Katie Kay for LA Times

 
Katie Kay Mead was sitting behind the counter in her Los Feliz boutique, GatherLA, in late summer when two European tourists came in, asking for directions to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The tourists gazed curiously at a taxidermied fawn displayed among her edgy, bohemian wares, nearly all of which were made in L.A. by local designers. Unknowingly, the tourists had stumbled upon a more authentic slice of contemporary L.A. culture, perhaps, than the Walk of Fame.

"Just walk that way for a while, you can't miss it," Mead said, smiling. It was one of the last times she had to give out directions to wayward tourists — she was just about to take GatherLA wholly online in the hope that, like the Walk of Fame, it would go global.
Mead launched GatherLA in 2010 with a singular vision: to present a curated version of the best in cutting-edge Los Angeles fashion. She had a store in downtown, then one in Silver Lake and finally the Los Feliz boutique for about a year before shuttering it in September. The problem with having a bricks-and-mortar store was that she was selling what she considers the best of L.A. primarily to locals. "Also, discovery had moved online," she says.
Now, with a vamped-up GatherLA.com, she and her business partner, social media expert Jenka Gurfinkel, plan to showcase the work of about 50 primarily L.A.-based designers to fashionistas not just locally but beyond the city limits too. "Now, if somebody lives in Omaha they still have the ability to see a curated version of what is currently happening in L.A., neighborhood by neighborhood," she says.
It's the neighborhood-by-neighborhood aspect that makes GatherLA different. Visit the website and you'll see how the hyperlocal site allows shoppers to tap into the spirit and style of Silver Lake, Echo Park, Highland Park, Hollywood or Venice, depending on their taste. "Locally made is my big thing," Mead says. "Nothing mass-produced, nothing made in China."
Where did this obsession with hyperlocal come from? "Punk rock," she says, not skipping a beat. "I got my sense of social responsibility and my do-it-yourself ethos from being in the punk scene."
Mead is a former tour manager for bands, and she's married to Curtis Mead of the now-defunct band Split Lip, one of the founders of emocore. (He proposed to her in the mosh pit at a punk show.)
She is also creative director for two L.A.-based fashion lines, Made for Pearl with the Janis Joplin estate and Belle N. Matisse.
At GatherLA.com, each L.A. neighborhood's idiosyncrasies seem to be reflected in what its local designers have produced. Mead picks up a pretty necklace with a quartz pendant. "This is by Free Bohemia, our line out of Venice — it's ethereal and feminine and yeah, you could wear it to yoga class."
Then she picks up another piece of jewelry, a hollow crucifix pendant meant to be worn upside down, by Echo Park designer Rune. "This is edgier, darker and hedonistic. It says, 'I am going to a Zola Jesus show at the Echo and I will probably go to Taco Zone after.'"
A turban made from jersey knit — one of the biggest sellers — is by downtown designer Venus Turbans. "It's artsy, it's vintage-inspired, yet very contemporary because of the fabric," Mead says. There are even localizations within the localizations. TwelveTwentyEight, with its 24-karat gold-plated fossil necklaces and crystal pendants, evokes the healthy-yet-hung-over glamour of Silver Lake Farmers Market on a Saturday morning, while Shelley Caudhill's distressed black leather ponchos and tank tops blend three Silver Lake fashion subcultures — hippie, hipster and leather daddy.
Even with GatherLA online, Angelenos will be able to see the merchandise in person at monthly pop-up shops.
Mead plans to roll out the Gather concept in other cities, starting with GatherSanFrancisco, slated for the end of 2012.
"There are a lot of wonderful things happening on the Internet, but ... there's not much curated, locally made fashion being presented," she says. "Look for 'L.A.-made fashion' online, and you'll find American Apparel. That's it. And let's face it — there's so much more to L.A. than T-shirts."

Read the story here.

Skaist Taylor for cover of LA Times fashion section

With their matching paisley mini dresses, matching teal streaks in their hair and matching snakeskin booties, fashion designers Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor are a head-turning vision as they breeze into Soho House, two peas in a haute-hippie pod.

 Their silhouette is all fierce bohemia — Marrakech romance teamed with Studio 54 party vibes, with remnants of 1960s and '70s fashionistas Talitha Getty, Jerry Hall and Marianne Faithfull stitched into a casually glamorous daytime uniform.

"We call our look 'California Eccentric,'" says Skaist-Levy, ordering a pair of matching kale salads for Nash-Taylor and herself. It's a look that carries into their new women's clothing line, Skaist Taylor, debuting in stores in August and something of a departure from their past design endeavors.

Best friends for 23 years, the two have been business partners since 1996, when they founded Juicy Couture out of Nash-Taylor's one-bedroom apartment, giving birth to the velour tracksuit craze of the noughties. Between them, the women transformed the humble track pant from casual closet staple into premium must-have, "non-fashion at its most fashionable ... it may be the future of the way we dress," declared Vogue in 2003.

Tracksuits were priced around $200, the pants coming complete with cute "Viva La Juicy" or "Juicy Bling" mantras, sometimes written saucily across the buttocks.

The apogee of comfort-based utilitarianism, the Juicy tracksuit seems diametrically opposite to the free-spirited, eclectic gypsetter look they're championing today in their new line. Times have changed.



Juicy came into being in the era of Hollywood comfort-bling, when denim was embellished and embroidered, and T-shirt logos were gothic and silvery. New York winced as Los Angeles exploded with these cheerful homages to conspicuous consumption. By the mid-2000s, you couldn't open Us Weekly without seeing Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan or Nicole Richie in top-to-toe Juicy, clutching a Starbucks cup or a small dog, or both.

The runaway success of the tracksuits came as somewhat of a surprise to Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor, who were never quite as obsessed with their creation as the rest of America seemed to be.

"We loved the track pants, but we didn't really wear the head-to-toe tracksuits," Nash-Taylor confesses. "But those things had a life of their own. We were, like, 'OK ... I guess we better hold on and go for the ride.'" (It's true that if you go to Google Image and search for Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor during the Juicy era, you won't find many photos of them wearing the tracksuits — rather, the top hats, feathers, silk, dyed fox furs and lace foreshadow their current line.)



Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor loved the pretty mini caftans and other boho looks they also designed for Juicy, as did their celebrity fans. But it was the tracksuit that became iconic, dominating the brand's identity, proliferating in malls and on college campuses across the United States.



In 2003, with Juicy in more than 1,000 stores around the world and annual sales of nearly $50 million, Skaist-Levy and Nash-Taylor sold the company toLiz Claiborne Inc.(now Fifth & Pacific Cos.), netting more than $200 million, they say. The BFFs had officially hit the big time.

They hated it. Not the money, but being part of a huge company — Fifth & Pacific also owns Kate Spade, Jack Spade and Lucky Brand Jeans. And they hated losing creative control of the brand.

They stuck around for seven years before parting ways with Fifth & Pacific. "We stayed at that party waaaay too long," Skaist-Levy, 49, says. "We should have grabbed our coat and our shoes and gone home."

Nash-Taylor, 53, adds, "Juicy, even though it was the most amazing ride ever, it stopped being fun. And that was hard."

They left Juicy Couture in 2010 and would have jumped straight into a new project were it not for the non-compete clause of their contract, which barred them from starting any new businesses for 17 months. This enforced sabbatical turned out to be the best thing that could have happened, they say, a sort of"Eat Pray Love"moment during which they were able to reconnect with their inner designers and manifest the new line.

Nash-Taylor hung out in London with her husband, Nick Taylor of the band Duran Duran, soaking up the scene at flea markets and vintage shows.

"There's a lot of noise in the world of fashion," Nash-Taylor says. "You're bombarded with images and politics and marketing … but that time allowed me to think about the things I really wanted to wear and make. It took me back to basics, to all the things that I believed in and liked."Skaist-Levy, whose husband, Jeff Levy, is a rock musician and film producer, did the same, browsing around Etsy and EBay, perusing vintage wares and adding to the mental vision board that would provide the foundation for Skaist Taylor. "It was a great experience being on that non-compete," she says. It provided "17 months to go back and think, 'What do I want to make now?' Without the confines of what it had to be. It was perfect."

One day, while the two women were apart, they each happened to watch a film featuring Italian actress and rock 'n' roll muse Anita Pallenberg. Re-inspired by Pallenberg's style, Skaist-Levy called her best friend and said, "I'm really feeling Anita ...," with Nash-Taylor finishing her sentence: "Pallenberg? Me too!" They took the coincidence as a sign that Pallenberg and her free-spirited ilk should be their totems, reminders of what it was they always loved about fashion in the first place.

And that meant "individual, free-spirited and eclectic," Nash-Taylor says. "As far as the company, small and fun is what we wanted this time around, and non-corporate for as long as we can."

Skaist Taylor presented its first collection in February, in a cold parking lot beneath Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week. Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour and other fashion luminaries gathered in the underground space, where dreamy shots of California redwoods were projected on the walls. Models channeled Jane Birkin and Barbarella as they glided not on a catwalk but through the crowd, dressed in oversize fur coats, metallic mini dresses, embroidered blouses with full poet sleeves, sheer backless black dresses that nodded to Emanuel Ungaro and skintight leather pants. "It's so fresh, so L.A.," were the murmurs.

There was a small nod to the designers' past in the shape of a Japanese velour tracksuit, because "casual luxury doesn't just go away," Skaist-Levy says. But other than that, the look was defiantly boho, with only a glimmer of bling.

Hamish Bowles, international editor at large for Vogue, noted the difference, saying via email on Thursday: "The Juicy girl is the Skaist Taylor woman at her most laid back and off-duty, but I think that what Pam and Gela are doing with their new label is very different — it's more sophisticated, more fashion forward and more niche."

Among the models was Theodora Richards — daughter of Rolling Stones guitar legend Keith Richards and model Patti Hansen — a "crazy little angel" who served as muse for the collection. "When we thought about the collection, we were, like, 'Who really would be the perfect girl in spirit and vibe?'" Skaist-Levy says, "and it was Theo. She was inspiring, amazing and we loved her. When she saw the python-skin boots she was, like, 'I'm in.'"

So were the buyers — Neiman Marcus, Net-A-Porter, Maxfield, Bergdorf Goodman and Nordstrom all scooped up the collection for this fall, as did Harvey Nichols and Harrods in London, among other retailers.

"It's a triumph," says Ken Downing, fashion director of Neiman Marcus. "Expressing your personal spirit is where fashion is going, and they have their finger on the pulse of that." The collection was less designed for design's sake, he says, and more like "an incredible wardrobe" that someone might have collected over time.

"It didn't have one single note, it sang in many different tones," Downing says. "And there was an edge to it; really feminine but at times it took on masculine qualities, coming together in a harmonious way. Great tension is always the sign of a great collection." Retailers are expected to price the collection between $600 and $1,000 for dresses, $295 to $500 for knitwear, $400 to $500 for trousers and $1,000 to $2,000 for outerwear.

Will the woman who wore Juicy Couture in 2002 want to wear Skaist Taylor in 2012? Downing hopes so. "That woman, like all of us, is in a different place now," he says. "It's a new fashion moment."

Although the looks have a definite California feel, Bowles says, "Pam and Gela are both global citizens, and they mix couture with vintage and cutting-edge contemporary in an exciting way in their own wardrobes and that's reflected in their runway. I think it's a seductive look for customers around the world."

One thing is for sure: Skaist Taylor represents a new kind of Californian eccentricity for its creators. "We're keeping things authentic and we're keeping things us," Skaist-Levy says. "All the way."

Article originally published July 22, 2012 in the LA Times. Read it here.

Audrey Kitching for LA Times

With her trademark cotton-candy pink hair and Harajuku-meets-skater-girl style, 27-year-old model, blogger and fashion designer Audrey Kitching has been turning heads since the mid-2000s, when she emerged as one of the rising crop of Hollywood Internet stars taking the underground by storm. They included androgynous (and even pinker-haired) singer Jeffree Star, hipster photographer Mark "the Cobra Snake" Hunter and club kid and model Cory Kennedy, all of whom were harnessing the Web to build their own DIY brands, growing their fame, page view by page view, via MySpace, Buzznet blogs and emerging social media.

Fast-forward to 2012, and it is Kitching — perhaps the least aggressive of the bunch — who looks poised to cross over into mainstream success. "Which is strange because I used to feel like the least mainstream of us," says Kitching, who has made worst-dressed lists in Cosmopolitan and Star magazines, among others. "Mainly because the press always treated me like I had five heads and was an alien."
But in the last three years, attitudes have changed, and she's viewed less as a wacky-haired club kid and more as a fashion-
forward meme queen. In the last 18 months, JCPenney has shot an online commercial starring Kitching, Kohl's hired her to promote its Vera Wang Princess Collection and PETA2 (the young adult arm of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) made Kitching, who is vegan, the face of a cruelty-free beauty campaign.
"I'm probably the smallest print model that has ever existed," says the 5-foot-4 Kitching. Yet she is booking international ad campaigns (for British shoe company Irregular Choice and Milan-based Kerol D. shoes), as well as editorials for magazines in Japan, Britain and Scandinavia. Her two clothing lines, Audrey Kitching Los Angeles and Coco de Coeur, have a backlog of orders she can barely keep up with. And there are TV offers on the table, from MTV, among others.
Kitching attributes her growing profile not just to hard work but also to a zeitgeist shift, one in which pop stars, led by a blue-haired Katy Perry, a pink-haired Nicki Minaj and a futuristic Lady Gaga, have made it OK to look weird again. This summer, even traditional blond beauties like Lauren Conrad, Dakota Fanning and Rachel McAdams experimented with pink ombre-style tips or peach pastel highlights. "Everyone was like, 'Aren't you mad that celebrities and models have pink hair now?'" says Kitching, who has been pink or variations thereof for seven years. "And I'm like, 'No, it has made my life so much easier!' I am no longer the weirdo in the room, because the entire industry has suddenly become more open to creativity."
Faran Krentcil, digital director of Nylon for five years and continuing contributor to the magazine, says she thinks Kitching's look is "fantastic, but her timing is even more impeccable. She started putting herself out there when the exact group of people who were inclined to think she was cool for being different were getting on the Internet. It was the perfect storm." Indeed, seven years ago, had you shown Krentcil photos of Minaj and Lady Gaga and told her that these were among the most famous people in the world, she said, "I would have thought you were kidding. But what's interesting about this generation that's coming up is that their boundaries of acceptance are a lot wider. A lot of schools have said you can't make fun of people just because they're different, and now you are seeing it in the mainstream, with shows like 'Glee,' where the whole message is that acceptance is cooler than anything else. Seems like today, it's all about being different and being yourself."
So it seems that Kitching (and her hair) are in just the right place at just the right time, so much so that she's having trouble keeping up with her fans' demands for all things Audrey. For instance, Coco de Coeur and Audrey Kitching Los Angeles, the clothing lines she founded on a whim with her roommate in 2010, are growing almost too fast for her to keep up. Visit the online stores for both lines and almost every item is listed as sold out.
Coco de Coeur is a punky, meme-heavy line of T-shirts decorated with cats in KISS eye makeup, kittens with batwings, kittens in general (her cat Waffle is a major design inspiration) and world-weary proclamations like "Wasted youth." Rocker Hayley Williams, singer for Paramore, is a big fan of the line — she wore a "Punk rock ruined me" Coco de Coeur tee to the Grammys.
Kitching's second line, Audrey Kitching Los Angeles (formerly Tokyolux), is a reflection of Kitching's ultra-girly side, merging the omnipresent kittens with cutesy rainbows, unicorns and My Little Pony and Sailor Moon motifs. "Growing up, I collected Barbies, ceramic unicorns and cat figurines, but I was also a skateboarder and a tomboy," Kitching says. "All my friends in high school were punks, and we would sleep at the skate park. I guess you could say I have a split personality." Her other design inspirations are 1970s all-girl rock band the Runaways (her friend Scout Taylor-Compton played Lita Ford in 2010's "The Runaways" biopic) and the Olsen twins. "If you see an Olsen twin out, it's like spotting a unicorn," she says.
Though hard to find online at present, the clothes are carried at Timeless in Los Angeles (7513 Melrose Ave.) and Beauty Is a Pain in Hollywood (1443 N. Highland Ave.).
When she launched the lines in 2010, Kitching's fans on Buzznet (3 million page views monthly), Facebook (104,000), Instagram (77,000) and Twitter (75,000) started posting photos of the clothes. The fashion kids on Tumblr started posting too, which caught the attention of trend analysts (who seem to spend all day watching what fashion kids on Tumblr are doing). The trend analysts told their fashion retail clients, and suddenly Kitching was inundated with store orders, around 500 in her first month, which she and her roommate had to produce and ship, all from their Hollywood apartment. "I never imagined that success could be a problem, but what with the events and the modeling and the blogging and now the fashion lines, it's been like overwhelming," says Kitching, who splits her time between New York and L.A. "Now I have a team that I work with, and we're working on scaling back, focusing and growing in a paced way."
For the next few months at least, Kitching will be focusing on building her fashion business in Japan. She shoots about four editorials a month for Japanese fashion magazines, and her designs are represented by one of Tokyo's top showrooms, which also represents leading L.A. streetwear line Joyrich. It's safe to say that based on chutzpah and pink hair alone, and without singing a note, Kitching is close to achieving the dream of every pop star — she's big in Japan. "Which is funny," she says, "because I've never even been there. Flying is one of the scariest things in the entire world to me, and 11 hours is a long flight, plus I'd miss Waffle. I'm trying to work up the courage."

Read the article here.

Christina Ricci for BULLETT magazine cover

Christina Ricci glides almost imperceptibly into the restaurant, making her subdued entrance exactly on time, almost to the second. “I’m never late, I don’t like to be late,” she says, sliding her 5’1” frame onto the leather banquette, resting those lantern-like green eyes on mine and smiling warmly. Time is obviously something Ricci respects—has she ever wondered how much time she really has, I wonder? Has she considered her mortality, in terms of years, or even days, left on this earth? “Never. I don’t like numbers,” she says, her voice lowering. “And you really shouldn’t worry about things like that too much—that’s a bad habit.”

This fall, Ricci is gearing up for a new phase of her acting career, with her first major television acting role in Pan Am. About the glamorous Pan Am air hostesses of the 1960s, it’s been billed as a kind of Mad Men in the sky, with some old-fashioned misogyny and espionage thrown in for good measure. When I ask Ricci if she knows that Pan Am had a waiting list for future flights to the moon, giving out “First Moon Flights Club” membership cards, she nods emphatically. “My mom got one in the ’60s. She still carries it in her purse!”


She’s moving to New York in a few weeks, because that’s where the show is being filmed. She and her Pan Am costar, Aussie actress Margot Robbie, have found an apartment in Brooklyn, which they will share for several months. “I haven’t had an apartment in New York in a very long time,” says Ricci, her shoulder-length, mousy hair perfectly flat- ironed. “It’ll be interesting. I’ll really miss my boyfriend and our home and our dogs.” She’s not worried about having a roommate, as she and Margot are very compatible. “I’m the kind of person who, if we have to be ready to get in the car at 6.30am, I set the alarm for 3:00am. And Margot will laugh and say, ‘Okay, Frank.’”


Frank?
“Yes, she calls me Frank. Long story. Anyway, she’s much more laid-back and relaxed than I am. I’m so high-strung, but she likes it because with me, it’s impossible to be late for anything. And Margot tells me to just look at her each time I feel anxious, which always calms me down. So we’re really a good match.”
If Ricci’s a nervous bird, she certainly does a good job of keeping it under control. There’s nothing fidgety about her demeanor in the slightest. In fact, she’s one of those rare beings who seems entirely unafraid to maintain steady eye contact. At first it’s unsettling, until you realize it’s because she’s actually paying attention to what you’re saying. Ricci agrees that she’s actually far more relaxed these days than she was in her teens and early twenties. “Back then, each day was like, ‘Oh, what fresh hell is this?’ And then you grow up.” Of course, there’s a part of her that’s nostalgic about her teenage angst. “The glitter and the combat boots and the tearing out sheets from Dante’s Inferno and pinning them on my wall? How amazing is that? I used to have this energy and anxiety, this need to constantly be making things happen or fighting for something. Now, even though I still have moments of being totally irrational and high-strung, I mainly just feel like I want to make the best of things and have a g


Ricci’s skin is dewy and makeup-free, and she is wearing ballet flats and a demure blue dress. Her attire accentuates her trademark china doll aesthetic which, combined with a dry-as-bone wit, made Ricci a bona fide child star with her iconic performance as solemn little Wednesday Addams in 1991’s The Addams Family. She followed with a string of ultra-indie, Lolita-ish roles. Who can forget her tap dancing in that baby blue slip dress in Vincent Gallo’s cult classic, Buffalo ‘66? Or her as a 16-year-old pregnant femme fatale in 1998’s The Opposite of Sex? As Johnny Depp’s winsome love interest in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow? As a Barbra Streisand-obsessed artist in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? John Waters, king of transgressive cinema, cast her as Edward Furlong’s laundromat-manager girlfriend in Pecker, a film about a shitty photographer who becomes a darling of the New York art scene. When asked what the word “indie” means to her today, Ricci pauses for a long time. Then, with genuine curiosity, “Are there still independent films? I’m not really so sure.”


In the early 2000s, around the time she swapped the New York downtown club scene for her life in L.A., she ventured into more adult cinema territory. “I’m usually drawn to characters based on people who are labeled in our society in negative terms,” she says, nibbling on her whitefish. “I like knowing why that type of person might be the way they are.” She won acclaim for her portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos’ lesbian lover in 2003’s Monster; also for her role as the chronically depressed Elizabeth Wurtzel in 2001’s Prozac Nation (which was never actually released in the U.S.), and for 2006’s Black Snake Moan. Here, audiences saw Ricci at her most provocative, playing a young, pathologically-promiscuous southern woman who is chained up (and saved from herself) by an older, religious bluesman played by Samuel L. Jackson. A dark, serious film hopelessly mis-marketed as a sex romp (the poster read “Everything is hotter down south”—Ricci was furious), Black Snake Moan did poorly at the box office only to later achieve a word-of-mouth following, thanks to Ricci’s raw and courageous performance. “I’m so proud of that film,” says Ricci. As a spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the subject matter was close to Ricci’s heart. “That character was manifesting her own victimization as a way of trying to have some control over what happened to her as a child,” she says. “That powerlessness left her terrified to be alone, so she perpetuated her own abuse by being the ‘slutty girl.’ That’s what I mean about being drawn to certain roles—maybe people who watch that film will think twice about abusing, discarding, and disrespecting the girl they call the ‘town slut.’”


After more than 20 years in Hollywood, there’s no sense that her love for the craft is waning. Not even slightly. “Oh my god, I love working,” she says. “I love being on set. I love crews and the whole process.” She says film crews make fun of her because she is so excited to be at work. “I’m that weirdo who starts dancing in the makeup trailer at 6:00am, and everyone’s looking at me going, ‘Oh, my god.’” Her Black Snake Moan costar Justin Timberlake decided that if Ricci was going to dance in the makeup trailer, he might as well teach her some moves. “You know, Justin told me it’s actually impossible to pop and lock at the same time. I was like, ‘Oh.’ He tried to teach me. Then I realized that, no, I don’t think I am a dancer after all.”


Ricci’s a dichotomous creature—hyper-sensitive yet utterly poised; obsessively punctual but unwilling to measure time; excited to be an actress, but really into cutting. Not the sad, dysfunctional cutting, but collage—she’s obsessed. “Okay, there are serious artists, the kind who are going to revolutionize the art scene,” she says. “And then there are people like me, who are just really, really excited about sticking fun shit together.” One of the reasons she’s excited to move to Brooklyn is because of the abundance of art supply stores there. “It’s like craft heaven,” she sighs.


She pulls out a brown bag and inside is a birthday card, a collage piece that she made herself. It is kitschier than kitsch and charming, in an awkwardly rendered and very honest pre-school kind of way. Ricci has decorated it with glitter and a huge, blue paper heart. “I love blue hearts,” she says. “I don’t go for red hearts at all.” The card is for some friends of hers. They had asked Ricci, along with all of their friends, to send birthday wishes on personal stationery. She laughs, nodding with pride at the giant “XOXO” she had Sharpied at the bottom of the card. “I’m 31, but there’s no way I feel grown up enough for personalized stationery. I’m not sure I ever will.”

Read the whole interview here.

Juno Temple for Dazed & Confused cover

Juno Temple lights up the first of several cigarettes, taking in the sheer lunacy of Venice Beach at sunset—the middle-aged skateboarders, the ganja stink, the spaced out hula hoopers, the tatted Latino gangbangers, the acid casualties, the white wizards with decades-old dredds, and some exceptionally friendly crack hos. We’ve unwittingly picked the most batshit crazy spot on the boardwalk to have a beer, and Temple, 22, is soaking it all up. “Los Angeles is such a minestrone soup of people,” she says, her eyes, the color of green tea. She notices a yacht gliding along the ocean. “You know, the best thing about it here is the never-ending horizon. Makes you realize how small you are in the bigger picture.” 

She’s forthright, jolly, and charmingly foul-mouthed—so very British. But she’s most passionate when she talks about America, where she moved from London three years ago, aged 19. She’s in love with it all, from the crumbling antebellum houses of New Orleans (“I want to retire there”) to the starry desert nights in Joshua Tree (“you’re in your underwear dancing and singing under the stars”) and even the tragically rotten Salton Sea in California. “It’s so romantic,” she says of the toxic red lake where she recently filmed. “Just destruction and derelict spaces built from trash. But at the same time, its one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen in your life. I would happily take a lover to the Salton Sea for a weekend and just be like, ‘look at these old fish bones!’”

(A sun-beaten woman with dry black lips asks Juno for a cigarette.) 

 Like so many English actresses before her, Temple, daughter of famed punk film director Julien Temple, crossed the pond in order to try her luck in Hollywood. Unlike so many English actresses before her, she seems to be making a real impression. She arrived in LA an established indie actress with a string of very British, schoolgirl-type supporting roles under her belt. Like Lola Quincey in “Atonement”, the flame-haired World War Two-era 15 year old who refuses to name the man who raped her; like Celia, the blonde trustafarian in the campy “St Trinian’s” film series; and like Di Radfield, the well-bred boarding school pupil with an obsessive crush on her beautiful teacher in the moody “Cracks”.  

(“Oh no I don’t have any change, sorry!”)

As the story goes, Temple’s producer mum Amanda Pirie and director dad Julien Temple, (who made iconic Sex Pistols films “The Filth and the Fury” and “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle”) were apprehensive when Juno announced she wanted to be on film. “When I first told them I wanted to act they were like, ‘fuck that!’” recalls Temple, named after a mount in the Grand Canyon. “’You’re going to be miserable, you’re never going to work, it’s going to suck’.” Her mum sent her to the audition for the Judi Dench/Cate Blanchett film “Notes on a Scandal” so she could see just how tough the casting process was. Despite having no major experience, aside from a few bit parts in her dad’s productions, Juno landed the part, playing Blanchett’s angsty daughter, Polly Hart. After that, mum and dad were on board with her career decision. “They said ‘fucking go for it. If it gets tough, call us and cry.’” 

And cry, she has. Petite as she is (only 5’2”) she’s got a big, sensitive, romantic heart. No doubt, that’s what makes her well-suited to a life in acting. It also means she requires a fair amount of Kleenex. “I’m an emotional headcase,” she says, matter of factly. “That’s why it’s really important for me to trust my director. Because at some point, I will cry.” She likes to unwind by writing poetry, and by reading—right now she’s digging into Nabokov’s “Lolita” for the first time. She also likes poetry, e.e. cummings, Ginsberg, Keats. And she really loves Charles Bukowski, the subversive Hollywood author, alcoholic mail-man and literary genius. She has jotted down some Bukowski quotes in her diary. “’The sadness becomes so great, I hear it in my clock,’” she recites. “Isn’t that so genius? So simple, but so genius.” She looks in her journal for more pearls of wisdom.  “’Live as if you’ll die tomorrow, dream as if you’ll live forever’. James Dean.” And then she finds her favorite. “No matter how beautiful she is, somebody somewhere is sick of her shit.” She erupts into raucous laughter. “That’s by a friend of mine.” 

Alongside the epithets in her diary are pen sketches, largely of feminine creatures (one looks like Medusa) in their underwear. She loves lingerie, and had hoped to study fashion design before deciding upon acting as a career. “Underwear is my favourite,” she purrs. “Like, it’s my problem.” Sometimes Temple’s mum will have to talk her out of spending all her money on panties and silk slips and vintage brassieres and ostrich feather nightgowns, reminding her that her rent is due. “Look,” says Temple, pulling a pair of black lace panties from her bag. “I am an Agent Provocateur junkie. And here’s the matching bra. See-through. Naughty!” She loves underwear because the female body is, to her, “so magical. I dress like a fucking homeless person, but underneath, I’m always a woman. And no-one needs to know. It’s my business.”

(A man walks by bearing a cardboard coffin on his shoulder.)

When we sit down for our beer on Venice Beach, she’s excited for a few reasons. First, she’s officially become a corporation—“Juno Violet Temple, Inc.” meaning that, in American accounting terms at least, she’s arrived. “Look, I’m incorporated!” she beams, showing me her business stamp, which she tested out on a page of her diary. She’s also excited because she’s in the middle of filming the latest installment of the Batman saga, “The Dark Knight Rises”. It’s her first big studio production, and could mark the transition of “Juno Temple, indie drama girl” to “Juno Temple, bona fide starlet”. She’s starring alongside heavyweights like Gary Oldman and Christian Bale in the multi-million dollar production, which has opened her eyes to a whole new process of filmmaking. “It’s like juicing a lemon and juicing an orange,” she says of the difference between acting in an indie film and a studio blockbuster. “And you know what, I fucking enjoy both flavors.”

She’s not allowed to talk about the movie, but it’s rumoured she’s playing Holly Robinson, Catwoman’s lesbian prostitute sidekick, and one of the few openly gay comic book characters. It’s easy to imagine why Temple was picked for the role—she has a long list of lesbian, bisexual, bi-curious or just hopelessly sexual characters on her resume. Take the upcoming “Jack and Diane”, a love story between two girls set in Time Square, New York. In it, Temple stars opposite Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, the mesmerizingly beautiful Riley Keogh. “I had a lot of fun making out with her,” says Temple.  She’s not gay (she’s in a relationship with an American actor who shall not be named), but she has “no problems with playing a lesbian, or being part of a movie that tackles homosexuality. It’s not that I am specifically going out of my way to choose those roles. But if one comes along and I feel good about it? Fuck yeah! I’m going to do it, and I’m going to really take it seriously too.”

 (An unwashed senior citizen wails, operatically.) 

And then there’s the charming “Dirty Girl”, a sparkly, gay version of “Thelma and Louise” in which, Temple plays a Rizzo-esque slutty teenager who takes a road trip in a stolen car with an overweight closeted gay boy, helping him lose his virginity to a super hot male hitchhiker along the way. The heartwarming coming-of-age tale shows us Temple at her sassiest and most outrageous (“what are your thoughts on the pull-out method?” her character asks a sex-education teacher). That character, a white-trash 1980s man-eater from Oklahoma, is a far cry the real Temple, the Bedales-educated boarding school Boho with the punk rock parents. But that’s why she enjoyed making “Dirty Girl”—it allowed her to explore an entirely different world to the one she grew up in. Which is kind of what she’s been doing for the last three years, anyhow.

(A ruddy-cheeked man yells over. “You girls British? I knew you were British! Your women’s team just won the football!”) 

No matter how far she is from her homeland, though, Juno Temple isn’t forgetting where she came from. A few days after our interview, she was due to meet the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their first official visit to Los Angeles, and Temple’s one of a handful of UK actors handpicked by BAFTA for the honour. She lights up another cigarette, pondering the weight of it all. For someone so self-assured, who has traveled thousands of miles and established herself in an unknown land, and who has absolutely no qualms about showing you her knickers, she’s surprisingly anxious about meeting the Royals. “I’ve got to keep it under control,” she says, furrowing her brow. “I mean, I have a mouth like a fucking drainpipe, don’t I?” 

Selena Gomez for the cover of Cosmopolitan

Selena Gomez is just 19 years old and already, the Disney child star is scaling some dizzying Hollywood heights, as a film actress, as a top-charting pop singer with her band Selena Gomez & the Scene, and of course, as the girl who won teen idol Justin Bieber’s heart. And she’s not taking any of it for granted—her rags to riches story (she was born to teen parents in small town Texas) mean this is a starlet who counts her blessings, each and every day. “The best piece of advice I ever got was from my mom,” she says. “Always remember where I started.” 

Unlike some other young actresses who become consumed by their own celebrity, Selena makes a habit of keeping her feet firmly planted on the ground. “It’s a very vain industry that I am in, and I want to make sure I don’t get caught up in that,” she says. “So far, knock on wood, I’ve done a good job of that.” Her straightforward confidence and likeability remind top Hollywood producer Denise Di Novi of a young Sandra Bullock. “She has a sophistication and emotional intelligence that is way way beyond her years,” says Di Novi, who worked with Selena on 2010’s Ramona and Beezus. “You just instantly root for her, and love her. And she works incredibly hard—she reminds me of a racehorse in that way. She knows what she wants to do, and she’s happiest when she is completely immersed in her work.”

Raised in the small town of Grand Prairie, just outside of Dallas, Selena’s mom Mandy was just 16 when she had her, and her dad Ricardo was 17. “I’d have a three-year-old child by now if I’d had a baby at the same age as my mom—that is terrifying for me!” she says. Money was always tight, and Selena remembers when her mom’s car would run out of gas on the school run and they’d have to dig around for quarters to buy more fuel. “Oh my God, that happened like 12 times,” she recalls. 

Her mom took her to museums and to the theatre, which is where Selena got the acting bug. “I don’t think I would have gotten out of the mindset of Grand Prairie if it hadn’t been for my mom,” she says. Obsessed with Britney Spears and Hilary Duff, little Selena became focused on her career when most girls her age were still playing with Barbie dolls. She got her start aged 7 with a role in Barney & Friends, broke through in 2007 with Wizards of Waverly Place, and continues her rise to the top with lead roles in feature films including 2010’s Monte Carlo and Ramona and Beezus. 

Today, Selena lives in a sprawling ranch-style estate in Los Angeles, where we find her hanging out with a team of stylists picking out clothes for MTV’s EMAs, a music awards show she is hosting in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her slim, toned frame is clad in a simple purple chiffon shift dress, her hair is pulled back in a high pony tail and she’s wearing hot pink nail polish on her toes. On her wrist is a silver cuff encrusted with amethysts and jade, which she downplays in her warm, jokey style. “This? It’s just a beat-up metal thing I like to wear.” She sits with her back straight in an office chair, neatly-piled scripts arranged on the desk. It’s her mom Mandy, 35, who keeps things organized she confesses (“you should see my closet, it’s a mess”), although Mandy might be needing some help with the tidying soon—Selena Tweeted on November 25 that her mom is pregnant with her new baby brother or sister. 

Warm and friendly as she is, Selena admits she’s actually pretty cautious when it comes to getting close to people. “I’m very guarded,” she says. “It’s hard for me to just trust, and because of that, I don’t have that many friends.” But the friends she does have, she loves with all her heart. She’s still very close with her childhood pal actress Demi Lovato for instance, whom she met when they both attended an open call for the Barney & Friends show. Demi was standing in front of Selena in line, and out of 1,400 kids, both girls were offered parts, launching their acting careers, and their friendship. They moved to Los Angeles together, living in the same house with their families as they tried to break into Hollywood.  “We didn’t have that much money coming out here at first, so we were living together to save expenses,” says Selena. “So basically there were seven of us girls living in one loft, including sisters and moms and everything. It was really interesting.” Their friendship has had its ups and downs (Lovato had a recent stint in rehab) and there was a point where “she and I were going our different ways because we were figuring out who we were, but now I would say we’re better than we’ve ever been.”

An only child, Selena found an older-sister figure in Leighton Meester, her co-star in this year’s Monte Carlo. Although as Meester points out, the eight year age difference between them wasn’t as noticeable as you might think. “I’m 25 and hanging out with a 17 year old, and it didn’t feel like that at all,” says Meester. “She’s really wise beyond her years. But she has this innocence to her that I hope will never go away, because she sees the beauty in everything. She’s quite a romantic, poetic soul.”

Growing up onscreen has had its pros (she’s worth an estimated $4million) and cons (she had her first kiss in front of four cameras—“I was shaking”). And as Selena blossoms from girl into woman, she’s still growing up on camera, venturing into edgier acting territory. She’s slated to star alongside James Franco and Vanessa Hudgens in “Spring Breakers”, a film by controversial director Harmony Korine, who penned the gritty, sexually explicit 1995 drama “Kids”. “I am choosing roles and movies and music that might be a little different, and might kind of freak people out,” says Selena. “But it’s just me evolving and growing and taking baby steps.”

 She’s just starting to get comfortable with becoming a sex symbol. “I’m not Mila Kunis,” she protests. “I’m not one of those ‘hot’ girls.” She recalls a photo shoot aged 15 where “they kept telling me to smile more’. And I was like, why won’t they let me be serious?” The photographer told her it was because she looked too sensual when she wasn’t smiling. “And he didn’t want to make me sensual, because I was a teenager.” At the time, Selena didn’t even know what “sensual” meant—now, she’s just about starting to figure it out. “I’m gradually working my way toward it—not toward being a sex symbol or anything, but becoming more confident in just being a woman.”

Thanks to her on-screen charm, and her off-screen romances, she’s become one of the most photographed young women in Hollywood—but unlike so many young actresses, she wont be getting drunk and falling out of limousines any time soon; she just doesn’t have it in her. “I don’t know if at some point I will have the urge to go out and explore that partying side of adulthood,” says Selena. “But like my old acting coach in Texas said, ‘I don’t think Selena’s going to have that phase’. And I don’t know if I am either.” In fact, she’s a homebody, who likes to hang out with her five dogs, watch movies, eat pizza and IM with her boyfriend, the Beebs. 

Selena and Justin started dating New Years Eve 2011, and she officially confirmed the relationship in March 2011, after they walked the red carpet together at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in Los Angeles. “Most of our dates have been online,” she says, and she’s only half joking—between them, Selena and Justin have among the busiest schedules in Tinseltown between them. It’s a miracle they’re ever in the same place at the same time. 

Bieber isn’t her first high profile squeeze—her exes include Taylor Lautner (whom she dated in Vancouver while she was filming Ramona and Beezus and he was filming New Moon) and Nick Jonas, her on-again, off-again 2010 love. “I was in a relationship before where I had to completely hide everything, and it wasn’t my choice,” says Selena. “I had to go through different exits and take separate cars and do the craziest things, and it just really wasn’t worth it. It was like a year of my life completely wasted.” 

Things are shaping up very differently for Justin and Selena, or ‘Jelena’, who are rapidly becoming Hollywood’s favorite teen couple. While they’re not talking marriage just yet (“sometimes you just want to enjoy life and be 19, you’re not even thinking about the future”) they are having a blast traveling the world together and posing for photographs on the red carpet. The alternative—hiding their relationship from the world—just didn’t appeal, explains Selena, an old-school romantic who says love is the “most powerful thing” in her life. “I’m just like every single 19-year-old girl,” she says. “If you’re in love, you’re in love to the fullest, and you just want to go to the movies, hang out and be as normal as possible. I’m very fortunate that I’ve found someone who also has that same philosophy.” 

NB: This is the unedited draft I sent to Cosmo...to read the final published version you have to buy a copy of the magazine, as the interview is not available online.

Odd Future for the LA Weekly

The 10 teenage members of L.A. hip-hop skater family Odd Future are natural magicians, mini wizards in Nike dunks and Supreme hoodies who, at some point during the short, cold summer of 2010, cast a powerful spell on chin-rubbing Pitchforkers, hip-hop superheroes, Fairfax sneakerheads and U.K.-style cognoscenti alike, hypnotizing them until they were all chanting the same thing: "The future's odd."


Led by a 19-year-old visionary who goes by the name Tyler, the Creator, Odd Future (or OFWGKTA, an acronym for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All) puts out tracks that un-self-consciously blend anarcho rap with retro post-hipster humor. Or sensitive, S.E. Hinton–style nihilism with sheer evil. Or a love of bacon with a hatred of talk-show host Steve Harvey. The Odd Future crew, all between 16 and 19 years old, is already way too cool for art school.


Their visual language reflects influences they don't even know they have yet — Aleister Crowley, '80s porn, Amityville, A Clockwork Orange and Dogtown. Their lyrical matter is XXX-rated, containing references a little too weird (rape? scat? Jermaine DuPri?) and a little too learned for their young-adult minds. They are tough enough to be on The Wu-Tang's radar (GZA is a fan), and their beats, dense enough to crush bone matter, are engineered by a girl — Syd, Odd Future's only female, who is arrestingly beautiful in a no-makeup-and-hoodie kind of way.


"Larry Clark just jizzed his pants," you're thinking, and you're right: Last month Clark filmed Odd Future as they re-created a scene from his skater movie Wassup Rockers for a short film that was screened during Marc Jacobs' New York Fashion Week show.


In addition to Tyler, the Creator, Odd Future is: Jasper Dolphin, Domo Genesis, Matt Martians of the Super 3, Left Brain, Mike G, Hodgy Beats, Taco, Syd and Earl Sweatshirt.


Sweatshirt's video, called "Earl," is how I stumbled upon Odd Future. Directed by A.G. Rojas, it features Earl sitting under a hair-salon dryer rapping about ass sex, catfish and decomposing bodies while his Odd Future posse members drink a smoothie made of cough syrup, weed, pills and powders, with gory, deeply disconcerting consequences. "Let's all fucking kill ourselves," someone commented on YouTube, which pretty much summed up how the video made me feel, too.


It was amazing.


I forwarded the link and Odd Future's blog to a few music editors to see what they thought. L.A. Weekly IM'd right back: "Get on it!" The U.K.'s Dazed & Confused wrote back, "Our music issue is full," followed a few hours later by: "We made space in our music issue." I sent the link to Jess Holzworth, the artist and music-video director: "You seen this?" Yes, she said. Her friend Heathcliff Berru had shown it to her. Berru had, like me, been trying to track down the kids. (There is no contact information on the Odd Future blog or website.) He asked GZA of The Wu-Tang Clan to tweet at Odd Future, and success: They tweeted back. Berru helped me set up a meeting with Odd Future at their studio in the Washington-Crenshaw district, not far from the street-wear boutiques on Fairfax they like to frequent.


A few nights later, I show up at the studio. It's in a guesthouse at the back of sister and brother Syd and Taco's house, a large, well-kept property on a quiet, tree-lined street. Syd and Taco's parents are well-off and supportive of their kids' art. As such, they have created the perfect environment for Odd Future to take seed and germinate. The kids, who call themselves a family, enjoy total privacy as they congregate at the studio, a home away from home for several of them.


"Hi, I'm Steve," says Tyler, Odd Future's lynchpin. He likes to lie about his name. He also likes to fall down, just for fun. Last week he went out of state for the first time, visiting New York City. He flung himself dramatically down onto the Manhattan sidewalk, and noted that no one seemed to pay much attention. "I prefer L.A.," says Tyler, who wears a pin on his cap that says, "Fuck Them."


Tyler says he really loves to masturbate, collects books and was, until very recently, studying film at a community college in West L.A. He dropped out, aware that Odd Future was turning into something that might require all of his time and attention.


A gigantic recycling box full of empty cans of Arizona Green Tea sits by the wall, alongside several skateboards. In the studio Syd mans the console and plays their latest track, "Sandwitches," and their eyes roll as they mouth the words and bang their heads, in some kind of trance. "I wouldn't work with anyone else," Tyler declares.


The kids' loyalty toward one another is palpable, and the love is thick in the air. Everyone high-fives and fist-bumps every few minutes. They're psyched to be alive. They try really hard to convince me that the word "dude" has a lost meaning: "ingrown ass hair." Anything they like, whether it's a person, a beat or a fact, earns the adjective "swag" — as in, "That's so swag!"As recently as July, Odd Future wasn't sure what the future held. They had sent their music out to some hip-hop blogs, but it wasn't getting much love. Their sound was too weird, too slow, too fucked up. Odd Future thought they probably would have to go back to school after summer. Then a writer for U.K. music magazine The Wire stumbled across them. He wrote a feature for the magazine's September issue and pimped Odd Future to everyone he knew.


Fader blogged about them at the end of August: "If the rappers in Odd Future were indicative of California's social climate, the West Coast would be currently experiencing a miniature apocalypse, complete with grocery store looting and armed survivalist militias, plus tons of drugs and skateboarding." Other bloggers started getting onboard, and buzz started to spread. Then MTV name-checked Odd Future in their list of 10 most anticipated albums. Even Snoop didn't make that cut.




It's surreal, what's happening, Tyler admits. Recently he was hanging out on Fairfax and people started crowding him. Tyler wasn't into it. Hodgy Beats, his brooding, doe-eyed co-conspirator, helped Tyler regain his perspective. Now Tyler's ready for whatever lies around the corner.


"Hey, where's Earl?" I ask, recalling the sweet kid who rapped about necrophilia in the video I had seen. The room silenced.


"Earl's on vacation," Tyler says.


Vacation? How long for?


"A while."


I'm not buying it. Is he in jail, I ask?


"He's on vacation." Tyler is steely.


Odd Future's sticking to their story, mourning Earl's absence with a solemn "Free Earl" graphic on their blog, and not much more explanation than that. Whether 16-year-old Earl is in jail, juvie, Jesus camp or a Swiss finishing school is yet to be established, but his mysterious absence, unfortunate as it may be, only serves to make him and Odd Future all the more intriguing.


The next day, when I tell 23-year-old hip-hop fan Deanna that I hung out with Odd Future the night before, she loses her shit. Why do you like them so much, I ask her?


"First of all, they are so young, and they are killing it," she says. "They are way ahead of their time. It's shocking, the words that come out of their mouths. They just don't give a fuck and they don't even realize that what they are doing is so amazing, which makes it even more awesome. They are writing all this shit that is in their head and they are not expecting anyone to listen — but everyone is listening and they are gonna fucking blow up!"


Yeah — that's what I thought, too.

(Published Oct 14 2010)

You can read this story on the LA Weekly's website here.

Cameron Diaz for Cosmopolitan

Cameron Diaz breezes into the restaurant of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont hotel, where she is greeted like an old friend by the wait staff. “We haven’t seen you in a while,” the maitre d’ says, and Cameron nods wistfully. “I know!” Time was, Cameron Diaz would be at the Chateau each weekend without fail, feasting on their “Sunday Fried Chicken”-- something of a religious experience, judging from the way her eyes mist up at the memory. But since January, this self-confessed “notorious eater” has been junk food (and fried chicken) free, marking the biggest shift in her lifestyle since she became a fitness devotee while filming Charlie’s Angels in 2000. Now that she’s applying her famously strict exercise discipline to her eating habits, life has improved “one thousand per cent” (one of her favorite turns of phrase). “I feel more alive in every way,” she says, sipping on sparkling water, her azure eyes as bright and as warm as they are onscreen. 

Cleaning up her diet is just the latest phase in the evolution of Cameron Diaz, a woman hell-bent on forward motion, whose lifelong quest for inner and outer self improvement has endowed her with a surprisingly wise and mature demeanor. It contrasts with her public persona, that of the sunny, carefree bikini babe unafraid to plumb the depths of goofball comedy. In the upcoming Bad Teacher, for instance, she performs a jaw-droppingly awkward dry humping scene with her ex boyfriend and co-star, Justin Timberlake. “How brave is Justin in that scene—I mean, what guy would do those faces on camera? It’s so twisted!” giggles Cameron, who plays Elizabeth, a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed middle school teacher whose primary goals in life are to get a boob job and marry rich. “Twisted” is putting it mildly—surely, the “Bad Teacher Dry Hump” ranks alongside Diaz’ infamous “Hair Gel Moment” in There’s Something About Mary, or her karaoke scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding—classic Cameron Diaz moments that remind you this is one Hollywood leading lady who refuses to take herself too seriously. Didn’t she once say a girl should never be alone without her dildo, after all? “No, actually,” she says, pretending to be offended. “I said ‘the two things that women should absolutely have at all times are a dildo and a triple AAA card’. Because you should never stranded by the roadside without help.” And with that she lets out her trademark raucous laugh.

Aged 38 (she turns 39 in August), Cameron seems unlikely to “grow up” any time soon—but her playfulness should not be confused with frivolity. Because beneath the light-hearted exterior lies a soulful, thoughtful woman, one who is trying to figure out some of life’s bigger questions. “I’ve been having this evolution of mind, body and spirit for my whole life, but it’s been more intense over the last few years,” she says, citing the 2008 death of her father, Emilio as a major catalyst. He died suddenly, of pneumonia. “Something like that reorganizes everything in your life, and continues to. I have learned a lot about what I want, having gone through that loss.” 

During her two hour heart-to-heart with Cosmo, (in which she opted for the very healthy roast chicken, served with kale and quinoa), Cameron revealed a set of well-formed personal philosophies on womanhood, spanning everything from ageing (“I love being 38, I am excited about being 39 and I am excited about being 40—I feel like life gets better as you get older”), to monogamy (“I absolutely don’t think it is natural—probably one of the biggest challenges of our society is to try and figure out how to come to terms with that”) and babies. She’s very publicly ambivalent about motherhood: “my family has never put that pressure on me…besides, my sister has four children. She did it, she took care of it.”

She even opens up about her current relationship, a subject she normally avoids in interviews. She’s dating New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez, former beau of Madonna and Kate Hudson, and has been famously “on the down-low” about their romance. But when cameras zoomed in on the endearing sight of Cameron feeding A-Rod popcorn during the Superbowl—the most watched sporting event of the year—the cat was finally out of the bag. 

“We were like, ‘oh my God, can you believe it?’” she recalls, laughing. “There are certain things you don’t want to give up completely, but in the end, we didn’t care. We laughed at it. We were just living our lives, and ultimately, you want to be able to go out and be in the world with the person you are with.” The ‘Cameron-A-Rod-Popcorn-Share’ was one of those cute, intimate lovers’ moments that neither of them had expected would be beamed around the world. In case you missed it, here’s exactly how it went down, according to Cameron. “He had finished his popcorn, so he went to eat some of mine and I was like ‘whoa—that’s my popcorn!’ I only had two pieces left!” She picked one piece of popcorn for him. “I said ‘ok you can have this piece’ and that was the only time in the whole game I fed him. Of course, the camera happened to catch us right at that moment.”

You might call Cameron Diaz a relationship girl—long term, high profile boyfriends have included Matt Dillon, Jared Leto, Justin Timberlake, and now A-Rod—but she certainly does not seem to have conventional ideas about relationships. She loves the word “lover” (“its a beautiful word. I think it encompasses everything that a relationship should be”), but the word “wife”—not  so much. “I don’t need a title or a label. I am happy being somebody’s lover…to me it’s the same. It carries the same gravity.” In fact, she’s living proof that not all single women in their 30s are desperate to get a ring on their finger. “Marriage hasn’t been really important to me. I believe we’re where we’re supposed to be, and with whom we’re supposed to be, when we’re supposed to be with them.” Having never been married, isn’t she even a teeny bit curious about what it could hold? Not really, she shrugs. “If I try to lock something down and say ‘this is what it is’, then I’m missing out on all the possibilities of what it could be. Why put a limit on things?”

And while she’s not ruling out having kids (“I never put out “no”... I never say never”), it’s not high on the list of priorities either. Again, she’s challenging the stereotype—a childless woman in her late 30s, she’s clearly unconcerned by the tick-tock of her biological clock, or by any societal pressure to become a mother. “If (kids) did happen, it would be a considered decision for the right reasons, not because I felt any pressure from any place or from anyone,” she says. Bowing to pressure is “how you end up unhappy in your life”, she says. “I really don’t care what society thinks I should do. I live my life the way I want to live it, and I love my life. I am blessed every single day.”

 Where her lack of definition in relationships might feel unsettling for some women, for Cameron, it’s how she feels happiest these days. Keeping things open and freeform is part of her ‘zero expectation’ approach to life—whenever she has placed expectations on herself, or on a relationship, the results have been ‘so unhappy’. “And that’s been the journey for me,” she explains, “realizing that the things that I always worried about were the things I was never satisfied with. The parts of my life that were really working well were always the areas where I had no expectations.”

Take her career, for example—she’s ranked among the top-earning actresses in Hollywood, has starred alongside Tom Cruise, Daniel Day Lewis, Al Pacino, Leonardo DiCaprio and John Malkovich, and her fortune is estimated at around $75million. Yet she swears she “never even thought about” whether she was going to be successful or not. “I never for one day wondered if people were going to see my movies. I just work as hard as I can—whatever the outcome is, it’s no business of mine.” Tom Cruise, her friend and co-star in last year’s action comedy blockbuster “Knight and Day” and in 2001’s “Vanilla Sky”, says he, and the rest of Tinseltown, knew right off the bat that Cameron was a golden girl. “From the moment we all saw her in The Mask and There’s Something About Mary, we all knew—this is an outstanding actress. This is a movie star.” 

Even Cruise, a notoriously hard worker and accomplished stuntman, was impressed with Diaz’s work ethic and her fearlessness. “She blew everyone away with how well she can drive,” said Cruise of working with her on “Knight and Day”. “On set, Cameron was known as “CD” for short, and the stunt coordinators couldn’t stop talking about her. ‘Wait til you see CD drive this car, Cruise,’ they said. She was pulling 180s and 360s, right on the mark.”

Drew Barrymore, Diaz’ best friend, is fully aware of Cameron’s kamikaze streak—it’s something they encourage in one another. “She’s my sister, but we bro out and have crazy adventures together, and I always know that she is game,” says Barrymore, speaking from the office of her production company, Flower Films. “That has been a big part of our friendship, knowing that she will throw down at any time, as well as that sisterly, cozy, nurturing love that we have.” Adventures they have shared include skydiving in California and swimming with sharks in Tahiti. Swimming with sharks? Were they protected by cages? “There was no cage,” says Barrymore, with pride. “We need no cage.”

Where Barrymore is the “flowery and romantic one”, Cameron is more of the pragmatist in their friendship. And while Barrymore was born into one of Hollywood’s most fabled dynasties, Diaz, part Native American (Blackfeather), part Cuban, was raised in a blue collar family in Long Beach, with parents who encouraged personal responsibility from a young age (“I got up in the mornings and made my own breakfast—starting at five years old I could cook an omelet.”) Diaz went to a rough and tumble high school, where kids teased her for being skinny (Skeletor was her nickname) and rapper Snoop Dogg was in the year above. Their differences have never come in the way of Drew and Cameron’s friendship though—in fact, its what’s brought them closer together. “We have this polarity, but we are very honest about that with each other,” explains Barrymore. “We laugh and bicker about our differences—we don’t kiss each other’s asses. We give each other tough love.”

Cameron describes a typical tough love interaction between she and Drew—because there’s an art to being able to tell your best friend something they may not want to hear. “Its all in how you say it,” she explains. “Rather than telling someone “hey, you always do this”, you can say “hey do you ever realize that when you do this, this happens? Is that something you are aware of?” 

Friends since Drew was 14 and Cameron was 16, and best friends since they filmed Charlies Angels, they now share the kind of closeness where if either is going through anything painful—romantic or otherwise—they simply move into each other’s homes until they feel better. Like many best friends, they speak their own language, and even have a special “noise”.  Barrymore describes it as a “funny, primal girly moan—and it just goes on and on and on. It’s a sound only she and I understand. It’s about letting all the feeling out, rather than using words.”

It’s easy to imagine Drew and Cameron being friends forever, swimming with sharks and jumping out of airplanes when they’re gray haired and wrinkly—but the future isn’t something that Cameron likes to focus on too much. “I have no idea what I’ll be doing twenty, thirty, forty years from now. I am limiting myself if I do.” It’s not that she’s dislikes talking about the future, it’s that by over-planning things, she might miss out on adventures she never even knew were possible. Who knows—maybe  she and Drew’ll fly to the moon together. “My present is so much bigger and better and brighter and funner and more exciting and more fulfilling than I would ever have been able to imagine,” she says. “I mean, two months ago I didn’t even know that I would not be coming here for Sunday Fried Chicken any more…you know what I mean?”

Published June 2011. This is an unedited version of the story I sent into Cosmopolitan. 

Dune magazine essay about Black Bananas

From behind, you might not be able to tell Jess Holzworth and Jennifer Herrema apart—they both have these amazing heads of tangled long blonde hair which are less emblems of their beauty, and more weapons of mass hell-raising. Like, if you piss ‘em off, they’ll face whip you to death with their follicles. Jess has a hippie-hesher-wild child energy about her that has made her the center of every scene she encounters, whether it’s with the NYC downtown art kids or the heavy metallers in the Sonoran desert of Tucson, Arizona where she currently lives. And Jennifer is the epitome of feminine rock ‘n roll badass-ness, a haute-couture outlaw with model stats, and Brigitte Bardot lips (cigarette always hanging forth). She’s the former front woman for Royal Trux, RTX, and now, Black Bananas. Jess just directed a video for Jennifer, for the Black Bananas’ track My House, taken from their latest album Rad Times Xpress IV. “Jennifer didn’t ask me to do the video, I just told her I was going to do it and she said yeah,” says Jess.

Who knows whether it was intentional, but the video seems to visually encapsulate Jess and Jennifer’s combined creative DNA which, when refracted through Jess’ director’s lens, emerges as a dreamy collage made from shards of the American underground. There are flashes of Chicano lowriders, Apache feather dances, punk rock hula hooping and train-track head-banging, all of it a kind of treasure map, laying out the roots of Jess and Jennifer’s inspirations—Native American spirituality, heavy metal, and rebel youth, thrashing like birds of paradise in the dust.

The video opens with Jennifer lighting one of her cigarettes with a cluster of smoldering sage leaves, the kind that will cleanse a house of bad smells and negative energies. A hazy backdrop of stars and stripes glows behind her, overlaid with detail from the micro-beaded turquoise, red, black, and yellow regalia of a Native American warrior. Jess got the footage at a Pow Wow close to her home in Tucson, where there are Hopi, Navajo, Tohono O’odham and Yaqui reservations. “I go as often as I can,” she says. Being at a Pow Wow is a holy feeling. To be immersed in the chanting, costumes, tradition and history…I cry at them…it’s a nice feeling.” The image fades and we see the silhouette of a long-haired kid head-banging in front of a suburban desert mountain range, hair spinning like a windmill. Then we cut to Jennifer wandering down the aisle of an Asian supermarket, clutching a shopping basket, wearing snakeskin boots and skinny blue jeans. “The grocery store came to mind because of the naturally vibrant color palette in them,” says Jess. “They said we weren’t allowed to film in the store, but we did anyway.” Somehow, even grocery shopping becomes a subversive act when Jess and Jennifer are involved.

Then the monstrous sight of a Monte Carlo hydraulic low rider, lurching up and down before crashing to the earth like a gleaming dinosaur, its rear wheels landing heavily on the tarmac of a parking lot, a little girl looking on in the background.  “The low-rider bit came out of nowhere,” says Jess. “I have a keen interest in Monte Carlos, especially ghetto tricked out ones—I love the way they look, mean and sexy.” She had originally wanted a black guy with braids cruising around smoking a blunt in one of those cars; instead she found a low-rider outfit from Tucson called The Sophisticated Crew to star in her video. “I scouted them at a church car wash on Sunday morning in South Tucson,” says Jess, “they then invited me to a low-rider gathering later in the day at the Rodeo Park. It was amazing.”

The low-riders are as flamboyant as peacocks, but heavy, lumbering and menacing as the tattooed Chicanos who ride them slowly through the streets of Tucson. Their weighty masculinity contrast with the sight of a gang of beautiful hesher kids who skip light-footed along the train tracks, running towards who-knows-where with their romantic greasy hair, scuffed leather jackets and dusty boots, waving at the freight trains as they rumble by. One of those metal kids is Jess herself, you can tell by the long blonde hair that tumbles down her back. She’s hanging out with her hasher friend from Buenos Aires, who’s wearing a beat up denim jacket, the back of which is decorated, it seems, with an iron-on kitten patch. There’s a humorous softness to these kids’ rebel defiance.

A nameless, faceless girl in a Misfits t-shirt spins a glowing hula hoop around her body, as the pow wow dance picks up speed, dancers in magnificent tasseled regalia spinning in a whirl of color. Then you realize, these kids are all warriors, from disparate tribes, fired by some common ancient spirit that compels them to spin, preen, battle and laugh. The result is a visual cyclone of a film, circular tropes evoking America as seen through a kaleidoscope, luminous, angry and transcendent. Veils upon veils of culture, ghostly visual membranes that are separate but interconnected, feeding each other through some cosmic osmosis as visualized by Jess, with Jennifer as muse.

I met Jess and Jennifer four years ago. Jennifer was talking about doing some writing projects together; she said, “you gotta meet Jess…Jess has to be a part of this.” I’d never before been invited to work on a writing project that involved a best friend as a third party collaborator. But I figured there must be a good reason Jennifer wanted Jess on board. We all hung out in Silverlake, at an Italian restaurant and I got see the cool energy that bonds them, a sort of instinctive, intuitive, co-dependent trust based on massive mutual appreciation for one another as artists. They’re deeply spiritual badass motherfuckers who like taking care of kittens but also appreciate tequila and will fuck shit up when and wherever necessary.

They met around 15 years ago, backstage after Jennifer’s old band—the groundbreaking Royal Trux—had played a show at New York’s Westbeth Theatre. Their mutual friend, musician Mike Fellows (who played with Royal Trux, Silver Jews, and Will Oldham) introduced Jess to Jennifer in a quiet dressing room. “It was chill; we shared some funny West Virginia stories about this infamous dude named Kirwood who ran the club Gumby’s in Huntington, West Virginia,” recalls Jess. “He was a notorious crazy ass mofo.” There was an instant natural rapport between the two women—Jennifer lived in Virginia at the time, and Jess came from the wilds of West Virginia, and they had an unspoken “outlaw sophisticate” understanding going on. Then they met again backstage at another Royal Trux show at the Cooler in NYC a year or two later. “I asked Jennifer if she had any more tee shirts, she said yes… and gave me one.” The friendship was sealed. When asked to explain why their friendship is so tight, both women are relatively guarded. “Jennifer is a Pisces and I am a Sagittarius, and she is Sagittarius rising. We speak the same language,” offers Jess. Also, “We talk jive slang 24 7 and we both love to call people MOTHERFUCKERS.”

She’s a little reluctant to share one of her favorite Jennifer stories, about the time RTX played the Hotel Congress in Tucson. But when she tells it, it’s worth the wait. It’s a kind of a heavy metal Thelma and Louise yarn that takes place about four years ago, around the time the smoking ban was implemented in Tucson. Jess recalls how Jennifer lit a smoke or two on stage, “and the hotel went bananas. The bouncers grabbed her off the stage and slammed her up against the bar.” On that same tour Jennifer had already had an altercation with some bouncers in San Diego, and Jennifer had spent the night in jail as a result. No one wanted that to happen again, so Jess was summoned by the band members. They asked her to pick up Jennifer at the hotel, and take her to a safe place. “We high tailed it out the back door to another joint, then Jennifer was like ‘shit, I need my suitcase.’ Our plan was to cruise over around back again and have Brian from RTX bring out her bag, which he did but within a split second this asshole was standing in front of my car, yelling at us saying he told us not to come back, blah blah.” Jess’ protective instinct for her friend reared its almighty head, and she confronted the angry security guy. “I was like EAT SHIT A-HOLE! If I was a dude I’d f**k your white ass up, you can’t stand in front of my car and hold us hostage’.”  Jess and the security guy went back and forth, with Jennifer just observing. “I told the dude if you don’t get out from in front of my car I will run your ass over, and he kept on saying the cops were on their way.”

Jess wondered how she was going to get her and Jennifer out of the situation. She revved the engine a little. She saw fear in the asshole security guards’ eyes. “Then I said to him I’m gonna count to 3 and if you don’t move… I will run your ass over.” She counted, and then ploughed forward. The security guy rolled over the side of the car. He grasped at the door handles, trying to get in the back of the car (“thank god the doors were locked,” recalls Jess) and then Jess and Jennifer “sped out like wild west bandits.” Jess was banned from the Hotel Congress for two years after that incident, which perfectly illustrates their friendship. Soul sisters with a wild streak, they keep things mellow and high vibrational unless you challenge them to a battle—at which point, watch out. You might end up a motherfucker.

Story with photos and stills from the video, coming out soon in Dune magazine

Anna Paquin cover for Dazed & Confused

Thoughtful and dry-humoured, with a quivering, bird-like alertness, New Zealand-raised actress Anna Paquin is a dichotomous creature – an ingénue who has seen it all; an old pro who remains wide-eyed; a Hollywood powerhouse in a 5'4" woman-child frame. She’s 28 now, but was, by her own admission, “a bit of a goth” in her teenage years – an awkward gap-toothed girl who hid behind long dark hair and DM boots, nervously squinting under the glare of the lights and cameras that had followed her around since she was a schoolgirl. As such, it’s fitting that she should go on to become a poster child of our vampire-obsessed culture, star of the graphically violent, unashamedly erotic True Blood, in which she plays telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse, a post-feminist small town blonde with a penchant for push-up bras and undead men.

Your character, Sookie Stackhouse, is telepathic. Some people say that telepathy is how super-evolved human beings will communicate with each other one day. Is Sookie super-evolved, being so hyper-sensitive that she can read minds?

I kind of like the way that Sookie actually thinks of it as being a disability, rather than some super-evolved trait. Because often what makes people more special sometimes, on a practical day-to-day level, makes life a little awkward. Most people just want to fit in and she can’t, because she’s got this internal monologue of what every single person is thinking 
all the time.

Yeah, I guess it would kind of be a bummer. And that is the interesting thing about it; that her superpower is a bummer to her.

Personally, I’m pretty happy not being telepathic. If you don’t want me to know something, that’s all good.

You have your own film production company with your brother. What’s happening with that?

We did one film and then my life became all about True Blood. I really enjoyed being in the driving seat though, as far as making decisions about who we hired and how we did things. I have been doing this for like 19 years, so 
I guess it’s natural to want to expand the range of responsibilities in my job. Most people want to climb up the ladder in terms of responsibility, or start working behind the scenes.

You seem conscious of being a grown-up as you approach 30.

For me, I feel like my numeric age is finally catching up with how old I feel. When you live in a world that is more traditionally occupied by grown-ups, it tends to make you grow up a few years faster – but if you are 18, 19, 20 and you look like you are 14, people tend to treat you like you are still a kid. At this point, it feels like the reality is catching up with what people expect of someone my age. I’m almost 30, so I guess it’s normal to have bought a house and be married.

So you’ve always felt older than your actual years, because you look young?

Yes, but I’ve stopped looking like a teenager, which I am pleased about – I feel like I looked like a teenager for way longer than most people do. There is something to be said for looking like an adult. There is a certain sort of thing where

“Never think too highly of yourself. It sets you up for a big fall”

people will look at you and think they know what your degree of life understanding and life experience is. Eventually, when people get to know you they realise you’re not some young flake – despite the fact that you look like you should be carded to go to an R-rated movie. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing, but sometimes people treated me like I was a kid – certainly not people who actually worked with me, because I don’t think I had the work ethic of a kid. 

What’s it been like, transitioning from being a New Yorker to being an LA girl in the last three years?

I swore I would never leave New York, come hell or high water, because I loved it… but I really love living in LA. And then as I kept deferring school to go work, and then my class graduated without me, I stopped pretending I was going to go back.

I want to ask you what you think of fate and destiny. Your career came about because of your talent…

(Laughs) If you say so! 

But also you were in the right place at the right time.

Well, certainly it’s very easy to see how you take a slightly different turn here or there, and it can lead you down a completely different path. I feel that stuff works well to explain the good stuff, but it doesn’t necessarily work to explain

“I guess they cast him and me in that combination because they thought we had chemistry. As it turns out, that wasn’t too 
far off the mark.” When tragic, horrible things happen to people. That’s when I have a little bit of difficulty with the notion of fate. Like well, if I was fated to end up where I am today, then if someone who was very close to me has cancer, was that also fated? I don’t believe that. I have been incredibly lucky. I don’t know if it’s anything more involved than that.

You seem to be a bit uncomfortable with compliments.

I will say thank you to compliments – I am told that is the appropriate response. But I promise, you are not going to get me to own any of that stuff – I refuse to own any of what people are saying to me, about me. It’s just the culture I was brought up in. I don’t know – I think English people have a good dose of that as well.  Never think too highly of yourself. Never make it seem as if you think it’s all sorted. Because on that level, it does set you up for a big fall.

That’s very un-LA of you. In LA, people tend to have the opposite approach, over-hyping themselves and their accomplishments in the hope that people will believe it’s true.

I find it really fascinating when people will freely tell you things they are really good at. It’s like, ‘Wow, I am really happy that you are so confident!’ I guess part of me feels like if you think you’ve already got it all sorted then you’ve got nowhere to go. Then there is nothing to strive for and nothing to be attained. If you think you’re as smart as you need to be, then where do you go from there?

Complacency is not something you can be accused of, then.

I am ambitious, but some of the things I’m focused on have changed a bit. When I wasn’t married and had all the time in the world to focus exclusively on work, work, work, more work… that was what I did. At this point, there are other things that are important to me, so to take some job that would take me to someplace for six months becomes a different sort of decision. Now I have a home that I would be leaving and people who I would miss.

It seems like working on True Blood has meant life-changing experiences for you on every level – doing a TV show for the first time, and then meeting your husband, who happens to be your co-star, who your character is in love with on the show...

Yeah, it’s all right. I guess they cast him and me in that combination because they thought we had chemistry. As it turns out, that wasn’t too far off the mark.

Read the interview at Dazed & Confused's website here

Holy Grail band for LA Weekly

The aroma of burning goat flesh permeates the night air as five kids clad in denim, leather and studs take to the stage. Their name: Sorcerer. Their mission: the resurrection of metal.

It feels a little like Ozzfest in the Echo Park backyard of Laurel Stearns, a former Capitol Records A&R lady and manager who had happened upon Sorcerer a few weeks prior. She had an A&R moment — that “feeling” — and invited them to play at her house on Sunday. 

She would happen to be roasting a goat in her backyard that day. And this would be Sorcerer's fifth show ever. 
A gaggle of music-industry types looked on, dumbfounded, as the pitch-perfect power-metal screams of lead singer James Luna exploded the heavens, causing dogs to whimper and startled neighbors to peer over garden walls. Guitarists James J. LaRue and Eli Santana emerged from clouds of dry ice, backlit and majestic, furiously harmonizing like latter-day Eddie Van Halens, high-speed arpeggios shooting from their electric fingers like bolts of proverbial lightning. Their gigantic bass player, Blake “B.A.M.” Mount, grimaced in the background while drummer Tyler Meahl pounded like a meth-addicted monkey. Strange things were afoot at the Circle K.

By the time we meet again, the band has signed with Prosthetic Records (Lamb of God, All That Remains), which will be releasing their debut EP this summer. In true metal tradition, the band has already undergone a name change, from Sorcerer to Holy Grail. (Apparently, there were a few too many Sorcerers in the kitchen — a 1970s band and an electronica DJ, both of whom, as one band member put it, were refusing to “pass on the scepter.”)

Holy Grail’s songs have Dark Agey, testosterone-dipped names like “Fight to Kill,” “Immortal Man” and “Valhalla Calling.” Their thematic oeuvre spans “Chicks, Vikings, Ex-Chicks, Being Tough, Macho/Machismo, FEMA, Fabio, Conan, Rad Dinosaurs, UFOs and Bilderberg Group.” Imagine Wyld Stallions with actual chops. LaRue’s motto is “a thousand scales for a thousand days.”

Blond/brunette creative duo LaRue and Luna (known as “James Squared” to their friends) are the primary songwriters. From an “elite school of San Diego shredders,” LaRue is the romantic, arpeggio-obsessed blond. “Have you heard the steel foundries, have you seen the fucking factories?” he marvels, when I tell them I have been to Birmingham, England, birthplace of heavy metal. “Have you been to the Euphrates? Have you seen the Tigris?” continues LaRue (he rides a bicycle and shares a bedroom with drummer Tyler, and is clearly ready for Holy Grail’s world tour). Luna is the sweet-cheeked Warrior-Next-Door, replete with tousled fashionista mullet and the resonant lungs of a Stradivarius. He hails from Pasadena — birthplace of Van Halen — and he can’t step outside his door these days without someone telling him how they used to hang with the Halen. “Everyone in Pasadena has a Van Halen party story,” he says.

A former choirboy, 26-year-old Luna worships metal screamers like Klaus Meine (Scorpions), Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Ian Gillian (Deep Purple) and Sean Harris (Diamond Head), and his own high-octane performance style is inspired by the stage antics of David Lee Roth and James Brown. What got him into high-pitched vocals was listening to Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Trapeze), “one of those underrated hard-rock singers no one ever talks about. He did these power-metal screams live at California Jam in 1974 when he was a bassist and backing vocalist for Deep Purple, and made Coverdale [Deep Purple’s lead vocalist] look like Bret Michaels — it was that gnarly.” Later Luna heard Judas Priest’s Painkiller album, and that “sealed the deal for me.” Now he hones what he terms his “diaphragmatic power” with vocal coaching and warm-up scales — although the real secret to his falsetto is, he says, “in the pants.”

Luna, along with LaRue and Tyler, was in the retro-metal revivalist outfit White Wizzard until a semi-amicable split last year. Burned but not jaded, they segued into Sorcerer with a uniquely alchemical mission: to melt down their favorite metal (Sabbath, Priest, Scorpions) and birth a new metal ore. Whether they’re entirely new-sounding is debatable; it’s their look, their drive and their talent that could propel Holy Grail to realms beyond the existing, tight-knit metal scene.

“We’re like deviled eggs,” suggests guitarist Eli Santana when we meet a few weeks later, at another metal barbecue. Gentle and perpetually smiling, he lives on his friend’s couch in Playa del Rey, and was recently fired from his job at Starbucks for insulting an early-morning customer. (“It’s a shame. I really took pride in my foam,” he sighs.)

So Holy Grail is like deviled eggs?

“Yeah,” he says. “We took the core of what metal was and then we took the egg out and we put all this paprika in and we made it all fucking fancy and guess what? It’s deviled eggs.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The egg is the metal. And the devil is us — something completely new that the egg didn’t even think it was going to become. We’re the devil within the egg.”

Despite its meticulously wrought Megadeth-meets–Early Man aesthetic, Holy Grail — unlike the farcical Metal Skool or some posturing Brooklyn speed-metalists — is 100 percent nonironic about its shredding. More accessible than modern-day metal purists (like Helvetets Port, Cauldron and White Wizzard, for example), it’s not solely trying to champion the old metal ways; like Bill and Ted, these young sorcerers come “from the past and the future,” says Luna, adding that “heavy metal is shunned by people who don’t listen to metal. People who think heavy metal is dead are dead.” LaRue’s two cents: “As much as the dinosaurs exist today as birds, classical music exists today as metal. It will never die.”

Indeed, if there’s any realistic hope for a mainstream metal revival beyond the enduring success of Metallica and other dinosaurs, perhaps the young warriors of Holy Grail could be it. The evidence is there, from the Paris catwalks through to the success of metal documentary Anvil, the public at large is showing its willingness to re-embrace the metal. And like Black Sabbath, who rose to dark dominion in the direct wake of the flower-power movement, Holy Grail — attractive, talented and tight as the pants they love to wear — could indeed provide a perfectly timed antidote to the indie-folk glut of today. Just look at them — evolved, Obama-friendly metalheads deeply in touch with their feelings. “Have you ever been so overwhelmed with emotion that you wanted to say a million words, but couldn’t?” asks Santana, as the heavy-metal barbecue draws to a close. “To me, that’s the meaning of shred: being able to say every single one of those words, as fast as you can.”

And, believe it or not, there’s a tear in his eye.

(Originally published June 2009)

You can also read the article at LA Weekly.com here.

"Granny Chic" fashion feature for LA Weekly

I met my granny for the first time in October 2004. She lives in São Paulo, Brazil, in a bullet-riddled cement block in a neighborhood called Wobbly Frog. And like all Brazilian women, she looked hot.

She’s nearly 90 — yet there was something daring about her knee-length stripy wool socks. An elegance to the way she tucked her silver hair inside a brightly patterned knotted head scarf. Nothing she wore matched, yet she was far from dowdy. Her mix of garish greens and mustard yellows, her wools and her nylons — those things to me spelled insouciance, quirkiness, an innocent joie de vivre. That moment marked the beginning of my appreciation for “granny chic,” the frumpy-is-fabulous style that makes it cool for youngsters to rock visors, gloves, brooches, netted hats, string pearls, alligator handbags and face-eating glasses. And don’t forget the Kleenex. Never forget the Kleenex. Because the key to granny chic, the thing that separates it from plain vintage, is practicality. Grannies wear their knickers big and their shoes orthopedic — and they don’t give a damn.

The phenomenon was spawned, some say, when Prada found its new muse — old Italian peasant ladies — and fashion entered what Vogue would dub its “senior moment.” Skirts skimmed the knees, and youthful celebrities sported fashions that wouldn’t have looked out of place in their nanny’s closet. The Olsen Twins wouldn’t leave the house without their long string pearls or oversize beads. And remember Christina Aguilera’s Norma Desmond–esque head wrap? In 2004 Katie Grand, the British über-stylist working with Prada and Miu Miu in New York, announced the new crop of style icons: Margaret Thatcher, the Queen of England and TV detective Miss Marple. (And if you’re a guy, it’s Sherlock Holmes — time to dig out Grandpa’s houndstooth and pipe.)

Some say that granny chic is a backlash against the hoochie-mama-show-me-more-skin/Paris Hilton celebutante phenomenon. They call it a return to modesty. Maybe it’s no coincidence that in a time obsessed with aging, dressing like seniors has become de rigueur among the youth. Either way, now it appears we are entering the second wave of granny chic, as announced by Vogue last month. “The new granny chic is all about appliqué and eyelet. Spring’s catwalks have been flowing with clothes apparently made from tablecloths.” Marc Jacobs, Chloe and Dolce & Gabbana sent their models mincing down the catwalk in pristine eyelet lace — “broderie anglaise” — and linens.

The new senior styles are, according to Vogue, more elegant than before. Looking like a curtain may be their fresh and dainty new take on granny garmentry, but frankly I’m a purist, a fan of the old-skool granny who, like Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude (the ultimate hot granny), looks sexier than hell in her musty faux furs, sagging stockings and clashing nylons. Echo Park stylist Charon Nogues, who rocks the AARP chic better than anyone I know, agrees, and came up with the following recommendations on junior-senior fashions for 2006:

If you’re going granny, your trouser should always be high-waisted and wide-legged. “Grannies don’t like things clinging to their pendulous bodies,” says Nogues. “And the high waist makes your legs appear longer and your ass smaller. Think sailor pants.” As for materials, it’s rayon, rayon, rayon all the way. Buy a cloche — a small 1920s felt hat that clings to the head, kind of like a skullcap. “Mark my words, that’s gonna be a hot item,” says Nogues. Basically, any hat with a feather or a veil says elegant granny. Don’t forget wide-brimmed gardening hats for the summer. The 1920s, 1940s and 1970s are key decades when you are putting together your granny-chic look. “Those eras celebrated bold patterns and simple construction. And the best part is, you can mix and match the decades to come up with a totally original granny ensemble.” Good pairings are ’20s with ’70s styles, or ’40s with ’70s. 2006 granny-chic hair is all about the finger wave — the Marcel. Think Charlize Theron at the Oscars, or Christina Aguilera of late and Maggie Gyllenhaal all the time. “The Marcel is a classic hairstyle that lends itself to granny chic if you wear it with a cloche, a big sweater and some clumpy shoes,” says Nogues. If you are going for the Palm Springs granny look, then a visor is essential (Prada put their models in visors and saggy gray stockings for a recent ad campaign). The truly committed should buy BluBlockers, preferably purchased from QVC. As for colors, always go bold and primary. Red-orange is hot right now, and green is a granny perennial. It doesn’t have to be putrid algae green — think crocodile green, avocado green . . . But the key to making granny chic sexy is to always wear garters. And here’s Nogues’ insider secret — buy designer tights and cut them off at the top. “The better made they are the less likely they are to run,” says Nogues. At night, you could try a little silk chemise worn beneath a kimono, à la Maude. And keep a boy toy in your bed at all times.

Lastly, remember granny chic is not just fashion — it’s a way of life. While we’re not suggesting anyone wear Depends or carry mothballs, you should at the very least brush up on your granny lingo (it’s not a dress, darling, it’s a frock), watch British soap opera Coronation Street (character Hilda Ogden, who was always in a pinny, curlers and head scarf, is a granny-chic icon across the pond), and whatever you do, don’t forget the Kleenex . . .

(Published in 2006)

Read the article at the LA Weekly's website here.

Rodarte for LA Weekly

​It is the most unusual of pairings -- a 14th century Italian monk and two fashiony young sisters from Los Angeles, 2011. Yet the devout Fra Angelico was the perfect muse for couturiers Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte, the good friar's frescoes inspiring an entire collection of gowns now on display at LACMA.

Suspended from the ceiling like pale angels, the ten Rodarte gowns in the middle of LACMA's Italian Renaissance gallery are the prettiest imposters you've ever seen, in decadent hues of mint green, lapis lazuli, halo gold and vermillion. The dresses will remain in the gallery, unworn and virginal, safe from the vulgar lenses of runway or red carpet photographers, too perfect to be worn.

​You'll notice how the blue of one dress almost perfectly mirrors the blue on a painted angel's robe. You'll see how the ecstatic religious iconography casts a heavenly glow over the fabrics, turning the gowns into glorious artifacts. There's something a little shocking about seeing dresses dangling alongside centuries-old oil depictions of the Archangel Gabriel. How on earth did this collection come into being?

At a press event yesterday, the sisters described to a small group of journalists how they fell in love with the old monk in Florence earlier this year. For an exhibit there, the Mulleavys had their pick of architecturally-stunning, historically-significant locations in which to house their project. Of course, they picked the least obvious spot -- a series of abandoned store fronts. Then they came upon Fra Angelico's frescoes, and his work, specifically his use of color, brought them to tears. They decided to base their entire collection on the art of a pious 14th century brother.

"We started with color," said Laura. "The frescoes have a chalky nature -- like, they're full of beautiful vibrant colors, but they're chalky. We wanted to find fabrics that had that quality, that weren't so completely shiny that they seemed too vibrant. We started thinking of each dress as something that could exist as part of a fresco."

Autumn De Wilde was also present at the press event and the only person allowed to bring a camera into the small gallery. Statuesque, red-lipped, and beatific as one of the Madonnas, De Wilde, who has documented the lives of Beck and the late Elliot Smith, has been taking photos of the sisters since 2005. That was before they were famous designers who left L.A. to become the biggest fashion story in New York, winning every conceivable accolade. Clearly, De Wilde has a nose for talent.

When the sisters reached out to her (they loved the cover she shot for Beck's 2002 album, Sea Change), she asked the sisters if she could document them, their lives and work, "much in the same way I would follow a band." She was with them when they visited Florence.

"You'd turn a corner in these abandoned shops and be confronted by the most incredibly angelic dress," said De Wilde of seeing the collection there. Here's a photo of how one of them looked, on her Tumblr.

Now, the dresses are much closer to home, as the collection was shipped from Italy to L.A., where they will become part of the LACMA's permanent collection, and will remain on display in the museum's Italian Renaissance gallery until February.

Iggy Azalea for Dazed&Confused

Mullumbimby is not a centre of hip hop. But somehow, this New Age-y little town on the east coast of Australia managed to produce the indomitable Iggy Azalea, a 21-year-old blonde-bombshell rapper whose pussy poetry and haute-couture thug-jams are spreading like crabs across North America.

Mullumbimby’s 3,129 patchouli-loving denizens enjoy three pubs, proximity to Nimbin (home to MardiGrass, the biggest weed festival in the world) and a crystal shop called The Laughing Buddha, where Iggy once worked. “It’s like, dreadlocks, no shoes, lots of weed-smoking, hemp clothing, a lot of tie-dye shit going on, that kind of thing,” says Iggy of her hometown. There’s also a motel in Mullumbimby where a 14-year-old Iggy once had a job as a chambermaid, making beds and emptying dustbins. She would save up her cash so that she could travel to rap battles in Sydney, a A$60, one-and-a-half-hour plane-ride away. As you can imagine, it was lonely being the only rapper in Mullumbimby. “I used to be really sad,” she says. “Everybody would laugh at me and be like, ‘You want to be American,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t want to be American. I’m Australian but I like this stuff. I was always outcast and didn’t have many friends, but once I connected with rap I just went for it super hard.”

Born to hippy parents, Iggy’s real name is Amethyst, and her younger sister’s name is Emerald. They are not close. “She just turned 19 this month. And isn’t it terrible that I didn’t wish her a happy birthday? We don’t really speak.” Iggy’s mum and dad were also around 19 when they had her. She was born in Sydney, but the family moved to Mullumbimby when she was still a baby, into a house on 12 acres that her father built by hand from mudbricks. Yeah, mudbricks, by hand.

 I was pretending to have sex with everyone in my rhymes. I’d say, ‘I’ll take you back home, I’ll give it to you, put it on you. I was like, 14. My poor mother 

Unlike Iggy, who was putting posters of Tupac on her bedroom wall, most of the kids in Mullumbimby listened to alternative rock, house and electro. “Everybody just like, takes ecstasy and like, gets a glowstick and a pair of gumboots. And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that’.” MySpace is how she started connecting with other rappers. She started visiting Lismore, a town about an hour’s bus ride away, where she’d hang out with Sudanese refugees and jam. “Lismore had a refugee program, and all the people from Sudan liked hip hop and I liked hip hop, so we would all be at the cipher zone,” says Iggy. “That’s where they play a beat, and then everybody’s standing around and it’s like, I say my rap, and you have to say your rap.” 

Oh, so how do you know who wins? “I don’t know, whoever’s the best. Certainly not me, I was shit.” 

Shit or not, even at the tender age of 14 she was rapping about her pussy, doing the kind of raunchy stuff that would eventually land her a major label record deal in 2012. Nonetheless she’s still pretty shocked at how X-rated she was back in Mullumbimby. “I was pretending to have sex with everyone in my rhymes. I’d say, ‘I’ll take you back home, I’ll give it to you, put it on you.’ I listened to it in December when I was back at home and I was like, that is really terrible saying this stuff – I was like, 14. My poor mother.”

By the time she was 16 it was time to wave bye-bye to Mullumbimby. She knew that the big time lay in the US. “I just knew I wanted to go to America and be a rapper and have a ponytail and a leopardskin jacket that went down to my feet, and like, 20 white, fluffy dogs on one leash.”

She told her mum she wanted to go on holiday to Miami with her best friend, a 26-year-old lawyer who seemed to have her shit together. What her mother didn’t know was that this was a lie – her friend was a meth-addicted bag-whore who happened to practice law, and Iggy had no intention of going to the US with her anyway – her plan was to go alone. “The last time I saw that girl she was fucking for crystal meth,” says Iggy, her voice lowering.  “We were at a ‘party’ and it was like, ten guys sitting in a dark room with guns everywhere, bagging up cocaine and smoking crystal meth, and I was like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck type of party this is, but I do not like these types of parties.’” 

Meth addiction notwithstanding, Iggy still used her friend as an alibi so she could travel to Miami. Two weeks after landing in the US she called home and told her mother the truth: that she was in Miami alone, that she was OK, and that she had absolutely no intention of coming back to Mullumbimby any time soon. She had a new boyfriend in Miami, and was practicing her rhymes every day for the homeboys in the apartment building in Miramar, where they lived. “I just used to sit out by the pool at my apartment, me and all these guys who were probably selling drugs, and we would just rap all day long.” 

After breaking up with her boyfriend in Miami, Iggy moved to Houston on the invitation of Texan hip hop producer Mr Lee, one of the godfathers of the region’s sound. He’d heard Iggy’s raps on MySpace and was the biggest person she knew in the industry. Mr Lee would become Yoda to Iggy’s Luke Skywalker, teaching her some Jedi rapper-shit that helped elevate her rhymes to the next level. “He’d be like, this is how you make a song, m’kay? Like… give it a theme, you know what I mean? Maybe you should not do 16 bars in the same flow, maybe you should switch it up.”

Things were going swimmingly. Then, out of the blue, Hurricane Ike hit Houston and, as Iggy says, Fucked Shit Up. Houston turned into a ghost town as Iggy, along with everyone else, fled. Shortly afterwards, the economic crisis hit. “It was fucking shit,” says Iggy. “I was like, I don’t have a place to stay, and my Australian money is worth 60 cents right now. I was like, fuck.”

 I just knew I wanted to go to America and be a rapper and have a ponytail and a leopardskin jacket that went down to my feet, and like, 20 white, fluffy dogs on one leash 

In January 2009, down and out, she found herself in Atlanta, Georgia. Despite her troubles some really good things would happen for her there. She met her present-day business manager and best friend, Peezy, her sassy surrogate sister who doesn’t take shit from anybody. And she signed a production contract to allow her to attend Marvelous Enterprises Artist Development Center – a sort of rapper bootcamp – for several months, for free. In terms of being on stage, that school taught her everything she knows. “Before that I just thought you stand around and grab your dick. And I don’t have a dick, so I didn’t know what to grab. Now I can dance in high heels. I couldn’t do that before.”

Problem was, her sponsors wanted her to be less Iggy, more Britney. And that just isn’t in Iggy’s personality. “They’re like, ‘You’re white, you look like a model, you don’t look like you rap, nobody will get this. You need to be a little bit softer and more like, …pop,’ is what they said. And I was like, ‘This kinda sucks.’”

Iggy decided to start over, and in 2010 she and Peezy moved to Los Angeles, where they now share an apartment downtown. There the rebirth of Iggy Azalea was plotted. The videos to her two breakout hits, “Pu$$y” and “My World”, uploaded on YouTube, immediately attracted love and hatred in equal measure. It ain’t easy being a white female rapper, especially if you’re from Australia. “They were giving me shit about rapping in an American accent. But I learned to rap over here, from people who live in the south, so what would you expect it to sound like?”

Haters went so far as to claim she had hired black people for cred, accusing her of shooting the “Pu$$y” video in a bad neighbourhood because she wanted “to be hood”. Not true, she says. The house in the “Pu$$y” video belongs to the grandma of one of her friends, and is two doors down from where she recorded her debut mixtape, Ignorant Art. It was the only place they could shoot the video for free. “Those people can fuck off,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Oh, she wants to be black,’ or, ‘She doesn’t give Australia props.’ All that crap. What does that even mean?” 

She had no tattoos until she moved to LA. Now she has several along the inside of her fingers, and one on her arm which reads “Trust Your Struggle” in flowing, cursive script. She drove past a wall, saw those words written on it, and got the tattoo about 20 minutes later. “Every single one of my tattoos I got the day I thought of it,” she says. Except for one, the one that reads “A$AP”, presumably in homage to her boyfriend A$AP Rocky. She thought about that one. “I was reading about tattoos, cos I like to know why I do crazy things,” she muses. “And they were saying how making something a part of your body is a way for you, in your mind, to try and control something. You know what I mean? When you feel out of control?”

LA has been tough for Iggy; the business relationships masked as friendships, the coldness of showbiz. “It’s a hard city,” she says. “People only love you here if you’re somebody to love. Otherwise nobody cares.” Plus she was bummed out at how much blow everyone does in Hollywood. “Do not offer me any bumps, I’m not interested,” she says. “I’ve never done a bump. I’ve never done cocaine. I am not interested in trying or experimenting with any of that shit, cos I seen a bitch fucking for crystal meth, and she was just doing bumps a few months prior. So I’m not interested. I am 100 per cent uninterested.”  Peezy chimes in here. “It’s definitely west-coast shit. When you’re in the south and you’re like, ‘I wanna do a bump’, everyone is like, ‘You’re Rick James, you’re a crackhead.’”

 I woke up in the morning, and was like, ‘Oh, Perez put my video on the site.’ And that was like, nine o’clock and by 12 o’clock it had like 60,000 views and I was like, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot of views,’ and by the end of the day it was on every other blog that existed 

She was down on life, down on LA and wondering if she would have to return home to Australia and take up cleaning hotel rooms again. “I was starting to go broke being out here in LA. Did I fuck my whole life?” Then an angel swooped down from the heavens – a very gay angel with a hugely popular blog called PerezHilton.com. Perez, maybe for the first time in his life, was in love with “Pu$$y”. “I woke up in the morning, and was like, ‘Oh, Perez put my video on the site.’ And that was like, nine o’clock and by 12 o’clock it had like 60,000 views and I was like, ‘Holy shit, that’s a lot of views,’ and by the end of the day it was on every other blog that existed.” All the attention eventually resulted in a deal with Interscope, which had been on the fence about Iggy for a while. The ink on the contracts was barely dry when we met for our interview – she had signed with the label just the week before. 

After spending time with Iggy Azalea, you can’t help but feel like she’s earned whatever successes lie ahead of her. Blond, statuesque and a total babe, Mullumbimby’s only white female rapper is poised to take over America with her album The New Classic, which is set to drop in the US in June. What will it be about, we ask? ”It will be about me,” says Iggy. Peezy, leaning in, whispers, “I’m sure there’ll be vaginas involved.” 

You can also read the article here.

Ryan Sheckler for the cover of RedBulletin

Ryan Sheckler has been many things in his whirlwind life: X Games sensation, action-sports brand, reality TV star. With a new phase of his career ahead, he’d prefer to be known by the one thing he’s been all along -- a skateboarder.

When Ryan Sheckler was 18, five years after he became the youngest gold-medal winner in X Games history, and one year after his MTV reality show “Life of Ryan” beamed his teen-idol looks to the rest of America, he got a mantra tattooed on both his forearms.

It reads: “Skate Life Till Death” -- a tattoo, he says, that sums up his life philosophy, and that “really represents me.” In the limelight-drenched stage that his life has become since he turned pro at 13, with its distractions and detractors, the words are there -- a reminder for when things get a little off-track. Not that he’s ever needed reminding.

“I don’t think I have changed, ever, in my whole life,” says Sheckler. “If things went down in the past, whatever. Now it’s all good. I just kept skating and believing in what I believe in.”

On July 29, Sheckler will go for his fifth X Games medal, and his second gold in a row in the street-skating event. He owes much to the competition that kick-started his career when he won gold as a 13-year-old. But in the past 12 months, Sheckler, now 21, has been diligently -- and quietly -- focusing on something else: a video part that will bring the exceptional talent the action sports community has known about for years to the wider world.

Produced by the respected skateboarding company Plan B, “Know Future” will showcase the technique and street-skating style he’s been known for. Its planned release date, 11/11/11, carries with it a suggestion of gravitas, and it will be accompanied by a premiere in New York City.

“As a top pro, this is sort of a missing piece of Ryan’s puzzle,” says Tom Jones, Plan B’s vice president. “You can win every contest in the world, but the video part is really the truest gauge of a pro skateboarder. Without it, the community finds it hard to quantify, in the truest sense, what makes this pro a pro.”

Plan B -- one of the industry’s oldest and most respected names -- signed Sheckler in 2007, seeing enormous potential in his immaculate street-skating technique and athletic style. “Ryan Sheckler has done one of the biggest kickflips we’ve ever seen,” says Jones. “It’s called the Costco gap. He absolutely ripped it.”

You can also read the interview here.

Cory Kennedy for LA Weekly, blast from the past

Cory Kennedy, ubiquitous club urchin and object of desire for fashion-mag hags everywhere, is hanging with her buddies after The Like show at MoCA. One of them is designer Jeremy Scott. “Cory’s the It Girl!” he announces. Then, pointing to her boyfriend, nightlife photographer Mark “The Cobrasnake” Hunter, he adds, “She’s always being hounded by the paparazzi!” Giggles all ’round.

A blonde girl is hanging out with them, and I ask how she knows Cory. “I just met her tonight,” she drawls. “We’re really close now.” She turns to Cory and asks how it feels to be a celebrity. Cory brushes a tendril of matted brown hair from her eyes and pauses. “I don’t really think about it.”

Away from the group, we sit facing each other, cross-legged on the edge of the MoCA fountain. The New York Times interviewed Cory the other week. It must have been kinda surreal, I suggest, especially because she’s only 16.

“I can’t even grasp it yet,” she says, all big eyes and spindly legs, like a foal. She tells me they asked her about her childhood, her fashion sense and the controversial nature of being her.

Controversial?

“I think that’s why I’ve gotten so much attention, because I’m so controversial,” she explains. “People either love me, or they hate me, hate me, hate me.”

She twiddles a ’90s-rapper-style gold chain, which she wears over a Marc Jacobs T-shirt dress, worn backward. A metallic American Apparel boob tube glimmers beneath the giant armholes. A Marc Jacobs scarf is tied around her right bicep and her flat gladiator sandals — Salvation Army, $4.50 — are falling apart. One is held together by a hair band.

Why does she think people hate her?

“Maybe it’s ’cause most celebrities are, like, perfect,” she ventures. “They have their hair brushed and their makeup done and no bruises on their legs . . . and I’m like BLEURRRRGH!”

Then there are those who hate on her for being, as Gawker.com put it, “a malnourished teenager who dresses like she raided her retarded grandma’s basement and does nothing with her wasted life but pose for pictures on a Web site and hang out and live off her parents while waiting to get famous for some as-yet-unrevealed talent.” Ouch.

Either way, Cory’s life has changed dramatically ever since The Cobrasnake made her his intern and splashed photos of her all over his Web site. A latter-day Bianca Jagger in ballet flats, she’s the one with the messy long brown hair, the crooked smile and the glass of white wine perpetually in hand. Now she gets MySpace messages from admirers all over the world, and fashion bloggers in Europe, Australia and South America have been asking “Who is Cory Kennedy?”

Apparently, the worldwide Cory craze started in the Netherlands.

“They were the first international place that started giving me attention,” Cory says. “Then it went to Spain, and then London, and blah blah blah . . . and Australia kinda came last, and Canada’s chillin’.?”

People usually ask her about her age, and her clothes. She says her biggest fashion inspirations are Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle, the 1920s through the ’40s, Twiggy, Edie Sedgwick and Kurt Cobain. She loves to mix vintage with designer, and lists her favorites: Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, Marni, Jeremy Scott, Isabel Marant, André Courrèges, Obesity & Speed, Pierre Cardin, Tsumori Chisato and Mary Ping.

She tells me she’s especially excited to be working with Jeremy Scott on his next collection. “I bring him stuff and say, ‘Look at this!’?”

I wonder where Cory gets the money to buy designer clothes. “My parents are good to me,” she says, adding, “But I’m good to them.”

She lives in Santa Monica and has a twin sister (not identical) who doesn’t go out clubbing like she does. She also has two younger sisters, ages 14 and 13. Her folks run education programs for adults who did not complete high school. They don’t want Cory to end up one of their pupils.

She agrees, and plans on getting her high school diploma before pursuing her career, probably in fashion. Her parents are vaguely aware that she has a following, but “they don’t really understand. It’s kind of weird because I say, ‘Yeah, I kinda have some fan sites and stuff,’ and they’re like, ‘That’s cool.’?”

Cory’s starting to get fidgety. We wander back into the courtyard, while she tells me about some haters who have been posting mean things about her on livejournal.com. Then she spots Mark and yells his name with extraordinary force for one so petite. He comes over. There’s a party downtown, he says. There’s a possibility it may be lame, and they carefully weigh their options. It’s a tough call — after all, Cory isn’t even supposed to be out. Turns out she’s grounded.

This was one of the very first pieces on club kid/model Cory Kennedy, published in 2006

The MC5's John Sinclair for BPM magazine

"When I realized there wasn't going to be a revolution I said to myself 'nice try', and went back to being a poet."

John Sinclair

Every revolutionary needs a bible - Marxists had The Communist Manifesto, feminists had The Second Sex, and in the 1960's, hippies had Guitar Army, a collection of incendiary writings by poet and counterculture father figure John Sinclair. In Guitar Army, Sinclair famously urged young people to launch a 'total assault on the culture' using three essential tools: 'rock n roll, dope and fucking in the streets'. Rock, he wrote, was "the great liberating force of our time and place here in the West." On dope: "Don't let old people fool you, there's nothing wrong with feeling good." And on fucking in the streets: "Everything else is about fucking; fucking is fucking."

No-one had ever heard anything quite like it.

Sinclair, an intellectual who spearheaded the White Panther Party and managed legendary proto-punk outfit The MC-5, wrote parts of Guitar Army from jail. He had been sentenced to 10 years for giving a cop two joints. It was a clear attempt by the government to subdue a man whose ideology threatened theirs, and it backfired - John Sinclair became a cause celebre, one of the best-known political prisoners of the era. He was released after serving 18 months, just days after John Lennon, Allen Ginsberg and Stevie Wonder headlined the "Free John Now Rally" in front of 20,000 people in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Fast-forward 35 years and I'm sitting with Sinclair in a coffee shop in LA. Scruffy and twinkly-eyed, he's twiddling his snow-white beard and holding a copy of Guitar Army as he recalls his time in jail. "My crime was possessing two marijuana cigarettes. I didn't think that would make me too much of a danger to society. I mean, I was trying to change the law - but I didn't intend to go to prison." He remembers the day he was told about the Lennon concert - "I was exhilarated because I knew it would lead to my release. It turned the key."

That was a joyous day for hippies, Yippies, freaks and beatniks, a day that further stoked the fires of their youthful revolution. But within a few years, the dream had died. Music, the lifeblood of alternative culture, had been commodified, as musicians were turned into pop stars who could in turn be manipulated by the industry. Meanwhile, the hippies were strung out on drugs and homeless in doorways. The comedown was rougher than anyone could have imagined. Today, says Sinclair "I ain't got no messages for anyone. I used to think I could save the world - but now I keep my opinions to myself."

He says this with a smile, but clearly, he's a little sad – and who can blame him? This is the man who articulated a complete vision for global change, through love, LSD and music. Today, in an era of global warming and homeland security, it's hard to imagine young people possessing that kind of optimism. Part of the problem, Sinclair says, is that kids are inundated with pop culture, "and it is draining them. Look at 50 Cent with his $150million. It's bullshit! Kids should try turning off their television sets. You want something to happen - turn off your TV!"

Or, you could try reading Guitar Army, which was re-released May 1, having been out of print for decades. It still contains Sinclair's original writings from Jackson Prison, and essays he wrote for the underground press during the sixties, plus two dozen previously unpublished photographs . The language, and even some of the anger may seem dated. Sex, drugs and rock n roll are no longer things we need to fight for (Motley Crue took care of that), but freedom is, and Sinclair's words still carry a potency and clarity that resonates, even in these jaded times. Since starting the American book tour, he's received many emails from supporters - young people whom, it seems, are still enthusiastic about what he represents. Just don't ask him to start another youth uprising – he's really not in the mood. "Do I still think in terms of revolution? Frankly, no," he says. "I can't even see people opposing the war (in Iraq) in a meaningful way."

Sinclair may have shaken off the mantle of revolutionary leader, but otherwise not much has changed. He is still a prolific writer and poet (he's working on writing one poem for each of Thelonius Monks' compositions), and a broadcaster (Radio Free Amsterdam). And, of course, he still smokes pot. Lots of it. He even sells pot behind the counter at the 420 Coffee Shop in Amsterdam, the city he made his home in 2004. "I'm a fiend," he says. "I like being lifted up from the reality of life on the street level. That's why I smoke." What about acid, the catalyst for his revolution? "Acid? Now you're talking," he says. "If there was a new wave of acid today, then things would get more interesting!"

These days, he mainly listens to "black music, mostly from the past". He likes Iggy Pop and Sonic Youth, or "the Sonic Youths" as he likes to call them (Thurston Moore is a friend and admirer of Sinclair's). Everything else pretty much sucks, in his opinion. Punk rock? Didn't like it. ("They have that selfish attitude.") Techno is just as bad. "It doesn't have a human heart. It's about deadening people so they don't feel anything." What does he think of Bono, modern-day rabble rouser? "I heard a song by U2 for the first time the other day and I hate that shit. Doesn't have any feeling." Same goes for Sting. "I didn't even like The Police. I mean come on - someone like me is never gonna like a band called The Police." In fact, he doesn't like bands, period. "Bands are for cowards. The idea of a band and a record company and a 'career' is bullshit. In New Orleans (where he lived for several years), people just play music because they want to."

Then he tells me his baby granddaughter has just been named Beyonce, and I think he might cry.

Mention The MC-5 though, the band he managed in Detroit in the 1960's, and his eyes light up again. If music was the key ingredient in Sinclair's revolution, then The MC5, a group of working-class bad-asses who joined the hippie movement, provided it. Led by Wayne Kramer, whose on-stage battle cry 'kick out the jams, motherfucker!' became synonymous with the counterculture, the MC-5 staged a series of politically-charged concerts that provided Sinclair with the proof he'd been looking for –rock n roll really does have the power to unite, and ignite, young people. And maybe it still does, some place far far away from the Billboard Music Charts (at the time of writing, Maroon 5 was at #1, closely followed by Avril Lavigne and Fergie). "Who knows if it could happen again," says Sinclair. "At the end of the day - we were a bunch of hippies who really cared. That's all. It was good."

Published in 2006

Dave Stewart for Variety

What happens to me for some odd reason is I wake up in the morning or I'll be half-way through a vodka martini, and something will just pop into my head," says Dave Stewart. We're at his Weapons of Mass Entertainment headquarters on Hollywood and Vine, a sort of Willy Wonka's factory that manufactures not candy, but ideas.

Each idea starts with Stewart, who sends it along an inhouse production line manned by his 16 or so staffers -- producers, directors, designers, writers, special effects people, and documentary and film editors. What emerges at the other end is a small silver box, not dissimilar to a candy box, containing the DNA components of Stewart's idea: The logo, a soundtrack CD with songs by Stewart, a treatment, perhaps a graphic novel that illustrates the story, a sizzle reel and other ephemera showing how the idea will translate across different platforms. It's as thorough a pitch as you're likely to see.

Since Stewart started gathering his team 4 1/2 years ago, every box that has gone out to a meeting has come back with a deal. There's a TV pilot, "Malibu Country," starring Reba McEntire and Lily Tomlin, which ABC is shooting this month. There are two feature films in the works: Paramount has picked up Stewart and Ringo Starr's "Hole in the Fence," and director Jonas Akerlund, known for his work with Lady Gaga, Madonna and U2, is attached to Stewart's "Zombie Broadway."

"Ghost," the musical based on the hit 1990 movie and for which Stewart wrote music and lyrics with Glen Ballard, is opening April 23 on Broadway following a well-received production in London, which earned five Olivier nominations and is still running; and he's developing "Songland," a televised competition.

Also in the works: "Pearl," an animated feature with original songs by Stewart and Orianthi Panagaris; "Smashed," a feature with Kara DioGuardi; and a six-documentary per-year deal with Cinedigm with each film featuring a legendary artist in the studio with Stewart, to name a few.

Stewart's success with his boxes certainly speaks to the power of slick presentation. But it also ensures that when his ideas go out into the world, his original blueprint remains as fully intact as possible.

"I know it sounds like I'm a bit of a control freak," he says, "but actually I'm kind of the opposite. I don't want to control it all. I want to take my idea to a certain point where it is exactly how I want it to be and there's no room for people to misunderstand it."

That's why Stewart keeps all his creatives inhouse, and rarely outsources. He can make sure whatever goes into each silver box is a true representation of his vision, and then whoever he hands the box to, can take it from there.

Pam Williams, formerly of Laura Ziskin Prods. and George Clooney's Maysville Pictures, joined Stewart's team about six months ago, focusing on "Malibu Country" and "Hole in the Fence." "Things are so often about meeting for meeting's sake and developing for developing's sake, and it stifles creativity," she says. "But here things jump from idea to box very quickly."

Take his idea for "Malibu Country": Stewart got that one while driving through Malibu one day shortly after returning home from Nashville. He snapped a photo of the landscape on his cell phone and sent it to his manager, Dave Kaplan, with a brief outline of the idea -- roughly a clash-of-cultures saga about a Nashville mother of three who leaves her cheating-heart, rock-star husband behind and moves her family to Malibu, where she attempts to resurrect her own singing career.

Six weeks later, a pilot was scripted, McEntire and Tomlin were brought on board, and, not long after, a deal was made with ABC.

Williams describes the office culture as an "open-door space," where there's a "constant cross-pollination of ideas between editors and music people and film and TV people. And all the while, Stewart has his eye on the long ball, not on the short development ball. It moves things very quickly. Sometimes I can't keep up."

On top of running an ideas factory, the Grammy Award-winner who came to fame as one half of the Eurythmics with Annie Lennox has his regular rock star duties to attend to -- his upcoming album, "The Ringmaster General," features duets with Alison Krauss, Jessie Baylin and Diane Birch; he's just completed writing and recording Stevie Nicks and Joss Stone's upcoming albums; and is contemplating the next move of SuperHeavy, the band he formed with Stone, Mick Jagger, Damian Marley and A.R. Rahman.

Dropping in and out of the office digs are Stewart's friends and proteges, including violin prodigy Anne Marie Calhoun -- managed by Stewart, she performed at the recent Oscars. Don't be surprised if Stewart grabs a guitar for an impromptu jam with Calhoun in the boardroom, which is exactly what happened half way through our interview.

At the end of the day, Stewart is known for gathering his Weapons of Mass Entertainment colleagues for one of his infamous "Martini Moments." In fact, if you Google the words "martini moment," among the first links that pop up is Stewart's website. "Well, everything we do has to be fun," he says. "If it's not fun, there's no point doing it. And by the way, did you know that vodka makes you 17% more creative than any other drink?"

Read the Variety.com version here

Odd Future for Dazed&Confused mag

Amid the graffiti’d freeway overpasses, lofty palm trees and downbeat liquor stores of central Los Angeles, eight of the ten members of hip hop family Odd Future are huddled together in their studio. They’re sticking close, staying alert as the countdown begins. Tick. Tock. There’s a tidal wave coming – and they’re it.

Odd Future is Tyler The Creator,  Jasper Dolphin, Domo Genesis, Matt Martians of the Super 3, Left Brain, Mike G, Hodgy Beats, Taco, Syd and Earl Sweatshirt. They often go by the acronym OFWGKTA – Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Aged between 16 and 19 years of age, they hang out at stores on the streetwear mecca that is Fairfax Avenue, where it intersects with Melrose. There, Tyler and his buddies are faces – kids who skate around, hang out at stores like Supreme and Diamond Supply Co, and make weird beats and videos. Their sound is a stripped-down, dark and heavy synth drone,  and their rhymes reflect a comedic obsession with ass-rape, Jermaine Dupri, scat, dead bodies, weed, brain tissue, swastikas, the morning chat show host Steve Harvey, bacon, and pretty much anything else that sounds funny at the time.

Odd Future was too weird for the rap underground to get its head around, and certain key blogs flat out refused to support their music. Beyond a few online “fuck you’s” the kids in Odd Future didn’t sweat the rejection too much – they carried on skating Fairfax and making beats and videos for themselves and their friends,  and self-releasing solo albums, EPs, and mixtapes on their Tumblr blog… all of it available for free.

Then, in September, something happened.  Writers from outside the underground hip hop and streetwear worlds started stumbling upon Odd Future. Independently, and all around the same time, they caught the bug – Fader, LA Weekly, and Rolling Stone among them. Pitchfork, the last word in American music snobbery, declared Odd Future “at the vanguard of modern hip hop”. It was a publicist’s wet dream, the media attention coming seemingly from out of nowhere. By October, the hype snowball had evolved into a fully-fledged viral avalanche, with Wu-Tang comparisons flying in from all angles.

Dazed met up with Odd Future just as the avalanche was beginning to hit, and we sat down for their first ever in-person interview. Eight of the ten members were there (Earl and Domo Genesis were missing). While Odd Future is very much an equal opportunity tribe, Tyler is without doubt its chief visionary and 

natural spokesperson.

“So Tyler – what did you do today?”

Silence falls over the room. Tyler considers the question for a few moments.

“What did I do today? Yo, I don’t know what the fuck I did today. Shall I keep it real?

Seriously… I woke up this morning, I jacked off, I took a shower,  I went to get some soul food and now I am here.”

His voice is as deep, and confident as his wit. Aged 19, he is one of the oldest members of 

Odd Future.

You’re studying film at college, right?

“I actually dropped out. I am not bullshitting. I am taking a semester off to focus on this music shit. If that doesn’t work, I might go back to school.” 

I tell him I think that’s a good call.

“Yeah, things are going pretty well. It’s going pretty swagged-out.”

“Swagged-out” is the adjective of choice for anything that is, in Odd Future’s opinion, awesome. Like Quentin Tarantino, for instance. Tarantino is swag (Tyler has a song called “Nosebleed” and his goal is to have Tarantino shoot the video for it). And Stanley Kubrick is swag, too. “Clockwork Orange is pretty swagged-out,” says Tyler. He watched the film for the first time two months ago because people kept telling him that Odd Future’s words and visuals reminded them of the film: “So, I said, ‘Fuck it, I’ll watch it!’” Unsurprisingly, the film resonated with Tyler – nihilistic ultra-violence and Nadsat-esque teenage slang are the defining characteristics of Odd Future’s creative output. He’s considering dressing up as the sociopathic Alex DeLarge – the film’s twisted anti-hero – for Halloween. “I wanna find a diaper with a hard cup in the front and swag it out,” he says.

“They sell those at CVS (American pharmacy),” chimes in Syd, the only female member of Odd Future “They sell man panties. Man diapers, for you.” Syd engineers all of Odd Future’s beats, and she holds her own in this room, heavy with teenaged testosterone. We ask her how she hooked up with Odd Future.

“I literally walked out of my house and there were 13 random niggas on my back porch. So 

I was like, ‘Everybody, hey!’”

So, you make beats? “Yeah. I am just the engineer,  pretty much.”

“Not ‘pretty much’,” Tyler interjects. “She’s a fucking excellent engineer!”

Your name is Syd, I say, like Sid Vicious?

“Yes… I guess. I’ve heard of who that is.”

Tyler bursts back into the conversation. “Oh my God! He’s like my fucking idol. His music was whatever, but as a person he was so fucking gnarly. He stabbed his girl… he stabbed that bitch. Then he died.”

Yes, he was young, he was 21 when he died, we tell him. He OD’d. Taco, Syd’s younger brother and the most boisterous of the group, bursts in to the conversation. “No, he died of 

ass cancer!”

“Ian Curtis,” says Tyler, ignoring Taco. “He was young too, when he died…”

19-year-old Fairfax skater sneakerheads don’t ordinarily reference Joy Division, Sid Vicious and Stanley Kubrick in the same breath. Tyler’s rich set of cultural influences, which extend way beyond the worlds of rap and skate, are reflected in Odd Future’s lyrical content and retro visual aesthetic. Perhaps that’s part of the reason they’ve captured the broader imagination. They’re significantly more sophisticated than they should be.

We ask Taco, the court jester, to tell us a little about himself. Before he can, Matt Martians of the Super 3 – a rapper and talented visual artist – interjects. “He doesn’t do shit.”

Adds Syd: “He literally doesn’t.”

“I am a gymnastic superstar!” Taco counters, and everyone cheers and claps. The energy and humour are infectious.

How did they all come together? Hodgy Beats, all brooding good looks, doesn’t skip 

a beat. “You asking us if we really come together?” he purrs.

“Dayum!” squeals Tyler.

“If we did, I would be the happiest nigga ever,” says Taco.

More laughs.

“We were destined to be together,” says Tyler, finally addressing the question. “It’s like nature. I really don’t know how we met. We just do what we do.”

Tyler describes his role in Odd Future thus: he makes instrumentals and then he makes lyrics and then he records them to each other. He repeats that over and over until he has many tracks to choose from. Then he picks one track out of the bunch, and shoots a video for it. Then he makes cover art,  if he wants that song released. And repeat.

“Also I am a chronic masturbator,” he adds.

Tyler’s not one for sampling. He usually says that’s because samples inhibit him, and that he doesn’t feel as creative when constrained by 

a sample’s blueprint. “Actually, it’s more because

I really suck at fucking sampling, so I just leave it alone,” he says. “Anyway, I like coming up with new shit. I like seeing how far my fucking mind can go.”

Tyler’s scrolling through his phone and looking at a photo of a pretty young lady. He shows it to me.

“I want to fuck her in her eyes,” he says.

Why would you want to fuck her in her eyes? That might ruin her look. Hodgy interjects: “No he said in her ass, not her eyes.” Asses come up a lot in Odd Future conversation. Asses, and in the mix, deep shit.

“What about your folks and stuff,” I ask. “Are they artistically inclined?”

Tyler shakes his head. “I don’t have a father.” Tyler’s much-acclaimed album Bastard is pretty much all about his father, whom he never met. He goes to dangerous places, emotionally and spiritually. (When he was younger his grandmother told him he was from hell… and he decided to roll with that.)

Syd picks up on the “artistically-inclined” part of our question. “Autistically inclined!” she chuckles. It’s true – people say Tyler is a little austistically-inclined, because he has an uncanny ability to remember the exact dates that albums came out. We test that out.

Baduizm?

“1997.”

In Search Of… (by NERD)?

“The UK version came out September 2001. The US version came out in 2002.”

Maybe Tyler is a little bit autistic, we concede.

“I might be a little R Kelly,” he nods.

We ask him where Earl is. Earl, along with Tyler, was the most visible member of OFWGKTA – until June 6 when he disappeared off-radar. Earl Sweatshirts’ video, “EARL” has been dong the rounds, viewers repulsed and fascinated in equal measure by its fucked-up Larry Clark teen skater zombie drug aesthetic. But word is that Earl, despite being well on his way to becoming a superstar rapper,  has been grounded by his mom until further notice. Tyler is tightlipped about the truth, stating over and over that Earl is “on vacation”.

We ask them how they feel about all the Wu-Tang comparisons floating around. It’s a sensitive issue, one that Hodgy ends up answering. “It’s petty cool because there are not many groups that have actually been compared to Wu-Tang. At least, there aren’t many people our age that will actually be compared to Wu-Tang. Wu Tang is a big-ass dynasty, and a lot of people look up to them, so if we are being compared to them, then that is pretty great.”

Syd agrees – she likes the comparison. 

“I think it’s accurate, structure-wise, if you think about the way we make songs. Like those two guys might make a song together, or those two might make as song, or we all might get on a song together, or everyone puts out their own album. We keep it all in the family.”

Keeping it in the family – keeping things simple; keeping it tight. If they have a plan, that seems to be the main one for now. They’re not recruiting any new members, and the doors are closed.  “I like keeping shit in house,” says Tyler. “When it’s not, shit gets fucked up.” The kids nod their heads and you get the sense they’ve all found the family they were looking for. Regardless of whether Odd Future rises to the ranks of the Wu-Tang or not, a new dynasty has been born.

“Oh, and by the way – I did not fuck OJ Simpson,” announces Tyler solemnly, totally out of the blue. “I did not fuck OJ Simpson.”

(Published 2010)

Read the story on Dazed& Confused's website here.

Tenacious D for Dazed & Confused

It’s been a long, cold sextet of years since Tenacious D unleashed their last album—cult classic The Pick of Destiny—upon the world. Beloved by fans, the record and accompanying film inexplicably failed to make much money and therefore was, by industry standards, a failure.

It took them a while to get over the hurt, but now the D—comprised of curvy funny man Jack Black, and his white-socks-and-sandals wearing friend Kyle Gass—have written a comeback album unlike no other. Featuring seismic rock hits like “Low Hanging Fruit” and “They Fucked Us In the Ass”, Rize of the Fenix may be Tenacious D’s greatest masterwork yet. Possibly. 

We find Black and Gass at their dark rehearsal space in a questionable corner of North Hollywood, nestled side-by-side on a threadbare sofa. A giant painted Virgin Mary watches from behind the drum riser as they talk about how this, their third studio album (with drums courtesy of Dave Grohl, and artwork resembling a large, veiny penis in the shape of a bird), may or may not be greatest comeback album in the history of rock. 

J: Remember 2006? When we put out our last album? Let’s get in our hot tub time machine and remember… 

K: Was there YouTube in 2006? Cause it feels like YouTube was the big demarcation of the advancement. 

J: What? 

K: Yeah. I feel like there was ‘before YouTube’, and ‘after YouTube’. 

J: OK but what were we doing in 2006? 

K: I think we were releasing our movie (The Pick of Destiny). We were working hard. 

J: We were globetrotting and feeling very cocky. 

K: Yeah, and shooting a documentary. 

J: Ronnie James Dio was still alive. 

K: Didn’t he ask us to be in his video? 

J: He heard that we wrote a song on the first album and people told him “hey! This band Tenacious D is dissing you.” And so he took a listen to it and said ‘no they’re not, they love me, this is a love song.” And he was right. He was the sweetest guy, very warm, very funny and very magical. 

K: He was quite diminutive. 

J: You’re saying he was very short? 

K: Well, yeah. 

J: Yeah, he was Prince-like in stature. Good things come in small packages. Or so I’ve been told. 

K: It was an honour meeting him but let’s face it, he was definitely more a hero of yours. 

J: Really, Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell wasn’t your first album? 

K: No, I think I was rocking the Beach Boys, something a little more poppish. In a battle of songwriting, I’d probably pick Brian Wilson over Dio, to be honest.

J: Well, Ronnie James Dio would definitely have had more evil songs than Brian Wilson. I mean, James is the greatest metal singer of all time. Brian Wilson is like the 500, 000th best metal singer of all time. In fact, he’s like the worst metal singer ever.

K: Satan in rock. That was really a 1980s phenomenon. 

J: Yeah. Black Sabbath was doing it in the 70s but for the most part it blossomed in the 80s. Back then, you couldn't be in rock if you didn't have a devil angle. Van Halen was able to rock pretty hard without Satan, but besides that all the top acts were devil-heavy. Now there is no devil in rock. In some ways rock has died. It's definitely taken a back seat to a lot of other genres. It doesn't have nearly the pull that it used to. 

K: It does feel like it's waning. 

J: Yeah, who's the biggest rock act? There used to be tons of them, now there are only a handful of bands that can fill a stadium. 

K: Foo Fighters. 

J: Yeah, you've got the Foo Fighters, but they're kind of carrying the torch alone. 

K: Jack White seems like he's carrying the torch a little bit. 

J: Some people think that the phoenix (on the “Rize of the Fenix” album cover) looks like a big penis, but I don’t see it. Maybe it's kind of like a Rorschach test. If that's what you see, it says a lot more about you than the artist. But what I think is cool is that the phoenix has a purple head and blue balls. 

K: Almost ready to burst. It's the perfect cover. We've cracked the code. 

J: Prepare for the love explosion. 

J: When I first I looked at it, I was scared of it. I was like, “oh no no no, that's too disturbing, we can't unleash that on the public.” But then I looked at it again the next day and I was like “wait a second, that's beautiful.” It is very real, and terrifying, it looks like the end of the world's penis 

K: I never thought of that. 

J: The A-Cock-Alypse 

K: O my god, you're on fire!

J: A-Cock-Alypse NOW! We’re boundary-pushing.

K: Yeah, like my white socks and sandals. Boundary-pushing. People like to remind me what a horrible look it is. 

J: But is it? Because ninjas have a similar sock, where it separates the big toe from the rest of the foot. 

K: If I just wear sandals, I notice my feet get really dirty, so this is really, yeah, this is the perfect combo. 

J: I’ve never been a big flip flop guy. They annoy my feet. I have kind of granny feet. Someday I’ll probably have horrible … 

K: Bunions?

J: Funions. I like to call them funions. I may have to have some kind of surgery to avoid that, because there is nothing less rock’n’roll than bunions. 

K: This album is definitely more rock ‘n roll than bunions. 

J: It’s a concept album and the concept is a comeback. In fact has there never been an album that was more about the comeback. 

K: What about LL Cool J? (referring to the lyric, “don’t call it a comeback” from the song Mama Said Knock you Out)

J: Oh, but he said don’t call it a comeback. We’re saying do call it a comeback. We are the first real comeback album. Wait a second, what is the greatest comeback album? Oh, it would be Back in Black, where they got a new singer. But that’s different, cause they are coming back with a different band. We’re still the same D, we’re just coming back. 

K: This whole thing could backfire on us.

J: What do you mean, what, how could it backfire? If people don’t like the comeback album then the backfire is what? 

K: That we didn’t come back!

J: Maybe we shouldn’t have done a comeback album then. We should have just done a regular album and pretended like we didn’t need to come back. We could have talked about how the whole album is just full of inspirational jams that make you want to exercise, and say ‘I can do anything, I can be the best’. 

K: You exercise?

J: I’ve done a fair amount of exercise. Believe it or not, I’m pretty strong. Underneath the soft exterior lies the heart of a lion. See, it’s pretty firm underneath, feel that. (makes Kyle prod his curled bicep) 

K: Oh my god! Dude. 

J: Yeah, it’s mostly natural. We exercise all the time, don’t we? 

K : Yeah, I don’t.

J: They say that of all the aging rockers, Mick Jagger is in the best physical condition because of his days of doing yoga. That’s what you and me are going to start doing. Yoga.

K: I don’t do yoga.

J: Never? 

K: No. 

J: You never did any yoga, no downward dog? 

K: Well, I dabbled.

J: I’m very good at yoga. Kundalini. It’s all about the chakras.  I’m working on the seventh. 

K: What’s that, the genital one? 

J: No I think the genitals is like the first one. 

K: Cool.