About

Caroline Ryder moved from London to Los Angeles in 2005. She wrote for Shepard Fairey and Roger Gastman's Swindle magazine; was one of the LA Weekly's first fashion bloggers, and edited Variety's style blog, The Stylephile. She has written about music, culture and style for the New York Times, Village Voice, New York magazine, LA Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Juxtapoz, The Advocate, and Dazed magazine. She has worked with brands and record labels, including Citizens of Humanity, DISTINCT, Hurley, Scion, UNIQLO, Dim Mak records, Disney, Hollywood Records, Warner Music, and Sanrio (Hello Kitty).
She has ghostwritten several books, including "Kicking Up Dirt", the memoir of deaf X Games champion motocross racer Ashley Fiolek (HarperCollins, 2011), under option by Sony Pictures. "Dirty Rocker Boys", the memoir she co-wrote with 1990s music video star Bobbie Brown (Simon and Schuster, Nov 2013) is a Kindle bestseller. She moved to Joshua Tree in 2010, and returned to LA in 2013 to attend USC's prestigious Masters program in Screenwriting. Her desert-based feature script Mimi and Ulrich was shortlisted for the 2015 Sundance Screenwriters Workshop. She is represented by Adam Chromy of Movable Type Management, New York.

Amandla Stenberg / Dazed cover

Cover interview with actress/activist Amandla Stenberg for the September 2015 cover of Dazed mag. read it here.

After igniting fierce debate with her pop-culture polemic, The Hunger Games actress Amandla Stenberg has emerged as one of the most incendiary voices of her generation – but she insists that her fight has only just begun.

This spring, an LA teenager’s school project ignited the internet. A charm offensive titled “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows”, the five-minute video deftly unpacked the thorny issue of cultural appropriation with a nuance that few would be able to nail. Raising an eyebrow at culprits like Iggy Azalea and Katy Perry treating black culture as a pick’n’mix stand at the multiplex, the clip, uploaded by 16-year-old Amandla Stenberg, announced a whip-smart new voice that was not to be fucked with.

Three years after she shot to global prominence as Rue in The Hunger Games (2012), the actress is leading a wave of young, hyper-informed trendsetters with a fresh and fearless take on today’s defining issues. Last month, she echoed the sentiments of her school project in a comment on Kylie Jenner’s Instagram. In response to the pouty reality princess’s latest look – cornrows – Stenberg wrote, “when u appropriate black features and culture but fail to use ur position of power to help black Americans by directing attention towards ur wigs instead of police brutality or racism”. Jenner retorted, “go and hang out w Jaden.” (Stenberg attended prom with Jenner’s ex, Jaden Smith.)

Yet Stenberg cuts through the noise. Using social platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, she’s always set her own agenda in terms of what’s important and newsworthy, regardless of what mainstream media is championing. She uses Instagram, but not just for thirst trap selfies or to promote her personal brand. More than anything else, she’s someone who refuses to stay quiet. “I think people discredit teenagers and how wise they can be,” says Stenberg. “Sometimes I meet teenagers who are much wiser than many adults I’ve met, because they haven’t let any insecurities or doubts about themselves get in the way of their thoughts.”

Stenberg refuses to be quoted on Kylie-gate in the wake of the resulting media frenzy. She would prefer to move on – after all, she’s made her point. Meeting her a couple of weeks before the Jenner ‘feud’ makes headlines, the actress wears a houndstooth shirt and pillar box-red lipstick, sitting in her favourite cafe in Culver City, on the west side of Los Angeles. She’s all smiles, despite recovering from an intense bout of flu. The doctor gave her tiger balm, and told her to reduce any stress in her life. Has she been stressed? “Not exactly,” she says. “I don’t think it’s negative pressure; it’s me being excited about moving forward and things evolving and becoming bigger in my career. But balancing school and work can be really stressful.” She says her mum encourages her to take time for herself, and she recently had a ‘sound bath’, a guided meditation in which glass bowls are played at various frequencies.

But the way things are going, there’ll be fewer opportunities for Stenberg to perfect her lotus pose. She’ll be shooting two indie films later this year (she’s not allowed to discuss them yet), and has been linked with the lead role in Looking for Alaska, a 2016-slated adaptation of John Green’s wild young adult novel that’s been likened to a modern-day Catcher in the Rye. When casting for the role began, #WOCforAlaskaYoung started trending on Twitter, with people calling for a non-white lead in the film and pointing out the lack of diversity in teen movies. Green got behind the campaign, and Lorde supported Stenberg’s bid for the role via Twitter.

For Stenberg and her community of friends – Tavi Gevinson, Willow and Jaden Smith, Lorde,Kiernan Shipka – it’s not enough to excel in your chosen line of work, be it acting, singing or publishing. What matters is inspiring others, sharing information and starting a dialogue. Far from the apathetic millennials of media lore, these kids have more in common with the politicised youth of the late 60s. “It’s so inspiring to see someone in the entertainment industry be vocal about critiquing it,” says Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson of Stenberg. “I’m lucky I can talk to her about being a young, independent, powerhouse woman – I think a lot about the time she compared losing your sense of self in this world to being unable to uncross your eyes.”

Ella Yelich-O’Connor, AKA Lorde, recalls being bowled over by Stenberg when they met last year. “It was early on a Saturday, and we ate pancakes with Kiernan (Shipka),” she recalls. “I felt so lucky to be in the presence of such smart, interesting young ladies. Amandla was working on a school project film adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper, which reminded me of me – I used to do the exact same strange shit at school! She told me while we were discussing work that there weren’t many roles for young black girls in film or television. I expressed dismay, but she said it very steadily, with a clear look in her eye, no sadness or disappointment. I got the impression this wasn’t something that would stop Amandla, and I think I was right.”

It figures that Stenberg is most at home around trailblazers. In May, her (platonic) prom date was Jaden Smith – she wore a septum ring and her hair in show-stopping grey braids, and he wore a long skirt with sneakers, a look she fully approved of. “Guys aren’t allowed to express femininity; they have to always appear masculine and that’s bullshit,” she says. “I love it when guys can be feminine and express their emotions and creativity; it shows strength.” Stenberg met Jaden’s sister, Willow, after they began having dreams about each other. Willow messaged her, saying, “I feel like we are supposed to be friends,” so the two met up and talked about everything they loved for a good hour. “Then we did interpretive dance toGrimes,” says Stenberg, giggling.

Born October 23, 1998, Stenberg was raised on the west side of Los Angeles. Her mum, Karen, is African American, a New York transplant and former entertainment reporter for People magazine who moved to California 21 years ago. She met Stenberg’s Danish father, Tom, at a concert in LA. Karen raised their daughter in the Agape church, and their daughter grew up immersed in spiritual practice, meditating from a young age. Even when it came to getting the part of Rue in The Hunger Games, says Karen, there was a mystical aspect. “She had a dream of Rue, which influenced how she did her hair and dressed at the auditions.”

Aged four, Stenberg did a few catalogue shoots for Disney, followed by commercials for McDonald's and Kmart. Come 2011, she’d scored her first feature film role inColombiana (2011), co-written and produced by Luc Besson. When she auditioned for the part of Rue, she was already a diehard fan of The Hunger Games, having read the book four times. The audition was fairly typical – a reading followed by a call-back with the director, Gary Ross. Stenberg’s approach, however, was not. Convinced she had to go the extra mile to get the part, she turned up at Ross’s house covered in mud, with leaves and twigs in her hair, for full lost-in the-wilderness effect. Soon after, she found out she had landed the role.

The release of The Hunger Games in 2012 marked Stenberg’s entry into the Hollywood big leagues, but a stream of online abuse slightly soured the triumphant news of her casting. While her character was clearly described in the books by Suzanne Collins as dark-skinned, apparently this didn’t register with a small – but vocal – minority of bigoted fans. “It was my first interaction with blatant racism,” says Stenberg of the odious tweets she received. “Even though it was painful, it was important to experience it, because it connected me in a very real way to the struggle that millions of people endure every day.”

As well as producing “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows”, Stenberg enthusiastically curates a popular and political Tumblr page granting viewers full and easy access to her thoughts, posting screengrabs celebrating the beauty of women of colour and quotes like, “Love between two women is powerful, and that is why you are afraid.” 

“Tumblr has totally informed what I’m interested in and what I care about, especially when it comes to social justice,” she reflects. “It’s such a cool platform for learning about black and trans rights.” Stenberg talks about the ‘Art Heaux’ movement, a community of black kids taking selfies and Photoshopping themselves in the name of art. “That is so amazing,” she says. “(It’s) black kids saying, ‘Look how beautiful I am,’ and defying the notion that they’re not allowed to be indie in that way.”

Does Stenberg consider herself indie? She’s not sure. On one hand, she loves Nicki Minaj andBeyoncé with her “entire heart”. On the other, she’s super-excited to go to LA’s upcoming FYF Fest, where she’ll see Frank Ocean, Solange and Death Grips. She shares her voracious interest in the arts with close friend Kiernan Shipka, the 15-year-old actress best known for her role as Sally Draper in Mad Men. “We both appreciate things that are artistic and want to watch more movies, read more books, listen to new artists and learn about new art,” says Shipka, who bonded with Stenberg over their shared passion for Studio Ghibli anime films,Haim and Taylor Swift.

If you search ‘Amandla Stenberg’ on IMDb, the website’s bio informs you that her first name comes from the Zulu word for power. Perhaps it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Later today, she’ll fly to NYC to channel the spirit of Black Panther activist Angela Davis, whose empowering words adorn Stenberg’s face in an image for this shoot. She’ll move there one day, she says, to enrol in film school and direct movies of her own. (As Gevinson says of her: “She is not content to speak only words she’s been given.”) Stenberg mentions that Spike Lee teaches at NYU. “I think I would die, studying with him. As much as I want to be fulfilled creatively as an actress, and get to be in roles that are meaningful and impactful, I hope the same thing for myself as a director, one day.” She smiles, the glint of fire lighting up her eyes. “I want to make things that have an impact on how we look at the world. I know it’s a tall glass to fill, but it’s a glass that really does need to be filled, as an African American woman.” In Stenberg’s charge, the glass isn’t just in safe hands – it’s shatterproof.

In cover image Amandla wears studded beret Marc by Marc Jacobs, earrings her own. Hair Tomo Jidai at Streeters using Oribe Hair Care, make-up Yadim at Art Partner, nails Rieko Okusa at Susan Price NYC using Essie Color Licorice, prop stylist Kadu Lennox, photographic assistants Stephen Wordie, Kiri Wawatai, Mark Luckasavage, fashion assistants Victor Cordero, Louise Ford, Katy Fox, hair assistants Yusuke Miura, Kim Garduno, make-up assistants Mondo, Kanako Takase, prop assistant Joanna Seitz, digital operator Erica Capabianca, on-set production Amie Norris, production assistant Maya Swan

Jennifer Jason Leigh for AnOther magazine

An in-depth piece about new Tarantino star Jennifer Jason Leigh for the Sept 9 2015 issue of AnOther magazine.

There’s something about Jennifer Jason Leigh’s acting, an arresting combination of haunted and feral that has always attracted the greatest directors—Ron Howard, Robert Altman, the Coen brothers, Sam Mendes, Charlie Kaufman and most recently, Quentin Tarantino, who handpicked her to play the sole female lead in his upcoming post-Civil War western, The Hated Eight. She smiles, slightly incredulous, when talking about the film—the lead in a Tarantino movie, a career peak after nearly 35 years in the business? Who would have thought. “You almost can’t take it on board, it’s like too big, in a way,” she says. “It sounds so trite to say ‘dream come true’ but for an actor, it really is, and especially this time in my career.” The Hated Eight will introduce a new generation of filmgoers to Leigh’s unique ability to shape shift into the embodiment of pure ravaged emotion, conveying a mountain’s weight of darkness with one sideways glance. It’s a fact -- no one in Hollywood does ‘flawed’ quite like Jennifer Jason Leigh.

We meet at an English pub in Hollywood called the Pikey, a dimly lit, red leather booth kind of joint that serves gourmet fish n chips and Guinness. Wearing beige and cream layers and a little summer hat, she could not be more low key if she tried—it’s a running joke that she is one of the least recognized actresses in Hollywood, unless she’s being mistaken for her doppelganger, Ally Sheedy. Her ability to fly beneath the radar is surprising when you consider her work, so much of it iconic, and critically acclaimed. The tragically numb prostitute Tralala in Last Exit to Brooklyn; the waify, unfixable junkie Sadie in Georgia (she dropped to 89 lbs for that role), the sociopathic roommate in Single White Female , and the naïve virgin Stacie in 80s high school movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High are just some of her most memorable roles. Leigh’s characters are complex, broken women, maybe boozed up, sometimes strung out. The narrative thread is clear—Leigh’s girls are flawed but fierce, and the wily prisoner Daisy Domergue, her character in The Hateful Eight, fits perfectly into the mold.

The story behind the film is worth a film itself—Tarantino wrote the script in 2013, but when the script was leaked in January 2014, he decided not to make the film, but write it as a novel instead. In April 2014 he held a reading of the script at the Ace hotel in downtown LA, and it was so successful he decided he would indeed make it as a film. The part of Daisy was among the most coveted in Hollywood--Michelle Williams, Hilary Swank, Robin Wright and Demi Moore were reportedly chasing the part. It was announced that Leigh had won the starring role in October 2014, playing a tough prisoner who is wanted for murder and due to hang for her crimes. “Hateful Eight” is set in Wyoming following the Civil War. The story follows two bounty hunters, Daisy, and a local sheriff as they wait for a storm to pass in a small haberdashers’ shop with four men who, it’s possible, may be attempting to free the prisoner.

“There’s a certain innocence to Daisy because she is so animalistic in a certain way, relying on her instincts and her smarts,” says Leigh. “She’s very present and in the moment, because she’s chained and is being brought to be hanged, so she doesn’t known if she is going to be able to get out of this or not. It’s all life or death, so every moment for her she is so alive and so in the present because she’s got nothing to lose—that’s really exciting to play. I feel like in a certain way there’s a bit of that in Sadie Flood (Georgia) and Tralala (Last Exit). People who live on the fringes of society but have very deep loyalties and connections.”

The only female among a cast of heavyweight males—Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Channing Tatum, Bruce Dern, Walton Goggins and Demian Bichir—her cast mates joked that she was the most hateful of the eight. “All the guys were kidding me that I was the scariest person in the room, that I was the most terrifying in a way. I do think that vulnerability combined with wildness in a woman can feel very dangerous.” In contrast to the roles she so often plays, Leigh does not consider herself wild, reckless or dangerous.  In real life, she is quiet, an observer, someone who considers things before jumping in—“unemotional”, she says. “I’m so different to the roles I play, and perhaps that’s why they are appealing to me as an actor. But I would never want to inhabit my characters’ shoes in real life.”

Her ability to convey emotional responses she may never have actually had is based partly on raw talent and method acting, of course. But some of it she attributes to having watched her sister, Carrie, struggle with the drug addiction that brought her to the edge of disaster. Usually fiercely guarded about her private life, Leigh is open when it comes to discussing Carrie, who was a heroin addict for 13 years. Leigh was in her late teens when Carrie was first admitted to rehab, shortly after Fast Times, and by this point, already profoundly influenced by the sickness and dysfunction she had witnessed in her sister. “I think a lot of my personality was formed as a child by watching Carrie,” she says. “She had a lot of temper tantrums, which made me want to be the opposite. I didn’t want attention, I wanted to be the good girl, so I would go clean my room while she was causing havoc.” She never allowed herself to express anger or be explosive as a child, “but I could allow it through acting, in a very safe way where I wasn’t hurting anyone or causing damage.”

Leigh was born in Los Angeles, in 1962, into a Hollywood family—her mother is the screenwriter Barbara Turner (she penned the script to Georgia) and her father the late actor Vic Morrow.  She was three years younger than Carrie. “I think she started using drugs when she was 13 years old, really young,” says Leigh. “I have memories of her smoking cigarettes at the age of six, actually. We lived on a dead end street and I remember her cutting her own hair and smoking cigarettes.”

Growing up with showbiz parents, being a Hollywood actress never felt like a far fetched dream for Leigh. After a few non-speaking roles and some TV movies (including  one in which she played an anorexic teenager) she landed her first film role, playing a blind, deaf, and mute rape victim in the 1981 slasher pic, Eyes of a Stranger. After that, she quit school to focus on film full time.  “I knew I wanted to act from a very young age, but it also seemed that’s what people did when you grow up in Hollywood. It’s the industry of this town so it didn’t seem like this far off and faraway dream, it seemed like that’s what people did when they grew up. Like if you worked at a railroad town you would work at the railroad. It felt very natural for me.”

Leigh has a tough time remembering dates, specifics about her past, and can remember feelings much more easily. It’s hard to imagine what 1982 must have felt like for her, a year marked by public success and private tragedy. 1982 was the year Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, based on Cameron Crowe’s undercover infiltration of high school politics. It featured the debut performance of Nicholas Cage, and the late, great film critic Roger Ebert singled out Leigh. "Don't they know they have a star on their hands?" he wrote. It was only her second film role, and people still come up to her in the street, quoting lines from the movie that she can’t even remember saying. “I think Cameron Crowe wrote a great script and Amy did a great job casting and directing it, so that it ended up really capturing a time and specific time. It is strangely real. And very simple.”  She gained a best friend on that shoot, her co-star Phoebe Cates. “Phoebe and I still talk all the time. We talk about everything.”

1982 was also the year her father Vic Morrow died, under the strangest and most tragic circumstances. Her mother and Morrow had already separated, and Leigh had estranged herself from him in the wake of that, changing her last name as a teenager to avoid being publicly associated with her dad. They were still estranged when he was killed on the set of The Twilight Zone movie, after a stunt helicopter crashed on him and two child actors.

Shortly after, her sister went to rehab for the first time—and not the last. “The way I understand addiction, from all the rehabs I went through with my sister, is that  some people are born with less of an ability to handle anxiety. So they’ll do anything to quell it.” She recalls group therapy where all the family would sit in a circle and announce themselves, and “share”. Excruciatingly shy, she had to steel herself for those moments. “It’s very hard for me to speak in front of a room full of strangers but if I have a reason or being there—like, because I’m on camera—it’s different.”

Through witnessing her sister’s struggles, Leigh developed an understanding of the addict’s mind, and of self-destructive thought processes. Also, a subconscious desire to exorcise those memories, and perhaps get closer to her sister’s experience, through her acting. (nb: Carrie made a full recovery and became a drug counselor).

And so began a career of playing damaged, neurotic characters. In the 80s these roles included a virginal princess kidnapped and raped by mercenaries in Flesh + Blood, which, of all the films she has done, was the first one Tarantino brought up. The nineties began with one of her most iconic roles, Tralala, the prostitutes who is famously gang raped in Last Exit to Brooklyn, adapted from the novel by Hubert Selby Jnr. “Tralala…she’s really very innocent,” says Leigh. “She plays all this toughness and all this knowledge, but really she’s a child. Amoral not immoral.” As Leigh’s fan, the late Roger Ebert pointed out, “Leigh has played a lot of prostitutes in her career, but each one is different because she defines them by how they are needed as well as by what they need.”

She met the story’s author, Hubert Selby Jnr. , and he helped her crack one of the biggest difficulties she was having with the part, namely, Tralala’s infamous walk. “He told me, the walk comes from rage. She’s fucking angry. And so once I could tap onto what was psychologically propelling, I got it. As opposed to working with a choreographer or a dance teacher, he helped me own it from the inside. The director was thrilled.”

Last Exit was followed by Leigh’s crossover into mainstream film, starting with firefighting drama Backdraft, then Rush, then Single White Female, a box office hit in which she memorably plays a woman who becomes obsessed with her roommate, borrowing her clothing, hair style, boyfriend…it’s one her creepiest performances ever. “I think it tapped into something that people are afraid of and many people have experienced. It was a fun role to play.”

Her greatest critical acclaim came with her portrayal of Sadie Flood in Georgia, the movie written by her mom. For the role, Leigh dropped to 90 pounds (41 kg) because, as she had witnessed first-hand, “There really aren’t many fat junkies, although I guess they are out there. Mostly, heroin addicts don’t eat. So I had a very specific diet--two poached eggs on toast every morning. Salad with a baked potato with butter and sour cream, and dinner was plain yoghurt and string cheese. Once in a while I would have a cheeseburger and fries. And that’s it. I was emaciated.”

She was cast as blacklisted writer, flapper and American satirist Dorothy Parker, (who wrote the original A Star is Born) in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, after Robert Altman introduced her to the film’s director, …who was struck by Leigh’s physical resemblance to Parker, once (and perhaps still) the wittiest woman America has ever produced. The film was incredibly hard to raise money for, as no one believed there was a market for a film about a woman of letters. Altman came on board and put his own money into the production, the during which Leigh

remained in character, on and off set. Entertainment Weekly called it the “love it or hate it performance of 1994”.

In 2001, she met the director Noah Baumbach while starring on Broadway in Proof. At the time he was relatively unknown in film, but would go on to co-write The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson. Leigh and Baumbach married in 2005, the same year that his film The Squid and the Whale came out to great acclaim. She starred in starred in his 2007 film Margot at the Wedding, alongside Nicole Kidman. She and Baumbach welcomed their son, Rohmer, into the world in 2010, the same year he made the film Greenberg, starring Ben Stiller and so-called Mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig. When Baumbach and Leigh separated after nine years, he and Gerwig became both a couple and a writing team. The tabloids couldn't help themselves: “Jennifer Jason Leigh is a single white female again,” they crowed.

A single white female having the last laugh, so it seems. The Hateful Eight was, for Leigh, one of those highs that she never thought she’d have again, not since her first movies perhaps. The kind where you cry when you say good-bye to the cast. “I had no idea how tired I was because we were on such a high during filming. I miss Daisy and Quentin and all the guys and everyone who worked on the movie. I physically and emotionally miss everyone. The movie was an exceptionally glorious time—I  hadn’t had that in a long time. Every single cast member cried when we had the final shot…it was that precious an experience.”

Her son Rohmer, fell in love with Samuel L. Jackson. So much so, it was hard for him to accept that the character Jackson was playing might be…bad. “He kept saying Sam is good, isn’t he mom? He’s good, right? And I had to say ‘yes, Sam is good’. I mean, no one’s good though, really. Everyone has one part of them that is their flaw. And in movies, that is the part you care about.”

FICTION: "The Audition" For Nikki Finke's HollywoodDementia.com

A desperate director discovers a skateboarding muse clued up on Melvin Van Peebles, John Waters and Kubrick. Originally published here.

It is 113 degrees in Downtown Los Angeles. El Salvadoran parking lot attendants stuff their pockets with cans of ice cold Coke Zero, enjoying the cool moisture on brown skin. I’m not there, of course; I’m a few miles northwest, chillaxing in the shade by my infinity pool. You can see the smog hovering above the city from my 1938 estate, a panoramic airborne sludge of green, orange and dirty white, a cap of toxic waste floating all the way from Downtown to Century City. I sniff -- even up here in these Hollywood hills, the air has a faint whiff of bongwater, especially on hot days. I like it, it makes me feel relaxed. So I close my eyes, rest my hand on my crotch and imagine how my obituary will read.

“Remembering Desmond Furie, born on June 16, 19--, a super fucking cool independent film director, screenwriter, producer, set decorator, cinematographer, actor, who established himself with one teen exploitation movie in 1997, a genre-defining masterpiece of experimental storytelling called A Minor, and then he made another cool film that was equally amazing (we’ll insert the name later – Ed.) Every year since then he observed himself grow further and further removed from the youthful subject matter that had made his name until today, the first day of his sixth decade, when he languishes in loose-skinned decrepitude, exacerbated by years of drug experimentation. His favorite song was “I Just Can’t Be Happy Today” by The Damned. His final words were…’It’s a trap!’ Did we mention he was cool?

The kids love my shit, always have, because it’s real. It speaks to them. My work is nasty like bongwater smog, I show them giving head, getting head, doing whippets, shooting up, doing the shit they actually dig.

Do you know what it feels like to peak on your first project? Do you, though?

Google Maps says it’s gonna take me 20 minutes to get to the intersection of Washington and Crenshaw, which is where Caviar lives.

Caviar is a rapper. Caviar’s my only hope.

A Minor happened and suddenly everybody knew my name. I’m getting money thrown at me by Japanese clothing brands, by indie boutiques in Paris, Hedi Slimane wants to bro down, Terry Richardson is taking my photo for i_D magazine, Courtney Love and Winona and Kate Moss want to chill with Desmond. What’s next, everyone wanted to know.

What’s next? Fucked if I know. I mean, I had never thought that far ahead.

My manager, TC, always asking — what’s next? Fuck you, I said. I’m an artist. My creativity adheres to no calendar, except its own. Between you and me though, the truth was…I had blown my creative load. Then some asshole in the trades said shit like “Could it be that Desmond Furie’s notorious directorial debut would also be his swan song?” And that’s when I started getting high. 

I open my eyes, see that the sun has set. My Rooibus tea is cold, so I dump the dregs into the infinity pool. One time, on a particularly dark night of the soul, I tried to guesstimate how long it would take me to drown in it. Like three minutes? Eight minutes? How long before my heart stopped beating, after my lungs had filled up with water? An hour? Whatever the answer, it was definitely less time than it takes for me to come up with a good idea.

This creative anxiety is crippling, I tell you. I’ve tried to remain positive about my little thoughts of suicide. They’re a motivator, a reminder that I don’t got this, that something needs to change. An egomaniacal artistic mind trapped in a state of torpor — there is no more twisted fate. One day I did the math. It’s a simple equation: creative dysfunction + isolation = wanting to kill myself. I couldn’t do anything about the creative dysfunction. But the isolation, I could address. I decided to get a girlfriend.

Her name is Tiara Loomis, she’s an actress, and she is 22. I met her in AA. She said she was a fan of A Minor. Duh, I thought. I am not hurting for pussy, and never have. It got crazy when social media started up -- LiveChat, Buzznet, Yahoo Chat, MySpace (before it got lame), Facebook, Twitter and of course, Insta — suddenly I was getting pussy and tittie pics from girls all around the world, every day. The Russians…the Russians.

But in my opinion, LA girls are the best. They get it, those bitches are creative too, even the groupie types usually got something creative and interesting going on, some kind of t-shirt line with their best friend or they’re stylists or they take photos of bands or they write haikus and web series and hour-long dramedies or some shit.

Tiara came over, read my tarot cards, told me my chakras were blocked, and fucked me like she was being paid for it. She promised she would never leave me, so I let her move in.

But things were starting to feel strained between us. She said I was boring, my negative hyper-emo outlook was interfering with her ability to create or some shit. A few months ago she stopped wanting to bone. Then last week, the worst — she called me “grumpy cat”.

“FUCK GRUMPY CAT!!!” I screamed.

“Exactly!” she yelled back, looking like a mad Asian Disney princess.

Today she's in Milan, meeting with some fashion designer about modeling in the Fall/Winter campaign. I mean, she didn’t need to go, it’s not like she needs the fucking money. She went to get away from me.

It’s obvious —even though I directed her favorite film of all time, bottom line, my girlfriend doesn’t think I’m cool any more. Fuck.

I thought about Eve, my first girlfriend. She was 12 when we met. She had these eyes, blue-white like a wolf’s. Her eyebrows were white and she wore a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and short shorts. She gave me vodka and told me I was cool, and when my fingers brushed against her push-up bra, suddenly everything seemed OK again, even though mom was dead and grandma was crazy and dad was taking me to his AA meetings where the old alcoholics always asked me “you getting laid?” I was what, 10? After that day with Eve, I could finally look those old alcoholics in the eye and say “yes”.

When Grandma gave me my first camera, Eve really encouraged me to use it. I got pretty good at taking pictures, mainly of myself and Eve and the other hood rats. Kids just got used to having me and my camera around, and after a while it was like I was invisible. They let me take pictures of everything they did. Pictures of things that weren’t supposed to happen. Things we did when our moms and dads weren’t looking.

Eve was my girlfriend for years. She sent my stuff to some hip magazines and they liked it. The weirder, the more fucked up, the better, they said. I was making a name for myself. “You should make a feature film,” Eve told me. “Leave town, be a director, go to New York, Hollywood.” I knew she wasn’t coming with me, and I never saw her again after I left.

It took several years for me to get established. By the time the script for A Minor came around I was already well into my 30s. A very hot skater called Foot Head collab’d with me on the A Minor script. (When I say he was “Hot” I mean zeitgeistally hot, of the moment, au courant. Not “hot” as in fuckable — I don’t mess with boys, contrary to the rumors.)

But I was still super down with the program. I knew what was up, and my fans were the coolest kids in town.

I slouch into the kitchen, check my phone. “MU”, I had texted Tiara several hours ago. I saw the “read” receipt. No answer.

Anxiety rises in my chest, so I take off my silver locket and open it up. Once upon a time I kept it filled with cocaine. Today, it contains a blend of pure, high-grade valerian root powder. “Nature’s downer,” Tiara says. I snort a bump of V, shower, and get dressed. I put on a black Chelsea Wolfe concert tee, black ACNE denim, black VANS and prescription self-correcting sunglasses and get into my black Audi. I set the air conditioning to “max”. Kendrick Lamarr, Christian Death and Japanese experimental noise on shuffle.

Some British music writer had sent me some of Caviar’s videos. His shit was psycho, next level. Both visually and lyrically, this kid’s vision was deep. He reminded me of myself when I was 16 — wherever he’s not supposed to go is where he’s at. Rape, scat, swastikas, anal in graveyards, the occult, the KKK, Chola girls, depression, Buddhism, unicorn sex — these were the things he rapped about.

How some African American skater kid from South Central could be clued up on Crowley and Jodorowsky and Jung and Melvin Van Peebles and John Waters and Kubrick and Spike Lee and Les Blank made no sense to me. It was like he had a direct line to my own lifetime’s worth of pop culture influences, the difference being — he was 44 years younger.

Maybe it was the internet, making it easy for these Millennial motherfuckers to appropriate everything that’s cool with just a click. I wished it had been that easy for me. But I knew Caviar wasn’t just some poser. He was the real deal. I wanted in. I wanted him.

There was one YouTube video in particular, in which Caviar performed some kind of occult ceremony on his friends. His eyes bled tears and his teeth fell out and all the children collapsed on top of one another on the dirty floor of some shit house.

16 years old. What was his problem, why did he hate everything so much, I wondered? I looked into the dark, angry eyes staring back at me on the computer screen and felt a warm kinship. “This kid doesn’t want to be alive any more than I do,” I realized, happy.

I did not know what had happened to Caviar, why he was filled with the same dark fear that dwelled in me. Maybe he too had lost his momma before he had even a chance to get to know her. Maybe he had unwittingly shoved his protégé into the arms of death, much like I had with Foot Head.

There were no amends to be made there, and I would carry that with me for the rest of my life.

Foot Head was looking for a new high. We met up in Seattle and I scored him some blow. No big. The cocaine in Seattle had always sucked but around that time was when they were cutting it with that animal de-wormer levamisole that metabolized into some lethal shit in your body and wound up killing a bunch of people one summer. Foot Head  was one of them. I was so bummed I went back to LA and scored some street dope in Downtown, and as luck would have it, I was busted by undercover.

TC, my manager, said he had had enough. “One more arrest and you’re finished,” he said. That’s when I, Desmond Furie, legendary for my resistance to sobriety, finally decided to get clean.

I worked the Steps alongside all the other A-list out-of-work substance fiends in town, admitting I was powerless over alcohol, acknowledging that my life had become unmanageable, and realizing that I was, on most days, the oldest motherfucker in the room. I made all kinds of amends, including financial amends to the church goers in Portland whose holy water I had spiked with LSD that one time. They were going to prosecute but said they’d prefer a sizable annual donation instead.

The summer I got sober the fires burned the green slopes around my home, charring the chaparral gardens of Dante’s View and Captain’s Roost. That brush fire was the last time I had felt excited about anything. Until Caviar.

This morning, I sent TC a text. “I think I have my new movie.”

Caviar was elusive — no contact info on his blog — but I managed to track him down by asking my publicist, who also represents GZA and the Wu, to Tweet at Caviar. Before long, I had the kid’s phone number.

“Tell him to meet me at my grandmother’s hair salon,” Caviar tweeted back. I knew better than to try calling him — kids only take phone calls these days if they think someone has died.

As I drive, I picture him throwing his skateboard to the ground, using his left leg like an oar to propel himself down the street. Steady, with the clack-clack of hard wheels on concrete, burning through neighborhood after neighborhood, drowsy pink bougainvillea rustling as he shoots by.

I pull into a strip mall occupied by a liquor store, a bar, and a hairdressing salon called Addictionz. Caviar is waiting for me, sitting on the curb, his skateboard rolling from side to side beneath his sneakers.

The whole city is burning up, but Caviar’s hat is on, floppy ears absorbing the rivulets of sweat that tumble from his temples.

As I get out of my car the look on his face says it all — “some old director dude wants to meet me today, and my manager says I should just do it.”

He sees right through me, and I know it. Fuck.

I watch Caviar pull out a bundle of keys and unlock the door to the salon. Inside, ragged leather chairs are haphazardly positioned in front of dusty mirrors. The lighting is unforgiving. Styrofoam heads in full makeup are crowned with cheap wigs on a shelf. There is no air conditioning and I feel my body heat billow beneath my tee shirt, warming my silver locket as I follow Caviar into a small apartment at the back. It smells yeasty in there, like old cheeseburgers.

A framed portrait of Jesus Christ sits on the mantle. The cheap bamboo blinds are drawn all the way down and the kitchen surfaces are grimy. An eviction notice on the counter makes me wonder where Caviar’s grandmother is, and if she is older than me.

“I really dig your rhymes,” I say, feeling like a dumbass the second the words leave my mouth. Caviar doesn't respond. His silence hurts my feelings. Why isn’t he speaking? Why am I here? Doesn’t he know who I am?

“I forgot to jerk off today,” are the first words out of his mouth.

I sigh, relax, and laugh.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Caviar smiles and pulls a blender out of the cupboard. He takes a bag out of his pocket and waves it in the air. It contains at least an ounce of weed.

“I don’t get high any more,” I tell him. He smiles.

“That’s too bad.”

Caviar pours the weed into the blender. I wonder why. He seems intent, focused, as he opens up his backpack, pulling more plastic baggies from its depths. Powders, herbs, pills and liquids; he drops them all into the glass jug. Another baggie, filled with a yellowy white powder of unknown composition. Next up, a green liquid. Robitussin. Next up, another brand of cough medicine, this time red.

Caviar pours the whole bottle into the blender.

“One time we were shooting in TJ,” I say. “I mean, shooting a film — and in the regular drug stores they sell everything — like, everything. Morphine, dialudid, oxycotin whatever. And the beer’s cheap as shit. You ever been to TJ?”

I knew Caviar was going to make me drink whatever that evil poisonous concoction he was making. Every single possible Class A, B and C substance on earth is in that smoothie. I mean, I have done a lot of drugs in my life —but never all of them at once.

I watch Caviar walk to the fridge, pull out a 24 oz Pabst Blue Ribbon, open it with his teeth, and spit the cap onto the floor. He pours the remaining beer into the blender.  The mixture is alive, foaming, mottled pink and gross and green, looking like the smog as viewed from my infinity pool. The lid goes on the appliance, and Caviar hits “blend”.

A few minutes later, Caviar pours the mixture into two red plastic cups, and hands one to me.

Under the heat of Caviar’s glare, I recall the deranged eyes of the armed Congolese border patrolman he met in 2002, back when I was still traveling international brothels and getting high.  My guide had urged him to remove his Aviator sunglasses — “Mr Furie, take them off, it will placate.” And it had worked. It had placated. I take off my prescription self correcting sunglasses and make true eye contact with Caviar for the first time. Shit. No placation possible. He can sense my desperation, he knows I need him more than he needs me. This situation is already out of control.

“You with me now?” Caviar says, holding out the cup, holding my gaze. “'Cause I only work with family.”

I think about family for a second. Father dead. Mother dead. Sister obese. Tiara fucking Italian lesbians. TC isn’t returning my calls. The only family I have are the kids. The little psycho scumbags who understand me, because I understand them. Because I am down with the program. That’s my family, right there.

I look into Caviar’s eyes, black holes even darker than they had been on the screen in the YouTube video.

He swallows from his cup, slow and hard. His Adam’s apple throbs. He gives no fucks. He’s crazier than I am. He’s all I have, and he’s waiting for me to prove what we both need to be true.

That I am cool.

“Shit. I could be catering to some bitch right now.” Caviar is losing patience.

My hand is shaking. I grip the red cup, and ready myself. I down the mixture, vile chemicals numbing my gums. A few seconds later I lunge toward the kitchen sink and throw up.

Fade to black.

About 15 minutes or 15 hours later — who knows — I realize Caviar and I have left the salon. We are in a liquor store. These are the only hard facts I can establish.

I am experiencing a familiar kind of delirium, the kind in which panic is accompanied by extreme physical ineptitude.

I search for my silver valerian locket, and my hands feel like paddles as they try to open the antique clasp.  I pour the contents of the locket into my mouth, and it tastes like the vilest most ancient cinnamon.

My eyes are wide open, I think, and yet my vision keeps shutting down every few seconds, like a camera shutter. Liquor store, black, tube lighting, black, Cheetos, black, store clerk, black. Store. Clerk. Store. Jerk.

I stumble over to the guy behind the counter. “Hey jerk. I need all your plant-based sedatives,” I say, aware of a cloud of valerian puffing from my mouth. I cling to the counter for balance.

Before he can answer, I feel Caviar’s arms around me, dragging me out of the liquor store. I collapse on his wiry frame and he laughs, and I am amazed he can walk without clinging to the walls. Balance and gravity are foreign concepts, echoes of a time long forgotten.

Caviar lies me down and from the hard discomfort in my back I intuit that I am lying on his skateboard. My arms and legs are splayed as I feel my body in motion. Caviar is pushing me along the sidewalk. I wish I could lift my arms, but I can’t, so my fingernails scrape on the sidewalk.  Clack, clack.This is no way to travel, I decide, the words appearing in a thought bubble above my head. Clack, clack.

I wonder where my iPhone is. I wonder if Tiara has texted back, if TC is coming to get me. I can’t get arrested again, I just can’t. Even for this kid.

I am aware of light, dark, approximate shapes, vomit and now the blood which seems to be pouring from my nose.  How did that happen? A scream. Who’s screaming? Am I screaming? Maybe I am.

My mind fills with gospel music and thoughts of old people on motorized scooters. So. Many. Thoughts. Government is not the solution and government is not the problem. Medicare is socialized medicine. I am on Medicare right now you motherfuckers and you’re going to pay for it.

“Um…you guys OK?”

A shadow leans over me. I’m still prostate on Caviar’s skateboard and Caviar is a few yards away, peeing in a mailbox.

“We need PVC pipe, PVC primer, a drill and some Aquanet, for ignition,” I say, remembering how fun it was when me and Eve would sneak out and shoot potato guns, getting high off the tubular thunk the potatoes made as they traveled to the stars. “And potatoes, lots of potatoes. We need to defend ourselves.”

The shadow backs away, slowly.

I looks up at the stars, remembering what my birthday horoscope said that morning. “No pressure, Libra, but as things are now, you might want to evaluate your career. Is it working out well?”

My phone. Here it is. Why can’t I downward scroll? What the fuck is wrong with my iPhone? I dial a number. Any number. Someone answers.

“Eve…we don’t have Aquanet,” I whisper.

“Desmond? Are you high?”

“Eve?”

“No Desmond, it’s TC. I’m at dinner. Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m in Crenshaw. I found our kid. I found him, TC. It’s going to be great.”

“You’re high, aren’t you Desmond. Fuck!”

“I’m higher than any human being, ever.”

“Fantastic. OK, well let me make this crystal clear, Desmond.”

“Uh huh?”

“I’m done with you. Done. Don’t ever call me again. Asshole.”

TC hangs up.

Talk about a buzzkill, man. I get up slowly, pick up the skateboard, and look around. I’m feeling strangely lucid. Clarity.

Fuck TC. Fuck Hollywood. Fuck Grumpy Cat being more popular than I am. I’m going to make this film with Caviar, on my own, and release it on my website, no distributors, no BS. My fans can pay to download the film, and I’ll shoot the fuckin’ thing on my iphone and crowdfund the entire production on Kickstarter. You can get those Moondog lenses and attach them to smart phones, that Filmic Pro app. Fuck RED. Fuck everything.

I’ll sell my house. Because my infinity pool is the least indie, least cool thing that ever happened to me. I’ll move into a studio apartment in Siverlake. Or better, Boyle Heights. I am an independent filmmaker on the cutting edge, a 60 year old teenager and my life is my fucking art. Where is he?

I get on the skateboard, push off. Clack clack. There’s a breeze…sweet Jesus there’s a breeze running through what remains of my hair.

“Caviar?”

He’s chillaxing on the grass in front of me. Lying down, taking a break. I sit down, look at the kid. His skin is gray under the light of the moon. Foam oozes from the corner of his mouth. I press my ear to his chest. The heartbeat is an irregular thunk, thunk, like potatoes in the sky.

Having OD’d more times than I can remember, I know it’s not looking good for the kid.

TC’s words echo in my head “one more arrest, Desmond, and you’re finished.” I know I have to do what’s right. So I get up, look around, and walk away.

I use my iPhone to find my car, which is still parked in front of the salon, a couple blocks away. Thank God for technology I think as I get back in my Audi, still high as fuck but more inspired than I have been in years.

Maybe I should make some music videos, I think, driving home, blasting Kendrick Lamarr, Christian Death and Japanese experimental noise on shuffle. My eyes are wide in the rear view mirror.

Yes. Desmond Furie, still here. Fuck Grumpy Cat. Life’s cool.

Molly Ringwald for AnOther magazine

 Molly Ringwald’s oldest daughter Mathilda was six years old when she first exhibited some unusually sophisticated musical tastes for a child. “I would ask her, ‘who do you like better, the Stones or the Beatles?’, and she would say ‘actually, I prefer the Kinks’,” says Ringwald, over lunch at a bistro in Venice Beach, California. After exploring the canon of 1960s rock, Mathilda fell into a Top 40 rabbit hole, getting lost in Lady Gaga and Katy Perry for some years. Then one day she woke up and realised - she was bored. She had outgrown pop music... she missed the Kinks; she found herself increasingly drawn to the work of slick multiinstrumentalist Andrew Bird. Mathilda’s tastes run unusually hip for the average ten-year-old. She is without doubt her mother’s daughter, her mother being one of the hippest kids America ever produced.

With her head of rust-coloured hair and plump lips that she was perpetually biting, Ringwald ruled the multiplexes in the 80s, in three movies made by writer/director/producer John Hughes. They were classic films about youth, made for youth: Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986). Sixteen Candles, about a girl whose family forgets her sixteenth birthday, launched Ringwald as a serious box-office attraction, leading to The Breakfast Club, which mined five classic American high school stereotypes – the brain, the jock, the kook, the princess (played by Ringwald) and the criminal. The movie was quickly hailed a classic of the “Brat Pack” genre. Last in the trio was Pretty in Pink, starring Ringwald as Andie and Andrew McCarthy and Jon Cryer as her two suitors: Blane (the rich kid) and Duckie (the lovable desperado) respectively. But Ringwald was always the main draw, and by the time Pretty in Pink came out, grossing a smash $12.4 million in just ten days, Ringwald was fully established as the poster child for an entire generation of Gen X youth, elevating high school prom politics into a metaphor for the injustices of society. Her young female fans (one critic called them “the Ringlets”) copied her post-punk flapper style, and lusted after the lace-up equestrian boots she wore in The Breakfast Club.

“Do you want to know my dream man, my favourite colours or what I read on the John?” she asked a People magazine reporter visiting the set of Pretty in Pink. Barely 18, she was already bored of the press asking her questions that insulted her keen – and as-yet unappreciated – intelligence. It was a media feeding frenzy. When Time magazine ran their 1986 cover story on Ringwald, “movie star and exemplary California teen”, they quoted Molly’s mom Adele talking about the obsessive fans who would track them down at their ordinary suburban home in northern Los Angeles. “Sometimes (they) get the address and drive by real slow and stare, but then, I guess, they say, ’Naw, that can’t be Molly Ringwald’s house.”

By the late 80s, Ringwald was pursuing more adult roles and venturing quite naturally into the next stage of her career. Her impressive performances in post- Hughes productions garnered critical acclaim, such as her role as Frannie Goldsmith in the 1994 television mini-series The Stand and her interpretation of Sally Bowles in the Broadway production of Cabaret from 2001 to 2002. But the public simply wasn’t willing to let Molly grow up, and the media frenzy subsided. Luckily, Ringwald retained a sense of humour about it all, gamely playing along with parodies of the 80s teensploitation films that she had come to represent. Not Another Teen Movie (2001) drew heavily on the most popular American teen films of the 1980s and 1990s, in particular the Hughes films. Ringwald makes a cameo appearance as a flight attendant who appears at the film’s climax, in which Jake (Chris Evans) is attempting to convince Janey (Chyler Leigh) – a character modelled on Ringwald’s Andie Walsh - not to leave him to go to France (where Ringwald moved in 1992). When the two lovers make up their differences, Ringwald’s character turns to the camera and breaks the fourth wall. “We all know where this is going,” she deadpans. “Fucking teenagers.”

Fast forward to the present, and Ringwald’s spectral 1980s persona continues to exist seemingly independent from who she is today, which is a mother, author and singer. In 2010, she published her first book, Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family, and Finding the Perfect Lipstick, in which she sagely outlines her philosophies on hair, make-up and such. “I have a theory of hair colour that is not unlike my overall theory of life. There is a magical colour that you have around the age of five. If you can, never stray too far from this colour.” In her second book, When it Happens to You, she ventures into literary fiction with a series of interconnected short stories that are a pleasure to read. Widely acclaimed, the book earned her a new hypenate – Molly Ringwald, “teen icon” was now Molly Ringwald, “literary ingénue”. Set in Los Angeles, the story’s interweaving eight chapters deal with betrayal, estrangement and reconciliation, its characters moving in and out of each other’s lives in deft and surprising ways. She wrote the book because, as her therapist commanded, “stop dating writers, and just write!” (Her husband, Panio Gianopoulos, is an author, as was her first husband Valery Lameignère.)

“I’ve always written,” she explains. “I never knew I was necessarily going to do it professionally. I think being in New York and being around so many writers, it just was calling to me. And then I thought, well, I’ll just write non-fiction.” It took her a while before she felt confident enough to share her writing. “A lot of it had to do with the idea of an actor writing. I thought that was going to be unacceptable to people. Then it got to the point where I was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck. Why do I care what other people think?’”

She had felt confined by her film career, nervous about being taken seriously as anything other than Molly Ringwald, the actress. “In show business particularly, people can’t wrap their heads around the fact that we might be able to do more than one thing.” Both books have sold well, and the second has been widely praised. Renowned novelist A.M. Homes said “not many people can advance a narrative so invisibly” , as reported in the New Yorker. Close on the heels of When it Happens to You was the release of Ringwald’s jazz album Except Sometimes, which she has been touring through art centres and jazz clubs around America. Comprised of Ringwald’s sultry interpretations of jazz and Broadway standards, the closing track is a cover version of Simple Minds’s “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” which John Hughes fans remember as the closing song on The Breakfast Club soundtrack. She dedicated her recording “to the memory of J.H.”.

Though the album was released in April 2013, in fact Ringwald had been honing her voice since the age of three, when she would sit on her blind jazz pianist father Bob Ringwald’s lap, and sing along. She recorded her first album at the age of six. There weren’t that many printed, but she has a copy. “Then the other day someone came to a gig with a bootleg recording of me aged three, singing with this band called “Sugar” Willie and the Cubes. It blew my mind that I could have been that girl.” Long before she became an actress, she considered herself a singer. When she was nine years old a musician friend of her father’s suggested that she try out for the first West Coast production of Annie. She auditioned and got a part in the chorus – her first professional job. After Annie, she auditioned for a show that would become The Facts of Life, got an agent and landed her first movie at age 13. When she was 15 she met John Hughes, and the rest is history.

To this day, every time she does an interview, the conversation inevitably returns to the work she did as a teenager. They ask whether she secretly wished that Andie, her character in Pretty in Pink, had gotten with Duckie instead of Blane (“I am Team Spader,” she says, referring to the film’s yuppie creep, played by James Spader). They ask which was her favourite film of the three Hughes movies (she says The Breakfast Club to watch; Sixteen Candles to make). They still ask about her style inspirations in the 80s (she was a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald and used to scour vintage clothing stores to find clothes she thought his heroines would wear). But what is the question she hears most of all? “Do I still stay in contact with the people that I made the movies with,” sighs Ringwald. And what’s her stock answer? “Um, you know… no. Occasionally we run into each other, but people have this feeling because they see the films all the time on television that we are just like hanging out still. Sometimes I feel like I am sort of disappointing people in a way, because we have moved on and we all have different lives.”

Her words echo the promotional poster slogan for Sixteen Candles: “It’s the time of your life that may last a lifetime,” or the thoughtfully penned New York Times obituary Ringwald wrote for John Hughes when he passed away in 2009. “I will always be the girl whose sixteenth birthday is forgotten”. “You have to understand, I am asked about those movies every single time I do an interview,” she says. “It’s hard because people want to focus so much on what I did as a teenager, because that was what propelled me to this sort of icon status. But it was a long time ago and I have never really been that interested in the past as much as I am in the future. “It’s also really hard to remember exactly what happened, even. It has been written about so much, and as we now know, the more you remember something, the more the memory changes. I don’t know how much I actually remember, and how much has just gone into this popular mythology. It’s really hard. I think one day when I sit down and write my definitive memoirs I am going to have to get in there and try to remember that time, because right now it feels so polluted with everyone else’s memories.”

Writing in the Cultural Studies Review, scholar Christina Lee analyses the Ringwald phase of the 1980s thusly: “It carries such emotional gravity for the youth of then and now that the actor has transcended her own existence to become a rare phenomenon, an image that encapsulates a moment so deeply that it has literally shaped pop culture history and is crucial to how it is remembered by the youth of that era. Nostalgic strolls down the 1980s memory lane are traced through the trajectory of a Ringwald-Hughes plot like a geographical map. Molly Ringwald meant something more than just a teenage takeover of the multiplex. Popular culture, popular memories and fandom have grounded the actor’s identity, fictional and real, in time and her place within it in which she is no longer just an abstraction of the 1980s. Molly Ringwald was the 1980s… it is a stalemate that consigns her to reliving her teenage years over and over again.” Ringwald understands that it’s hard for fans to adjust as the star they love moves on, changes. She’s even guilty of it herself. “It’s funny, I was looking at Viva, the actress who was a Warhol superstar, on Facebook. I’m friends with her daughter. Anyway I had the same sort of feelings, wondering if she was still best friends with any of the people she met at the Factory, like do they just all hang out together and talk about Warhol? I just assume that because they were part of this moment in time that they must have just stayed really tight. And of course, that’s so rarely the reality.”

She’s glad she grew up when she did though, and suspects that life for contemporary teenagers might be even more complicated than it was for Gen Xers. “Just watching my own kids grow up with the internet, how they are real digital natives, I just wonder how that is going to be. Learning how to negotiate that sense of living out loud. Living in the public eye. It’s a choice they make, and most kids today just make that choice without even thinking. It’s like Big Brother but they are choosing it and they don’t see anything wrong with that. And that’s kind of hard for me because I’ve always been very protective. I have a public life and a private life and they have been pretty separate, by choice. That’s been a very important part of maintaining my sanity and my dignity. But that’s a hard thing to teach.” She asks people to turn their phones off during her shows because technology can get in the way of a real connection, she says. “I can’t create a connection with an audience that is watching me through a screen. You can’t. They’re not there. I really find when everyone puts their cell phones away, it’s a much better show. You feel it in a room. And I have to remember that when I am with my kids. If I am experiencing them through that little box then I’m not in the present. There’s a disconnect. Even though there is a temptation to document every moment because I know that they are not going to be that age again.” Ringwald truly believes that. One of her most famous quotes is “you can’t be 16 forever”. Even if the whole world wants to believe otherwise.

“I don’t believe in this reinvention that people seem to be obsessed with. I don’t feel the need to reinvent myself, it’s about evolution more so than reinvention. I have grown and I have changed and I am a different person than I was when I was 16 years old. Mainly, I’m just a lot smarter. More stuff has gone into my brain. Like, duh.”

When it Happens to You: A Novel in Stories is published by Harper Collins

Julia Cumming for Dazed

Goth pale, with a bleached out bob and wearing all black with a choker, musician and model Julia Cumming, 19, is a slice of NYC in the most LA of places, a tripped-out restaurant called Café Gratitude where super happy yogis serve dishes with names like “I Am Blissful”, “I am Beaming” and “I Am Grateful”. “This would never go down in New York,” says the front woman of slacker psych rock trio Sunflower Bean and Saint Laurent model, in town for a few days to play a show at the Echo. With every meal served at Café Gratitude, the diner is asked to ponder a question: this time it’s ‘what’s beautiful about your life?’ She’s game to participate. “Hmm…what is beautiful about my life? Too many things,” she says sipping on green matcha tea. “That I have the chance to do really cool things with musicians and artists that respect a lot and care about? Also, guacamole tacos. I am so grateful for those.”

Cumming has a lot more to get up for in the mornings than Chipotle cravings, though. Sunflower Bean have been championed from everyone from Tavi Gevinson, who called them “one of the coolest teenage bands making music right now in New York”, to The New York Times, who noted the unique interplay of punk, pop, and psychedelia to their sound. They may have just one EP to their name (January’s Show Me Your Seven Secrets), but you really need to see them live anyway. Doesn’t hurt that Cumming, who plays bass and sings, has a laidback, Kim Gordon-esque cool about her and a super now-ish, gamine 5’11” beauty that prompted Hedi Slimane to have her walk in his last two Saint Laurent shows in Paris, and front the brand’s SS15 campaign. On paper she’s the full rock icon package. In person she has the warm, understated confidence of those that don’t need to protest their cool. 

Cumming spent yesterday wandering around the Burgerama festival, a yearly event put on by Burger Records, a prolific label and record store credited for spearheading SoCal’s teenage garage rock revival, and known for their cassette releases. The Burger devotees recognized her, came up asking if Sunflower Bean were going to play the festival. They weren’t, they were there to support their friends Cherry Glazerr, a hazy guitar rock trio fronted by fellow Saint Laurent muse Clem Creevy, with whom Cumming and her two band mates have been crashing “I had this feeling at Burgerama yesterday, like ‘they did it!’,” she says. “This is a festival with a big stage outside and inside and there are kids everywhere and good music playing—and it’s not an EDM festival.” Rock ‘n roll is not the sound of the mainstream any more, and it hasn’t really been for a while, so she’s inspired by her peers in the Burger scene as champions of a sound that remains steadfastly in the underground. For now.

Being from NYC, she and Sunflower Bean are not technically of the West Coast Burger Scene, nonetheless she’s loosely connected to the label’s zeitgeist energy: a DIY community inspired by bedroom recordings, being born in the 90s, sandwiches, minimum wage, pizza, Kurt Cobain, forgetting to wear makeup, chipped nail polish, Twin Peaks (the band, and the TV show), not being able to afford Coachella tickets – ingredients of an eternal adolescence, most likely spent in California or at least, dreaming of it.

Born and raised in New York’s Alphabet City neighbourhood, Cumming is less hedonistic and perhaps more politically-conscious than some of her super-chill West Coast counterparts. From 2011-13 she co-hosted an internet talk radio show about politics on the Progressive Radio Network, and has protested in support of SlutWalk NYC, the global movement challenging rape culture and slut-shaming. With parents who played together in 90s band Bite The Wax Godhead, Cumming started getting guitar lessons by her Dad at age 13. She adored The Kinks, Cat Stevens and Elliot Smith, but questioned why the rock legends in her parents’ record collection were practically all male. “My first memories are of wanting to be in the Beatles and wondering why there weren’t any girls singing,” she remembers of how she learned how to strum Fab Four’s songs. “I always had to sing from a guy’s point of view.”

Sick of having other people’s words in her mouth, it wasn’t long before Cumming was writing lyrics of her own. Bored and lonely during a temporary spell in Florida with her Mum, she begun a long-distance collaboration with her friend Rachel Tractenbuerg, who grew up playing in artrock outfit Tractenburg Family Slideshow Players with her parents. Quirky teen pop band Supercute! was born, with various floating third members including Olivia Ferrer (daughter of Guns ‘n Roses drummer Frank Ferrer). They played indie bubblegum teen 60s psychedelic acoustic pop on ukeleles, guitars and keyboards, covering Pink Floyd and wearing space suits on stage. “Their songs were about everything that affects 13 year olds. That is, apart from boys. “We took a stance we didn’t want to do that,” says Cumming of their lyrics, which were more likely to talk about pet turtles they bought in Chinatown. “Mine was named Elliot Smith. He died very quickly, and I was like ‘I’m sorry I gave you such a doomed name’.”

Supercute! grew into a real thing, with press in all the right places, SXSW performances, and tours with Kate Nash. The expereinces taught them the basics every indie rock band needs to know: how to budget tours, make itineraries, and handle correspondence.” They recorded an album in London with Nash which as never released, and the band dissolved, thanks to a “situation” with their publishing. When Supercute! came undone it was “devastating,” says Cumming. “I was like ‘what the fuck is my life, who am I?” because I had kind of given my whole life and identity to that project.”

In 2013, Sunflower Bean came along, to fill the void. Her band mates Jacob Faber

 and Nick Kivlen were in a noise band called Turnip King, and wanted to start a new project. Their hunt for a bass player ended when they met Cumming. Now, the three musicians live with their manager in an apartment in Brooklyn. “We don’t drink or do drugs, not for any straight edge reasons, mainly we’re just like lazy.” Instead they practice a lot, five times a week for three to four hours, and try to stay as inspired as possible at all times. “I listen to the Velvet Underground every day, and it makes me cry. I don’t know what they did, how they recorded it—I mean, I’ve seen the documentaries—but it’s so just so good and you can’t even get close… we are trying.”

It’s this genuine passion for music that has informed every aspect of her life, including her style, which is perhaps what caused Slimane to single her out in the crowd, having her walk the runway three weeks after meeting her (WHERE), and making her the face of his Spring 15 campaign. Her collaboration with Slimane/Saint Laurent, while exciting and completely a propos, considering Slimane’s enduring obsession with rock ‘n roll babes (from Sky Ferreira and Clem Creevy to Marianne Faithfull), does not mean she now sees herself as a fashion muse more so than a musician. First of all, being a model is something Cumming never really thought about, as she never even considered herself to be “pretty” per se. “I didn’t think I was very attractive. Not in a bad self-conscious way. I just didn’t think that that kind of life would happen to me.” For her the modeling is another aspect of her journey through music. “I’m in this for life,” she says, and it’s clear she means the music. Everything else is just bonus.

In fact, it sometimes annoys Cumming that because she’s a girl, and good looking, and good at playing music, she gets extra attention. Like, why should it make a difference that she’s a girl? “Being a woman playing rock music now is basically kind of a press story in itself, mainly because women are attractive and have parts that are really interesting to men, and not necessarily because of the music,” she says. Cumming is all too aware of the specific challenges that a life on the road can bring for a woman, not to mention the gender-specific ageism that exists in rock ‘n roll. Iggy Pop and David Bowie and Mick Jagger face very different realities heading into their 60 and 70s, to Marianne Faithfull or Yoko Ono. “I’m even nervous about turning 21,” says Cumming. “I haven’t seen the world to be a very forgiving place for women, and I feel like there’s a lot of pressure for us.” Style doesn’t override substance with Cumming , and she’s ready for the ride, as it takes her playing over Europe this summer with Sunflower Bean, and then back to Brooklyn to wrap their record.  “If I can be the best musician that I physically can be, and write the best songs and best bass lines and feel like I am doing the best I can, then no one can take that away from me. Who cares whether I’m a girl or not.”

Gloria Noto for DISTINCT

Originally published here.

Adaptable, disciplined and a true follower of her instinct—LA-based artist and entrepreneur Gloria Noto is a creative ninja, blazing a formidable trail limited only by her limitless imagination. At only 30 years old, she’s already an accomplished painter, musician, top Hollywood makeup artist (working with celebrities like Shailene Woodley and Olivia Wilde), founder and editor-in-chief of art magazine The Work, and the creator of her own skincare line, Noto Botanics. 

Some spend years in pursuit of just one of these goals—how can she tackle all five simultaneously? Gloria’s unflinching resolve, once activated, is a heat-seeking missile programmed to explore, understand and master whatever challenge she sets for herself. 

Born to Sicilian parents in Detroit, Michigan, Gloria is the youngest of five, with much older siblings. “I spent a lot of time alone, playing by myself, with my own imagination, which has definitely, obviously, shaped who I am today,” she says. She felt most at peace when drawing and painting. Gloria eventually went to art school, but dropped out when faced with picking a major during her second year. “I just didn’t understand how you could pick one thing to be for the rest of your life,” she says. She decided to pursue her dreams outside of school and moved to Florida for a year to reassess her goals.

“To this day, I don’t really believe in failure,” she says. “Failure is an opportunity to learn from something. If you do something and it doesn’t work, maybe you should try looking at it differently and learn from it.” 

Gloria returned to Detroit, determined to build a portfolio of creative work that would launch her as a serious makeup artist. “I was still under 21, but I was like, ‘I know what I want to do.’ So I started producing photo shoots. Finding the photographers. Finding the models. Styling. Doing the makeup. The hair. Doing everything.” 

Gloria knew she’d eventually need to move to either New York or LA to further her career. At the time, she felt New York was saturated with talent, so she chose LA and found a job as a national creative executive for Napoleon Perdis cosmetics. At just 23, she was making a good salary, had her own office and was working with chemists to create product. But, after 3 months, she realized it just wasn’t in her DNA to work for someone else. Her portfolio was strong enough that, within a week, she signed with a major makeup artist agency.

Many would’ve been happy with that, but not Gloria. Within a few years, she found herself getting restless. During that period, she was going to dance clubs in LA and feeling inspired by the people she was meeting there. Underground artists, dancers, painters, filmmakers. At the same time, the publishing industry was going through a transformation—big publications were folding or slimming down, and small, grassroots publications were beginning to sprout up. Gloria wanted to be part of the shift, so she founded The Work, a magazine dedicated to showcasing the processes of creative people across different media. She produced art shows and events, and provided a platform for emergent music. She also started a beauty blog, Set Daze.

She had a magazine, a successful makeup career, multiple collaborations and was painting every day. Many people enjoying this degree of creative success might be happy to maintain the status quo. But Gloria has no fear of rocking her own boat when something doesn’t feel right. “I just knew something had shifted. I realized what makes me feel the most fulfilled, despite the fact that I can be a lone wolf, is collaboration. Bringing people together and seeing how we can work together and what we can do together.” 

She started her natural skincare line, Noto Botanics, after realizing just how toxic the cosmetic industry can be. She focuses on using “real” models to promote her products—friends, people she thinks are cool—and showcases them and what they’re doing. “I mean, what is the point if you can’t share with others? So I think maybe that’s kind of where I’m at right now, too, where I’m finally accepting of that fact that, yeah, we do need other people to be human.”

Yolandi Visser

My Dazed&Confused cover interview with Yolandi Vi$$er of Die Antwoord is out now. Read it here, or below.

As she prepares to take on Hollywood in Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie, the Die Antwoord frontwoman talks about her unpredictable ascent to fame

• Text Caroline Ryder
   
• Photography Pierre Debusschere
   
• Styling Robbie Spencer

8 days ago

Taken from the spring 2015 issue of Dazed. Read our interview with Ninja here

Yo-landi Visser appears in the piano bar of an old-school west Hollywood hotel, looking like an albino gangster from another dimension. Wearing a sweater bearing the legend ‘BO$$’ in large green letters across the front, the Die Antwoord frontwoman perches on a leather armchair and orders coffee and fresh fruit. Guests sneak glances at her, no doubt wondering where this fragile-yet-formidable life form with a silvery white mullet, corresponding eyebrows and little girl voice sprang from. “I roll with bodyguards when I go back home to South Africa,” she says, looking around the room. “Like, full on. People want to fucking assassinate me.” It’s hard to imagine this five-foot tall mother of two should pose such a threat to the self-proclaimed torchbearers of decency and good taste in society. But that’s what happens when misfits succeed. Feathers get ruffled. 

Visser, real name Anri du Toit, has fast become an unlikely pop-culture icon. Flipping between Lolita songbird vocals and thugged-out raps delivered in a blend of English and Afrikaans, she has broken every approved music industry convention en route to success with her bandmates, rapper Ninja and DJ Hi-Tek. Since exploding on the scene in 2010 with their viral video “Enter the Ninja”, Die Antwoord have compromised their vision for nobody, aiming to remain as “punk and fresh and kind of psycho” as possible. At the end of last year they confirmed their A-list clout with the cameoheavy video for “Ugly Boy”, with appearances by Jack Black, Marilyn Manson, Flea, the ATL Twins, an almost topless Dita Von Teese, and supermodel Cara Delevingne. Cheered on by the obsessive freaks and geeks that have claimed Die Antwoord as their own, they have become one of the world’s most visceral live acts, with crowds proclaiming their allegiance by chanting “zef, zef, zef” – an homage to the downwardly mobile South African street culture that inspired their favourite band’s trashy aesthetic. 

Visser rarely grants interviews, and never solo interviews – until now. She prefers to remain an enigma; an elfin rave avatar whose life story remains relatively undiscussed. “I got irritated with people asking us the same questions,” she says. “Like, ‘Are you a real band?’ Journalists wanted to slay us, tried to cut us down, and I just started caring less and less about doing interviews. With Facebook and Instagram, you kind of don’t need to anyway. But now and again we’ll do something when there’s new information to share. Like now.”

Gallery Yo-landi Visser

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After amassing more than 200 million views on their YouTube channels, the group will make the leap on to the big screen next month when Visser and Ninja star alongside Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman inChappie, a family sci-fi drama by District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. In the film, they play a pair of musicians-turned-gangsters who adopt a newborn artificial intelligence in the shape of a robot, Chappie. “There’s something about Yo-landi and Ninja, they both have very unusual magnetism,” says Blomkamp over the phone during a break from editing the film. “Whether you love them or you don’t, you’re drawn to them. Yo-landi has something that is hard to put into words. There’s some unknown factor about her that just makes you interested. She has this split personality – the dichotomy between the imagery you see and the lyrics she is singing is fascinating. That, coupled with the fact that she is actually very smart, makes people identify with her in a different way to anyone else.”

Born on March 3, 1984 in Port Alfred, a small town on South Africa’s east coast, Visser was adopted by a priest and his wife and struggled to feel like she belonged anywhere. Growing up, she describes herself as “a little punk” who was always getting into fistfights. “Which is weird, because actually I am quite soft and caring.” She considered herself goth in spirit (“me and my best friend even dyed our underwear black in the bath”) and obsessed over Nirvana, PJ Harvey, Nine Inch Nails, Cypress Hill, Eminem, Marilyn Manson and Aphex Twin. “I loved dark shit. When the Chris Cunningham video for (Aphex Twin’s) ‘Come to Daddy’ came out, that was like a fucking religion.” It’s an influence that’s plainly felt in the dark yet wry, blood-splattered video for “Ugly Boy”, which features Visser as a cute but terrifying alien being with eyes as black as night. Fittingly, the song is actually a refix of Aphex’s 1992 track, “Ageispolis”.

At 16, Visser was sent to a boarding school nine hours’ drive from her family home, where, surrounded by other creative kids, she finally blossomed. “The school was very artistic and open-minded for South Africa,” she says. “I was fucking happy. For the first time in my life, I connected with people who were artistic.” She has never met her birth parents, and she doesn’t want to now. She doesn’t know too much about them, except that her mother was white. Recently, a portrait artist specialising in identifying genetic history told Visser she has the facial structure of a ‘coloured’ (in South Africa, ‘coloured’ is the commonly used term for mixed race). At first, Visser was confused. “I said, ‘No, I’m white.’ She kept asking about my family and then I started thinking maybe I am coloured.” Visser now thinks her father may have been black. She was born during apartheid, and believes her white mother’s parents may have forced her to give her baby up for adoption, after getting pregnant by a black guy. It’s a theory. 

Another determining factor in Visser’s identity has been Ninja, father of her daughter, and her sparring partner in Die Antwoord. “We’re bound by life and music. One doesn’t work without the other.” Ninja, real name Watkin Tudor Jones, 40, had been on the South African hip hop scene since age 13. He grew up in Johannesburg and frequented black nightclubs where he cut his teeth as a rapper. “You had to be good to do that shit,” says Visser. “The fact that he was white meant he had to be really good.” Visser met Ninja outside a Cape Town club around 2003. He was sporting a similar suited-and-booted attire to slick hip hop duo Handsome Boy Modeling School. “She was like, ‘What the fuck’s up with this dude?’” recalls Ninja. “‘Why are you dressed like that? Don’t speak to me.’ She was a little goth kid who looked about 13. I was scared of her.”

After reconnecting at one of his own shows, Ninja asked the gothy Visser to lend vocals to a track by his horrorcore act, The Constructus Corporation. “I just wanted her to go ‘yeah motherfucker’ with an American accent,” he says. “We went into the studio and she did it with this attitude and her voice. I was just like, ‘ARGH!’” Visser told him she didn’t know anything about rap, and he promised to teach her. They became romantically involved for a period, and in 2006, she got pregnant by Ninja.

“I was young,” she says. “I was like, ‘Fuck, my life is over,’ because all my friends were out smoking weed and hanging out and hoodratting, and I was at home with the baby. But I was psycho about it. No smoking and drinking. I wanted to be a cool mom. It was hectic. I felt very isolated for a long time but in the end it was cool, because it helped me and Ninja stick together. If we hadn’t, we would have maybe drifted.” Though they are no longer a couple (Ninja is now married), many fans continue to assume they’re an item. “A lot of people still see us as a couple,” says Visser. “I understand – we have such a unique companionship, it’s really weird that we’re not. But it’s hard being in a group together and having a kid.” 

“I love dark shit. When the video for Aphex Twin’s ‘Come to Daddy’ came out, that was like a fucking religion” – Yo-landi Visser

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Ninja and Visser’s daughter, Sixteen Jones, is currently in a band with Flea’s daughter, Sunny, called The Boy With the Rainbow Face. “Sunny is the lead and Sixteen is the backup and writer,” says Visser, who’s lived in LA for the past few years. “She’s really good.” In keeping with rebellious-kid tradition, Sixteen is the opposite of her parents in that she can’t stand foul language.

Visser is also a parent to Tokkie, a street kid she adopted four years ago. He was nine years old at the time, from a rough neighbourhood in Jo’burg. His family was poor, so Visser offered to take care of him at weekends, and then full-time. “I’ve always had that maternal thing; that connection with street kids and people who are misfits,” says Visser. “I saw so much potential in Tokkie but I knew there was no hope for him on the street. No one’s gonna give a shit. Now he’s blossomed and become this enchanting boy.”

In 2007, Visser suggested the idea of starting a group to Ninja, and the seeds of Die Antwoord were sown. While working on new tracks, they met Hi-Tek, their third member and DJ. “Something just happened,” she says. “A triangle. But we wanted to have a real look. Not just go in the studio and make some songs. We wanted to have a whole style.” This is where the hair comes in.

Visser swears it wasn’t until she started sporting her brutal, cyber-punky peroxide mullet that Die Antwoord really found its visual direction. It was 2009, and they were shooting a video. The director wanted her to be all little-girl and cutesy. “My hair was long with a fringe and people would make jokes, calling me Britney and Lady Gaga. I told Ninja I needed to go in a different fucking direction. I wanted to have an edge that was more like me on the inside. Ninja said we should just cut the sides off, and I said, ‘Fuck, let’s do it.’ And it was just, BAM – there’s Yo-landi. It affected the music, it affected the way I acted and how I felt. For me it was like a birth or something.” Visser’s haircut and bleached eyebrows represent more than a fashion quirk or a cry for attention. They are a statement of her outsider pride; an unmissable declaration of who she is and what she stands for. Ninja still cuts her hair to this day. No one else is allowed to touch it. 

Yo-landi wears puffa jacket by Cottweiler

Cool hair or not, no-one gave a shit about Die Antwoord. They had two songs out, and an album, $O$. They’d made a video for “Enter the Ninja” that featured Visser as a cyberpunk schoolgirl heroine, wearing underwear with marker-emblazoned dollar signs, and a rat crawling over her. Her image flipped the Lolita archetype on its head, with body language that screamed, “Look, but don’t fucking touch.” She may have been dressed like a schoolgirl, but unlike Britney and her entreaties to “hit me baby one more time”, Visser’s attire was more a method of visual torture, double-daring the viewer to underestimate her strength.

Visser remembers the night everything changed as if it was yesterday. It was February 3, 2010, and the band had been booked to play a show in Johannesburg. “It was raining, and I was saying to Ninja, ‘Fuck, no one’s coming because of the rain. We drove around the corner and saw kids queuing around the block. And as we walked up, people started screaming. I remember rapping that night; the mics were fucked and the crowd rapped all our lyrics. I remember going home and wondering what the fuck had just happened. It was like something aligned. All the kids connected with this thing that we were feeling.”

That night, their video got 10,000 new hits. Their email address was still on their website and the fan messages started pouring in. The following morning, their video was featured on US television, and a day or two after that, someone from Interscope got hold of their phone number. They flew to the States for a meeting with legendary label head Jimmy Iovine at Interscope HQ. “We walked into the offices and saw NWA, Slim Shady and Tupac on the wall. I was like, ‘Fuck, this is the best label.’ We were like these wild animals from South Africa in a meeting with Jimmy Iovine. He said, ‘We love you guys, we don’t want you to change a thing.’” So after a couple months’ thinking time, they signed with the label and got ready for their first US show, at Coachella. It became the most buzzed-about performance of the festival.

“Interscope wired us $1 million, so we wired it back. We didn’t want the money” – Yo-landi Visser

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Soon enough, Hollywood came knocking. In 2010, David Fincher reached out to Visser about playing the lead in his adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. “Ari (Emanuel, Visser’s agent) was calling me saying, ‘You have to take this role or your career is over,’” she says. “But I said no. For me with music, there is no half-stepping. This is my calling.” Visser felt that, if she stepped away from music for a year or two to make a movie, Die Antwoord would lose focus. Fincher kept asking to meet with her, and she kept refusing. “I always make a decision, even if it’s the wrong one. I hate being confused. I’m like, ‘Fuck it, I am going in this direction, and I am going hard.’”

At the same time, Ninja was considering a film offer from Neill Blomkamp to star in Elysium. “I told him, ‘No, I don’t think it’s right,’ and we had a big fight,” says Visser. “Ninja is super-ambitious, more than I am. He’s like, ‘Let’s do everything.’ But I felt like if his attention was distracted for a year, we’d be fucked. I said, ‘Let’s wait.’” The role went to Matt Damon, and the pair went back to South Africa to work on their second album with DJ Hi-Tek.

They delivered the record, Ten$ion, to Interscope and waited to hear back. “It was like fucking school,” says Visser. “They said, ‘Well, it’s good, but it needs more rave.’ We were like, ‘How much more rave do you want?’” The label told them they needed to write three more songs, including a collaboration with a commercial artist. “We were like, ‘Fuck you! Why should we collaborate?’ We should only do that if we really dig someone, like when you’re hanging tough and it just works. There was this weird pressure. So we called our lawyer and said, ‘Can you make Interscope go away?’”

Their lawyer wasn’t sure how easy it would be. “It was like a fucking bible, the contract we had signed with them.” Luckily for the group, Interscope let Die Antwoord go without much of a fight. “I think they were scared of Ninja, to be honest. They had wired us $1 million, so we wired it back. We didn’t want the money. It was more important to us to make something we believed in. Everyone was saying, ‘They are a fucking joke band, they are fake.’ I was like, ‘No, we really wanna get better and prove that we didn’t just get lucky like Vanilla Ice.’ We wanted to prove that we are going to make music until we die.” In 2012, the following year, the band released Ten$ion on their own label, Zef Recordz, and declined an offer from Lady Gaga to open up on the South African leg of her tour. 

Printed hooded top Yo-landi's own

Currently, they’re working on a fourth album with DJ Muggs of Cypress Hill after meeting him at aquinceañera, a traditional Mexican birthday party, in the heavily Latino neighbourhood of East LA. “Me and Ninja roll up and it was like the fucking Godfather, low-riders and suits and wives and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ A friend introduced us to Muggs. We had always loved that dark shit. Cypress had those beats that were so warm and cosy and dark and hard. Instantly we clicked and Ninja said that night, ‘We have to do it with him.’” So far they have eight songs, recorded at Muggs’ studio and another place owned by Flea, both in LA. The tracks, says Visser, are “fucking insane and dark and epic and moody and just phat. I always joke with Muggs that he is the same breed as us. We dig the same things and for me, that’s what I meant about collaborations feeling right.”

Their collaboration with Blomkamp for Chappie felt similarly organic. Rather than trying to shape them to fit his vision, the South African director used the pair’s existing personas as the springboard for his script. He wanted them to play themselves in a world of his creation. “I look around and I see a lot of artists every day, and not many of them are actually doing what their heart is telling them to do,” says Blomkamp. “The artists we are exposed to in mass media tend to be very watered-down and predictable. Yo-landi and Ninja are not influenced by the external forces that derail most artists and make them put out very benign, boring work. I think that is by far the most interesting and refreshing thing about them.” Despite initially doubting whether a global audience would understand the pair’s accents, the executives financing the movie sided with Blomkamp’s insistence that it was impossible to make the project with anyone else.

While filming Chappie, some of the movie’s producers finally recognised Visser and Ninja’s on-screen magnetism, and said they wanted to make a TV show about them – scripted or reality, whatever they wanted. At the time, Visser and Ninja had already started work on a film in South Africa documenting their life story, but they decided a TV show would afford them more latitude to tell their story. “We wanted to do it about the real shit that happened” says Visser. “How we signed to Interscope. About the night we blew up. About our kid. About the wild-wild-west adventures we have had. You can’t make shit like that up – it’s almost supernatural. There’s never a dull moment. It’s always fucking something.” They plan to call the show ZEF. In fact, Visser says they are even considering changing the band’s name to Zef. “Fucking Die Antwoord… I mean, it’s cool because it sounds hard and German and has this cool meaning that is like the essence for us. ‘The answer’. I have a tenderness for it. But Zef is just, like, easy. Ninja’s fucking easy. Yo-landi’s fucking easy. And Zef is fucking easy. Let’s see, eh?”

Like this? Then you'll love our 2010 feature on Die Antwoord too – read it here

Chappie is released in the UK on March 6. Die Antwoord's latest album, Donker Mag, is out now

Subscribe to Dazed magazine here or pick up your copy from newsstands now

Miranda July for AnOther magazine

(Interview appears in AnOther Magazine, 2015)

  

Miranda July greets me at the door of her Silverlake, Los Angeles home with those famous cornflower blue eyes. Delicately formidable, with her trademark curly mop of brown hair and vintage letter box red cardigan, she’s like a cheerful Sylvia Plath, a poster child for hip American intelligentsia in the 21^st century, one of the boldest female voices in underground film, literature and multi-media art since 2004, when Filmmaker Magazine pronounced her number one among the “25 New Faces of Indie Film". Her first feature film “Me You and Everyone We Know” (2005) won accolades at Cannes and Sundance, and her short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award in 2007. Her 2011 film The Future premiered at Sundance, amid myriad creative collaborations, including an email-based art project with Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham, and Kirsten Dunst and her own mobile app, “Somewhere”, which incites strangers to deliver messages to one another.

Two years ago, shortly after giving birth to her son Hopper (with husband noted director Michael Mills) July, 40, started work on her first novel, The First Bad Man. A notable addition to July’s zeitgeistal, left of centre oeuvre, it tells the tale of Cheryl, a sexually-frustrated, middle-aged anti-heroine with grey hair and a dirty mind. In creating this brave, oddly Bukowskian heroine, Miranda paints a picture both ugly and charming at the same time, forcing us to question what is “appropriate” these days, when it comes to love?

There are pretty big age gaps between the various lovers in your book. One of the characters goes so far as to say: “I think everyone who is alive on earth at the same time is fair game.” Have you ever had a lover who is much older or younger?

I’ve almost always been with older men. The oldest being twelve years older, and I was only 24, so that was a lot.  Mike, my husband, is eight years older than me. I mean maybe there’s some psychological daddy stuff going on, but guys my own age just always felt like chums. The few times I dated someone my own age it just felt weird,  like, “OK so you knew about the Pixies at the same age I knew about the Pixies. So what.”  I like the disconnect that comes from age differences. I want us not to have stuff in common. And for us to each know and be experts on our own thing. I mean maybe it’s almost too intimate when a romantic partner is the same age. It’s like “ugh, get out of my decade”.

Age differences have been a theme throughout your work, actually.

Yes, in my first movie there was this five year old and a middle-aged woman who had a quasi-romantic relationship. It was interesting to explore that without actually making it about something really awful and scary. We always see the same people together and those well-worn grooves don’t really create new feelings for me. Even when the age differences are pretty implausible, I feel like it sparks all this hidden stuff.

There’s a crying passage in the book, where one character cries on the phone to another and it’s a sexual experience for the listener. What’s been a good, sexy cry for you?

I am the kind of person who builds up feelings over days. I get wound tighter and tighter and at a certain point I have to cry to sort of reset that to zero. It was late at night and I had managed to not talk to a single adult all day, and I was feeling totally crazy. I started texting with Lena Dunham, who is a good friend. She was in Germany and she said she had just had half a beer, and we started I was all wound up and as we were texting I started crying. It was all really loving stuff, we were just supporting each other. And when we were done I was like “that was the first time that I managed to get that much emotional relief from a text.” It was like sexting, but the cry version. I felt so much better afterwards. I got off.

Cheryl, the protagonist of your book is middle aged and grappling with what that means, while her younger counterpart, Clee, is very much an example of “entitled youth”.  Youth, and middle age—what are your thoughts on what those words mean today?

Youth has always been power. But now it literally means running the companies that are creating our reality. I picture youth in the past as kids at a sock hop (a dance from the 50s). But it seems like technology is the huge divider between youth and middle age now. I am really on the other side of this divide. I might not feel old, but just the fact that I didn’t grow up texting makes me different. It’s interesting to be my age, because it’s really straddling two eras.

In the book, there’s a passage where Cheryl talks about ways that women can disguise their pear shaped figures. Care to share some pearls from your vault of fashion secrets past?

I was very on my own page in my twenties in terms of what I wore. I always wore my tights over my shoes, for example. Which meant I’d go through a pair of tights almost every time I went out, and they would get really dirty on the bottom. But it was very elongating for the leg, and just kind of alien looking. Also, when I was younger I wore just a little black mark on either side of my lips. Little lip extenders. Kind of like making your lips bigger with lip liner, but much more overt, because obviously you can see there are two black marks there.  You couldn’t draw them too long, or you looked like the Joker. I felt like it looked good and was flattering, even though everyone was like “that’s so weird, what are you doing?” But I wasn’t trying to look ugly. I was basically making sure that anyone straight felt completely alienated by me. It was cool.

Mr Chow, art/food legend

For Citizens of Humanity magazine

FOUNDER OF THE EPONYMOUS MR. CHOW RESTAURANT CHAIN LOOKS FOR MASTERPIECES IN ALL AREAS OF LIFE, BE THEY IN MODERN ART, DECO FURNITURE OR NOODLES. 

Mr. Chow is an aesthete, PR showman, networker, collector and culture maven, his many success stories—from his collection of eponymous Mr. Chow restaurants, to his world class art collection, to his handpicked circle of jet-setter friends from Andy Warhol to Mick Jagger—all informed by a simple philosophy. It’s called Qiao Mer (pronounced “Chowmer”), and it means special technique, know-how or knack; the notion that every last detail is perfectly planned and executed so as to reflect the universal plan. “Mother Theresa says if you clean the toilet with love you will find God there,” he says by typically dry means of explanation. “What she said is true, though. Nothing is trivial. Every detail matters. And so, sometimes, nothing is so important as cleaning the toilet.”

Indeed, Mr. Chow’s restaurant business, founded 45 years ago, has sprouted according to that notion—that each detail should be a reflection of the grand plan. “My restaurants are always controlled environments,” says Chow. “Everything has a focus, every detail, even the way a waiter puts a glass on the  table, is thought through.” So the body language of his wait staff, the lighting, the chair upholstery—all are somehow a reflection of Mr. Chow’s very soul? The hyperbole, of course, is by design, as much a part of the Mr. Chow experience as the delicious noodles on the plate. Think of the food as a Qiaodriven reflection of this larger-than-life persona, 74 years in the making.

Born Michael Chow in Shanghai, China, in 1939, he is the son of the Peking Opera Grand Master Zhou Xinfang, who was already a star by the age of 7. His sister is actress and former Bond girl Tsai Chin. His mother was a tea heiress. At the age of 13 he was sent to a British boarding school. He never saw his family again—Zhou Xinfang was imprisoned, and his mother killed, during Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

He studied architecture at St. Martin’s in London and tried to launch himself as a painter, completing 300 to 400 works in a period of eight years and achieving some gallery acclaim. But he struggled to succeed as a painter. “I quit, basically. There was no support system for me because I am Chinese. That is a truth. Jean-Michel Basquiat, before him there were no black painters in the art world he inhabited. And there was no support system for me in London because I am Chinese. And no support system in China, where blood was running through the streets… it’s hard to have much culture in those conditions.”

Thanks to his architecture background, he also worked as a designer and in 1965 designed Smith and Hawes hair salon on London’s Sloane Avenue, which was sold to Leonard of London, the hairdresser who made a star out of Twiggy. He continued to design boutiques and restaurants in London. In his early 20s, while still trying to succeed as a painter, Chow came up with an idea to bridge East and West and demonstrate the greatness of China in a way that London would appreciate.

In 1968, the first Mr. Chow restaurant opened in Knightsbridge, offering Chinese food served by Italian waiters with an easyto- understand menu. “No one on this earth truly understands Chinese food because it is so complex, so sophisticated,” he says. “There are so many ways to make an egg, not just boiled, scrambled or fried. The culinary vocabulary is so complex. I wanted to make a statement about how great China is and how great Chinese food is.” A Beverly Hills location soon followed in 1974, and then Midtown New York at 57th Street in 1978.

“I really wanted to communicate my roots and culture when I launched Mr. Chow, which involves theater, food and art. But mainly it was to bridge the East and West.” Mr. Chow instinctively knew that a restaurant is only as successful as its clientele, and thus set about creating a Studio 54 of fine dining. His fabulous friends from the worlds of art and fashion became fixtures at his restaurants, and each bite of a meal at Mr. Chow seemed coated with that glamour. In fact, as he once told a British newspaper, he is less in the restaurant business than “the glamour business.”

Today, Larry Gagosian, Mick Jagger and L’Wren Scott, Ed and Danna Ruscha, Angelica Huston and Robert Graham, and Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière frequent Mr. Chow’s establishments. Back in the day, it was the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. John Lennon ate his last meal out at Mr. Chow New York. Andy Warhol would order food to be polite and just push it around, so in the end Mr. Chow would serve him an empty plate. Basquiat enjoyed the wine list while sketching figures at the restaurant. Groucho Marx once came and had a hamburger delivered—proof, if there ever was, that Mr. Chow’s was a place to see and be seen, even more so than a place to order food.

Peter Blake—the pop artist who designed the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s  album cover—was the first of many artists to draw or paint Mr. Chow, resulting in a now-famous collection of portraits of the proprietor. Keith Haring loved the green prawns, which he immortalized when he drew a portrait of Mr. Chow as his own green prawns. Warhol made a black-andwhite silkscreen of Chow in 1984. Julian Schnabel did a large oil portrait of Chow in 1985, on a canvas of broken, painted Yet there are a few portraits Mr. Chow prizes above all the rest. Minimalist artist Dan Flavin made an ink sketch of him at the erstwhile Los Angeles restaurant L’Orangerie, which he signed and gave to Chow. “It is one of my treasures,” he says.

A second treasure is a double happiness Buddha signed by Andy Warhol and given to him on his birthday. And perhaps his favorite piece of all—an ink painting by the great Chinese artist Qi Baishi commemorating his father and his 50 years on stage as an opera singer, called “50 Years of Stage Life Celebration.” “Why I treasure these three objects so much? Well, it is because all of them were free, of course.” He pauses for effect before erupting in laughter.

This smart, self-conscious wit is as much a part of Mr. Chow’s carefully crafted persona as are the noodles, the artsy friends and those round, owlish glasses of his. About those glasses, made for him by Cutler & Gross in London: He adopted them in homage to the architect and artist Le Corbusier and renowned French Art Deco designer Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann. (He owns one of the largest collections of Ruhlmann’s furniture in the world.) The glasses do more than pay homage, though; they help Mr. Chow become visually memorable or iconic. “For me this is ‘trade dressing,’ just like Andy Warhol with his wig and Don King with the hair and the cigar,” he says. “Also, and this is serious and a little sad to say—but it detracts a little from my Chineseness, which has been necessary at times.” When he explained his trade dressing as a means of overcoming cultural and racial  stereotyping to a reporter at London’s Telegraph, he was mocked for it, the reporter going so far as to call him pathetic. But Mr.

Chow was perhaps more realistic about the true (and ongoing) history of racism than the reporter—let’s not forget that fear of miscegenation remains alive and well, and that until very recently, in the 1950s, it was illegal for a Chinese man to legally marry a white woman in California. Such realities, ugly as they may be, are as thought provoking to Mr. Chow as a Ruhlmann artwork. “I collect racism every day. Every day. Because I am a collector.

Also, I have learned how to use that prejudice and weakness.” He has a complicated relationship with Chinoiserie, for example—the decorative style created in the West and inspired by Chinese artistic tradition. It is art in which “all the women are dragon ladies and prostitutes, and all the men have Fu Manchu mustaches,” says Chow. It’s the kind of art you can find in many of his restaurants, though; he set aside his personal feelings for the aesthetic. “Chinoiserie was a very racist kind of thing,” he says. “But it has its own evil grooviness.” In the 1980s, fashion designer Giorgio Armani went to Mr. Chow in New York and was so impressed with the owner’s flair for architectural design that he gifted tuxedos to all the wait staff and invited Mr. Chow to design Armani’s Rodeo Drive boutique in 1987 and later, in 1999, the Giorgio Armani boutique at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

Mr. Chow’s personal life has been as glamorous as his public endeavors. He was married to Vogue’s Grace Coddington, then to supermodel Tina Chow (who died of AIDS in 1992, two years after their split) and is now married to Korean-American fashion designer Eva Chun, who wore a Vivienne Westwood gown when they married and is as intriguing and glamorous as her husband.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Chun was invited at age 11 to study with two great masters of Korean traditional watercolor, Byun Kwan Sik and Kim Eun Ho. Her art training ended when her family moved to the U.S. in 1994. She enrolled at the Otis Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, where she created a small collection of simple evening dresses and tailored suits and showed it to a buyer for Neiman Marcus, who placed an order and launched Chun’s career as a fashion designer. Chun opened her flagship showroom in 550 Seventh Avenue in New York, joined CFDA in 1991 and was touted as “one of the top five young designers in America” by Bernadine Morris, fashion writer for The New York Times .

The following year Chun and Mr. Chow married and shortly afterward Chun left Seventh Avenue behind to have their daughter, Asia Chow, who was born in 1994. Mr. Chow also has a daughter, China, and son, Maximillian, from his previous marriage. For the last decade or so he’s lived with Eva and Asia in the impeccable L.A. mansion he designed, filled with one of the world’s most impressive private collections of contemporary art.

“I have no idea how to develop a good eye, but I can say the following—there are four things to being a great collector. One, courage. Two, money. Three, knowledge. And four, the eye. These are the four things one should possess, although you can get away  with three.” (It is also worth mentioning that Mr. Chow collects shoes, and has kept every pair of shoes he has ever owned. He owns several of the Duke of Windsor’s slippers and shoes, which he bought at auction.)

While the art collection may be impressive—think Keith Tyson, Peter Blake, Nam June Paik, a two-story Keith Haring mural and a 1973 portrait of Mr. Chow by Ed Ruscha made entirely from food—the house itself could be considered something of a masterpiece. Modeled on the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, it features a study that is paneled floor-to-ceiling in macassar ebony, a 16th-century Belgian tapestry and a collection of Émile- Jacques Ruhlmann deco furniture that is among the world’s most comprehensive. There is a leather-lined elevator that is identical to the one in Hermès in Beverly Hills, which he designed. He says the guest bathroom is among his favorite rooms in the house.

“It’s a necessity, and that’s why I love it very much,” he quips. His wife Eva has ascribed the beauty of the home to its perfect proportion. “Eva is quoting Mondrian,” says Chow. “Mondrian said if the world had perfect proportion there would be no war. Proportion is everything. When you have perfect proportion you can’t help but strive for harmony. You must have alignment. Even colors have to be aligned. You have to have a lot of discipline structurally to design, and you cannot deviate. If you do, you will be all over the place, in a disorientated house, and you won’t be able to put your finger on why. But if you are true to the work, so to speak, then God will reward you, with the chance of masterpiece.”

And this, perhaps, is what Chow has been striving for all his life. The chance of masterpiece. But living life so acutely aware of just how perfect it could be can’t be the most relaxing way to live. Perhaps that is why after more than 40 years, Mr. Chow is painting again, revisiting the work that he gave up so many years ago when he became a businessman, host, art-world figure,designer and man about town. “Yes it’s true that I stress all day  long,” he says. “But things are never out of place.”

Gallerist Almine Rech

(James Turrell/Almine Rech Gallery)

For the Citizens  of Humanity brand magazine

An uncompromising commitment to a radical vision is leading gallerist Almine Rech’s favorite quality in an artist. “Radicalism has always been the narrative for me,” she says, speaking on the phone from London. “I love it when artists take big risks and don’t feel the need to justify them, despite any notions of good taste or bad taste. They just go for something radical, and they make zero compromises.” One could say that Almine herself, one of the few female gallerists in Paris, is herself a woman of zero compromise, in that her taste for that which is daring has come to define her.  There is little room in Rech’s heart for artists who bend to please the fickle whims of the art-buying public. “It’s a special feeling you get when you are in front of someone who is not going to try to please people. Someone who is going to impose their vision. That’s when I feel confidence. They don’t need even need to say it. You just feel it.”

The daughter of famed French fashion designer Georges Rech (founder of one of France’s first ready-to-wear companies), and the wife of Picasso heir Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Rech fell in love with art as a child, painting alongside with her father on the weekends. “He would paint landscapes, with no intention of showing his work to anyone except his kids and my mother. It was really for pure pleasure.” For Almine, it was all about people, and she painted many portraits of her mother and two younger sisters. Family friends began commissioning her to make portraits of them too, in her trademark Hockney-esque style. At the weekends, she would stroll around the museums of Paris, eyes wide. “My parents were always bringing us to the Jardin des Tuilerie at the Louvre, and they have the most beautiful Impressionist paintings at the Musée de l'Orangerie there.  We used to live close to the Musee Marmottan near the Bois de Boulogne, dedicated to Monet. All my childish first discoveries about great paintings happened in Paris.”

Art is in her blood on both sides: her great-grandfather, Mai Trung-Cat, the Regent of Vietnam, was a renowned calligrapher at the beginning of the 20^th century, and you can still see his work in the region of Haiphong, in northern Vietnam, where the ancestral home is. Her grandfather’s brother was Mai-Trung Thu, another renowned painter. It came as no surprise to anyone when she decided to attend art school, at ESAG Penninghen, in Paris, but within just a year, she realized that the artist’s life was not for her after all. “I very quickly noticed how lonely it is to create. To be in your studio, alone, all the time. What a life. Truly, I don’t believe good artists  decide to become artists. They have no other choice. Because it is not an easy life.” So she turned her focus to cinema. After three years studying French and German film, she pursued art history at l’Ecole de Louvre, and then a brief stint working at Drouot auction house. By then, her extensive formal education was complete. Rech was ready to explore her life’s calling—the discovery and distribution of great art.

She opened her first gallery, Galerie Froment-Putman, in rue Charlot in the Marais, with Cyrille Putman, son of design legend Andrée Putman, who would later become her husband. Oddly enough, despite her early love for figurativism, she found herself most strongly drawn to minimalist and conceptualist artists. “I was most attracted to very radical artworks. Perhaps because I had had my fill of painting. When I discovered Donald Judd, John McCracken and James Turrell, it was such an aesthetic shock. This radicalism of perception. I had already been interested in the way that minimalism and Bauhaus had influenced theatre and film. And when I discovered its application to art, it was like falling in love. So powerful.”

For the gallery’s inaugural show, in November 1989, she placed the work of visionary California light artist James Turrell in a commercial gallery setting in Europe for the first time. She had seen his work at an exhibition at a museum in Nîmes, and spoken with Turrell, telling him her plans to open a gallery in Paris. So full of enthusiasm was she, Turrell agreed to show his work with her even though at that point, there had been no major light-based artworks shown in European galleries, (although there had been a few museum exhibits). Rech hoped to create, or tap into, a completely unknown market. She hired an architect to prepare the space based on the few images and notes given over the phone by Turrell. Shortly before the opening, Turrell himself came and looked over the gallery. He said it was perfect, and  Rech felt confident ahead of the opening. “It wasn’t until I had an interview with a small radio channel that I started to feel worried. They asked me, ‘aren’t you afraid about going bankrupt after this show?’ and I said ‘oh my God. I hope not’.” She and Putman went ahead and launched their gallery with one piece by James Turrell and hoped that a buyer would share their brave vision. “In those days, people liked art that you could hang on walls,” she points out. Luckily, there was a buyer -- The Centro Televizo Mexico’s museum bought the Turrell piece, its director, Bob Littman, traveling all the way to Paris to buy it. “That was  my very first sale,” she reminisces. “And it taught me everything I needed to know about the art world.”

Nearly 25 years later, Turrell is still represented by Rech in Europe. And the gallery has held important solo shows by such luminaries as John McCracken, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons and Liu Wei. Rech now has three more galleries—a new space in Paris, one in Brussels (where she also lives, in a three-story brick villa, which was designed in the ’30s by Adrien Blomme, and naturally boasts many Picassos, as well as Martin Szekely coffee tables, a James Turrell light piece, an Ed Ruscha 1974 word painting (in which “actress” is spelled out on moiré silk), and a half-ton Jeff Koons sculpture of inflatable pool toys in trash cans). When we speak she is in London, where she has just opened her latest space upstairs from one of the most esteemed bespoke tailors on Savile Row, Huntsman. “The owner is a major collector, too,” says Rechs. “It’s perfect.”

She is still possessed by the same passion for radicalism that motivated her in the first place. And she still admires those artists, both young and established, who are brave enough to remain uncompromising. Like London-based Ayan Farah, whose work was presented by the Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels in October 2014. The exhibition, entitled “Notes on Running Water”, included Eldfell (2011), a piece made from the polyester–cotton lining of a sleeping bag, buried for six months at the foot of the Icelandic volcano that gives the work its title, and Eylon (2014), a work stained by mud and clay from the Dead Sea. Before that, Almine Rech  Gallery exhibited photos by Saint Laurent designer Hedi Slimane. Her remit, while extending beyond typically conceptual art, still remains firmly entrenched in the cutting edge.

Artists have changed in that they are acutely more aware of the market and are therefore perhaps more cautious than they used to be, she says. But those artists are not interesting to her. “Art that is that purely commercial will not remain in art history,” she says. “It’s maintaining their conviction that is the most difficult thing,” she says. “Those are the ones that will remain.”

Krautrock Pioneer Damo Suzuki for The Work mag

For The Work magazine

The musical performances of 64-year-old Krautrock pioneer Damo Suzuki are, and have always been, exercises in improvisation, informed by a philosophy that places spontaneity at the forefront of the creative process. Suzuki views rehearsal as cosmic pollution, a betrayal of his unspoken vow to the audience that each show will be a conversation, an experiment between him and his musicians (or Sound Carriers, as he likes to call them) and the people standing before them.

Suzuki’s best known as the vocalist for Can, the pioneering Krautrock band that found him busking on the street in Munich in 1970. They asked him to play with them that evening,  leading to vocal performances on landmark albums such as Tago Mago, Future Days and Ege Bamyasi. From the start, his hypnotic, non-specific lyrics in languages he created off the cuff were like Beat poetry set to music, a never-ending Kerouac-esque scroll of spontaneous ecstatic observations expressed as melodic growls and mantric repetition.

Suzuki performed with Can from 1970 to 1973, and his idiosyncratic performance philosophy would influence countless musicians since.  The Fall famously named a song after him; the Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez, members of Broken Social Scene and Tame Impala have all signed up to be his “Sound Carriers” at one point or another.

Based in Cologne, Germany for more than 30 years, he continues to perform regularly in Europe, and is still committed to his lifelong goal of spreading “energy”--aka good vibes—through a fascinating musical dialogue that, we’re happy to report, will continue for many more years to come.

In a recent documentary you talked about traveling to Italy and France and Mexico, and how you noticed how similar cities were starting to look. When did you start noticing that?

It’s globalization. Every big city looks quite the same. Mainly I perform in the big cities because there is the demand and people are informed about my music. But everybody looks the same if you are in Berlin or NYC or London. The same American culture and cafes and hamburger restaurants.

So where can we find contemporary authenticity? Seems like these days people can find themselves by going online shopping.

Nowadays it’s difficult because there is too much information. If you find yourself online it’s often manipulated, based on a product. Too much of the information out there is not really spiritual food for you. It’s very difficult time for everybody.

So how do you find what’s good out there?

If I read an article and I get a good feeling, that helps me decide. But there is no bible. Good is about having the freedom to decide for yourself.  People should not get too much information from other sources. It is not your experience, and often it’s manipulated. But if you are satisfied with yourself, the next step is to share good energy with human beings. These are sources of energy which we need right now.

If we are bombarded with information and news and entertainment, how do we get back to ourselves without cutting off and moving into a cave?

Information can be a type of junk food especially from big companies and TV stations and big radio. So instead, go to the internet and find your truth or go to local stations because they have much more interesting news and truth.

You’ve described performing as a spiritual experience. When you are on stage, what is it that you are channeling?

Every time, I am in the now…I’m creating time and space, every time. I have a good opportunity to do that because I am not working within an industry or in a system, and I am able to be free. This is how everybody should be, free from any kind of organization, free from kings and states.  Don’t believe in gurus. I make music like Damo Suzuki and I don’t like to be categorized as “this is underground,  this is progressive”. I am not so interested in this. I like to be myself. And I ask that the audience should also have that freedom.

Why is it that you refuse to rehearse? Why is spontaneity so important to you?

Let me explain it like this. I eat organic food because I like to harmonize with nature, and nature does not like rehearsal. Look at a landscape, you can see there is no rehearsal. So, music is a part of nature’s communication. And I like to connect with people, but not as a band or artist creating a separate world. Not where I’m the artist on stage and you’re the people in the audience.  Because then the people in the audience are expecting hit songs, and already there are answers. I don’t like to have any answers. So If we make this a spontaneous thing, you don’t have answers. You don’t have a concept and you don’t know how it ends. But I am free. I am free from myself too. So together we are free to create and we can go every direction and at the same time the audience can get it, because they don’t have any expectations, and they can travel with us. That is the most important thing in music. Communication. Maybe 200/300 in the audience making their own stories. Interactivities. Interactivity is communication. And communication is how music started. I feel actually people can understand many things without talking, and without one person needing to be the star or hero. Everybody is equal under the sky.

So it’s more like a conversation then; you are having a conversation through music, responding to your audience in that moment and it’s a democratic experience in which you don’t believe yourself to be any more important than anyone else?

I don’t like to use the word democratic. There is no real democracy in the world.   I am not into any kind of ideology. I like people to find themselves, but without being egotists. We can create many things together, if we are creative enough we can get much more energy. Energy is something to do with creativity. This is one thing that we human beings must reach for. It’s not energy we can get from a philosopher or politician or a king. They are also just like us. Why should we believe in such people? Why should we believe in stars or gurus? Everybody must realize everybody is nobody, but everybody has meaning in society and everybody has a mission just maybe they didn’t find it yet. You don’t have to believe in me, find yourself and you can see things much more clearly and you can share your good energy with other people. These are easy things.

Supposedly we are more connected than ever before, as humans. With phone, social networking and the such. What do you think about that?

Yes there are many communication tools but actually people are losing communication with other people. You go to parties and they are there with phones in their hands talking with another friend somewhere else, but they are in the middle of a party. What is this?

Do you think it’s important to spend time alone in order to find yourself, or can you find it through other people?

You can find yourself through friends too. There is always a kind of energy coming out from other people.  We can learning more and things if there are many people. I don’t think you can make conversation with 100 or 200 people, but I like to take a good conversation with maybe 7 or 8 people. With music it can be more.  Last time played it was in Sheffield with 40 people on stage, 35 of them singers.

35 singers, like a choir? And everyone improvising?

Yes. Next day I was waiting for a train in Sheffield and people came up to me and said it was really good. I thought so too, I had a really good feeling.

I wish I could have seen it myself. What other memorable experiences have you had on stage recently?

Two years before that, in Croydon, just outside London, I performed together with disabled people, and two music teachers. Together we made music and it was really something special. With me, seven people.

What kind of disability did they have?

In the brain. I don’t know what it is called in English. But it was one of the most interesting concerts. When they found some nice riff, they continued and continued and continued. Almost like krautrock.

So maybe Krautrock is basically an autistic expression of music, just looping on and on and on, is that what you’re saying?

Yes. They really got in a trance.

Gilbert and George for The Work mag

Upcoming in The Work magazine

Gilbert and George have been creatively and emotionally merged as one since they fell in love at first sight in 1967. Usually wearing similar or complementary attire, and often finishing one’s sentences, theirs is a striking, almost vaudevillian double act that started in college and now extends into the farthest reaches of the popular culture.  It’s rare for an artistic and personal partnership to have survived so long—what’s their secret, I wonder? Their trick, apparently, is alchemical in nature – the fusing of two elements to create a magic compound. Possible only through the complete and willing abandonment of self, of course. “We always say we are two people, but one artist,” says George. “One artwork, composed of two human beings. So we are not a ‘collaboration’. We are a composition.”

Born Gilbert Proesch in Italy in 1943, and George Passmore in England in 1942, Gilbert and George have worked and lived together as a single artist since first meeting at St Martin’s School of Art, London in 1967. Their works feature themselves as subjects, dancing vaudevillians with stern expressions, telling their own personal emotional stories within Zeitgeistal contexts. They are their own subjects, their own muses, always, always together.

Two individuals as a single cell organism...how does that work in a studio, I wonder? Are there ego-driven battles for creative supremacy? Is there a leader in their collaboration? George shuts that question down immediately.

“Leader? No. That’s sexist. Please don’t be sexist.”

So, a leader implies patriarchal forces are at work?

“We believe in a modern relationship of equality,” he explains. “We are against the idea of bank managers pretending to be like medieval knights with a little wife, a bit like a bird, who tweets around. We believe in equality of the relationship.”

I’m curious what they think about other famous creative pairings - Lennon and McCartney, Dali and Disney, Smith and Mapplethorpe? There are so many instances artists have come together and become greater than the sum of their parts.

“No idea,” says George.

“We’re not really into that,” adds Gilbert.

“The only ones we like are the Queen and Prince Philip,” says George. “The queen. What a woman. Amazing woman.”

A curve ball from this gleefully atypical pair, a pair of homosexual Conservatives who love the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, and made headlines in 1970 by publishing self portraits of themselves titled “George the Cunt” and “Gilbert the Shit”, as a means of pre-empting the hatred they knew would inevitably come their way. Indeed, from the beginning, they were discredited and shunned by the art establishment. “In the 60s we were doing the work that was not the art of that time,” explains George. “We were not minimalist. We were not conceptualists. We believed in color. They didn’t. They did lines and circles. We wanted to talk about sex and life and hope and death.”

Fifty years on, we are in the White Cube gallery in East London and their work is still about sex and life and hope and death, set in their ever-changing perception of “now”. Their show Scapegoating Pictures features large-scale works with literary, Joycean day-in-the-life names. “Body popping”.  “Fruit Exchange”. “Smoking Dildo”. Conjures a colorful picture of Brick Lane in 2014, does it not? The works feature, as always, Gilbert and George as threads woven through the fabric of the city, against a backdrop of Zeitgeistal memes - women in burkas and empty whippets cans, in homage to the stuff kids in their neighborhood are getting high on these days. This is how they’ve always worked, merging themselves over and over, in different societal laboratories.

So here’s a thought - what if they were wrenched apart for a day. Made to create their own art as individuals. What would that look like? Some kind of nuclear fission, perhaps? Would they create their own personal Higgs Boson “God” particles by moving into separate studios, just for a bit? George laughs.

 “Work alone? Why on earth do that? Everyone does that.”

Neck Face for Huck magazine

Published in Huck magazine, Nov 2014

LA-based artist Neck Face has been living in a barely converted garage off an alleyway in Hollywood for four years. It’s smells a bit, because “homeless people pee right there,” he says, motioning to the ajar garage door that leads to the alley. The walls outside are among the most colourful in the city, every inch of brick and breeze block adorned with works by well-known graffiti artists. Neck Face’s home happens to be sandwiched in between some extraordinarily bad murals, obviously commissioned by commercial interests, and I won’t describe them in the name of preserving what little anonymity he has left. The ugliness of the murals works in his favour, he says. “No one would ever expect me to live inside a bad mural.”

But he does.

The garage is a super cluttered dusty artist space featuring a Murphy bed that he pulls down at night, a desk covered in sketches, and an office chair whose back is decorated with the words HIGHWAY TO HELL and a pentagram. The set-up suits his life perfectly; it’s the perfect venue in which to do three things: drink alcohol, make art, and sleep, in that order. Drinking is definitely high on his list of preferred activities these days. In his own words, “a wasted day is a day not wasted”. His last show, in August, was entirely inspired by boozing. So it’s no surprise that this morning he woke up and started the day by finishing a bottle of vodka.

“It doesn’t matter what kind,” he says. “I had some cheap shit in there. Either way, if it’s in there, I’m gonna drink it and if it’s not, I won’t.” It was peach vodka today. His friend in San Francisco had recommended it because “it tastes just like pussy”.  I take a sniff and surmise that the quality of pussy in San Francisco must be high – it smells sweet and delicious. Neck Face opens up a kitchen drawer; it is filled with empty mini liquor bottles. On top, rests a gigantic Ziploc bag filled with chicken bouillon powder. “I cook,” he shrugs, shyly motioning to the plug-in camping stove buried under a pile of dusty papers on the floor.

So he woke up, downed four shots of vodka, and then the bottle was empty. He didn’t mix it with anything, but he chased the shots with two beers. Right now he’s into Miller Lites, because the company reverted to their old vintage can design, and that kind of thing turns him on.  “I am influenced by presentation. It doesn’t even have to be booze. It could be a Coke can, for instance, but if it’s the Olympics Coke can, I’ll be like ‘ah, it’s different.’”

But back to alcohol. He doesn’t drink wine. But knows a fair bit about it because his uncle works at a winery in Napa, hub of California wine country. “My uncle brought home a bunch of wines for Christmas, and they were all different labels, but they were all the exact same wine inside. All the same shit, just different labels.” Who knew.

So today, an October Monday in Los Angeles, he drank, and then he worked.  Work involved making a storyboard for a little 15 second commercial for the TV network Adult Swim, where you can watch shows like Metalocalypse and Robot Chicken. He is a fan of the channel although he doesn’t actually have cable TV. “Cable is like 80 bucks or some shit,” he points out. This is the first time he’s done stuff with Adult Swim. It was fun. He mocked up the storyboard in pencil on a large piece of sketch paper at his desk. The story features his bat character saying  “go!” to two creepy little alien people. In the next frame, the creepy aliens are tying a lady up. She is pregnant and has sticks of dynamite tied to her. Then the aliens set off the dynamite, and a baby flies out of the lady. One of the aliens catches the baby, and the final, unillustrated frame features just three words: “Crowd Goes Wild”.

It reminds me, conceptually, of something that the barbarian heavy metal band GWAR might have come up with. I ask him if he felt sad about the recent passing of GWAR front man Dave Brockie.  No, he says, he was not really a big fan. Also he doesn’t really get sad when people die. “You die, you die.”  I ask him what he thinks will happen when Neck Face dies. Reincarnation, maybe? “Sometimes I believe in reincarnation, sometimes not. I’d be down though. Hopefully, I get to come back and haunt people as a ghost.” Who would he haunt? “Probably just my friends. ‘Cause I seriously feel like I get fucked with (by dead friends) every once in a while. Things happen.” Like for example his good friend Harold Hunter, the iconic skater and actor who died in 2006. On April 2 this year, the day that would have been Harold’s 40^th birthday, Neck Face could have sworn that his old buddy was hanging around. 

“This girl that I was hooking up with like a while ago, I hadn’t heard from her in a long time and then she hit me up out of nowhere. I was at the bar and I was like ‘why did this girl hit me up, I haven’t talked to her in so long?’ I ended up hooking up with her, it was so random. She came out of nowhere. Then I was like ‘Harold hooked it up! It’s him!’”

So it was like a birthday present from Harold, on his birthday?

Exactly, says Neck Face.

Back when Neck Face and Harold lived in New York, Harold used to big up Neck Face for being one of the only kids he knew that didn’t drink. True story: Neck Face was completely sober until after his 21^st birthday. That’s because when he was growing up, drinking was something that dumb jocks did.

“I was so anti jock, because I was a skateboarder, so whatever, I just avoided it.” His avoidance ended in Australia, land of professional drinkers. He saw how Antipodeans liked to party down, and it inspired him. “I got there and I was hanging out with these people who were exactly like me. And they were having such a good time, I thought maybe this isn’t just for jocks. I said fuck it, I’m gonna try it.” That night he had three or four drinks and went out around the town. “I was climbing on stuff and writing on everything and having the best time ever.” He never looked back. Has his passion for alcohol ever disrupted other aspects of his life, I wonder? “Not yet,” he says.

He takes a sip from his can of Miller Lite.

“A lot of people think of drinking as a bad thing. Which it is. Sometimes. But I wanted to convey that I get something out of it. I am not just there, like, waking up in the morning and drinking booze and doing nothing else. Something comes out of it. I took a negative and turned it into a positive and got work done.” Most of the pieces that were in the show were conceptualized at his favourite bar, around the corner, a place called Black on Santa Monica Boulevard. He shows me bar napkins covered in ideas for pieces, all doodled while propping up the bar at Black. But he’s in no hurry to do another drinking inspired show. Been there, done that. “I am trying to think of a different way to approach this whole thing,” he says.

Sitting in his garage for four or five months straight, drawing every day and every night, in that cycle for ten years as a working artist, has lead him to the next evolution of Neck Face. From being someone known for creating 2D pieces, he’s now thrilled to be getting his hands dirty with plasma cutters and welding equipment. “I like working with metal because it’s, like, just raw. It’s straight union worker-type shit. You can get burned. Cut. You can go blind. Its more risky and not a lot of people use it. It’s different way to express yourself.”

Working with metal fits with his general lifestyle, anyway, in that he is a huge fan of heavy metal music. He’s super excited to be seeing one of his favourite bands, King Diamond, on Halloween. “That’s another reason I like to work with metal. You can’t be working on some metal shit and be listening to some Neil Young. Or Beatles. You gotta be listening to some metal shit.”

His phone pings, a pretty little chime that is not very metal. A text from a lady friend. They are going to dinner tonight. “This is the first normal date for us,” he explains. “She said ‘let’s do something nice’, and I said ‘let’s go to dinner’.”

As he speaks, the song “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds wafts from a ghetto blaster. The song was famously featured in John Hughes’ movieThe Breakfast Club. “I like the Brat Pack,” says Neck face. “My favorite one in that film was the moody Goth chicks. I like Goth chicks. Actually I like all kinds. But people always ask if I like big boobs or big butts, and I am like ‘no boobs and no butt’. Because those are the girls that no one is going after.”

Aw. Isn’t that kind of romantic?

“I guess so,” he says. “I don’t care if you are big or small. As long as you are cool up here, in your head, I am fine.”

Ah. He must be a sapiosexual, then. Someone who is turned on by someone’s mind.

“Sapiosexual? Sick! I am going to write that down,” he says, scribbling.

What if the girl he is going out with tonight ends up being The One, I ask him. What if they fall in love? And what if she wants them to move into a nice pretty clean house together, away from the homeless pee pee, the Freddy Krueger posters and serial killer memorabilia. Well, that’s too bad, says Neck Face. “Even if I had all the money in the world, I would be living in a place like this. Love it, or leave.” Then he downs a shot of golden liquor from a boot-shaped glass.

New York Times "T" Magazine / Pappy and Harriet's

Ten years since taking over a desert saloon in Pioneertown, Calif., two New Yorkers have transformed it into an oasis of indie rock and a breeding ground for music stars.

In 2003, Robyn Celia and Linda Krantz took over Pappy and Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace, a dusty desert roadhouse that they’ve since turned into one of California’s most unique live music venues. A two-hour drive from Los Angeles, it’s next to a defunct movie set built with the help of Roy Rogers in the 1940s, complete with empty saloon, jail and bank facades. Pappy’s clientele is a Lynchian mix of bikers, hipsters and the occasional celebrity like Anne Hathaway (who stopped by for nachos the night after her Oscar win) and Kesha (who sang a Bob Dylan song during an open mic night).

When Celia, a musician, and Krantz, who used to work in the film industry, bought the bar from an airline pilot who had let it slide into disrepair, the Pappy’s house band played what sounded like the same music set almost every night. Celia decided to reach out to the country star Lucinda Williams, who, to her surprise, accepted an invite to play there and tore down the sold-out house. Ten years in, Pappy’s has become a go-to venue for arena acts — Spiritualized, Vampire Weekend and Conor Oberst, among many others — hungry for more intimate shows. But no matter how star-studded it gets, Pappy’s remains steadfastly down-home, with local acts entertaining the often-rowdy crowd. “It’s the only place I’ve been thrown out of three times and still go back to . . . because you’re thrown out with love,” says the desert native and Queens of the Stone Age singer Josh Homme.

Read the original article here.

Movie deal for my book, Kicking Up Dirt!

My first book, the true-story sports saga "Kicking Up Dirt", is gearing up at Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions' AFFIRM Films, with 'Parental Guidance‘s' Andy Fickman set to direct.
The film is based on the autobiography I wrote for four-time Women’s Motocross Association champion Ashley Fiolek.  I met Ashley when Paper magazine commissioned me to write a short article on her. Her story was so amazing I reached out to William Morris agent Kirby Kim who encouraged me to write a book proposal - three months later, we had a deal with Harper Collins. And now, a movie!
From the press release: "Like AFFIRM’s 2011 movie 'Soul Surfer', 'Kicking Up Dirt' tracks the inspirational journey of a female athlete up against the odds. In this case the Oops Doughnuts production will follow Fiolek’s rise to become the youngest WMA champion at age 18, winner of two consecutive X Games gold medals, and the first female factory rider for Honda Red Bull Racing."
Kristin Rusk Robinson and Ian Deichtman (Life As We Know It, TV’s Parenthood) are writing the script.
I'm beyond excited to see Ashley's tale brought to the big screen! She' an amazing woman.

DIRTY ROCKER BOYS tops the Kindle chart!

"Dirty Rocker Boys", the book I co-authored with glam metal video babe Bobbie Brown, has been getting crazy press, with major coverage in the NY Post, Daily Mail, Entertainment Weekly and other outlets.  The fan reviews on Amazon have been great too. Bobbie and I couldn't be happier!

Buy it here.

James Franco / Dazed Cover Interview

I lay on the beach with James Franco and talked about art. Read the interview in the December 2013 issue of Dazed and Confused magazine. Here's a snippet.

James Franco really wants some coffee. He's tired. He’s just flown in from a shoot in Canada, modeled for Dazed’s cover and tonight he’s filming again. In the morning he’s teaching a class at UCLA and then getting on a plane to Mississippi, where he is shooting his film adaptation of William Faulkner’s classic, The Sound and the Fury. Being James Franco, actor-director-writer-artist-teacher-student-PhD candidate-multi-hyphenate-object-of-desire, obviously requires excellent time management. It also requires coffee. But here, on the Venice Beach boardwalk on a Sunday afternoon, there’s not a cup of Joe in sight.

He’s wearing a black t-shirt bearing the word “Fassbinder”, a homage to Rainer Werner Fassbinder the German auteur, but in Spinal Tap lettering. In that it merges the experimental with the ironic, the high brow with the playful, it really is the perfect shirt for James Franco to be wearing right now. Or as Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel would say, “This is my exact inner structure, done in a tee shirt.” We start to discuss how the duality of James Franco, mainstream actor and auteur, both feed and muddy one another. He answers questions lying on his side, one hand making shapes in the sand. Rarely making direct eye contact, his Ray Bans point towards the crashing waves of the Pacific. Perhaps he's dreaming of a macchiato.

"People look at roles I've done in Milk or as Allen Ginsberg and it all kind of projects back on my persona, this public persona that has been created of "James Franco", this weird thing that has been created around me that is me and yet it's not me. It's partly my creation and yet not my creation, so I just use it. Art, for me, is about finding a free space outside of that persona, where I can mix it up. There, I can just kind of play and be free."

Ian Ruhter for Red Bulletin magazine

In 1859, Charles Weed was the first person to ever take a photograph in Yosemite. In the early 1860s, Carleton Watkins was the second, taking huge 18x22 inch negatives that convinced Abraham Lincoln and congress to sign the 1864 bill designating Yosemite the nation’s first national park. Ansel Adams came along 100 years later, with his brooding images of Half Dome that elevated environmental photography into an art form. And today, in 2013, Ian Ruhter is here with what may be the most unusual camera these granite slopes have ever seen. His camera is as big as a truck. It is a truck, in fact. And its mechanism is the humans inside.

“I’m pretty sure it’s the biggest camera that has ever been in Yosemite,” says a man who goes by the name Yosemite Steve. It’s nighttime and we can hear the bear patrol circling, rangers making noise so as to scare away any wandering beasts. We’re sitting around a barely smoldering campfire, Ruhter’s pale blue camera truck parked a few feet away, looking less like a camera and more like someplace to buy ice cream or some tacos. Yosemite Steve, also a photographer and a videographer, is a fan of Ruhter and his remarkable camera, which uses a lens the size of a beach ball to create images on huge aluminum wet plates, resulting in iridescent, finely-detailed silver impressions of the world outside.

Yosemite Steve is studying the photography of Carleton Watkins, the second photographer in Yosemite, whom he believes to be an unsung hero of photography. He sees many parallels between Ruhter and Watkins’ work. Ruhter’s camera, for example, is basically a supersized version of Watkins’, using the same “wet-plate collodion” technique. “Except Carleton made negatives and Ian is doing positives,” says Yosemite Steve. “Carleton made negatives so that he could make prints, but I don’t want to make prints,” says Ruhter. “I want to make one-off things, like a painting,” he says. It’s a novel approach, when you consider that anywhere between 20,000 to 50,000 photos are shot on iPhones and digital cameras around Yosemite, every day. “Me, I am really fascinated in the ‘one’,” continues Ruhter. “Especially in this age where everything is mass produced, mass reproduced. I really like just one. That’s all it takes.” Ruhter is going to attempt to photograph a dramatic rock face and waterfall tomorrow. We say attempt, because there are no guarantees with this camera truck. The last time he was here, none of the shots he took with the camera developed, and he was not happy about it.

Ruhter speaks in cryptic Yoda-meets-the-Cheshire-Cat riddles, and when I ask what time we should we meet him tomorrow to observe him shooting the rock face and waterfall, this is his response. “You can come between noon and noon fifteen. Or two to two thirty. Or five to six. Or you can show up whenever you want. I can’t guarantee I will be there.” There are giggles to his left, from Ruhter’s mellowed-out protégé Willie, a 23-year-old photographer and self-confessed “art nerd” from Casper. Willie met Ruhter two years ago, shortly after his father died. He sat in Ruhter’s truck, cried, and decided he was going to go on the road with Ruhter, and join his so-called " American Dream Project", a sort of traveling oral and visual history of the nation, all images captured in the magic truck. Willie even has the camera truck tattooed on his left arm.

Wandering around the camp is Lane, also in his twenties, also a photographer, and a filmmaker and a welder. He helped Ruhter customize the truck, a former delivery vehicle that Ruhter bought in Los Angeles nearly two years ago. Lane is the clearest communicator of the trio, and helps fill in some gaps as I try to piece together why on earth Ruhter, a former pro snowboarder and commercial photographer, would have decided to devote his life to driving around the nation in a truck-sized camera.

“Well I heard about this guy who was building a giant camera in Lake Tahoe,” says Lane. “I am really into building and fabricating so I just started showing up where he was working on it. To me, Ian had this Wizard of Oz magic about him, like the man behind the curtain. I kept asking to help until one day, he let me.”

At that point, Ruhter had yet to shoot a plate that he was happy with. Bear in mind, each plate costs around $500 to make. The first time Lane went out with Ruhter, to an abandoned silver quarry in Nevada, was the first time that Ruhter successfully captured an image. “I had never seen wet plate before, and I was blown away by the silver highlights and the way it looked,” says Lane. That was in September of 2011.  “And what’s the end goal of all this?”  I ask Lane. “To do what we want when we want to do it,” he shrugs.

After that Lane, Ian and Willie started traveling, Lane filming their trips for an online docu series which includes the remarkable Silver And Light, a short film that has helped elevate Ruhter from ‘that guy with the crazy camera’ into a latter day Thoreau, with a growing cult following around the US. To many, Ruhter is an iconoclast, an analogue man in a digital age, bearing an almost anarchic distaste for the wasteful, acquisitory, “more is more” nature of our society. The whole analog vs. digital point is moot though, as far as Ruhter is concerned. He Instagrams, he’s on Facebook and has an iPhone. He’s not trying to make a statement about the proliferation of social media—actually he loves social media, it’s how many of his fans have been able to access his work. As an artist, he appreciates the power of modern technology and he does not dress up in period costume, like some other enthusiasts of wet-plate collodion photography. Rather he sees himself as a contemporary photographer, building a bridge between past and future.

“Come here,” says Ruhter the next day, pulling back the black tarp on the back of the truck. Inside it is pitch dark except for a ghostly, upside down moving image on a plate. It’s Yosemite Falls and Cooks Meadow, waterfall flowing, in real time. The image is black and white and unbelievably crisp, a hypnotic living scene that is somehow, dare I say it, more beautiful than the real thing outside. How can that be?

“Because we are creating it,” says Ruhter, poet philosopher to the core.

“What’s really cool about this is that your eyes actually see things this way, upside down” says Tim, another of Ruhter’s disciples. “Then our brains flip the image over.” For Ruhter, 39, who suffers from severe dyslexia, these photographs are the only way he knows to clearly and confidently express himself. “My photos are my voice,” he says. “This is how I show people how I think and feel, and this is how I see things. Upside down and wrong way round.”

Originally from South Lake Tahoe, Ruhter was a sponsored snowboarder who took up photography at age 26 after retiring from the sport. His aunt had given him an old 35mm Nikon SLR film camera and he studied dark room photography at community college, getting a part-time job at a local casino so he could buy a better camera. He moved to LA and established a successful career as a commercial and magazine photographer, but found that he resented the pace of that life. He did not like having to shoot digital, he hated retouching and airbrushing. So he quit, left LA for Lake Tahoe, and poured his life savings into a big pale blue truck. Now he’s happy.

Inside the truck, Ruhter shifts the plate back and forth, focusing the image. “Right now, we are the camera,” says Ruhter. “We are the gears. Trippy, huh?” When he is ready to make a photograph (he prefers the term “make” to “take”) he pours silver nitrate over the plate. It’s the silver that makes the plate light sensitive, and gives it its eerie reflective quality. The last time he tried to shoot at Yosemite, none of the plates developed. Today, luck is on Ruhter’s side, and he makes several stunning plates of the landscape. Later, to celebrate, he poses on top of a precipitous rock overhang, grinning above a 3000 feet drop. He hands his iPhone to one of his team--  “I just want a picture of me standing on this rock, you know?”—and then shares it on his Instagram. “Now that’s what’s up,” he says.

Elizabeth Olsen cover interview for Dazed&Confused

The younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Olsen may have grown up alongside America’s most famous twins, but she has pointedly remained her own woman. Studying theatre at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, she paced her career to suit herself, remaining happily under the radar while honing her craft. Two years ago, she finally dipped her toes in cinematic waters, making several films in a row, some good, some not so good, and one mesmerizing—“Martha Marcy May Marlene”, a moving contemporary drama about a girl haunted by memories of life within a twisted utopian cult. Her vulnerable, instinctive performance in the lead role (her first) prompted the late great film critic Roger Ebert to describe Olsen as a “genuine discovery”, an actress who reminded him of a young, raw Michelle Williams. Whatever whispers of nepotism may have existed prior to that film (who is this new Olsen, and is piggy-backing off her sisters’ fame?) were immediately silenced—Elizabeth’s talent was undisputable. She’s still thankful for the magnificent debut that complex role afforded her.

“I don’t know where I would be if that movie had not happened,” says Olsen, sitting outdoors at a low-key cafe in the neighborhood of Toluca Lake, in the Valley about 20 minutes from Hollywood. This is where she grew up, and she seems relaxed and at home. Her features are perfectly symmetrical and her wide set eyes are the color of light jade. Her warm, slightly sallow skin is untouched by make up and she’s wearing her hair long, tousled and sun-kissed--pure California surfer babe. So much so, it feels like we’re at the beach, not in the Valley, the sort of Essex of Los Angeles, a sprawling suburban enclave much-maligned by city hipsters who, unlike Lizzie, are unaware of its high quality donut shops and tucked away vintage stores.

Since “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, Olsen has landed some meaty, high profile cinematic fare, including a lead in Spike Lee’s much-anticipated remake of Chan-wook Park’s dizzying 2003 horror classic, Old Boy. The Korean-language original, she says, remains among the most impressive films she has ever seen, featuring a notorious scene in which the protagonist swallows a live octopus. “In Korea, it became kind of like a copy-cat competition,” she says. “Men would try and swallow octopuses…one even died after it got stuck inside his esophagus.”  She can’t divulge too much about Lee’s interpretation of Old Boy except to say that the ending, subject of much heated debate among in fan forums, will be a surprise. “This film is very different to the original,” she says. “We made it our own thing, and the ending is one that Western audiences will enjoy.”

Also upcoming are Godzilla (“I think this one is going to be really fucking cool,” she says, “it will be nothing like any American Godzilla,”) and the lead role in Therese Raquin, a period piece and adaptation of the classic 19th century French novel by Emile Zola, in which she stars opposite Jessica Lange and Tom Felton (aka Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies). She plays the titular role Therese, a woman whose sexuality and freedom have been so suppressed that when she finally unleashes them, shit gets primal. This kind of theme is right up her alley. “Women’s sexuality is something that I am obsessed with, and I love stories that touch on it,” she says. She’s also vocal about motherhood (“I find it is actually the most modern feminist thing to do, choosing to have a family young instead of having a career,”) and masturbation (“I think it’s weird that teenage girls know more about giving blowjobs than they do about masturbation...it makes me sick to my stomach that so many young girls think sex is just about a guy finishing.” Demure she may look, but a shrinking violet she is not.

In fact, like a latter day Kate Winslet or Jane Fonda, Olsen exudes a charmingly outspoken intelligence that, combined with her romantic beauty, results in what you might call “the full package”— beauty, brains, and balls. Imagine if Botticelli’s Venus had had a PhD…and a punk band. “When I was 13, I told my parents I didn’t believe in God any more,” she says. “I wanted to be an atheist because I believed that religion should be about community and having a place to go in prayer, not something that should determine women’s freedoms.” This is rare and brave talk for a young actress in America, where the fear of offending the right wing, God-fearing masses (who tend to buy lots of tickets to the movies) is more intense than most Europeans could ever imagine.

She left LA for New York in 2007 aged 18, and while technically, she still lives there, she’s now ready to come back to Los Angeles, after a few projects are completed. It’s hard thinking about going back to my isolated square footage in New York,” she says, sighing. “The heat of walking in Manhattan in the summer, the ac units dripping with water, the laundry units spitting out heat and the smell of urine...I used to love New York, and get off on how stimulated it made me feel, but right now I’m kind of dreading it.” At the ripe old age of 24, she feels like she’s already paid her NYC dues. “I actually feel more productive in LA. Here, if you decide to stay home, that’s perfectly OK. In New York if you stay home you’re like ‘what am I doing with my life? I have nothing to do, I’m a loser, argh!’”

She will, however go back to New York City, where she will play Juliet in a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, off-broadway. It wasn’t until being offered the role that she fell in love with Juliet, whom, at first, she had dismissed as something of a sappy, boring female character. “But the more we worked on it the more I realized she was one of the greatest characters ever written,” says Olsen. “She is just so smart. She is smarter than anyone in the play, aside from maybe Mercutio. She uses her words to benefit her and to screw with other people, but she also feels things so earnestly and deeply. She is so powerful and strong and committed and determined!”

Olsen’s enthusiasm is sincere, and infectious. When she likes something, she’s not frightened to say so, whether it’s Shakespeare’s Juliet, or Robert Downey Junior for example. “I would do anything with him. If he was part of project and I could be in any scene with him, I would do it, hands down.  He’s so talented. And so smart. You just don't have that kind of humor unless you’re smart.” Sounds like she’s having a bit of a Downey moment?  “Girl, I’m always having a Downey moment,” she laughs. As far as female role models go, she’s obsessed with Michelle Pfeiffer. “Best Catwoman ever,” she says. “Also, she is able to exude sexuality without being written off as dumb. You look at her and think ‘fuck, she’s sexy, but she’s not sexy and stupid, she’s sexy and owns it…because she’s smarter than everybody else in the room.” Olsen, much like Pfeiffer, counterbalances her waifish beauty with the aura of inner strength. It’s the kind of attitude that could see her succeeding as a mainstream comedic or blockbuster actress, as well as an indie muse.  Both worlds are her oyster.

Her phone buzzes—it’s her dad, calling to say hi. She’s very close to her father, who is an avid golfer, in the same way that she is an avid actress, her brother is an avid collector of comic books (he has an entire storage unit filled with them) and her sisters Mary Kate and Ashley are avid fashionistas (they named their fashion line Elizabeth and James after their siblings). “It wasn’t that creativity was nurtured so much in my family as much as a spirit of hard work,” she explains. “My dad always says beat your last best score, and don’t worry about the person who beat you. Be the best you can be and don’t compare yourself to someone else.” A valuable, and very liberating lesson indeed, especially for someone who grew up with immensely successful siblings. Today, she’s close with her immediate family, and collectively, she views them as a team. Team Olsen.

“I’m obsessed with teams,” she explains. “When I was in sixth grade, I realized that mine and my siblings’ fist initials spelled the word TEAM. T-rent, E-lizabeth, A-shley, and M-ary Kate.  So I bought us all little trinkets that said TEAM, so we could always remember that.” She likes doing movies because it feels like teamwork, “all these weird people that probably shouldn’t ever be in a room together, who have to work together and get one thing done…it’s the best.” Her pet peeve is actors who fall into the trap of believing themselves the most important person in the room. In Olsen’s view, a film is the sum of its parts. In that sense, she’s the anti-Russell Crowe, the anti-Christian Bale, the anti-any actor who sees themselves as more important than the movie. “Sometimes, I can’t stand the bullshit of actors,” she says. “You know where they’re more interested in “getting in the zone” (she says this in an affected Zoolander-esque voice) than they are about showing up and doing their job and remembering that film is a group activity. When you’re an actor, it’s not about you, it’s about a team.”

You get the sense that whatever limelight is inevitably around the corner for this talented young actress; fame, awards and adulation are not the end goal here.  Perhaps growing up with such well-known sisters, who cast her in their TV show when she was a baby, stripped that whole lifestyle of its mystique for her. She’s already seen that life first hand, and witnessed how the tabloids have hounded her sisters, how the entertainment industry can be a cold and fickle mistress. After years of observing its mechanisms from the safe confines of Camp Olsen, Lizzie is developing her career unburdened by unrealistic notions of what success means, and remains very clear about what she wants. “The only things that are important in life are family, and friends,” she says.  “Fuck the rest of it.”