Discovery Channel India - December 2014 - PDF Free Download (2024)

ART BYTES 46

NEW AGE CANVAS

FOOD CENTRAL 60

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

COMIC CAPERS 72

STRIPS OF LAUGHTER

THE BERLIN WALL 88 A CITY REGROUPS

DECEMBER 2014 I `150

C H A N N E L M AG A Z I N E I N D I A

NIGHT FEVER

WHAT DISCO REALLY MEANT, AND WHY IT STILL MATTERS PG 30

EDITOR'S LETTER

C H A N N E L M AG A Z I N E I N D I A

INFOTAINMENT INC.

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04 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

Is Discovery Channel Magazine a science-led, informationdriven, hard-nosed journal of facts, or is it a fun-to-read compilation of ideas that could alter the way we think and live in the future? The answer, dear reader, lies in the pages of the issue you hold in your hands. First up, is our cover story on Disco Dance, just the thought of which is likely to throw up a tune in your head. Be it Y.M.C.A, Stayin’ Alive, or the classic Indian Zindagi mera gaana...as you read on, your choice of song will reveal facets of your personality you never knew existed. Why, then, did the entire music fraternity of the time join hands to kill disco, the “happy-in-the-head” genre that celebrated life, set trends, spread smiles? You may ﬁnd Govinda’s brand of humour obnoxious, but you can’t diss his mega-watt smile, can you? Next in this issue, you’ll ﬁnd indulgence of the mind, body and soul. Molecular Gastronomy may be the talk of every foodie in town, but the other debate is constant: has cooking been a science forever, or is it really a creative art form for the open-minded? And our question: Erm, in the middle of all this, is the thought of taste and nutrition forgotten?

For comic book fans, there’s a trip down to Belgium which has produced some of the most iconic satirical superheroes of all time. What made this tiny nation give birth to The Smurfs, Asterisk and Tintin? Here’s a novel look at the country beyond Belgian chocolate and diamonds... And in travel, there’s a 25th Anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin wall. A divided city till the cusp of the 90’s, our story will tell you what makes Berlin one of Europe’s most exciting capitals today. Go on, ask again. Is Discovery Channel Magazine a hard-nosed compilation of facts, ﬁgures and fundamentals? Or is it a fun-to-read set of thought-provoking ideas that will someday shape our future? Lean back, put your feet up, then think up the right answer. Happy 2015!

Jamal Shaikh Editorial Director twitter.com/JamalShaikh instagram.com/JamalShaikh facebook.com/JamalSShaikh

CONTENTS ISSUE 12/14

DEPARTMENTS

FRONTIERS

SHOCKERS

How far will people go to stop feeling bored? The answer is pretty ‘electrifying’

20 18

NEWS

ROCK SCIENCE

Rare rainfalls and winds have outsmarted some of the world’s smartest researchers who are studying rocks TECH

MEDIEVAL MARVELS

Know weapons and ammunition or past “modern marvels” from all over the world

HISTORY

NOTABLE QUOTES

Anne Frank, JFK, Mr Freeze, Mitch Hedberg - whose words echo best through history? HORIZONS

FOOD STYLE

18 14

A sneak-peek into one of the most delicious jobs in the world and what makes it so cool

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE WOW 10 ITS EASY TO TAKE A GOOD PHOTO OF THIS PEAK, HARD TO TAKE A SUPERB ONE, SAYS ONE SNAPPER. FIND OUT IF HE SUCCEEDED THE GRID 13 AN IRAQ WAR VETERAN HOPPED INTO THE WHITE HOUSE WITH A KNIFE AND 800 BULLETS!

06 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

NEWS 14 HOW DOES THE DUMBO OCTOPUS GET TO BE THE DEEPEST LIVING OF ALL OCTOPUS SPECIES?

HOUSEHOLD TECH 16 DON'T BE TOO ALARMED IF YOU WALK THROUGH A WIRELESS INDIAN HOUSEHOLD

AMAZING INSECTS 21 WE PROFILE SIX OF OUR FAVOURITE BEETLES TO FIND OUT WHAT SETS THEM APART

SPORTS 14 SOME TRIVIA AND MUSTKNOW FACTS ABOUT ATHLETES AND SPORTSMEN OF THE COUNTRY, AND THEIR SUPER RECORDS

TIMEFRAME 16 WHEN DID MONET CREATE HIS FAMOUS PAINTING, SUNRISE? ASTRONOMICAL CALCULATIONS TELL US

WHAT'S ON 102 SAVE RHINOS WITH YAO MING, FIND OUT WHY SHARKS ARE "FINTASTIC" AND ROCK OUT WITH TWO FUN-LOVING GENIUSES

08 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

FEATURES ISSUE 12/14 COVER STORY

DISCO MANIA

Is there anything behind the glitz and crazy clothes of disco? We look at how this genre changed the world, one hit at a time SCI-TECH

ART BYTES

Traditional paintbrush can now be dismissed for a mouse and a keypad. But how are artists responding to this new tech playground?

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

QUICK FREEZES TO CRYO DRINKS

Cunningly crafted food that looks like one thing but is actually something entirely different. Are you open to trying some chemistry for dinner? CULTURE

THE NINTH ART

How has one small country sandwiched in the centre of Europe, crafted so many of the world’s best-loved graphic icons? We sketch out the path of Belgium’s comic legacy TRAVEL

BOOMTIME IN BERLIN

No other city has reinvented itself quite as often, or as dramatically, as Berlin. Today, the city is a hipster’s playground and home to silicon start-ups

09 DECEMBER 2014

PHOTO PHOTOPRESS/ROBERT BOEOSCH

ALL OF THE LIGHTS On July 14, 1865, the British climber Edward Whymper reached the peak of the Matterhorn (4,478 metres) in Switzerland, together with his rope team. Fast forward 150 years, and celebration plans for this momentous achievement are in full swing — a recent promotional event had Zermatt mountain guides tracing the route over the Hörnligrat ridge in a chain of lights. Mountaineering photographer Robert Bösch captured the special moment shortly before dusk. “The Matterhorn is one of the most photographed mountains in the world,” he says. “Its extraordinary form makes it easy to take a good photo. Paradoxically that was what made it so challenging, because it makes it so difficult to produce a breathtaking photo.” 10 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

WOW

11 DECEMBER 2014

FRONTIERS

ILLUSTRATION QUENTIN GABRIEL

ISSUE 12/14

SYSTEM ALERT! MEN PREFER SHOCKS

TO DOING NOTHING, REVEALS STUDY You’re in a room. Your pockets are empty. It’s quiet. No distractions. Your job? Sit and do nothing for 15 minutes. But in front of you is a nice shiny button. If you get bored, says a nice scientist, feel free to press it and give yourself a mild diverting shock. And people did just that. The team of social psychologists who authored this recent study noted that people prefer to do something rather than nothing, “even if that something is negative”. Men in particular had trigger ﬁngers, with 67 percent of the lads giving themselves at least one shock

12 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

compared to 25 percent of women. That doesn’t include “one outlier who administered 190 shocks to himself”. In a world where the average smartphone user checks their device an average of 150 times a day, we shouldn’t be surprised. Or might it all be down to some unplanned reverse psychology? In another study, participants were told to speak freely for ﬁve minutes, but on no account to think of a white bear. Naturally, the bear crept into their minds at least once a minute. Whether it is solitude or thought suppression, the mind is as untameable as — well, a white bear!

DISCOVERY

THE GRID A S I A- PAC I F I C

HUGS

AMERICAS

MIDDLE EAST/AFRICA

EUROPE

WRATH OF THE BEAK

THE SCOTTISH JOB

Canadian mounties were recently on the case of an odd crime — the theft of a First Nation (native tribal) mask. It depicts Huxhukw, a supernatural bird, used by the Kwakwaka’wakw people during winter ceremonies. But the thieves got more than they bargained for. As one book describes, this bird-god “cracks skulls of men to suck out their brains.” Luckily the mask was soon returned, perhaps because the thieves got wind of Huxhukw’s reputation.

Armed daylight robberies are usually the stuff of action movies, but in Glasgow recently, it was a fact. Four men in ski masks with sledgehammers raided several jewellers at a shopping arcade. Though they triggered smoke bombs and hammered at the windows, they didn’t make off with much loot. A witness told the press he ﬁlmed one of the robbers shouting “I’ll f...ing kill you all!” as he ﬂed. Sensibly, the witness stopped ﬁlming at that point.

INTRUDER ALERT The White House was recently breached by three intruders. First, an Iraq war veteran hopped the fence with a knife and 800 bullets. Days earlier, a man with a Pikachu hat was tackled by guards. The month before that, a toddler squeezed through the main fence. According to Secret Service agents: “We were going to wait until he learned to talk to question him, but in lieu of that he got a timeout and was sent on [his] way with [his] parents.”

BULLETPROOF This ain’t your grandma’s groceryshopping clunker. BMW have unveiled their X5 Security plus, a monster car designed, as they proudly boast, to withstand a barrage from “the world’s most popular ﬁrearm”, the AK-47. With a 450 horsepower turbocharged engine, shatterproof glass, run-ﬂat tyres, a self-sealing fuel tank and an intercom system, this might be something to add to your “pipe dream” Christmas present list.

THE VAMPIRE DEFENCE Sometimes,

HELPING HOUNDS

ARMS RACE Is there a

THE LOVE BUG Insurers

LION ATTACK Move

Slowly but surely, animalassisted therapy is taking off in India. The Saraswathi Kendra Learning Centre for Children, for example, is home to an affectionate Labrador, aka Dr Ruffles. He is on call to help kids with dyslexia, autism and ADHD adapt better to a social world — and not just because he’s huggable as heck. One mother told press that her child used to be hyperactive but has made great strides following the studies.

gesture more laden with complex meaning than a hug? The New York Times recently dissected the issue, from the embraces of politicians that are closely scrutinised, to the awkwardness of going in for a hug and being rebuffed. The article also had handy tips from a humourist on acceptable moments for male friends to hug: “I return from combat. Someone dies. I earn a degree. I go into surgery.” And when not to: “I spring for lunch. I get over a cold.”

AXA recently polled 2,000 Brits to ﬁnd out what makes them happy — no prizes for guessing what one of the things was. It’s obvious that hugs cheer us up, but why? Research from earlier this year found that hugs release oxytocin, the “love hormone”, which also has anti-ageing effects. Although another study found the oxytocin release is only conﬁrmed after a 20-second embrace, which to us just seems uncomfortably long.

over, Ruffles (see “Helping Hounds” at far left). Cats can hug too, even huge ones. Conservationist Valentin Gruener recently visited a wildlife enclosure in Botswana, where an old friend, Sirga the lioness, was waiting. Gruener had rescued Sirga as a cub when she was exiled from her pride. The 50 kilogram predator thanked him by leaping into his arms, sinking Gruener into the ground. The ﬁlmed event has since gone viral on YouTube.

ranked counterfeit product in Taiwan is probably nowhere near as exciting as you think it is. In 2013 the customs office seized a range of over 96,000 counterfeit items. The top ﬁve were masks, clothes, mechanical parts, leather products and cell phones. Chinese customers are particularly fervent buyers of these cosmetic products, as Taiwanese face masks are considered top quality.

SECURITY

MASKS

SKI MASKS? NOT QUITE The number-one

STRANGE AND SERIOUS EVENTS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD

More Armoured Cars to Buy

BMW 7 SERIES 760LI SECURITY EDITION USED BY PM NARENDRA MODI PROTECTS FROM BOMBS TO GAS ATTACKS 439 HORSEPOWER UP TO 100KMPH IN 7.5 SECONDS TOP SPEED

superstition beats a hefty security system. That’s what residents of Cullinan, a small, crime-ridden South African town have found. A few home owners in the diamond mining town 90 minutes from Johannesburg, have ditched the electric fences and gone lowtech — erecting coffins to keep burglars at bay. Thus armed, one couple went from three break-ins a week to zero.

MERCEDES-BENZ S600 GUARD EDITION USED BY ACTOR SHAHRUKH KHAN BULLET-PROOF AND BOMB-PROOF, 6.0 LITRE V12 ENGINE 525 HORSEPOWERENTIRE INNER-BODY IS ARMOUR-COVERED, SPLINTER PROOF

13 DECEMBER 2014

NEWS BREAKING GOOD

52:17

A STUDY BY THE DRAUGIEM GROUP, A SOCIAL NETWORKING COMPANY, RECENTLY FOUND THAT EMPLOYEES ARE MOST PRODUCTIVE WITH 17 MINUTE BREAKS FOR EVERY 52 MINUTES OF WORK

10%

1 TASK

THIS SMALL SUBSET OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE WORKERS GOT MORE WORK DONE EVEN WITHOUT WORKING LONGER HOURS

FOR BEST RESULTS, TAKE YOUR BREAK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER, SO WHEN YOU COME BACK REFRESHED YOU CAN FOCUS ON A SINGLE TASK

OF MOVING ROCKS AND DUST SWIRLS Every now and then, you get reminded that hey, we humans aren’t as clever as we think we are. Your brain is the most complex system in the universe, yet when was the last time you managed to insert a USB dongle the right way up in one go? Never. It’s near impossible. Such human fallibility was made clear with two separate studies recently, when highly intelligent experts were baffled — outwitted even — by rocks. Plain old insentient rocks. Mystery One: for about a century, bright minds have wondered how boulders weighing 250 kilograms each moved from one place to another along the desert

ﬂoor of Death Valley. Was it thanks to the swirly power of mini-tornadoes known as dust devils? Hurricane-strength winds? Aliens? To ﬁnd out, an engineer and scientist pair named Richard and James Norris have attached a bevy of GPS and camera equipment, clustered on the rocks like limpet mines. The answer: with rare rainfalls, the ﬂat, frozen surface, made slick by sunshine and wind, pushes the rocks several metres per minute. Simple, right? Bear in mind, this has been a mystery for a long time. But not as long as Stonehenge. You would think the area around this

world-famous landmark in Wiltshire, England — a twominute walk from the A303 highway — would be well and truly explored by now. Yet just months ago, archaeologists

discovered that Stonehenge had a “stone sibling” perched about three kilometres away. “Up ‘til now, we had absolutely no idea that the stones were there,” confessed a co-director of the investigation. In fact, in

Quote Unquote

“I BELIEVE IN THE NEXT 20 YEARS WE WILL SEE THE FIRST SUB TWO-HOUR MARATHON.” DAVID BEDFORD

Rolling in the Deep The Dumbo octopus is known as the deepest living of all octopus species. But recently, scientists discovered it has a handy getaway trick — it can coil its arms up tightly and use its ear-like ﬁns to swim away. 14 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

Bedford, a former 10,000 metre world-record holder, uttered this statement back in 2011. So why are

surveying a total area of just over seven kilometres, the archaeologists have uncovered 17 other large, henge-like Bronze- or NeolithicAge monuments, and 60 prehistoric monuments in total. Sixty! Still, rather than getting depressed at the endless mysteries the world throws in our face, we can celebrate them. No matter how much we know, there will always be more mysteries to solve. And if the Stonehenge archaeologists have proven anything, it’s that you should dig up your back garden, post-haste. You’ll probably ﬁnd Amelia Earhart’s bones, El Dorado and the City of Atlantis.

we classifying it 1960 Sprinter Milkha Singh as news? Because won the fourth position just weeks ago, a in the Summer Olympics Kenyan runner, in Rome, Italy. This was Dennis Kimetto, also the year when he blitzed through the was titled ‘The Flying Berlin Marathon Sikh’, after winning a friendly race between in just two hours, India and Pakistan. two minutes and 57 seconds, shaving 26 1985 seconds off the world Celebrated track athlete, marathon record. PT Usha, won two gold Most experts agree and two silver medals that a marathon in the World Railway time just one second Meet at Olomouc, Czech Republic. under two hours would require a 1999 runner to average a Anil Kumar Prakash speed of nearly six metres per second. completed a 200m sprint in 21.6 seconds at the But hey, people AAFI Circuit Meet in thought the fourBangalore - the closest minute mile couldn’t ever to Milkha Singh’s 20.6 seconds record. be done, either.

PHOTO CORBIS (DAVID BEDFORD); NOAA (DUMBO OCTOPUS) ICON: MEDITATION DESIGNED BY JUAN PABLO BRAVO FROM THE NOUN PROJECT

Find out how rocks are pushed several metres per minute, thanks to rare rainfalls and wind.

NEWS

In theWireless Household Life before wires and cables

Monet got a tan, but when did that happen?

WIRELESS OVENS

In the early 1870s, Claude Monet painted Impression, Sunrise, a hazily beautiful view of Le Havre harbour (below). But when, exactly? Now, forensic astronomer Professor Donald Olson thinks he knows. Using old astronomical calculations of the sun, tide levels and meteorological observations of the sea and sky, he arrived at the precise time by feeding data into computer algorithims. Olson has used his techniques to date other masterpieces, including The Scream

by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. The artist recalls the moment he was compelled to paint the piece while walking with friends: “all at once the sky became blood red […] clouds like blood and tongues of ﬁre hung above the blueblack fjord and the city. I felt a great, unending scream piercing through nature.” That blood-red sky, Olson’s team found, was the result of atmospheric disturbances caused by the eruption of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia in 1883. Tonnes of ash crept through the sky, reaching Norway later that year,

when Munch heard his ﬁery scream.

SUNRISE Some now call Monet’s painting the birth of the Impressionism movement, which captures emotions and experience rather than accurate depictions of events. Monet was asked for the title and was told his painting “could not really pass for a view of Le Havre, so I replied: ‘Put Impression’. From that came ‘Impressionism’ and the jokes have proliferated.”

CRYBABY! IN JAPAN, IT'S CONSIDERED GOOD LUCK IF A SUMO WRESTLER MAKES YOUR BABY CRY. THE TRADITION DATES BACK 400 YEARS. THE WAILS "ARE INTENDED TO REACH THE GODS AND PARENTS HOPE THEIR LITTLE ONES WILL GROW HEALTHY AND STRONG," SAYS A PRIEST WHO STILL OVERSEES THE PRACTICE. COVERAGE FROM THIS YEAR'S CEREMONY NOTED THAT BABIES WHO CHEERFULLY REFUSED TO BAWL "WERE ROARED AT IN THE FACE IN A BID TO GET TEARS FLOWING."

16 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

Were pre-20th century Indians deprived of breads and biscuits? Not really. Power supply was out of the question in villages. But even in urban settings that did afford electricity, ovens were a rarity. Charcoal-fuelled clay or stone ovens baked breads and biscuits while sand-ﬁlled aluminum pots were used to cook cakes on a stove.

PESTLE AND MORTAR

These heavy stone blocks came in various shapes and sizes and mimicked an electric mixer/ grinder quite efficiently! Chutneys, masalas, marinades and other mixes were created on this equipment.

commercially-packed food era. A pair of ﬂat, heavy stone blocks was used to grind grains. The running or top piece, which actually did the grinding, was maneuvered by hand using a thick wooden stick. Needless to say, this was an intense, time and energy consuming activity.

EASY AIR COOLING

Electricity or no electricity, airconditioning was no issue back in the day. Bamboo blinds with dried vetiver or khus were used in almost all houses. These were sprayed with water from time to time, keeping the rooms cool and pleasant.

WORKING HOURS

HAND CHAKKI OR MILL STONES

This near-extinct piece existed in the pre-

Homemakers spent almost the entire day at work. With the number chores to be done manually (right from boiling water on the stove for bathing!), women hardly rested during the day.

MUSEE MARMOTTAN MONET (IMPRESSION BY MONET)

TIMEFRAME 7.35AM, 13 NOVEMBER, 1872

TECHNOLOGY

Killer blasts from past “modern” marvels

been laced to the user’s forearm. It weighed just 700 grams.

MAGGOT MUNCH You know what else is transforming healthcare apart from microscopes? Maggots. They might be gross, but they do a lot of good. A pilot study in a Kenyan hospital is reviving maggot therapy, a practice that has been around for millennia. Sterilised ﬂy larvae are placed into ﬂesh wounds, where they happily eat infected ﬂesh, cleaning the area — without the use of costly antibiotics. Made from colonies of green bottle ﬂies Size one millimetre Efﬁcacy maggots excrete an enzyme that liquiﬁes dead ﬂesh, they do not eat live ﬂesh so there is no pain Timeframe patients that were due to stay in hospital for three months for surgery and a course of antibiotics have been able to leave hospital in under three weeks Popularity 20 countries around the world regularly use maggot therapy Supply a green bottle ﬂy can lay over 2,000 eggs in her three-week lifespan

The First World War, which ended 96 years ago, is infamous for bringing technological developments to the battleﬁeld. Tanks, machine guns and planes were deployed in full-scale for the ﬁrst time. And yet, the truly terrifying fact is that this “modern” war deployed weapons as old as time. Many were hand-made weapons, crafted by the soldier who wielded it. 1 American

Knuckle dusters were adapted to include a knife. Apart from a slicing blade, it also included ﬁnger guards for punching, and a “skullcrusher” knob on the base of the grip. 2 Anglo-French

A “gauntlet dagger” was a glove-like device with a crude blade and protective sheath made from light sheet steel. A gripping crossbar inside the glove provided a grip, and the weapon may have

3British

A lead head moulded around a wooden entrenching tool. This particular example was used by Private Harold Startin, who says it was “a most effective weapon, especially when used on listening patrols between the trenches.” 4 German

A short steel cable linked a cast iron head with a handle. 5 Turkish

Light club from a single piece of hardwood. 6 French

A 98-centimetre long gnarled wood, weighted with lead and ﬁtted with iron spikes, used as a spear or, as the Imperial War Museum posits, “it may well be that it was intended primarily as an officer’s walking stick.”

18 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

Foldable Gold A microscope that saves lives Microscopes are clunky, heavy, expensive gizmos, aren’t they? Not the Foldscope. This ingenious little device could transform medical care in poor communities, say its Stanford University makers. With resolution strong enough to spot parasites just 800 nanometres in size, it could soon provide an easy way to diagnose malaria, African sleeping sickness, chagas disease and more. Cost less than US$1 Zoom over 2000x Weight 8.8 grams Attachments coin cell battery provides over 50 hours of power Construction can be folded together in 3 to 5 minutes Sturdiness can be stepped on, or dropped from threestorey building

PHOTOS: IWM (GETTING MEDIEVAL); FOLDSCOPE.COM (FOLDABLE GOLD)

GETTING MEDIEVAL

HISTORY BEST ONE-LINERS

T H E M AT C H U P : H I S T O R I C Q U O T E S WOMEN

ANNE FRANK

MAE WEST

AMELIA EARHART

“It is a very strange habit to write in a diary.... It strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a 13-year-old schoolgirl.” How wrong she was.

“Too much of a good thing is wonderful.” The bombshell conﬁrms that yes, you should probably have another half-dozen chocolate biscuits before dinner. Oh go on, after dinner, too.

“The most effective way to do it, is to do it.” An aviatrix who was a doer, not a thinker. She also said, “The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.”

Obama is a Renegade? Since the time of Harry Truman, US presidents have been given a snappy code name by their Secret Service protectors DWIGHT EISENHOWER: PROVIDENCE JOHN F. KENNEDY: LANCER LYNDON JOHNSON: VOLUNTEER

MEN

RICHARD NIXON: SEARCHLIGHT DIENEKES

MITCH HEDBERG

JOHN F. KENNEDY

Told that the opposing Persian army had so many archers that their arrows blotted out the sun, the Spartan officer chuckled: “Then we shall ﬁght in the shade.”

“One time, this guy handed me a picture of himself and said, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger.” This comedian just blew our minds.

The President’s last words: “No, you certainly can’t.” This was in response to the governor’s wife: “You certainly can’t say that the people of Dallas haven’t given you a nice welcome.”

GERALD FORD: PASSKEY RONALD REAGAN: RAWHIDE JIMMY CARTER: DEACON GEORGE BUSH: TIMBERWOLF

ONAL FICTI

BILL CLINTON: EAGLE MR FREEZE “Cool party.” — Batman Forever. Delivered by Arnold Schwarzenegger in that unforgettable accent, and topped with a thumbs up. Is this the best bad pun ever?

CAVE JOHNSON

“When life gives you lemons? Don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give me lemons!” — Portal 2

Feeling vexed? Verbalise this verse: “Everybody is special. Everybody. Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody. Everybody has their story to tell.” — V for Vendetta

TOP THREE WINNERS

ANNE FRANK

MITCH HEDBERG

CAVE JOHNSON

Thirteen years old she might have been, but the words of this girl have stood the test of time. Her last entry, written 70 years ago, ended: “If only there were no other people in the world.”

Like the best humour, his jokes make you see the world anew. “I like rice. Rice is great if you want to eat 2,000 of something.” Or, “I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem.”

There’s nothing more annoying than a trite adage. Johnson remixes the stereotype into glorious anarchy. It’s appropriate for a video game character with megalomaniac tendencies.

GEORGE W. BUSH: TUMBLER BARACK OBAMA: RENEGADE “Sheer whim” How the White House Communications Agency says they choose codenames I, Gore Vice-president Al Gore once deadpanned that he was so boring that his Secret Service codename was “Al Gore” Cat’s crown Visiting dignitaries get Secret Service monikers too. Queen Elizabeth II’s was Kittyhawk 19 DECEMBER 2014

SCIENCE MURDER RATES IN FICTIONALISED TOWNS

3.2 MURDERS PER 110 PER 100,000 PEOPLE 100,000 MIDSOMER (UNITED KINGDOM), OF MIDSOMER MURDERS

YSTAD (SWEDEN), OF THE WALLANDER SERIES

DOZING OFF

140 PER 173 MURDERS 100,000 PER 100,000 CABOT COVE (USA), OF MURDER, SHE WROTE

IN REAL LIFE, SAN PEDRO SULA IN HONDURAS IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

MORE bang for your buck

Sleep nabs a third of your life

Explosive reel facts to blow your mind

Let’s start with the obvious: you spend a third of your life asleep. You spend about 90,000 to 100,000 hours at work — and with office hours increasing, maybe more. Will you die at your desk? nine years — but two Maybe. In Japan where years of that is made up long work hours are the norm, the phenomenon is of commercials. Three months of your life are spent stuck in traffic. There’s good stuff too, of course — about two weeks of your life is just kissing, while Brits listen to 13 years worth of music. so common it has a name But here’s the real — karoshi. It was legally question: how much recognised as a cause of of the time is spent in death in the 1980s, and the present moment? surviving family members In 2010, Harvard can receive compensation psychologists crafted from the US government an app that tracked to the tune of $20,000 a year. In China, the overwork phenomenon is known as guolaosi. In 2010, it’s estimated 600,000 Chinese people died from it. Then there’s the 2,250 people’s actions. routine chores. But they add up. Men, you’ll spend The results? Nearly 47 percent of our day is 3,000 hours shaving in spent daydreaming. total. We will all spend So while sleep might 92 days on the toilet. We nab a third of your life will watch TV for over experience away, your brain in effect steals half your time on Earth. “A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” the researchers wrote.

If there’s one thing director Michael Bay is known for, it’s on-screen kabooms. Depressing hipster cinephiles everywhere, blogger Kyle Vanhove at frankenspace.com found a startling correlation: the more explosions a Bay ﬁlm featured, the more it grossed. His latest Transformers ﬂick had 283 explosions, and earned over US$1.1 billion. The Island, meanwhile, had "just" 16 explosions, and performed relatively abysmally.

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four Tricks from the Dead Move The Lazarus sign, named after a biblical character who rose from the dead, is a spinal reflex when corpses cross their arms over their chest, sit up, or turn their heads. It accounts for several false alarms of resuscitation in braindead patients to this day. Smile Hair and nails don’t grow — they just appear to, because your skin pulls back. This also exposes your gums and sharp canine teeth, which may have contributed to the vampire myth. A fun fact for a first date. Go #2 When you die, your muscles all relax, including the ones in your sphincter. This allows faecal matter to ooze out. It might not seem too regal, but considering fetuses defecate in the womb, it seems defecation is a fact of life — and death. “Speak” Decomposition produces gases that force their way out of the windpipe, which can sound like a low moan.

SCIENCE

Beat That, Beatles One in every four named species on EARTH is a beetle. With that in mind, here's some gorgeous closeups of these fascinating animals — one shown in actual size — alongside their amazing superpowers

PANGS OF PLEASURE

Labour that is for more than a child Before painkillers to ease labour pain became widespread in the 1970s, it’s difficult to imagine how Granny bore 10 children. Ever wondered how she remembered the delivery process? In a phenomenon known as Fading Affect Bias (FAB), scientists suggest that over time, negative feelings towards a life event fade faster than positive ones. DCM spoke to midwife Ina May Gaskin, author of Spiritual Midwifery and one of the women behind the renaissance of “unmedicated” home births in USA. Ironically, it was medical intervention that scarred Gaskin the ﬁrst time she went into labour. “Like two-thirds of US women at that time (1966), my baby was pulled out with forceps and kept from me for the ﬁrst 24 hours,” she says. Of the countless births the 74 year-

old has since attended, the women certainly felt pain. Yet nobody she’s met was dissuaded from having more children. So what is it about childbirth that’s so positive it can sustain humanity? Waves of pleasure, it appears. “Once the baby is born,” says Gaskin, “the pain will be gone and [even] if she hasn’t had anesthesia, she’ll usually be euphoric from the high concentration of oxytocin released in her body — the same hormone released during org*sm, by the way.” Surveying 121 mothers, Gaskin found 21 percent had experienced org*sm, some even during labour itself. Results from FAB studies further suggest that across cultures, FAB may promote the retention of positive feelings that can help individuals stay optimistic about everything — including, it seems, birth.

TORTOISE BEETLE The golden tortoise beetle, a relative of this fellow, looks as bling as its name, and can change its shell to a brick-red colour in two minutes, thanks to altering the ﬂow of liquid in its exoskeleton. Larva protect their soft exoskeleton by manufacturing a shield made of their own faeces

CLICK BEETLE Can pop its thorax to ﬂip powerfully out of the beak of a predatory bird, or right itself off its back

ZIG-ZAG FUNGUS BEETLE Known as the "pleasing fungus beetle". Because of its pleasing colours, no doubt

RHINOCEROS BEETLE One of the strongest animals on the planet, it can lift 850 times its weight. They are popular pets. Some people gamble on their ﬁghts, as two beetles attempt to knock each other off a log

It’s really all about cats and dogs! This July, a pet store owner in the USA made headlines for eating Cats, Asian nothing but dog and cat food for 30 days in a stunt to promote their otters, brand’s healthy, all-natural ingredients. But what is your pooch spotted actually eating when it tucks into many pet foods? hyenas, sea Some brands, for example, add H2N(CH2)5NH2 — that’s lions and dolphins cadaverine, a foul-smelling chemical compound found in decaying are just ﬂesh and dead bodies. Dogs in particular love it, which is not some of the surprising considering that canines are hunters. carnivores Meat byproducts or “meat meal” is another ingredient, which can that cannot include ground up livestock bones, zoo animals, road kill or even dog taste sugars. and cat meat. Erich Schlosser, author of the 2002 book Fast Food Nation, wrote: “Although leading American manufacturers promise never to put rendered pets into their pet food, it is still legal to do so.” And in 2003, pet food manufacturer Hill’s Pet Nutrition ﬁled for a patent cat food which included ginger, to reduce the noxious smell of pet faeces.

TIGER BEETLE The fastest insect on the planet. It can run at nine kilometres per hour (equivalent to a human running 822kph). It's so fast it goes blind when chasing prey

ACTUAL SIZE ‘Lowly’ dung beetles navigate with the stars, using the light of the Milky Way for orientation. To conﬁrm this, scientists inserted little cardboard hats to block the beetle’s heads, causing them to roll around aimlessly 21 DECEMBER 2014

HORIZONS VISUAL TREATS

Style served on a platter

From rava dosa to ravioli and from the Indian kulﬁ to an English triﬂe, their magic wand can make any recipe look Michelin-star-worthy in a jiffy! Intrigued? Explore the delectable world of food stylists with Adii Dande

Let us assure you, they are no magicians. They are foodies who have simply taken their passion to a new level. Indranie Dasgupta, one of India’s ﬁrst food stylists, gives us a sneak-peek into this up-and-coming albeit lesser known profession.

STYLE ESSENTIALS The colours of the garnish or dips, placement of a few grains of rice, a dollop of butter or even a single parsley leaf can make or break the look of a dish. These are the intricate details that a food stylist is innately aware of. At times the perfect fruit for a fruit juice shoot isn’t available, or the condensation simply refuses to stay on the glass. This is when “Oh that was easy! I’ll wrap it up and go see a movie” simply cannot work, Indranie says. “But some foods never fail you. Like Japanese; they are so beautifully presented to begin with,” she shares.

FOOD BEAUTIFUL FOOD If the delicious snapshots of scrumptious food on Pizza Hut, KFC, Maggi, Subway and MTR commercials have made you ditch your diet plan, you can blame Indranie for it. Her impeccable aesthetic sense has made even the simplest of recipes look stunning since 1991. She has also styled for the menu cards of hotels like the Oberoi and Maurya Sheraton.

D.I.Y. There are no specialised courses available in India that formally teach food styling. “Your love for food, lucky breaks and the market situation determine your stability,” Indranie says. It goes without saying that an immaculate aesthetic sense, understanding of colours, textures, shapes, sizes and the diligence to try out numerous permutations and combinations to get best results, work wonders.

TOUGH CLICKS

IES, INDIAN CURREAMS PIZZAS, ICE CR

PATIENCE PAYS She shares that it happened purely by chance for her when she accompanied her photographer husband for one of his shoots. “He was shooting food at a hotel, and I very apprehensively made some changes in the display and cleaned it up a bit. They loved it, so it went on for some more shoots,” she says. This “free service” went on for some time after which she decided to take it up professionally. “The initial few years can be tough here. But patience and being a great team player takes you a long way. Of course, an insane love for food is an absolute must!” she says. COOL JOBS FOR FOOD STYLISTS

đ đ đ đ

FOOD PHOTOGRAPHER FOOD AESTHETICIAN FOR TV/MOVIES AESTHETICIAN FOR FOOD STORES EDITORIAL FOOD CONSULTANT

22 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

FOOD STYLIST INDRANIE DASGUPTA ABSOLUTELY CAN'T DO WITHOUT

đ PASSION AND DESIRE TO COOK EVERY DAY đ A KEEN SENSE OF COLOURS AND TEXTURES đ PATIENCE WHILE YOU FAIL AT NUMEROUS COMBINATIONS

FEATURES

28 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

PAGE 30 GET YOUR PLATFORMS AND FLARED PANTS TO D.I.S.C.O

PAGE 72 DIG DEEP INTO BELGIUM'S COMIC WORLD

PAGE 46 CAN BYTES AND PIXELS REPLACE PAINTS AND BRUSHES?

PAGE 88 KNOW BERLIN BETTER AS IT CELEBRATES 25 YEARS OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

PAGE 60 WHERE CHEMISTRY CREATES A FANCY FEAST

29 DECEMBER 2014

THE DEEPER MEANING OF

ROCKERS MET IN STADIUMS TO DESTROY IT, PUNKS GOT LOUD TO TRY AND SHAKE IT OFF. YET, DISCO SURVIVED. IN THE SPIRIT OF SEASONAL GIVING, DCM DROPS THE NEEDLE ON THE RECORD AGAIN. CHRIS WRIGHT GOES BACK TO HIS SILVER SEQUINS AND PLATFORM SHOES, ONLY TO DISCOVER THAT DISCO MAY JUST HAVE STUCK WITH US FOR A REASON

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PHOTO GETTY IMAGES

COVER STORY

! PLUS THE ION UT EVOLDISCO OF DIAN IN INIC, P34 MUS 31 DECEMBER 2014

OTOS

You could make a case that disco is the most vacuous musical movement ever devised. Look at the clothes! The shoes! The hair! And then the lyrics: “It was so entertaining when the boogie started to explode”; “Boogie yourself to death”; “Clams on the half shell and rollerskates, rollerskates.”

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PHOTOS CORBIS (MAIN); GETTY IMAGES

COVER STORY

t would be easy to make that case. But you would be wrong. For while it is true that disco is beloved (or be-loathed) for its escapism, for its meaningless love of the beat, and for its costumes and ﬂuffiness, it is easy to forget that it also emerged from the bleakest of roots. After all, if music is going to be based so solidly on escapism, then there must have been something pretty serious to escape from. In short, disco needs defending. Granted, it has driven people mad for decades. The original movement triggered a backlash so vicious that in July of 1979, when the Chicago White Sox baseball team ﬁlled a crate with disco records and blew it up with dynamite on the ballpark as a mid-game promotion, many in the crowd of over 50,000 people had to eventually be dispersed by riot police. There was a well-known DJ at the time, Steve Dahl, who formed his own army called The Insane Coho Lips, which rallied around a strident mission statement: “Dedicated to the eradication of the dreaded musical disease known as DISCO.” What did disco do to deserve this? Why, to this day, is it mocked and derided, something that most of us only dance to with a sense of self-mockery when wasted at a wedding? Something’s not right here. It’s time to stand up for disco.

SOLID GOLD ROOTS One of the most absurd misconceptions about disco is that it didn’t mean anything, that it was all teased hair and spangles. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. It is easy to forget, at this nuanced distance, just what a pitiful hellhole New York represented four decades ago. “In the early Seventies, the words ‘New York City’ became a shorthand code for everything that was wrong with America,” writes Peter Shapiro in his passionate defence of disco, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Writing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby went even further. “New York City has become a metaphor for what looks like the last days of American civilization. It’s run by fools. Its citizens are at the mercy of its criminals,” he wrote in 1974. “The air is foul. The traffic is impossible.” This all felt a very long way from the peace-and-love idealism of the 1960s, but that was largely due to the fact that, unlike the previous decade, nobody had any money anymore. By now, the Vietnam War had escalated terribly, civil rights marches had been replaced by race riots, and recession had

kicked in. On a national scale, there was a growing sense of disillusionment.

DISCO WAS SO GREAT BECAUSE IT IS THE FIRST AND ONLY MUSIC IN HISTORY EVER TO BE EMBRACED BY EVERY RACE, COLOUR, NATIONALITY AND AGE GROUP Alongside this, some inﬂuential demographic changes were taking place. New York in particular, and Chicago and Philadelphia too, were attracting millions of poor rural African-Americans. The process was exacerbated by a change in the law in 1965, which saw more Asians, Latin Americans and AfroCaribbeans entering America. Yet as Shapiro explains, these unskilled workers arrived just at the time when the manufacturing industries that could have supported them began to unravel and decline. As recession times hit, it FROM ITS HEYDAY became a vicious circle. NewIN MANHATTAN'S STUDIO York, nearing bankruptcy, ﬁred 54 (RIGHT) TO A VICIOUS BACKLASH THE LATE more than 63,000IN municipal 1970S, LED BY DJ STEVE employees in 1975. The white DAHL (BELOW), DISCO HAS middle population of HAD class A WILD RIDE THROUGH MUSICAL HISTORY New York ﬂed to the suburbs, PREVIOUS PAGE: PEOPLE taking their tax contributions DANCING AT THE DISCO CLUB NEW YORK NEW YORK with them, meaning the city’s IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1978 tax revenues shrank further. Services were cut and strikes 33 DECEMBER 2014

MITHUN CHAKRABORTY DANCES TO I AM A DISCO DANCER FROM DISCO DANCER (1982)

ITS THE TIME TO DISCO FROM KAL HO NAA HO (2003)

IT’S THE TIME TO DISCO...AGAIN! ADII DANDE TAKES YOU THROUGH THE LIGHT-FLASHING DISCO FLOORS OF BOLLYWOOD, TRAILING BACK TO THE 1970s, WHERE IT ALL BEGAN. PLATFORM HEELS, SILVER PANTS AND SPARKLY LEOTARDS AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE YET!

SINGER NAZIA HASSAN

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The year was 1977. John Travolta catapulted to instant international stardom with his smooth Night Fever moves and the Bee Gees crooned their way to phenomenal success. And while Western music had gotten over the summer of love and The Beatles’ psychedelic musings, and when ABBA was smoothly cruising between pop and disco, music director RD Burman was still making Bollywood sway to Lata Mangeskar’s Aaj kal pao zameen par. That was exactly when the “disco” seed took ﬁrm root in Bappi Lahiri’s heart and soul, and the catchy Mausam hain gaane ka (Gun master G9) from Suraksha (1979) was conceived. Thanks to the then unusual number, India got its very ﬁrst disco star, Mithun Chakraborty, and Bollywood music found a ﬂashy, ultra glam direction.

Disco, then, was on a roll! Bappi continued to experiment with this newfound musical treasure and the 1982 ﬁlm Disco Dancer reiterated both, his and Mithun’s, stardom. The ﬁlm saw never-seen-before worldwide success, and much of this was, without a doubt, because of its foot tapping, disco-to-the-core numbers like I am a disco dancer, Auva Auva, Krishna dharti pe aaja tu, Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy and Yaad aa raha hain mera pyaar. And even though Auva Auva was clearly inspired by The Buggles 1979 hit Video killed the radio star, it did not fail to hit the correct notes with Indian music connoisseurs. Karan Razdan did a ‘Travolta meets Tom Selleck’, glitzy ﬂared-bottom pants and shirt in silver with the gold waistband et al, and Kalpana Iyer’s bold moves in a shimmery bronze leotard and silver boots set a new trend for the Western music-starved youth, who had hardly seen beyond the

quintessentially Bollywood, ‘dance in the park’ melodies. Disco balls, hologram outﬁts, bright neon lights in the background and a ﬂashy dance ﬂoor became the rage. Something else that the Indian music scene hadn’t experienced before was a fearless, bold and powerful voice that brought to life all these hits – Usha Uthup. Usha gave an interesting jazz and soul feel to disco numbers, givting back to back hits like Shaan se (1980), Hari om hari (1980), Rambha ho (1981), Tu mujhe jaan se bhi pyara hain (1981), Auva Auva (1982) among many others. While the Disco Dancer fever was at its peak, BritishIndian composer Biddu came with Disco Deewane (1981) and Boom Boom (1982), and gave disco a fresh new voice – Pakistani singer, Nazia Hassan. Nazia’s whispery Aap jaisa koi from the 1980 movie Qurbani has been a favourite over generations. In fact, almost all her disco hits in India have been released and re-released as pop and movie

COVER STORY

SHAAN SE…! KEEP ASIDE THE MINIS, WE HAVE OUR VERY OWN USHA UTHUP, WHO DOES THE DISCO LIKE NONE OTHER IN A KANJEEVARAM! AND SHE’S BEEN DOING IT SINCE 1969. THE QUEEN OF DISCO IN INDIA GETS INTO THE GROOVE WITH ADII DANDE

ZEENAT AMAN IN AAP JAISA KOI FROM QURBANI (1980)

COMPOSER BAPPI LAHIRI

DISCO WAS WHAT GAVE INDIAN YOUTH THE MUCHAWAITED DOSE OF LIBERATING WESTERN MUSIC AND A NEVERSEEN-BEFORE FLAMBOYANT FASHION versions over the years; be it the Aap jaisa koi pop video with the then supermodel Madhu Sapre or the most recent Disco Deewane in Karan Johar’s Student of the year in 2012. Pyaar bina chain kahan re... from the 1985 ﬁlm, Saaheb, saw not only a change in the typical disco ambience, but also the score. The neon-ﬂashing dance ﬂoor was replaced by a deserted midnight street and the disco balls and neon lights gave

way to basic street lights. Techno beats and electric guitar made the entire nation dance with Anil Kapoor and Amrita Singh. The 1990s came in with much more than disco and a lot of pop made its way to the Indian music scene. But disco still owned the dance ﬂoor. Biddu came up with his album, Boom Boom – The Biddu Experience in 1995, and brought back Nazia Hassan’s hits like Boom Boom and Disco Deewane. Come 2000s, and it is clear that disco isn’t dying down anytime soon. DJ Aqeel redid the hit Disco 82 from the 1982 movie Khuddar, and got everyone dancing to the beats again. And then there was the rockstar version Dard-edisco in Kaal (2005). But the best tribute to the generation gone by was It’s the time to disco from the 2003 hit Kal ho na ho. Not only did it carry the whole glitzy 70s disco feel, but also Travolta’s famous dance moves. So whether it’s rap, pop, soul, or plain Bollywood music, nothing can drown out the robust disco, with its own unique fashion of big hair, super-ﬂared pants, psychedelic prints and an attitude to match. It sure is Stayin’ Alive!

When and how did the whole disco wave begin? For me, it always existed. I have been singing Boney M and ABBA since 1969. So, be it Rasputin, Rivers of Babylon, Brown Girl in the ring, or Mama Mia, disco and pop have always been a part of me. It came much later in India though. Your name is synonymous with disco. Was it a conscious decision to stick to this genre? I did not make that decision! Bappi Lahiri and RD Burman thought my voice was perfect for songs like Shaan se… or Rambha Ho. I am glad I could do justice to these numbers and of course eternally thankful to them for recognising it in me. Was disco accepted quickly in the Bollywood? Disco music always existed. But yes, the kind of beats and the videos that we can see from back in the day were clearly not like your usual Hindi movie songs. Also, one cannot forget the fact that most of the popular disco songs were part of medium to low-budget movies. Then there were these dancers wearing ﬂashy, skimpy outﬁts, dancing their heart out! It was deﬁnitely looked down upon. Despite that, the songs did go on to create history. No one can forget a single disco number from back then, even today. Was it a bold move for you personally and professionally then, singing for these movies? Some might say that. But I have no complaints. I loved my music, I love all the songs wI have ever sung. I didn’t really care what people said or thought about me as I got fantastic support from my family and love of people who loved my work.

But wasn’t most of the disco music heavily-inspired by Western music? Of course it was and no one’s hiding the fact! But back then, not many were listening to The Buggles to check if Auva Auva sounded like Video killed the radio star or to Neil Sedaka to see how One way ticket sounded like Hari om hari. End of the day, good music is what people like and enjoy, and the success of these songs cannot be marred if one ﬁnds out that they had heavy Western inspirations. And who doesn’t do that anyway? Search for a song on YouTube and you will get a 100 versions and variations and remixes. How much have actors contributed to the success of disco music? Now that’s really something to think about. Did Mithun make Disco Dancer or was it the other way round? However, you certainly cannot deny the contribution. You cannot miss Mithun and Kalpana Iyer when you think about disco. How did disco revolutionalise Indian music? With disco, space drums and the rototom drums were introduced to the Indian music scene. Plus, a lot of bass guitar was used. The music that these create is phenomenal… that in fact is what you remember when you talk of the 1970s and 1980s disco beats.

35 DECEMBER 2014

DESPITE BEING BORN MAGGOTLIKE, FROM THE ROTTEN REMAINS OF THE BIG APPLE, DISCO IS ALL HIGH HEELS AND LUSCIOUS LIPSTICK, SAYS AUTHOR PETER SHAPIRO “Whatever its veneer of elegance and sophistication, disco was born, maggot-like, from the rotten remains of the Big Apple.” Equally, the way we think of disco today has little in common with the way it was viewed in its infancy. Now, we see innocence, fun and inebriation. We laugh at it, and ourselves, as we dance. All of which is ﬁne, yet it is odd to think that it “could only have emerged from the 36 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

dark underground of a society teetering on the brink of collapse,” as Shapiro argues. The fabulous book Disco chronicles the era in great big slabs of garish 1970s colour. Its foreword has this to say: “Music is always indicative of the social climate. So what could the social climate have been that acted as a catalyst for disco music and the clothing, that no designer had previously imagined?” The writer then describes the economic decline of the early 1970s, and the need for inexpensive relief from the drudgery of everyday life. She continues, “I am glad to have been there to witness the result of someone having the brilliant idea of completely changing music entertainment venues by ﬁrst putting in a dance ﬂoor, and then a makeshift booth which was more than occasionally made from a storage closet, convert-ed by cutting off the top half of the door.” This was the birth of the DJ booth, in a club within which the cover charge would be modest, if there was one at all. “I always felt that nothing could be more gratifying for an entertainer than to know that you are the reason that people are out on the ﬂoor not just to dance, but to shake off the worries and tensions of their day.” The author of this foreword? Gloria Gaynor, singer of the most famous and revered disco anthem of all, I Will Survive. To understand disco better, we sought to track her down.

THE GREAT SURVIVOR DCM speaks to Gloria Gaynor by phone from New Jersey. What a voice she has, even now. Deep and velvety, rounded and assertive. It is a slow melt of a voice, and a precious commodity. Although Gaynor has written many songs, it’s through

NEW YORK CITY WAS THE EPICENTRE OF DISCO, WITH CLUBS SUCH AS 2001 ODYSSEY IN BROOKLYN (ABOVE) AND STUDIO 54 IN MANHATTAN (FAR RIGHT) DRAWING STYLISH DANCE-LOVING CROWDS IN THEIR DROVES RIGHT GLORIA GAYNOR PERFORMS ON STAGE, LONDON, 1975

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES

were started by sanitation workers, ﬁremen, police. Murder in New York jumped by 173 percent between 1966 and 1973, and the police themselves were, in a great many cases, corrupt. As another New York Times scribe, David Burnham, wrote, “The fear is visible.” This is where disco started. Without the misery and the pain, you would never have had the music. And this is its great contradiction. “Disco is all shiny, glittery surfaces; high heels and luscious lipstick; jam-packed jeans and cut pecs; lush, soaring, swooping strings and Latin razzamatazz; cocaine rush and Quaalude wobble,” writes Shapiro. While disco saw the height of glamour, decadence and indulgence, he argues, it happened for a reason.

COVER STORY

performing them that she has made her living. Gloria Fowles, to give her the name she started out with, grew up with modest means, the ﬁfth of seven children born to her mother by three men, none of whom stuck around very long. She described her mum as having had more relationships with men than any woman would wish for in a lifetime. And not all of them were wise choices. One molested Gloria when she was 12 years old. It was the second time that she’d been abused by a man. Sadly, it wouldn't be the last. Her childhood home was known as 150 and a half Howard Street in Newark, New Jersey, a Harry Potterish address that stems from the fact her house sat behind number 150, and was only accessed by walking through the middle of it, past the people who lived there. Gaynor lived on the ground ﬂoor of 150 and a half, with other families on the next ﬂoor and in the attic. In her apartment, intended for a family of two, lived eight people, with no bath or shower and no heat. Bathing took place in a tin tub on the kitchen ﬂoor. The kitchen was also where she slept, along with her brother Arthur. It was hardly a childhood of riches but, as she says, it didn’t matter. “Children never mind or even know that they are poor, as long as they are loved, which we certainly were,” she says now. Drifting through childhood, she felt bored, and boring. “I felt that if all the interesting things that had happened to me were written on the head of a pin, there would still be room left for the Gettysburg Address.” But like many people before and since, her life was transformed by music. Holding down jobs at Bambergers Department 37 DECEMBER 2014

DISCO DJS AT A CLUB IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1977

Store and Brown’s Beauty World Shop, she got her break through a combination of luck and ability. She used to sing at a friend’s house where she babysat, and noticed the footsteps above her head stopped when she did so. So began a game she played for four or ﬁve days: stop the footsteps by singing. A few nights later, she and her brother went to a Newark nightclub called The Cadillac, to watch Eddie McClendon and the Pacesetters. To her surprise, during the set, the bandleader called her from the audience on stage, where she sang Save Your Love

JOHN TRAVOLTA’S WHITE SUIT AND WAISTCOAT, WITH HIS STRUTTING POSE, RIGHT HAND POINTING IN THE AIR, PELVIS BACK, CHEST OUT, IS ICONIC EVEN NOW For Me by Nancy Wilson to great applause, and sufficient acclaim that she was asked to join the band. The man whose footsteps she’d been stopping with a song? He was 38 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

the manager of the club, who had spotted her in the crowd. The next few years were a procession of tours, 10pm to 4am sets, unpredictable money, disreputable agents, drummer boyfriends, changing line-ups — and guitarists who doubled as the van driver. She called this the “Chitterlings Circuit”. “It means that you’ve made so little money and been so poor, that all you could afford to eat is hog guts.” If it sounds a romantic, picaresque existence, it wasn’t. One day, at Fudgy’s in Scarsdale, New York, a man was shot in front of Gaynor while she was onstage. Another time, in rural Maryland, in a scene straight out of The Blues Brothers, they turned up with all their disco ﬁnery, to ﬁnd that the clientele only liked country music. The argument over payment escalated, until they were given 20 minutes by the police to leave town. Yet when DCM asks her about this time, she remembers it fondly. “I really feel that it is something that is missed by young artists,” she says, “They make a record today, and tomorrow they are a huge star on stage in front of hundreds and thousands of people.” She sees this instant fame less as an asset, but really as a disability. “I had a chance to hone my craft before I got to that position,” she says. “I got to learn how to actually sing. How to form words so that people understand what I’m singing,” she says. “How to stretch my range, how to work an audience, how to work the stage — and how to appear. All of these things I learned, before anybody could ever call me a star.” Along the way she changed her name to Gloria Gaynor, a name suggested by record executive Johnny Nash, for no other reason than the pleasing alliteration of the double G.

LEFT DONNA SUMMER'S 1979 VINYL SINGLE, "HOT STUFF"

Having started out singing soul and R&B, in 1974 she found success with the song Honey Bee, considered one of the early standards of disco — followed later that year by Never Can Say Goodbye, a Clifton Davis-penned song ﬁrst performed by The Jackson Five. The album that featured these two hits went gold, and was the ﬁrst ever to be made of nonstop programmed dance music. “I guess it was a milestone in the story of the new kind of disco music everyone was going for,” she says. The

years of graft paid off. In 1975, Gaynor was elected Queen of the Discos by the International Association of Discotheques Disc Jockeys, an event which might sound twee today, but led to such crowds when she was crowned at New York’s Club Les Jardins in March 1975, that the police had to rope off the streets. So what does disco mean to her now? “Disco, I thought, was great music in its purest form,” she recalls. “And by that I mean clean lyrics and a great beat — and just good music. It

COVER STORY

THE CASE FOR DISCO AND SO IT COMES DOWN TO THIS. DOES DISCO DESERVE TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY OR NOT? LET THE TRIAL BEGIN. FIRST, THE DEFENSE:

DISCO BALLS They might be the height of cheesiness, but is there any prop that more instantly — and ﬂashily — shouts, “it’s party time”? And we are willing to bet that a third of our readers had their ﬁrst kiss under the twinkly tweeness of a school disco. Fun fact: they were actually invented way back in 1917, and were known as Myriad Reﬂectors

“STAYIN’ ALIVE“ The clue is in the name — this song has literally saved lives. How come? It’s used by CPR classes as a shorthand for how to time chest compressions

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES (MAIN, BEE GEES, DONNA SUMMER RECORD

“GET LUCKY” was great because it is the ﬁrst and only music in history ever to embraced by people of every race, creed, colour, nationality and age group” But why was it so embraced: was it the simplicity of it? “Yeah,” she says. “Just fun music. Everybody has a time in their life, probably every week, when they want to just have fun, just loosen up and enjoy themselves until they have to go back to work on Monday. That’s what the music did.” Along the way, she feels now, disco got bad press.

“The subject matter generally was fun, until people started bringing in all this sex stuff — and started associating drugs with it,” she says. This was in no ways exclusive to the genre. “They sang jazz in opium dens, but nobody associates opium with jazz. For some reason, disco music got associated with half-naked clothing and over-indulgence on drugs and alcohol.” Somewhat bizarrely, disco has its roots in Nazi-occupied Paris in World War Two. Discotheque is a portmanteau of two French words, disque

That summer hit by Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams in 2013? That was a modern funk song with disco blood bubbling in its veins. It was universally loved by critics who declared: “We’ve caught Saturday Night Fever again.” And yes, that is disco legend Nile Rodgers from Chic playing guitar. he also co-wrote the track

YOU SHOULD BE DANCING, YEAH It's tempting to relegate disco dance moves to the single, sweaty pointed ﬁnger of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, but nothing could be further from the truth. From "the Hustle" to "the Funky Chicken" and "the Bus Stop", there's a medley of dance moves for all levels of skill. Rhythmically challenged? Try The Bump, which encourages you to bump into your partner's hip 39 DECEMBER 2014

for record and bibliotheque for library. But ultimately, the genre we know came of age in New York. Disco historians (yes, they exist), credit a few DJs with getting the genre underway. One is Francis Grasso, who according to Shapiro, “Set in motion the notion that a good DJ was a gifted musician in his or her own right, and that a turntable and a mixer were his or her instruments.”

DISCO'S BEGINNINGS Grasso is generally credited as being the ﬁrst DJ to beat mix, sonically overlapping two records so that their drum beats are synchronized, and to use the slip-cueing technique, whereby one record, about to be cued, is held in place while the turntable underneath spins, so that the record can be started exactly when the DJ wants.

PHOTO GETTY IMAGES (MAIN)

DISCO IS A BLACK MOVEMENT AND A GAY MOVEMENT, AND A SOURCE OF CONSIDERABLE PRIDE TO BOTH COMMUNITIES Another key ﬁgure was Nicky Siano. “If Francis Grasso was the Chuck Berry of the turntables, Siano was the Jimi Hendrix,” writes Shapiro. In dextrous fashion, Siano would play on three turntables, while controlling the club’s lights with foot pedals; and is credited with the ﬁrst use of vari-speed turntables in club DJing. Other crucial developments included the 12-inch single, which was easier for DJs to handle, and 40 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

wore out less quickly than a 45-inch; and the use of sub-bass. Up until 1976, bass tones below a frequency of 60 hertz were taken out in the process of mastering a record, yet the band Chic decided they should be kept in, because of the impact that exceptionally deep bass had in dance clubs. Their record Dance, Dance, Dance was the ﬁrst to feature such sub-bass tones. In disco, the musicians who recorded the tracks were just a starting point to the experience. Increasingly, the DJ became equally important, then in turn the sound system and the crowd. “The almost symbiotic relationship between crowd and DJ became one of the hallmarks of disco,” notes Shapiro. The result was a heady concoction of sweaty bodies, intoxication and thumping music, which he writes “all conspired to create a heated sense of newness, a sense that nothing existed outside that room.” There were several musical ﬂourishes that we associate with disco: the thumping bass, the up-tempo drum beats (more often than not punctuated by computerized handclaps), the soaring, hyperactive strings, the overthe-top vocals — the hissing open hi-hat cymbals that one still hears in dance music today. Alongside these technical dimensions were the human ones — and a variety of social movements around race and sexuality. Disco is, through its background, a black movement, and also a gay movement, and it would become a source of considerable pride and unity to both communities. It’s also true to say that although disco lyrics were frequently ridiculous, many of them also had something

COVER STORY

ACTRESS AND SINGER GRACE JONES SMILES WHILE PARTYING AT NIGHTCLUB STUDIO 54 IN NEW YORK IN 1978

to say. There is something primal and powerful about Sister Sledge proclaiming: We Are Family. And consider Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now, a disco staple recorded by McFadden & Whitehead. While on the face of it, the track feels as cheesy as any, a closer listen betrays a strong well of resistance. “If you’ve ever been held down before / I know you refuse to be held down anymore.” The Billboard writer Radcliffe Joe wrote in the mid-1970s, “Disco, unlike many other entertainment mediums, has exhibited an extraordinary ability to bring together people of varying colours, races, ideologies, sexual preferences and social ﬁnancial levels, in an ecumenical dialogue of music and dance which transcends the limitations of petty prejudices.” One of the principle interviewees in Shapiro’s book is Nile Rodgers, the legendary guitarist, best remembered for founding the band Chic. He recalls that their biggest hit, Le Freak, which sold seven million copies and was for many years the biggest selling single in Warner Music Group’s history, came about because he and co-founder Bernard Edwards were refused entry to a nightclub one New Years Eve, went home, got drunk and set about shouting “F…k off”, set to funky music, later sobering up and realising they had accidentally written a really good song. The refrain was softened to “Freak off”, and evolved to Freak out. A huge hit record had been born, almost by mistake. Rodgers is a great believer that disco mattered, and was politically relevant. He places the music in context, besides the Black Panthers organisation, and the wider Black Power movement.

THE CASE AGAINST DISCO PLATFORM SHOES Flashy, garish, dangerous, and frequently worn by both men and women, we can only guess how many twisted ankles they were responsible for on the dangerous danceﬂoor

DISCO STU Possibly the most one-note and pointless character The Simpsons ever introduced, he also wore water-ﬁlled platform shoes (containing two long-dead goldﬁsh). but hey, at least in researching this story we found out disco stu's full name: discotheque stuart.

ALL STYLE, NO SUBSTANCE? Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of the New Wave rock band, was one of many musicians who fought against disco. IN an age before political correctness, He compared the genre to “a beautiful woman with a great body and no brains”

XANADU You’ve heard of the Golden Raspberry Awards, which “honour” the worst movies of the year? Their creation can be traced back to a single movie —1980’s Xanadu, a roller disco romantic musical starring Olivia NewtonJohn. One reviewer summed up the trainwreck of a ﬁlm by sighing, “In a word: Xana-don’t.”

THE VERDICT LOVE TO LOVE YOU BABY sure, Your brain can hate the glitz, the apparent emptiness, the fashion that has dated beyond belief…until you put on chic's Le Freak. and then suddenly your brain stops caring and your hips start daring. For bringing millions of frumpy, wouldbe non-dancers to the danceﬂoor — particularly at weddings — we will always be very grateful. Thanks, disco! 41 DECEMBER 2014

PHOTOS CORBIS (MAIN); EVERETT/TPG/CLICK PHOTOS (SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER)

THE HIGH POINT OF DISCO’S EXPOSURE WAS THE MOVIE SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, STARRING JOHN TRAVOLTA (FAR RIGHT) WITH THE ICONIC SOUNDTRACK FROM THE BEE GEES. FOR MANY, DISCO'S LOW POINT WAS THE VILLAGE PEOPLE'S "STALE BEATS" AND "COMPLETE LACK OF SUBTLETY" ACCORDING TO MUSIC CRITIC PETER SHAPIRO

Disco, he argues, came about as a sense of celebration that all of these protest groups — gay power and women’s liberation alongside them, plus the end of the Vietnam War — had won. “We were all out there protesting together,” he said. The end of the Vietnam War, he notes, “masqueraded as liberation for everybody. So what happens? You celebrate. And that’s all that happened. In the middle Seventies, we started celebrating.” “The dance ﬂoor is nothing if not communal, and this group body was a polymorphous, polyracial, polysexual mass affirming its bonds in a space that was out of reach of the tentacles of the church, state or family,” writes Shapiro. Before

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long, it was also everywhere. Disco music was played during the inaugural ball for President Jimmy Carter in January 1977, surely the only inauguration to feature two disco dancers in peanut costumes. In New York, some discos began to open at lunchtime, to allow workers a boogie in their lunchbreak. And there were disco breakfast clubs, for people who’d danced through the night to keep the beat alive.

BEEN KICKED AROUND The high point of disco’s exposure was likely the movie Saturday Night Fever, a ﬁlm which illustrates the tension between disco’s earthy roots and the sense of ﬂamboyance it came to embody. Just try wearing the disco outﬁt that

John Travolta’s character Tony Manero wears in that movie — white suit and waistcoat over a black shirt with vast collars. It’s best remembered in combination with Travolta’s strutting pose, right hand pointing high in the air, pelvis back, chest out. We’re not ashamed to admit, DCM tried it on recently. Wandering around in a suit like that, it suddenly feels good to be ridiculous. You strike poses on the danceﬂoor with self-deprecating irony, sure, but you step out of yourself that bit more, aided by the now iconic Bee Gees soundtrack, whose high falsetto voices add to the brief throwaway thrill of it all. But what everybody forgets is that Saturday Night Fever

is also a gritty, sometimes downright nasty ﬁlm. There are gang ﬁghts in the movie. There are numerous layers of racism. A woman is raped. Manero’s friend, alienated and depressed, falls to his death from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Nile Rodgers, in the same interview quoted earlier, says of the soundtrack: “It’s easy to say it’s superﬂuous because it’s disco, but that’s just not true. Those songs are powerful: they tell a story.” Yet today, few seem to remember this. No doubt its popularity is partly to blame: by the end of 1978, the soundtrack sold 30 million copies and had become the biggest-selling record of all time. Even disco purists were uneasy about the movie. For a

COVER STORY

start, it was all actually based on a lie: an article called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night published in a New

JOHN TRAVOLTA’S MOVES FROM STAYIN’ ALIVE BECAME QUITE A RAGE. BUT FEW KNOW THAT THIS DANCE WASN’T DISCO. IT IS NORTHERN SOUL ASSOCIATED WITH THE INDUSTRIAL NORTH OF ENGLAND York magazine in June 1976 by a newly-arrived British journalist called Nik Cohn, who later admitted the whole thing was fabricated, and based on a friend's experience in Britain. Moreover, the dancing actually wasn’t disco, it was Northern Soul, a whole separate genre associated with the industrial north of England. Northern Soul spoke more about the individualist moves that Travolta characterised in the movie. Disco, instead, was more communal — a huge body of people moving together. As disco became vastly inﬂuential, in doing so, it began to implode. By the late 1970s, roller disco had arrived, with its own particular uniform of boob tubes and hot pants, legwarmers and glowsticks, along with a host of unspeakably dismal roller disco movies. The craze was swiftly followed by the Village People.

By this point in his book, Shapiro is entertainingly angry. “There was no aspect of disco culture that was more ludicrous than roller disco,” he writes. “Inevitably, many of disco’s early devotees hated roller disco and everything that it represented.” If roller disco was the genre’s embarrassing cousin, the Village People represented its death-knell, he says. “The Village People represented everything naff about disco: the stale beats seemingly phoned in by studio hacks, the dunderheaded English-as-a-foreign language lyrics, the complete lack of subtlety, all delivered by guys wearing a Native American headdress and a loin cloth, a construction worker’s uniform and leather biker gear.” The Village People, Shapiro points out, were loathed by the gay community they might be mistaken to represent. Instead, he says, they got most of their play at aerobics classes for senior citizens, barbecues thrown by car mechanics, and in children’s playgroups. Soon, saturated and very distant from its roots, disco had become tedious and a long way from cool. By the end of the 1970s, writes Shapiro, the music felt very different. “Disco wasn’t getting swept off your feet by John Travolta. It was hearing YMCA six times in one night at the Rainbow Room of the Holiday Inn in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, while doing line dances with a bunch of travelling salesmen. Outside of its original contexts, disco was anything but what it promised, and it was this stupefying mundanity that ﬁnally punctured disco’s veneer of splendour and dazzle.” An unlikely document of the time is the 1980 classic movie Airplane! There is a scene where a city skyline is shown with a radio tower and a neon-lit call sign. A DJ voiceover is heard: “WZAZ

in Chicago, where disco lives forever!” Then the plane cuts the tower in half with its wing and the voiceover goes silent. In those days, you just knew the audience was rooting for the plane. Before long, scenes like the mass demolition in Chicago were almost commonplace. A group called DREAD (Detroit Rockers Engaged in the Abolition of Disco) was created.Members had to swear to never wear platform shoes. Their logo was a meat cleaver smashing a record, with the inscription “Saturday Night Cleaver” below it. “Shoot the Bee Gees” T-shirts did a roaring trade. Like all movements, disco had come to its natural end just as punk in Britain and the beginnings of hip hop in the US began to offer something newer and more dangerous. What was now the sanitized idiocy of disco quickly faded out. It was over.

AFTER THE FLOOD Gaynor’s disco career lasted for some years after I Will Survive. And in order for it do so, disco had to so some surviving too. Gaynor has her theories as to the culprits. “It was middle America saying I don’t want my children associated with this stuff — so let’s kill it.” It is argued that new movements such as punk

thrived as an alternative to the political apathy inherent in disco, since disco’s lyrics weren’t widely associated with social complaint, or pretty much anything besides an amorphous sense of freedom and fun. “Lost in Music”, as the song had it. Not surprisingly, Gaynor’s disco albums released in 1980 and 1981 sank without a trace. But she had one major hit song to come: I Am What I Am in 1983. It was arguably disco’s last rallying call, until its revivals decades later. But it had been good while it lasted, and Gaynor remains adamant that disco never died, nor ever deserved its bad press. “Music is like money,” she says. “It takes on the character of the person who’s using it. You can’t blame money for murder, just because somebody, for love of money, wants to kill somebody,” she reasons. “And you can’t blame any of that drugs and alcohol stuff on disco.” But how did it feel, for those few great years, to be, as they used to call her, the Queen of Disco? “It felt great to me, because I’m only thinking of the purity of the music, and how it helps people to have fun and release tension. That’s all I was ever thinking about.”

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I WILL THE SONG I WILL SURVIVE RECEIVED THE GRAMMY AWARD FOR BEST DISCO RECORDING IN 1980. IT WAS THE FIRST AND LAST TIME THAT THE CATEGORY APPEARED AT THE AWARDS

IT IS AN E MAJOR 7TH THAT KICKS IT ALL OFF: A HAMMERED E BASS WITH THE LEFT HAND, AND THEN A DEXTEROUS TRILL UP AND DOWN THE KEYBOARD WITH THE RIGHT. IT IS AT ONCE DELICATE, FOREBODING AND A LITTLE BIT FLIRTY. 44 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

COVER STORY

PHOTO FOTOS INTERNATIONAL/REX FEATURES (CLICK PHOTOS)

SURVIVE More than that, it’s a signal. Whether it’s at a wedding, while you’re driving, or in your own home. To some, it’s a signal to celebrate identity or faith. But however you interpret it, you almost certainly will know the introduction to I Will Survive. “At ﬁrst I was afraid I was petriﬁed. Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side. But then I spent so many nights thinking how you did me wrong. And I grew strong — and I learned how to get along.” Gloria Gaynor has been recording music for 40 years. She's had multiple hits all over the world and has performed in 75 countries, from Buckingham Palace to the Pyramids. She’s recorded disco, gospel, rhythm and blues: yet mention her name, and that’s the song most will instantly recall. It is a remarkable journey for a record that began as a B-side. One of Gaynor’s onstage tricks used to involve her cracking a microphone cable like a whip. One of her backing

singers would then grab it, and the two would feign a tug of war — through which Gaynor would be pulled back towards centre stage. One day in March 1978, the other singer didn’t grasp the cable, sending Gaynor crashing backwards over a monitor. She carried on, only to wake the next morning unable to move, and spending two weeks in traction. Two weeks later, she was in even worse shape, spending the next three months in hospital with a spinal surgery. The incident had two impacts. One was that it rekindled her faith. The other was, while in this frame of mind, wounded and listening to people tell her she was ﬁnished, a writer called Dino Fekaris came to her with a song written by him and producer Freddy Perren. When Fekaris came to the studio for the ﬁrst time, he’d forgotten to bring the song with him, so Gaynor’s ﬁrst viewing of I Will Survive was scrawled on a brown paper bag. “When I ﬁrst heard the song I believed, and I do believe, that it was an answer to a prayer,” she remembers. “At the time, the record company had said they were not going to renew my contract. I had fallen onstage, and woken up the next morning paralysed from the waist down. And I was in hospital praying and asking God, ‘what’s going to happen to me to me? Where do I go from here? I was asking for guidance, strategy, instruction.” When she was called again by the record company, which now boasted a new president, it felt like a sign. That feeling grew

when she ﬂew to Los Angeles to record the song. “When I began to speak to the producers, they talked to me about what sort of songs I liked, what kind of subject matter. And they said, ‘We believe you are the one we have been waiting for to record this song we wrote a couple of years ago.’” It is scarcely believable now that I Will Survive started as the ﬂipside to a track called Substitute. Yet Gaynor felt its potential. ”I really believed the song was going to be a huge hit and it would be popular for as long as the radio would play it,” she says. “I was standing here relating to the song, because of what I was going through, and I thought other people would do the same.” Radio airplay and constant live performance eventually gave the track such a following that Polydor re-published it as a single in 1979. Such is Gaynor’s connection to the song, it’s easy to forget she didn’t write it. I Will Survive was one of a number of hits Ferakis wrote or co-wrote for Motown-era stars including The Temptations, Diana Ross and Curtis Mayﬁeld. Gaynor knows little of the song’s genesis. “I have always thought that Dino had a situation with unrequited love, and him and Freddy wrote the song together, but I honestly don’t know.” What we do know is that I Will Survive was simultaneously the number one song in ﬁve countries at one time, including the USA and the UK. The song, and the

Love Tracks album it appears on, have sold 14 million copies and won a Grammy Award — the track is now certiﬁed multi-platinum in the US, and has been recorded in at least 20 languages.

GLORIA GAYNOR BELIEVED I WILL SURVIVE WAS GOING TO BE A HIT AND POPULAR FOR AS LONG AS THE RADIO WOULD PLAY IT. SHE WAS RELATING TO THE SONG, BECAUSE OF WHAT SHE WAS GOING THROUGH Ever since the track’s appearance in 1978, people have found encouragement from its irrepressible backto-the-wall lyrics. And while the obvious interpretation is that this is a stubborn rebound from lost or unrequited love, it is remarkable what a range of people found inspiration from the disco anthem. In 2013, a book, We Will Survive, compiled accounts by 40 different people, from the mother of an autistic son to an Auschwitz survivor, each explaining what the song still means to them.

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THE PIXEL

PICASS OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH TECHNOLOGY SEEMS LIKE A LOVING BOND. SO WHY IS IT SO TOUGH FOR SOME PEOPLE TO ACCEPT ART MADE WITH MODERN TOOLS? DANIEL SEIFERT GAZES INTO A VOLCANO TO FIND OUT WHAT MAKES DIGITAL ART TICK

PHOTO NILS CLAUSS/ KISU PARK

ART

Over on trading site eBay, a screenshot of a post from controversial website 4Chan is for sale for US$90,900. “Art used to be something to cherish. Now literally anything could be art. This post is art.”

ournalist Esther Honig sends designers from 25 countries the same plain portrait of herself, asking each of them to Photoshop it. Her brief boils down to four words. “Make me look beautiful.” India removes her collarbones. The United States changes her eye colour. The Philippines puts her in a business suit. The published results stir discussion as to what beauty means to different cultures around the world.

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The website Zefrank.com accesses your computer’s microphone and responds to sound by creating brushstrokes. Different volume levels create different angles and intensities of texture. It’s hugely fun, and monstrously difficult to sketch anything that doesn’t look like a very small scorpion throwing up on itself. Especially when your colleagues stare at your experimental coughing, yowling and ﬁnger-snapping. A forum on another website, Deviantart.com, asks the question, “Is digital art cheating?” Incidentally, this question brings up over two million results on Google. One user sarcastically replies, “It’s deﬁnitely cheating, especially with the ‘Make Art’ button in the upcoming Photoshop CS7.” These are just a few recent stories, and a sparse snapshot, from the brave new world of digital art. This evolving and exciting artform is too complex and too endlessly changing

ART

PHOTOS NILS CLAUSS / KISU PARK, UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING

THIS PAGE AND PREVIOUS PAGE DIGITAL ARTWORK FROM THE STUDIO OF UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING, WHICH HAS WORKED WITH DIVERSE ENTITIES INCLUDING MICROSOFT, THE BAND COLDPLAY AND THE LONDON OLYMPICS

to condense into a few soundbites. Does creativity nowadays boil down to a few dry, quiet clicks of the mouse on Photoshop? To understand digital art, we’ve got to go deeper, and walk amongst the pixels. Or hey, what the heck — let’s start by dangling above a river of molten steel in South Korea.

REAL STEEL Matt Pyke likes to think out of the box, to use a well-worn cliché. Which is why his studio, Universal Everything, has worked on projects with some

pretty major brands, including Microsoft, MTV and the Olympics. The studio pimped out a mirrored room with pixel spheres and LED animations, “creating an endless digital landscape” for Microsoft. It designed an audiovisual app tied to Radiohead’s album The King of Limbs. There was a colour-soaked, childishly awesome series of ads for MTV; stadium visuals for Coldplay’s 2012 world tour; and the launch event for the London Olympics. So when the studio was approached by the vice-

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chairman of Hyundai Motor Group to visualise their innovative approach to engineering, Pyke wanted to do something special. The team took a week-long tour around South Korea’s shipyards, wind tunnels, crash test labs and test tracks. It was at the sun-like heat of a steel foundry that the team found inspiration for one of their 18 large-scale works of video art.

IN THE FINE ART CIRCLES, COLLECTORS HAVE BEEN RELUCTANT TO PURCHASE DIGITAL ART. THEY ASK, HOW DOES ONE BUY ARTWORK THAT SOMEONE HAS ALREADY DISTRIBUTED FOR FREE ONLINE?

hasn’t been before,” Matt tells Discovery Channel Magazine. And so, “violating every health and safety code in the book.” Pyke’s team got permission to hang a camera above a river of molten steel that cuts through the factory. Given that steel melts at around 1,400 degrees Celsius, wasn’t there a risk that the camera, which could shoot at 1,000 frames per second, would liquidise like a marshmallow in a campﬁre? Not when you have obviously measured the distances carefully. And even high-tech cameras that can shoot in Hollywood 4K resolution aren’t that expensive anymore. “The cost means that you can take a bit more risk, because the camera’s not US$100,000 or whatever,” he muses in soft English tones. At any rate the results, digitally animated into wallsized screens 24 metres wide, are stunning. A tidal wave of boiling gold, like a bottled supernova, roils around the screen so realistically it’s frightening. It was a view that had never really been seen before, says Pyke. “It was almost painful that you could see the details of molten metal, with ﬂakes drifting off it. It was like looking into a volcano.” And a volcano that puts James Cameron movies to shame. It took 270 computers rendering in parallel to create

1990

ADOBE PHOTOSHOP 1.0 IS RELEASED, THE FORERUNNER OF PROGRAMMES THAT TODAY LET YOU EDIT OUT YOUR DOUBLE CHIN (OR GIVE YOUR MOTHER-INLAW A TRIPLE CHIN)

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2013

YOU CAN HAVE A PLAY WITH THE 1990 VERSION YOURSELF. LAST YEAR ADOBE RELEASED THE SOURCE CODE FOR THE RETRO PROGRAMME—ALL 128,000 LINES OF SOURCE CODE OF IT

PHOTOS NILS CLAUSS / KISU PARK, UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING

JIGGLE WITH MONET The Magic Tate Ball, a deceptively simple app linked to the Tate Modern museum in London, brings masterpieces to you. Shake your phone, and it will use your device to “What we wanted to present you with a relevant creation. Based do rather than just depict on the time of day, ambient noise, date, the steelworks in a clichéd your GPS location and the weather, you'll way the audience would be receive an artwork that ﬁts your current familiar with, was to take surroundings. So start shaking next to a the camera somewhere it noisy building site, and a sculpture by Georg Baselitz might pop up — hewn from a growling chainsaw. Each shake also brings up a related, bite-sized fact. Best of all? The app is free. QUANTUM OF CREATIVITY DIGITAL ARTS IN NUMBERS

1967

ARTISTS BILLY KLUVER AND ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG CREATE A FORMAL ENTITY TO “DEVELOP AN EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND THE ENGINEER.” DUBBED EXPERIMENTS IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY (EAT), IT INVOLVES THINKERS SUCH AS ANDY WARHOL, JOHN CAGE AND JASPER JOHNS

ART

A TOTAL OF 270 COMPUTERS WERE USED TO RENDER THIS COMMISSIONED DIGITAL ARTWORK OF MELTING STEEL FOR THE HYUNDAI MOTOR GROUP IN SOUTH KOREA

10,000,000

IT’S THOUGHT THAT ABOUT 10 MILLION UNITS OF SMART WATCHES, FITNESS BANDS AND WATCHES WILL BE SOLD IN 2014. BY 2018, OVER TEN TIMES THAT AMOUNT OF WEARABLE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IS EXPECTED TO BE SHIPPED

US$6

IN 2008, DESPITE BEING IN HIS SEVENTIES AND ALREADY FAMOUS, DAVID HOCKNEY STARTED DRAWING ON HIS IPHONE, AND LATER AN IPAD, USING A US$6 APP CALLED BRUSHES. “WHO WOULDN’T WANT [AN IPAD]?” HE TOLD PRESS. “PICASSO OR VAN GOGH WOULD HAVE SNAPPED ONE UP.” HE ADDED, “WHAT IS ALSO UNIQUE IS THAT WITH THE IPAD YOU CAN ACTUALLY WATCH A PLAYBACK OF YOUR DRAWING. I HAVE NEVER WATCHED MYSELF ACTUALLY DRAWING BEFORE”

Contd on pg52

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the CGI steel. Hence why the end result is so clear, says Pyke, you can stand with your nose touching the screen and you’d still see the same level of detail.

ART IS MADE FROM THE MUD OF RIVERS TOO. BITS, BYTES, AND BINARY ARE TODAY’S MUD, JUST LIKE THE POLAROID CAMERA WAS ANDY WARHOL’S, OR CHARCOAL WAS THE MUD OF CAVEMEN EMBRACE THE COMPUTER Technological power is, of course, at the heart of the digital art movement. And as computers develop, it has made artistic expression easier than ever. It’s a far cry from the old days. ENIAC, or the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the ﬁrst electronic computer. It was designed during World War II, and boy does it look ancient to our modern eyes. Made up of over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200

crystal diodes and ﬁve million hand-soldered joints, this room-sized beast was huge. If you bal-anced the 25 tonne tool on 15 king-sized beds, it wouldn’t ﬁt. And yet Harry Reid, the computer scientist who worked with ENIAC, recalled that it was “strangely, a very personal computer. Now we think of a personal computer as one that you carry around with you. The ENIAC was actually one that you kind of lived inside.” You didn’t hold a computer, Reid sighed. “The computer held you.” It’s a weirdly sweet, telling quote, and one that brings up a contradiction. We are more surrounded, invested and connected to digital technology than ever. Yet the smaller it gets, the less we examine what it means to us. This is strange, a Guardian article exploring digital art notes, given the tech hasn’t become smaller per se. It’s just that the framework is hiding from us. The huge satellites that power our GPS, miles above our heads. The server farms that power “the cloud”. The 270 computers that allow us to ogle the ﬂowing forms of Pyke’s Korean steel. The digital “shapes our culture at every level,” says the article’s author James Briddle. Given that we now live in a digital landscape, why shouldn’t our art reﬂect this? The artist, designer, inventor and lecturer Rich Gold felt

QUANTUM OF CREATIVITY DIGITAL ARTS IN NUMBERS

250 TERABYTES

TOP FIVE

AMOUNT OF STORAGE SPACE REQUIRED TO CREATE THE 2013 CG ANIMATED MOVIE THE CROODS. DREAMWORKS SAYS IT REQUIRED 80 MILLION COMPUTING HOURS TO RENDER, THE LONGEST OF ANY OF ITS FILMS TO DATE. BETWEEN 300 AND 400 ANIMATORS WORKED ON THE FILM, WHICH IS CRAMMED WITH 250 BILLION PIXELS. EACH CHARACTER TOOK SIX MONTHS TO CRAFT

VIDEOGAMES ARE INCREASINGLY BEING JUDGED AS AESTHETIC, ARTIST PRODUCTS AND NOT JUST ENTERTAINMENT. TITLES AND SERIES WHOSE LANDSCAPES ARE REGULARLY VOTED AS THE MOST BEAUTIFULLY RENDERED INCLUDE: BIOSHOCK, ASSASSIN’S CREED, SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS, ICO AND SKYRIM (WHAT, NO TETRIS?)

52 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

ART

WALK THE WALK

MATT PYKE, THE FOUNDER OF DIGITAL ART STUDIO, UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING, DISCUSSES GRAFFITI, HOSPITALS AND DAMN LOADING BARS

the ﬁlm. So still even now with the speed of technology, we are always having to wait for the progress bar as it renders!

We love your video Walking City, where a trundling human form morphs into different architectural styles over several minutes. How much time did it take? In terms of the idea and planning, the architectural evolution, that maybe only took two or three weeks to research the different architectural forms, and set up the software to grow and evolve between the different forms. For this it was just a very simple animation loop called a walk cycle, and we used that repetitive walking as the kind of skeleton, then we dressed that skeleton in these different architectural costumes. AS DIGITAL ARTIST MOLLY SODA EXPLAINS, "IT'S BECOMING COMMON TO EXPRESS A SINGLE IDEA ACROSS MANY MEDIA." PICTURED HERE, IS A TIME LAPSE OF IMAGES FROM INTERNET ARTIST PETRA CORTRIGHT'S 23-SECOND WEBCAM VIDEO FILE ARTWORK, RGB, D-LAY

1965

15.2 CM

THE FIRST EXHIBITIONS OF COMPUTER ART ARE HELD IN THIS YEAR; ONE IN NEW YORK, THE OTHER IN GERMANY. BOTH ARE ORGANISED BY SCIENTISTS, AND MOST OF THE SUBMISSIONS ARE FROM SCIENTISTS

AS SMARTPHONES BECOME OUR PRIMARY COMPUTING DEVICES, THEY ARE ALSO INCREASING IN SCREEN SIZE

What was the hardest part? What took the majority of time, and it will always be the brick wall you hit, is the render times. Because we wanted something that was very realistically shaded and had a slow-evolving organic movement to it, that took six to eight weeks to render

SAMSUNG GALAXY S: 10.2 CMS SAMSUNG GALAXY S3: 12.2 SAMSUNG GALAXY S5: 13

You’re working on designing spaces for a hospital accident and emergency deptartment? Digital art is focused on changing not just our environment, but our moods. It’s good to be able to create something that affects people not just for entertainment. The purpose is a few different things. One is to calm children down and distract them so they are more relaxed and it's easier for doctors to administer tests and things like that.

Content, and our attention span, are getting shorter. Is that a real worry? I think it is. The whole thing is about holding people’s attention now. I love that you can get these really simple ideas out there, or a simple image

IPHONE 3GS: 8.9 IPHONE 5: 10.2 IPHONE 6: 11.9

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NOKIA LUMIA 610: 9.4 NOKIA LUMIA 925: 11.4 NOKIA LUMIA 1520: 15.2

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that each generation makes use of the world around them to express themselves. Or, as he was fond of proclaiming: “We make art from the mud of our own river.” Bits, bytes, and binary are today’s mud, just like the Polaroid camera was Andy Warhol’s, or charcoal was the mud of cavemen who painted on walls.

WHY DO MANY STILL DISTRUST DIGITAL ART AS INFERIOR, OR DECEITFUL, WHEN WE SEEM TO HAVE EMBRACED DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN SO MANY OTHER WAYS? Gold’s imagery dovetails with the thoughts of W. Brian Arthur, author of The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How it Evolves. Why do many still distrust digital art as inferior, or deceitful, when we seem to have embraced digital technology in so many other ways? As Arthur says, we have a familiarity with nature that comes with three million years of human evolution. We trust nature. When we happen upon technology, he writes, we experience hope. “But we also immediately ask how natural this technology is. And so we are caught between two deep unconscious forces: our deepest hope as humans lies in technology, but our deepest trust lies in nature.” Traditional art, with its sticky pigments you can run between your ﬁngers, wooden brushes and stone-made 54 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

statues hewn from the ground itself, is nature. But digital art is asking to shift our deepest expression to a new form. At a time many experts still say is the early stage of digital art, we are still very suspicious.

GOING, GOING, GONE Yet that’s changing. Like so many problems in this world, if you can crack the economics side of the equation, you can get the ball rolling. In ﬁne art circles, collectors have been reluctant to purchase digital art because of ownership issues, amongst other things. How, after all, do I "buy" your artwork that you’ve already distributed for free online? Undeterred, Paddle8, an online auction house founded in 2011, last year went ahead with one of the ﬁrst auctions dedicated solely to digital art. At that event, the top lot sold for US$16,000. At this year’s auction, the top lot sold for nearly three times that ﬁgure. This was IMG885 (holographic), a casting compound on a board which mimics the ﬂatness of a digital image, even when seen in person. “Thus it ampliﬁes a dual reality, much like the duality that any physical work encounters when uploaded to a screen based device,” the artist Michael Staniak told press. The digital art movement is clearly snowballing. We asked the auction’s curator, Lindsay Howard, what their events had achieved. “Auctions are a tremendous tool for exposure, and have proven to be an effective way to expand interest in digital work and individual practices,” Howard says. Molly Soda, who featured in one of the auctions, was named alongside big names such as Banksy and Jeff Koons as one of the “Most Important Artists of 2013” by Complex magazine.

CREATIVE ART STUDIO UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING'S EXHIBITION OF PRESENCE, A SERIES OF LIFE-SIZE VIDEO ARTWORKS EXPLORING CHOREOGRAPHY, MOVEMENT AND THE HUMAN FORM

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WALK THE WALK using Instagram which is restricted to a low-res square. But you do kind of lose the depth a bit. Some ideas need more time and space to incubate.

PHOTOS UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING

FLOWERS TO PIXELS We asked folk artist Buffy Sainte-Marie if people are bemused to ﬁnd out a "hippie" is such a proponent for digital art? "They used to be surprised, and sometimes even offended. I made the ﬁrst ever electronic quadraphonic vocal album in the mid-1960s, Illuminations. The folkies didn't get it. Years later WIRED magazine pronounced it one of the 100 records that set the world on ﬁre. Yikes!" When working as an adjunct professor at colleges, she would say to students, "Computers don't 'replace' anything, they're just another really fun tool in the hands of artists."

So shorter isn’t always better? There’s a nice quote somewhere, that watching a one hour lecture or reading a thick book is like collecting pounds. But looking at blog posts and tweets is more like collecting pennies. There’s a much richer experience to going deep into a subject rather than just skimming the surface, like people do now. I think the next big thing is going to be curating that content, so you get a really nice focused stream that’s important to you. It’s pretty overwhelming at the moment, I think. You’ve said you get inspiration from reading New Scientist? There’s been a lot of talk about what’s happening beyond Google Glass. One was this idea of contact lenses which project HD content onto your retina. And that is pretty amazing — rather than building screens that sit in front of you, you might be able to replace what your eyes are seeing with digital contact. And that is pretty crazy — it would truly be virtual reality.

Does your past as a grafﬁti artist reﬂect that? From an early age I was obsessed with drawing and mark-making. The one thing that was interesting about grafﬁti was that it was outside the boundaries of ordinary art, back in the 1990s. So there was complete freedom to invent your own letter forms and colour schemes. Another thing that emerged from it was this balance between abstraction and legibility. In much of our work we use the human form in abstract ways, where you can barely make out the body. Grafﬁti is similar — you’re using this jagged mess of shape and colours, but you can just about make out a word. There’s this little bit of reality shining through. Grafﬁti and digital art would both seem to be very shareable I think that’s what the incredible thing of tech is. Every time there’s a revolution in tech, whether it’s desktop publishing, desktop video or desktop game development — it puts the power from what was the high-end, Hollywood world into kids’ hands. They get to use the same tools. The CGI tools that were used to make Transformers, you can now get on a Mac laptop. It’s a much more powerful equivalent to a spray can when you pick up a laptop or tablet these days.

It seems like new media is about democraticising art. 55 DECEMBER 2014

Soda’s piece, Inbox Full, was a webcam video where the green-haired youngster read aloud messages from strangers in her Tumblr inbox, ranging from “I love you and I think you’re the queen of everything” to “Can you suggest names for my little green snake?” It was eight hours long, and sold for US$1,500, pipped by a GIF that nabbed US$2,000. Both buyers walked home with USB drives of the ﬁles. In a later interview, Soda noted that her sale might befuddle many. “I think a lot of people have issues making money off the work, because it’s not a physical thing. It’s like, ‘You’re not an artist. Where is your painting?’” So what is Howard’s take on the issue of digital copies of online work devaluing pieces? A GIF is a GIF, after all. But as she argues, unique objects are becoming less important nowadays. Artists are exploring expanded, conceptual practices. “It’s becoming common to express a single idea across many different mediums, including

IS DIGITAL ART CHEATING? THE QUESTION GETS OVER 2 MILLION RESULTS ON GOOGLE! SOME SAY YES, GIVEN WITH THE ‘MAKE ART’ BUTTON IN THE UPCOMING PHOTOSHOPCS7 sculptures, websites, social media, videos, paintings and performances.” In the future, she says, “these works will generate value through their interconnectedness.” 56 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

THE EYES HAVE IT Staniak’s holographic piece brings up an interesting point — what is the difference between viewing an artwork on a screen versus in person? The vast majority of us have seen the Mona Lisa. Not in person, but in hi-res on a screen. Are our eyes perceiving an inherently altered image? We asked George Mather, a professor of Vision Science at Lincoln University. There are three signiﬁcant differences, he explains. An obvious one is that when viewing a digital scan, we don’t have a way to gain a visual impression of the actual size of the artwork. As Mather cautions, “actual size can potentially make a very signiﬁcant difference to the viewer’s experience.” Large works can evoke a sense of wonder, he says. We become awed by the sheer scale. Small works “can impress with their intimacy and jewellike detail.” These elements are lost when vieiwing a digital image —though not in the case of a project like Pyke’s ﬂowing steel. Another difference: monitors still can’t deal with ﬁne details when we zoom in on a small part of the image. The “live” viewing of a pointillist artwork, where images are made up of thousands of dots, “may

depend on dual responses to the colour separation of the dots as well as to the blended colours of many dots.” We take in both images at the same time, and this is not something which is possible on a digital version. Finally, says Mather, digital reproductions can “interfere with the colour and lightness properties in unpredictable ways”. Nor do they allow us to pick up the textured quality of the paint, sometimes thrown thickly onto the canvas, casting ﬁne shadows. There have been numerous recent studies suggesting we take in information differently whether we read on an e-device, or with a physical book. “Deep reading” and comprehension is hampered by digital devices, scientists say. Might the same apply to aesthetics, when we view digital art? There have not been any studies on this speciﬁc issue, but Mather thinks “there may well be something in this”, as distinct from the three differences he details above. It may “relate to our awareness of the work as a physical objects, its physicality and ‘presence’” of the paper or canvas itself. Such issues are interesting to ponder — more and more of the world, after all, is becoming a screen that we can interact with, from smartwatches to much larger surfaces like the sides of buildings. At present, the average person spends about eight to nine hours a day looking at a monitor — a ﬁgure that is likely to increase. But a far more interesting point is this. Digital art is allowing us to experience the world in even kookier ways than ever before. And interactivity is a key part of that. London’s Barbican Centre, a performing arts space in the heart of the English capital, recently

ART

THE "PRESENCE" SERIES OF ARTWORKS ARE A RESULT OF A COLLABORATION BETWEEN UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING AND CHOREOGRPAHER BENJAMIN MILLEPIED. USING MOTIONTRACKING TECHNOLOGY, DANCERS’ MOVEMENTS WERE CAPTURED AS THEY PERFORMED CHOREOGRAPHED RESPONSES TO MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS OF VARYING INTENSITY OPPOSITE FOLK MUSICIAN TURNED DIGITAL ARTIST BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE

ﬁnished its exhibition "Digital Revolution". Visitors could enter the space and encounter The Treachery of Sanctuary, a modern take on shadow puppetry. It grew from hacking the Kinect, Microsoft’s hands-free gaming console. Standing before three screens, your body is silhouetted onto the surface. Your movements trigger your form to burst into a ﬂock of yowling birds, which then swoop down and eat you before you are reborn as an eagle. It’s like a three-act play you direct yourself. Sure, Treachery can be about rebirth, bodily form, man versus nature — but it’s also playtime and dreamtime mixed into one. More importantly, it puts you in the driver’s seat. Art is no longer one-way, but more experiential than ever. Even creepy interactive cyber pieces are tongue-incheek. Like AGNES, an online spambot personality found at the Serpentine Gallery site. She manifests as an upbeat, chirpy female voice. At ﬁrst she comes across as friendly, but then she starts to ask for more and more personal information, coldly asking whether you have children, and why. Then she asks you to type in data for her to collect, like the name of your mother, your “greatest childhood enemy” and “someone you wanted to kiss but never did.” The whole site, drenched with typical internet fodder like cute cats, is of course a political commentary on the information we choose to share online. It's humorous and discomforting at the same time.

ALICE IN LEGOLAND Buffy Sainte-Marie knows both the feeling of being monitored, and of playing in a new world. The American57 DECEMBER 2014

DIGITAL ART DOES NOT REPLACE WET PAINT ANY MORE THAN OIL PAINTING REPLACES PENCIL ART; OR DIGITAL MUSIC REPLACES GUITARS Not that it stopped her. Sainte-Marie continued to ﬂourish as a folk artist, even as she became one of the ﬁrst people to enter the digital art world. She started with a 128k Macintosh in 1984, playing around with MacPaint. Soon she upgraded to 512k, “and felt like queen of the world,” she laughs. “I loved it like a puppy.” She compares the freeform experience of painting here as like playing with Lego for the ﬁrst time: “Fascination, surprises, no need of a teacher, no idea what you might get, imagination off the leash. Delicious. I didn’t know what I was doing or if there were any rules, and I loved it. Still do.” 58 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

Nowadays, of course, she’s upgraded from the tiny nineinch monitor of 1984, but even now she speaks of the dated technology with fondness. Sure, MacPaint was black and white, and like Lego, very angular. But when did that ever stop a kid from having fun, she asks. Who cares that her lines didn’t look smooth, like an oil painting? That was the whole point. Her self-portrait Hands: The Coming of the Digital Age, is a case in point. She snapped a photo of a still from a video, then traced it in pencil and paper — already a broad mix of technologies there. This was in the early 1990s when Sainte-Marie was in England recording her CD, Coincidence and Likely Stories. “It was the very ﬁrst album to use the Internet for delivering music ﬁles for an album, back and forth between my studio in Hawaii and London,” she says. Next, Sainte-Marie brought the tracing home and scanned it into her Macintosh Quadra 840 AV. They didn’t have layers then, she says nostalgically, and she was working in black and white. Then colour programmes and monitors came along, so she played with Hands again in different shades. She printed it out, painted on it some more in her physical or “wet studio”, and kept scanning it back in and out. “I really loved — as opposed to resisted — the pixelation of some of my images. Remember, I could already make real oil paintings, so I wasn't trying to fake that effect in my computer, or disguise the fact that mine were digital. I had no shame.” What’s striking about Sainte-Marie’s example here is what most digital artists already know. Computerised, real world, or somewhere in

PHOTOS NILS CLAUSS / KISU PARK (UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING)

Canadian, who has Cree Native American ancestry, started as a musician at the height of the Flower Power era, and quickly gained fame. You’ll have heard her songs, amongst other places, on the soundtrack to the ﬁlm An Officer and a Gentleman. She co-wrote the track, “Up Where We Belong”, which received the Academy Award for Best Song in 1982. But her anti-war, pro-tribal lyrics also put her on the wrong side of the White House. President Nixon placed her on a creative blacklist, making it harder for her to ﬁnd airtime.

IN ITS DESIRE TO UNCOVER ENTIRELY NEW FORMS AND AESTHETIC IDEAS, UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING OFTEN WORKS WITH CUTTING-EDGE TECHNOLOGY LIKE MOTION CAPTURE, GENERATIVE SOFTWARE, AND LARGE-FORMAT SCREENS AND PROJECTIONS TO EXPERIMENT WITH NEW CREATIVE EXPRESSIONS

ART

between, art is art. “Digital art does not replace wet paint any more than oil painting replaces pencil art; or digital music replaces guitars and vocals. The art happens in the artist and the process, regardless of the tools.” Sure, devices are letting more people than ever create and share imaginative works. But aren’t artists afraid that in such a crowded sphere, it gets harder for a piece to shine? Isn’t it trickier to create the next Mona Lisa when we can simply click through to a million images of Mona Lisa each day online? “I hope so!” Sainte-Marie ﬁres back instantly. “That’s progress. I’m thrilled and fulﬁlled to have imagined this day, when everybody can make and share art.” As for making your creative work speak for itself, great work shines no matter what, she says. “Chuck Berry’s music never became no good just because The Beatles came along.”

RAINBOW 2099 You only have to skim a few articles on your ever-more powerful handheld device to realise something. Digital art is riding on the back of a crazily fast rollercoaster of technological development. Wearable tech, stretchy screens and perfect 3D projection are just some of the toys that artists are playing around with. That speed of development can affect artists in unexpected ways. Matt Pyke shares that in terms of ﬁle storage of Universal Everything’s archived projects, even work they did just ﬁve years ago is unreadable now. “The hard drives are too outdated, or they have deteriorated.” It reminds him of how he moved house recently. Years ago, when he did more print design, he moved house

with books, magazines and record sleeves stuffed under his arms. “This time I just carried a terabyte hard drive with me, with my life’s work on it. Bit sad really,” he chuckles. We break out in sympathetic sweats, possibly because our Mac lost power the day DCM spoke to Pyke. Surely he must have guarded that hard drive with his life? “Haha, yeah! But it’s crazy, eh? That’s what you hand down to your grandchildren.” Speaking of developing technology, Pyke ponders some pieces the studio crafted a while back using 3D printing. “And I’m sure those objects we printed will outlast me, as I die and deteriorate into the earth again,” he says with a small smile. “So there’s a question: how to create some pieces that outlast you? I think that’s an interesting dilemma.” These morbid thoughts make us think, for some reason, of sci-ﬁ movies like THX 1138 or 2001: A Space Odyssey. The cliché seems to be that in the future, the world will be a bland, white space of such Zenlike calm we will become emotionally neutered. Universal Everything seems determined to create the polar opposite: a world ﬁlled with swirls and uploaded doodles that dance across a screen. After all, he’s previously said that people don’t want every screen around you shouting at you to buy something, right? Absolutely, says Pyke. Now with intelligent lighting, or smart screen surfaces, the sky is the limit. You can create moments of wonder, reﬂection and emotion. “There will be an opportunity to ﬁll the world with colour and light in the future.” 59 DECEMBER 2014

PHOTO CHEF ABHIJIT SAHA, CAPERBERRY AND SAHA

CHEERS TO CRYO MARGARITA! CRYO MARGARITA

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

SPHERES THAT BURST IN YOUR MOUTH TO OFFER INTENSE POPS OF FLAVOUR. CUNNINGLY CREATED FOOD THAT LOOKS LIKE IT IS ONE THING BUT IS ACTUALLY SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT. DISHES WHERE YOU TASTE MULTIPLE FLAVOURS IN A PLANNED SEQUENCE. ONES THAT INCORPORATE AROMAS AND SOUNDS OR TEXTURES. IT’S CLEVER CUISINE. IT IS MOLECULAR COOKING THAT INCORPORATES SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGICAL TOOLS FOR EVER NEWER AND MORE EXCITING EXPERIENCES. PRIYA PATHIYAN EXPLORES HOW…

PHOTO DREAMSTIME

CHEMISTRY AND FOOD SCIENCE HAVE JOINED HANDS TO DISH OUT SOME FANTASTICALLY DRAMATIC CREATIONS, THANKS TO SOME BRILLIANT MINDS AT WORK IN PROFESSIONAL KITCHENS

62 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

RASPBERRY CAVIAR WITH STRAWBERRY FOAM AND CARAMEL

C ooking has been about science right from the ﬁrst time a human cracked an egg and decided to crisp it up in a bit of animal fat. Maybe even before that. It’s been a continuous journey of experimentation down the decades. And today, restaurants across the world are raising the bar to evolve ever more interesting versions of classic preparations or create entirely new ones. Experts are applying the science of how different ingredients react at molecular levels and using these reactions to be the foundation for presenting food in a very visual, sometimes interactive, and often surprising format. Think of the newly gingerhaired Heston Blumenthal, no stranger to the average Indian who has watched a few seasons of Masterchef Australia, who wields his molecular magic wand at The Fat Duck in London. His famous Sounds of the Sea dish, created in 2007, was all about his multi-sensory philosophy. He created a

course of dried kelp, hijiki seaweed, baby eels, razor clams, co*ckles, mussels and sea urchins, displaying in a way that was reminiscent of the sea shore, with an ocean ‘spume’ and edible sand. He served this on a glasstopped box that was ﬁlled with real sand. To add to the experience, there was an iPod in a conch shell attached to headphones that played the sound of seagulls and the waves crashing on a beach. These tableside theatrics are not only an impressive indication of culinary skills but also necessary for a restaurant and its chef to be taken seriously in gourmet circles and talked (or tweeted) about. Many Indian chefs are clued in to this phenomenon. Of the three restaurants that Abhijit Saha, Founding Director & Chef of Avant Garde Hospitality owns, two keep modern culinary techniques centre-stage. His award-winning signature Indian restaurant is Saha in Singapore and Caperberry in Bengaluru, where he hosted and impressed MasterChef Australia’s celebrity judges Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris in 2012. When we ask him to pick one creation that incorporates molecular cooking that he is personally proud of, he ﬁnds that difficult, as the tasting menu at Caperberry changes every two months and there are 63 DECEMBER 2014

so many dishes that he has innovated with. It’s all about the right ingredients and techniques, experimenting

MOLECULAR COOKING OFTEN RELIES ON LEDBLINKING WATER BATHS, SYRINGES, PH METRES AND SHELVES OF FOOD CHEMICALS LIKE XANTHAN and perfecting each creation. “And our patrons have loved the results. Be it a deconstruction of Salad Caprese, the imitation

CHEF GRESHAM FERNANDES

Carpaccio or the live New Age Tiramisu. Also, the duck in different versions,” he says. Some of his dishes with Indian ﬂavours that are also enhanced by molecular cooking techniques are the Gol Guppa Spheriﬁcation, Sous vide cooked lamb roulade with Kakori Kebab Spices and live maple wood smoke and Spiced Cryo Espuma which have been quite a hit. Similarly, Gaggan Anand, who went through the paces with Ferran Adria at the erstwhile El Bulli, recently impressed Mumbai’s luxe lunch bunch with his dhokla foam and chocolate pani puri. His eponymously named restaurant Gaggan in Bangkok, Thailand, was proclaimed the 17th best restaurant in the world earlier this year. Gresham Fernandes, Group Executive Chef, Fine Dine Division at Impresario Entertainment & Hospitality, and the man behind Delhi’s Smoke House Room’s genius, spent three months at Noma last year to understand the Nordic cuisine and molecular techniques. “At that point, we had forayed into degustation menus and 20-course meals at Smoke House Room. We had travelled a lot - Spain, France, the UK - just eating at restaurants, thinking what we wanted to do in our own country. Working at Noma

HOW IT ALL CAME ABOUT...

1969

HUNGARIAN-BORN, OXFORD-BASED PHYSICIST NICHOLAS KURTI GIVES A LECTURE AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTE CALLED ‘THE PHYSICIST IN THE KITCHEN’

64 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

1988

KURTI MEETS FRENCH PHYSICAL CHEMIST HERVÉ THIS AND THEY CONDUCT SEVERAL EXPERIMENTS TOGETHER AND FIRST REFER TO THIS MODERNIST COOKING AS ‘MOLECULAR AND PHYSICAL GASTRONOMY’

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY CHURROS MODERN - WITH A MOLECULAR TOUCH

THE DESI DEMYSTIFICATTION SARABJIT KAUR, MASTERS STUDENT IN FOOD INNOVATION & PRODUCT DESIGN AT THE AGROPARISTECH, FRANCE, EXPLAINS…

In Indian cuisine we have a lot of interesting physiochemical phenomena going on. For instance, the swelling of a roti or the spongy texture of khaman dhokla. We study these phenomena under Molecular Gastronomy. There’s also the study of Culinary Precisions, which are age-old practices used in cooking. For instance, the fact that resting the dough before making rotis keeps them soft for a long time. Molecular Cooking is the use of scientiﬁc principles in cooking. For example, making a Kulﬁ with liquid Nitrogen or serving lassi in an ice sphere. That will be similar to pani-puri but the pani will be replaced by lassi and the puri will be a hollow ice sphere. Note by Note (NBN) cooking is using compounds like protein powder for creating food. In NBN, we use only chemical compounds as ingredients. For ﬂavours as well we use chemical compounds. For example, using protein powder for making Chicken tikka. So, Indian dishes and ﬂavours can be used for NBN cooking.

1992

A SET OF WORKSHOPS CALLED ‘SCIENCE AND GASTRONOMY’ ARE HELD IN ERICE, ITALY, BRINGING TOGETHER SCIENTISTS AND PROFESSIONAL COOKS FOR DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE SCIENCE BEHIND TRADITIONAL COOKING PREPARATIONS

PHOTO CHEF ABHIJIT SAHA, CAPERBERRY AND SAHA; DREAMSTIME (BELOW)

NEW AGE PINA COLADA

1994

HERVÉ THIS PROPOSES THE THEORY OF NOTE BY NOTE CUISINE AND PIERRE GAGNAIRE COLLABORATES WITH HIM

65 DECEMBER 2014

SOME KEY MOLECULAR TECHNIQUES INCLUDE HOT ICE, JELLY NOODLES, AROMA LEAF, FOAMS, LIQUID NITROGEN AND DEEP FRYING IN WATER So, what according to him, is the essence of modern cooking, we ask. Fernandes grins, “Basically, all the top chefs are just kids in their heads. The food is always about a surprise, about tapping into nostalgia, just an opening of your mind. Like, if you’ve grown up in Mumbai, you’ll remember Simba wafers, which you 66 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

PHOTO MASALA LIBRARY BY JIGGS KALRA

for three months, I got a different perspective on how people cook there with very few ingredients, how to keep it fresh and the ideas churning,” he says. For him, it’s all about using the techniques to create something that can’t otherwise be done. “For instance, if you want to try and freeze a gin and tonic, it can only be done using liquid nitrogen,” he says. And it’s imperative that molecular cooking isn’t used just because it’s there, but because it serves a purpose, he emphasises, explaining, “Foams have always been around. They’re basically just an incorporation of air into anything. Cappuccinos in the 1920s had foam. But that was created to keep the coffee hot as it was cold in Italy. Similarly, the way ﬁlter coffee is poured at a height from cup to cup in South India makes it creamy. It’s there for a reason, not just to impress.”

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

ON A NEW NOTE PHYSICAL CHEMIST HERVÉ THIS, WHO WORKS AT THE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY AGROPARISTECH-INRA IN PARIS, IS CONSIDERED THE GODFATHER OF MOLECULAR COOKING. HE’S THE MAN WHO WAS INVITED TO LECTURE ON LIQUID NITROGEN WHEN HE WAS 12 AND THE ONE WHOSE SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTANT KNOWLEDGE HAVE INSPIRED AND IMPACTED CHEFS ACROSS THE WORLD, FROM HESTON BLUMENTHAL TO PIERRE GAGNAIRE! EXCERPTS FROM OUR INTERVIEW WITH THE MAN WHO FAMOUSLY UNBOILED AN EGG…

ABOVE JALEBI CAVIAR WITH SAFFRON GLAZE AND PISTACHIO RABDI INSET ZORAWAR KALRA OF MASALA LIBRARY BY JIGGS KALRA FAR LEFT THE TRADITIONAL MISHTI DOI GETS TRANSFORMED INTO LOLLIPOPS LEFT MOLECULAR COOKING TECHNIQUES TURN KHANDVI INTO SPHERES

If all cooking is about science, then how is molecular cooking different? In my view, cooking has nothing to do with science, and science has nothing to do with cooking! Indeed, cooking is technique + art. Science is looking for the mechanisms of phenomena, and science does not make anything except producing ‘explanations’, models, theories. When you use the result of science, it’s for education or for technology. And technology makes the link with technique (cooking). Molecular gastronomy is deﬁned as ‘the science that looks for the mechanism of phenomena occurring during cooking’. This is different from ‘molecular cooking’ which is nothing to do with science. Its deﬁnition is ‘cooking with modern utensils’. Do you believe that a home cook can and should try molecular cooking or should it be left to the professionals? Molecular cooking was introduced for anyone! I don't

care about professionals (in a way), but I use them to show the way. This is part of my strategy. But remember that I am working for the public. We deserve modern tools for cooking, not Middle Age pans! In your opinion, who are the current chefs doing the most innovative work in molecular cooking? Ah! You have to know that molecular cooking is a very old stuff, as I proposed it in 1980. Today, I am in New York in order to show the new thing, called Note by Note Cooking. And Pierre Gagnaire is the ﬁrst in the world who could do this! What exactly is Note by Note cooking? It began in 1994, when I dreamt of the day when recipes gave advice like ‘add to your bouillon two drops of a 0.001 percent solution of benzylmercaptan in pure alcohol’. The ingredients used in Note by Note cuisine include water, ethanol, sucrose, amino acids and lipids. For example, in wine made by Note by Note cuisine, the following might be added: water, anthocyanins (for colour), sugars, ethanol, amino acids (for ﬂavour), glycerol, phenols, quinones, and organic acids. Pierre Gagnaire and I developed Note by Note dishes for between six months and a year and presented the ﬁrst Note by Note meal in Hong Kong in 2008. Two years ago, I published La Cuisine Note à Note and now, every year, I, along with the chefs and students at Le Cordon Bleu prepare a note by note dinner. In the Note by Note sphere, the idea now is to understand the 'bioactivity' (think of ﬂavour release as an example) of about 1,500 different kinds of gels that I discovered. Do you think Indian cuisine lends itself well to molecular cooking? Yes, Indian cuisine can certainly be modernised. 67 DECEMBER 2014

only get at the circus these days. So your Waiter could just come up wearing a red clown nose and give you wafers with vinegar and salt… It doesn’t have to be 200 ingredients to be good. It has to be simple but done with a perspective and presented a certain manner. And unlike in the past where people just did things for effect and used three different techniques on a plate, everything is simple and ﬂavourful today. I look at it as Instagram. You can take a picture and spoil it by using too many different settings or you can have a good picture and even use it without a ﬁlter. And yet, the visuals are very important.

MOLECULAR co*ckTAILS ARE A HIT AMONG FANCY FOOD LOVERS. TECHNIQUES LIKE DRY ICE AND LIQUID NITROGEN CREATE A DRAMATIC EFFECT

They can make or break a dish. It’s always good to have beauty on the plate. That’s what everyone wants. A chef can cook good food, but the question always is ‘how do you elevate it?’ Molecular cooking gives you more ways to play with it.” Fun is something that Zorawar Kalra understands well. As the son of celebrity chef Jiggs Kalra, and Founder & MD of Massive Restaurants, he could have stuck to the tried-and-tested formulae of success – plush Indian restaurants with familiar Indian food. Instead, he has chosen to do it differently, with ﬂair. The man behind Delhi’s recently opened Farzi Café and Mumbai’s Masala Library by Jiggs Kalra that has been getting rave reviews since 2013, tells us how he conceptualised the unique 68 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

PHOTO BRICKHOUSE CAFE AND BAR, MUMBAI; DREAMSTIME (RIGHT)

NOTE BY NOTE CUISINE USES WATER, ETHANOL, SUCROSE, AMINO ACIDS AND LIPIDS

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY SPHERICAL VANILLA YOGURT WITH STRAWBERRY COULIS

THE DESI DEMYSTIFICATTION ABHIJIT SAHA, THE MAN BEHIND THE MENUS AT CAPERBERRY, BENGALURU, AND SAHA, SINGAPORE, IS ONE OF INDIA’S FOREMOST EXPERTS IN MOLECULAR COOKING. HE EXPLAINS THE SCIENCE OF IT AND THE MOST COMMONLY USED TECHNIQUES…

MOLECULAR BREAKFAST- EGG, ASPARAGUS AND BACON

Chefs are now collaborating with chemists, food scientists and industrial designers to transform food that look and taste different. Some key techniques include deconstruction, hot ice, jelly noodles, encapsulations, aroma leaf, foams, sous vide, liquid nitrogen and deepfrying in water. Another aspect of molecular gastronomy is combining foods with similar volatile aroma molecule compositions, which determine their ﬂavour. If one ingredient has high levels of amines or aldehydes then it should be combined with other ingredients that contain high levels of amines or aldehydes. At the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal (even though he does not subscribe to the term ‘molecular gastronomy’ to describe his cooking) combines caviar with chocolate and oysters with passionfruit jelly. Unusually shocking combinations seem to work wonderfully due to the presence of common amines. CRYO COOKING This new-age method of cooking uses liquid nitrogen to cool food very quickly at a staggering minus 196 degrees centigrade. This process aids in creating interesting textures and mouth feel, and sensational style of food presentation. At Caperberry, we use liquid nitrogen to prepare some of our signature creations including Cryo Margarita,

Granita of sangria, Frozen duck liver parfait powder, Frozen chocolate ganache powder and Cryo espuma. SOUS VIDE COOKING Described by Harold McGee (who wrote the chef’s bible, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen) as ‘one of the most important culinary innovations of modern times’, sous vide is a French term that literally translates to ‘under vacuum’. It is a slow cooking method, where food is cooked in an airtight bag, immersed in a water bath heated to a precise temperature. Especially useful for cooking seafood and meats, this unique technique prevents the leaching out of juices, helping to retain tenderness and ﬂavour, all the while cooking the food to perfection. At Caperberry, we use this technique for all our meats, some seafood, ﬁsh and vegetables. SPHERIFICATION & FAUX CAVIAR Spheriﬁcation is a modernist technique pioneered by the celebrated Ferran Adria of El Bulli fame. It is a process by which liquids are shaped into spheres without external casing, using Xanthan (a thickening agent) and Gluco (Calcium Lactate Gluconate) in a water bath and sodium alginate (a seaweed extract used to increase viscosity). The liquid is encased within itself. Sizes of the spheres can vary, but when spheriﬁcations are made in tiny sizes they are referred to as imitation or faux caviar, because of their resemblance in appearance and texture to caviar. Both spheriﬁcations and caviars create startling explosions of ﬂavour in the mouth. At Caperberry spheriﬁcation is used to prepare spoon co*cktails, skinless raviolis, fruit caviars and much more. 69 DECEMBER 2014

CRYO COOKING IS A NEW AGE METHOD THAT USES LIQUID NITROGEN TO COOL FOOD QUICKLY AT A STAGGERING MINUS 196 DEGREES CENTIGRADE exactly the same ﬂavour of the dish, but in a scientiﬁc, surprising way. The idea behind Farzi Café was to bring Indian cuisine back ‘in vogue’. Young people love eating out, but they don’t go for Indian meals, which intrigued me for the longest time, and then I realised that there is a lack of hipness associated

CRYO ESPUMA OR FOAM

with our cuisine, even though the pleasure of having a good Indian meal actually supersedes anything else. As an Indian and an avid lover of the robustness Indian food offers, we take immense pride 70 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

in our cuisine and believe that it is up to us to make the effort to elevate Indian food, reintroduce it to the world in its modern avatar, retaining its traditional roots.” Kalra believes that dining is a sensory experience. According to him, “Though the taste of a dish is of extreme importance, while eating, it is essential to use all the ﬁve senses to enjoy a holistic culinary experience, which not only does justice to the food served but also engages the consumer at various levels with an avant garde experience.” The very clinically named Phirni Oxide at Farzi Café is certainly dramatic and engaging, being poured in front of you at the table with liquid nitrogen, and then broken into a hundred pieces! Meanwhile in Mumbai, the thandai sphere served as an amuse bouche at Masala Library, encapsulates all the ﬂavours of the traditional thandai into a small bubble, which bursts as soon as you put it into with your mouth, releasing all the ﬂavours of the dish! They also do a signature co*cktail, which uses the foaming technique to create a star anise foam. This offers a glimpse into the potential use of modern techniques, not just for cooking food but also to develop unique beverages. At an industrial-themed Mumbai bar, all the bartenders are trained to make ‘molecular co*cktails’, which the patrons are really ﬁnding interesting. The most popular is the Dutch Kettle, made with orange, basil and dry ice, which has people reaching for their cell phones to click and post pictures on social media sites. Whiskey drinkers like The Smoked Godfather, which is infused with a smoky burnt

wood ﬂavour. “Molecular Gastronomy is becoming popular worldwide. I ﬁrst saw these techniques in London and decided to see if we could recreate some of them. The response has been overwhelming!” enthuses Bunty Arora, owner of the Brickhouse Café and Bar. The trend seems to be catching on with more and more restaurants in India starting to experiment with molecular cooking. Kalra says, “This is surely the beginning

and there is a lot more that we have to showcase using modern culinary techniques and presentations. However, it is important for us to be aware that too much too soon may not work today. I believe there is still a long way to go before you would witness a pure molecular gastronomy concept in India appealing to the ﬁve senses of the diners.” According to Fernandes, while there are people like Kalra who are doing it and doing it well, it’s hard to create

PHOTO CHEF ABHIJIT SAHA, CAPERBERRY AND SAHA; DREAMSTIME (ABOVE)

menus. “The thought came to me almost eight years ago when I had visited El Bulli in Spain. After experiencing it, I kept wondering why we could not do something similar with Indian cuisine. It seemed too cutting edge and radical for that time, but now the infrastructure is available, enabling us to make bhel-puri with liquid nitrogen, where you get

COCONUT JELLY & MANGO GEL MADE TO RESEMBLE AN EGG USING MOLECULAR GASTRONOMIC TECHNIQUES, GARNISHED WITH PASSIONFRUIT PEARLS OR CAVIAR

MOLECULAR GASTRONOMY

YOU CAN DO IT TOO! IF YOU LOVE SCIENCE AND DREAM OF DISHING UP DELECTABLE FOOD, MOLECULAR CUISINE CAN EMERGE FROM YOUR KITCHEN TOO!

an Indian menu that uses a lot of these techniques. “Indian food is not built that way and molecular cooking takes away from it. It’s not that we cannot do it, but it’s a thin line,” he avers. When we press him for more clarity, he explains, “In India, there are too many variations (some people will eat only vegetarian, some won’t eat pork, others won’t eat beef, some will be fasting on certain days, etc) and it’s difficult to customise that much and at such short notice.

For instance, Noma has just 30 dishes. People book tables in advance, they come on time, they don’t ask for too much customisation except in case of dietary restrictions or allergies. That makes it easier to plan as all of these processes are timeconsuming and you have to create your menu much in advance. Also, when people visit a restaurant of that calibre there, they look at the chef as a musician. They go for the music. They respect it.”

MolecularRecipes.com, a leading online source for molecular gastronomy recipes and techniques which has even been invited by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to present to their Science & Cooking class, strongly believes that molecular cooking should not be the turf of top chefs alone. Their Quantum Chef explains, “I would see these amazing dishes created on television. I would taste these culinary masterpieces at restaurants. But that wasn’t enough. I had to try it myself. My love of science, physics, design and food drove me to explore and experiment with Molecular Gastronomy at home. Using make-shift equipment and ingredients, I would hunt for online and in specialty stores, I was able to create my own dishes. Of course, there was a lot of trial and error, but with experience and practice I was able to master the techniques and achieve some beautiful results.” With all this talk of chemicals, is it safe to create and to eat, you wonder. “When people hear the words Molecular Gastronomy or molecular cuisine for the ﬁrst time they often mistakenly view it as unhealthy, synthetic, chemical, dehumanising and unnatural. This is not surprising given that Molecular Gastronomy often relies on fuming ﬂasks of liquid nitrogen, LED-blinking water baths, syringes, tabletop distilleries, PH meters and shelves of food chemicals with names like carrageenan, maltodextrin and xanthan. The truth is that the ‘chemicals’ used in molecular gastronomy are all of biological origin. Even though they have been puriﬁed and some of them processed, the raw material origin is usually marine, plant, animal or microbial. These additives have been approved by EU standards and are used in very, very small amounts. The science lab equipment used just helps modern gastronomy cooks to do simple things like maintaining the temperature of the cooking water constant (water bath), cooling food at extremely low temperatures fast (liquid nitrogen) or extract ﬂavour from food (evaporator). There is still some debate out there about the healthiness of molecular gastronomy but I personally believe there are far bigger health issues in the everyday food we consume. In the end, you are not going to be eating liquid pea spheres every day anyway,” explains the Quantum Chef. 71 DECEMBER 2014

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WHILE IN MOST COUNTRIES COMIC STRIPS ARE FOR KIDS, IN EUROPE, THE ART FORM OF BANDE DESSINÉE (DRAWN STRIPS) IS TAKEN VERY SERIOUSLY INDEED

PHOTO AFP

JUST AS MOTOWN WAS TO MUSIC, SO IS BELGIUM TO COMICS. ALISON MARSHALL TURNS THE PAGES ON THE STORY OF BELGIAN COMIC SERIES SUCH AS TINTIN AND THE SMURFS TO INVESTIGATE WHAT IT WAS ABOUT THIS SMALL NATION THAT MANAGED TO INSPIRE SUCH WONDERFUL VISUAL LEGACIES

WITH SUPERHEROES OF A DIFFERENT KIND AND GENTLE POLITICAL SATIRE THAT CAN MAKE EVEN ADULTS SMILE, BELGIUM HAS ELEVATED THE HUMBLE COMIC STRIP TO A DIFFERENT LEVEL. A LOOK AT THIS COUNTRY'S INTRIGUING RELATIONSHIP WITH COMICS

PHOTO AFP

AN EARLY DRAWING BY THE CARTOONIST PEYO OF THE SMURFS

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COMIC CAPERS

ith more cartoonists per capita than any other country in the world, it is small wonder that many of the world’s bestloved characters come from Belgium. From the perennially cheerful blue woodland folk in The Smurfs to Europe’s favourite teenage detective Tintin or the hapless Gaul Asterix, all have been inﬂuenced, if not born in a country which cannot fail to be happy with its key exports of cartoons, chocolate and beer. The Belgians may have perfected the art of the comic, but that’s not to say they were the inventors. Drawing linear ﬁgures is an art form that has been around for centuries. The earliest form of the modern day comic strip is thought to be drawings found in caves

in south-west France, a pictorial of the great hunting successes of thousands of years ago. Step into the gloom and be met with the sight of powerful beasts, ready to spring from the rocks, where orange-eyed bison seem to leap from the walls almost as vibrant a drawn record of their capture today as when they were when created by Cro-Magnon man, all those years ago. Fast-forward through the centuries and the simple appeal of the comic strip is as enduring today as it has ever been. HERGÉ POSES FOR A PORTRAIT IN FRONT OF A PICTURE OF HIS COMIC CREATION 'TINTIN' IN BRUSSELS,BELGIUM, IN NOVEMBER 1979

AS HOME TO "THE NINTH ART", YOU WOULD EXPECT BELGIANS TO WANT TO SHOWCASE THEIR HOMEGROWN CELEBRITIES. THROUGHOUT THE BELGIAN CAPITAL OF BRUSSELS THERE IS A FAMOUS COMIC STRIP TRAIL, WHICH PAYS HOMAGE TO THE WORK OF LEGENDARY CHARACTERS AND THEIR AUTHORS. SOME 40 FRESCOES CAN BE SEEN THROUGH THE STREETS.

SPIKE AND SUZY The girl with an egg-shaped head, Suzy has been ably assisted in her adventures by Spike since 1945. The undisputed power couple of Flemish comic strips, their 315th album rolled off the press in 2011. NIC’S DREAMS A boy in red pyjamas, Nic is a loner with a talent for dreaming. Drawn by Hermann, Nic starred in three albums depicting his nocturnal adventures in the company of an elephant, chimpanzee, giraffe, hippo, turtle or whale. But despite their escapades being fun, they don’t always turn out well.

PHOTO BY MARC GANTIER/GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES

LE JEUNE ALBERT The boyish pranks of a child growing up in post-war Brussels make up the comic books of Le Jeune Albert, drawn by Yves Chaland who died in 1990 at the age of 33 in a car accident, just as his career was starting to take off. Collectors ﬁght over the modest body of work of the artist who is said to have set himself up as heir to the masters of the ligne claire. BILLY THE CAT Billy the Cat with his black and yellow stripes appeared in Spirou magazine in 1981 but his career didn’t take off until 1987. A cat that is the reincarnation of a boy — and would like to return to normality, Billy the Cat is also the star of a TV series. Contd on pg79

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PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES SIDEBAR EDGARD P. JACOBS (BLAKE AND MORTIMER); HERGÉ (QUICK AND FLUPKE); DUPA (CUBITUS)

THE 1967 FRENCH/BELGIAN FILM ASTERIX THE GAUL WAS THE FIRST FRENCH CARTOON FEATURE FILM IN 15 YEARS. IT TOOK A FULL TEAM OF 100 PEOPLE OVER 13 MONTHS TO PRODUCE THE 45,000 DRAWINGS NEEDED

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Despite digital and technological inroads, the thrill of the smell and feel of a new book ﬁlled with simple but brilliantly drawn adventures is gathering more fans by the year. Mention modern day comic strips and the superheroes of America are usually the ﬁrst to spring to mind. The world-renowned page-turning celebrities such as Spiderman and Captain America are key to Marvel Comics’ iconic status, a brand that has been enthralling youngsters across the world for 75 years. But unlike the American comic industry, largely built on a tradition of superheroes, the European equivalent is a much more diverse affair. In the United Kingdom, the anarchic humour of Beano has been keeping children entertained since 1930 — despite some parents (who read the same comic in their youth) wanting their offspring to read something else.

SO IMPORTANT ARE COMIC STRIPS TO THE BELGIANS THAT IN THE 1960S, BELGIAN CARTOONIST MORRIS DUBBED THEM “THE NINTH ART” Travel over to France and Belgium, and the comic strip is elevated to an entirely new level. While in most countries comic strips are for kids, here, the art form of bande dessinée (drawn strips) is taken very seriously indeed. Unlike the comic strips elsewhere that are purely designed for youngsters, the cartoons of Belgium in particular are laced with clever wit and wordplay and in the past sometimes even included gentle political satire. So important are comic strips to the Belgians that in the 1960s, Belgian cartoonist Morris (creator of the cowboy cartoon Lucky Luke) dubbed them “the ninth art”, in an article in the inﬂuential Spirou comic strip magazine, a cultural categorisation that 77 DECEMBER 2014

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has remained ever since. To put this in context, the “ﬁrst art” is architecture, followed in order by sculpture, painting, dance, music, poetry, and cinema — with television as the “eighth art”. Although they now have a culture of their own, the general feeling towards comic strips in Belgium has always been as an art form, a part of the country’s very essence. This is a movement, which has seen the creation of a museum dedicated to the genre: The Belgian Comic Strip Centre (BCSC) in Brussels, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

TINTIN ILLUSTRATION HERGÉ –MOULINSART 2014

THE NOW UNMISTAKABLE SPARSE, LINEAR STYLE CAME INTO ITS OWN WITH THE CREATION OF TINTIN, WHICH USES ONLY CLEAR STRONG LINES WITHOUT HATCHING OR SHADOWS FOR CONTRAST Annually, more than 200,000 visitors arrive to see the work of the country’s famous cartoonists. Over 80 percent of these comic strip fans come from abroad. For foreign fans of the genre, this dedicated showcase of the art form is unprecedented, as Willem De Graeve, communications director of the BCSC explains. “When we welcome American comic strip artists here they are a bit jealous. They say that people want to read comics in the US but they don’t have a museum — and it’s just seen as a nice entertainment and not culture.” It’s now 85 years since Tintin’s ﬁrst adventure made it into print, but the hunger for comic strips is still on the increase. More accessible than poetry, and easier to understand, De Graeve says that its popularity is at its highest ever. “This has to do with changes in the printing DESTINATION MOON IS THE 16TH VOLUME OF THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, COMICS SERIES

process. In 1950 it was very expensive to produce a book and that honour was reserved only for the best comic strips. Today with digitalisation it’s quite cheap to produce a book and so it’s possible to publish the work of more artists.” Despite the digital age, comic strip fans still prefer paper, but unlike the US adventure comics and Japanese manga comics, Belgium’s “ninth art” still comes at a premium. “In Europe you will pay 10 to 15 euros a book so you buy it to read and keep. There is a big collectors’ movement,” adds De Graeve. So why has Europe and the tiny country of Belgium in particular been such a hotbed of talent and the birthplace of so many talented cartoonists and their art? As De Graeve says, this is fundamentally down to two explanations. “The ﬁrst reason is historical. Hergé (the pen name of The Adventures of Tintin creator George Remi) was the ﬁrst Belgian comic strip artist to become famous with his art, it happened right from the beginning of Tintin — and this inspired Belgians,” he notes. “Hergé was only 22 when he created the ﬁrst Tintin adventure so many saw this young guy who earned a living from drawing cartoon strips and they were inspired. It’s like if a country is known for a sport like tennis, they have lots of great players and it becomes a national model. It was more or less the same with Hergé and comics. He was the locomotive of the whole comic strip train.” Although the onset of World War II proved frustrating for comic strip lovers when the US artists were unable to get their work across the ocean to Europe, for Hergé it presented an ideal opportunity. “Because the US comic strips were not coming through, Belgian artists were temporarily recruited to ﬁll the gaps in the newspapers,” explains De Graeve. The second explanation for Belgium becoming arguably the world’s stage for comic strips is its population. “Belgium is a small country but it’s quite a complicated one,” he adds. “We have 11 million inhabitants and three official languages: Dutch, French and German. As a consequence, communication is to people of mixed languages, so traditional text was not efficient. We think that people communicated in newspapers by images because it was so much more effective than using traditional text.”

COMIC CAPERS

BLAKE AND MORTIMER Every one of Edgar P Jacobs’ comics is a classic. The Adventures of Blake and Mortimer: The Yellow M is considered to be one of the best comic books of all time. The courageous British duo with their superhuman powers were a surprise hit. JOJO JoJo was born in 1983, the work of young artist André Geerts who died in 2010. The thoroughly modern boy with his Gameboy lives in a nostalgic setting with his grandmother. The honest youngster with an infectious appetite for life features a dynamic drawing style. QUICK AND FLUPKE Like Tintin, Quik and Flupke are also sons of Hergé but couldn’t be less like their serious older brother. The mischievous pair — Quick always in his red polo neck jumper and Flupke in his green jacket — deliberately play tricks on authority ﬁgures. CUBITUS A ﬂuffy haired dog, Cubitus is the sidekick to Semaphore, an accident-prone inventor. The talking dog is the work of Walloon artist Luc Dupanloup. In the late 1980s, Cubitus made an appearance in a Japanese cartoon ﬁlm series, which further enhanced his popularity.

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TINTIN ILLUSTRATION HERGÉ –MOULINSART 2014

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TINTIN ILLUSTRATION HERGÉ –MOULINSART 2014 SIDEBAR TIBET (RIC HOCHET); JIJÉ (BLONDIN AND CIRAGE); MORRIS (LUCKY LUKE)

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But the simplicity of the drawing was not the only reason for the genre’s success, says De Graeve: “Ligne claire (clear line drawing) is all about clear communication in clear lines. But nobody will buy a book if there is no story, and for this reason comic strips had already become an important form of communication.” Compare Belgium with the centre of comic strips across the other side of the world: New York City in the US, and the many cultural similarities are clear. This is another key reason why the tiny European country became the home of so many well-loved characters. “Since the end of the 19th century, comics had been coming in from the US,” says De Graeve. “They came from New York

TINTIN’S CREATOR HERGÉ WAS ADAMANT THAT THE DETECTIVE’S ADVENTURES END WHEN HIS LIFE ENDED. SO SADLY, THERE HAS BEEN NO MODERNDAY TINTIN ADVENTURE AFTER HERGÉ’S DEATH IN 1983

THE GLOBAL EXPLOITS OF THE TEENAGE DETECTIVE TINTIN HAVE BEEN POPULAR FOR OVER 85 YEARS. HIS ADVENTURES HAVE INCLUDED, RED RACKHAM’S TREASURE (PREVIOUS PAGE), THE SEVEN CRYSTAL BALLS (ABOVE) AND EXPLORERS OF THE MOON (BELOW)

— and that too was a melting pot of culture. Not many people spoke English there, so the only pages they would read in a newspaper were the comic strips. So it’s not surprising that the comic was invented in New York, and then crossed the ocean to Europe where it was adopted by Belgium — as it ﬁts in so well with our national identity.” With Belgian artists becoming more proliﬁc in the war, the now unmistakable Belgian style of ligne claire came to the fore. It was Hergé, who pioneered the style in his comic The Adventures of Tintin. As a newcomer to the art scene, his original style is said to have begun as a much looser execution, in a similar vein to the American superhero comics. But the now unmistakable, sparse linear style 83 DECEMBER 2014

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came into its own with the creation of Tintin, which uses only clear strong lines without hatching or shadows for contrast. The clean and uncluttered execution also translated to the young detective’s storylines, which were very straightforward and easy to follow. The ligne claire movement, popular mostly in Belgium and France peaked 84 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

in the 1950s. Adopted by the Brussels school of his compatriots, the style soon became ﬁrmly established as the unmistakable genre of Belgian cartoons. One of the founding fathers of Belgium’s proliﬁc cartoon clique was Edgar Pierre Jacobs, who began a science-ﬁction comic called Le Rayon U. The Tintin author Hergé noticed his work and

employed him to take on restyling the older Tintin tales so that they could be published in colour. After the war, Jacobs went on to create the series Blake and Mortimer, about the nuclear physicist and head of MI5 who were years ahead of their time and who appeared in Tintin alongside the young detective whose adventures

TINTIN ILLUSTRATION HERGÉ –MOULINSART 2014

THE COMIC BOOKS THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN, ABOUT A TEENAGE DETECTIVE WITH HIS TRUSTY SIDEKICK, SNOWY THE DOG, BY BELGIAN CARTOONIST HERGÉ HAVE ENRAPTURED FANS FOR DECADES

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have sold over 230 million books worldwide. Incidentally, the ligne claire movement saw something of a revival in the 1980s, spreading its inﬂuence more widely throughout Europe — epitomised in strips like Martin Handford’s Where’s Wally. Another reason for Tintin’s popularity is that in 1949 the French reportedly banned books and comic strips that showed cowardice in a good light — so Tintin, the wholesome teenage detective proved to be the ideal young icon for post war Europe.

SIDEBAR WILLY VANDERSTEEN (SPIKE AND SUZY); STEPHANE COLMAN (BILLY THE CAT)

IN 1949, THE FRENCH REPORTEDLY BANNED BOOKS AND COMIC STRIPS THAT SHOWED COWARDICE IN A GOOD LIGHT — SO TINTIN THE TEENAGE DETECTIVE PROVED TO BE THE IDEAL ICON FOR POST-WAR EUROPE In Belgium, the cartoon characters that have endured are those with a many-layered approach. For 85 years, the derring-do and global exploits of the teenage reporter turned detective Tintin and his west highland terrier Snowy have enthralled countless fans. Despite the death of the books’ author Hergé in 1983, the stories continue to be popular with generation after generation. But sadly there will be no further modern day adventures for Tintin. Hergé was adamant that when his life ended, so too would the detective’s adventures, even though other comic strip creators have made sure that their legacy lives on. While the naïve charms of Tintin have never been seen in any new adventures since Hergé died, as was his wish, the rambunctious Gaul in The Adventures of Asterix has continued on his travels for decades after the death of one of his creators. Asterix was the brainchild of French scriptwriter René Goscinny and artist Albert Uderzo. According to the 86 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

BBC, his popularity in France has seen him outselling Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code put together. Asterix ﬁrst appeared as a comic strip in the French magazine Pilote in October, 1959. Thanks to Goscinny and Uderzo and accompanied by his sidekick Obelisk, and canine companion Dogmatix, he had many adventures across the world. Though not technically of Belgian origin, the creators of Asterix met in Brussels and Uderzo is said to have trained with the ligne claire movement. The diminutive Gaul and his escapades have sold over 355 million books in over 100 languages. After Goscinny’s death in 1977, the legacy of Asterix was continued by Uderzo by himself until last year when, despite reported opposition from his daughter, he sold his 60 percent stake in the publishing company Editions Albert Rene. He then handed the reins of the character’s future travels to writer Jean Ferri and artist Didier Conrad who produced Asterix and the Picts in 2013 — the ﬁrst of the cheeky Gaul’s adventures in eight years. While the writing and artistic partnership may be different, the voice of Asterix and the Gauls remains the same. Translated by Anthea Bell since 1969, the tiny Gaul’s indomitable spirit has been kept intact through her consistent tone. As DCM went to press, it was reported that Uderzo and his daughter had ended their seven-year legal battle amicably. But surprisingly of all the comic strip glitterati, it is in fact the tales of those blue be-hatted woodland folk, The Smurfs, who have become Belgium’s most famous comic export, at least according to Willem De Graeve. “What most people don’t know is that it was a spin-off from another series, Johan and Pirlouit, a medieval duo who get to meet supernatural characters,” explains De Graeve. “In 1958 they met The Smurfs. It was just going to be a one-off but children loved it and they contacted the artist Peyo to see if he would do more.” And more they did. The Smurf comic expanded into a franchise with advertising, movies, TV series, video games, theme parks and dolls. “Today,” says De Graeve, “The Smurfs are more famous than the comic strip they ﬁrst appeared in.”

COMIC CAPERS RIC HOCHET The savvy journalist with a Porsche, Ric Hochet outwitted the bad guys for 78 albums. The artist Tibet (Gilbert Gascard) and writer Paul-André Duchâteau met in the Brussels studio of Walt Disney. CORI THE SHIP’S BOY Bob de Moor was the right hand man of Tintin creator Hergé for 35 years and when not working to create adventures for the young detective he pursued his dream project of creating Cori. The character appeared in six albums which are said to be the work of a technically superior artist, well versed in ligne claire. BLONDIN AND CIRAGE Blondin is a serious Tintin-type hero and Cirage is his crazy sidekick who prefers to act rather than think. They were invented by Jijé, said to be one of the godfathers and pioneers of the comic strip. XIII A man wakes up on a beach, suffering amnesia from a bullet wound. His only clue to his identity — a tattoo of the roman numeral for 13. First serialised in 1984, this popular spy caper has been adapted into an incredible video game which retained the comic strip aesthetic. LUCKY LUKE Faster than his shadow, the lonesome cowboy Lucky Luke is primarily the work of cartoonist Morris, who coined the term for comic strips as the "ninth art". Lucky Luke ﬁrst appeared in the Spirou Almanac in 1946.

PHOTOS CORBIS; EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS (METROPOLIS)

WHO WAN A BERLINI

AFTER GERMAN REUNIFICATION, POTSDAMER PLATZ WAS THE LARGEST BUILDING SITE IN EUROPE. TODAY, UP TO 100,000 PEOPLE COME TO THIS SQUARE EVERY DAY TO EXPERIENCE THE UNIQUE BLEND OF ART, ENTERTAINMENT AND SHOPPING

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NTS TO BE IONAIRE? ON THE CUSP OF THE NINETIES, BERLIN WAS STILL A DIVIDED CITY. TODAY IT IS EUROPE’S MOST EXCITING CAPITAL. AND MANY BELIEVE, THANKS TO ITS ODD MIX OF TECHNOLOGY AND TECHNO MUSIC, IT COULD SOON RE-EMERGE AS ONE OF THE WORLD’S MOST DYNAMIC PLACES. ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL, BOYD FARROW REPORTS ON AN EXTRAORDINARY TRANSFORMATION

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A MAN CYCLES PAST THE EAST SIDE GALLERY, WHICH IS A 1.3 KILOMETRE LONG SECTION OF THE BERLIN WALL

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PHOTOS CORBIS; EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS (METROPOLIS)

In 1925 the ﬁlm director Fritz Lang was mooching around Berlin, hatching what would become the most inﬂuential sci-ﬁ ﬁlm of all time — Metropolis, with its iconic images of a futuristic city. Today, Simon Schaefer, an irrepressible young entrepreneur, has an equally ultra-modern vision for the German capital. “I want robots, I wants drones ﬂying around here,” he says, one sunny morning in June, bounding around Factory, Berlin’s biggest start-up hub. “I want this to be a place where imaginations can really be unleashed.” On the eve of the grand opening of this ideas laboratory —and with Twitter, Mozilla, SoundCloud and 20 rising tech stars already tenants — its 38 year-old founder is entitled to think big.

A lready, Schaefer, who has driven this ambitious project for three years, is busy scouting the city for additional space. Not even the World War II grenades unearthed near the entrance just days before Factory’s ribbon-cutting has dampened his enthusiasm for grandiose plans. Not with Google’s executive chairman Eric

Schmidt in attendance. Distractedly rolling a detonated shell around the black desk in his airy topﬂoor office, Schaefer says that Factory will be “a playground for entrepreneurs that will help transform Berlin”.

HIPSTER HANGOUT He means this literally. This space — all wooden ﬂoors, exposed brickwork and full-height glass — straddles what was once the Berlin Wall death strip. One side of the main building actually formed part of the interior Wall. When the city was divided, residents woken up to sirens, as escapees clambered from apartment

blocks in the East to streets in the West. These days, they are more likely to be kept awake by a jangly Wilco melody, as hipsters from Brooklyn and Barcelona continue to pitch up in the area.

BERLIN IS LIKE A START-UP. THERE’S A LOT OF INTERESTING MOMENTUM. PEOPLE ARE DRAWN BY ITS HEDONISTIC LIFESTYLE TOO “Out of the ﬁrst hundred people working at Factory, 91 DECEMBER 2014

BERLIN HAS SUCCEEDED IN DRAWING A NUMBER OF START-UPS IN RECENT YEARS, INCLUDING THE FACTORY (TOP LEFT) A START-UP CAMPUS FOR INTERNET AND HIGH-TECH FIRMS; AND SOUNDCLOUD

BERLIN’S LURE IN THE FIRST PLACE IS ITS COUNTERCULTURE, ITS FREESPIRITED ANTICAPITALISM —ESSENTIALLY ITS LACK OF ANY PLANS, BUSINESS OR OTHERWISE 92 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

there are 30 nationalities,” marvels Schaefer. By the yearend, more than 500 people will have moved in, many drawn to Berlin by its creative buzz, hedonistic lifestyle and ultra-cheap living costs. “What makes Berlin so exciting,” he says, “is that it was bombed ﬂat in the Second World War. The city is like a start-up. It doesn’t have a rule set on how it functions. There’s a lot of interesting momentum. For anyone who wants to be part of that movement, it would make sense to be here.”

Off campus on nearby Invalidenstrasse, another startup, ResearchGate — described as “Facebook for scientists”— is on course to rack up ﬁve million subscribers. Founder Ijad Madisch, whose aims are to “speed up scientiﬁc discoveries and to win a Nobel Prize”, says he couldn’t imagine the company headquarters being anywhere else. The 200 multilingual employees working in a newly refurbished high-ceilinged office represent every continent. Like everything

else, Madisch says, working hours are relaxed, and there is a great collegiate atmosphere as colleagues work and party. And here lies the great irony of Berlin. ResearchGate and Factory — which Schaefer says will “give start-ups the chance to learn, fail and chill together as they grow” — may be a perfect metaphor for this reinvented city. But, for many, Berlin’s lure in the ﬁrst place is its counterculture, its freespirited anti-capitalism — essentially its lack of any plans, business or

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BERLIN: A CITY CAPTURED ON FILM CATCH THESE MOVIES IF YOU WANT TO GET A SENSE OF THE CITY’S PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

POST-WORLD WAR I BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A CITY (1927) A symphony indeed – this silent ﬁlm, available in its entirety on YouTube, thunders into the past with operatic majesty. Beginning at dawn and ending at midnight, it shows a city in an upbeat interwar period, before the rise of Nazism would change everything. Its gorgeous shots of central Berlin are particularly poignant — less than 20 years after its release, some 30 percent of the city had been leveled by Allied bombs.

COLD WAR

PHOTOS GETTY IMAGES (THE FACTORY); AGEFOTOSTOCK (KREUZBURGER)

THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006) This quietly chilling thriller portrays an East Berlin living in terror of the Stasi, the secret police who kept a cold eye on most of the populace. Set in 1984, it follows a surveillance ofﬁcer who becomes obsessed with a couple he is charged with spying on. The director ﬁlmed in the previously Sovietcontrolled portions of the city, as well as the Stasi archives, which have been converted into a museum.

otherwise. Many fret that the inﬂux of venture capital and developers will not just drive up prices but destroy the unique culture that has made the city so seductive for creative people. “You can feel the pace of life quicken street by street as new people arrive,” says Helena Ahonen, an artist who moved to the city from Sweden 17 years ago to focus on her successful hatmaking business. “This isn’t the Berlin I moved to.”

BRING IN THE TOURISTS It could be argued that the

unique Berlin vibe is already on the wane. While many are sustained by the promise of an eventual Silicon Allee bonanza, Berlin’s main industry steadfastly remains tourism. The number of visitors has risen from 13 million in 2004 to a record 27 million in 2013 and around a third of all overnight stays are speciﬁcally for the nightlife, according to tourism agency visitBerlin. Estimates suggest that clubs alone pump more than US$1.26 billion in revenue into the city each year.

MODERN DAY RUN LOLA RUN (1998) This heart-pounding thriller literally races audiences through a near-millenial Berlin, as we follow the titular heroine Lola. The premise: she must collect 100,000 Deutsche Marks in 20 minutes, or her boyfriend dies. In her quest, Lola sprints through dozens of locations in just 90 minutes, leading one blogger to calculate that she’d have to keep up a speed of 49.2 kilometres per hour.

FUTURISTIC AEON FLUX (2005) This sci-ﬁ thriller makes use of some of Berlin’s most modernistic architecture to make you believe you’re in the 25th century. Some of the stunning sites strutting their stuff onscreen include the shapely Bauhaus Archiv, the jaw-dropping pillars of the Krematorium Baumschulenweg, and the crop circle-like constructions of the Tierheim. The post-apocalyptic world never looked so good. 93 DECEMBER 2014

When it comes to nightlife, Berlin has been pretty much unmatched for much of the last century. The Weimar era was deﬁned by its decadence and sexual freedom; David Bowie’s residency in the 1970s embellished the city’s avant-garde image. But it is the legends that have grown around techno clubs such as Risiko, Tresor, Berghain, Bar 25 and Watergate — and the electronic dance music festival Love Parade — that have drawn a more global wide-eyed crowd.

BERLIN’S MAIN INDUSTRY IS TOURISM. THE NUMBER OF VISITORS HAS RISEN FROM 13 MILLION IN 2004 TO A RECORD 27 MILLION IN 2013

PHOTOS STEFAN WOLF LUCKS (MAIN); AFP (BERLIN WALL); EVERETT/CLICK PHOTOS (METROPOLIS)

Whereas debauchery and chaos deﬁned the scene that ﬂourished among the abandoned ruins following the Wall’s collapse, today’s

beats are largely contained in better-organised, more sanitised premises thronged by weekend thrill-seekers dispatched by budget airlines. Inevitably this has brought friction as many of the quirkier shops and bars are forced out of central locations — or even out of business — to accommodate the Scandinavian fast-fashion chains and Asian-themed co*cktail bars that have mushroomed to cater to youngsters when they are not busy doing drugs or each other. Shopkeepers wail that ﬁve years ago the monthly rent for a premises on Neue Schönhauser in the Mitte district was €60 (US$75) per square metre. Now it is more than double that. It is this frenetic pace of gentriﬁcation that is responsible for the city’s latest geographical shimmy. Since the Wall’s ﬁrst bricks were dislodged on November 9, 1989, most of the attention has been lavished on Mitte, the city’s historic core, which includes most key tourist sites as well as all the charming dilapidation. But after two decades of turning

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OLD BECOMES NEW To say that Berlin is a culture lovers' paradise is perhaps an understatement. The city is bursting with cultural activities, from modern ballet performances to jazz recitals, many in repurposed venues. For example, Sammlung Boros houses impressive contemporary art displays in a massive World War II bunker and Mobile Kino is a cinema on a bicycle that roves the city to screens movies in different venues. Here, the Berlin State Ballet performs at a converted power plant.

anything with at least two walls into coffee shops, the city’s centre of gravity is now heading westward again.

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN Nothing illustrates this better than the metamorphosis of the district around the Zoologischer Garten, which from the 1950s through the 1980s was West Berlin’s version of Times Square — a seedy mix of sex shops, dodgy bars and lodgings. Now scrubbed up, this area is being aggressively promoted as City West, Berlin’s new poster child. Last year saw the opening of the 32-storey limestoneclad Zoofenster tower, home to a glitzy Waldorf Astoria hotel, and anchoring highend retail units, offices and restaurants. Its neighbours include the newly reopened Hotel am Steinplatz, once a hangout of famous German writers such as Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, and now the ﬁrst German property in Marriott’s Autograph Collection. In 2016 the vast crater close by will become Upper West, a curvy skyscraper, which will contain Europe’s largest Motel One hotel as well as more shops and offices. Immediately opposite stands the Zoo Palast, one of the world’s most glamorous cinemas, which re-opened after a lengthy and costly renovation just in time for this year’s Berlin ﬁlm festival. Nearby, the equally historic Astor Film Lounge has just reopened with reclining armchairs and a synchronised music-and-water show in the main auditorium. The overall art scene is getting starrier in these parts too. Daniel Buchholz, a one-time collaborator to musician and producer Brian Eno and patron of ﬁne art photographer Wolfgang 95 DECEMBER 2014

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PHOTOS CORBIS (MALL INTERIOR); AFP, GETTY IMAGES (THE FACTORY); AGEFOTOSTOCK (KREUZBURGER)

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revival is another throwback to post-war architecture which had long diced with demolition: the Bikinihaus. The distinctive feature of this long, thin office block, built in 1957 to ﬁll a bombed-out hole next to the Zoo, was an open second storey that divided it horizontally into two pieces — like a bikini. Now it has been transformed into Bikini Berlin, with its lower ﬂoors laid out as an industrially chic showcase for fashion and design brands more associated with the hidden courtyards of the East. Upper levels contain art galleries

SCANDINAVIAN FAST-FASHION CHAINS AND ASIAN-THEMED co*ckTAIL BARS HAVE MUSHROOMED TO CATER TO YOUNGSTERS IN BERLIN

ABOVE THE WINTER GARDEN RESTAURANT AREA OF THE KADEWE DEPARTMENT STORE FAR LEFT MODEM, A CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS IS HOUSED IN A FORMER POWER STATION. IT IS ALSO THE HOME OF THE TRESOR TECHNO CLUB LEFT BERLIN HAS SUCCEEDED IN DRAWING A NUMBER OF START-UPS RECENTLY, INCLUDING THE FACTORY

Tillmans — has brought his famous gallery from Cologne to the stately surroundings of nearby Fasanenstrasse. Artists David Lieske and Peter Kersten opened the fashionable Mathew Gallery in Schaperstraße 18 months ago. And C/O Berlin, for years a legendary photography venue in the Mitte, has moved into the iconic Amerika Haus, which, following World War II, was one of West Berlin’s most

culturally signiﬁcant addresses. Another Mitte institution, Circle Culture, the city’s hippest art gallery, has also opened new premises nearby. Owner Johann Haehling von Lanzenauer says: “Most people in the Mitte now are tourists, who don’t really buy art. There is more money spent here and you can get bigger premises for less money.” The centrepiece of the Zoologischer Garten’s

and eateries. In Bikini Berlin’s missing stomach is a version of New York City’s High Line park, overlooking the zoo’s monkey enclosures. An outpost of the hip Austrian 25Hours Hotel chain delivers panoramic views of the zoo and Tiergarten from its rooftop bar and restaurant. The City West is also getting a more glamorous take on their nightlife. Late last year the German-American billionaire, Nicolas Berggruen, opened Avenue Club in a basem*nt beneath his Cafe Moskau, a rather blingy affair designed by the Berlin architecture team, Karhard, who incidentally have also designed the Panorama Bar atop the vast industrial club Berghain.

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THE ART OF THE BUILD

THE WALL: 25 YEARS UNDER THE SLOGAN “FROM WALLED CITY TO WORLD CITY” THE CITY OF BERLIN HAS BEEN COORDINATING A SERIES OF EVENTS ALL YEAR TO MARK THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL ON NOVEMBER 9, 1989. MANY EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS TO COMMEMORATE THE ANNIVERSARY OF THIS HISTORIC EVENT HAVE BEEN HAPPENING ACROSS THE CITY THROUGHOUT THE YEAR

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Another supersized dose of consumerism comes in the shape of Germany’s biggest shopping centre, The Mall of Berlin, which has just opened on Leipziger Platz, once the location for the Wertheim department store, ﬂagship of a Jewish-owned business that was “Aryanised” under the Nazis. The new mall’s 76,000 square metres of shopping space will swell to 130,000 square metres next year. This will be a boon to the residents of the new penthouses going up along the Spree river, such as Living Levels, the 13-storey glass tower, which made headlines

last year when it uprooted a chunk of the outdoor East Side Gallery, once a section of the Wall. But it is not just property tycoons who are keen to put their stamp on this rapidly evolving city. The pioneers of the city’s clubbing scene want their say too. In fact, Juval Dieziger and Christoph Klenzendorf, the hard-living pair who once ran the notoriously wild Bar 25, and more recently KaterHolzig, a huge chilled-out riverside club in Kreuzberg, want to create their own version of utopia along the Spree in the city centre. Incredibly, two years ago this unlikely development

duo paid a sum believed to be more than €10 million (US$12.6 million) to acquire a much sought-after slice of real estate, known as Holzmarkt, via a collective they had created with around 120 fortysomething ex-clubbers, and with funds they had secured from a Swiss pension fund. Adding to the whole surreality of the transaction, it turned out that the fund Stiftung Abendrot, was aligned to the anti-nuclear movement, which naturally had its own share of members who enthusiastically pursue alternative lifestyles. Dieziger and Klenzendorf’s hope is to create a public

PHOTOS CORBIS (BERLIN WALL); AFP

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GERMANY’S BIGGEST SHOPPING CENTRE, THE MALL OF BERLIN, WILL INCREASE ITS CURRENT SHOPPING SPACE OF 76,000 SQUARE METRES TO 130,000 SQUARE METRES BY NEXT YEAR 100 DISCOVERY CHANNEL MAGAZINE INDIA

space for artists, students and entrepreneurs to ﬂourish — possibly the very deﬁnition of Berlin. Plans for Holzmarkt (which means “timber market”, the site’s use until the 19th Century) include a park, a hotel, a cluster of artist studios, a restaurant and a 24-hour day care centre with space for 30 children. There will also be a nightclub for party lovers. Indeed, it is precisely the techno spirit of the early 1990s that the collective is now trying to apply to urban planning — the sense of community, the willingness to experiment and, of course, the old hippie adage that somehow, things will just

work out. Rather thrillingly, a delegation of Berlin club owners travelled to Detroit to give presentations and to have a look at how some of the American city’s decaying buildings could be repurposed. To kickstart income for Holzmarkt’s construction and the annual ground rent, Dieziger and Klenzendorf recently opened a new venue, Pampa, on the site, where people can hang out, eat and drink. There are food stalls, a temporary theatre, a wood-clad nightclub, called Kater Blau, and a restaurant inside the arches beneath the railway line. It is estimated that it will cost at least €100 million

(US$126 million) to realise all the pair’s plans for Holzmarkt, with around 90 percent still to be raised. However, in Berlin’s excitable property climate, that might not be too difficult. The next stage is the construction of the Eckwerk — a cluster of buildings for living and working, with a riverside path winding through them connecting the complex. The plans also call for the building's rooftops to be used as ﬁsh farms, with composted ﬁsh manure being used to fertilise vegetable gardens on different levels. Now, nobody predicted that in the Metropolis.

PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES (THE FACTORY); AGEFOTOSTOCK (KREUZBURGER)

DINER KREUZBURGER ATTRACTS A HIP CLIENTELE

WHAT’S ON THIS MONTH ON DISCOVERY CHANNEL

Revealed: Rann of Kutch Spread over vast region of 23,000 square kilometers, The Rann of Kutch is reputed to be one of the largest salt deserts in the world. Revealed: Rann of Kutch captures the awe inspiring beauty, complexity and the paradox that this deserted wasteland and yet the cradle of life and civilisation. PREMIERES ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 8 AT 9 PM

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WHAT'S ON

How China Works In How China Works, host and architect Danny Forster will travel across China exploring the country’s most ambitious projects, technological innovations and gaining insight into Chinese society. Whether it’s investigating the world’s fastest trains, exploring the tech behind China’s most successful smartphone app, or building and operating the world’s biggest machinery, Danny will be meeting some of the country’s brightest minds as he attempts to understand how China works AIRS EVERY SATURDAY 6 PM STARTING 13 DECEMBER

Dual Survival Experts agree there are some very basic and universal rules for surviving in the wild. Find shelter, ﬁnd water, ﬁnd food, ﬁnd help. Beyond that, there’s not much they agree on. No one knows this better than Cody Lundin and Joseph Teti, who take on some of the planet’s most unforgiving terrain to demonstrate, in their own way, how the right skills and some creative thinking can keep you alive. AIRS EVERY DAY 9 PM STARTING NOVEMBER 10

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Beast Tracker From the murky alligator swamps of Louisiana to Hawaii’s deadly waters; to the snake infested waterways of Florida to the hog ravaged plains of Texas, humans are struggling to ﬁnd a balance between conservation and survival as deadly animals increasingly ﬁnd their way into our everyday lives. Dr Andrew West is the BEAST TRACKER and he’s on a mission to investigate the ﬁne line between thrive and survive. AIRS EVERY THURSDAY 8 PM, STARTING 11 DECEMBER

Making of “Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain” The programme Making of Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain goes behind the ﬁlm which stars Martin Sheen, Kal Penn, Mischa Baton and Rajpal Yadav and tells the story of that eventful night when toxic gas leaked from the Union Carbide Bhopal Plant and what happened before that leading to the accident. PREMIERES ON WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3 AT 9 PM

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WHAT'S ON

Ebola: The Search For A Cure The Ebola virus. No-one knows exactly where it comes from but one thing is certain – it’s one of the most virulent infections known to science. Since 2013, an Ebola epidemic has been spreading across West Africa and efforts to contain the outbreak are failing. The programme meets the doctors working on the frontline to try and contain the current outbreak and interviews the scientists who ﬁrst discovered the disease back in 1976. PREMIERES ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 15 AT 9 PM

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