Walls of Fame

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, 10 May 2010
For four decades Maya Romanoff has been leading interior fashion into realms both bizarre and beautiful

Brace yourselves: tie dye is back and it is trying to take your home by sneak assault.
Wall-ware emperor Maya Romanoff may be best known for surfaces swathed in Swarovski crystals and tortoiseshell, but he has marked his brand’s new milestone with a nod to simpler times, when he was largely known as the man who could tie dye a wall. Celebrating four decades, the brand’s Anniversary Collection brings back the psychedelic patterns of its seventies debut, but contemporized and camouflaged with colours by New York-based designer Amy Lau.

It is a nostalgia being indulged. New York’s Museum of Art and Design previewed the collection in early March with a retrospective of Romanoff and his work, while high-fashion yardstick Bergdorf Goodman just rolled out the Anniversary series – the brand’s first ever retail …

The World’s Forgotten

‘The World’s Forgotten’, Asia Sentinel Hong Kong, 19 April 2010, reprinted as an Op-ed in the Jakarta Globe, Indonesia

Millions of detainees across the globe remain in filthy, crowded and unsanitary prisons (See online version here)

As the UN’s top investigator into torture and punishment prepares to end his term later this year, he has focused on a group people whom he has long called the globe’s “most vulnerable” to discrimination and to neglect. Detainees, says Dr Manfred Nowak, have become the world’s forgotten.

The theme has become central to the Austrian professor’s six-year tenure, and in the most recent session of the Human Rights Council this March he strongly reiterated his call for a new convention to protect them.

Where other forms of discrimination are strongly represented in global social movements, the plight of those considered “criminal” tends to raise much less interest and certainly less sympathy. Media coverage is sporadic. While it took sexually explicit photographs…

A Luang Prabang guide

For Smart Travel Asia, written in 2007, regularly updated.

First you have to get to Laos. Then you can enjoy the incredible temples, the charm, shopping, and laid-back lifestyle, not to mention some fine Luang Prabang boutique hotels.

THERE IS a reason why Luang Prabang remains the town that time forgot. It’s bloody hard to get to. Snuggled well in the treacherously undulating northwest of Laos it was, until recently, served by just two alarming modes of travel. The first was Lao Airlines – a carrier essentially blacklisted by the US Embassy, the UN, and other companies that prefer their employees whole. The second was a punishing ten-hour bus journey from the capital Vientiane, at the mercy of bandits, and a million sharp turns. Yet the lure of gilded spires, saffron robes and cobblestones was strong, and still the travel pilgrims prevailed.

So things are different now. In 1998 a fancy modern airport was constructed 2km from town, and a few years later Bangkok Airways,…

Philippines Massacre: ‘They Made a Monster’

January 8, 2010, Guardian Weekly, UK
Reprinted in the Sri Lanka Guardian

For an uncut version of the interview, click here. (Link coming soon)

Joseph Jubelag narrowly escaped the November massacre in Maguindanao, the Philippines, which claimed the lives of 57 people – 31 of them fellow journalists. They were allegedly murdered by a candidate for governor, part of a ruling family dynasty accused of war lordism. Jubelag expects the trial to bring a backlash against the private militias that are allowed to be kept by politicians for reasons of national security, as well as against President Arroyo for her past protection of the notorious clan.

In the Philippines, local governments are allowed to form their own paramilitary forces to fight against local insurgents. President Arroyo owed the Ampatuans during her 2004 election because in Maguindanao the administration got sweeping votes against the opposition. Not a single opposition candidate won in Maguindanao….

The China Challenge

Prestige, Hong Kong, October 2009

US-trained designer Lyndon Neri had a hard time getting used to the mainland, but now he’s revelling in the challenges.

Though passion is imperative in any good designer, it can be taken too far. This is something Lyndon Neri learned on the day he accidentally collapsed his own lungs. “I wasn’t well and I hadn’t slept for three days straight. So I spent two days in hospital then went straight back into studying again,” chuckles the designer of his breakdown at Harvard. “It probably wasn’t the best approach.”

Back then the man who would later co-found the Neri and Hu Design and Research Office in Shanghai had been throwing himself full tilt into his thesis, about a pocket of a Californian Chinatown in which first-generation customs were still perfectly preserved. It was a critique mostly, but one that Neri felt he could give because he’d grown up somewhere not so different about 8,000 miles away.

As a boy Neri had…

Full Steam

October 2008, Discovery Magazine, China

Jo Baker takes the waters in Taipei

The air was dark and tinged with cool, old trees struck dramatic poses against the night sky and below them, a near-naked elderly man waxed lyrical about the stars. “This is a good place,” he said, a blue towel twisted jauntily around his head. “Out in the open air with the stars, the moon. It’s a very good way to relax.” The scene was a hopping Friday night at a Taiwanese public hot springs; the place, a sleepy town called Xin Beitou, just north of Taipei.
When the Japanese gave up Taiwan after World War II they left a number of lingering legacies, among them great sushi and a penchant for orderly queues. But their best loved hand-me-down is the onsen (in Japanese) or wenquan (Putonghua). The Japanese have been dunking themselves in steaming, therapeutic mountain ponds for centuries, and developments in ex-colonial towns like Beitou are long-standing tributes to this love…

A Thankless Task

August 22, 2009, South China Morning Post, Hong Kong
August 27, Sri Lanka Guardian, Sri Lanka, and and as ‘Thankless tasks: Rights defenders in Sri Lanka & Pakistan’ in Selected Articles on politics, human rights & the rule of law in South Asia, Article 2, Vol. 08 – No. 03, September 2009 (PDF)

As a truth commission secretary MCM Iqbal helped gathered evidence on thousands of forced disappearances in Sri Lanka, only to see it disappear itself

As President Mahinda Rajapaksa speaks of ushering Sri Lankans into a new era of peace, a slight, bespectacled man in his sixties watches him from across an ocean with the weariness of a man who has tried and failed to call his bluff.

MCM Iqbal was secretary to two of Sri Lanka’s ‘truth commissions’, presidential commissions of inquiry into the 30,000 or more forced disappearances that took place in the late eighties and early nineties in the south, during a dirty war that many believe has yet to run its…

Polo Returns to China

March 2008, Prestige Magazine, Hong Kong

Jo Baker delves into the Middle Kingdom’s new highlife on horseback

Download original: Prestige Polo

A line of Australia’s finest polo ponies fidget unhappily in their stalls, one picking moodily at the stable planks with his well-bred teeth. China is in the throes of its worst winter in fifty years, and it’s not only the people here that are suffering. “They don’t really like being inside,” says Romiro Pellegrini, a young vet and skillful Polo player from Argentina. “They’re athletes. They want to be out playing, and this snow just gets them down.”

The ponies of China’s new Nine Dragons Hill Polo Club may well be dreaming of last October; three days in which man and horse tussled on a field of verdant grass to a backdrop of fizzing champagne, hats of architectural daring and delicate wahs of enthusiasm. Shanghai’s elite were learning how to do ‘garden party’ and in the process, sporting history was being made.

Polo…

Love is in the wear

South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, April 24, 2009
Architecture with a lived-in touch is winning hearts

When architect Bill Bensley was asked to design a hotel in Phuket not long after the tsunami, he found himself wanting to give it a deeper layer of meaning. That layer was found by his team of Thai and Indonesian designers at salvage auctions in the area, where they bought driftwood and other bits of wreckage wrought by the giant wave, and incorporated them into the hotel, Indigo Pearl. “We picked up a whole lot of materials and in various innovative ways reused them, in the structure, in sculptures,” he recalls. The hotel, which also uses a lot of old tin in tribute to the area’s tin mining history, has received rave reviews for its vision and its sensitivity.

Using architectural salvage like this is a great way to bring emotional resonance to a space. Though Asian consumers tend to love the look and smell of the brand spanking new, the virtue of an old door, scuffed…

Stay Overnight in a Turkish Mansion

May 14, 2009, Time Magazine

“Make yourself at home” may be a refrain heard in guesthouses the world over, but it takes on new meaning when it comes from one of your host country’s wealthiest families — and when your temporary “home” is their mansion. The Buyukkusoglu family, who made their fortune in the automotive industry, converted their 48,400-sq-ft (4,500 sq m) modern manor house in Bodrum, Turkey, on the edge of the Aegean Sea into a 12-suite hotel, and in 2007 opened it to paying guests as the Casa Dell’Arte.

“We wanted the hotel to still feel like a house, and to be very social,” says owner Fatos Buyukkusoglu, who led the hotel’s design team and lives in a smaller house on the property. “We designed a lot of inner courtyards and spaces where guests can come together — at the dinner table, in the lounge or by the pool.” Meals are taken at a 14-seat dining table, on the terrace, or on various sculptural bits of lawn furniture, and each night guests…

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