, talking about how he made the cross in the cup final in 1964.”) And he is content, it seems, to let Richards claim the title of lovable old rock ’n’ roll war horse. He would rather be distinguished by the renaissance breadth of his interests. He speaks excellent French. He is an ardent cricket fan. He acts. He produces movies. He reads widely in fiction and nonfiction. When asked what he has been reading lately, he leaps up to consult his Kindle and recites a long list that includes the stories of Alan Furst and Olen Steinhauer, “Churchill’s Empire” by Richard Toye and “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen. (“It’s not really my kind of thing, but everyone was talking about it so I thought I’d have a look.”) On the morning of his interview, he missed his usual 40 minutes of every-other-day exercise in Central Park in order to attend a lecture on “wave and sand formations.” “Mick has a genuine disdain for nostalgia,” Lorne Michaels notes. “He is relentlessly curious, and more than most men of his age, he is really interested in talking about what’s happening now.”

hroughout our conversation in the Royal Suite living room, L’Wren Scott has been conducting a business meeting in another part of the suite. The couple, who met on a photo shoot, have been together for nine years now, and Jagger has become a reliable presence at her fashion shows, providing proud boyfriend quotations to the press and a useful shot of rock ’n’ roll glamour to the proceedings. Perhaps because Scott has a serious, demanding career of her own, their relationship has given the appearance of being rather more equal and grown-up than Jagger’s previous romances. But Jagger vigorously rejects the notion that he has departed from form. “I don’t know what ‘grown-up’ means,” he says. “If you mean you’re being supportive of someone who has a life, I’d say I’ve always done that. I used to support Marianne Faithfull’s career when I was, like, 22. I used to read her scripts with her. If it was ‘The Three Sisters,’ I’d be the other sisters. I was supportive, and she’d support me too. So, no, I disagree with that. I try and help L’Wren. You always try and help whoever you’re kind of dating. I always help them out in one way or another. When I was living with Jerry Hall, I used to help her pick her model pictures, or if she was doing a stage thing, I’d read her plays with her. I mean, that’s what you do, and vice versa, they do the same for you.”

It seems a little quaint for a 67-year-old to refer to his girlfriend of nearly a decade as someone he is “kind of dating.” But Jagger is disinclined to articulate any greater commitment. “I don’t really subscribe to a completely normal view of what relationships should be,” he says. “I have a bit more of a bohemian view. To be honest, I don’t really think much of marriage. I’m not saying it’s not a wonderful thing and people shouldn’t do it, but it’s not for me. And not for quite a few other people too, it would appear.” He laughs. “I just think it’s perhaps not quite what it’s cracked up to be. I know it’s an elaborate fantasy.”

He goes on to talk, in a rather rambling way, about the animal kingdom and how human mores regarding marriage and fidelity correspond to what we know of primate behavior. “If you have studied or have even a passing knowledge of animal behavior, it’s hard to see how our rules and regulation fit in,” he says at one point.

There are swans, he is reminded.

“Oh, yeah, I love it when women say that,” he replies. “I always have a joke with L’Wren about that. Women tend to say these things more than men do, don’t they?” He affects a sentimental whisper: “ ‘They mate for life, you know.’ ” He chortles heartily at this piece of feminine nonsense. “Yeah,” he muses, when his laughter dies away, “it’s swans and there’s one other. What is it? Albatross, or something.”

Has he, one wonders, got any better at romantic relationships over the years?

He looks irritated for a moment. And then he breaks out the patented Jagger grin — a goofy, face-dividing beam that sends his eyes deep into his head and manages to convey, even when all evidence is to the contrary, a deep, ingenuous delight with the world. “Nah, not really,” he says. “I’m quite independent.”