The Rake

When I was growing up in Manhattan in the 1980s, it was not cool to be Asian — so much so that I managed to talk my way out of learning Mandarin as my second language. At the time, anything that smacked of my cultural heritage embarrassed me. Even when my family spoke to each other in Chinese when we were in public, I could feel a flush of self-consciousness and shame heat the back of my neck. Instead, profoundly inspired by the first scene of Claude Berri’s Manon des Sources, when the cinematic world was introduced to the transcendent Emmanuelle Béart tending goats à poil, I was inspired to take up French. However, my penchant for all things Francophone (including referring to my parents precociously as mere and pere)…

It is August again — my favourite issue of the year, because it comes out at a time when many of you will be on your Adirondack chairs overlooking one of the many lakes in Muskoka, smoking a Montecristo Double Edmundo and drinking a sundowner while listening to the loon birds. Or drying off on a sunbed after a Mediterranean plunge, from a boat or otherwise. The possibilities are endless, but if there’s a demographic I like to think knows how to turn relaxation into an art form, it is The Rake’s readership. If that is you, what will you find in these pages? Well, we are indulging in the wonders of far-off lands, for this is our Travel Issue. It can be read in one of two ways: either…

brian bowen smith Brian, who was born and raised in New York, became a professional photographer via a less-than-traditional route. After catching the eye of Herb Ritts while performing as a pro athlete in a print campaign, the legendary photographer became a friend and mentor, helping Brian to find his personal photographic style. He has been working steadily ever since, shooting for countless publications and commercial clients, as well as publishing two books and focusing heavily on his fine art photography. Brian lives in L.A. with his wife and young son, and when he is not shooting you will find him surfing, snowboarding or riding his motorcycle. He has made a welcome return to The Rake in this issue, shooting our cover star, the Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada, in Santa…

I hadn’t been in the living room of Gay Talese’s East Side brownstone more than 10 minutes before he said, “You wouldn’t go to a wedding or a job interview dressed like that, would you?” Probably not. I was wearing a puffy Dodger-blue hoodie over a dress shirt. Did Talese equate our author-writer conversation with the formality of occasions such as a wedding? Probably so, and he’s long regarded sartorial style as a sign of respect. “When I go to interview someone,” he tells me, “I always felt I was representing myself as a professional and I had to dress the part. It’s a sense of separateness, not protection; a sense of self and pride. Most people will dress for a funeral. I dress for being alive, not being dead. I…

I hadn’t been in the living room of Gay Talese’s East Side brownstone more than 10 minutes before he said, “You wouldn’t go to a wedding or a job interview dressed like that, would you?” Probably not. I was wearing a puffy Dodger-blue hoodie over a dress shirt. Did Talese equate our author-writer conversation with the formality of occasions such as a wedding? Probably so, and he’s long regarded sartorial style as a sign of respect. “When I go to interview someone,” he tells me, “I always felt I was representing myself as a professional and I had to dress the part. It’s a sense of separateness, not protection; a sense of self and pride. Most people will dress for a funeral. I dress for being alive, not being dead.…

Who is the most swooningly romantic of movie directors? A case could be made for Jean Vigo or Wong Kar-Wai, whose poetic-erotic offerings, from L’Atalante to In The Mood For Love, are equally adept at the shimmer and the simmer. But both would surely doff their caps to Nicholas Ray, whose films, according to the Harvard Film Archive, are “among the most heartfelt and disarmingly authentic works of the Hollywood studio era, intimate portraits of indelibly three-dimensional characters and lyrical intimations of loneliness or loss”. Whether bringing a skewed eye to the genre picture, like his 1954 western Johnny Guitar, or practically inventing the troubled teenager in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause, Ray’s work foregrounded the wounded underdogs and outcasts he keenly identified with. He was acclaimed as the auteur…