1: GET STACKED
Pick up a number of chips as shown – between six and ten should do.
2: LIFT OFF
Use your thumb to roll the front three chips upward to your index finger.
3: CHIP AWAY
Drop the front chip, positioning your middle and ring fingers to guide it back to the stack.
4: FINISH IT
Follow through with the other two chips, like an overhand shuffle. Repeat, menacingly.
EXECUTE THE ZIPPO SNAP
Granted, you don’t smoke – but that’s no reason not to own a lighter. There’s a worldliness in being able to start a campfire, put a flame on a dinner candle or do the required when someone asks you for a light. A metal, Zippo-style number is what you need – and the slickest way to strike it? Look no further than how Ryan Gosling wields his for Emma Stone in Gangster Squad (2013). He sparks it up with just enough flare to cut a dash; anything more complex would look too studied and, therefore, unstylish. Here’s the move…
1: ALL IN HAND
Produce your lighter, holding it as shown with its hinge to the left.
2: PING THE LID
Snap your thumb and fingers together while rotating the hand through 90 degrees.
3: MAKE SPARKS FLY
Strike the flint wheel, straighten the lighter and present the flame.
4: CLOSING TIME
Turn the lighter horizontal again and whip your hand to snap it shut.
SABRE A CHAMPAGNE BOTTLE
Legend has it that, during the early part of the Napoleonic Wars, the French cavalry would celebrate their victories by slicing open champagne bottles with their sabres. And so, “sabrage” was born. “It was then copied by the British, by the King’s German Legion, by the Russians,” says Julian White. “But it stopped after the Battle of Waterloo as obviously there was no more fighting.” In 1986, the Confrérie du Sabre d’Or, for which White is Ambassador Emeritus, was set up to repopularize the art. Here’s his guide…
1: LOWER THE TEMPERATURE
Chill a champagne bottle. “A fridge is 5°C (about 40°F), which is cold enough, but if you want to have a really clean cut and not lose a lot of spume, chill the bottle in the deep freeze for about ten minutes.” Next, remove the wire cage and foil around the cork.
2: CLEAR A PATH
Find the vertical seam where the glass joins. Expose a strip in the neck foil so you can see the full line. “The seam, generally speaking, is where the foil comes together, so you can just turn the foil back on both sides.”
3: PRESENT ARMS
Put your thumb in the base of the bottle, and cradle it at 45 degrees with your fingers. Ensure there’s nobody in the line of fire. Position a blunt sabre – or, failing that, the blunt edge of a kitchen knife – a few inches from the base of the bottle. Hold the blade flat against the seam.
4: SABRE AWAY
Run the blade up the seam. The impact of the metal against the lip of the bottle will cause the cork and the glass around it to fly off. “Go straight through and don’t stop. You don’t need a lot of testosterone; it should be an elegant sweep.”
5: AFTER NOTES…
While sweeping the blade, it should never lose contact with the glass. “If you ‘chop down’ even a millimetre on to the glass at the end of the bottle, it will explode.” Also, avoid sabring clear bottles, as the glass may be too weak. And pour the champagne immediately – well, do you want a warm drink?
TURBO-CHARGE YOUR MEMORY
Could you recite pi to 4,100 decimal places? Dominic O’Brien can. The eight-times winner of the World Memory Championships can also memorize the order of 54 packs of playing cards shuffled together; he can recall the names of 100 previously unseen faces after just 15 minutes of study; and he keeps every appointment without the need of a diary. Yet he says there’s nothing special about his mind. In fact, all his feats are based on a few simple principles, which he regularly teaches to actors struggling to learn lines and to foreign dignitaries who wish to speak without notes. “There’s a misconception that there is only a finite amount of information you can remember before you fill up your ‘memory banks’. That’s nonsense,” he says. “The more you train your memory, the easier it is to memorize information.”
1: MAKE AN IMAGE
To remember a sequence, you need to visualize each item as an image. For objects, this is straightforward – but you must imagine them with all your senses and try to make them more memorable by giving them unusual details. For abstract sequences, such as strings of numbers, you have to think laterally. Perhaps 53 can become an image of Eric Clapton, because five and three correspond to E and C in the alphabet. O’Brien’s book You Can Have an Amazing Memory (2011) details various systems for you to borrow. Now, you need to combine the images.
2: THE JOURNEY METHOD
You need to place each item at a stop on a familiar journey that you can visualize in your mind. Imagine walking around your house. The stops might be: bedroom, landing, bathroom, kitchen, front door. If the first item on the list is an axe, imagine that there is an axe lodged in your bedroom wardrobe. If the next is a car, imagine walking on to the landing and having to squeeze around a roadster. Journeys like this can be used to store everything from shopping lists to the structure of a speech.
3: BUILD A BANK OF JOURNEYS
You may wonder how to avoid being confused by “ghosts” of previous items when memorizing a new list using the same route. The answer is to have at least ten familiar journeys that you can rotate – by the time you use the first one again, you will have forgotten what you stored on it. “I collect journeys,” says O’Brien. “I add two or three new journeys every year that I can use for competition or demonstrations.” This could be a route around a town, perhaps, or a golf course. The best journeys are those you know without hesitation, involve indoor and outdoor spaces, and have a significance for you.
4: THE RULE OF FIVE
If you are remembering a large data set that you wish to use for a long time – O’Brien once learned forty years’ worth of number one singles – you need to repeat the memorizing process. “Through experience I’ve noticed that I need to do that five times.” Ideally, you would study the information and then review it immediately, and once again 24 hours later. Revisit it a third time four to seven days after that, and a fourth time after a month. The final review should happen three to six months later.
5: AN EXTRA TOOL
The journey method is a powerful tool, but mnemonics can also prove useful. “This tends to be quite popular with medical students who have to remember quite difficult Latin terms.” “Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle”, for example, is a mnemonic for the carpal bones: Scaphoid, Lunate, Trapezium, Pisiform, Triquetrum, Trapezoid, Capitate and Hamate. And if you need to remember a large number of acronyms? Store images of them on a journey, of course.
WIN AT KICK-UPS
Jermaine Jenas says that kick-ups are becoming a lost art in professional football. Once athletes reach the top tier, the focus shifts to strength and speed – no time for what seems like a childish trick. “I’ve come across players who would openly say, ‘I can’t do 50 kick-ups, that’s not part of my game,’” he says. To Jenas, a former England international and now football pundit on British television, that’s regrettable. Sure, juggling a ball around your body looks impressive – but it can also train you in vital aspects of the sport. Brazil is one of the few countries where players keep drilling kick-ups, and their track record speaks for itself. “I watch the training now and the fundamentals of what they do are head tennis and beach volleyball with their feet – juggling the ball.”
Jenas believes that his career, which started at Nottingham Forest and took him to Newcastle United, Tottenham Hotspur, Aston Villa and Queen’s Park Rangers, directly benefited from obsessively practising kick-ups while growing up in Nottingham. “I would be in the back garden all day and I’d come running in, saying to my mum or dad, ‘I’ve done 80
kick-ups!’ They’d say, ‘Do it again…’” Not only does the skill teach control, balance and technique, it also helps you learn to use both feet – and develop a useful competitive streak. “The fundamentals of it are what create footballers, in the end.” Despite being out of the game since the 2013–14 season, today he can easily still do 100 kick-ups. With these tips (and practice), you can too…
1: LET IT OUT
If you’re a beginner, you need to lower the difficulty. Practise on hard ground and, more importantly, deflate the ball just a little. “If you watch all these skillsters on YouTube, and they’re doing all these tricks, their balls are not fully pumped up.”
2: KNOW THYSELF
Poise the ball on top of your foot. Where it naturally sits is your sweet spot. When you start practising, this is the part of the foot that should connect with the ball. You should also train your overall stability. “Try standing on one leg while covering an eye – it will throw you off massively.”
3: THE ACTION ITSELF
Think of it less as a kick than a flick, and always point your toe slightly upward to ensure the ball doesn’t fly off. “The lower you can keep the ball, the more control you’ll have over it. You don’t want to go any higher than your knee.” Keep those knees bent and joints loose.
4: HOW TO TRAIN
Drop the ball and let it bounce. Kick it up, let it bounce and kick it up again. Keep repeating this pattern until you’re confident enough to try two kicks prior to each bounce. Build up from there. Don’t omit to train your weaker foot, too. “The quicker you can get to using two feet, the better.”
5: TAKE IT FURTHER
When you can do lots of kick-ups, experiment with feeding the ball up to other parts of your body such as your head. Jenas’s tip for sets of headers: don’t just use your neck, or you won’t get enough power. “You need to use your hips to generate thrust with your shoulders and head.”
SING LIKE A STAR
In 2017, the music blog Pitchfork ran a piece headlined, “Jorja Smith has a voice that could heal the world”. A voice, it went on to observe, that is “soothing and substantial… filled with an aching that suggests she was born to counsel the world’s suffering”. The writer was not alone in her adulation. The soul/R&B singer has won plaudits across the industry, from Drake (who Instagram-messaged her, asking to collaborate) to radio and TV presenter Nick Grimshaw (who called her “his favourite British voice since Amy Winehouse”) via Kendrick Lamar (who enlisted her for his 2018 all-star Black Panther album). At 2018’s BRIT Awards, she justifiably picked up the coveted Critics’ Choice gong. Here, Smith and her vocal coach Emma Stevens offer a masterclass in singing like a star…
1: WARM UP YOUR VOCAL CHORDS – AND EVERYTHING ELSE
Before a show, Smith begins by finding a soprano warm-up video – readily available online – that provides music for singing words such as “kiu” and “ning” at different pitches. “It’s twenty minutes and I do that,” she says. It’s also important to stretch. Sit down on a chair and lock one arm under the seat, then tip your head to the opposite shoulder while keeping your chin tucked in. To loosen up the mouth, imagine you’re using your tongue to get toffee out of your back teeth. Also, try standing up and shaking out your whole body.
2: FORGET EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT BREATHING
“If you watch Céline Dion or Beyoncé – their upper chest won’t move very much, their breath is coming from very low in their body,” says Stevens. “That is crucial, because if your breathing is shallow, you’ll have a situation where you get tension up in the neck and jaw, and that will create vocal damage very quickly.” To learn how to breathe the right way, “Imagine a balloon behind your belly button, and that you’re sucking air through a straw directly into that balloon. That is a singer’s breath.”
3: SHIFT THE VOICE
“Don’t sing from your throat,” says Smith. “You have to sing from your diaphragm.” However, you will notice that notes of different pitches resonate in different places: lower notes resonate in your chest (“chest voice”), while higher ones resonate in your head (“head voice”). For the notes in the middle, you have to decide which voice to use – and that choice will let you achieve particular effects. If you go high in your chest voice, you can belt like Chuck Berry. Equally, says Smith, “Sometimes I’m not going to belt it if it would sound awful, so I would do head voice.”
4: BEWARE THE NOSE
“Don’t sing through your nose,” says Smith. “A lot of people do. I used to – my Dad used to tell me off for it.” The problem with doing this is that it can make you sound squeaky, like a Disney character. That said, if you’re careful, using the nose in moderation can be helpful. “It can put an edge on a breathy sound,” says Stevens. “So if Jorja wants a little bit more power up there, I would say, ‘Put it in your nose a little bit.’ But she has to be very careful it doesn’t turn into a chipmunk sound. It’s a balance.”
5: SMILE!
“If you smile, it makes you open your mouth while you’re singing,” says Smith. It also lifts up the soft palate at the back of the mouth, which is crucial for resonance and tone; if it’s dropped, then you’ll get a deader, flatter sound. The sound itself, however, should feel like it’s at the front of the mouth. “Imagine that your voice is hitting the back of your front teeth,” says Stevens. “That will bring your voice forward into the harder space.” If you do that, you won’t need to stretch your jaw wide like a chorister. And on stage, you don’t want to look like a chorister.
HANG ART ON YOUR WALLS LIKE AN ARTIST
The British art superstar Tracey Emin made her name with autobiographical work that doesn’t pull its punches. There’s My Bed (1998), the installation that was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999, for instance, and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent appliquéd with names. Her opinions on buying art are no less direct. “Some people buy art that they don’t understand, that they don’t feel for, but they’ve been told it’s the right thing to do and it matches their status. That’s a big mistake,” she says. “The best reason is that it makes you feel different, makes you feel more imaginative, more loving, more passionate, more intellectual, more poetic.” Once you have something you love, here’s her advice for presenting it in the home…
1: REFRAME WITH CAUTION
“One mistake that people often make is they change the frame that the artist put on. You shouldn’t do that. The artist chose that frame because the artist felt that’s what the work should have. If you want to change the frame, you should ask the artist – not ask their permission, but explain that you’d like to have something else and discuss it with them.” That said, keep in mind that reframing can devalue the piece. Bonus tip: if you want to reframe an old painting in a more contemporary fashion, put it in a brushed-steel tray frame with a gap of 3–4mm (about 1 10in) around the canvas.
2: THINK ABOUT THE SPACE AS MUCH AS THE ART
While it can work to hang a piece that dominates a room – that is, if the interior design is relatively minimalist – you should beware of allowing a room to overpower the art. “You can have a really tiny work on a wall and it looks hideous, because it looks like a hole in the wall.” And sometimes deciding where not to hang is just as important. “In my bedroom at home I have no art at all, nor in my bedroom in New York nor my bedroom in France. I just like to have clear space, I like to wake up with my own thoughts.”
3: PUT IT AT THE RIGHT HEIGHT
“155 to 160cm [61 to 63in] is the usual height for the centre of the piece to be at eye level. But often that’s too high. If it’s a small work, you want it to be lower – you want to be able to look into it. Things are normally hung for the heights of men and not for the heights of women.” You can also think about hanging things in extreme places to achieve a dramatic effect. “You can hang things at different heights depending on what it is. Some things can just look really cool hung low or really high in the corner.”
4: CHOOSE SU
ITABLE CONDITIONS
Don’t put artwork in direct sunlight – that’s why north light is often used in galleries. “The thing you mustn’t ever have in direct sunlight is photographs because they’ll disappear within a year.” Also, think carefully before putting something up in the bathroom. It won’t last long, and besides, is it necessary? “I always look at the art in the [British Airways] Concorde Lounge, in the toilets, and I think why do they do that, do we really need to look at a Peter Doig when we’re on the loo?”
GQ How to Win at Life Page 10