NOVEMBER, A MONTH FOR TURKEY'S TO REMEMBER

MUSIC AND EVENTS

THANKSGIVING BROUGHT BLESSINGS AND THANKS

Well, we are really glad the the President at least pardoned one Turkey this Thanksgiving. As much as we love the spirit of this holiday, the overall shedding of little and large Turkey’s sends chills down our little and large spines. Nevertheless, we herein bring you a few of the most notable tunes heard on Turkey day and all the other notable happenings in November.

MACY’S DAY PARADE

FASHION

ALIVE AND WELL IN NOVEMBER

Written by: Olivier Saillant for Colette Pop-Up Modifications by: THE REVIEW® Content courtesy of: Chanel

For the latest takeover of renowned Parisian concept store Colette, Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel created an exclusive Adidas sneaker with musician Pharrell Williams, available on the first floor. The month-long residency (also offering limited-edition tees designed by Lagerfeld, soundtracks by Michel Gaubert, and more) was on through November 25. And after 20 years, Colette closes its' door for the last time on December 20.

ART

THE LOUVRE OPENS IN ABU-DHABI

Written by: Alexandra Peers for ArtinAmericaMagazine.com Modifications by: THE REVIEW® Content by: Mohamed Somji Courtesy of: The Louvre Abu Dhabi

The Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum opened officially to the public November 11, though Arab sheikhs, French president Emmanuel Macron, and other VIPs got an early preview.

Designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Jean Nouvel, the museum comprises some fifty white-cube galleries that spill from under a perforated steel canopy, off which sunlight flickers across the sprawling 260,000-square-foot complex. Sitting on the seaside of the United Arab Emirates’ capital city, the institution resembles nothing so much as a floating, cracked-open Rubik’s Cube in white and grey. And, much like a Rubik’s Cube, it is both maddening and addictive.

In an unprecedented deal, many of the several hundred artworks inside are on loan from the Louvre and from a dozen French national institutions in a consortium dubbed Agence France-Muséums. (The thirty-year partnership, which reportedly cost Abu Dhabi one billion dollars including construction, entails special exhibitions, revolving art loans, curatorial consultations with a raft of Louvre staffers and the loan of the Louvre brand name.) The display diverges from the encyclopedic tradition epitomized by the Louvre—the collection is organized by era, and sometimes topic, rather than by geography. Adieu to the “Egyptian Wing” and the “Arts of Asia Gallery.” Here, in one of the ancient art galleries, a Gandharan figure from Central Asia stands next to a Roman one, flanked by a Han dynasty horse and a pre-Columbian mask. Another room pairs the legendary Blue Qur'an—a medieval manuscript on indigo-dyed vellum—with a Yemenite Torah and a fifteenth-century French Bible. In a witty gallery illustrating the art of war, Napoleon rides in on horseback, crossing the Alps in one of Jacques-Louis David’s most famous paintings, this version on loan from Versailles The display is a visual farrago. But as with the Barnes Museum, the jumble can occasionally be magnificent.

First announced over a decade ago, the museum has been plagued by delays and controversy. The global media has reported on substandard working conditions at the construction site (though the issue was given short shrift in the news coverage on the eve of this week's unveiling). In his opening remarks, Jean-Luc Martinez, president of the Louvre, briefly addressed these concerns. "We made sure that [conditions for] all the workers on the site conformed to all the regulations of the country," he said.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi was supposed to be the first of several starchitect-designed cultural institutions on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, all of which are now in various degrees of limbo: a Guggenheim satellite by Frank Gehry, the Maritime Museum by Tadao Ando, a performing arts complex from the studio of the late Zaha Hadid, and a museum in honor of Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, former president of the UAE, from Foster+ Partners (the British Museum withdrew from its partnership agreement with the Zayed National Museum last month).

But the Louvre Abu Dhabi pressed on. The UAE augmented the Louvre’s loans with its own recent acquisitions and commissions. These include a handful of glorious early photographs (many of which are from Egypt), works by Jenny Holzer and Ai Weiwei, and a Piet Mondrian that formerly belonged to Yves Saint Laurent.

The blockbuster Impressionist room, much of its material from the Musée D’Orsay, Paris, features beautful works by Manet, Caillebotte, Monet, and other big names. It risks coming off as a “greatest hits” of French painting. But few of the works are the overexposed ones seen on gift-shop postcards. In the modernist galleries, a black-and-white Jackson Pollock hangs opposite a moody, deep-purple Mark Rothko. The paintings sit so gorgeously in conversation that you can imagine both artists making the works for just this space.

Viewers who dive into every corner will be rewarded. There is a sarcophagus visible only after negotiating a maze of black marble vitrines, while a dimly lit side gallery opens onto an Art Deco room by Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann, transported from the Champs Élysées. Other highlights include an 1888 van Gogh self-portrait, La belle ferronnière (ca. 1490–96) by Leonardo da Vinci (though its attribution has been disputed for decades), Bellini’s vivid and spiritual 1480-85 Mother and Child, and Paul Gauguin’s Children Wrestling (1888).

There are problems. The need to have wall text in three languages minimizes the information avaialable in each one. The Nouvel building and its grounds are unfinished, so first impressions, at least from the land-locked side are underwhelming. The organizers are simply trying to do too much here, and the historical narrative can get muddy. Consider that, in the Renaissance galleries, dishes from the Ottoman empire sit in front of the aforementioned da Vinci. However, if this juxtaposition rankles, it is easy enough to forgive when you spot works by Titian and Holbein hanging nearby. (One guest from France, where the collaboration has been criticized as a sale of the nation’s cultural patrimony, argued the latter was a "basement Holbein" piece. But it is not in my basement, and I wish it were.)

All in all, while the Louvre Abu Dhabi can seem in places like an art-historical CliffsNotes, the ambition to reshuffle the deck and the fabulous objects thus brought together make the museum a game-changer. It has the potential to dramatically shift perspectives on world culture. On a personal note, I was sorry to leave. I wanted to tour one last time to see what I had missed. Blessed and mobile as some of us are in the art world, we see a great many museums and become jaded. This one offers a sense of new discovery. At the opening, Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, the chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, made an announcement that would have sounded puffy patriotism if it were not delivered with such a genuine thrill and effervescence. “It is a great day, a great day when you will all see history,” he said. “This is a museum for the world. It will broadcast tolerance, acceptance, culture.” May it be so.

HOSPITALITY

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE A HOTEL LOBBY

Written by: Rosie Spinks for QUARTZY Modifications by: THE REVIEW® Content by: Ian Schrager

It may have taken them a while, but it’s fair to say that the hotel industry finally sees Airbnb as a bona fide threat. And that threat is much of the reason why hotel groups are launching new products and concepts to go after the same young, lucrative, and digitally-inclined demographic that Airbnb so effectively lures.

However, in trying to emulate the company—which is valued at more than Hilton and Hyatt combined—hotels might be missing an obvious beat. As boutique hotel pioneer Ian Shrager told Skift recently, hotels already have something that Airbnb can’t offer: communal space (known by most folks as the hotel lobby). Sure, it may be a standard, if not a bit ho-hum, concept. But the tried and true hotel lobby offers unique advantages for a variety of reasons—chief among them, as Shrager pointed out, is that Airbnb (with its inventory of private homes) “can’t do it.”

Despite this, the innovation that we’re seeing again and again today seems to be focused on everything but lobbies. Instead, hospitality companies appear obsessed with “customizable” and “connected” experiences as well as surface level features and add-ons that have, for better or worse, become synonymous with millennials. For example, Hilton just released its “Connected Room” which is anchored around modern conveniences like syncing your Netflix account with the in-room TV, using your phone to turn off the lights and adjust the temperature, and solving the great injustice of generic hotel artwork by replacing it with your camera roll.

Hilton’s Joshua Sloser, Senior Vice President of Digital, says that the “Connected Room is rooted in the unique needs of our guests, who have voiced an increasing desire to personalize their stays.” Of course Hilton’s new product may appeal to those beyond the millennial demographic—after all, nearly every traveler is connected digitally these days. Yet this kind of innovation is indicative of the larger trend of brands rolling out “millennial-focused” hotel rooms, with the standard-issue fast wifi, minimalist furniture, and cheaper prices they supposedly desire.

While this can’t necessarily hurt, there’s no guarantee it’ll help, either. What could help, as Shrager hints at, is focusing on the specific reasons why a traveler should stay in a hotel over another disruptive accommodation option. Positioning the hotel lobby as a communal space for collaboration, spontaneity, and an overall atmosphere you can’t get at home—and re-designing them to enhance those very qualities—is a good place to start. It’s an offering that someone’s rented apartment can’t touch and provides a much needed dose of old-fashioned fun and novelty that’s worth leaving home for. This, at the end of the day, might still be a hotel’s most valuable proposition.

Hotel chains like Ace Hotel have built entire properties around this notion of curated pleasure and service mixed with function. They’ve designed many of their properties’ lobbies as quasi co-working spaces, where you’re just as likely to find a local freelancer or relaxing creative as you are an actual hotel guest. Shrager’s newest property, PUBLIC Hotel New York, opened in earlier this year on the Lower East Side and has also clearly embraced the “lobby-as-lifestyle” trend. PUBLIC ditched usual amenities like check-in desks and room service to focus on spacious public and communal spaces where guests can mix, mingle and get a solid sense of the hotel’s DNA. Again, the emphasis is as much on functionality as fun—what else to expect from the man behind not just the boutique hotel concept, but the legendary NYC nightspot Studio 54.

In blurring the line between bar, lobby, and hotel business center, spaces like Ace and PUBLIC invite guests to linger and enjoy the novelty of the hotel experience, whether they’re drinking a cocktail or working on a business proposal—or, likely, both at the same time. Another variation on this theme is the current renaissance of luxury hostels, with travelers seeing the benefit of paying for an experience that comes with a built-in space to meet like-minded people and hoteliers offering them surroundings as appealing as a hipster bar.

It took the hotel industry a while to come to grips with the threat that the sharing economy poses. They now have the opportunity to innovate around their own strengths, in addition to going after the competition.

TECH AND INNOVATION

A BIT ABOUT BITCOIN

Written by: Martin Venezky and modification by THE REVIEW Content by: wired.com

In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. His email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym. But while Nakamoto himself may have been a puzzle, his creation cracked a problem that had stumped cryptographers for decades. The idea of digital money—convenient and untraceable, liberated from the oversight of governments and banks—had been a hot topic since the birth of the Internet. Cypherpunks, the 1990s movement of libertarian cryptographers, dedicated themselves to the project. Yet every effort to create virtual cash had foundered. Ecash, an anonymous system launched in the early 1990s by cryptographer David Chaum, failed in part because it depended on the existing infrastructures of government and credit card companies. Other proposals followed—bit gold, RPOW, b-money—but none got off the ground.

One of the core challenges of designing a digital currency involves something called the double-spending problem. If a digital dollar is just information, free from the corporeal strictures of paper and metal, what’s to prevent people from copying and pasting it as easily as a chunk of text, “spending” it as many times as they want? The conventional answer involved using a central clearinghouse to keep a real-time ledger of all transactions—ensuring that, if someone spends his last digital dollar, he can’t then spend it again. The ledger prevents fraud, but it also requires a trusted third party to administer it.

Bitcoin did away with the third party by publicly distributing the ledger, what Nakamoto called the “block chain.” Users willing to devote CPU power to running a special piece of software would be called miners and would form a network to maintain the block chain collectively. In the process, they would also generate new currency. Transactions would be broadcast to the network, and computers running the software would compete to solve irreversible cryptographic puzzles that contain data from several transactions. The first miner to solve each puzzle would be awarded 50 new bitcoins, and the associated block of transactions would be added to the chain. The difficulty of each puzzle would increase as the number of miners increased, which would keep production to one block of transactions roughly every 10 minutes. In addition, the size of each block bounty would halve every 210,000 blocks—first from 50 bitcoins to 25, then from 25 to 12.5, and so on. Around the year 2140, the currency would reach its preordained limit of 21 million bitcoins.

When Nakamoto’s paper came out in 2008, trust in the ability of governments and banks to manage the economy and the money supply was at its nadir. The US government was throwing dollars at Wall Street and the Detroit car companies. The Federal Reserve was introducing “quantitative easing,” essentially printing money in order to stimulate the economy. The price of gold was rising. Bitcoin required no faith in the politicians or financiers who had wrecked the economy—just in Nakamoto’s elegant algorithms. Not only did bitcoin’s public ledger seem to protect against fraud, but the predetermined release of the digital currency kept the bitcoin money supply growing at a predictable rate, immune to printing-press-happy central bankers and Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation.

Nakamoto himself mined the first 50 bitcoins—which came to be called the genesis block—on January 3, 2009. For a year or so, his creation remained the province of a tiny group of early adopters. But slowly, word of bitcoin spread beyond the insular world of cryptography. It has won accolades from some of digital currency’s greatest minds. Wei Dai, inventor of b-money, calls it “very significant”; Nick Szabo, who created bit gold, hails bitcoin as “a great contribution to the world”; and Hal Finney, the eminent cryptographer behind RPOW, says it’s “potentially world-changing.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocate for digital privacy, eventually started accepting donations in the alternative currency.

The small band of early bitcoiners all shared the communitarian spirit of an open source software project. Gavin Andresen, a coder in New England, bought 10,000 bitcoins for $50 and created a site called the Bitcoin Faucet, where he gave them away for the hell of it. Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida programmer, conducted what bitcoiners think of as the first real-world bitcoin transaction, paying 10,000 bitcoins to get two pizzas delivered from Papa John’s. (He sent the bitcoins to a volunteer in England, who then called in a credit card order transatlantically.) A farmer in Massachusetts named David Forster began accepting bitcoins as payment for alpaca socks.

When they weren’t busy mining, the faithful tried to solve the mystery of the man they called simply Satoshi. On a bitcoin IRC channel, someone noted portentously that in Japanese Satoshi means “wise.” Someone else wondered whether the name might be a sly portmanteau of four tech companies: SAmsung, TOSHIba, NAKAmichi, and MOTOrola. It seemed doubtful that Nakamoto was even Japanese. His English had the flawless, idiomatic ring of a native speaker.

Perhaps, it was suggested, Nakamoto wasn’t one man but a mysterious group with an inscrutable purpose—a team at Google, maybe, or the National Security Agency. “I exchanged some emails with whoever Satoshi supposedly is,” says Hanyecz, who was on bitcoin’s core developer team for a time. “I always got the impression it almost wasn’t a real person. I’d get replies maybe every two weeks, as if someone would check it once in a while. Bitcoin seems awfully well designed for one person to crank out.”

Nakamoto revealed little about himself, limiting his online utterances to technical discussion of his source code. On December 5, 2010, after bitcoiners started to call for Wikileaks to accept bitcoin donations, the normally terse and all-business Nakamoto weighed in with uncharacteristic vehemence. “No, don’t ‘bring it on,'” he wrote in a post to the bitcoin forum. “The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to Wikileaks not to try to use bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

Then, as unexpectedly as he had appeared, Nakamoto vanished. At 6:22 pm GMT on December 12, seven days after his Wikileaks plea, Nakamoto posted his final message to the bitcoin forum, concerning some minutiae in the latest version of the software. His email responses became more erratic, then stopped altogether. Andresen, who had taken over the role of lead developer, was now apparently one of just a few people with whom he was still communicating. On April 26, Andresen told fellow coders: “Satoshi did suggest this morning that I (we) should try to de-emphasize the whole ‘mysterious founder’ thing when talking publicly about bitcoin.” Then Nakamoto stopped replying even to Andresen’s emails. Bitcoiners wondered plaintively why he had left them. But by then his creation had taken on a life of its own.

LIFESTYLE AND BRANDS

ABSOLUTE ELIX GOES BUGGY CHIC

Written by: Marcy Medina and modification by THE REVIEW Content Courtesy of: Absolute Vodka

Capitalizing on the retail trend toward experiences, premium vodka brand Absolut Elyx is growing its burgeoning lifestyle brand with a pair of physical retail outposts in Los Angeles. There is an Elyx boutique at the new Fred Segal in West Hollywood, and on Nov. 27, a mobile version, dubbed the Elyx Boutique Buggy, landed at The Original Farmers Market adjacent to The Grove, through Dec. 24.

Jonas Tåhlin, chief executive officer, said he didn’t set out to sell products other than vodka when he launched the brand three years ago. The focus was on experiential marketing via private events at his historic Hollywood estate, which doubles as a venue for private dinners for the likes of Kate Hudson and Lady Gaga.

The brand developed a copper pineapple cup in partnership with the Edition hotel in Miami a couple of years ago, and started rolling out more items at private events at the Elyx house in Los Angeles. The precious metal is used in its distilling process, with a 1921 still and packets of copper that are used to give the vodka a smooth taste.

“Whenever we had parties, perfectly respectable people were stealing these items, which was frustrating at first. So a year ago we launched elyxboutique.com and the item went out of stock. That’s when we realized we’d become a lifestyle brand, and it just started to grow organically,” said Tåhlin.

Absolut Elyx soon added copper barware and cuff links, and copper sequined bow ties and jackets by Any Old Iron, as well as turbans by Julia Clancey. Retail prices range from $50 to $990 and its first pop-up launched last holiday season in Bryant Park.

“We’ve been getting more requests from customers who want to see and touch these things, so it’s been somewhat of an unexpected turn, like Porsche going into design. It’s never happened in the spirit industry before,” he said. “It’s no longer about what you are drinking, it’s about how you are seated, what you are drinking your cocktail out of, that says a lot about your choices. It could be quite a revolution.”

For every item sold, the brand provides one week’s worth of clean drinking water through the Denver-based NGO Water for People. To date, it has helped 30,000 people access clean drinking water. “Any good luxury brand has a sense of giving back. It might not affect what people buy, but they can feel good about their purchase. I liked that about Toms and Warby Parker, which had philanthropy built into the business model,” Tåhlin said.

While the next step is setting up freestanding stores, the brand first plans to go into select Williams Sonoma locations.

THE REVIEW would like to wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season and a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

Bring on 2018 and as always WATCH THIS SPACE!!!!