Some 6,000 years ago, humans strapped wood to his feet to glide across the icy tundra in the very first act of skiing.
Those early shredders likely weren’t concerned with their carving technique and didn’t think twice about pizza versus french fries. Instead, it was all about survival. These primitive planks allowed them to travel long distances safely in winter and track their prey as it migrated during the season. Humans would continue to take to the snow this way for thousands of years until skiing was no longer a necessary task. But, by that point, the sport had been hardwired into our brains as necessary for something else: fun.
There are now thousands of ski resorts dotting the globe, all promising to deliver the thrill that humans have enjoyed for millennia. However, there are far fewer promising an unparalleled luxury experience as well. So this winter, rather than hunting down your dinner, why not head out on a quest to find both excitement and the best in luxury? Here are a few luxury ski experiences that would make our prehistoric, powder-loving ancestors proud.
MANY ARE FAMILIAR WITH JEREMY Irons from such films as The Mission, Kafka, The Lion King, Die Hard with a Vengeance, or Justice League. But what many do not know is that the thespian, one of the very few actors to receive the Triple Crown of Acting—having won an Oscar, Emmy, and a Tony—owns a medieval castle in Ireland that has been restored to its whilom glory.Built around 1450 by the clan of Dermod MacCarthy, the fortress is composed of two adjoining towers on an islet in West Cork, one squat and the other rising tall toward the sky. It was one of Ireland’s last redoubts to fall to the invading forces of Elizabethan England during the last stage of the Tudor conquest. It has long been abandoned until Irons bought it for himself in 1998.
Pop music moved at high speed in the 1960s, but even so the story behind the song for which Gary Brooker was always going to be remembered almost beggars belief. It was taped in April 1967, the same month that the band who recorded it formed: they hadn’t even got around to recruiting a drummer yet and had to use a jazz player moonlighting as a session musician. A couple of weeks later, Paul McCartney was interrupting his first date with his future wife Linda in order to rush to the DJ booth at Soho’s Bag O’Nails club, demanding to know what the hell he was playing (“God, what an incredible record,” he subsequently enthused) and John Lennon was informing a journalist friend that all current pop music was “crap” except for “that dope song, A Whiter Shade of Pale – you hear it when you take some acid and wooooh!”A few weeks after that, it was No 1, a position it held until the middle of July. You do wonder how incredulous Brooker must have felt. He had only started Procol Harum as a last resort. He had left the minor R&B band the Paramounts with the intention of becoming a full-time songwriter, only to discover that no one wanted to buy the songs he had written with lyricist Keith Reid, so he would have to sing them himself. And now here he was less than two months later, on Top of the Pops and feted by the Beatles as the vanguard of pop. A Whiter Shade of Pale caused so much commotion that the effect was discombobulating: Procol Harum organist Matthew Fisher once recalled being mortified after they were parachuted into a headlining slot over the Jimi Hendrix Experience when “we weren’t one 10th as good as him”. Perhaps it was just as well he didn’t know that on the other side of the Atlantic, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys – in the throes of mental collapse and on the verge of abandoning his latest opus, Smile – had taken A Whiter Shade of Pale as another signal that he was finished: “I was so sensitive for the dramatic organ sound that I thought it was my funeral tune,” Wilson later recalled.
Train travel was once as common place as commercial flight is today. While preferred modes of transportation have adapted over the years, many still prefer the experience afforded by coasting along the tracks, accepting the occasional jostle as part of the charm, and taking in the scenery around them. Our writers have shared their favorite rail experiences and we encourage you to add one of these great trips to your 2022 bucket list. Whether you prefer a short hour-long excursion, or a transcontinental journey, here are some of our favorite train trips to experience in the coming year.
During a year of zoom wine tastings rather than actual winery visits, the wine really had to do all of the talking. I spent more time squinting at a screen than I did exploring new wineries meeting winemakers. Hence, it was left to the wine to make a statement telling the winery’s story through acid, fruit, tannin and structure. From the familiar confines of my office, I was introduced to a charming Old Vine Chenin from Sonoma, a cool native Sicilian varietal, and a silky California red with Australian roots—among others. Just more proof that despite the situation wine still has the ability to transport us, something that mattered oh-so-very much this past 18 months. My thanks to every winemaker who toiled over vines and fermentation tanks to bring us all a taste of someplace far, far away.Beyond recipes, cookbooks contain the stories of their creators. Between the pinches of salt and handfuls of sugar, a great-grandmother’s cookies or a 19th-century church group’s cake often reveals something far more precious than a mere dessert.
Here at Gastro Obscura, we live for these stories that hide among ingredients and instructions. Perhaps no place embodies this better than Morris Press, the United States’ largest community cookbook publisher. This year, we visited Morris and combed through their treasure trove of recipe collections authored by groups ranging from bikers to quilters to clowns.
For communities like these, producing a cookbook is often an act of celebration and preservation. From the 18th-century book that helped save the Slovene language to the first recipe collection by and for Central America’s Afro-Indigenous Garifuna community, here are some of our favorite cookbook stories of 2021 that do just that.
A lesser-known art form allowed British aristocracy to circumvent rules of propriety, with in-jokes and suggestive messages hidden inside seemingly innocent images, writes Holly Williams.LLook up the term “collage”, and the Tate’s website will inform you that this cut-and-paste method for making new work was “first used as an artists’ technique in the early 20th Century.” Generally, Picasso and Braque get credited with inventing collage, with Picasso’s decision to paste oilcloth into his painting Still Life with Chair Caning in 1912 considered a firing shot for an explosion of avant-garde art. And when photographs were included in such mixed-media works, the results were particularly witty, subversive, or downright unsettling – as seen in the photomontages by Dadaist Hannah Hoch and Surrealist Max Ernst, revolutionary Soviet artists Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, British pop artists like Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, and Linder Sterling’s punk collages.So far, so coherent a journey through 20th-Century art trends. But what if the Cubists, the Dadaists and the Surrealists were actually predated in this innovation by… upper-class Victorian society women?
Skyscrapers are defined as tall and continuously habitable buildings with multiple floors (sorry not you CN Tower in Canada). Just how big a building needs to be before it’s deemed to be scrapping the sky is not universally agreed on. Historically one would have used it to refer to buildings with between 10 and 20 stories in the 1880s – but these would hardly be enough to impress anyone today.Ten-to-20 stories is considered high-rise for sure, but is not becoming of the more lofty term “skyscraper.” Generally, sources define a skyscraper as being at least 100 meters or 150 meters (492 feet) high. Here we will go by the higher measure. Today many cities around the world have veritable forests of skyscrapers.