My Alchemical Romance: An Interview With Ezra Woods and Alia Raza of Regime Des Fleurs

November 20, 2015

Ezra Woods and Alia Raza’s alchemical romance started about ten years ago with a mutual love of flowers. It should be noted that Ezra and Alia are not a romantic couple, but they are bound by some other fateful and supernatural force of nature that allows for their close collaborative efforts. After ten years as close friends, the pair decided to start Regime Des Fleurs, a “postmodern lifestyle art-practice” disguised as a luxury perfume brand. Before starting the brand, Alia was a video artist in New York City and Ezra was a stylist in Los Angeles, but they weren’t exactly satisfied with where their careers were going. We met up with the pair a few weeks ago, and Ezra recalled his grandfather's long-time love of flowers. It is understandable where Ezra’s love of organic fragrances comes from. Alia is just as infatuated, and in the following interview recalls being enraptured by the perfumes on her mother’s vanity. Currently, Regime Des Fleurs includes ten scents – separated by three tiers: Lyrics, Ballads and Epics. With ingredients such as palo santo, extractions of Laotian and Indian agarwoods, and Indian blue lotus, their fragrances take you on an enchanted journey though history, from the opulence of Ancient India to the era of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and all the way up to 20th century high modernism. All in all, what Ezra and Alia have achieved with Regime Des Fleurs is something very rare for a perfume brand: a unique identity. In the following conversation, Autre chats with the duo about their origins, their inspirations and influences, and they give a hint of what’s next for Regimes Des Fleurs (hint: a candle is in the works and so is an edible fragrance).

AUTRE: So how did you two meet, and did you know right away that you guys wanted to work with each other?

ALIA: We met through my roommate ten years ago, and we had no idea whatsoever that we would ever work together for the first nine years that we knew each other.

EZRA: We were friends, and we did kinda fun things together, but we never thought that we’d end up working together.

AUTRE: Did you know that you had shared interests?

ALIA: Aside from flowers and perfume, I don’t know how many overlapping interests and references we had until we got to know each other a lot better––and then we realized that we had tons in common.

AUTRE: So when was that specific moment when you knew? Can you describe it?

ALIA: We had a dinner one evening, about two years ago, and we started talking about how I was making art, and how I loved what I was doing but also wanted to turn it into more of a business type thing.

EZRA: We were both in transition with our careers. Sort of not satisfied with where we were professionally, and in some ways creatively. Although Alia had received a lot of validation and recognition for what she did, she wasn’t making money and turning it into a business.

AUTRE: And, Alia, you were in video art?

ALIA: Yeah I did video art, and made one short film and wanted to direct movies. But I think we both did a lot of work that we loved and that we were proud of, but supporting yourself doing creative work is difficult. So I think separately, we had each thought about creating objects to sell. But only when we came together two years ago, and had this one dinner in Beverly Hills, did we actually discuss what it would be like if we had a brand together, and what the kind of codes of the brand would be––what we’d be wanting to say with what we made.

AUTRE: Was it specifically fragrance? Or was it more abstract?

ALIA: It was fragrance, it was beauty, it was fashion, it was an art practice all rolled into one.

AUTRE: So like a collective?

EZRA: Yeah, a collective. But it was more, and still is more about what the brand is about than any kind of particular output, I would say. Does that make sense? It’s about the idea of the brand in a way. The meaning of the brand.

ALIA: It’s about seeing the world in a certain way.

AUTRE: So going back a little bit, Ezra, I read another interview that said you used to wear cologne to kindergarten. So I want to talk about some of your background in fragrances, because it seems like that goes back really early, that you’ve had a long love affair with fragrances.

EZRA: (Laughs) Yeah, I think my folks are really aesthetic, sensual people. They raised me and my brother to appreciate those things and consider them in a way that’s more than frivolous, or extra, or unimportant, or a second thought. So from a really young age that was always really important to me, and then as I got older I started to think about things in a more critical and analytical way. Because I’d always loved perfume and it was a part of my life, I started to see it that way also. Kind of considering what this perfume is saying, not just that it smells good. What it means. I guess since a young age that was always part of my life, and as my mind expanded and grew, so did my relationship to that one thing. But you should ask Alia about her experience with perfume, it’s really interesting.

ALIA: We were both obsessed with perfume from a really young age. I was fascinated by my mother’s vanity with all the perfumes on it, and even my father’s colognes. I loved smelling different shampoos, and I was just really into smell. I loved the idea that you could bottle it. But I was also really into the flowers in our garden, and the lilacs and all of that.

EZRA: But you remember what perfume you were wearing when you met everyone. You always remember what perfumes other people like. You always remember what people wear.

ALIA: Right. I got kicked out of 7th grade math class once because I was wearing way too much dewberry perfume from the Body Shop. My math teacher, Mr. Dam was like “I can’t handle it.”

AUTRE: Amazing.

EZRA: To add to the question for both of us, it’s kind of always been one thing that was a lens through which we see other things. And understand and relate to the world.

AUTRE: My next question is about nostalgia and how that ties into the scent of perfumes. Can you recall any scents associated with a specific memory that stands out the most?

ALIA: For me, if I wash my hair with a certain shampoo, I’m like back in 9th grade. You know what I mean, 100 percent there.

EZRA: I get more feelings than specific recall of a moment in time. On Wednesdays I go to the farmers market, and I buy flowers for both of us because I like us to have flowers in our houses because it’s what inspires us. I bought ginger lily and I hadn’t smelled it for a long time. It completely made me feel like a child, and I don’t even remember where I smelled that but it transported me emotionally; smelling that and feeling like a child. It was so weird and intense and amazing.

water/wood A forest underwater. On a tranquil forest walk. A cool bracing mist/ meets ancient sun-warmed trees.

With pale herbs, palo santo, sparkling young pine needles, myrrh resin hydrosol, rosewood, driftwood, himalayan cedarwood dust, hawaiian sandalwood oil, dried wild tobacco bud, orris root butter, white lotus blossom absolute, and crystallized amber.

BUY HERE

AUTRE: So making the fragrances by hand, how long does that process take? From finding the ingredients to bottling it, what is that process like?

EZRA: We’ve been collecting and discovering ingredients on our own since before we started our company. And then together we constantly are collecting ingredients. Discovering new things, ordering samples, trying them out and experimenting with them. Coming up with a specific perfume can take anywhere from an ongoing process of three days to things that we’ve been working on for a year that we’re still not done with.

AUTRE: Do you sell internationally?

ALIA: We have one international store that’s in Saudi Arabia, and then Net-A-Porter sells our stuff in Europe. Aside from that, since the product is handmade there’s different regulations for it. So it’s difficult, we won’t be global until next year.

AUTRE: I want to talk about the bottling, which you talked a little bit about it earlier. I guess that ties into budget stuff, but creatively, the bottling and the packaging of Regime Des Fleurs is a major part because it’s so creative and brilliant.

EZRA: Thank you!

AUTRE: So how do you communicate your fragrances with the bottling? How did that come about and what is the origin of the packaging – can you explain that process?

EZRA: That’s a really interesting question.

ALIA: We always start everything by talking a ton.

EZRA: Yeah we talk about everything ad nauseam sometimes but it’s always fun.

ALIA: But it’s just a lot of conversation to figure out how we want to start. Ezra will be like “I think we should do a paper label” and I’ll be like “what are you talking about, what kind of paper?” and then he has to clarify. There’s a lot of explaining and a lot of communicating.

EZRA: We like a lot of the same things, but there’s a lot of things that one of us appreciates and the other isn’t into or vice versa.

ALIA: And then we have to convince the other one that it’s cool or worth it.

EZRA: But it’s kinda fun.

AUTRE: It’s like a constructive duel.

EZRA: Definitely! So when we came up with our packaging it was really about conveying ideas and feelings. To us, we see it as a lot of different elements happening in harmony to create our vibe.

ALIA: It’s a little bit of Memphis, it’s a little bit of…

EZRA: 80s mall.

ALIA: A mall in the 80s, yeah totally. A little bit of rococo baroque.

EZRA: Rococo baroque or late 18th, early 19th century France.

ALIA: A little bit masculine, and just very simple. They almost look like skyscrapers if you line them up. But then the colors can be childlike, or feminine, or punchy.

AUTRE: And you use really interesting paints and materials too right?

EZRA: Yeah, so we developed our first samples which was how we kind of created the design. We were like “we want to kind of paint these bottles” but then we didn’t know what we were fully going to do until we figured out how the bottles were going to be painted, and then through that process and working with that first person who was actually an art fabricator that works with a lot of artist friends of ours, we figured out the design. That was really weird and cool because it just kind of happened.

ALIA: Well, there were a couple things. We were on a deadline. You know we had this opportunity, to go to Paris to show whatever we had come up with by March 1st. We had only started working on the packaging in January so we literally had six weeks to figure it all out.

EZRA: And no money.

ALIA: There was a deadline, we had to get them finished, I wasn’t sure at all about doing color. Ezra really wanted to do color badly, we tried doing it and then we both loved the way it came out… but if one of us had hated it, I don’t know what we could have done. We wouldn’t have been able to go to Paris. There was no choice. Luckily it worked.

EZRA: (Laughs) It worked.

ALIA: Our logo also was designed by an old friend.

AUTRE: The logo’s great.

EZRA: Thank you! Oh my god we love our logo so much. If you look at what our references were, and then you look at how the logo came out; we couldn’t have imagined it to be more of what we wanted.

ALIA: And the girl who did it, doesn’t even do logos. She’s an illustrator and a photographer and a fashion designer but she was like “I don’t want to do a logo, I don’t know how to do a logo” and we were like “you’re the only person whose taste we trust and you get us and I’ve known you since I was 16.” And she did it and it was great.

EZRA: We were like “just draw it, we’ll vector it, we’ll add the copy to it. We don’t need any of that, we just want you to draw the framework and basically create the gist. We’ll take it from there.”

ALIA: Because we’d done color for the bottles, we were like let’s go back to one of the original ideas and do totally colorless for the boxes.

EZRA: So our whole brand code developed out of that, which was extreme color and pop and emotion with product.

ALIA: And then a very stately, restrained outside.

AUTRE: It seems like a perfect combination.

ALIA: Yeah, it kind of is. The gray boxes all lined up kind of look like…

EZRA: Your personality?

ALIA: Me, and then the colored bottled line up with Ezra.

EZRA: I would say the colored bottles in a mess look like me.

ALIA: When they’re cracked and chipped.

EZRA: When they’re cracked and chipped and laying all over each other.

ALIA: But the gold crest’s both of us.

AUTRE: Yeah, it’s great. I want to talk about history, because history plays a lot into your descriptions especially.

ALIA: We’re obsessed with the romance of history.

AUTRE: 18th century Europe, 20th century high modernism; can you talk a little bit about that and your interest in history?

ALIA: What’s more fascinating than the history of humans and civilization?!

EZRA: Things that have happened that are extreme that aren’t a part of our everyday lives anymore. Alia and I both have certain things that we’re obsessed with, and we share them. Moments in time, and stuff that we know a lot about. When we were little kids we were both obsessed with Versailles. Kind of everything from the 17th and 18th century mostly, but in a weird way we’re both similar where we sometimes just want to spend a day by ourselves and learn about things. Sometimes on a Sunday Alia will be texting me throughout the day and be like “did you know that…”

ALIA: …That Marie Antoinette only drank hot chocolate with orange flower water?

EZRA: Yes. Or I’ll text Alia and be like “will you google Laiterie de la Reine” which was this amazing grotto which was designed for Marie Antoinette.

ALIA: It’s always about Marie Antoinette.

EZRA: It’s always about Marie Antoinette, no it’s about a lot of other weird things. I don’t know, people that wear flowers as jewelry for example.

ALIA: I also think that for me at least, the older I get the more that I appreciate and care about history. The more moved I am when I go to other cities or countries and see old stuff. I think when you’re younger, for me at least, I was much more interested in what was happening in the world right now, and the older I get it’s more fascinating to me what has already happened.

Nymphaea Caerulea A singing iridescent floral An out of body experience, Nymphaea Caerulea dances on the skin with an extremely rare hyper-purified extraction of the sacred blue waterlily. Like the enchanting call of Sirens to chosen wayward ships, the mesmerizing base of Nymphaea Caerulea features an abundance of genuine White Ambergris, supported by celestial notes and shimmering accords composed of 80 ingredients: both precious naturals and intuitively selected aroma materials.

With Indian blue lotus, Hawaiian blue lotus, white ambergris, aurora reconstitution, Nile waterlily headspace, pandanus amaryllifolius, salty water, and the absolutes of 15 flowers.

BUY HERE

AUTRE: What led to now?

ALIA: Yeah! What led to now?

EZRA: There’s all this stuff from the past that was executed without the conveniences that we have today that would be extreme and amazing with those conveniences and the fact that they were done despite having computers or electronics, whatever, it makes it even more moving. We kind of fetishize the aesthetics of the pre-industrial world.

ALIA: But at the same time we’re not interested in going back. We really appreciate the fact that we were raised in a democracy. It sounds pretentious but I don’t care. Our brand is pretentious.

AUTRE: Well it’s glamorous, there’s a distinct glamour that emanates from your brand, and that certainly ties into a lot of different things. We live in a weird world where attention to detail, attention to making things by hand is not there at all.

EZRA: We feel that way completely. I guess going back to that first conversation we ever had, the main point of the conversation was that we wanted to have a brand and create products that spoke to us directly; the things that we wanted that we felt like we couldn’t get.

ALIA: We were sophisticated consumers who had always paid attention to luxury, and so we thought: what can we make that we would be impressed by? That we would think is special?

AUTRE: Sure.

EZRA: I always say that if I wasn’t responsible for the brand or the products, and I had come across it, I would be obsessed with it. That’s kind of our standard: obsessibility.

AUTRE: Can you talk about the first and second collections and how they differ?

ALIA: I think that we would say that the first collection is all about water. They don’t all smell watery, but to us they all have something having to do with water. Whether it was cool mist, or freezing cold. “Dove Grey” is vapor, or running water in “Water/ Wood.”

EZRA: Ocean water in “Nymphaea” and in “Nitesurf.”

ALIA: Yeah the first collection to us is more about water and the second collection is more about texture.

EZRA: That’s the real thing, the second collection is really about texture. Sparkling, oily, radiant, bisque, porcelain, those were a lot of the things. Then the stories became a little bit different. The first one was a lot more whimsical and the second one is a little bit more serious I think. We’re weirdoes but there’s a logic there.

AUTRE: Well it’s abstract and it’s very hard to put a fragrance into words that make any sense besides the actual name of the fragrance. You want to create a sort of story with those fragrances.

ALIA: The truth is, like with almost anything else, you can spin something either way. We could spin “Dove Grey” as an all-synthetic industrial smelling perfume, or we could spin it as a natural root.

EZRA: But they’re both true. It’s interesting how what you were saying relates to the way we approach what we do, which is almost painting meets cooking, meets poetry, meets science. All this stuff happening. We see it really layered and intensive I guess. Because we talk about it so much we’re on the same page about it.

ALIA: When I used to do film and video, I used to say what I loved about doing it was that it was a combination of all these different art forms. The acting, the costumes, the camera, all of it came together to do one thing. I actually feel like what we do now, together, is even more that way.

AUTRE: So what’s your personal favorite fragrance that you make?

ALIA: Ezra’s is “Nymphaea Caerulea.”

EZRA: I love wearing it, but it’s not necessarily my favorite to wear. But it’s my favorite that we’ve made. I like them all. There’s something about all of them because I feel like they’re all accomplishments.

ALIA: They are! My favorite is “Bel Époq.” If I could only choose one, it would be that one.

EZRA: More than “Floralia”?

ALIA: Yeah!

EZRA: Really? Huh. That was fun to make. That took a long time, Bel Époq. Months.

ALIA: It’s our most classic light floral. Gardenia, jasmine, that kind of thing, that’s what I respond to. That’s really all I care about.

AUTRE: That’s interesting. So let’s talk about the next collection.

EZRA: Ok! There’s a lot of stuff coming up.

ALIA: There’s a few next collections, but before we release the third collection which is going to be called “The Third Collection” we have a series of individual products and collaborations coming out. So we can talk about those if you want.

AUTRE: Yeah! Go for it.

ALIA: We have an edible perfume, originally it was made for a restaurant in New York called Dimes because they asked us to make a Regime Des Fleurs cocktail with them. It’s on their menu and it’s their most popular cocktail. It’s insane. You can’t go to New York without going to Dimes.

EZRA: Next time you go you have to go to Dimes, it’s the best place.

ALIA: So there’s the edible perfume, there’s the collaboration we’re working on with a brand called Hood By Air.

AUTRE: Oh yeah they’re great.

EZRA: We kind of have an ongoing relationship with them, we scented one of their shows with this perfume called “Fauna” that’s from our second collections. We’ve done a couple of things offline together. We’ve known them for a long time, it’s a fun relationship.

ALIA: We’re also launching our very first candle, which is going to be a limited edition of only 75 of them and it’s in collaboration with Maxfield.

EZRA: And this Italian company called Bloc Studio, they make marble stuff. It’s called “Dregs.”

ALIA: Yeah the name of the scent is “Dregs” as in wine dregs.

EZRA: It’s the remains of the wine, but also dregs of society. It’s incredible, it’s really really good.

ALIA: It smells so good. It’s very dark and gothic.

EZRA: And every time we’ve smelled it we’re like “shit we did good with this one” (laughs).

ALIA: We’re getting better and better, the perfumes get better and better we think.

AUTRE: So when are these projects going to be launched?

ALIA: The Maxfield collab comes out in December

EZRA: The edible perfume called “Timelapse” should be out Black Friday. There’s so many people that we like and respect and we see adjacencies with our brand, that we want to work with tons of people. There’s also three or four other people that we’re talking about doing collaborations with but they’ll probably all be in the new year. We’ll see.

To learn more about Regime Des Fleurs, visit their website here. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Photographs by Sara Clarken. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Casual Burnouts, Lovable Weirdos: An Interview With Actor, Artist and Jack of All Trades Mel Shimkovitz

October 1, 2015

About a month ago, Autre was asked to cover the second Summer Sacrifice for How Many Virgins? at the Ace Hotel. If that doesn’t make any sense, it’s because it doesn’t. Little did we know that we would be introduced to one of LA’s most enigmatic, energetic, and multifaceted performing artists by way of a hilarious mock acting reel spanning 10 years of highly varied and absurdly captivating film projects. From parodic audition tapes for films like Pretty Woman, to the superimposing of her character on iconic ‘90s infomercials, to abstract layerings of sound and industrial imagery, Mel Shimkovitz’s work is at once arresting, captivating the viewer with a chameleonic quality that leaves you anticipating the next impressive transition. It is perhaps that chameleonic quality that makes Mel so fascinating. The moment the reel finished playing, I immediately scanned the audience for this curious specimen in hopes of a handshake and the prospect of an interview. Little did I know the magnitude of the Pandora’s box I was about to open.

Researching Mel’s work before the interview, I found a wide range of recent, mostly acting work (she’s popped up in skits on Funny or Die and has made cameos in varied televisions series), but struggled to dig very deep into the past. She would later explain that this is due to a slew of pseudonyms she used throughout the early aughts in order to protect the Shimkovitz family name—a nice Jewish family from Chicago. In the following conversation, Macho Mel (as she is known in some circles) covers a dizzying gamut of work and life experience. There was her meeting with William S. Burroughs as an adolescent in Lawrence, Kansas. There was her founding of the Voodoo Eros record label, which released music by the likes of Devendra Banhart, CocoRosie, and Antony and the Johnsons. Voodoo Eros also took the form of a retail store that she ran with CocoRosie’s Bianca Cassidy—it was more an elaborate conceptual art piece than a real retail experience. But next year may change everything for Mel, because she will find herself in a reoccurring role on Jill Soloway’s groundbreaking series Transparent, which just cleaned house with five Emmy awards. We can’t wait to watch.

Indeed, Mel’s approach is wacky and unbridled, yet focused, professional, and somehow she seems to be completely devoid of pretense. She is familiar, but also alien in her virtuosic comedic talents that have an almost vaudeville vibe, but maybe it’s just her willingness to fall over to make an audience laugh. It’s the best kind of comedy, because it’s real and authentic. In the following interview, Mel and I chat about Trans vampires, her Zelig-like position in the music, art and Hollywood worlds, and the media’s sudden shift in focus toward the lives and rights of the LGBTQ community.

Summer Bowie: So, I loved the Melvira work you produced with Amy Von Harrington at the Ace Hotel. Can you talk a little bit about how that came together?

Mel Shimkovitz: Ben Lee Ritchie Handler and Ava Berlin have a project called How Many Virgins? They asked me if I had any videos I wanted to be shown, because I had been making videos with Amy for a long time. So, I had all these years of work and I thought it would be a nice opportunity to dig into the archives. We had some extra time, so we made a new reel that was really influenced by the Hollywood vibe. When I came out to LA, being an artist quickly transformed into being an actress. Not just in art stuff, but in the semi-mainstream as well. Amy has been making reels for me for a while, and we got the idea to make a fun reel for once. She’s obsessed with Elvira, so we created the character “Melvira”—Elvira’s cousin, who came out to LA wanting to make it. She’s an awkward trans vampire—Melvira: Mistress of the Stage and Screen. So the video screening was Melvira’s acting reel.

SB: That seems pretty surreal. How did you meet Amy Von Harrington?

MS: I was running a record label at the time. I was doing a huge mailing of promos in Brooklyn. She was standing behind me at the post office, deciding if she hated me or not, as I spent an hour holding up the line. Later that night, she showed up at a party that I was throwing with Bianca Cassidy for our project Voodoo Eros. We had a fried chicken party that night and I recognized Amy from the post office. That was it. We just started hanging out and working together. And it’s been like that ever since. We’re casual burnouts. Lovable weirdos.

SB: Can you tell me about the Voodoo Eros project?

MS: Yeah, we had a store on the Lower East Side called the Voodoo Eros Museum of Nice Items. This was 2007. We were a record label, so we would record in there at night. But during the day, we sold XXXXXL sweatshirts and sweatpants that we had hand-painted. Our thing was “the biggest clothes on the Lower East Side.” It was such a small store that we could only put up one thing on each wall. They were all horribly priced. Some were $2 and some were $2,000. We also sold items from the 99¢ store across the street, but we would mark them up about 1,000%, but with really nice price tags. The only people who came into the store were Japanese tourists and dudes who would come in to gay bash us. Bianca and I decided that we were going to play shopkeeps for a year. To be a shopkeep, though, you have to have a long attention span and a will to make money. We didn’t have either of those things.

SB: Where are you from, and when did you first know you wanted to become an actor?

MS: I grew up in Chicago, but I left when I was 17 and went to Kansas. I was really obsessed with the Beats. I was obsessed with William Burroughs. This was before I knew what misogyny was. I was happy to meet him; he wasn’t happy to meet me. But he was very happy to meet the very good-looking guy I was hanging out with. Lawrence, Kansas is really a cultural mecca in the Midwest. There’s a legacy of major progressive hippies out there. It’s a major abolitionist town. That’s not to say that the Westboro Baptist Church isn’t down the street, and didn’t protest every play when the Harlem Choir Boys came to town.

Growing up in Chicago, you do a lot of improv and sketch comedy. I grew up doing community theatre and plays in school. When I went to Kansas and didn’t know what to do with myself, they took me in. There were so many communists teaching at the University of Kansas in the theatre department. That was a really political education—political theatre. I went from there to New York.

I was there for a number of years before I met Bianca Cassidy. We started this feminist collective called “Wild Café Theatre,” and no one was coming. But then Bianca and her sister started this band, and I started doing performance art for their shows in front of thousands of people. We were making videos and fictional worlds. We were queering the world. That time in my life, everything was a creative choice.

SB: Tell us about your period with CocoRosie.

MS: Our first album that we put out was just for fun. It was a box filled with tapes that friends had made. We put it out as an album called “The Enlightened Family.” We had songs by CocoRosie, Antony and the Johnsons, Jana Hunter, Vashti Bunyan, Metallic Falcons—just before anybody knew who these people were. All of a sudden, people were buying it! It was a cool project; we were doing whatever we wanted for a couple of years. It was a pure aesthetic project.

SB: Wow, that's amazing. Now, let's fast-forward to your life in LA for a second. As a performance artist, it seems like you’ve become this integral part of LA’s creative community, but it also seems like you’re gaining footing in the more mainstream Hollywood industry. Where do you feel most at home?

MS: In the past, I always would have said in the art world, because of my interest in all things beyond theatre and narrative—I’m super interested in poetry, abstraction, and psychedelic visualscapes, etc. But amazing things have happened in the past year. I’ve met such a great community of writers, directors, and performers. I have this super amazing TV and film community that I never had in the theatre and music worlds of New York. I found a really good tribe. Now, I would say I feel really good in both places, which is so cool. So, I don’t know, I’m really just trying to be very charming, super polite, show up on time, do whatever’s asked of me, have no ego at all moments, and be ready to humiliate myself. I think that’s it.

There’s this idea that nice guys finish last, but I’m getting the feeling that nice guys are getting ahead. In the art world and the Hollywood world, the thing that they have in common is negative competitiveness. The art world is held back by its own self-reference, which makes it super exclusive. The Hollywood world is held back by its own nepotism. Which doesn’t work for anybody who isn’t a straight white cis male—there’s no community for them. People are realizing the patriarchy of that doesn’t work for them. We’re seeing change now. When the first Whitney opened, there was not one woman artist. In the new Whitney, there is amazing work by female artists on every floor. It’s a mindful and purposeful choice, but that’s how equality happens. The cameras are finally being put in the hands of women, queer people, people of color, trans people, people of different ages even.

"I’m really just trying to be very charming, super polite, show up on time, do whatever’s asked of me, have no ego at all moments, and be ready to humiliate myself."

SB: Have you noticed any differences coming to LA from New York?

MS: Coming here, people are starting to collect and to pay attention. All kinds of people can be a part of it. It’s so optimistic out here. Being an artist in New York feels like you’re part of an industry, part of the company. But being out here, especially for the first few years, it felt like being an outsider. And isn’t that who should be creating new culture in a community? The people for whom the current culture isn’t working?

SB: What would you say has been the catalyst for the boundary pushing we’re seeing in regard to gender and sexuality in the media today?

MS: I want to say that it’s been people who identify as queer rising up and forcing their voices to be heard. But nothing happens without the majority paying attention to it. So that makes me think the majority of people just want to see different stories and experiences. The thing that’s so interesting about the civil rights movement of the LGBTQ community, versus the racial civil rights movement of the 60s, is that queer people are born into your family, which forces us to face it. In recent years, numerous legislators have had to contend with their children coming out. How can they go and say their child doesn’t deserve marriage equality? And so it was passed. Also, when an American hero comes out as trans—that really pushes things forward.

I wonder where we would be in gay rights if AIDS hadn’t happened. Not only did we lose so many great artists and leaders in the community, but all of the resources had to go to screaming for help and taking care of each other.

In the trans community—which is related, but separate from LGBTQ in a lot of ways—trans people have fallen in and out of being accepted throughout humanity. Being trans is something that indigenous communities throughout time have upheld as a shamanistic trait. It’s only been a few hundred years in white society in which a trans person has been an unacceptable thing. We love Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner, but 20 trans women of color have been murdered this year. I’m all for marriage equality, I’m happy that went through, but I’m kind of like—fuck getting married, can we save these lives?

My family—who didn’t want to talk about me being gay—is suddenly so interested in talking about trans people. I was on the show Transparent, and these old Jewish people are in it, which really helped my parents with understanding the show. I did a short documentary (which is part of a series of short documentaries) called “This Is Me,” produced by Wifey.TV. They were nominated for an Emmy. I star in one, and my family saw this. Suddenly, I’m getting phone calls from my sister, who has never talked about my queerness. Now, she’s asking me what I want my niece and nephew to call me—Aunt or Uncle. We’re having this conversation now.

Everybody, all of a sudden, decides that they have to be cool with it, because it’s not cool to not be cool with it, and then everybody just gets on board. These days several of my friends have kids, and six-year-olds totally understand trans people. They don’t get separated by boy’s lines and girl’s lines anymore. I’m going into more spaces that have gender-neutral bathrooms. Even for me, hearing a guy peeing in the stall next to me feels like a radical act. It’s not a radical act, but it feels so radical. We’re all just people peeing now.

There are all these new stories to tell. There’s a huge society of people that haven’t been telling their stories. We want to know what their stories are about. I mean, look at how many stories about gay couples and trans people are coming out in Hollywood this year. So many! Everybody is really into it. I mean, I’m already hearing people say things like, “Isn’t it enough already with all the gender stuff.” But this is the first year after 100 years of filmmaking history that these stories are starting to emerge. A lot of people have had enough with the same straight love story.

SB: Are there roles that you feel more comfortable with, or do you jump into all of them with an adventurous attitude?

MS: If the camera’s rolling, I’m there. I’m ready to perform. I’ll jump into anything. I’m lucky now that I’ve been given really fun stuff to play. I didn’t grow up like that. I’m a writer because I had to write my own stuff. I couldn’t get casting. I’ve always been like this. My mom got my ears pierced when I was one so people would stop calling me a “cute little boy.” I’ve been told by so many people that this was going to limit what I was able to do. But recently, I’ve realized it means I can do anything. I’m performing male and female all the time. What I love doing now—which horrifies a lot of other butch lesbians—is to wear a dress. I have a bunch of stuff coming out where I’m the ugly best friend, or I’m the prostitute, or whatever. That’s drag to me, but I can get into my femme side. I feel like an artist when I do that. It’s so powerful.

I always used to stick to comedy. Now, there are parts written where I’m playing a character closer to my own experience. That’s really challenging, and totally new.

SB: So, what kinds of projects are you working on at the moment, or in the near future?

MS: I’m finishing up shooting the second season of Transparent. I have a really cool, fun, scary role in that. I’m finishing writing a feature that I’m supposed to shoot next year. It’s called The Sangres. It’s a dark, comedic, anti-Western with queer themes that Devendra is writing the soundtrack for. It’s influenced by Bob Dylan and Sam Peckinpah. And the fucking desert. I’m doing anything people ask me to do. I starred in a webseries. I’ve been drawing a lot. Just creating my own content.

I’m doing embarrassing things all over town. If anyone has anything embarrassing for me to do, I’m there. If you want me to cry, I can do that too. I’m always on time, congenial, and I’m always sober on set.

SB: There’s definite progress being made in terms of acceptance and rights for those within the queer community, but is there an ideal destination and what does it look like to you?

MS: The part of me that came out in Kansas—the person who had to hide for so long—wants to say that the destination would be to not have physical violence done upon you because you are Other. The more optimistic thing to say would be that there would be no Other. Or rather, that we would all be Other. I see us opening up our gaze on gender, and seeing it as a broad spectrum. But I think that’s only one little domino to knock down. Okay so we stop seeing people of other genders as Other, when are we going to stop seeing people from different countries and religions as Other?

I would love to see a year in which people who have consistently been at the back of the line take a move to the front. I would love to see them take over in film and in art. Just for one year. Take the director and turn him into the PA—see what happens. That would be a good short-term goal. Just a year, just sit down, shut up and watch!

You can catch Mel Shimkovitz in the new season of Transparent on December 4, 2015 on Amazon. Click here to see more of Mel's work. text and interview by Summer Bowie. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

Heaven On Earth: An Interview With Jack Pierson on Tomorrow’s Man

September 18, 2015

Jack Pierson’s art is dangerous and seductive with the lure of a sordid kind of glamor. Close your eyes and imagine a motel with a blinking vacancy sign. You’re on the edge of the desert and it’s 110 degrees in the pitch-blackness. Indeed, he is an enigmatic artist with a sense of hopeless romanticism – his work screams this tortured longing. Over the last few decades, Pierson’s art seems to get cooler and cooler – there is a distinctly dreamy and quixotic quality to all of it: the photographs, the collages, the text based works that incorporate rusty and discarded signage and his beloved artist books. Officially launching today at the New York Art Book Fair MoMA PS1 is the third installment of Pierson’s highly acclaimed and groundbreaking publishing project Tomorrow’s Man. Borrowing from the title and aesthetic of a 1950s homoerotic chapbook disguised as a muscle building mag, Tomorrow’s Man is a pastiche of found imagery, collaborations with contemporary artists, text, and work by Pierson himself, which seems to send that beautiful lightning bolt that brings the publication to life in an electrifying way. Whereas the first and second installments were denser, the third issue is much lighter with contributions by only four artists. Geometric abstractions by Richard Tinkler, text works by Peter Fend, and a short story by Veralyn Behenna entitled ‘The Flavor of Your Wish.” There is also, of course, a series of beautiful previously unpublished photographs by Pierson – male nudes in natural form. In the following interview with Autre, Pierson talks about Tomorrow’s Man (where to hide it and what to listen to while you’re reading it) and contemporary gay life.

OLIVER KUPPER: Let’s talk about Tomorrow’s Man, where did the idea come from to start this publication?

JACK PIERSON: It began as a one-off arty little book. I've made them throughout my career. I was dragging my heels on this first one because I wanted to do something new that really engaged the viewer. Including work by other artists made the project exciting for me. Once we had done one I had so much fun I wanted to keep it going. So I set a goal for a dozen issues. This will be the third.

OK: It’s interesting – the combination of appropriation and collaborations with artists and friends – what draws you to this format?

JP: I'm super into other artists and the work they make. I know a lot of great artists, young and older, who need venues where their work can begin to be discovered. A nice publication is one of the best ways I can think of. And the ephemera? I just find myself liking printed stuff and really believing in it as modern to present old stuff in a new way.

OK: What is your idea of “Tomorrow’s Man” – what is your definition of ideal masculine beauty?

JP: I don't think there is any one ideal of masculine beauty. That's one of the great things about contemporary gay life - Every physical type has a fan base.

OK: I love the visual assemblage involved in the series…turning the pages, it really feels like a scrapbook…do you collect a lot of these old magazines and what is the curation process like?

JP: Thank you! I have collected printed material, usually from an earlier period, since I was a teen. It started with 1920s sheet music I think. Lately, I have been collecting a lot of scrapbooks from the 20s to the 60s. I guess the format, now that you mention it, might come from that.

OK: There is something palpably erotic about Tomorrow’s Man and there are a lot of homoerotic themes, is this a magazine anyone can put on their coffee table?

JP: I'd of course be happier if it wound up under the mattress than on the coffee table. Part of the format is a reaction against the idea of male nude coffee table books. I think soft cover and smaller is a sexier way to receive naked men.

"I'd of course be happier if it wound up under the mattress than on the coffee table....I think soft cover and smaller is a sexier way to receive naked men."

OK: This new issue seems to be going in a different direction than other issues, can you talk a little bit about the themes in this issue?

JP: Well issue 1 was dense with imagery with over 18 artists, number 2 became even more so. Really a lot of information and artists. For number 3 we decided to change it up and allow more breathing room. It's just three artists; Richard Tinkler, Peter Fend, and myself, and of course a story written by Veralyn Behenna.

The design has at once more breathing room and complexity in the layout. I saw some new text pieces by Peter Fend and knew immediately I wanted them for Tomorrow's Man 3. He deals mainly with environmental concerns, ways to steer the planet back to health. I thought those themes would be good both with Richard Tinkler's intense metaphysical mind maps as well as my essentially naturist photography.

OK: You decided to include your own work in this issue…what brought you to the decision to include your own work and why haven’t you included your work in previous issues?

JP: My work has been in every issue so far. The first two I included only that which had been published already. Tear sheets etcetera, and in that way mine was already in the stream of ephemera from which I cull. Tomorrow's Man 3 is the first issue to include unpublished work by me, in this case naked pictures of handsome men.

OK: Who are some artists working today that you think are truly breaking boundaries?

JP: I think all the artists in the first 3 issues of Tomorrow's Man are radical and ready to break through.

OK: What’s a good song to listen to while you flip through the pages of Tomorrow’s Man?

JP: Not just one song. The Platter's Greatest Hits!

OK: What’s next for Tomorrow's Man…anything in mind or are you just going to let things flow?

JP: Flowing is what's best to do to be creative. I'm already thinking back to extremely dense. Dense work on top of dense work. A lot of drawing based work and maybe more writing.

Jack Pierson's Tomorrow's Man will be available at the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1 Friday through Sunday, 18 - 20 September 2015 at the Bywater Bros Editions Booth, G4, 22-25 Jackson Avenue on 46th Avenue Long Island City, NY. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

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On Faith and Synchrodestiny: A Proper Interview of Publisher Kristin Prim

August 28, 2015

Kristin Prim is a freak of nature and she is so wise at her young age that it will astound you. When she started Prim magazine at only 14 years old, she became the youngest print magazine editor in the world. Indeed, Kristin Prim is not your average girl – now woman – but she’s always been powerful and individualistic, which is one of the things that makes her so fascinating. Her first loves were music and art, but when her parents moved to a more conservative town in New York, she turned towards fashion, and publishing, as an outlet to connect with people that were more like her. While many kids were plastering their walls with cut outs from Teen Vogue, Prim was publishing her own glossy mag and distributing it globally. At 19, though, Prim grew disillusioned by the saturation of the fashion market and culture – and the idea that anyone with an impressive Instagram following could make it to the front row at fashion shows. Now 21, she has focused her efforts back to the arts. With Prim magazine on the backburner, the brilliant, young, wise and articulate publisher has recently released the first issue of a new biannual art book, entitled A23, which highlights the work of ten artists. The inaugural volume, entitled The Mysticism of the Female explores “the metaphysical and tactile nature of both women and feminism” and features major artists like Luciano Castelli, Mary Beth Edelson and more. Each page is a gorgeous example of the art book’s grand ambitions. We were lucky enough to catch up with Prim to discuss her new art book, the founding of her magazine when she was barely a teenager, her relationship with fellow publishing prodigy, Tavi Gevinson, and she gives some great advice to other young culture shapers on how to get the ball rolling.

Oliver Kupper: What was your earliest exposure to art, fashion, and photography? It seems like you had a very early introduction to this world.

Kristin Prim: My two big interests had always been music and art. They had nothing to do with fashion. But when I was about 13, I decided that I wanted to do something that would take me out of my comfort zone. I figured that thing would be fashion. I was so into art and music. I’m a classically trained musician; I had been painting, drawing, and taking photographs since I was young. That’s how I was introduced into fashion. I decided to start my own fashion magazine that was called Prim. I worked on Prim for seven years, until I was nineteen. Then, I wanted to turn my attention back to my own fine art work. I worked on building my portfolio for about a year. I decided to do a print when I was twenty. Now, I’m twenty-one, and the edition is coming out in two weeks. That’s how that shape shifted.

OK: How did you start Prim? Were there certain magazines that inspired you? Did you think you could do something better than other publications?

KP: When I started Prim, I had no idea that magazines like Self Service and Dazed existed. I had no idea there was this world out there of high fashion, style-oriented, artistic publications. I was looking at Vogue and Elle and thinking that I would want to take fashion in a different direction. About a year into starting Prim, I discovered this world and how amazing these magazines were. It did begin to influence me, because I felt at home with them. Prim was still unlike any other magazine out there. It was a happy accident. I was lucky. I was able to create a home for something that didn’t exist.

OK: A lot of people start magazines because they are inspired by independent publications.

KP: They’re the best. There’s nothing like an independently published magazine.

OK: Were your parents supportive of the magazine?

KP: My father financially supported the magazine until I put Prim on hiatus when I was 19. He gave me the investment money that I needed when I was 14 to pay for the print publication. I don’t want to say my parents don’t support my work, but my parents are much more conservative than I am. As my work began to evolve into more boundary-pushing, they began to step away from it.

When I started Prim, I was only 14. I wasn’t into myself yet. As I grew into my creativity, so did the publication. I began to do more things that were rather unconventional. They support my entrepreneurial efforts, but I don’t know if they support my work.

OK: Did you have a lot of support from the fashion world? Were there any designers that reached out to you that you looked up to?

KP: The reason I started Prim was because my parents moved me to a conservative area in New York. I didn’t fit in at all. I got in trouble a lot with my peers. I started Prim just to keep myself busy and stay connected with people around me. I didn’t want Prim to have more than ten readers. I really mean that. To be able to print was incredible. The feedback from the fashion industry was so unexpected. I’m being genuine when I say that. It was incredible because I never fit in. To be welcomed and grandfathered into such an amazing industry that could support me was life-changing.

OK: A lot of people talk about Tavi Gevinson when they talk about your work.

KP: I’ve known her since I was fourteen. We met when she was twelve. She sent me an email introducing herself. She was running Style Rookie at the time—her blog. She said, “I’d love to meet up. I’m coming to New York during fashion week. Can we do it? Tavi and I, for eight fashion seasons back-to-back, would go and get ice cream.

OK: Did you have conversations about what you were doing?

KP: We were in the same boat. We were the youngest people there by far. That created a bond between us. A lot of people put us in the same boat because we are two of the youngest girls in fashion, media, and art. We were each other’s mentors.

OK: You’re starting to pull back from the fashion world. Is there anything specific pulling you away, or do you just want to get back to your initial interests?

"I got so drawn to mysticism and spirituality. I say I don’t have a religion. My religion is karma, faith, and synchrodestiny."

KP: It’s half and half. When I started in the fashion industry, there was no Instagram. Facebook wasn’t even big. When I started, fashion week was still in Bryant Park. You had to work really, really hard to get to where you were. Today—and a lot of people don’t agree, but I will stand by this—I think the fashion world is overly democratized. It has been so mulled over. You can do nothing and have an Instagram account that has 40,000 followers and sit in front row. It really began to hurt the industry. When I was fifteen and sitting in front row, I was sure that the people sitting next to me were working as hard as I was, or more so. These were people like Jefferson Hack. When I was 18, 19, and 20, sitting front row, I would look next to me and see Instagram girls. That hurt the industry. I will say that. I got very discouraged with what was going. I see that in the art world, but less so than the fashion world.

Next week, I have a few meetings with fashion magazines to work with them, so it would be hypocritical to say I’m done with the fashion industry. I definitely wanted to shift more of my focus to art.

OK: This issue is not really an issue. It’s an art book. There’s a lot of mysticism involved in the themes of this volume. Is mysticism close to your heart? What are some of your experiences with mysticism?

KP: I grew up Catholic. I went to a private Catholic grammar school and an all-girl’s Catholic high school. I love the act of ritual. I connect—to a certain extent—with Catholicism. You go to a mass and it’s so ritualistic. There’s such a beauty in that. When I was in high school, I reached out to discover more cult practices, paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism. I’m a very spiritual person. My aunt, who died when I was 13, she was a big influence on my work. She was very spiritual. I remember when she would tell me about these out-of-body experiences. I was about 5 years old when she told me this. I don’t remember much about my childhood, but I remember being fascinated with that. After she died, I began looking into it and what it meant. I got so drawn to mysticism and spirituality. I say I don’t have a religion. My religion is karma, faith, and synchrodestiny.

The second edition of A23 is metaphysics. All artists have spiritual beliefs, and we have an interesting roster of art. It should be very interesting to get an insider’s look into their heads.

OK: What is the curating process like?

KP: When I first conceptualized the idea for A23, the first four editions popped into my head. The first edition is about mysticism and the female. I didn’t want to approach it from the physical standpoint necessarily. In the edition, we actually have a cisgender man in it. I thought that was incredible, to be honest. I thought of artists who were prolific, who have exhibited worldwide, who have cut their teeth. I wanted to know which of those artists I would be personally interested in. I wanted to know their views on the female and gender. So I looked to Mary Beth Edelson—who is a pioneer in feminist art in America. I looked to people like Luciano Castelli, Heide Hatry. I wanted to get a lot of different viewpoints. I wanted to get a lot of different artists who had different mediums. The process was rather calculated, but it was also simple. I picked out artists from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and a couple from today. Everything is contemporary, but there are all different mediums.

OK: What is your advice—not just to other women and girls—but to everyone who wants to start their own thing or get something off the ground?

KP: I always say to do it yourself. That’s so important. Being in the fashion industry, I was subjected to a lot of abuse from different people that I walked away from. For young women, it’s very easy to fall into that trap from people who want to take advantage of you. Young men, too, but women still face it a little more in today’s fashion society. I would say always do it yourself. One of my proudest themes of my career is that I have done everything myself. Of course, there are people that taught me along the way.

I would also say to not be afraid of failure. That sounds so hackneyed, but you have to take risks. Every single project that I’ve worked on has been a major risk. Putting the money out there to start a publication is major. Putting the money out there to start an art book is major. But if you don’t take that risk, you’re never going to grow as an artist, as a creator, nor as a person in general. Do it yourself, and don’t be afraid to fail.

Kristin Prim's A23 is available to order online here. It will also be in selected fine bookshops and museums. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper. Follow Autre on Instagram: @AUTREMAGAZINE

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Yes All Women: An Interview With Photographer, Artist and Social Activist Jessie Askinazi

August 20, 2015

Jessie Askinazi is one of those rare connectors that seems to know or work with everybody - and not just in the art world. Art, fashion, politics, social justice – she’s there. Visit her Tumblr diary and you’ll see excerpts from fashion spreads she has featured on Autre, portraits of comedians, actors and musicians, and nightlife snapshots in black and white. Her photography is real, raw and it tells stories – it’s the opposite of vapid, which seems to sum up perfectly who Askinazi is as a person. She is also the founder, organizer and curator of the #YESALLWOMEN fundraiser, which is hosting a silent auction and exhibition featuring some of the most exciting women championing women’s rights, like Kim Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Rose McGowan, Mira Dancy and many more. Proceeds from the exhibition will be donated to the East Los Angeles Women’s Center, which aids survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse. The exhibition will be on view at Dilettante on Saturday, September 19 for one night only. There is also a Go Fund Me page raising the capital to support the project and the exhibition. In the following conversation, Jessie Askinazi opens up about her bouts with depression, the importance of standing up for people that need it and her exciting #YESALLWOMEN campaign.

OLIVER KUPPER: Where are you from originally?

JESSIE ASKINAZI: I was born in Levittown, New York, and then my family relocated to South Florida, where I lived until I moved to NYC after high school. I was watching an episode of Seinfeld last night where Jerry said, "New York, Long Island, Florida... It's like the Bermuda Triangle. Unfortunately, nobody ever disappears."

OK: You work in a variety of mediums and industries, from arts to politics, where do you feel most comfortable?

JA: Well, my involvement in the arts and activism come from a similar place of necessary vocalization. I am compelled to do these things. I've always had a kind of fire under my ass, if you will, to expose corruption and help those who - while they have voices - are stifled. Even when I was in elementary school, I assembled a group of friends to have a lemonade stand for an organization called Kids in Distress, which is an organization that cares for abused children. I can't exist without creativity in various disciplines of the arts, or without attempting to influence social change. I don't really get the point of being alive if you're not going to use your own experience to make life better for others in some way. Ego and self-furthering is boring.

OK: What do you think motivated you to be so active in the different worlds that you exist in - is there one specific instance or a series of instances?

JA: It's hard to pinpoint exactly how these journeys originated. I have been through a lot and have been exposed to a lot. I was often very sick as a child and later on suffered from major depression, and so because of many periods of debilitation, I was forced to create my own world outside of our standard. I stayed home from school a lot and was kind of a recluse, so that led me to exploring and archiving as an escape. I wanted to be a soldier for those who couldn't do it alone. I think there is a lot of shame around the idea of needing other people, but we do - we were made to be communal creatures and in this day and age we are so isolated. There's a lot that I've experienced personally which I'm sure has contributed to this sort of lifestyle - I don't know any other way to be.

OK: You are a very talented photographer and you tell great stories with a camera - who were some of your photographic or artistic inspirations?

JA: Thank you so much! I have so many influences and they constantly change. I would say Surrealism, Italian Giallo horror films, art house movies, documentaries, lo-fi video, lost Americana, 60s mod fashion photography in Harper's Bazaar, 80s post-punk (and the teenage rebel movies from those years), retro futurism, psychedelia, the occult, mysticism, and vampy silent film have been a constant. And The Rudi Gernreich book, Guy Bourdin, Francesca Woodman, Barbara Kruger (floored that she is donating work to my show), Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Craig McDean, David Hamilton, Diane Arbus, Melvin Sokolsky, Eugenio Recuenco, Claude Cahun, Wim Wenders, Mick Rock, Tim Walker, etc. But mostly the weirdos in my own life inspire me to take pictures. Ha.

OK: You usually shoot on analog film, right - what cameras do you use?

JA: I do try to shoot analog as much as possible because the texture of film photography is something that can't be replaced. I almost always use my Nikon N65, although in the past I also used the Lomo LC-A a ton. When I shoot art events, that's when I use my digital camera, because film is just not practical in those instances.

OK: What is your favorite thing about working around and with such creative people?

JA: How my perspective is constantly expanding which in turn makes me really able to see the world, and at the same time there is such a deep understanding between artists. Again, the reality of our corporate-commercial conglomerate was always foreign to me. So the creative people around me have been some kind of siblings.

"I don't really get the point of being alive if you're not going to use your own experience to make life better for others in some way. Ego and self-furthering is boring."

OK: Okay, let's cut to the chase, what brought you to start #YesAllWomen?

JA: It's all been building up to this. Every day. The comments I receive, the way I've been objectified by men since I was extremely young. The way men have pretended to care about my humanity for their own gain. Being expected to be quiet or polite or passive. Every day. Television, movies, social media, the news, video games, contemporary art, the film industry, magazines. Every day. Advertising, marketing, consumerism, the dumbing down, the ignorance, indifference, bullying, violence, fear, misogyny, regulation, inequality. Every day. The Kardashians being an ideal, being worshiped. What we're expected to be, what we're expected to do, what we're expected to say. Every day.

OK: There definitely needs to be more female creativity in the world...What is your advice to young women who feel stuck, repressed or held back from their true passions?

JA: I actually think the phrasing of this sentence is wrong. Female creativity is everywhere. Practically every woman I know is a brilliant artist or thinker. Women are often creative heroes because we have such rich emotional lives and possess a regal strength. In Peter Pan, The Lost Boys are "boys who fall out of their prams when the nurse is looking the other way and if they are not claimed in seven days, they are sent far away to Never Land". There are no "lost girls" because as Peter explains, "girls are far too clever to fall out of their prams." It's just our society that is repressive, and it's the system that keeps the male in the spotlight (the patriarchy, as it goes.) It's all to service the man. Even our laws.

So my advice to all women (not just the young) who feel stuck on the road they are traveling, is to speed up. Go all in. Make a decision and follow through, despite what challenges you think lie ahead of you. That's what I'm doing - I'm not letting the vampires suck the life out of me. I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time, but luckily the people in my life are fantastic colleagues and friends, and we work together to achieve our goals. A year ago, I never would have guessed that I'd be curating a show with some of my greatest heroes. But what I constantly remind myself is, "If you don't ask, the answer is always no."

OK: What do you think is the greatest challenge facing women in today's time?

JA: I guess the fact that questions like this one have to be asked. That we are considered "other." We are the ones who create life, yet ours are always persecuted. There really isn't just one challenge, that's why I wanted to spotlight #YesAllWomen (because it covers the broad, various factors of this big picture - and is an ongoing conversation). Also, different challenges present themselves to different cultures, which is something that needs more awareness. Child marriage affects the Middle East and Africa, for example. Women of color often have an added layer of oppression that white women will never experience. For me, personally, I'm sick of being so obsessed with what my face and body look like, as if that is all that defines or validates me.

OK: How can people be a part of the #YesAllWomen campaign?

JA: In this case, you can make a donation to our fundraiser at: http://www.gofundme.com/elawc. We are trying to raise money to cover the hard costs of this large production, and we also hope to raise additional money for the East Los Angeles Women's Center, the organization that we are benefiting; they help survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Beyond that, keep sharing art that is reflective of the female experience, keep telling your stories that have so much weight. The only way for there to be real and actual change is by having the conversation, first and foremost.

OK: There is a one night only event supporting the campaign where people can purchase art, but what happens after the event?

JA: Actually, the one night only event at Dilettante is where the artwork will be exhibited and where there will be a series of performances and entertainment, hosted by Rose McGowan. The artwork will be available through online auction, via the website Paddle8, so anyone can bid and purchase the artwork which goes toward the charity. The auction will go live around two weeks before the actual event. Those details will be posted on the project's website soon: I am hoping that this will become an annual project, with different contemporary female voices benefiting different organizations for women.

OK: What's next for you - anything exciting that you want to share?

JA: I have some photo series in mind, and one of the artists in our show, Snovit Hedstierna and I want to collaborate on a project together. I'm really excited to work with her one on one - her passion is a rocket. She has such a rare enthusiasm.

The #YESALLWOMEN art auction and fundraiser will be on view for one night only on September 19th, 2015 at Dilettante, 120 N. Santa Fe, Los Angeles, CA. You can visit the Go Fund Me campaign here to make a donation. You can also use the #YESALLWOMEN hashtag to join the global cause. text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

The Real Story and Swansong of Mudditchgirl91 and The Boy Genius Who Created Her: An Interview with Alex Kazemi

August 17, 2015

A few weeks ago, a mysterious series of short vignettes began arriving on Snapchat under the handle mudditchgirl91. Soon, the vignettes were edited together for a short film called Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91. In the film, mudditchgirl91 pines for a mudditchboy with a string of strange and shocking anecdotes, like wondering if mass murderer Elliot Rodger’s cum tastes like avocado oil. People freaked out. Who was mudditchgirl91? In another week, Marilyn Manson had tweeted a link to the video and the mudditchgirl91 phenomenon went viral. A day or two after that, one more film was released – it was mudditchgirl91’s suicide note. Just like that, she was dead.

The real story, though, is that mudditchgirl91 was a character in an elaborate plot filmed in real time on the popular social media video sharing site, Snapchat, and directed by Vancouver based artist, novelist, and boy genius Alex Kazemi. After an exhaustive ten-hour casting search on Instagram, Kazemi found Bella McFadden (otherwise known as @internetgirl). Over night, his film started to gain traction. During the live filming, Bella, who played mudditchgirl91, was getting frantic phone calls from her friends, family – even her boyfriend threatened to never speak to her again. Alex Kazemi’s intention was not exploitation – his intention was to examine the rampant social media culture of instant gratification and clickbait slavery. It was a social experiment. The fact that the mudditchgirl91 video became clickbait itself was shocking and ironic. Men were sending dick pics and sexually threatening messages. Mudditchgirl91 had to die. People didn’t get it. People still don’t get.

Fortunately, Autre was able to speak with Alex Kazemi, a twenty-one year old prodigy from Vancouver who has deeply prescient insight into his generation. Kazemi can count American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis as a fan. Mudditchgirl91 wasn’t just another barely legal girl exposing her body on Snapchat – it was an exploration – a digital exploration into the soul of identity, gender and sexuality and how it is portrayed within the digital spheres of social media. In the following interview, we had an in depth conversation about art, life, mudditchgirl91 and more. Kazemi has also shared with Autre an exclusive video of his directing Bella over FaceTime during the making of mudditchgirl91 to show that she herself was complicit in this postmodern movie making experience that quickly backfired and brought on the ire of social commentators, social justifiers, internet predators and trolls.

OLIVER KUPPER: So, your short film Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91 really took an interesting turn, can you talk about some of your thoughts on how this social experiment became so viral – even Marilyn Manson was tweeting a link to the video?

ALEX KAZEMI: It’s funny to me how people will tell me that I shouldn’t have to explain things. They tell me, “Just let it be. It’s going to make you look weak if you try to explain.” I think the entire meaning of the short film got lost in the culture. When it got put into the blender of the Internet, it became fetishized. If anything, I could use that as an example of my point being proven.

OK: You’re almost shockingly successful in your annihilation of that culture.

AK: I think it’s all fucking dark. I’m happy that it got attention. There was this thing in the news a few days ago, holding up a mirror to the Tinder debate. That article in Vanity Fair got this whole dialogue rolling. I feel like I was doing the same kind of thing—holding up a mirror. I was doing it in the form of visuals. Sometimes when you articulate it that way, the message gets lost. It was interesting that two things went viral in two weeks. You see the article getting the discussion that I was hoping to get. Mine is just becoming fetishized and called “art.”

OK: Do you think that is one of the major things that is holding back your generation?

AK: My generation is very stuck on the idea that everything and anything when uploaded online, is art. When everything uploaded to Instagram and Tumblr is gazed at as "art". What is the value of having a "creative perception" in a world where everyone is exploiting theirs for instant gratification? You could argue that anyone with access to LTE or WiFi is a genius, because no one is arguing against their claim.

OK: What about the highly provocative images that young girls are posting on social media?

AK: I think of these kids today who are posting basically child pornography to their Tumblr pages and Instagram, because they just want the sugar rush of strangers giving them instant gratification. When they turn 25, and look back at that - are they just going to be cool with that and laugh it off? It’s terrifying.

OK: You mention clickbait as a major issue with today’s media and it seems like a pretty disingenuous way to pander content to the masses…do you think it is affecting humanity negatively?

AK: People are consuming from these hubs every day, and allowing themselves to be slaves to clickbait. It's insulting to think that sites like Buzzfeed think everyone feels the same about everything. There is this kind of lack of empathy for the human experience. Life isn’t a group hug. I don't have ten reasons to remind you of what it was like when you experienced the worst moments of your life. Your experiences can be precious; they do not have to be exploited. You just need to remind yourself. I look back at how vulnerable I was as a young teenager using social media, and all the fucked up situations I put myself in. It’s really disgusting, but when you are that unaware and so far gone - I didn’t even know I needed to be protected.

OK: Let’s talk about triggers….a lot of magazines are putting trigger warnings on their headlines because they don’t want to trigger someone’s trauma…what are your thoughts on this?

AK: Everyone’s the most fragile special snowflake, and they can’t even be spoken to without you triggering them. It’s like, the whole Devin from DIIV situation that Pitchfork had a fiasco over, when he got caught on 4Chan saying dirty stuff. It’s like, I’d like to see all of your throwaway Reddit or Yahoo answers accounts, or private iMessages before you judge him. He’s also in a rock band. You are surprised a guy in a rock n roll band has the mouth of a guy in a rock n roll band?

OK: Speaking of special snowflakes, do you think that Snapchat is encouraging this false sense of uniqueness?

AK: The content on Snapchat is disposable but the idea is that humans feel they are special enough to have a 'story' for others to watch, even if it's maybe 200 friends. This is really no different than reality TV. I mean, the opening shot to Caitlyn Jenner's show is footage of her filming herself. Isn’t Kylie, like the Snapchat queen or something? Everyone is a Kardashian. There’s not one friend I have hung out with in the last year, who hasn’t Snapchatted something when we hung out.

OK: I want to talk about your background. You’re based in Vancouver?

AK: I was born and raised here.

OK: Is there much of a creative environment in Vancouver?

AK: Not that I’ve ever been exposed to. I spent a lot of my life in the suburbs. Obviously, I was inspired by what I know. That’s what I try to do. I feel like I was never exposed to any other artists or creative people. I could never ask kids in my neighborhood to help me with projects; I would have to find someone on Instagram. I never went to Vancouver looking for creative people. I went to the Internet. I had that opportunity—to make something with someone who wasn’t in my city. We could still collaborate, even though we were area codes away—which is kind of weird.

OK: You wrote a novel at a young age. Whenever someone writes a novel and they’re that young, people seem very surprised. Teenagers have a lot to say, maybe even more than adults. It’s a very intense time. Can you tell me more about that experience?

AK: I don’t know what really happened. There was a point in my life where everything culminated. I don’t feel like I wrote it; it wrote itself. It was all happening. I had to create a character to get through all of the things that I was dealing with at the time. I couldn’t handle it. I was writing a lot of poetry lyrics. I was obsessively writing all the time—on napkins, the back of magazines, foam—everything. I was always writing. There was a point where I thought I had enough content to form it into a book. I wrote the manuscript, and I hustled really hard to get it published. I put it online first, when I was 18. I started writing it when I was 17. It was not expected at all. It happened to me, rather than me doing it. I was really scared of myself for a long time. I don’t understand it at all.

OK: Let’s jump into Mudditchgirl. It was misunderstood. Why do you think it became misunderstood?

AK: Bella played her character, and people were unable to tell if it was a character or if it was her. Essentially, that’s what I wanted. People looked for my expression rather than the character expressing herself. It’s very similar to the cultural imagery that people want right now. People like Lily Rose. But they take it at surface level. They don’t question anything beneath it. They say—“That’s my look. That’s my vibe. Oh my god, me.” They continue to do that. It was misunderstood because we’re in that mentality of anything uploaded online is art. People made it seem fetishized and creative. Endorsing the look fucked it up. It has a very strange look. Everyone is focused on the look. If they like the look, they’re going to tell everybody, and they’re not going to look at anything beneath it.

OK: How did you come to hire Bella for the role of Mudditchgirl91?

AK: I found Bella at 3 in the morning, after I spent 10 hours looking for a girl to cast. I have been working on this project since last December. I was given 24 hours before this project would be pulled. This was hours before I had found out I was being set-up by a big Hollywood director and production company that manipulated me into thinking they were going to work with me but they were executing my ideas without me, behind my back. After being called 'young and stupid,' I was given a choice, to be a victim or to pull through. I decided to do the project on my own that day. You have to trust yourself. You have to persevere. I'm only telling you this because I want everyone, especially young people, anyone who is reading this to protect themselves from this kind of experience. I'm grateful to have learned from this huge mistake.

OK: You chose Bella after a long casting search…did you have an intuition about her acting abilities?

AK: Did you see how her character pouted and talked in a baby voice, sexualizing her suicide? Isn't that a very accurate snapshot of humans who find doom sexy?

OK: When we initially talked, you told me that you got some scary phone calls after the short film went viral…can you talk about one particular phone call that really scared you?

AK: People like to think young dudes who are working in any industry don’t get sexualized or put in scary positions but I was on the phone with a powerful agent who was trying to turn my whole project into this cheesy Hollywood-fetishized meme, and wanted to get a big blonde bombshell model to make videos on the Snapchat account mimicking the movie. He was saying the creepiest deviant stuff I have ever heard, I can understand “bro-ing out” but it was 10 steps further than that. I was so uncomfortable yet I felt like an idiot because I didn’t know how to get off the phone with him. I froze up. Hollywood is the darkest. I felt like I was in The Canyons.

OK: What was the initial inspiration for Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91?

AK: Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91 was inspired by a collective representation of people I have been observing. I’m obviously fascinated with LA actress, Lauren Alice Avery as much as anyone else because she is a great example of how you are unable to tell if people online are being genuine or fake. Is she really like this? Or is she calculating/manipulating a character very cautiously with every photo and every tweet? Does it even matter, at this point? The character is NOT based off Lauren, it's a movie made by a young girl who is 18 in this world - obsessing and idolizing over Instagram icons like Lauren, wanting to be chic but strange.

OK: What do you think hit home about the short film?

AK: I think the reason people like the video is because of the Snapchat element. It was made in real time on Snapchat. It probably hits home. Young girls are uploading this kind of stuff on social media every hour. It's their art.

OK: There is a lot of overlapping with reality and fiction and even some of Bella’s friends were confused and nervous, right?

AK: The character in Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91's fake storyline is very similar to the one that happened in our real world. The two overlap. Bella didn't kill herself; her character killed herself. Bella's character is 18; Bella, the actress is 19. You have to figure out what is real or fake. The character, Mudditchgirl91, made the movie on her Snapchat. It's watching a movie of a movie that the character in the movie made.

OK: Ok, Bella has an Instagram account, which seems not too far off from Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91…don’t you think it makes sense that people would be confused?

AK: @InternetGirl is not Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91 but to someone who doesn't know Bella, and looks at her social media…they might think that's the same girl, that she's not in character. Our perceptions and judgments of people are based via our feelings of who we see them as in the URL world. That's very wrong.

OK: What would you do you if you were Mudditchgirl91?

AK: If I was Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91, I'd fucking kill myself too. Could you imagine how overwhelming that'd be? To have all eyes on you over night? To go viral? I think in her fictional story, she was probably on like Buzzfeed and shit which didn't happen in our real world, but I mean, it's horrifying. It's like what would have happened if that girl who was a part of the Calgary rodeo threesome video that leaked, was ashamed?

OK: How similar are you to Mudditchgirl91?

AK: I don’t think I am like Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91. I’m not going to lie, I’ve had some nice conversations with detergent pods before and I can relate to going stir crazy at home, because I don’t go out much.

OK: Do you think the movie is exploring or reinforcing a stereotype?

AK: The movie could be reinforcing a stereotype. I mean, young girls and guys have sent us feedback that actually shows us that in their head, they are interpreting Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91 - the character as a glamorous and sexy aesthetic or something to aspire to be. People are tweeting things like “I want a mudditch boy”. This makes me sad, but I guess it has a life of it’s own now. It’s out of my control. I don’t know. I didn’t make this to have it be fetishized. I truly in my head thought that this could get a dialogue going, hold up a mirror in a violent way to make people question today’s culture. Bella and I have gotten pictures sent to us by young people imitating the scenes in the film. It’s really upsetting to me. Maybe, I should just shut up and be grateful my work got out there.

OK: Mudditchgirl91’s t-shirt in the film says “CINGENDER” – what does that mean?

AK: “CINGENDER” was an inside joke with myself about the 500 different labels there are today for sexuality/gender, and you know that’s great for the visibility of the transgender and queer community. You go to people’s twitter pages, and read their bios and it’s like some dystopian movie, it’s like reading brail- “gender fluid”, “gender neutral”, “intersectional feminist”, “non-binary”, “agender”. I don’t know? A lot of these people are young too, and get excited by their identity defining them, and they’ve got 10 thousand different options to have the whole “I’ve arrived. I’m here. I’m different” experience, but at the end of the day - you’re going to just be a human. Maybe, someone out there feels they need to be in the body of a sinner. Live and let live.

OK: You probably received a lot of comments and maybe some threats…wasn’t this disturbing?

AK: I didn’t realize, you know having the privilege of being a cis-straight white male and being in the Snapchat account of a female character. All the unsolicited dick pics, and the “come sit on my face”, “I wanna rape you so bad” messages - that kind of sexual objectification. The entitlement to her body because she was showing so much of it. It made me feel what these girls have to go through, and it was really disturbing to me. I’m happy I’m not a girl.

OK: Do you think you exploited the actress for the sake of this film?

AK: I think I definitely exploited Bella, but I think she knew she was going to be exploited and was ok with that. I mean, am I a predatory exploiter for being a cis-straight male sexualizing a teenage girl that is 2 years younger than me or is it really no different than the self aware, barely legal photos she's posting of herself online? #Feminism

OK: Do you think we are all exploiting ourselves online…especially with social media?

AK: I do think the exploitation of oneself on social media, and the morbid narcissism comes from a sense of hopelessness, like “Well, I don’t have the patience to make anything. I’ll just make myself into a character that I can express, and call that my Internet art. I might as well make myself my own god. I'll tweet all my best thoughts, I'll post all my best photography. I won't save it for something bigger”. I guess, it’s no different than what I do with my fiction writing - it’s just when you write fiction, you have the luxury to dissociate.

OK: Did you have any premonition that people were going to like the short film or dislike the short film?

AK: I mean, I already knew that people were not going to like the movie before it went up. I knew the reactions, but I did it in hopes that someone out there would get it, and other people who are questioning our culture right now - could be like, “well, hmm…I relate to why he made that”, “I relate to him, maybe I’ll email him and say hello, maybe we can talk” but obviously, the total opposite happened.

OK: Do you plan on doing any more of these films, or are you done after it sort of backfired?

AK: I need to focus on finishing the book. I’ve been working on the book since I was eighteen. It’s interesting, when you’re working on a project, how many people your age say, “You need to hurry up. You need to get it out, or you’re going to be forgotten.” It’s not about that for me. When you have a vision, it grows and fertilizes every day. When it stops, it stops. There’s a lot of pressure, especially for young people to rush it out. Get your likes, get your reblogs. I would like to make other movies one day. I would like to experiment with other mediums. Mostly, I just let it all happen. I don’t think anyone should force anything. The universe is always going to give new things to you.

OK: So, you’re comfortable just being an artist and letting the creativity flow?

AK: This is going to sound so fucking annoying but I don’t really identify with the identity of the artist. I’m not enigmatic. I’m boring. I watch Big Brother 4 times a week. I don’t like to go out. Everyone in my life has always told me I’m tortured and dark and fucked up, and I’ve always tried to distance myself from that rather than get off on it. I see people out there, who want to attract that kind of negative attention with ideals of “Heroin Chic” or “Sick Chic” and it grosses me out. I have been obsessed with being normal since I was born. I don’t think this kind of thing is okay. I’m not glamorizing it. I mean, if I could just not be me and still make these things - That’d be very, very nice.

You can keep up to date with Alex Kazemi by following him on Twitter or Tumblr. Text and interview by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Public Access: An Interview with Glenn O'Brien

December 17, 2014

Before he became the Dapper Dan with lily-white hair and a suit as crisp as the white tablecloths at Mr. Chow’s, Glenn O’Brien was a chronicler of the Golden Age of the New York avant-garde and the subculture underground of the 1960s and 70s. He was the first editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine. He was also, briefly, the editor-at-large of High Times magazine. But what he is best known for is TV Party – a public access cable show that featured some of the first appearances of artists like Jean Michel Basquiat, Klaus Nomi and Blondie. After 30 years, O’Brien has released three brand new episodes of TV Party on YouTube. Shot at locations such as MoMA Ps1, Le Baron New York, and Lafayette House, the new TV Party – a “television show that's a cocktail party, but which is also a political party” – features a number of luminaries and a smorgasbord of who's whos. In the following brief interview, Glen O’Brien offers a bit of fashion advice and talks TV Party and why it is always important to look ahead.

AUTRE: You were a part of a fascinating era in New York – with Andy Warhol’s Factory, Basquiat, the birth emerging music scenes like hip hop and punk, a pre-gentrified New York – do you miss those days?

GLENN O'BRIEN: Well, it was exciting and maybe a more interesting and inspiring community, and I prefer the spirit and tone of the art world then as opposed to now, but if you start to think that way you’re kind of doomed. I have to deal with the moment like everybody else and keep evolution going, so I don’t think too much about the past.

AUTRE: Can you remember when the idea for TV Party first came to you?

O'BRIEN: I always wanted to do a TV show. I have probably mentioned too much that I loved Playboy’s Penthouse and Playboy After Dark, Hugh Hefner’s 2 shows, because they were in a party format that seemed a lot more cool than the typical talk show. The direct inspiration was going on a public access show, Coca Crystal’s If I Can’t Dance You Can Keep Your Revolution, and discovering that people had actually seen it. I was immediately motivated to create a public access show.

AUTRE: What can we expect from the newest episodes of TV Party – there are only a few online right now, are we going to see more in the future?

O'BRIEN: We want to move the party from city to city, place to place and have guests that aren’t the usual showbiz fare. We’ll see how much stamina we have.

AUTRE: Many people don’t know that you worked for High Times magazine – can you talk a little bit about that?

O'BRIEN: When I went to High Times it had a bigger circulation than Rolling Stone and seemed more interesting culturally—drugs aside. I was working at Playboy in Chicago and was desperate to move back to NY. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Aside from some things dealing with Rasta, I didn’t have much connection to the pharmaceutical aspect of the magazine. I was kind of the culture czar.

AUTRE: You are known as a 'style guru' – what is one piece of fashion or style advice you can offer?

O'BRIEN: I guess my basic advice is don’t follow fashion; express yourself.

AUTRE: What’s next?

O'BRIEN: Writing a couple of books. Working on some films and TV Party. The usual.

Text and interview by Oliver Kupper for Autre. You can visit Glenn O'Brien's website to read poems and other writings. You can also view all three episodes of TV Party here.

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An Interview With Christian Bland from The Black Angels

January 10, 2013

Spectrum

The sprawling, dilapidated Seaholm Power Plant on the southwestern edge of downtown Austin, Texas is an ideal venue for a haunted house—or, incidentally, for the purpose it served on the weekend of April 29th; the creation of a dark, otherworldly atmosphere to celebrate the current resurgence of psychedelic music and commemorate its Southern roots. The vast cement edifice, its original purpose defunct since 1986, now serves as a occasional venue for performances, festivals and other events, resting dormant for the remainder of the year. For this year’s Austin Psych Fest, the Seaholm plant housed two stages, a sweeping bar, a band merchandise area, several local vintage clothing and record-vending stands, an outdoor food court where one could procure face paint, henna tattoos, feather jewelry or a massage, countless mazelike passageways leading to various vacant, roped-off chambers and a private upstairs area decorated with giant dream-catchers, draped string lights, communal hookah pipes, plush fur rugs and sunken couches for artists, their guests and members of the press to unwind in.

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Upon entry, we descended into a hypnotic, cavelike haze of smoke, fog and ethereal technicolor lights. The immense, dimly-lit industrial space was interspersed with mind-expanding, optical-illusion-inducing installation art pieces by Austin-based contemporary artist Jeremy Earhart (a collection of moving images projected onto a “wall” of moving mist, several arrangements of meticulously carved, seemingly undulating mirrors and transparent, fluorescent-colored acrylic and plexiglass lit with strobe lights). Over the course of the three-day festival, we met some fascinating characters and listened to an array of incredible music performed by an eclectic mélange of bands hailing from all over the country—ranging from Roky Erickson, one of the founding members of original 1960’s psychedelic band 13th Floor Elevators, to cult experimental Spacemen 3-offshoot Spectrum, to sugar-coated electronic psych-pop-synth group Black Moth Super Rainbow, to breakout neo-psych bands such as Crocodiles and The Soft Moon.

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The Black Angels

Christian Bland, lead guitarist for Austin-based headlining band The Black Angels, founding member of the Reverberation Appreciation Society and creator of psychedelic art & design collective Bland Design, was able to answer a few questions for us about his fourth year curating and participating in the burgeoning festival.

ANNABEL GRAHAM: The Black Angels curated Psych Fest. It seems like you guys had a significant impact on the aesthetics of the festival. Can you tell me a little bit about your involvement? What was your experience in curating the show this year and in forming such an environment for your music?

CHRISTIAN BLAND: We started the festival in 2008. After touring the US, Canada, Europe and the UK since 2005, we've met hundreds of like-minded bands. We figured what better place to bring all our friends’ bands to town for a psychedelic weekend than the place where psychedelic rock was born. The first 3 years I did most of the booking, but this past year we've been so busy touring that Rob Fitzpatrick (one of 4 members of the Reverberation Appreciation Society) did 90% of the booking for APF 4.

GRAHAM: As demonstrated by the festival, the genre of psych-rock is undergoing a major reemergence. Psych Fest is one of the only modern-day festivals dedicated purely to the genre of psychedelic music. What are your views on the manner in which the genre is reemerging in relation to its past (similarities/ differences)? What are your predictions on the future of the genre?

BLAND: It seems like psych rock is gaining more popularity than it has since the late 60's. Hopefully it'll take over the radio waves; then we can start the revolution. I honestly don't think the masses are ready for psych rock to hit the mainstream. It almost seems psychedelic rock is meant to live underground. Maybe one day it'll boil over and take over the world, but I think it'll take a re-awakening of some sort.

Crystal Stilts

GRAHAM: How did this year’s Psych Fest compare to previous years? It’s definitely grown in size and notoriety since its founding in 2008.

BLAND: This was the biggest year yet. Every year it’s grown more and more. It seems to be a testament to the rising popularity of modern psych rock.

GRAHAM: I’d love to know a bit more about your solo endeavor, Christian Bland and The Revelators. How is that developing, and how is it different from your work with The Black Angels? What new avenues or directions has it allowed you as an individual musician?

BLAND: If the Black Angels could put out and album every year, then I probably wouldn't have a side project. It's really an outlet for me to put out as much music as I possibly can. I'm constantly writing new songs, so I need different avenues to release my music other than The Black Angels. I've got another project called The UFO Club with Lee Blackwell from The Night Beats as well.

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GRAHAM: The city of Austin has a rich history in the realm of psychedelic rock. In your opinion, in what ways is Austin a prime environment for the reemergence of the genre? Do you think that Psych Fest’s location has contributed to its success?

BLAND: Yes, for sure. It’s the reason we have Psych Fest in Austin, and the reason The Black Angels started there. We owe it all to the 13th Floor Elevators.

GRAHAM: I’m sure you’re still cooling off from this year’s Psych Fest, but any ideas brewing for next year?

BLAND: The 5th anniversary’s gonna be the best year yet. Hopefully we can get all the bands we've wanted over the past 5 years, but haven't been able to get.... Clinic, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, The Zombies...

Text byAnnabel Graham

Color photography by Annabel Graham

Black and White photography by Sebastian Spader

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Patti Astor: Queen of the New York Underground

October 22, 2012

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“New York is the only place where a girl can graduate from the Scarlett O’Hara School of Business and build an art empire held together with Aqua-Net,” Patti Astor told New York Magazine in 1983, at the height of her reign as “Queen of the Downtown Scene” and co-founder of the legendary FUN Gallery. Astor, who René Ricard famously called “the first natural blonde in town since Edie Sedwick,” has succeeded in doing just that. The Manhattan it-girl, underground film star, and groundbreaking curator tells all in her memoir, FUN Gallery… The True Story.

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“We did it, motherfuckers!” the diminutive Astor, clad in shocking pink, cried gleefully at her October 6th book launch party at Clic Gallery in Soho, pulling guests Lee Quinones and Charles Ahearn into a tight embrace. FUN Gallery began in 1981, when Bill Stelling approached Astor at an art opening and barbecue being held at her “hideous 65-dollar-a-month apartment” on East 3rd Street (attendees included Keith Haring, Jeffrey Deitch, Futura—who was painting a mural on Astor’s wall, and Kenny Scharf—who busied himself customizing Astor’s kitchen appliances with “cowboy and army figures and glitter”). Stelling had an East Village space that he wanted to transform into a gallery—and social butterfly Astor knew artists (did she ever!). FUN became the first gallery to give important solo shows to Scharf, Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Thanks to the ever-bubbly and vivacious Patti Astor, the gallery brought widespread recognition to graffiti as an art form, showcasing work by emerging street artists such as Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Zephyr, Dondi, Cey One, Jane Dickson and SHARP. In her memoir, Astor gives us an exclusive look at the glory days of FUN—that short-lived, magnificent, ever-transforming hodgepodge of glamour, sleaze, hip-hop, disco, punk, paint, glitter, knives, garbage cans and two-dollar beers—with the effervescent, unmatched spirit of adventure that made it all possible.

ANNABEL GRAHAM: Can you tell me a bit about how FUN Gallery started?

PATTI ASTOR: What I describe in my book is the path that led me to the opening of the FUN Gallery. I moved to the East Village in ’75 and when I first moved over there, all my friends said, “Oh my god, we’re never going to visit you, it’s too dangerous… See you!” And that wasn’t true at all. CBGB’s was the local bar, and Blondie and Talking Heads were the house bands. So we would go there every night… and this period, which covered from maybe ’75 to ’77, ’78… was sort of the punk rock band, the music period… and the film director who I went on to make two feature movies with, with Debbie Harry as a co-star, was Amos Poe. I met him at CBGB’s, and he had done this movie called Blank Generation, which documents CBGB’s. It’s a great movie to look at… if it was sync-sound, it’d be worth like 20 million dollars, but it’s not… but it shows the bands at CBGB’s. So I met all of those guys, and I was very young, about 25 or 26… drinking the two-dollar beers, and that was when I acted in my first feature. And so the next thing that came along after the bands was the underground film scene. Jim Jarmusch is probably the most successful person that came out of that period. Over the next two years, I would make over fourteen beyond-low-budget movies. In Rome ‘78, we’re all running around in togas… We shot Snakewoman entirely on location in Central Park, for five hundred dollars… it’s our homage to the 40’s jungle movies. So everybody was just doing these wild, creative things. What happened though, which is interesting, is that a lot of Underground U.S.A., which was probably my best role, the sort of Sunset Boulevard punk rock version, was shot in the Mudd Club. We couldn’t afford to rent the Mudd Club, so we just shot while it was open, but it’s a fascinating look at the club. Later on, when I did Wild Style, which is the ultimate hip-hop movie, it was the same thing—we were so broke that we just shot in the midst of it. So you get the real scene. All that existed—you’re not going to get some scripted thing. That came later. So I met Fab 5 Freddy…

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GRAHAM: How did you meet him?

ASTOR: It’s a good story! It’s actually the pivotal story—this story is what I start the book with, because I just happen to be very lucky. I’m adventurous, so that helps. But I really think that our meeting was so pivotal. I told you about Underground U.S.A., which was playing at St. Mark’s Cinema—which now has turned into a GAP. But at the time it was the hip movie theater, and Underground U.S.A. was running as the midnight movie there for about six months. This is the end of 1980, and no one downtown had heard of rap music, break dancing or graffiti art. It did not exist. We had no idea it was going on. It was all going on in the South Bronx and in Brooklyn. Fab had dragged Futura and a couple of other guys down to see the movie. So the next day, I think it was… I was really hung over, I remember… Duncan Smith, who was a poet-philosopher, was having a big party at his loft for the 100th birthday of Stéphane Mallarmé, the poet. He was serving vodka and cucumber sandwiches. So we’re there, and I see this black guy… which was not that usual on the scene… with the porkpie hat and the shades and everything, and I’m like, “Woah, who’s that?” And of course, everyone was too cool to introduce us. It was a birthday party, so Fred took a little paper plate and he walked up to me and said, “Patti Astor, you’re my favorite movie star. Can I have your autograph?” And I said, “Oh, yeah, of course! You must be my new best friend.” And of course, that’s what he was, and that’s how it really all started. Fred said that I was “down by law.” That’s like the beyond-silver-platinum-American Express card in hip-hop. That means, like, Patti A. is cool. So that meant everybody would talk to me and everything. I got to know all of the guys, and this was when the clubs were all really big, and I was going into Peppermint Lounge. So now the uptown guys are starting to come downtown, they want to go to the clubs and everything. So Futura and Dondi and Zephyr were outside the Peppermint Lounge, in line waiting to get in, and they were like, “Hey Patti!” And I’m like, “Yo guys, what’s up? Come in with me!” Because I always went into the door, and, you know, as soon as they found out that with me they could get into any club in town, I was like double “down by law.” So then what happened was that Futura offered to give me a painting, because that was something that they would do.

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By this time, I realized that it was cooler to have a mural, because a mural could not be bought or sold. So I was living in this hideous dump, a sixty-five-dollar-a-month apartment on East 3rd Street, across from the man shelter, which was… we called them “bums” then, but it was like a homeless shelter. It was an awful apartment, but everyone lived on that street. Eric Mitchell, John Lurie… all the stars. I always call it the Street of the Stars. So I said, “Listen, why don’t you just come over and do a mural on my wall in the morning, and in the afternoon we’ll all have an art opening and barbecue! It’s gonna be great!” And so Kenny Scharf also offered to join in, because… and this is what’s so fascinating, I don’t think it happens anymore—that we would just do something. We wouldn’t worry about, “Are we going to make money? How much is this going to cost? Is it going to be organized?” You know, we’d just do it. So Futura and Kenny did their art. Kenny was customizing my appliances… he took my blender and decorated it with paint markers, and glued all these little cowboy and army figures, and glitter and whatever… and then your appliance would be customized. He did that, I made potato salad and ribs, Futura was painting… and then in the afternoon we had the art opening and barbecue. So we’re all there, we’re drinking the two-dollar beers, and Keith Haring is looking out the window and he goes, “Oh shit!” So we all rush to the window, and we see Jeffrey Deitch, who’s one of the biggest figures in art—and was then, too, because he was the art buyer for Citibank—getting out of a cab with Diego Cortez. Even the bums—the bums would all come out when we had parties, they would sit on all the garbage cans outside and listen to the music—they were so impressed that they didn’t even bother to panhandle. So we were all like, “Jeffrey Deitch is coming to this little downtown party… There’s something going on here.” However, that had nothing to do with starting the FUN Gallery. At this point, I needed to get all these guys and all these beer bottles out of my apartment. So my partner Bill Stelling came up to me and said, “I have this little space that I want to fix up and make into a gallery, do you know any artists?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” People always ask me how we got started… we just started. It wasn’t even a graffiti artist at first, it was my ex-husband, Stephen Kramer. We had twenty colored pencil drawings—he was a genius, they were beautiful—he cut them out himself, and we were so broke that we couldn’t frame them, so we shrink-wrapped them like albums. We put them up and sold everything the same day; we made a thousand bucks.

GRAHAM: How do you think the gallery scene has changed nowadays? Had it been a different era, would the FUN Gallery have happened, or was it a product of the times?

ASTOR: You know, I don’t think it’d be possible today. When I did the LACMA show last year, “Art in the Streets,” I had a room that was the FUN Gallery original crew, the people who made the gallery what it was. Those were the men—and one woman—who had one-person shows in the FUN Gallery. I’m looking around now, and over half of those artists are gone. I’m here to make sure that they’re taken care of, that their reputations and their artwork are given the respect they deserve. I’m seeing a younger generation—but I think it’s so difficult now, and I don’t think people really have that spirit of adventure anymore. People are saying, “Patti, bring it back! Bring the FUN Gallery back!” What I really need to bring back is that spirit of adventure—because without that, it’s never going to happen. So find it within yourself. You can make a difference.

You can find Patti Astor's book FUN Gallery… The True Story at Clic Gallery & Bookstore, 255 Centre Street, New York, NY or online. Text and photography by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

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Lucia Cuba on Gender, Strength and Politics

June 22, 2012

Can fashion be used as a medium for social change? If fashion is an artform and one of art's inherent powers is to change people minds then the answer is yes. From 1990 to late 2000 the former president of Peru Alberto Fujimori was engaged in an alarming series of human rights abuses including the forced sterilizations of men and women as part of a family planning campaign called Contraceptive Voluntary Surgery. As a result nearly 300,000, mostly indigenous, women were coercively or forcefully sterilized during these years. Medical procedures where executed without consent, using fake signatures and untranslated "agreements", and under unsanitary conditions. In most cases no post-operatory information and treatments were provided. This caused secondary effects related to the surgery, terrible complications that in some cases lead to the death of patients. Fujimori is currently serving a 25 year prison term for his involvement in the kidnappings and mass killings carried out by an established paramilitary group called the Grupo Colina death squad which was supported by Fujimori and former head of Peru's intelligence service Vladimiro Montesinos. But will justice be served for the victims of the forced sterilizations? In 2001, a brave group of 12 women from the town of Anta, in Cusco, Peru denounced the violation of their rights and after 15 years of protest the public prosecutor's office has reopened the case, but there is a risk it may be dismissed. Peruvian social activist and designer Lucia Cuba, who recently graduated from Parson's in New York, has started Articulo 6, named after the statute in Peru's general health law that all persons should have the right to choose their own contraceptive method, as a way to give greater visibility to the case and to open a dialogue about issues of human rights, gender and justice. I got in touch with Cuba to learn more about the Articulo 6 and how she is using fashion design to broaden awareness.

PAS UN AUTRE: You are both a social scientist and a fashion designer – what brought you to these two seemingly disparate paths?

LUCIA CUBA: I was brought up in a household that is very concerned with social issues, and highly motivated by the arts and sciences. As a child, this environment nurtured all sorts of creative impulses, and I remember making some of my own clothes from an early age. While in college I became interested in the social sciences and decided to study psychology. To my surprise in 2004 a group of people who knew I sometimes created clothes invited me to participate in an experimental runway show. At this time, I was beginning to focus on my practice as a social psychologist in human development and public health, however this re-encounter with design opened a parallel world I finally decided to fully explore. During this time, independent fashion and design in Peru were growing exponentially and the context was also very stimulating.

In 2005 I created an independent brand called LUCCO, while I kept on working as a consultant and coordinator in different projects related to the social sciences. I had the need to explore how both practices could connect, and how they could grow together, as one; I started to realize that if I could not find clear connections between them, I needed to develop my own. Everything that came after, took place in a very natural way.

Today I feel that both “sides” of my work have merged in a symbiotic, dialectical and very productive relationship. I can’t think of another way of approaching my practice, but from the understanding of social sciences as a foundation for fashion and design.

AUTRE: You just graduated from Parsons for fashion design – what are some of the differences between the world of fashion in the US versus Peru?

CUBA: Aside from the fact that fashion systems in the US are more internationally established and recognized, I would dare to say both worlds behave in similar ways: They are both fundamentally powered by the idea of fashion as a commercial project, object and experience, one that basically responds to in-depth research on consumer trends. Their foundation does not grow through critical thinking and social analysis, for example. They both urgently need a strong educational reform in the field so as to develop local understandings of fashion, advance theoretical research, and broaden the way we understand and accept different fashion systems.

AUTRE: You had an internship at Kenzo in Paris - can you talk a little bit about what kind of impact that made?

CUBA: My experience in Paris came right after I won a local “young designers” contest and when I had just started a PhD in Public Health. Until that point I was totally attracted to my new practice as a designer, but I was also very involved in my practice as a social scientist. With the award came Paris, and with Paris came experiencing the reality of something that had been, until then, an ideal of what I had heard fashion “was supposed to be”. This experience included a short stage at Kenzo and classes in a local fashion school. This was my first experience in a “formal” environment of the fashion industry. Until then I had been working as an emerging independent fashion designer in Peru.

Two special things happened to me during this time. I started my practice as an active speaker and researcher on fashion—analyzing emergent fashion systems in Peru—and I confirmed that, whatever I was looking for as a designer, I wasn’t going to find it in a formal, traditional or conventional fashion environment.

AUTRE: It seems like the first big socio-political project that bridged the world of art and design was Project Gamarra - what was the project about and what is the Gamarra Commercial Emporium?

CUBA: The Gamarra Commercial Emporium is one of the main clusters of micro and small firms in the country, a key regional actor in trade, production and development of the Latin American textile and garment industry. Gamarra is located in the district of La Victoria, in Lima, and is also a conglomerate of histories of entrepreneurship marked by important migratory processes that began in the 1960s, due to increasing economic and social crises that forced people to migrate to the capital city. Today, over 20,000 firms are located in Gamarra, spreading through 34 city blocks and employing 70,000 people. It receives over 60,000 daily visitors and reaches 800 million dollars in annual sales.

Project Gamarrais an activist-design project that aims to raise awareness about the importance of understanding the Gamarra Commercial Emporium not only as an industrial cluster, but also as an urban ecology—a site of creativity and a space of confluence of diverse peoples and cultural identities. This project also aims to promote open dialogues among designers, students, business owners, neighbors, politicians and consumers in an attempt to promote self-reflection, the strengthening of social cohesion and sustainable practices in this urban context. The idea is to re-think of Gamarra as a creative and sustainable space.

The project creates a number of small but highly visible projects created by designers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, etc., in conjunction with local firms and exhibited in public spaces inside and outside Gamarra, aiming to give these preoccupations great visibility among consumers, decision-makers and the local media. It’s main objective is to promote the commitment of local firms and authorities towards the advancement of creativity, cultural diversity and sustainable practices within Gamarra.

AUTRE: I'd like to discuss the Articulo 6 project - how did you first hear about the forced sterilizations and what was your initial reaction?

CUBA: The first time I heard about the case was in 2002. I remember reading about it on the newspapers, but also reading about other cases of human rights abuses that took place during Alberto Fujimori’s first and second term as President of Peru.

The second time I connected to the case was almost six years later, during my PhD studies in Public Health, and while having group discussions about the “social determinants of health”. My classmates and I decided to follow the case closely and chose it as a case study for the course. During this time I got to interview former congresswoman Hilaria Supa, and Maria Esther Mogollón, a journalist and activist on gender rights. They have both supported the victims of this case for more than 14 years, empowering them and helping them to pursue justice and reparation.

However, It wasn’t until the past presidential campaign in Peru in 2011 that the case returned to the public eye. The case acquired a lot of visibility and was strategically used as a key issue against Alberto Fujimori’s daughter, who was – ironically – running for president. I became convinced that I could take action, and use my work to give this case and the issue it brings forth, greater visibility. While I was geographically far away, I felt emotionally committed and connected to a case that exemplifies the situation indigenous women face in contemporary Peru.

I started to draft the project while processing the incredible amount of information that exists on the case, and connecting with people involved in documenting, researching and actively promoting justice for women and men affected by the sterilizations. I traveled back to Lima and Cusco that year to conduct research, and I had the opportunity to interview two very inspiring women engaged in a permanent search for justice. They shared with me very personal and horrifying accounts of their experiences. These and other testimonies have been essential materials for my work.

The name of the project Articulo 6 is chosen in ironic reaction to the General Health Law of Peru which sustains in its Sixth Article that “all persons have the right to choose freely the contraceptive method they prefer, prior to the prescription or administration of any contraceptive method, appropriate information on the methods available, their risks, contraindications, precautions, warnings, and the physical, physiological, or psychological effects that might be caused by their use”, and that “the application of any contraceptive method shall require the prior consent of the patient”. These are regulations that were completely ignored when the massive sterilization campaigns took place.

AUTRE: After 15 years, why did the prosecutor finally open the case? What is the status of the case currently?

CUBA: The case was conveniently “archived” in two different occasions, and attracted renewed attention in 2011 when it became a key issue during the electoral debates. Even though Ollanta Humala, Peru’s current president stood up for the victims during his campaign and even though he spoke loudly and clearly about the need for justice, the case has not being solved yet.

On March of 2012 the case was re-opened for a third time. The Association of Forcefully Sterilized Women (AMAEF) from Anta (Cusco), accompanied by activists, intellectuals, journalists and politicians approached the Attorney General, to yet again present over 2,000 testimonies and other pieces of evidence that have existed for years. However, all this evidence appears to be “invisible” in terms of the legal aspect of the case. At this point in time, the case appears to have lost its political importance, and we are afraid that it will be archived yet again.

AUTRE: Will the women who had to undergo these sterilizations finally have justice - in what form?

CUBA: As abstract as it may sound, I believe that justice is the least they deserve; yet perhaps the last thing they will receive, if things continue to move as they have in the past.

They know that the sterilizations are permanent, that they where subjected to harmful and inhuman conditions. They were disrespected and hurt. They have mourned and, as one of the women I interviewed told me, they have cried so much that even their tears are now gone. Another women told me that “they just want to be untied”, liberated from a kind of binding condition of injustice. It makes you rethink in what form should justice come. There is no amount of money that can compensate for their loss. Can one put a price on fertility? However, they do demand medical and psychological attention, but more importantly they are demanding to be treated with respect by health and government officials, to have the State officially recognize their loss and the violence they were subjected to. If this does happen, I believe a very symbolic and crucial healing process may begin to take place.

I strongly believe that justice should also come from all of us. All Peruvian citizens need to know that this happened, and they also need to remember it. We need to finally accept that this happened to all of us, and that the responsible one is not a single person, but a complex logic of vertical power and racist ideologies that unfortunately do not only stem from the State. Peru is a country defined by inequality and discrimination. We need to feel responsible, related, and act upon this.

AUTRE:Articulo 6 has a very important message – how will a fashion collection get the message out - could you produce this collection for stores or boutiques across the world?

CUBA: As a fashion designer and social researcher I will always struggle, trying not to let one of my sides win over the other. In this project I am very aware of the highly social and political issues I am raising in the form of garments, and that garments—as I conceive of them—can transform into bodies that advance and open debates as well as new understandings. One of the foundations of the project is to use fashion platforms to talk about the case, but also to discuss the narratives that can be touched upon while presenting it: issues of gender, strength and politics.

I understand garments to have agency, and that when they interact with people and things while performing themselves (in a runway, a photo shoot, a video, a conference, etc.) they may generate emotions, raise questions, foster divergent thought, and challenge established memories. If I know that the garments I created can make at least one person more familiar with the case, if I can move them towards it and prompt a reaction, a feeling and perhaps even an action, I will be satisfied. I strongly believe that we are all capable of letting people know more about this case, and to explore the ways in which we can all take part and change things.

The next part of the project does actually include the development of new pieces inspired in the initial garments and their trajectories as migrate and transform into more “public and commercial garments” that spread the message of the piece in numerous ways. I am aware that this project won’t solve the case. But it can definitely give it greater visibility. It can also let people know that we are all capable of talking out loud not only about ourselves.

AUTRE: Do you think fashion should be more of a medium for social change?

CUBA: I believe that it already is. However, it appears to suffer some sort of blindness towards its own powerful agency and the potential impact it could have if conceived as a device and a medium to transform and change things. In order to so we need to see fashion less in terms of material objects for consumption. We need more fashion that acts, critiques and reacts. We need design and actions for transformation, stronger activism and less narcissism.

AUTRE: Whats next?

CUBA: I am preparing to present Articulo 6 in Peru in August (in Lima and in Anta, Cusco). The idea is to engage in an open discussion about the case and its current situation, and not only about the project. In September I will be presenting the first collection of Articulo 6 in the New York Fashion Week. This experience in itself will constitute another “action” of the project. Later on I will develop at least 10 more actions that stem this work, and I am currently looking for funds to develop them. A total of 12 actions will be performed as part of Articulo 6. I want them to represent the 12 of Anta: the group of brave women that made the first formal accusations and that became a symbol for the case.

To find more about the project, its actions, and the case, and to pledge your support visit the Articulo 6 website. Photography by Erasmo Wong Seoane, Model Carla Rincón for IceBerg, styling by Lucia Cuba & Yasmin Dajes, assistant production Joy Rosenbrum, hair by Olga Sonco. Text for this article by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre.

Man on Fire: An Interview with Brian Duffy

May 9, 2012

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The end of the 1950s saw a drastic change in fashion photography—a kinetic, freewheeling, rule-breaking “documentary” style pioneered by three unlikely East London working-class “bad boys”—David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy. Perhaps the most technically sophisticated of the three, the inventive and wildly acerbic Duffy initially picked up photography “as an easy way to make money” after seeing a few contact sheets in the office of a fashion magazine he was working for as a freelance illustrator. It turned out that his instincts were correct, for him at least—Duffy soon found himself at the forefront of a rebellious, groundbreaking new photographic sensibility that would document and reinvent the image of 1960s London. Duffy, Bailey and Donovan, who quickly became notorious throughout London press as “The Terrible Trio” or “The Black Trinity” (the latter nickname bestowed upon them by photographer Norman Parkinson) ushered in the visual spirit of the “Swinging Sixties,” meanwhile completely changing the image of the fashion photographer established by the predominantly upper-class “gentleman” photographers of the 1950s like Parkinson and Cecil Beaton. As Duffy himself once said, “Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp. But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual.” The three even inspired Michelangelo Antonioni’s first entirely English-language film, the cult hit Blow-Up, about a jaded young fashion photographer working in mod London. Irreverent, short-tempered and wholly unafraid to take risks, Brian Duffy embodied the playful dynamism and vibrancy that would come to characterize the 1960s, replacing the static, untouchable ambiance of 1950s imagery.

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Throughout his incredibly successful career as one of Britain’s reigning photographers, Duffy created revolutionary spreads for Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Esquire, Queen, The Observer, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. He generated some of the most iconic images of the 1960s and 70s—from the album cover of David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane to some of the most renowned images of celebrities like Jean Shrimpton. Grace Coddington, Jane Birkin, Michael Caine, William S. Burroughs, Debbie Harry and others. Within the realm of advertising, the prolific Duffy lent his unique vision to two Pirelli calendars and shot award-winning campaigns for both Benson & Hedges and Smirnoff.

In 1979, Duffy grew tired of the business and decided to give up photography, going out in a characteristic “blaze of glory” as he spontaneously set fire to most of his negatives in the back garden of his London studio. Though a great deal of his images were lost, his son, Chris Duffy, has spent the past five years archiving those that remain—and this arduous process (which remains ongoing!) has culminated thus far in both the publication of a book of Duffy’s images and the openings of several retrospectives around the world. These exhibits showcase, for the first time ever, the oeuvre of Britain’s own enfant terrible: a visionary who created his own unique visual language, changing the face of commercial and fashion photography for good. I was lucky enough to sit down with Chris during the opening of the first-ever stateside Duffy retrospective at Clic Gallery in SoHo for a brief chat about his father’s legendary life, work and the infamous negative-burning incident…

ANNABEL GRAHAM: Your father captured and helped create the image of the “Swinging Sixties.” What about his particular method, style and personality do you think most set him apart from other photographers of the day?

CHRIS DUFFY: Ultimately… and it’s changed today, but I think photographers of the sixties had a lot of power. Clients came to them because they had a particular look and way of doing things. I mean, if you think of Helmut Newton pictures, no one else did that kind of picture, a Guy Bourdain could only be done by Gilles, and that was because photographers did have immense power, they could say how or what they wanted to do, which I don’t think really exists today. Most pictures that I look at, I mean I see hundreds of names all the time, but I couldn’t tell you one photographer from another. It all looks exactly the same. I think in part that has to do with technology, because the digital medium now has changed the game plan. I mean, in this period, in the sixties, all these pictures you look at are a fraction of time on a piece of film. The digital medium, with your recorder there, which is also a camera… if I take a picture of you, first of all, where does it exist? You can’t see it, taste it, smell it, touch it… so, I take a picture of you now, you email it to someone, they change the color of your hair on PhotoShop, they email it to someone else, and they put a background in, and then it comes back to me, where does it exist? There’s no way of knowing what the picture is, because you’ve extended the envelope of believability by digitally compositing elements. Now, traditional mechanical photography, the dynamic it deals with is a metaphysical condition, it’s about a slice of time, a moment in time. And a great picture is not a moment before that or a moment after that, it is that moment… and so it’s a very different, I think you need to differentiate between traditional-style photography and the new digital medium. So, in a roundabout way, in answer to your question about what made Duffy different, ultimately, it was a reflection of his personality. Every photographer infused and had different techniques to get people to react in certain ways or they had affections for certain styles, certain looks with cameras and lenses and techniques… it’s just a reflection of his personality.

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GRAHAM: Which was?

DUFFY: Which was, well, he was a natural anarchist… he pushed himself very hard and always tried something new. I think that’s always risky, in a way, it’s much easier to be safe and keep producing the same kind of image, and people like that and you get paid for doing it, but he always wanted to kind of push it as far as he could go. He had a short fuse, he didn’t suffer fools lightly, and he was an incredible intellect; his depth of knowledge on so many subjects, from jazz to food to art to furniture to poetry… So photography was just one part of his makeup, really, I mean it was the medium that he expressed himself in.

GRAHAM: I read that he originally just picked up photography as an easy way to make money.

DUFFY: Well, yeah, originally, he started out, he went to St. Martin’s [School of Art], and he wanted to be a painter. And then what he realized in his class was that there were so many brilliant geniuses, so he went into the dressmaking department. So he had an innate understanding of fashion. Then he started illustrating and got freelance gigs for magazines like Harper’s, and it was when he was in the office of one of the magazines that he saw a set of contact sheets, and he said, “Oh, these all look the same!” and the fashion editor said, “No, no, if you look carefully they’re all different!” And then he realized at that point that that was probably much easier than sitting down drawing things. So he took up photography.

GRAHAM: And he happened to be good at it!

DUFFY: And he happened to be good at it. Well I think actually he would be good at anything he put his mind to.

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GRAHAM: Yeah. It seems he was good at a lot of different things.

DUFFY: He was incredibly talented. He then went into film, into commercials, and then when he jumped out of that he’d always had a love of furniture and he was very good with his hands, at making things, he had an amazing workshop at the back of his studio, and he went into furniture restoration. I think by ’79, after working from the late fifties, he saw the writing on the wall, or what was going to happen with photography, and its demise.

GRAHAM: That was actually one of my next questions. What do you think sparked his ultimate disenchantment with the world of fashion and photography, and the burning of most of his negatives in 1979?

DUFFY: Well, I think that after being in the business that long, he felt that he wanted to go out while he was still at the top, and not just water down, you know, become a pale imitation of what he’d done before. I think he’d just had enough.

GRAHAM: He went out with a bang.

DUFFY: He did. I mean, you know, he actually burned a lot of his… well, we’re not really sure how much he burned, but there are big gaps in the archive where you look through and for example you get Job #900 and the next job will be #1008 or something, you know, there’s a big chunk missing. He just started arbitrarily burning things in the back garden on the bum fire to get rid of them. Luckily, he got stopped by the local council… we’ve got a lot of stuff, but I still keep finding things. There are archives around the world that have got pictures that I’m still uncovering. I mean, he was working every day for 25, 30 years. I worked for him from ’73 to ’79 and we just worked all the time, just continually. Nonstop.

GRAHAM: What was the experience of working for him like?

DUFFY: Well, you couldn’t have had a better apprenticeship or grounding. He was the ultimate craftsman. It was demanding, but in the end, a privileged position to be in… to fly around the world and work with a top photographer and meet incredible people and learn so much, really.

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GRAHAM: This is the first-ever U.S. exhibition of Duffy’s work, right?

DUFFY: That’s correct. We had a small David Bowie exhibit last year, but this is the first solo retrospective.

GRAHAM: Now that you’ve been archiving his work since 2007, are there plans for more exhibitions in the U.S. and worldwide?

DUFFY: Well, we just got approached by a gallery in San Francisco, it’s the Modern Book Gallery, I think? So we’ll see how it goes. This year we’ve had… Gosh, I think this is about our eighth exhibition already this year. We started out at the Alinari National Photo Museum in Florence, and that’s been a major success, they extended it twice… We are in Monash Art Gallery in Melbourne, we just had the original Aladdin Sane dye transfer at the Victoria & Albert in London, we’ve got this show, we’ve got one in LA, and then we’ve got plans for Spain and Germany at the end of the year. We’ve got another UK exhibition at the Montpelier Gallery in Cheltenham at the end of the year, so it’s pretty full.

GRAHAM: Will those exhibitions show these same photographs?

DUFFY: Well, in the end, it’s up to the gallery, what they think works. For me, all of the pictures work in whatever way you want to put them together

GRAHAM: Do you have a favorite of your father’s photographs?

DUFFY: Well, there are so many pictures that I like… but one of my favorites is this portrait of William Burroughs over there, taken in 1960, with the soft machine and the typewriter, which actually William Burroughs offered to my dad for 15 francs… which he said he bought, but I haven’t found it yet. If I do, that will be an amazing feat… But he photographed him again in 1974 in London, and the portrait was Burroughs holding that picture, and it was shot for Rolling Stone, but he cut Burroughs’ head off. It’s just his body holding the picture of himself taken in 1960. It’s in the book. That’s one of my favorite pictures, because it’s just so anarchic. To take a portrait of someone, and cut their head off… I mean, if I told you I was going to take a portrait of you and cut your head off, you’d say I was mad.

Text by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

Duffy: A Retrospective of Photographs by Brian Duffyis on view until June 3, 2012 at Clic Gallery, 255 Centre Street, New York.

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Crime & Love: An Interview with Maxwell Snow

February 17, 2012

You'd think by the look of things that artist Maxwell Snow's outlook on life is decidedly grim, but amidst the decay and the funereal macabre lies a deep curiosity about what it means to really be alive. His artistic oeuvre is a documentation of sorts of life's constant and cruel reminder of its strange impermanence, from the grim-reaperesque portraits of hooded KKK members, to his stark black and white imagery of skulls, crosses, coffins, and girls tied to railway tracks, to a headstone in a recent series that reads, "Wish you were here." However, Snow, who is based in New York City, seems fastidiously intentional about his philosophies on life and death. There is a sense that Snow subscribes to the notion that the soul lives forever and the body is like a some sort of racing motorcycle and we're all blowing down the highway at 120 miles an hour and we might as well crash into the wall at full speed in a heap of burning metal than at a slow meaningless sputter. Snow's new series 100 Headless Women, which will be on view this March at the Kathleen Cullen gallery in New York, explores this notion further by turning the gallery walls into a mausoleum with a selection of ghostly mugshots, black and white photographs of statues of saints who were doused in acid to obscure their features, and a series of portraits of nude women with their faces blackened out with a whip of etching ink in order "[to wrap them] in a cloak of anonymity to seal their singular identities….[so] the viewer is asked to focus on the collection group and devise a story within." I got a chance to ask Maxwell Snow a few questions about death, life, the afterlife, his inspirations, and a run down on what his new show is all about. Read interview after the jump and see selections from the new series.

PAS UN AUTRE: A lot of your work seems to be seeped in the mythologies of death and the afterlife – where do these allusions to death and darkness come from?

MAXWELL SNOW: Death is ever present. Human beings for as long as they have been on this planet, have been fascinated with the afterlife. I would say for good reason. It is a part of almost every story. In mythology, heroes and saints are defined by how they die as much as by how they live, Artistic representations of the end of life stimulate my curiosity. As a child I was always interested in stories of great men and I continue to be inspired by the hero’s journey. Death is a mystery. Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” Death is beautiful. No one likes to talk about it, people want to sanitize the idea of death because they are afraid of it. People fixate on the physical side of it and not the metaphysical. You cannot erase energy you can only change its form. The soul doesn’t die it just takes its clothes off at the end.

AUTRE: What do you expect the afterlife to be like?

SNOW: If its hell its Time Square but I imagine the conversation there will be more interesting than anywhere else.

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AUTRE: You started to pop up on the gallery circuit around 2008 - have you always been such a consummate artist?

SNOW: Thank you for that but satisfaction with my work is elusive. There is no such thing as consummation. I am always striving for an imaginary plateau that can never be reached. Always looking for perfection, though impossible, I aim for it. I want to make things that resonate with the universe.

AUTRE: Where does the outlaw persona come from - what is it about the American outlaw?

SNOW: I suppose it has always been my nature to question authority. Crime and love go hand in hand.

AUTRE: Who are some of your favorite American outlaws?

SNOW: Billy The Kid.

"Crime and love go hand in hand."

AUTRE: There is a quote in the press release for your new series of photographs called 100 Headless Women that says something to the effect that death is a "territory unknown to the living, and thus can be whatever we make of it" - can you talk a little bit about that and the new series?

SNOW: It’s the ultimate mystery and who doesn’t love a good mystery? This series is about stripping perspective in order to force it into new channels of awareness. How do we see the other? What are we looking at? What are we looking for? Most importantly, what are we missing? When the eyes and face are taken away you are forced to redirect. You almost frantically search for an anchor for your view, a place for your eye to rest. The place where the information can be appropriated. The subjects are naked, eyes completely obscured. I expect that perhaps the viewer will experience is a form of cognitive dissidence that shakes them up. It puts you off kilter and off balance. The only way you can expand on your conciousness is to question the way you do things now.

AUTRE: Who are some of your biggest artistic inspirations?

SNOW: The surrealists and the old masters.

AUTRE: Whats next?

SNOW: The undiscovered country.

Maxwell Snow's100 Headless Women will be on view at Kathleen Cullen Fine Artsin New York from March 3 to April 7, 2012. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

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Ima Read That Bitch: An Interview With Zebra Katz

February 6, 2012

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“Like a slaughterhouse I’m gonna bleed that bitch,” goes a line from the Zebra Katz track Ima Read. The beat is repetitive and the lyrics are like the visceral, aural equivalent of watching meat get pounded. If you haven’t heard Zebra Katz’s song Ima Read or seen the accompanying music video [see video after the jump] you’re seriously missing out. Ima Read, featuring Njena Reddd Foxxx on Mad Decent's Jeffree's Imprint, a brainchild of DJ and record producer Diplo, is Zebra Katz’s debut release. Katz, based in Brooklyn, who has a theater and arts background, is part of a new wave of hip-hop auteurs, bringing the medium back to its roots with a certain amount poetry, artistic predilection and originality that harks back to the heroin induced darkness and excitement of jazz. Starting off with artists like Spank Rock of Baltimore and more recently Tyler the Creator of ODDFUTURE out of Los Angeles and Harlem’s A$AP Rocky, the mainstream just isn’t cool or exciting anymore. Zebra Katz, aka Ojay Morgan, which seems to be less a pseudonym or stage-name and much more an alter ego, is definitely on the rise. In the following interview Katz sheds a little light on the on his background, artistic influences, and hints at a debut album. After the jump: must see music video for Ima Read.

PAS UN AUTRE: Where are you from and where do you live now?

ZEBRA KATZ: I was born and raised in West Palm Beach, Florida and now live in Brooklyn, New York.

AUTRE: Do you have a background in theater and art?

KATZ: My background in the arts come from attending a performing arts school from grade 6-12. My major was in theatre, but I minored in dance, visual arts, and communication.

AUTRE: When you did you become Zebra Katz and how would you describe your current sound?

KATZ: I started developing Zebra Katz during college and began playing shows two years after I graduated. I would say my current sound ranges from pure-punk-rage to the infinite depths of chopped and screwed crunk hybrids like witch house.

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AUTRE: Who are some of your biggest inspirations and influences?

KATZ: Nina Simone, Grace Jones, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Missy Elliott, and Andre 3000 (to name a few).

AUTRE: What is the song Ima Read all about?

KATZ:Ima Read is all about context, the art of reading, and the importance of literacy.

AUTRE: Where did the idea for the music video come from?

KATZ: Ruben Sznajberman wrote the treatment and directed the video. As a team we trusted each other’s creative visions and collectively made it work.

AUTRE: What’s next?

KATZ: I'm looking forward to touring with Njena Reddd Foxxx, new collaborations with brilliant artists, and working on my debut album.

You can download Zebra Katz's track here. Photography by Federico Cabrera. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre.

The Revolution Will Be Sewn: An Interview with Maison Fin de Saison

February 3, 2012

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Meet the new avant-garde revolutionaries of the high fashion set. There are not many designers that come around that cite 18th century philosophers as their main source of inspiration, but the duo behind the London based fashion house Maison Fin de Saison are not your typical designers. Calling them simply provocative or edgy might be a cop out and certainly an understatement. There is a definitive sense that the designers behind Maison Fin de Saison, which translates roughly to House, End of the Season, use their fashion house as a collective voice to experiment creatively with their deeply fascinating, beautifully contradictory beliefs and philosophies with roots in French 18th century romanticism and Eastern transcendentalism. Maison Fin de Saison in that regard is a hypothetically unsolvable Rubik’s cube of unending dualities that translate right down to the beautiful pieces they design. With applications of uncommon fabric pairings, unusual cuts, and studies in androgyny you could say that contrast is a part of the dogma of Maison Fin de Saison. What is that dogma exactly? Each new collection is presented with a black and white fashion film (see film after the jump) and even the brand itself is presented on a platform of black and white because, as the designers point out, a monochrome palette is essential in communicating their complex ideas. Their Fall/Winter 2012 collection, with pieces typically masculine in nature cut with feminine fabric, dip dyed ostrich feather trims, leather edges, and revealed shoulder pads, it looks like the uniform for some kind of ultra post-modern fashion army from the future sent to the present time to start an all out riot.

Maison Fin de Saison is turning heads in the fashion world. This month alone the fashion house will see the debut of their Fall/Winter 2012 collection, entitled MAN GARB, at two covetable events in London and Paris. The first of which, in mid-February, is an intimate invite only exhibition and presentation in collaboration with French Radio London during London Fashion Week, called ON AIR/OFF AIR–VISION MEETS SOUND, which promises to be an all out sensory orgy of stimuli – uniquely mixing a multitude of mediums including fashion and sound. The second of which will be Maison Fin de Saison’s debut at Paris Fashion Week presented by the venerable fashion showcase ON | OFF with an exhibition and a couple runway shows. I was curious to learn more about Maison Fin de Saison so I reached to Gigi, who is the creative half of the fashion house, who was gracious enough to take time out of their chaotic schedule to chat with Pas Un Autre.

PAS UN AUTRE: So, you are a brother and sister design duo with a background in design and law. Who has the design background and who has the law background? Can you please introduce yourselves?

GIGI - MAISON FIN DE SAISON: Yes, we have been educated in design and law, although opposites in relation to the type of 'human institutional' occupations, yet still sparsely co-related through societal philosophies. I am the creative half of Maison Fin De Saison with acquired interests in the arts and the fashions, my brother in law. We prefer to remain behind the Maison Fin De Saison persona and speak through its voice. I am Gigi and my brother is Jas Karan.

AUTRE: What brought you two together to create Maison Fin De Saison?

GIGI: Well, our common ground, our opinions on philosophies and the transcendental, this is something that has surrounded us from a very early age through our family background - North India. Maison Fin De Saison, was created as a propaganda of two individuals' obsessions on philosophies and our reactions to the notion of mankind. We see the body as a stage and it is a constant stage of opinions, judgements, assertions, choices and awareness or lack of. Interestingly these obsessions that we have are brought forward as artisanal but wearable 'garb' - dressing the walking stage. Mankind. Some how our opposing interests yet common perceptions bring together visions which come forward each season as thematic garb. Fashion was just a general interest, specifically in cultural context and this is how Maison Fin De Saison seasons come forth, the season is about the idea.

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AUTRE: Is there a particular cultural connotation to Maison Fin De Saison that is lost in translation - can you explain the name?

GIGI: Maison Fin De Saison - the name was a vision in itself, translated into English 'House' End of Season. Our language is quite dense and the inspirations behind the seasons are executed in black and white film and capsule collections. You could call them abstract visions until they are solidified into reality, when this process takes place, yes, sometimes it can get lost in translation. Furthermore diluted when perceived through the other eye - the audience. Cultural connotation....Maison Fin De Saison is a proclamation to the condition of mankind as we see it - in the essence of now. Its a voice, its almost poetic, its about mankind and the avante garde relation.

AUTRE: The label has a lot of diametrically opposing ideas, philosophies, and even fabrics which is actually quite radical for fashion and I couldn't help but notice there were even a few pieces named after the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau - what kind of role does philosophy play and how important is philosophical thought to Maison?

GIGI: Everything Maison Fin De Saison creates and brings forward is an extension of philosophical 'obsessions' and our interpretation of these are, what brings hopefully the aura of authenticity and depth to our work. To answer your question - its invaluable.

AUTRE: If Rousseau were alive today what do you think he would think of todays culture - especially fashion and art?

GIGI: I see art as an extension of human emotion, the word 'fashion' falls under this world, unfortunately mass societal habit has a tendency towards being fed faceless attributes. I believe we are in an era that requires revolutions, however revolutions should start from within the sentient soul or else it would fail the cause of beginning. The revolution.... the condition of mankind, in order to begin a relationship with its body, we must either perceive it through the eyes of others in form of art, fashion, film or voice, else we may cease to exist in a stagnant culture - overly fed and hungry souls. In light of Rousseau, the word I will use is 'aloof'.

".....we are in an era that

requires revolutions...."

AUTRE: Why black and white films - why is black and white important - can you talk a little bit about the concept behind the new Maison fashion film?

GIGI: Maison Fin De Saison executes all seasonal film in black and white, which allows for dramatic contrasts, visually it focuses on the subject or the matter without interference. Because our inspirations can be quite thick, black and white allows the idea to live in a more liberated character and not to mention a more sombre approach to the inspiration. The film for this season titled: Mankind, was our reaction to a feeling through firstly the garb, conditions, movement, the human senses but in a dark and almost romantic motion. The film houses man, woman and the idea of maddened conditions through gestures and settings.

AUTRE: The new collection is called MAN GARB - can you talk a little bit about the new collection?

GIGI: In view of the season and its title, the collection has a a minimalist approach to silhouette, voluminous fabric layers, exposed layers and a combination of menswear suiting fabric such as Italian wool paired with feminine french tulle's. The collection is dark and has some very subtle trimmings such as - feather, nappa leather and french lace. You will also find the exposition of flesh in this collection. Although a womenswear collection, we titled the collection 'MAN GARB' in relation to the idea of - MANKIND which entails men and women. The collection is an extension of a feeling and I guess this is why you will see some bizarre use of interpretation and execution. Some of the current collection has been worn by presenters and editor's, we have also been asked if we have a menswear conceptual collection. This is something we are considering.

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AUTRE: You are first presenting the new collection in London this month - can you talk a little bit about your collab with French Radio London and can you explain what the underground mantra is all about? Sounds fascinating….

GIGI: Well, from the start of Maison Fin De Saison, we had decided that any associations we have in regards to 'our philosophy' must be complimentary to the idea, including execution of work. The current season 'MAN GARB' is based on human pre-occupations, conscious sub-conscious awareness and conditions and radio is a fascinating means of communication - speech. French Radio programming is of an eclectic mix of music and houses some exceptional sounds. The collaboration is called ON AIR OFF AIR- VISION MEETS SOUND, its an intimate exhibit and is during London Fashion Week, it will consist of Maison Fin De Saison speech in interview, dialogue, static installation, live models and to take it a step further within their studio's. We are expecting quite an interesting guest list. Its the idea of authentic and revolutionary concept that suggests the 'underground mantra' and the coming together of two very unlikely mediums.

AUTRE: After London you are showing the new Maison collection during Paris Fashion Week with On/Off - thats kind of big deal - what can we expect during fashion week?

GIGI: On Off, have a very reputable name in the industry, this is Maison Fin De Saison's debut at Paris Fashion Week, we will be showing alongside other designers in exhibition and there will also be a few catwalk shows. The exhibition will be held at : Espace Commines, 17 Rue Commines Paris 75003 and will be through 29th February until 3rd March 2012; from 10.00-19.00. It's open to everyone and for more information you can also find us on www.onoff.tv.

AUTRE: Whats next?

GIGI: The next season capsule collection, the film and New York. SS13 will be even more 'concentrated' in essence of Maison Fin De Saison and even more deeper in relation to ideas.

London Fashion Week: ON AIR OFF AIR- VISION MEETS SOUND (strict guest list) will be held February 15, 2012 atFRENCH RADIO LONDON. Paris Fashion Week: ON | OFF – Espace Commines, 17 Rue Commines Paris 75003 and will be through 29th February 29 until March 3rd, 2012. Visit WWW.MAISONFINDESAISON.COMfor more info.

Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper for Pas Un Autre

TOAST OF THE TOWN: An Interview with LORIN STEIN

January 30, 2012

The editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein, doesn’t watch Gossip Girl. He does, however, stand on tables when giving toasts—something he is quite adept at. Tonight’s is in honor of Pulphead, a new collection of essays published by the esteemed literary journal’s Southern editor, John Jeremiah Sullivan, or “JJ,” as Stein lovingly dubs him. Ever charming and poised, Stein relates from his lofty perch, to a mixed audience of bright-eyed Ivy Leaguer interns and lit-world “old boys” alike, the story of his trip to Scotland with JJ, their semi-successful hunt for the mythic beauty of Loch Lomond, and JJ’s baffling wildflower-picking excursion (“When I find a really good wildflower, I like to take a picture of it so I can look it up and identify it when I get home… don’t worry, I don’t use it in my writing or anything like that”). The first time I met Stein, he advised me not to go into the editing/publishing business (find out why in the interview below).

The second time, we ended up having an in-depth discussion about Gossip Girl as I photographed him sitting in an armchair in his spacious, book-lined office at the very back of The Paris Review’s Tribeca loft (the inside of which resembles the late George Plimpton’s living room, cozy and replete with books, framed black-and-white photographs and old Paris Review posters, oriental rugs and taxidermied birds—purportedly the addition of Philip Gourevitch, the second editor-in-chief, who Stein succeeded in April 2010). To be fair, the conversation arose in an academic discussion—but I was nonetheless surprised, and pleasantly so. With Stein, it seems there is never a dull moment. At just 39 years old, he is the third and youngest-ever editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary journal—and while he plans to steer the Review back in the direction of its Plimptonian, purely fiction-and-art roots, there is no doubt that he brings a fresh, unique and decidedly hip perspective to the table. His attention to detail in combination with a certain facetiousness make him into a perfectly Baudelairean mixture of the ephemeral and the permanent, the modern and the classic— much like the Review itself—and though (like George Plimpton) he enjoys a good party, the eloquent Stein radiates editorial dexterity and pure, joyful devotion to his work.

“They’ll of course use the smoking picture, won’t they?” he smirks when I ask him to hold the hand with the cigarette up for another shot. He drapes a leg over the arm of the chair, sipping his whiskey—and yet somehow, in his revelry, he remains utterly composed. About a week later, I was lucky enough to spend some time picking Stein’s enigmatic, highly coveted brain. We talked about the editing and publishing business, the future of print and the effects of technology on the literary world (and later, off the record, about Morrissey and David Bowie).

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ANNABEL GRAHAM: When we spoke last spring, you told me not to go into the editing/publishing business. Can you explain why? Do you have any advice for young people who want to go into the literary business?

LORIN STEIN: Well, because… book publishing is contracting, and within book publishing, and within literary book publishing, the sales forces are contracting, but the editorial departments are also contracting, so I don’t think I would have had the kind of luck I’ve had if I were to do it now, and I’d hate to see someone spend three years… you know, slaving away as someone’s secretary, essentially, and then not even having the chance of a promotion. It was always true that most people who worked didn’t then get to become editors, but I think it’s gotten even trickier now.

GRAHAM: Are sales contracting?

STEIN: I don’t know whether sales are contracting, but in literary publishing, new literary publishing, it seems to me that there are fewer jobs. There are fewer books that are… there are fewer houses that are devoted to that… I think that there are fewer books that are in that kind of very special corner of the world of letters. I think the publishing business has pretty quickly gotten used to the idea that the future is going to be gizmos, and they’re getting smarter, quickly, about gizmos.

GRAHAM: You mean like the iPad, the Kindle…

STEIN: Yeah, reading devices. E-books. So, if you and I talk in a year… and I hope this won’t be true… it may be that the climate has changed.

GRAHAM: Right. Well, going off of that, do you feel that publishing is a dying art? Will print ever be obsolete?

STEIN: I think print is in more trouble than most people think. And less trouble than some people think. James Wood just wrote this very good piece about trying to sell off his late father’s library—in last week’s New Yorker—and he stumbled on this fact, which is that there isn’t really the market for second-hand books that there used to be. That market is changing so quickly, and nowadays what’s going on is that these used bookstores, these used book-dealers are buying up, very cheaply, they’re filling these warehouses full of these books that they’re making available online, but more and more, you can pay a low price—you may not get to see a photo of the book the way you have been able to do for the past five years, you’ll get a book in some condition that you don’t know what it is, maybe you’ll buy five copies before you get an okay copy, but right now the price of these books is very depressed, so they’re very available, but the shelf space, I think, is about to disappear, and in about 10 or 15 or 20 years, I think there are going to be books that are actually very hard to find. Which is really different from the way it is now.

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GRAHAM: Yeah. You can find anything.

STEIN: You can find anything, which is not going to last forever, it’s going to be very hard in cases where you need the hard copy, and there are a lot of books that are not going to be easily found. And I know your question was about print, and presumably what you mean is new books or magazines?

GRAHAM: Well, no, I think what I was asking is whether you think the internet is going to completely take over, if for example in the future The Paris Review might be only online, or books may only come in the virtual form, like on an iPad.

STEIN: I do think that there will be more and more books that will only come in the virtual form. There’s a really good argument, one of the really good arguments, for The Paris Review to always put out a print edition, which is, do you have anything stored on CD? Emails or anything, stored on CD?I worked for a publishing house that, around 1999, started using email regularly. It didn’t happen all at once; different editors took longer to do it. You would still hear people giving dictation and typing when I started.

GRAHAM: Wow. [LAUGHS]

STEIN: And I had never had an email account. And my boss and I both learned how to use email together. And if you look at the archives of that publishing house, all of our correspondence—the company would delete things after 90 days or something—so we were keeping email files but we realized… I took my email files, the ones that I’d saved, I copied them and put them on a CD, so that I could have them… it turns out that CDs that you buy at the drugstore, they only last for a few years! And even just getting the email off my computer, it took someone who was an expert, really, because just in the 12 years I’d been there, the systems had changed so much. Now, if you put a book on a shelf, if you put a piece of paper on a shelf, it stays there until you tear the shelf down. If you store things electronically, you need always to be… what’s the word I want… every time you switch hardware, you need to re-save them, you need to transfer them to a new medium, essentially. And sooner or later, you’ve done it, you know? And that’s part of the reason for publishing stuff on paper, if you do care about the lasting value, I mean maybe you’re kidding yourself, but I don’t want something to have that—that as soon as the hardware finishes it will disappear. I want to be the hardware, I want to own the hardware!

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GRAHAM: Makes sense. So… I’m sure you get this question all the time… How has The Paris Review changed since you’ve taken over? I understand that when Philip was the editor, there was a distinct move towards nonfiction and photography that created a bit of controversy, and that you have begun to steer the magazine back in its original purely literary and artistic direction, much like George Plimpton. Can you talk about that a little bit? What is your ultimate goal for the magazine, and where would you like to see it go?

STEIN: It’s true, Philip was interested in publishing pure reportage. And reportage just isn’t something that I know that much about. And I also think that—especially now—even on the web, there’s so much good reportage, that it would be hard for us to distinguish ourselves, I mean Philip could do it, I don’t think I can—and my real love, I mean, I think the thing that needs the most help, is short fiction and poetry. And essays. And by essays, I mean something very…

GRAHAM: Like what John Jeremiah Sullivan [the Southern editor of The Paris Review] writes?

STEIN: Like what John writes. Though he sometimes writes reportage. Some of what he writes wouldn’t be right for the Review. And I guess I think of reportage as things that are tied to matters of real concern in the world, the essays that John writes that we’ve published are more personal essays. I want the Review to be what I think it often has been, which is America’s literary magazine. I want it to be a laboratory for the best new fiction and poetry and this funny thing that you call the essay. And I want it to maintain its integrity of, especially, it seems like choosing the writers—I want it to reflect what we really think is important, not just what’s fashionable or what sells, but the writers who really interest us as writers. And I think that there’s more work for a literary magazine to do now than there used to be.

GRAHAM: How so?

STEIN: Well, the world doesn’t have much room for literary magazines. And, well… you and I could put out a web magazine tonight. And we could take a Xerox machine, and we could pretty easily distribute a magazine together. In fact, there are many, many magazines. But it’s become very hard to reach a large circulation—of people who really read it and care about it. And to make them feel the importance of what you’re doing, that’s what’s gotten to be hard, for lots of reasons.

GRAHAM: Especially since there’s such an inundation of stuff being put out, all over, you know, blogging, and…

STEIN: Bingo. And, well, a lot of it’s very good. There’s a lot of crap, but that’s always been true. The tricky thing is that people like you and me have some very good claims made on our attention. I mean, Breaking Bad is really good!

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GRAHAM: Is it? I’ve been hearing that.

STEIN: It is. But the thing is, there are only so many hours in a day. And even—I’ve never owned a TV as a grownup. But now, on our computers, the very things we use to do our work... we have these distractions. That’s the trouble. It’s not the crap so much as it’s the good stuff… that edges out the kind of reading that happens with short stories and poems. And, for that matter, novels.

GRAHAM: Yeah. Did you always know you wanted to go into editing, and can you tell me a bit about the trajectory of your career, how you got started… and what you find to be the differences between editing books and editing short stories for the Review?

STEIN: There was a guy who came to visit my school when I was in second grade and talked about how a book gets made. And I thought that was what I wanted to do. And I started making books, I was always making books. I found it, just… the idea that you could just make a book was just such a big deal for me. I did think I was going to be a writer… I didn’t realize I was never going to be a writer, but… I went to a writing program, I tried to write a novel, and realized that I had absolutely no talent.

GRAHAM: Did you study writing in college?

STEIN: No. After college I didn’t know what to do with myself, and my college advisor said that he thought I could get a teaching fellowship in a writing program. Well, I’d been writing, of course I’d been writing in college. I’d been trying to write poems, and fiction… in high school too, I always wanted to write, and I thought… that maybe I could be a professor of English, and I got turned down from the PhD program that I wanted to go to, and… another PhD program called me and made an offer to me, and they said… maybe you’ve had this phone call… you have x number of years to finish, and just to be clear, you’re going to be working mainly on the 1890s, and also the 1840s, and I’m thinking, I can’t do this…

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GRAHAM: So there were restrictions put upon you in terms of what you had to study?

STEIN: Well, no, it was my idea; I had applied. I’d said I wanted to be an Americanist and that the periods that interested me were the 1890s and the 1840s. Once it became an actuality, once it became an actual phone call, I thought, Christ Almighty, get me out of here! My advisor said, the only thing I can suggest is that I bet you can get into this poetry program, and it’ll be a teaching job, so you’ll be paid, and you’ll be able to see what you’re like as a teacher. Well, it turned out that I was a terrible teacher, and I couldn’t write, and… so I came to New York thinking I’d be a novelist, and couldn’t do that, so I got a job as a secretary, essentially, at Publishers Weekly, and started editing a lot of the little reviews. And because I was there, I got to know which publishing houses interested me… and there was one that I really, really liked, so I just decided that I’d get a job there.

GRAHAM: Which one was that?

STEIN: It was the one I ended up working at, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. So I tried to get different jobs that would make me more attractive to them, but no one would even give me a callback, because I was so obviously out of their… [LAUGHS]

GRAHAM: So how did you realize that editing was your calling, so to speak?

STEIN: I edited the literary magazine in high school, and in college, and when I was a kid my father hired me to edit for him.

GRAHAM: Was your father a writer?

STEIN: No, he and my stepmother ran a nonprofit in Washington, where I grew up. I think I must have been kind of good at it, because I loved it from the beginning; I loved it much better than I liked writing. I’ve always found writing very hard and I’ve always found editing a lot of fun. To answer your question, about the difference between editing short stories and novels, it’s very different. With a novel, you really live in the book for a few weeks, and a short story, you read it in a few minutes and think about it, and then you go back to it.

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GRAHAM: This is a bit of a loaded question, but who are some of your favorite contemporary writers?

STEIN: Oh, I can’t tell you. Not unless you’re willing to become my bodyguard.

GRAHAM: All right, then how about a few of your favorite authors that have passed away already?

STEIN: Dead people? Recently dead, or long dead?

GRAHAM: Your choice. Either.

STEIN: Last night, as I was falling asleep, I was thinking about how hard it would be to explain to someone who’s not American how much Mark Twain means to us… and to me. I mean, I know that he’s a national hero and stuff, but it’s kind of weird that our national hero writer should also be our greatest writer, and to me he is. And he is an icon for us. And then… Proust matters a lot to me, Tolstoy matters a lot… David Foster Wallace, among the recently dead… I mean, it’s hard to answer that question, you know.

GRAHAM: What is your favorite aspect of your job, and the literary world in general?

STEIN: It’s a lot like being in college. I think I’ve been able to read more than I’ve been able to read since I graduated from college. It’s also like being in college in the sense that there’s often a gathering about to happen with people that you like, and I miss that about college. I think the amount of freedom, and also the chance to… put out a magazine. And a web magazine, too. It’s really fun. It’s all really fun.

GRAHAM: I think The Paris Review definitely looks one of the more “fun” literary journals. Serious, but also fun.

STEIN: We try. If it looks like fun, it’s probably because it is fun to do. We’re all very… we can’t help being serious, and we work very hard but there are not very many of us, its’ a very tiny team, so we’re always up in each other’s business, but it’s really great in the sense that our deputy editor is also in charge of the t-shirts, and that our associate editor, he used to be an assistant but he’s also the guy who organizes the interns and designs our advertisements and thinks about computer stuff.

GRAHAM: That’s nice… not so many fingers in the pot, like a lot of magazines and newspapers.

STEIN: Right.

Text and photography by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre.

Visit the Paris Review for more.

(Annabel Graham is a photographer and writer who travels regularly between Los Angeles, New York, and Paris – she has worked for Interview Magazine as well as the Paris Review, and she is a regular contributor to Pas Un Autre and Autre Quarterly. Read all here articles for Pas Un Autre here)

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MODERN-DAY DANDY: AN INTERVIEW WITH CASSIUS MARCELLUS CORNELIUS CLAY

January 25, 2012

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In the summer of 2010, a particularly dapper Yale sophomore, wearing a pair of distinctive, gold-crested Stubbs and Wootton slippers, encountered Kanye West while shopping at Barney’s in New York. As the story goes, West complimented Cassius Clay (no relation to Muhammad Ali—but Clay is, in fact, a descendent of the renowned abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay) on said slippers, introductions were made, a conversation ensued and email addresses were exchanged. One thing lead to another, and by the end of the summer Clay had taken a leave of absence from Yale at West’s request and moved to New York to become the rapper’s personal full-time confidant and right-hand man (he eschews the term “stylist” for its unsavory connotations; a more detailed explanation can be found in the interview below). Once the news got out, some were dumbfounded by what they perceived as an abrupt trajectory from diehard academic to celebrity stylist— envy, resentment and incredulity arose with fervor (one has only to peruse the anonymous commentary under any online article published in late 2010 about the Cassius/Kanye partnership to surmise this), yet the always-resourceful young aesthete seized the opportunity to help shape the rapper’s professional and sartorial choices, bringing his unique, quirky perspective to the table and turning the coveted job into an artistic and intellectual experience that furthered his education just as much as his missed year at Yale would have (though in a very different way!). If that’s not enough to convince the aforementioned internet haters of his academic seriousness, Cassius is now back at Yale and currently in the process of completing a simultaneous bachelor’s and master’s degree, both in Art History—a hefty task for any college student, especially one with the unspoken responsibility of remaining impeccably dressed! I hadn’t seen Cassius since we attended Phillips Academy Andover together (I remember quite clearly the feather bowties, pocket watches and other striking accoutrements he sported—I don’t think I spotted him wearing sweatpants once during those three years, not even during finals week—as well as the memorization skills and admirable command of the English language he showcased during the art history class we shared). I spent a beautiful October afternoon walking around New York’s Nolita and Lower East Side with the poised, and drily witty Cassius as he shed some light on “the whole Kanye thing,” his plans for the future, his sources of aesthetic inspiration and his illustrious taste.

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ANNABEL GRAHAM: Tell us the story of how you initially met Kanye West and ended up becoming his personal stylist; what was the whole experience like, what kind of responsibilities did you have, what did you find most interesting/take away from it and how did it end?

CASSIUS CLAY: I met Kanye on several occasions during a summer I spent working at Christie’s in New York. We got along very well talking about fashion, art, film and the relationships between each of them. I was already great fan of his music, of course, but was most impressed by his ambition and the assiduousness with which he pursues those objectives. Those qualities alone convinced me I could learn a lot from working with him. He wrote to me that fall, when I had just started my second year at Yale, offering me a position to work with him on a series of projects related to the release of the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album. I’m uncomfortable with the word “stylist.” The word risks either oversimplifying fashion’s broader significance to identity and aesthetics, or somehow glorifying dressing-up as some glamorous veneer du jour. I admire Kanye in that he collaborates with many people in realizing a vision, whether it’s a particular outfit, music video, apartment redecoration, or concert performance. I was a creative consultant responsible for working on many of those projects simultaneously, so seeing and developing the connections between those different endeavors was immensely rewarding.

GRAHAM: I’m sure you learned a lot about both the fashion world and the music business while working with Kanye West—can you talk a bit about that? Did it further or change your interest in either of those realms?

CLAY: In fashion-related projects I enjoyed applying academic approaches – research, analysis, criticism – to the generative processes of creative work. I think works that synthesize those modes are always the most successful. Though I’m a great fan of Kanye’s work and convinced of music’s power to induce and communicate a feeling, I must confess that I’m musically inept. My childhood attempts in learning to play an instrument were abortive, and I sidestepped the music requirement at my high school by taking music history rather than music theory. I found the different ways in which the fashion and music industries treat products or talent particularly interesting. The power figures in fashion are often on the critical or receptive end of production: editors, department store buyers, celebrity style icons, etc. In music, the creative side of star singers and major producers have more direct control on the popular outcome of an album or single. That is, I think that Vogue can have a greater impact on a fashion brand than Rolling Stone could have on a musician.

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GRAHAM: As you told me during the shoot, you are in the process of finishing a simultaneous bachelor’s and master’s degree (both in art history) at Yale. What intrigues you about art history in particular, and do you plan to do anything specific with those degrees?

CLAY: Many animals have means of communicating with each other – but creative representation is unique to humans, which makes art history very important. I like the idea of art being one of the only pure and universal forms of expression, mathematics being the other one. Artistic production continues to have meaning across centuries and cultures, irrespective of how unfamiliar its context of production is to the time or people that examine it.At the same time, art history is an instrument of social and political history by manifesting the questions, achievements, and fears of a culture. In that sense I think art history has plenty of applications to fields that are not strictly academic, advertising being just one example.

GRAHAM: What intrigues you about fashion? How would you describe your own personal style? Who are your favorite designers, and why?

CLAY:I’m curious about the way that fashion has evolved from something purely functional – Neanderthal necessity for warmth – to its more sophisticated uses today. It can indicate mood and personality, sexuality and sexual availability, wealth, class, or social alignment. Fashion condenses a lot of human civilization into a few bolts of cloth. I respect formality because it requires some effort, but also demand because that requires some thought. Collections by Antonio Azzuolo, Lanvin, Bottega Veneta, Burberry Prorsum, and Alexander McQueen usually achieve that balance. I’m not terribly interested in trends, and I don’t care much about comfort. I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t still wear most of the clothes I have now in ten or twenty years.

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GRAHAM: We talked briefly during the shoot about your Halloween costume… I believe you said you were thinking about dressing as the Greek mythological character of Daedalus… did that end up working out? Explain…

CLAY: I ended up using things I already had in my closet, which probably suggests an unsettlingly close relationship between costume and daily wear. I went for pathetic and conscientious this Halloween: a bird in an oil spill. I wore black jeans, black button down, a crinkled Jil Sander blazer with a metallic petrol sheen, an inky coq feather Martin Margiela cape, gold leaf on my nose for a beak and drips of black face paint for the oil.

GRAHAM: Do you have any plans yet for what you’d like to pursue in the future? Or rather, what field intrigues you?

CLAY: Broadly speaking, my decision to do undergraduate work at Yale rather than Oxford was driven by a desire to study both the visual arts while taking courses in departments that are more explicitly political, like history and political science. I have competing interests in aesthetics, analysis, and ethics, I suppose. Still, I’d like to be able to reconcile all of them in some complementary capacity. I’m very keen on the economics of fashion and the art market – particularly in moments of downturn and recession. I’m interested in the dual nature of curation: literally “caring for” by definition, but also meaning critical assessment in practice. I’m sure I’ll be considering applications to law schools.

GRAHAM: What do you find most inspiring?

CLAY: I’m constantly assessing, planning, and thinking of contingencies, so surprises – rain, kindness, a mixed-up seating arrangement – are the most inspiring in that they force you to generate new ideas, reactions, and solutions. Travel involves all of these surprises.

GRAHAM: Do you have a favorite artist or work of art at the moment?

CLAY:My favorite young artist is Winston Chmielinski, based in New York, for his incisive use of color and ability to define and obscure forms in portraiture. The academic art of the 19th century and kitsch art of Soviet Socialist Realism in the 20th century need to be reassessed in most museums. I want to collect Albrecht Durer prints and drawings, sculptures by Lorenzo Bartolini, and paintings by John Everett Millais; I would have wanted Giovanni Boldini to have painted my portrait and William Morris to decorate my house.

Text and photography by Annabel Graham for Pas Un Autre

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The World According to KEEFJNAK: An Interview with Alexander Keefe

December 19, 2011

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"Playa Los Yuyos, Lima: una prueba perfecta cont. Ectoplasm enters in the messianic guise of the perfect proof, the ultimate ghost-effect, visual and haptic, a new monstrance at the very edges of the sensorium and its modern prostheses―it exceeds photography (it cannot be properly photographed) it exceeds touch (it can be touched but only with grave danger) — it can barely be seen — emergent like a spider’s web cocooning the medium in a sticky veil, a prophylactic balm to salve the wounds of materialism, Casaubon’s key to all mythologies."

You could say that, unbeknownst to us, some sort of kismetic spirt is colluding with our lives, telling us when to go when we don't exactly know the direction or telling us what to say when the words aren't quite there. You could also say that a certain sense of wanderlust is innate and inexorable–the eternal wondering about magical, faraway places that seem entirely painted by daydreams and travel writers before us. And when you combine these two forces, one more corporeal and the other a tad more phantasmagorical–two forces conceivably as tightly wound as the double helix of our genetic code–it is a catalyst for something else altogether. Tarrah Krajnak, a documentary photographer who was born in Peru in 1979 in an orphanage run by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart and grew up in Ohio, and Alexander Keefe, an ex-professor who studied Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard Universities, and a freelance writer for publications such as Artforum and Bidoun magazine, crossed paths in Burlington, Vermont and the rest, as they say, was history. Their online travel diary, called Keefjnak–an amalgam of their surnames–is a collaborative effort to document the world around them on their journey in the great tradition of travel documentation. A great travel writer such as Ernest Hemingway and any scholar of his would admit that his fantastical stories of seafaring adventures and bullfighting would not hold the same weight without his extensive real life adventures. On Keefjnak, Tarrah Krajnak's somber, yet liberating photographs of a dream-like South America are supplanted with Alexander Keefe's brilliant, poetic text and historical minutia to paint a portrait of the same kind seething wanderlust that all great adventurers share in order to remind us that life is happening to us whether we like it or not.

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Barranco, Lima: the perfect proof cont. And so there is always an anxiety about the nature of their evidentiary claims, the proofs offered by photography and recorded sound in the late 19th and early 20th centuries required not just display but performance, hypnosis, and scripting… argument to fend off the lurking potential for disbelief and “ridicule.”

What is the Keefjnak project? Keefjnak is the project that Tarrah and I started as a daily photo/text blog... kind of a shared project while we were traveling around the world for six months working on other stuff. We made a portmanteau of our two last names and thought it sounded cool. We also liked that it was the only Keefjnak on the internet: a tabula rasa to do with whatever we wanted. We weren't really sure what we wanted to do with it, so that was appropriate. We just knew we didn't want to do a typical travel blog...

How did you two meet? We met when our paths crossed in Burlington, Vermont. Neither of us is from there, but Tarrah was living and teaching there at UVM for five years. I spent a couple years there as a kind of break from life in New Delhi, India, where I'd been living and working for several years previously. We hit it off.

Where did your journey start from? It started when we left Omaha where we were staying for a few months while Tarrah did a residency at the Bemis Center.

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“Like the radio, it picks up voices from beyond the vibrations of the human senses but unlike the radio, the broadcast comes from a world which is tuned to rarer vibrations than our own, stepped down, or transformed, to us through ether by the agency of this ectoplasmic substance.

You mentioned that you post your photos and Alex posts his writing without consultation, is it safe to say that your photos and his text are a representation of how a visited place affected you both? Actually there is some consultation... But it is pretty low-key and usually takes the form of a quick editorial suggestion. Sometimes I'll show her a text that I'm considering and say "should I cut that part out?" She almost always says "yes" to that question for some reason... Ha! But I like it. I think of the texts for Keefjnak as the product of a kind of reductive rather than additive process. As for the photos, if she's stuck on deciding between a couple of them, she asks which I think is better for the blog. As for the question of representation, I don't know if that is really what the text and photos are doing. The photos are taken onsite in the various places we go so at least on some level they have to be tied to place. But I think that in the same way that my texts and Tarrah's photos sometimes converge and seem to speak directly to each other, and sometimes diverge and seem to operate independently, that our trip and itinerary works the same way. That is to say, sometimes our location and trip enter into dialogue with the texts and photo in a direct or explicit way, other times not at all. We always wanted the Keefjnak project to be not-obvious and kind of dry, stingy and austere, even cold. We don't want the text, photo and trip to be engaged in some big long group-hug and we don't want people viewing/reading the blog to feel that way either!

Any harrowing stories thus far from your travels or a experience that stands out the most? Tarrah got food-poisoning from a salad in Wisconsin and then ended up getting an upgrade on a flight from Chicago to Mexico City to first class so she could be closer to the bathroom and puke in luxurious comfort while I sat alone in the back of the plane wondering what was going on. At one point in my ambien-fogged semi-sleep I heard a flight attendant ask over the intercom "Is there a doctor on the plane?" I was worried. Then it turned out it was for someone else.

What's next? Well we are in Lima until late January working on a couple projects: Tarrah is shooting portraits of elderly nuns from the Catholic order called the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. They are German and have lived here in Lima at a convent in the back of a hospital for some 50 years. They also happen to run the orphanage that Tarrah was adopted from, which is how she got interested in the project. Some related work that she did in Reading, Pennsylvania at a retirement home for the missionary nuns is on her website: really affecting portraiture, some of it pretty harrowing, some more beatific. I'm working on writing an article on early video art for Bidoun magazine, a long-term writing project of mine that is being funded by Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation. After Peru, we're making our way to India to work collaboratively on a project related to video art and the Indian space program in the 70s. I'm preparing by collecting stamps related to Indian telecommunications satellites.

Stay tuned to Keefjnak to follow Tarrah Krajnak and Alexander Keefe's journey. Text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper & Abbey Meaker for Pas Un Autre. All photos and captions Copyright © 2011 Tarrah Krajnak and Alexander Keefe.

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“There is an age-long and invisible force, termed ectoplasm, re-discovered by modern science, which has met with ridicule from every walk of life."

[INTERVIEW] Beware of Ojo Señor!

September 22, 2011

German physician Franz Anton Mesmer theorized that there was a natural energetic transference that occurred between all animated and inanimate objects that he called magnétisme animal (animal magnetism) and other spiritual forces often grouped together as mesmerism. Thusly, we arrive at the word mesmerize. Ojo Señor!, a Barcelona based art collective have take to the streets with their mesmerizing wheat-pasted posters of haunting children, as well as a series inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, with glowing eyes. But Ojo's intentions might be far more sinister – Ojo Señor! wants to control your mind. Pas Un Autre got in touch with Ojo Señor! to learn more about their diabolical plan for world domination. Read interview after the jump.

Is there one of you or many of you? Who is Ojo Senor? People usually use the word "collective". But, the thing is that Ojo Señor! is the one watching and stalking out there in the darkness, or the one standing totally hypnotized in front of him, or even the one who steals the LEDS [Ojo Señor! used LED lights to illuminate the eyes] when nobody's looking. It is not about us.

Where did the idea to incorporate LED lights into the posters come from? Kids from Village of the Damned lost their powers when they were flattened by the printer. So we were forced to bring them back to life. This is the least we could do for having them working for us out on the streets. But the whole idea came up to us because of a sneaky shiny eyed cats stearing at us at night. So we started to talk about it and then we remembered a movie about kids controlling people's mind (Village of the Damned).

What are some of your inspirations or influences? The characters you see and will see staring on the walls.

How long have you been doing this particular project? We've been 4 months working on it, but Ojo Señor! took an entire month; you know...vacations and stuff.

How long have you been putting your art out there in this medium? This is Ojo Señor!'s first time.

Does you have a particular political or social message? Or any message for that matter? Yeah, BEWARE!

I guess getting in trouble for the whole street art thing is always a risk - any close calls or worse? Luckily, no.

What you think about mainstream popularity and commercialization of street art? Just the same way about making art from mainstreamed streets and commercial popularity. We havent thought of that. There's so much music to listen to. But it is really ironic to bring that up. Why else would you bomb the whole city with your name but to get some attention.

Whats the master plan? Control them, to control you, to control yourself. Summarizing...Control the whole world, with the less effort possible. Pretty basic economics.

OJOSR.TUMBLR.COM

text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

[INTERVIEW] The Taxidermist

September 21, 2011

By the time your reading this, Ryan Hanley could very well be pulling back the flesh off an otter or maybe a pig. Taxidermy is an age-old profession – romantic, morbid and seemingly alchemical in the practitioners ability to bring the dead back to life – even if its only in the sparkle of two glass eyeballs. Taxidermy, from the Greek word for arrangement of skin, became popular in the Victorian era – mementos of man's triumph over beast. Soon, taxidermy became an art and the taxidermist an artist. Florida based taxidermist Ryan Hanley is an artist, but also, I can tell, a legend in the making – a regular American outlaw peeling back the hides of God's own creatures to make his hard earned dollar. In a country where man is free to do as he pleases, if he so is willing, Hanley, with his switch-blade grin and greased up pompadour, is doing alright in my book. Lately, Hanley has been presenting his objets de la mort on a tumblr called 'The Taxidermist' – which provides a fascinating peek into the daily life of a young taxidermist at work. Naturally I was curious. Read interview after the jump.

What's a normal day look like for The Taxidermist? Wake up, fuck my wife, make a shitload of coffee, thaw out an animal from the freezer, hit the flea markets, score some roadkill, check my traps, come home to a defrosted animal, put a Venom record on, get to work skinning/fleshing/mounting/re-shaping the animal, take a shower, cook a french dinner (or if the animal was something fresh, cook its meat), fuck my wife, relax.

How did this project come about? Not a project, a trade that I have worked hard at for the last two years. Self-taught then apprenticed at a taxidermy shop for a hard ass hillbilly ex-con who gave me six five foot alligators my very first day to skin out and flesh, which having never attempted before I then completely fucking aced. Not one fuck up. Needless to say, he was impressed and this was just the beginning of my year of apprenticing at the shop, doing everything from an elk to a 13 1/2 foot alligator (among countless others, not always as big) to someone's pet dog and any animal that came through the shop doors.

Where do you find the animals you work with? A lot are for customers who bring in a kill/catch/pet but often I find a lot of road kill everyday which piles up in the freezer. So long as the animal is fresh enough, or even a little beat up, you can always save at least the head, arms or hands, if not do an entire mount which is typically what happens.

What is your favorite creature to mount? Mounting a 13 1/2 foot alligator was pretty unreal. Having your hands and arms inside this thing that has been living in a swamp for 50 years that you now get to bring back to life forever is pretty sick. As far as favorites go, every animal is different to mount and I enjoy each one. Always looking forward to finding a new animal I've never stuffed before, always a new challenge I am happy to take on.

This is gross, but did you know they just found out that Armadillos are carriers of leprosy? Yeah we heard about this, but we also heard that nearly all people are immune to the disease so I could really give a fuck.

Can you tell me a little bit about the shootin' squirrel? After mounting hundreds of stand up alligators, sometimes holding beer cans, other times footballs (we do live in Florida), I thought why not make a less cheesy version with this small squirrel and one of the miniature .357 magnum guns we picked up one of the flea markets. Turns out, everyone's going fucking nuts for them.

Any threats yet from animal activists? I got a house full of animals and couldn't love them more.

Whats the future look like for The Taxidermist? Tomorrow I'll be in the shop mounting an otter and once that's done, make a few shootin' squirrels, maybe flesh a pig skin to turn into a rug for our sick house and clean up a few of the animals that have finished drying to then send to customers.

Check out thetaxidermist.tumblr.com

text by Oliver Maxwell Kupper photography by Cameron Smith and Jen Hanley

CATEGORIES: ART / CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM PROSE / DESIGN / FASHION

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