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FA L L / W I N T E R 2 0 2 1

WHAT TO WE AR NOW

Your Guide to Getting Fly PLUS:

Blissing Out in Malibu With

JONAH HILL

Watches We Love Furniture We Covet Artists We Adore

dior boutiques 800.929.dior (3467) – dior.com

S H O P. G Q . C O M

CONTENTS

GQ STYLE FALL/WINTER 2021 WHAT TO WEAR NOW: STARRING THE ‘GOSSIP GIRL’ GUYS P27

FRESH PAINT 2: FOUR ARTISTS YOU’VE JUST GOTTA SEE

JONAHHILL P54

COVER STORY:

P64

P100

WATCHES 48 HOURS AND IN ATLANTA FURNITURE P80

THE LAST GLIMPSES OF CALIFORNIA’S VANISHING HIPPIE UTOPIAS

P110

ON THE COVER Photograph and artwork by Ed Templeton. Styled by George Cortina.

THE UNTOLD STORY OF IRAK, DOWNTOWN NEW YORK’S MOST LEGENDARY GRAFFITI CREW

P126

R A LPH L AUR EN

CONTENTS

GQ STYLE FALL/WINTER 2021 ON THE COVER Jacket, $4,995, by Ralph Lauren. Sweater, $540, by Bode. Shorts, $175, by Aimé Leon Dore. Sunglasses, $750, by Jacques Marie Mage x George Cortina.

ST Y L I ST, G E O RG E C O RT I N A .

THIS PAGE Sweater, $1,290, by Marni. Shirt, $495, by Brunello Cucinelli. Sunglasses, $850, by Jacques Marie Mage. Ring, his own.

Ph otog raph by E d T emp leton

T I M E T O R E AC H YO U R S TA R A ARON RODGERS

SPORT T H E F U T U R E O F S W I S S WATC H M A K I N G S I N C E 18 6 5

L e t t e r F r om t he Ed itor

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

Jonah Hill’s legs by Ed Templeton.

A Very Short Interview With Ed Templeton As a longtime fan of skater, artist, and iconic street and skate photographer Ed Templeton, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to call him up and ask him about his career—and his awesome cover shoot with Jonah Hill.

How do you go from putting your board on the curb by hand to going pro? And you started shooting photos on tour, right? Well, within five years I was pro. I started in ’85, and I was pro by 1990. I immediately got immersed in going to the skate contests and hanging out with all the local kids here. So yeah, by 1990 I was pro and started traveling. Four years after I turned pro is when it kind of hit me: “Look at this life you get to live. You get to travel the world and get paid to do what you love.” It kind of coincided with seeing Larry Clark’s Teenage Lust for the first time and Nan Goldin’s book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. It made me realize: I’m living a life that’s kind of interesting—I feel a responsibility to document it. Is it true your first cameras were disposables, or is that just apocryphal artist biography shit? No, I mean, I think I got a Canon AE-1. Once I realized I wanted to do it, I wanted to use a good camera. There was a trend at that time of just shooting point-andshoot everything. Just on-camera flash. But I always kind of hated the way those [photos] looked. I was really going for the black-and-white Cartier-Bresson, Larry Clark, Garry Winogrand style. In the shoot in this issue, a lot of the tools that you use in your art practice are present: text, washes, collage. What led you to start playing around with those things,

and what guides you when you feel like painting or washing a photo versus just doing a pure black-and-white image? Yeah, there’s kind of two schools in photography, I guess. The traditional way is that you make your photograph and that’s it. You don’t mess with it. But I’ve always been a big fan of people who did more with their photography. Artists like Jim Goldberg. David Hockney spent the whole ’80s doing photo collages. All of Robert Frank’s later work, past The Americans, was scratching the negatives, making prints and writing on them, painting on them. So for me, sure, I’m going for that iconic photograph. But when that fails, for instance, you can still use the photograph—maybe painting on it or writing something on it brings it up from that mid range and back into the good range. What is the first memory that comes to mind from our shoot day? Off the top. Oh, gosh. My first thought was just confusion. I don’t do a lot of shoots, so when I first got there, I couldn’t even find the trailer. I was just in the parking lot, and there was no cell reception in Malibu, so I was looking around, like, I’m literally lost until someone comes and finds me. Of course, with Jonah, the first impression is just really funny and personable. Since he grew up skateboarding, he was well aware of my history because he grew up looking at the magazines. So for the shoot day, literally the first direction I gave him as a photographer—it was so mild. I was like, “Oh, can you look down?” and he instantly started razzing me, like, “Oh, demanding, aren’t we? Did you learn that from Jamie Thomas?” He started throwing out skate references. There was a point when he was looking at me intensely for a second, and I was shooting all these photos. And then he just paused and said, “I never thought I’d be eye-fucking Ed Templeton today. Did you enjoy that eye-fuck right there?” And I was like, “I did!”

Will Welch Global Editorial Director Ph otog raph and ar twork by Ed Temp le to n Po laro id b y De anna Tem pl eton

J O N A H H I L L : ST Y L I ST, G E O RG E C O RT I N A . JAC K E T, $ 7 9 0, BY B O D E . V I N TA G E S H O RTS F R O M M E L E T M E R C A N T I L E . R I N G , H I S OW N .

How did skateboarding become your life as a young man? I was living in Huntington Beach, California, which is known for surfing and skateboarding culture in general. As a kid, I remember seeing a couple of kids skate by my house and ollie up a curb. And I just remember being blown away by that. When I skated I had to stop and pick up my board and put it on the curb, until I saw an ollie and I was like, “Okay, I want to do that.” That was the spark of the obsession.

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BIG BANG INTEGRAL Blue ceramic case with integrated bracelet. In-house UNICO chronograph movement.

Wear Portraits by Richie Talboy Styled by Jon Tietz

S TA R R I N G

THE BOYS OF GOSSIP GIRL

PLUS

THE BEST NEW FASHION GEAR , DESIGN OBJECTS , WATCHES, AND JEWELRY Still Lifes by Martin Brown

W h a t t o Wea r Now

Thomas Doherty, Eli Brown, and Evan Mock are three of NYC’s most stylish raconteurs and heartbreakers. Oh, and they’re also the stars of Gossip Girl. Here they show off the biggest fits of the season. Turn to page 50 for a proper introduction.

ON DOHERTY

sweater-vest $450 Kiko Kostadinov

FALL’S FLYEST FITS

coat $1,200 Ernest W. Baker

pants $300 Head of State shoes $1,230 Marsèll hat $80 Polo Ralph Lauren scarf $240 Marni watch $6,600 Cartier rings (throughout) $1,350 each Bernard James ON BROWN

Custom Vintage Vest

Herbie Mensah $180

jacket and pants (prices upon request) shirt $530 Wales Bonner boots $378 Frye earring (throughout), his own bracelet $975 Tiffany & Co. ON MOCK

jacket $5,000 pants $2,700 shirt $950 shoes $850 Gucci earring (throughout) and necklaces, his own

Proof that the Birkin isn’t Hermès’s only insanely covetable bag.

QUILTED PUFFER Moncler $2,370

Studio 189 shirt $225 pants $225

Studio 189 strives to promote African fashion through the waviest expressions of traditional fabrics and silhouettes. (Rosario Dawson happens to be a cofounder.)

Fa ll/ Wi nt er 20 21

Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada’s first joint men’s collection for Prada was a lot of things: historic, masterful, and full of brilliantly boyish Art Deco long johns.

07 Advanced Layering sweater $1,100 turtleneck $1,240 Prada

W h a t t o Wea r Now

CHECKS ON CHECKS

At a time when many designers responded to the pandemic by going futuristic, Marni’s Francesco Risso doubled down on the humble pleasures of classic patterns and tactile textures.

coat $2,450 pants $690 belt $550 scarf $240 Marni hat (price upon request) Lanvin

Thompson Street Studio $600

Are these trousers part of a Renaissance costume? Part of a kite? Jonathan Anderson loves clothes that invite interpretation by ballooning and flaring in unexpected ways.

10 COLLEC TIBLE QUILT JW Anderson (price upon request)

09 Origami Trousers 11

Brioni $6,500

Bernard James $3,950

Sue Fisher King $105 each

12 Millefiori Tumblers Versace sweater-vest $775 shirt $1,295

Even the nerdy polo-and-sweater-vest combo looks sexed up in the hands of Donatella Versace.

Going-Out Tops

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

jacket $448 ERL tank top $43 for pack of three Calvin Klein Underwear overalls (worn as pants) $432 Engineered Garments boots $1,150 Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane necklace $4,250 Bernard James

Bodega Fit

Thanks to the likes of ERL and Engineered Garments, you no longer have to choose between clout and comfort when you get dressed.

W h a t t o Wea r Now

CROCHETED TANK

tank top $490 Bode jeans $250 Lorod his own underwear Heron Preston for Calvin Klein

Bode’s multicolored shirts and tank tops have quickly joined the brand’s sublime quilted jackets as tier-one grails.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

18 M A J O R MIN AUD IÈ R E Gucci $11,010

John Lobb $665

17 Luxe House Shoes Marni $1,250

Alessandro Michele has already sold mankind on the idea of a Gucci purse (with the help of Harry Styles). What’s next? A bejeweled anatomical evening bag.

YEEHAW LOAFERS

20 Artisanal Vase

Toga Virilis $470

Nalata Nalata $270

Yasuko Furuta’s footwear line embellishes well-worn forms with incredibly badass Wild West hardware.

Owl at Bi-Rite Studio $2,200

Fa ll/ Wi nt er 20 21

blazer $1,195 Ami shirt $1,195 Judy Turner pants $595 Winnie New York shoes $928 Marsèll necklace (throughout), his own

Handmade in New York City, Judy Turner’s gauzy, frilly top is the perfect formalwear flex in the post-bow-tie era.

FRESH FORMALWEAR 39

W h a t t o Wea r Now

Some of your favorite streetwear brands (Supreme, Noah, Palace) are run by Polo obsessives—and there’s never been a better time to go straight to the source.

THE RETURN OF PREP coat $1,398 sweater $298 shirt $99 hat $60 Polo Ralph Lauren pants $690 Marni scarf $155 Begg x Co.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

Party Shirt

Salvatore Ferragamo $690

25 BELTED CORD SUIT Dzojchen $2,370

Tennis Bling

FROM TOP

Mateo $5,950 Jacob & Co. $24,000

Canali $6,210

DOUBLE-PLEAT WALES

Shearling Peacoat 30 With Tiffany’s resurgence, Hermès’s abiding quality, and Chrome Hearts’ brashness, these days there’s a luxury sterling link for every fashion taste.

FROM TOP

Tiffany & Co. $17,500 Hermès $1,375 Chrome Hearts $2,090

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

GREEN SCREEN

coat $7,500 jacket $1,300 pants $1,100 boots $650 Bottega Veneta

Bottega Veneta calls this shade of green “parakeet.” We call it the retina-searing color of the season.

W h a t t o Wea r Now

PRINCELY PATCHWORK SUIT

Dolce & Gabbana does classic doublebreasted tailoring its own way: in patchwork velvet, with a sharp-as-knives silhouette.

jacket $3,895 pants $1,595 Dolce & Gabbana tank top (price upon request) Ludovic de Saint Sernin boots $550 Ernest W. Baker

T OR T OISESHELL SHADES Nanushka $325

Needles $340

This season Needles, already the preeminent purveyor of actually cool clogs, delivers an homage to the techno punks who used to cut the leather off the toes of their steel-capped Docs.

35 A Lamp We Like Danny Kaplan Studio $2,450

Tom Ford $4,990

Jacques Marie Mage $670

Mike Amiri, the king of ball-tight denim, is making it easy to embrace a post-skinnyjean future.

Amiri $1,290

39 CL ARK KENT BUSINES S CASUAL shirt (price upon request) pants $2,330 Louis Vuitton Men’s tie $180 Paul Stuart bracelet $875 Tiffany & Co.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

If anyone’s going to save the shirt and tie, it’s Virgil Abloh, whose instinct for modernizing menswear archetypes is nothing short of prophetic.

W h a t t o Wea r Now

Electric Blue Blazer

hair by evanie frausto at streeters using bumble and bumble. skin by akiko owada at the wall group using chanel. tailoring by victoria yee howe.

blazer $2,990 sweater $1,550 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello pants $992 Casablanca

As a true designer for the Instagram age, YSL’s Anthony Vaccarello knows the best blue blazer is the kind that pops.

2– 3 8 , 4 2 & 4 3 ) P R O P ST Y L I ST: D U ST I N H U B B S AT M A R K E DWA R D I N C . 4 1 ) P R O P ST Y L I ST: M E LO D I E D EW I T T AT M A R K E DWA R D I N C .

wallet chain (worn as necklace) $2,730 bracelet $2,090 Chrome Hearts

Fa ll/W inte r 20 21

Hublot $169,000

Loewe $1,450

Developed by the engineering wizards at Hublot, the synthetic sapphire case that shows off the Big Bang Tourbillon Automatic’s mesmerizing movement is as durable as any metal.

41 OR ANGE SAPPHIRE T OURBILLON 43

Emporio Armani $1,595

Gossip It was all but certain that the

Gossip Girl reboot would turn leads

Evan Mock,

Thomas Doherty,

and Eli Brown into stars.

But who knew the show would

turn them into best buds too?

By Samuel Hine

Boys

Photograph by Richie Talboy

Styled by Jon Tietz

W h a t t o Wea r Now

the toast of New York, Thomas Doherty, Evan Mock, and Eli Brown, the male leads of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot, are drinking at buzzy downtown French bistro Lucien. Over spicy margaritas, the boys start comparing their characters with those from the original series. Doherty’s Max Wolfe, an arched-eyebrowed instigator of chaos, is the Chuck Bass figure—and Doherty acts circles around Ed Westwick. Doherty presents a theory to Brown: “You’re— what’s his name, Dan?” Brown replies, “That’s what they’ve been saying! By they, I mean my fans.” The fans got that one right: As the Brooklyn-dwelling Otto “Obie” Bergmann IV, Brown brings a Dan Humphrey–like sense of nominal moral clarity to the show’s twisted social matrix. They turn to Mock. His character, the mellow Akeno “Aki” Menzies, was based partly on Mock himself. But as a Hawaiian skater and surfer without much acting experience, he doesn’t seem to fit the show’s blue-blooded framework. Or does he? A

FEW

MONTHS

BEFORE

BECOMING

“I’m Blair Wardolf, or whatever her name is,”

Mock says.

jacket $4,990 tank top $475 pants $990 shoes $595 necklace $3,750 Givenchy

Girl series premiered on the CW, but he’s the break-

socks $14 for five pairs Dockers

out star of the new show.

ON DOHERTY

Doherty and Brown erupt in laughter. Part of the

“They’re like college roommates,” says Whitney

reason Gossip Girl was targeted for a reboot at all

Peak, one of the show’s female leads. Filming a TV

is that any millennial worth their salt knows that

show last year, in an unopened New York City, was

Leighton Meester’s character was named Blair

tricky—and before they could safely venture out, they

Waldorf. While one of the refreshing things about

had only one another. “When we moved here there was

the new Gossip Girl is that prior viewing experience

nothing going on, at all,” Brown says. “The city was

varies among the Gen Z cast, this is too much to

shut down, it was freezing outside—”

bear. “Wardolf! Blair Wardolf!” Doherty and Brown

“We didn’t know anyone,” Doherty says, finishing

shriek. When Mock tosses out one more try—“Claire

the thought. “There was a certain sense of codepen-

Wardoff?”—Doherty, on the verge of tears, lays his

dency that flamed the friendships,” Brown continues.

head on the table.

Doherty and Brown solidified their bond a few months

“These two make me laugh,” Doherty says, once

into filming when, after a night of drinking, Brown

he’s composed himself. “There’s some telepathy shit

used a needle and ink to give Doherty a homemade

going on. We all know exactly what the other per-

tattoo—a heart on his right arm. (“I later found out it

son is thinking,” Brown confirms. Their collision was

wasn’t actually tattoo ink,” Doherty says.) “It was like

essentially random, a paint-by-numbers casting of

fucking Parent Trap,” says Doherty. “They hated me

impish jokester, rich do-gooder, and chill skater. But

in the makeup trailer,” Brown admits.

against all odds, they became practically inseparable.

In November, the cast was spotted together for the

According to Mock, “The girls get mad at us because

first time while filming on the steps of the Metropolitan

there’re so many inside jokes.”

Museum of Art. It was a meaningful moment for the

Call them the Gossip Boys, a Brat Pack for the

new gang—and a bonanza for paparazzi starved for

Instagram age. Doherty, 26, is a Scottish former

celebrity content by the pandemic. “It was really cool,”

Disney star whose role alongside Zoë Kravitz in High

Brown says of the swarm of photographers and fans

Fidelity generated headlines such as “Why Is Thomas

gathered around the museum, “but when everybody

Doherty on High Fidelity So Hot?” Mock, 24, is a pink-

wrapped and I went home, my phone started blowing

haired model and ambassador of multihyphenate

up. I was being tagged all over the place on Instagram,

cool who frequently graces Calvin Klein billboards.

it was being covered by everybody, and I was like, ‘Here

Brown, 21, was only eight when the original Gossip

we go. This is the beginning of the end.’ ”

PREVIOUS PAGES ON MOCK

coat $1,995 Boss turtleneck $575 Eckhaus Latta jeans $35 Wrangler shoes $480 Camperlab socks $20 for six pairs Nike rings $1,350 each (on left hand) and $375 (on right hand) Bernard James ON BROWN

sweater-vest $295 Maryam Nassir Zadeh shirt $675 Brunello Cucinelli pants $1,150 Lanvin shoes $480 Camperlab

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

P R E V I O U S PA G E S : H A I R , E VA N I E F R AU STO U S I N G B U M B L E A N D B U M B L E ; S K I N , A K I KO OWA D A AT T H E WA L L G R O U P U S I N G C H A N E L ; TA I LO R I N G , V I CTO R I A Y E E H OW E . T H I S PA G E : WOJ TA S I K / H B O M A X ( 2 ) .

On the set of Gossip Girl, from left: Eli Brown and Evan Mock; Thomas Doherty.

Soon enough, it would be hard for someone to go

I don’t think we’ll be pigeonholed as much as they

two blocks in New York without seeing the actors

were back then,” says Mock, who’s excited for the

on posters, and the premiere in July would vault

first season to wrap so he can get back to filming

all three to a shinier tier of fame. (The second half

skate parts. In the original series, the general public

of the season airs this fall.) Initial reviews were

saw Penn Badgley only once a week, on the CW; today

mixed: Critics hailed the updates (more diversity,

the boys—especially Mock—seem to be everywhere.

timely references, appearances from the likes of

“Social media’s an amazing platform,” says Doherty,

Jeremy O. Harris) but generally panned the rivalry-

for the way it lets the actors themselves, rather than

filled plot as stilted and confusing. Not that it mattered.

network marketing teams, shape the way they’re

If watching the original GG was like getting sucked into

seen by audiences.

an enthrallingly trashy tabloid, streaming the reboot

And it turns out the Gossip Boys’ fellowship is good

is like scrolling through Instagram: As soon as you

for more than laughs. As we polish off another round

start losing interest, a juicy detail—a niche downtown

of beers, I ask Mock about his first real acting role.

cameo, a resplendent Bode outfit—pulls you back in.

He leans back and gestures at his friends. “I’m really

The first episode set a viewership record on HBO Max

thankful for these two,” he says, “because they’re

and seemed to set a horny-tweet record as well.

very encouraging.” Just as Mock helped Doherty and

At Lucien, the guys say they aren’t sweating what’s

Brown with the Manhattan social scene, they spot-

to come. They may not have watched the original

ted him as he jumped headfirst into their industry.

franchise, but I wondered if they thought much about

“Someone coming from the outside to this whole

how things had gone for the original cast. Over the

entertainment world is fucking scary, and I had

course of six seasons, the identities of the original

sweaty palms for months knowing that I had this job

three male leads seemed to merge in the public imag-

that I’ve never done before.…”

ination with those of their characters, and for years

“You’re fucking killing it though, bro,” says Brown.

after the actors struggled with Gossip Girl’s long

“You really are, honestly,” adds Doherty.

shadow. Do the boys worry, I ask, about being strapped

“To have that support off the bat is really nice,”

to the cultural rocketship of a franchise?

The short answer is: They don’t. They happen to be as unflappable, and as thrumming with coolness, as

Mock says. “So thank you. And I’m signing off.” The

Gossip Boys clink glasses one more time and head off

into the night.

the Upper East Side teens they portray. “Now there are other avenues—people are into a lot of things.

S A M U E L H I N E I S G Q ’ S S E N I O R A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R .

Art

Farshad Farzankia

Andrea Marie Breiling

In the second installment of our studio visit series, we present four visual artists who are making the art world as lively and engaging as ever right now.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

Alake Shilling

Harry Gould Harvey IV

B y He le n H o lm es

Photographs by, from left, Petra Kleis, Chase Middleton, Samuel Trotter, and Buck Squibb

Art

C O P E N H AG E N

Farshad Farzankia B. 1980

answering a Zoom call than Farshad Farzankia. Rolling a cigarette while perched on a stool in a studio flooded with sunlight, the painter cuts a wry, Dylan-esque figure. Fittingly, Bob Dylan happens to be one of his heroes. A Copenhagen transplant born in Tehran, Farzankia creates canvases that feature abstracted visages floating through existential landscapes while gnashing teeth or skulls hover close by. The work is as indebted to cinema as it is to mythology. Since slipping into the scene only a few years ago, the artist has seen his paintings sell out at art fairs and has conjured knockout solo shows at venues like Andersen’s in Copenhagen— and his first museum exhibition is up now at Denmark’s Arken. NO ONE HAS EVER LO OKED CO OLER

Ph otog raph s by Pet ra K le is

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 When you choose what to paint, do any subjects or symbols or images occur that you would never want to touch? I want to say I’m open to everything, but that would be a lie, because no matter what, we all have a small path that we’re walking on and it’s somehow there, you know. Have you been making any work directly about the pandemic? No. I never really do that, but my paintings became very black. I started using a lot of black and red, and I was surprised by that. But that happened during that time, and then it became blue. It’s almost like you practice, you go to the studio and play the music and rehearse, and then when the painting happens it’s more like a performance, not like practice. So then it happens, like Keith Jarrett on the stage when he just improvises. But it’s not really improvisation. Because he brought something with him.

You worked in graphic design before you transitioned fully into your art practice. Why did you return to painting? FARSHAD FARZ ANKIA: When I went to graphic design school, I had basically made my flat into a studio. I was thinking that graphic design was more hands-on. But of course it was on the computer; everything was on the computer, right? This was 25 years ago. It changed when I figured out I had to do just one thing: I started pursuing painting. GQ S T YLE:

A RT WO R K : M A L L E M A D I S O N /C O U RT E SY O F T H E A RT I ST.

This notion of you needing to decide to pursue one path feels consistent with what often seems like a kind of devotional aspect present in a lot of your paintings. You know the story about the Virgin Mary, right? And the birth of Jesus and everything? Somehow maybe it’s more abstract, you know—maybe we are all Virgin Marys and we have to give birth to this thing. But that sounds crazy. It’s a concept from Rūmī; he talks about it. You have to devote yourself to one thing. Like in love, like in true love. In an open kind of way, you know, because I think happiness comes from choosing. It’s an act of choosing. You’re willing to go there.

Untitled, 2018–19

The Iranian-born artist Farshad Farzankia at work in his Copenhagen studio. He started out as a graphic designer before devoting himself to painting.

How do your paintings take shape? Making paintings for me is like a conversation, or a series of constant decisions. I make the drawings and then turn the drawings into paintings. There’s always a transformation or shift going from paper to painting. It kind of shifts shape and size and fits on the canvas. And also, the painting becomes very different from the drawing and it’s a very intuitive process, so the drawing always gets abandoned initially and then the painting becomes something that can stand straight for itself. Philip Guston says that in the beginning of a painting everyone’s in the studio—like all of your thoughts and people who are on your mind—and little by little everyone leaves and finally the painter leaves too, and then the painting happens, and it becomes a painting. I’ve always thought about this description, and it’s for me very true.

Art

Andrea Marie Breiling B R O O K LY N

Andrea Marie Breiling’s newest series of paintings, seen here in her New York studio, are made from applying layers of spray paint.

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Andrea Marie Breiling’s 2021 exhibition of layered, sweeping canvases at Broadway Gallery in New York, represented a departure in line curvature from the crosshatched paintings she showed a year earlier, which themselves were strikingly dissimilar to the more traditionally Abstract Expressionist pieces she was making before that. Such rapid evolution could be attributed to the American painter’s sharp instinct for recognizing, and transcending, limitations. An expired passport leads to a new studio in New York; a returned box of spray paint becomes an entirely new artistic direction. In turn, her colorful work, on view at upcoming shows at Almine Rech in London and Night Gallery in L.A., offers transcendence to others. “EYES TO THE WIND,”

GQ S T YLE:

How has your recent move to New York impacted

your work? When I got here in 2020 and I made the show for Broadway, I started adapting and learning techniques with all the different tips of spray paint cans and all the different things that they can do. I was able to really create some interesting depth and atmosphere with just that alone. It really made the work more airy and kind of floaty, and it was presenting itself to me in this really fresh way.

A R T W O R K : P I E R R E L E H O R S / C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T I S T A N D N I G H T G A L L E R Y, L O S A N G E L E S .

ANDREA MARIE BREILING:

Just making one key change in how you apply paint to canvas could change how the final piece turns out? Yeah. Because there weren’t any big philosophy shifts I was going to make. My work is emotional. It’s really about transcendence. And for me, it’s a form of poetry, so it’s not like I was going to go in and do anything different about the way I was approaching the work, because that wasn’t the problem. People were into the energy force and how much of my body was being thrown onto the work and how physical it was and almost violent in ways. I was attacking the canvas. I knew that that wasn’t an issue and that was also something that I wasn’t going to reject. I wanted that to stay sacred; it’s something that I enjoy and get pleasure from.

In the Garden, 2021

How would you say your day-to-day life relates to your time in the studio? I’m starting to wonder if there are two different kinds of painters. There are the painters that operate out in the world very seriously, and then they get in their studio and a lot of it is almost comedy, where they go in there and they get to poke fun at society or the things that are hurting them or make commentary. And I think for me it’s the opposite. Outside in the world I’m much more lighthearted and fun and not taking it all so seriously, but I don’t believe in irony in the studio. I don’t even think there should be irony in art, period. I’ve never really heard a good love song or any great album that has irony to it. But I do credit the studio for the fact that I can exhale and have a good time outside of it. Recently, [New York Times critic] Roberta Smith shared my painting on her Instagram, and I was like, “Well, that’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me.” You can quote me saying that.

P h o t o g r ap hs b y Ch ase Mid dl eto n

From top: Spotty Dotty Dog House, 2020; Tickle Bug Is Back in Town, 2020

LOS ANGELE S B. 1993

Alake Shilling 60

Ph otog raph s by Sam uel Tr otter

F a l l / W i nt er 20 21

winsome creations of Los Angeles–based sculptor and painter Alake Shilling have landed in the collection of the Hammer Museum, in an upcoming exhibition hosted by Jeffrey Deitch, and in the heart of anyone who discovers her work. Shilling maintains a shifting roster of inspirations that includes both Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo and Nickelodeon’s CatDog. Fittingly, her favorite characters to render— a bear astride a train, a ladybug on a joyride—were recently transformed into limited-edition miniatures made in porcelain, the first of which quickly sold out. And she recently collaborated with Marc Jacobs for a series of pieces featuring her work as part of his new Heaven collection.

O P P O S I T E PAG E , A RT WO R K : C O U RT ESY O F T H E A RT I ST ( 2) .

THE PSYCHEDEL IC,

GQ S T YLE: Coming out of the pandemic, are you creating an abundance of art? Do you feel a new rush of creativity? AL AKE SHILLING: The pandemic was very helpful for me, because I’m an introvert. So the fact that I didn’t feel the stress or pressure of having to go out was great, because a big part of making art is meeting other people and going to openings, which is very stressful for me. I could just stay home without any guilt for not going to openings—it made me feel much more creative and much more stress-free.

What are you feeling inspired by lately? I really like nail art; that inspires me. I wish I could get some of the techniques nail technicians use onto the canvas. I like fashion a lot too; I’ve been looking at a lot of fashion

Ar t

Instagrams, just people that post iconic pieces from really iconic designers. Why do you think your cartoon and animal figurines get the response in people that they do? I want people to look at my work and feel automatically really good, and I feel like cartoons are so relatable. It’s a universal thing. I haven’t done any research on it; I just feel that a lot of people across many subcultures and cultures gravitate toward cartoons and can understand them. And the colors and the organic shapes are really enticing to people, I find.

Alake Shilling’s winsome creations have come to life as porcelain figurines, appeared on garments in a Marc Jacobs collection, and will soon adorn the walls of the Jeffrey Deitch gallery in NYC.

Is there a difference in your creative process when it comes to making paintings versus ceramic figurines? When painting I have to do more research when it comes to creating an environment and a scenario. I usually make sketches for paintings but not for ceramics. When I start a ceramic I think of an animal I want to make and start building. It doesn’t always turn out to be the animal I had in mind, but it’s okay. Ceramics is definitely more labor intensive, but I feel there is a carefree aspect to embrace when I make ceramics. When you create these characters, are you trying to give them an identity? At this point it’s still kind of developing. They don’t really have their own identity; it’s more like each character comes out of a feeling I’m trying to go for. They’re not people, but the personification of a feeling or an emotion or an idea.

Art

Harry Gould Harvey IV FA L L R I V E R , M A

B. 1991 Instead, multidisciplinary artist Harry Gould Harvey IV and his wife, artist Brittni Ann Harvey, founded the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art on the ground floor of an active textile manufacturer in Fall River, Massachusetts. A talented photographer who found his first success making photos as a teenager, Harvey managed to capture the art world’s attention when he began creating his arresting, occasionally gothic and hexed-seeming objects. He’s landed a spot in this fall’s New Museum Triennial, as well as in an upcoming two-person exhibition at Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery with the eco-feminist artist Faith Wilding, and he doesn’t half-ass anything: Harvey IV’s respect for Wilding is so acute, he has her name tattooed on his hand. D U R I N G T H E PA N D E M I C, M A N Y D R I F T E D I N WA R D.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 GQ S T YLE: How did you make the transition from commercial photography to the art you’re making now? HARRY GO ULD HARVEY IV: I started out as a bit of a troubled youth in the greater South Coast, Massachusetts, region. I was a high school dropout—I got expelled from nearly every school I went to. Ultimately I realized that educational institutions didn’t really work well with whatever neurodivergent soup I was in, or even just my colorful lived experience. So I went touring in punk bands around the U.S., and that experience in documenting that kind of lifestyle became something I learned how to commodify at a young age. By the time I was 18 or 19, I was working for Time magazine and The Fader and all these different magazines. Those initial trips to New York City, where I would start to acquire contacts or figure out how to navigate the spectacle of media, were incredibly formative to my art practice as a whole.

Is that why wood and fabrication play into your work? Is it a reaction to the digital ether? Initially I had to pare down my art practice out of economic struggle. I couldn’t produce photographs anymore, I couldn’t make larger sculptures. Back in 2015, I had a pretty severe mental episode where I lost language, and through drawing I rediscovered ways to communicate more effectively. Once I had the drawings, I realized it was important to protect and guard and revere these drawings with some type of object. I realized that traditional frames are kind of afterthoughts, or something that is meant to be quiet in relation to the objects that they’re framing. I saw it as an opportunity to protect these spiritual ruminations with a crown of thorns. I happen to have friends that had a black walnut tree that was poisoning their yard. They had to cut it down, and I started milling that wood. I have a lot of interest in ecology, so I was already interested in the whole ecosystem and how the black walnut tree relates to native and non-native species, how it has certain pollinators that relate to it, how it has certain moths that are attracted to it. Not only did the wood come to me by chance, but it became something that I could manipulate to protect these drawings.

A RT WO R K : C O U RT E SY O F T H E A RT I ST.

Harry Gould Harvey IV works out of an old factory building in Fall River, Massachusetts, where he and his wife, Brittni Ann Harvey, founded the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art.

How did pandemic isolation suit you? I mounted a solo show and started a museum during it, so in a certain sense I thrived. But it was also really tough because my mother passed away immediately before COVID hit. It was a pretty tumultuous time—she was only 56—and then I went into this isolation and hit a depressive wall. But any day could be anything for me; I try to deal with things holistically. Ultimately I found the pandemic to be pretty rewarding, because I didn’t have to travel to New York so often. How has opening your own museum affected your work or perspective as an artist? We started it last October, and it’s one of the more integral things to my practice. There are certain aspects of creating and making art that can ultimately feel self-serving, and the museum allows me to use the cultural capital that I’ve been able to acquire within art media and within the gallery structure and institutional structure to illuminate socio-economic issues in the city of Fall River. 

ART SAVES <3 I, 2021

P h o t o g r ap hs b y Bu ck Squi bb

H E L E N H O L M E S I S A N A R T R E P O R T E R F O R ‘ T H E O B S E R V E R .’

C o v e r S t o ry

His 20s were wild: a parade of raunchy, era-defining comedies. Then Jonah Hill shifted gears, directing a deeply personal film and taking on the kinds of rich, complex roles he’s always wanted. Here he opens up to director Adam McKay (another funny guy gone serious-ish) about that evolution—and how nice it is when your happiness finally catches up with your success.

Moderated by Sam Schube

Photographs and artwork by Ed Templeton

Styled by George Cortina

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1

C o v e r S t o ry OPENING PAGES of his career, Jonah Hill met Adam McKay shirt $440 Kapital over tacos at a Mexican spot in Hollywood. This was back in 2004, just after Hill appeared in his first movie— OPPOSITE PAGE blazer $1,195 I Heart Huckabees. McKay, a former head writer for SNL who Richard James was just beginning a streak of comedies that would define the vintage shirt aughts, loved his performance. They riffed for hours. from Melet Mercantile Hill would go on to star in his own run of raunchy, coming-ofvintage jeans age comedies that captured a generation. Then he pivoted: first from Front General Store to more serious roles in movies like Moneyball and The Wolf of slippers Wall Street and then to the other side of the camera, directing (throughout) $455 his coming-of-age skate drama, Mid90s. McKay, too, would go on George Cortina for Anderson & to more dramatic fare, writing and directing The Big Short and Sheppard Vice. But until they made Don’t Look Up, a dark comedy about sunglasses our imperiled climate that Netflix will release later this year, the $600 Jacques two had somehow never worked together. Marie Mage “I’ve gotten to work with all these great directors now,” Hill necklace (throughout), says, “and Adam is one of the ones I’ve wanted to work with forhis own ever, and we finally found the right thing.” He’s speaking from his backyard in Malibu amid a riot of greenery, a smoothie and a pack of American Spirits by his side. (McKay Zooms in while lying on his couch at home.) “What I love about Adam,” Hill continues, “is he started in comedy like I did, and he’s directed comedic masterpieces, and then he’s also gone on to direct masterpieces outside of that very specific genre. But he’s still the funniest guy.” We’ve enlisted McKay to get on the horn with Hill to talk about his career path and the tricky shift from funny guy to Oscar contender. It’s a leap that many have failed to make, and one that expended much of Hill’s industry capital and psychic energy. But at 37, Hill seems to have found his groove, acting in movies like McKay’s and continuing to direct, including a very meta documentary about his therapist. That film has been its own therapeutic process, and Hill speaks openly and eagerly about his mental health. He looks well too: His hair is blond, he’s wearing a blue-and-purple tie-dyed T-shirt, and he’s got the warmed-over complexion of an everyday surfer, which he’s become over the past couple of years. McKay is immediately heartened by how relaxed his pal looks, and their conversation quickly swells to encompass the power of therapy, the myth of the tortured artist, and the square-dancing movie they’re definitely going to make next. — S A M S C H U B E

AT THE VERY START

Adam McKay: We should start the interview with how blond you look. Oh, my God. What are you doing with your average day, living out by the beach? I mean, I can’t get over how blond and sun-dappled you look. Thanks, baby. I’m still a workaholic. I still write and direct and get all my projects in order and stuff. But then I also surf every day. I make myself surf every day. I don’t know if dropping out is kind of the accurate word, but I kind of dropped out a little bit. I still love my creativity and my work. But I definitely live a very quiet lifestyle, where I surf, hang with my dog, hang with my nephews. Just keep it mellow.

What time do you surf? Are you doing the thing where you get up at 5 a.m.? No, I’ll surf at like 7 a.m., and if it’s good again at like 3 or 4 p.m., I’ll take a work break for an hour and surf. So you’re surfing, working out a little bit in the morning, and then as your day progresses, you’re writing, you’re working on things you’re going to direct. Yeah. I have my company, Strong Baby Productions, that we started last year. And then I have my three main projects I focus on, which are the next film I’m directing, from something I wrote; then the

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 documentary on our boy [Phil] Stutz, my therapist; and this movie I cowrote with Kenya Barris that he’s going to direct and we’ll shoot in the fall, which is an interracial-marriage comedy. For my next movie I’m directing, I have to make, like, a straight-up presentation reel for Warner Bros. to present to the committee. You don’t have to deal with this because you’re a super baller, but second-movie people got to literally go in front of the gauntlet and give a presentation reel to get the green light, along with the script and the cast and everything. It’s this big, formal presentation, Succession-style. But I break everything into weekly chunks. So I’ll do a rewrite on the Kenya movie—that’ll be a week. I’ll have a next round of editing and shooting for Stutz, and that’ll be a week. I did the Stutz doc and Don’t Look Up during COVID, and Don’t Look Up was such a great experience because it was obviously such a weird-ass time for everybody, but you and I got to laugh together. Even if I’m making a heavy-ass movie, I never want to not be funny and fun during the experience of it. I think that’s something people don’t quite understand, is that you can do serious stuff, but even when you’re doing very serious stuff, you can still laugh. I mean, one of the funniest people I’ve ever talked to is Errol Morris. David Lynch is another guy. Have you ever met David Lynch? I never have, but I do TM [Transcendental Meditation] and I’m reading his book on TM right now, and it’s amazing. I love his book. But he’s hilarious. The two funniest directors I’ve ever…I mean, I would say the obvious ones like Judd [Apatow] and Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and all those hilarious people. But the funniest people that just consistently made me laugh while we were making a movie, and sometimes it would be heavy, were you and Martin Scorsese. If you see that Martin Scorsese is funny as fuck, even while he’s doing a scene where you’re doing some crazy shit or some heavy shit, I’m like, Oh, you can just be a blast no matter what. You can be making Schindler’s List and treat the material very seriously, but the experience doesn’t have to be a nightmare. I always joke that unless you’re making Apocalypse Now, relax. That’s the one movie where you can lose your shit a little bit. They literally had the Philippine army [loaning them helicopters and pilots]; Martin Sheen had a heart attack. There’s rumors that there were actual dead bodies on the set. You’re allowed to freak out if you’re making Apocalypse Now. Maybe Fitzcarraldo. Those would be the two movies. Yeah, but the point is you can’t even make Apocalypse Now or Fitzcarraldo now in this modern society. It’s not like you can live it like you did back in the day, and I don’t even think it’s fun to. When I was a younger actor and I would get Moneyball or something, I’d be like, I’m going to walk around as the character for two years. Now I’m like, Fuck that, dude. I just come off as pretentious. It doesn’t help. I take my work seriously. But we should be having fun, and if we’re not, we’re just being miserable for some fake artistic pretentious reason, and I actually don’t think that’s rad. I think there was this idea, especially in America, that artists have to be miserable. Artists have to be dark. Dude! You know what the first thing Phil Stutz said to me was? First thing. He said, “You’re not a good artist because you’re fucked up. You’re a good artist in spite of being fucked up.” It’s all a dumb mythology that you’re supposed to be miserable to be talented, and it’s so absurdist. It’s genuinely: I got healthier, my art got better, and I was happier. Straight up. I haven’t seen misery bring better art out of anybody. I just haven’t. (text continued on page

70)

sweater $450 Aimé Leon Dore pants, vintage sunglasses $750 Jacques Marie Mage

C o v e r S t o ry I’m older than you, but for my generation, it was Jim Morrison. It was Jimi Hendrix. It was these people that were literally killing themselves. And then I heard a musician interviewed about Jim Morrison and they’re like, No, when that band started, they were really cool, but then he started drinking so much that they sucked. You never hear that part of the story, that they were young guys who were exciting and cool, and then he started drinking a gallon of gin a day and he became insufferable. He couldn’t show up. He literally couldn’t show up to the fucking thing and do his job. I think the biggest generational difference I can throw out there is between how John Belushi’s death was perceived and how Chris Farley’s death was perceived. When I was a kid and I heard about John Belushi dying, it was romanticized, like, “Yeah, dude, he was punk rock and he died from heroin,” and all this shit. And then when I was 13 or 14, I lost Chris Farley, and the shit wasn’t sexy or romanticized. It was just sad. I cried for a fucking week when Chris Farley died, and it wasn’t like I was like, “How punk is that, dude?” It was like, “What the fuck? This sucks.” He hosted SNL about two months before he died. He was clearly really struggling, but he was such a sweetheart, he still had this big, loving, eager-to-please heart. And I had the same reaction. What you really see is, this was someone who was in a lot of pain and trying desperately to deal with it. And you’re right. The way that hit was nothing but sad. Everyone was just like, We lost someone who was giving us a ton of joy, and he should have had joy. He should have had joy. That breaks my heart. So when you ask me what I do, I’m like, Work shit comes easy to me. I love work. I love being creative. I want to be happy. I literally want to be happy. That is the mission of my life, that I work hard at. Can you talk a little bit about this shift? What was it like when you were coming up and you were doing the big hit comedies? I guess, first off, just to give this some sort of frame, do you remember the first time we ever met? I remember when we met, because Seth Rogen lived in an apartment behind Canter’s [Deli, in Los Angeles], and then Seth was the first one to start making paper. And so he got a house, and then I moved into his apartment behind Canter’s. There was a taco shop around the corner, and you and Will Ferrell were eating tacos. It must’ve been right before or after Superbad came out, but I remember that you guys wanted to talk to me. And I sat down and talked to you guys. And you guys were, like, talking to me. And I was like, This is the sickest! This is it! I get to talk to these people I’m obsessed with. It was before Superbad. I think I had seen you in—correct me if I’m wrong here—I Heart Huckabees. And you were awesome in it. So I knew you were good. I knew everyone liked you. And

“Mid90s made me understand that I can just be a good person and have value and sit at the table. I don’t need some supernatural thing to offer.” 70

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 jacket $790 Bode vintage shorts from Melet Mercantile sunglasses $695 Jacques Marie Mage ring, his own

C o v e r S t o ry we were just talking about the tacos, and you were being funny as shit about the tacos. And I’m like, “Anyone who can talk about tacos with joy and humor is okay by me.” So that was the first time that I met you. And then I think shortly after that, you were just on the rocket ship. You were starting to bang out these huge comedies. What was that period of your life like? It was very overnight for me. Michael Cera and I talk about it all the time. We just had this really rare experience: One day life was one way, and then one day life was a different way. Right after Superbad, I took a writing job on Brüno [with Sacha Baron Cohen]. I was 23, and they asked me to host SNL for the first time. And I didn’t want to leave the writers room. I was like, “Guys, I don’t know what to do.” It was my first job working for Sacha. And Sacha was like, “Dude, you should go host SNL.” To me, having a writing job for Sacha Baron Cohen was as rad as hosting SNL. I was a kid. I had probably too much power for a young person, and too much autonomy, and not enough life skills. I dropped out of college, and I used to not get why people would go to college. Because if you’re ambitious, why would you spend four years just idling? And then I didn’t realize until I turned 30 that what those four years gave all my friends was this wobbling period of how to be a person. I was really advanced professionally but really behind personally. All my 20s, I wasn’t really looking inward. I was just running toward success. Or trying to find success. And when I was 30, I was like, I’ve always wanted to be a director, but if I don’t get off this train now and write Mid90s, I’m not going to do it. And I hit Pause. I took three or four years to reshape things. I was like, I could just do this for 10 more years and I’m not going to evolve as a person. And Mid90s, a lot of that’s about how you grew up, right? Isn’t that the scene you came up in? Well, it’s not literally how I grew up. I am not a representative of skate culture. But the two gnarliest environments are skateboarding and comedy, and I grew up in both of those environments. I was an insecure, overweight kid, which in both of those communities is like having a scarlet letter on you. You are a target for abuse. But also in both of those communities are the smartest, most interesting, most damaged and beautiful people, as we know. They really remind me of each other because they bring in these lost souls that don’t fit anywhere else, and they really are similar. It’s not about skateboarding—it’s just about the animal kingdom, the sense of community and how harsh but ultimately how loyal the people are. That’s how I came of age, and that’s what I wanted to show in my first film. I really wanted to make this movie that expressed the movies I want to make, which are movies that are really funny but have a deeply human sadness to them as well. That’s how I feel. I feel like I’m really funny and I have a deeply rooted human sadness, like we all do. I don’t want to ignore either one. And that’s how I got there. You’ve gone through the blur that is your 20s, which is a blur for a lot of us, but for you it was cranked up to 110 miles an hour with this insane success and these incredible comedies. And then you take this moment to take a deep breath and exhale. What did that feel like, doing that? I don’t know if this is obvious to anyone else, but Mid90s is straight-up about self-abuse. The whole movie is the line that Na-Kel Smith says at the end, when he’s like, “You take the hardest hits out of anybody I know. You know you don’t have to do that, right?” I sucked at skateboarding. But I would throw myself down 10 stairs to make my friends laugh, knowing I couldn’t ever do any trick that would be good. Or in comedy, I would be brutal to myself, or allow brutality to me, because I felt like that was my seat at the table. And what making Mid90s did for me personally was make me understand that I can just be a good person and have value and sit at the table. I don’t need some supernatural thing to offer that is beyond just being a good dude. I started seeing Stutz probably four months before principal photography on that movie, so I was already thinking about this

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stuff. And to me, it was just very therapeutic to watch a kid go through that and maybe at the end of the movie, almost in a fantasy way that I didn’t have, have someone older than him say, “Yo, you’re enough.” That’s how I look at that film and what it’s about. You mentioned Stutz again. So what year is this, when you start seeing Stutz? This is 2017, because Joaquin Phoenix and I were making Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, and we became friends during that movie. And then I moved back to L.A. to make Mid90s, and he was like, “Yo, you should go see this guy.” And I did.

THIS PAGE jacket $4,425 Hermès pajamas $550 George Cortina for Anderson & Sheppard sunglasses $695 Jacques Marie Mage

For anyone reading this, Jonah sees a therapist named Phil Stutz, and I saw his partner, Barry Michels, for years and years, so we both have that bond with each other. Do you want to explain a little bit who Phil Stutz is and what he means to you? He invented a set of visualization techniques that greatly changed my life. Netflix let me make a doc on therapy and Phil’s teachings, and then it became about Phil’s life, and then it became about how insane it is that I am making a movie about my therapist, and now it’s become…I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s become very collapsed on itself. The person that I vent to while I’m making a film, I now can’t vent to, because the film is about him, and I can’t let him know it maybe isn’t going to work. I remember my first therapy session with Barry Michels, walking out and being like, “Holy fucking shit.” No

exaggeration—it was like 20 pounds was off my back. I realized I’d been carrying a small wall safe on my right shoulder for absolutely no reason. There’s that movie The Mission, where Robert De Niro carries around a sack. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It’s politically a little problematic because it glorifies missionaries, so I don’t know if it’s held up so well— It glorifies the missionary position? A lot of it’s about the invention of the missionary position. That’s exactly it. It’s rated NC-17. No, Robert De Niro carries around a sack of armor because he killed his half brother in a jealous rage, and that’s his penance. And then, of course, there’s the moment in the movie where he forgives himself and his armor is cut loose. I’ll never forget seeing Barry Michels and being like, “Holy shit, I just put down a wall safe.” Not to say I put down all the weight, but I put down some of it. I felt that exact same way. And then what I realized over years of doing this shit seriously is, yes, you learn these things that can cut the emotional weight off immediately. But it takes daily diligence to keep doing it. You can have that experience of like, “Cool, I can drop this thing I have shame around,” but then two weeks later, you still feel that feeling, and you have to use the tools to continue to drop that. Well, don’t get me wrong—I think I picked up the wall safe about four days later. But Jonah, you’ve got to have a good wall safe. I mean, it was a beautiful wall safe. I’m not going to just

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“I want people to see shit they don’t usually get to see in movies that makes them feel like it’s okay to be themselves.” leave it there. And you have valuables that you don’t want to lose! I respect that. Now, mine is more of one of those digital hotel safes, instead of a full Acme Looney Tunes safe. The safe is smaller, but I’m still carrying it around. You’ve got to be able to put your watch in there, your wallet. Totally. For real, though, the mission for me, whether it’s Mid90s, or this Stutz doc, or the next film I’m making, what I care about is: I get what it’s like to be somebody who really has a hard time existing, and really has a hard time with their emotions, and all this shit—even the work we did on Don’t Look Up, where I play this completely fucked-up piece of shit, essentially. All this shit I’m doing, I want people to see shit they don’t usually get to see in movies that makes them feel like it’s okay to be themselves. I do this a lot. I did it in The Wolf of Wall Street—I gravitate towards playing the polar opposite of where I’m trying to get to. And I think that’s why you can laugh at it. The Wolf of Wall Street’s one of my favorite movies of the last five, 10 years. And there’s two things happening in that movie. It’s this glorious release of our base instincts while at the same time being a total cautionary tale. But I think you can do both— you can play Grand Theft Auto, and do horrible, horrible things in Grand Theft Auto so that you don’t go on a subway car and bite someone’s arm. I think it’s an individual spectrum, though, right? For some people, yes, playing Grand Theft Auto is so they don’t go do that. I think it’s ultimately about knowing yourself. I can’t let too much negative shit in, or I get negative. You produce Succession, which is my favorite show on TV. But I can’t binge-watch Succession, because it’s letting too much negative shit into my brain. It seeps in too deep. In this world with the pandemic, with social media, with income inequality, with scary temperatures and heat waves and all this stuff going on, you’ve really got to take care of yourself and be gentle with yourself, in a way that I’d never experienced. I feel like in the ’90s, I was more like what you’re describing, where I could fall down a flight of stairs, where I could take a shotgun blast standing and laugh about it. And now it’s like, the world got intense. You’ve got to really breathe and go slow and be loving. Or maybe you changed and evolved.

blazer $1,195 Richard James

No, no, no. That wasn’t it. Yeah, if I was in my 20s with my comedy friends and I knocked some teeth out, I would think that was rad.

vintage shirt from Melet Mercantile

You know that literally happened to me, right? I was in Philadelphia in the early ’90s with a couple of friends, and we’d been out doing stand-up. We’d had some drinks. We were going down a dark side (text continued on page 78)

sunglasses $600 Jacques Marie Mage

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coat $3,900 Louis Vuitton Men’s shirt $440 Kapital vintage shorts from Melet Mercantile

C o v e r S t o ry OPPOSITE PAGE jacket $795 Massimo Alba sweater $1,835 Loro Piana vintage jeans from Raggedy Threads belt $1,395 Artemas Quibble sunglasses $600 Jacques Marie Mage hair by johnnie sapong using leonor greyl. skin by holly silius using retrouvé. tailoring by susie kourinian. set design by evan jourden. produced by hinoki group. special thanks to ezra woods at pretend plants & flowers, and to paradise cove, malibu, california.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 street. And the old Trinity houses in Philly, the stone steps jut out. And I clipped my foot on one of the steps and fell and knocked out my front tooth and chipped the tooth next to it. And we all immediately started laughing. I took the teeth and put them in a cup of milk, because someone said maybe they can put them back on [that way]. And then we went and had some more drinks and laughed and laughed. And the next day I went to the dentist with my teeth. He’s like, “I can’t put these back.” That was life in your 20s as a comic. And maybe that’s just a function of being in your 20s. But I’m starting to think normal people don’t go through shit like that. Very good point, Jonah. Even my friends who were in their 20s were like, “That’s fucking crazy.” That’s my point—where I hear that story, and I have 20 like that, and I’m laughing when you’re telling it to me. But as your friend, I’m like, Maybe people shouldn’t do shit like that. Maybe you could have just had a nice night. For example—the only things I gravitated towards in my youth and 20s were things that were fucked up and raw. And now I’m like, “What is beautiful art that’s not all about feeling broken and beaten down?” I listen to more dance music, ’70s Spargo, Erasure—things that are just more upbeat and positive. And then I’ll listen to a lot of classical music too. I find this, too, Jonah—I love that classical music is untouched by commercial interest. It’s so old. Well, sorry, I should stop you right there. I only listen to Skrillex’s remixes of classical music. Sponsored by Verizon. Yeah, Mountain Dew presents Skrillex presents classical. Presents Shostakovich. But I love in this day and age that you can hear something that isn’t owned by a conglomerate, that doesn’t have money on it, it doesn’t have stardom on it. That’s what I’m thinking about with movies, too, is not chasing shit. What is great without chasing being young and on trend? That’s my energy. I’m 37. Not that I’m old, but I’m not young. I’m not 25. And I don’t chase youth, and I don’t chase trends. I don’t put any new music in movies. Mike Nichols is my favorite director ever. And if you watch Carnal Knowledge, or you watch some of his real bangers, it’s almost like they could have been made 20 years earlier or 20 years later. They’re just not chasing anything. He’s just chasing humanity, essentially. So that’s what I try and do. I’m just chasing humanity. You know, what I take out of this exchange is that you and I have to do a really profound, honest, emotional square-dancing movie. There’s got to be a beautiful story in the middle of it. Make the least cool story possible. You know a movie that’s one of my favorite movies and has nothing cool about it? [The Coen

“What is great without chasing being young and on trend? That’s my energy.… I don’t chase youth, and I don’t chase trends.” 78

brothers’] A Serious Man. It’s one of the best movies ever made, and it’s literally about old Jews in Minnesota. Nothing ill about it. And it’s perfect, because they’re not chasing anything. They’re like, We’re going to fucking tell a story about boring old Jews. And it’s still going to be your favorite movie. You’re talking about what is cool: trying to do stuff that’s honest, and reflecting real feelings. I think we’re at a really interesting time right now—and a lot of it’s from social media. Social media, as we know, has a lot of really dark stuff too. It can be very toxic. I have a real theory on this, if you want to hear it. It might be too real for the people, dude. Okay? All right. What do you got? So I’m a member of this group called QAnon, right? Yeah, they’re great. A civic organization. So, Instagram. Instagram—as I smoke a cigarette—is the cigarettes of this time. It is the biggest killer. It is death. And I fully participate in it, like I smoke cigarettes. Again, it’s a spectrum of what you find healthy. I have to have really limited interaction with it. I was curious to bring it up because we’re literally—both of us are engaging, technically, in a movie profile piece. Yeah, because we’re not special, and we’re not evolved above anybody else. We’re just lucky. We’re still playing the same game. Okay, I’ll be totally real. My neighbor here is 92. His name is Geoff. And he’s the reason I moved to the beach, because I was talking to him one day on the deck—I would have lunch with him once a week on the deck. I said, “What’s the deal, man? You’re the happiest guy I’ve ever seen in my life. Why are you so fucking happy?” And he’s like, “I don’t look around at what anybody else is doing. I just live my life, and I don’t look at what other people are doing.” And he passed away two days ago. And the reason I bring this up is because my hero used to be Mike Nichols, but now my hero is Geoff. Literally, if you said, “Who’s your hero?” I’d say Geoff, because this guy lived happy, not giving a fuck about the stupid rat race, and then died at 92 at the beach. And so for me, I’m not dissing anybody. I’ll post a selfie on Instagram. I don’t give a fuck. I’m just as hypocritical as everybody else. So the point being is it’s all maybe a work in progress to get towards happiness. But the real truth of it is we’re out here selling a movie. You like me, but you can get lunch with me. You’re doing this to help your movie out. I’m doing this because they asked me to be on the cover of a fashion magazine. And ultimately I think that’s cool. My ego is stroked in some way, so I said yes. And cool! Today I’m playing a different game. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be less self-involved. These social media things have turned our exchanges into, like, slot machines. But guess what? Slot machines can be pretty fun. I’ve played video poker before! I still cheat and have a cigarette occasionally. You know what I did two days ago? I went through a Del Taco drive-through. You know why? Probably because I saw some ad that made it look way better than it is. And I was like, Fuck it, I’m getting a Del Taco. This is something that I do. I have two boards in my house. [Hill walks to another room in his house and trains his phone camera on two dry-erase boards.] One is a gratitude list: meditation, surfing, therapy, Josh, Chuck, Dana, Bond, smoothies, creativity, and Fig, my dog. And here’s a positive-actions list: pray, meditate, steam, vitamins, wellness shots, surfing with friends, check in with my buddy Tim. So that is all the shit I’ve written down and done today to be positive and healthy. And at the same time, I smoked a cigarette and did an interview for the cover of GQ. So I’m all of it, dude. I’m all of it. I’m not perfect. I’m not a monster. I’m all of it, dude. But I’m out here trying. 

Fashion P ho to gr ap hs b y Ke n ned i C ar ter S ty le d by M ob ol aj i Da w od u

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It’s a mecca of Black excellence—that also happens to be one of the most fashionable cities on the planet. So we sent GQ’s global fashion director, Mobolaji Dawodu, to the A with a few suitcases full of clothes and a mission to highlight the most stylish people we could find. 81

Fashion

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their 1996 masterpiece ATLiens, they were broadcasting to the rest of the world the most important fact about Atlanta, Georgia: Its people and culture operate so far outside normal laws and standards that they might as well be from another planet. It’s the last true thriving American subculture. A place of dualisms, both Southern and progressive. In Atlanta, the strip club and church aren’t warring ideas; they’re just two stops on a routine Sunday. (Also: Both prefer cash.) It’s also become, in recent years, America’s number one exporter of pop culture, which is no accident. While the city has long been famous for its music—which can be punk or trunk-rattling or soulful or a mix of all of the above—style permeates everything. And everyone. From green locs to finger waves to military-approved side parts (see: a young Jimmy Carter), every phylum of personal style is represented in the A. Which is why we wanted to showcase the city and all its glorious energy. So we flew down with some of fall/winter’s most beautiful clothes with the aim of dressing some of the coolest people on earth. And we also called up the fashion savant and native son Derek Watkins, a.k.a. Fonzworth Bentley, to write a blazing incantation that takes you TEDDY C O OPER on a first-person interAGE 26 OCCUPATION galactic ride through Artist, model, and entrepreneur the mecca’s most styljacket $1,790 ish corridors. No space Etro ship necessary. shirt (price WHEN O UTK AST NAMED

upon request) Dior Men

— MARK ANTHONY GREEN

his own chain-link necklace Louis Vuitton Men’s

(opening pages, from left) ANT WON JACKSON OCCUPATION Cashier

KEY HARRIS AGE 27

his own short pendant Vivienne Westwood

all clothing, shoes, and accessories, his own

dress $4,752 boots $2,969 Roberto Cavalli

OCCUPATION

Wardrobe stylist and model

his own chrome necklace and cross pendant Chrome Hearts

sunglasses $464 The Attico x Linda Farrow

his own long chain Gucci

earrings $3,200 David Yurman link necklace $17,900 Tiffany & Co. chain necklaces, bracelet, and ring (on ring finger), her own cuff (on right arm) $375 pinkie ring $175 Jennifer Fisher

(from left) KEMONDRE BROWN AGE 25 OCCUPATION Fashion designer

coat $3,890 shirt $1,050 pants $1,850 Fendi Men’s jewelry, his own IMANI DIXON AGE 26 OCCUPATION Dancer and creative

jacket $8,900 Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane top and skirt (prices upon request) Alaïa boots $1,650 Dior earrings $280 Dinosaur Designs bracelet $1,200 David Yurman rings, her own

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(this page) R AURY AGE 24 OCCUPATION Musician

sweater $2,750 jumpsuit $2,190 Prada socks $27 Falke (opposite page, from left) KRIS BODNIZA AGE 24 OCCUPATION Chef and ceremonialist

dress $3,700 Gucci earring, her own FOREST

AGE 10 months

clothes, his own CHARD ONNAY BUNKLEY AGE 34 OCCUPATION Musician

dress (worn as outerwear) $3,200 Gucci dress $1,230 Wales Bonner vintage jewelry, her own

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NIGEL X AVIER AGE 26 OCCUPATION Creative director and designer

blazer and pants (prices upon request) Walter Van Beirendonck turtleneck $225 Botter sneakers $85 Converse jewelry, his own

Fashion

HAQ Q TERTULIANO AGE 24 OCCUPATION All Star Code Summer Intensive lead instructor

coat $5,490 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello turtleneck $1,350 pants $1,450 Dior Men glasses and jewelry, his own

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G AVRIELLE LOVE AGE 20 OCCUPATION Model

coat $3,910 top $690 skirt $960 Emilia Wickstead tights $49 Wolford shoes $845 Giuseppe Zanotti

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LINDSEY UNDERWO OD AGE 20 OCCUPATION Nail technician

jacket $1,685 skirt $829 Moschino boots $1,595 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello sunglasses $1,000 Dita earring $2,400 for pair David Yurman rings, her own

Fonzworth Bentley, the crown prince of style, pays homage to the sights and sounds of his hometown

all across Atlanta, the Strafe classic jam played. It didn’t matter if you were in your 40s at Mr. V’s Figure 8 or in your teens at Shyran’s Showcase. This meant the party was about to begin and you were to report to the dance floor. The tempo was one where you could move in your clothes. It’s not so fast that you have to sweat (I mean, you gon’ sweat, but you know what I mean), but the perfect tempo to get acquainted with the drape of one’s ensemble. If your shirt is tucked—your Bocci silk shirt and matching shorts, a fresh pair of K-Swiss with the gold package, white socks with the ball in the back, and wood-frame round gold Cartier glasses—this is the opportunity to adjust your fit so you can still take advantage of everything being in place while doing the Bartman seen on Atlanta Jams. Our very own Soul Train. Kids from all over the city UNIVERSALLY AT MIDNIGHT,

tailored notch-lapel suits with tassel loafers. As

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donning an Alexander Julian pastel striped button-up long-sleeve rolled so you can see my clear Swatch watch on one arm and my white braided cotton nautical bracelet on the other. Canary yellow Polo chinos, kelly green Polo socks, and tan Timberland boat shoes with the thick white soles. But all that is behind you now as you’re nearly at the top of the second escalator and the runway of all runways now begins. The goal is clear.… I’ve saved enough money to purchase the esteemed Gucci belt, but what do you know about asking for a larger bag so you can lap the mall for the next umpteen hours? For the bag is now more important than the belt—you see, size does matter. The motivation, you may ask? The Gazelles and Clydesdales better known as the Jennifers, the Nikkis, Tashas, and Japonikas. Derek Watkins is never caught slippin’, Cool Outrageous Lovers of Uniquely Raw Style is the punctuation. The crown jewel of the mall? If I’m keeping it funky, it’s the Neiman Marcus sale rack, but everybody knows it’s the Polo store. I became a loyalist to dressing timeless after a bad stint when, one year, my parents gave me and my younger brother $500 to buy whatever we wanted for Christmas. A clothing line called Skidz were the coolest things out. Think if MC Hammer’s pants and some wacky pajamas had a test-tube baby… I bought six outfits. By my birthday in February? They were completely out of style. And that’s when my dad sat me down with Alan Flusser’s book Clothes and the Man and talked to me about my great-grandfather Daddy Emmit’s sense of style. It was timeless. He was a well-dressed deacon who was never seen without a fedora, an umbrella, or a cane. So when it was time to go to college, naturally, being a SpelHouse baby I went to Morehouse, as the majority of those foundational juggernauts that the civil rights movement stood on were bred at the Black Ivies, better known as HBCUs. I admit, when I arrived my freshman year, I still had a couple of Major Damage and Exhaust suits left, but I never wore them because they didn’t translate in this new arena. Going to an all-male school, other than Crown Forum, I was dressed in my collegiate track-and-cross-country grays almost daily. It didn’t matter, because I was with hard legs throughout the week. This made getting dressed on Fridays that much more of an event. You had The Wall at Clark Atlanta University, where all the AUC schools would gather in their freshest fashion Friday attire, and of course Lower Manley at Spelman. In the fall you might find me in my Kayak Polo rugby, a white Jockey tee, my chocolate brown shearling vest, RRL indigo denim jeans with one leg tucked into my Polo socks so you could see the player, and chocolate brown Polo boots with the buckle across the first through fifth metatarsal. And for the spring: my navy Polo basketball tank top, Moco Sport cotton heather gray athletic shorts and white slouch socks—a nod to my DMV fam—and white Reebok Pumps. After all, next week is FreakNik, the stand-still stand-up-on-your-car-while-on-the-expressway traffic jam when everything inside the BeltLine became a sidewalk, including portions of 285. The humidity gave way to women in booty shorts, combat boots and midriffs, spaghetti straps, and tennis skirts with slingbacks, who were dropping it down to everything from the J-Team to 2 Live Crew bass music from Bazooka tubes powered by Rockford Fosgate punch 45 amps. And one, and two, and you know what to do—YEEK! You see, by this time I had nurtured a relationship at the Polo store. Archie Smith, who started in security, was now a sales associate in the men’s shop and would become my plug. I started at the cash wrap through Christmas and started on the floor in Polo Sport in January. After proving myself in sales, I was promoted to the Men’s Store, which gave me access to tailored clothing and arguably the best men’s sales team in the league. It would be disrespectful to say we had a starting five—we had six starters and there was no bench.

Randall Cartwright was Michael Jordan. Leonard Gresham and his unparalleled clothing knowledge was Magic. A recruit from the New Orleans store, Arthur Simon, with his center part and perfectly laiddown 1930s coiffure, was our Doc Rivers. And Benjamin Harris, our men’s manager, was our small forward—assists when you needed but could put numbers on the board. And me? Well, I was the Billy “White Shoes” Johnson of the crew. How can you deny a six-foot-one-and-three-quarter gent in a brownand-tan chalk-stripe Super 150s three-piece Purple Label suit, lapel waistcoat, English cutaway spread-collar shirt, champagne satin cravat with the Wall Street cleavage (dimple) in full plump assisted by a silver monogrammed tie bar, and laceless British tan side-gusset wingtip brogue spectators, finished with a featherweight silk pocket square…boy stop! And once I found out the power and extension a cream gabardine did to a man’s wardrobe, I was truly unstoppable. It made sense my first hip-hop moniker was actually Polo Man, given to me by a former street entrepreneur and Dungeon Family member BlackOwned C-Bone because shawdy from Zone 4 was wearing tailored clothing daily. Every morning before the mall opened, I would stop by The Athlete’s Foot and Champs to see the latest releases, and before I would go through my client book I would take all the XXL and XL outfits that could match the new drops and hide them in the stockroom. You see, the best way to say it is I was trapping out the Polo store. We had the best product, and I was your pusher. You had to be on your A game, as the competition was high. The anchor stores were Neiman Marcus, Macy’s, and Rich’s. There was Brooks Brothers, Britches of Georgetown, H. Stockton, and directly across the corridor was Ray: Mark Shale’s very own Charles Barkley. This was a time when a professional retail associate could earn a decent living if he took care of his clientele and was proficient in his craft. It was not unheard of for a seasoned professional to make $100,000 annually. You have to understand, the music industry was at a tipping point. L.A. Reid and Babyface were now having a run with their Y Combinator start-up, LaFace Records. Dallas Austin had carved his niche and shown dexterity with his forward approach at Rowdy Records. And College Park’s own Jermaine Dupri was here for all the smoke with a rally of hits through his label, So So Def. You see, in order to break a record in the South you couldn’t skip over Atlanta. And so they all came. And when they did, at some point they had to stop by the Polo store. I sold Pimp C an olive green suede Purple Label sport shirt and trousers. I sold Nas a medium. And I remember beating up C-Murder so tuff the next day Monica came in looking for who helped him, as she swore she couldn’t get him new gear on the regular. Before the city’s blood pressure gets too hot, let me assure you I did not forget a thing. I saved the icing for just that. You see, Organized Noize (Ray Murray: YODA, Rico Wade, and Sleepy Brown) were more than a label. They represented the phoenix from which Atlanta is named rising from the Dungeon. (A heartwarming fun fact about the trio: They still write and produce as a collective to this day.) The culture that runs through the veins here prepared me for what was next, the Rhinelander mansion flagship store on Madison Avenue in the concrete jungle of New York City. This was the final training ground that opened a new world of opportunities for me, because this was the apex of culture and lifestyle wrapped in a retail experience second to none. I was ready, and it was the organized noise of all of this that groomed me. And with that I tip my lowercase Bob Horner Atlanta Braves baseball cap. Blaaaat!  D E R E K WAT K I N S , K N O W N T H R O U G H O U T H I S C A R E E R A S “ F O N Z W O R T H B E N T L E Y,” I S A R E N A I S S A N C E M A N A N D A D E A C O N O F D A N DY. H E I S A N A U T H O R , P R O D U C E R , M U S I C I A N , C R E AT I V E D I R E C T O R , A N D A P I O N E E R O F S A R T O R I A L I N N O VAT I O N .

Fashion

KISHAR A MARIE AGE 28

OCCUPATION Designer

jacket and top (prices upon request) skirt $6,100 Dior tights $49 Wolford shoes $950 Chanel earring $95 for pair Dinosaur Designs necklace $12,800 Tiffany & Co.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 SAVESTRYKER AGE 20 OCCUPATION

Artist and designer

sweater $1,650 jeans $550 shoes $895 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello

Fashion (from left) PARISS SULLIVAN AGE 26 OCCUPATION Model, influencer, painter, adult entertainer, and upcoming YouTuber

dress $1,550 LaQuan Smith earrings $1,148 cuff (on right arm) $995 Jennifer Fisher bracelet (on left arm, top) and ring, her own bracelet (on left arm, bottom) $8,655 Carolina Bucci SILENCE AGE 26

OCCUPATION Exotic

dancer

all clothing her own

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Fashion

DJ RETROSPEC AGE 27 OCCUPATION Arts and entertainment executive

jacket $2,000 Bethany Williams turtleneck (price upon request) Dior Men pants $495 Nanushka roller skates, glasses, and jewelry, her own

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 NANI L. L. EDWARDS AGE 27 OCCUPATION Model and CEO of Pivot.Life, LLC

tuxedo, shirt, and bow tie (prices upon request) Brioni her own sneakers Nike

hair and makeup by danielle mitchell. grooming by brandi lashay and calvin mcfarland. tailoring by fhonia ellis. produced by west of ivy.

Design

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A DE SI GN ER’ S GR E ATE S T C HA L L EN GE IS TO C RE AT E SO ME THING TH AT ’ S BOTH PE RFECTLY F UNCTIO NAL A ND PER FECTLY BE AU T I FUL . W HIC H IS WHY WATCH E S A ND FUR NIT U RE AR E PER HA P S TH E MOS T FE TI SH IZED OB J ECTS I N THE DE S IGN WOR L D. H ER E, WE PAIR THE M UP.

Photographs by Keirnan Monaghan and Theo Vamvounakis

Set Design by Andrea Stanley

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(opening pages, left) ZENITH CHRONOMASTER The Zenith El Primero, originally released in 1969, changed watchmaking forever by introducing the first-ever automatic chronograph caliber. It also just looks killer—thankfully, Zenith recently introduced an extremely faithful tribute to the original.

Chronomaster Revival El Primero A385 on ladder bracelet $8,400 Zenith LOUNGE CHAIR BY WARD BENNET T FOR BRICKEL ASSO CIATES, U. S. (1960s) Largely self-taught, Ward Bennett designed over 150 chairs in his lifetime. Stylish clients like Gianni Agnelli were drawn to his simple forms and obsession with comfort.

$10,000 for pair from 1stDibs

(opening pages, right) TAG HEUER MONAC O The square-faced timepiece has been forever associated with racing ever since Steve McQueen wore a Monaco in 1971’s Le Mans. Reintroduced in titanium, it looks as fast and futuristic today.

Monaco with silver dial in titanium on alligator strap $7,900 Tag Heuer SERIES 8600 CHAIR BY HANS-ULLRICH BITSCH, GERMANY (1982) With his steel-andwoven-metal chairs, German designer Hans-Ullrich Bitsch updated tubular Bauhaus aesthetics for a new era.

chair and ottoman $1,800 from 1stDibs

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OMEG A SEAMASTER 300 Bronze is everywhere in the watch world right now—for good reason. Omega’s brand-new Seamaster is clad in a custom bronze-gold alloy that will, like your favorite leather chair, develop a gorgeous patina over time.

Seamaster 300 in bronze gold on leather strap $11,600 Omega

LOUNGE CHAIR BY G ARDNER LEAVER FOR STEELCASE, U. S. (1970s) Steelcase was one of the furniture makers behind the coolly functional midcentury American office, and artist Gardner Leaver created the Michigan company’s most coveted C-suite lounge chair.

$3,500 for pair from 1stDibs

AUDEMARS PIGUET ROYAL OAK Karl Lagerfeld’s favorite watch, the Royal Oak, has been given a royal upgrade in this gold-and-money-green chronograph edition, of which only 125 were made.

Royal Oak Selfwinding Chronograph in yellow gold $74,800 Audemars Piguet

MIRRORED SIDE TABLE BY JAC QUES GR ANGE, FR ANCE (1975) Interior design legend Jacques Grange has worked with a who’s who of fashion royalty: Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, and Lagerfeld, to name a few. Who knows what this disco-ready mirrored table would say if it could talk?

$3,700 for pair from 1stDibs

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Design ROLEX EXPLORER The Explorer is one of Rolex’s most traditional watches, so the skeptics started clucking when the Crown put out a new two-tone model. But who says a watch designed for mountain climbing—like this one—can’t be flashy too?

Oyster Perpetual Explorer in Oystersteel and yellow gold $10,800 Rolex

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TRI 15 CHAIR BY ROBERTO G ABET TI & AIMARO ISOL A FOR ARBO, ITALY (1968) Italians Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro Isola first partnered in 1950 to start an architecture practice, then branched off into lighting and furniture—like this lounge chair—that spoke the same language.

$5,400 for pair from 1stDibs

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PIAGET P OLO SKELETON This Piaget Polo’s case clocks in at a beefy 42 mm in diameter—all the better to show off the skeletonized interior. But unlike similarly show-offy watches, it’s an ultra-skinny 6.5 mm thick.

(opposite page) GR AND SEIKO SBGY007 Leave it to the ever elegant wizards at Grand Seiko to craft a dial that takes inspiration from “God’s Crossing,” as the rippling frozen-over surface of Lake Suwa, in central Japan, is known.

Polo Skeleton with blue movement in steel $28,500 Piaget

SBGY007 on crocodile strap $8,300 Grand Seiko

MANDARIN CHAIR BY ET TORE SOT TSASS FOR KNOLL, ITALY (1986) Ettore Sottsass led the Memphis Group, the Italian collective responsible for colorful, zany, and eventually Instagram-devouring design. In his hands, even sober dining chairs feel whimsical.

ALUMINUM DINING CHAIR BY AMOS MARCHANT & LYND ON ANDERSON FOR ALLERMUIR, U.K. (1996) Cast aluminum is often used for cookware, but designers Amos Marchant and Lyndon Anderson used it to give these chairs a space-age quality.

$5,700 for six from 1stDibs

$3,300 for six from 1stDibs

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De sign

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Design

CARTIER TANK MUST In the ’70s, Cartier began releasing its iconic Tank in era-appropriate funky colors. Four decades later, the richly colored Must collection is back.

Tank Must with red dial on alligator strap $2,860 Cartier

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C OFFEE TABLE BY J. WADE BEAM FOR BRUETON, U. S. (1970s) No ’70s shag pad was complete without one of J. Wade Beam’s cantilevered gems. Same goes for a tastefully appointed 2021 loft.

$7,600 from 1stDibs

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O f f t h e Gri d

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vi By d J Kr am acob er Da

Ph by s ph l ra e og ha ing c ot l Mi el hm

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Half a century ago, a legion of idealists dropped out of society and went back to the land, creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Here, the last of those rogue souls offer a glimpse of their otherworldly residences— and the tail end of a grand social experiment.

The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias

O f f t h e Gri d THERE WA S AN APHORISM in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we’re on today is bad. Several miles inland from California’s foggy coastline, we’re driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late ’60s and ’70s: Table Mountain Ranch. The entire expanse—which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who’d fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life—now looks deserted. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The only sound is the chirping of birds. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he’s one of Table Mountain Ranch’s last remaining members. Now in his mid-70s, he’s wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I’ll refer to him as Jack Berg. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load. Berg is restoring the Whale Schoolhouse, a progressive academy founded in 1971 that became the pride of communards across the Albion region of Northern California. Fifty kids, from elementary to high school age, were enrolled here, but it’s sat unused for decades— and now Berg is moving in. “Nobody cared about this building,” he says. “It was disintegrating.” He takes us inside. It’s a single room, the size of half a tennis court, with old class pictures on a corkboard. A circular window overlooks an empty field that had long ago been a playground. At one point in 1970, Table Mountain had over a hundred residents, some living in tipis, some in cabins, some crashing in the open air. It appears that before it became a commune, the 120-acre property had been a dude ranch, and the cabins and outbuildings were constantly being expanded in an endless ad hoc construction project. Residents scavenged materials from an abandoned hotel in nearby Fort Bragg and chicken coops from a Jewish communist chicken farm a few hours’ drive south, in Petaluma. The living was primitive: There was no electricity or telephone lines, and the toilets were compostable. Residents shared their money and meals. This was the vision of one of Table Mountain’s founders, a former Navy pilot named Walter Schneider, who discovered the deforested property from the air and, according to Berg, purchased the plot with cash he made trafficking pot via plane— and with his friend’s inheritance. Countercultural luminaries moved up from the Bay, like Allen Cohen, founder of Haight-Ashbury’s foremost underground newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle. A close friend of Timothy Leary’s, Schneider brought the famed professor for weekend visits. “Walter and Tim came up here looking for a place to drop acid,” Berg explains, “to retreat from the city and do their thing.” Berg first came to Table Mountain Ranch to visit his sister, then a resident, and never left. He doesn’t remember precisely when that was, just that it was around the time Schneider finally got arrested for smuggling weed. Berg didn’t know it then, but when he joined the commune he became part of the greatest urban exodus in American history. From the late ’60s to the mid ’70s, nearly a million young people went back to the land. Nowhere was the urge to reconnect with nature more keenly felt than in San Francisco, where droves of young people were suddenly fleeing a city overrun by heroin, speed, and bad vibes. Cops were shooting down Black Panthers in Oakland and the military was tear-gassing students in People’s Park in Berkeley. Vietnam veterans were looking for a salve for their PTSD. Faithful Marxists aimed to put their ideals to the test. Some just wanted to get high in the woods.

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Opening pages: An abandoned structure at the Nonagon commune in Humboldt County. Below: A deserted cabin at Table Mountain Ranch. Opposite: One of the last remaining residents of Table Mountain repairs an old schoolhouse.

This movement found its epicenter in a sunny swath of Northern California between the Bay Area and the Oregon border, a region where plots of land were going cheap, decimated by a century of logging and an economic downturn. Thousands of cooperative communities like Table Mountain Ranch sprouted up along the coast and the inland forests. Residents taught themselves to farm, practiced free love, and built their own homes. It was a grand social experiment, but the promise was often rosier than the reality. Most found the grind too hard going and the poverty too bleak, and within a few years returned to the city and more conventional lives. But a small number stuck it out for decades, long after the Summer of Love had dissipated, and a handful of them still live in communities scattered across Northern California. These flinty souls remain a study in principled self-reliance and human ingenuity, having supported themselves and their families for years through subsistence farming and sundry side hustles: ceramics, teaching, salmon fishing, instrument making, firewood hawking, and weed growing. These residents are now in their 70s and 80s. For some, the isolation has become challenging due to medical needs, yet they continue to remain, some living like hermits, others as community activists. Although the last holdouts within these fading utopias are all uniquely compelling characters, it’s the question of what they’ll leave behind that has drawn us here. Living in strange homes of their own creation, forever fearful of building inspectors and outsiders, they’ve kept these structures hidden and shrouded in mystery. Will these dwellings languish as ruins of a lost civilization, relics of

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Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 a long-obsolete 20th-century idea? Might some, like Berg’s current project, be outfitted for new uses? Many seem on the brink of collapse, and before they’re gone, I want to know what lessons they could teach us. As the light begins to fade, Berg walks us into the woods on a tour of the property’s most neglected structures. We trek down a damp glen, which becomes darker and colder as we walk under a thick canopy, and in a small clearing come upon a shack with a mossy dome and triangular windows. The foundation is sinking into the earth. This would have been a sunny spot 50 years ago, when the land was newly decimated by logging. Still, Berg thinks the builders were foolish for choosing this side of the hill. He struggles to remember who they were, mouthing names to himself as we continue. Deeper into the woods sits a cabin with walls aslant, its windows knocked out. “The design is impractical,” says Berg. “I think it’s humorous architecture.” He pauses, considering the structure’s design. “Some are really beautiful, though. This is beautiful.” Both structures are beyond repair. Berg has long planned to burn them down, following in a tradition among communards of destroying properties they’ve abandoned so that the state doesn’t have the chance to condemn and bulldoze them. But he hasn’t brought himself to do it yet. in San Francisco that I first developed an interest in these strange structures. I’d been thumbing through an issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of self-help advice and product reviews, founded and edited by Stewart Brand, that became the bible for back-to-the-landers when it was first published in 1968. (Steve Jobs would later call it “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”) What struck me most was the opening statement: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. A realm of intimate, personal power is developing— power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” I found a particularly unshakable fantasy in the “Shelter” section, which told the stories of people who had built their own homes and, in some cases, formed their own societies. Did I need to continue grinding away in the city in hopes of one day maybe owning my own home? Was I going about my existence all wrong? A generation had already put this alternative lifestyle to the test. I wanted to meet those who were still living the fantasy. On a Mendocino community Facebook group for back-to-thelanders, I found a man named Ron Blett, who lives on a five-acre plot a short drive from Table Mountain Ranch. In April, Michael and I visited him at his cabin, a simple structure he has continued to renovate over the years, and which features a stained-glass window salvaged from an abandoned church. Blett is 78 years old now; tubes from an assisted breathing apparatus dangle from his neck into his knapsack. After dropping out of Western Michigan University, during his final semester, in 1968, he headed to California, borrowed $1,200 from friends, and built the house he still lives in. The commune never had a name; he just started letting friends live on the land. At its peak there were 16 residents in cabins that he’d built. Now those original tenants are gone, and all that’s left are the cabins, some shake-shingled, fitted with odd, mismatched windows. The homes’ chaotic design reminds Blett of an experiment he’d read about where spiders were dosed with various drugs. “If you look at a normal spiderweb,” he says, “then you look at a spiderweb on acid, that’s how these homes appear to me.” It’s common in Northern California to find people who abruptly dropped out of society, never to return. Monty Levenson lives 50 miles from Blett, up a winding mountain road outside the town of Willits, on the northern edge of California’s redwood forests. His home is a minimalist, pragmatic structure that befits his nononsense personality. He came out here with little more than his books, 500 of them, and an intent to focus on his doctoral thesis. But IT WA S AT A USED -B O OK S TORE

A cabin at Table Mountain Ranch with a geodesic dome.

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O f f t h e Gri d he soon abandoned his studies and began to pursue a different kind of knowledge. “I felt I didn’t know anything, really,” he says. “After going through the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war movement, I started thinking, Do I really want to be a professor training other professors who will in turn train other professors?” Levenson sought to move beyond talk of revolution; he wanted to embody it. “My impulse was to do something with my life, that just by being here, I would be making it a better place,” he says. “That’s what came out of the ’60s, the sense you could create your own reality. In 1968 in Paris you’d see the phrase ‘Be realistic but demand the impossible’ spray-painted on walls. I needed to manifest that.” Levenson, who’s in his mid-70s, has a short white beard and the same intonations as Bernie Sanders—a contemporary of his at Brooklyn College. The curriculum there hadn’t prepared him for building his own dwelling. “The only wood I ever held in my hand was a pencil,” Levenson says. “This thing where we’re going to change the world? I didn’t know how to wipe my ass.” His methodology was “trial and error—mostly the latter. You make a lot of mistakes, and if you survive them and you have half a brain, you figure it out.” When Levenson arrived, the land had been ravaged by loggers. “It was ecocided,” he says. “Destroyed. Deemed worthless land that was being sold to unsuspecting hippies. And it backfired.” He expanded his home, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, Kayo, and reared four children, three of whom moved to Brooklyn as adults—an irony not lost on him. He’s recently built a meticulously crafted sauna and a Japanese-style bath house, both straight out of a high-end eco-retreat. Unlike many back-to-the-landers, Levenson never cared to live on a commune and has always resided in a private abode with his family. “I don’t like going to meetings and I’m still that way,” he explains. “If you want to do something, sometimes the most efficient way is to do it yourself. I wanted to make my own decisions, and if I made mistakes, then I dealt with them myself.” For all his plucky gripes, Levenson is a student of Zen and has become a world-renowned craftsman of the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute that dates back over 1,200 years. A big break came when he was personally invited to include one of his instruments in a 1971 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Ever since then he’s been backlogged with orders. At one point, he refers to a Japanese saying:

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“We were kindred spirits forging a world we wanted to live in, connected to the earth organically and spiritually.” — R I C H A R D E VA N S

Below: Richard Evans poses beside a geodesic stainedglass window he made for Tommy and Karen Hessler’s home in Humboldt County, 1972. Opposite: Evans beside the same window today.

joshaku shushaku—mistake upon mistake compounds to become the sum total of one’s knowledge. Then he blows the flute for us, eyes closed. It’s a pure, swelling sound that fills the room and seems to transport him to another place. The audacious confidence of building one’s own house according to one’s own vision tends to be reflected in back-to-the-landers’ other creative pursuits. Laird Sutton is an artist, Methodist minister, and sexologist who has spent his life intermingling these disciplines. For years he commuted into San Francisco from his ranch in Bodega, an intentional community about an hour-and-a-half drive north of San Francisco. He built his home there in 1968 and has continued to tinker with it over the years. His front window, made of curved plexiglass, like a cockpit, overlooks the hillside; it once displayed a collection of ancient erotic art. One of a handful who remain on the community’s land, Sutton lives with his 15-year-old Labrador, Maggie (whose bloodline he has traced back to J.R.R. Tolkien’s own dog), and a library of sexological literature. With his long hair—he hasn’t cut it since 1967—bushy eyebrows, and hoary beard, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Gandalf, and speaks with no less gravitas. He felt a deep connection with the land, and he pledged to never leave, despite the commute. An intentional community requires harmony not only with its members but with the earth itself, he explains. The land, Sutton says, “can decide that people aren’t good and drop a tree on their house.” He tells the story of a troublesome member who woke up in such a scenario. The woman was unhurt but rattled enough to leave. “The land spoke,” Sutton says. “I won’t say divine intervention, because when you say that, you’re talking about somebody up there. We’re talking about the intervention of the living ranch, because everything here is alive.” movement consisted of predominantly white heterosexual youth from middle-class backgrounds. And so Richard Evans, who is Black and gay, found himself a double anomaly, not just on the commune he lived on near Garberville but in the broader Humboldt County region. In his 20s he’d spent time at a pansexual urban commune in the Haight, Kaliflower, that was known for creating the elaborate costumes worn by the legendary avantgarde drag performance troupe the Cockettes. But Evans had always loved nature and wanted to be nearer to it. In the early ’70s, he found some friends willing to pool their finances to purchase land up north and was dispatched to find a parcel for the crew. For six months he camped and fished, scouring territory all the way up to Oregon. “I never met another Black kid hitchhiking,” he says, noting that times haven’t become any more encouraging. “Nowadays I don’t see women hitchhiking, either. It’s unimaginable.” In San Francisco, he says, “the Summer of Love was a huge heart opening. What changed?” When Evans finally found a fitting plot, he called up his friends and they established a commune there named Narnia. For his personal living quarters, he built a geodesic dome with wood salvaged from a demolished school. Domes were frequently found on communes, their technical experimentalism and trippy look symbolizing a certain lifestyle. But living in his dome alone meant that there was a part of Richard Evans not being expressed. Narnia’s (text continued on page 120)

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ARCHIVAL IMAGE: COURTESY OF RICHARD EVANS.

THE BACK-TO-THE-L AND

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A R C H I V A L I M A G E S : C O U R T E S Y O F H A R R I E T B Y E , M O N T Y L E V E N S O N , A N D T H E F I S C H B A C H FA M I LY.

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O f f t h e Gri d other residents were three heterosexual couples, and with the exception of a few lesbian communes, he knew of no queer communes so far up north. He was on his own, in a sense, and came to develop a deep sense of self-reliance, one he still retains. The first thing to look for on new land, he tells me, is a stream: You can’t live without drinking water. And so Evans taught himself how to dowse for underground springs by reading an article in the Whole Earth Catalog. Lloyd Kahn, the former editor of the “Shelter” section of the Whole Earth Catalog, still lives on the half acre he and his wife purchased in Bolinas, a coastal community in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, in 1971. Now 86 years old, with bushy white hair, he is, after Buckminster Fuller, the most famous proponent of geodesic domes. His Domebook, volumes one and two, sold hundreds of thousands of copies before he pulled them from print, renouncing geodesic domes as impractical—they can’t be sealed against wind and weather, and barns were simply better structures. His agent couldn’t dissuade him. “I didn’t want any more domes on my karma,” he says. Kahn now largely espouses simple stud houses, with vertical walls and simple roofs, inspired by the conventional farm structures he would see on the side of the road. “I had to admit I was wrong in front of a quarter of a million people,” he says. “It was great. People are so disinclined to admit mistakes. That’s part of learning. If you’re experimenting, there are going to be failures. You acknowledge them and go from there.” He runs his own press, Shelter Publications, out of an office he built with recycled lumber from an old Navy barracks. He’s pub-

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Below: The attic of Laird Sutton’s cabin in Bodega, California. Opposite: Sutton, a Methodist minister and sexologist, at home.

lished dozens of books on alternative and mobile living spaces and he maintains an Instagram account where he features examples of spaces he finds captivating. Every day he gets emails from people gushing about how his work inspires them. On YouTube you can find his tutorials—how to shoot and vacuum-pack squab, for instance, or ferment pickles. Kahn disapproves of the sloppy construction typical of commune dwellings. “I thought those places were abominable,” he tells me. “You could build anything you wanted, so terrible stuff got built. Those loose anarchistic ones are probably gone now. Good riddance, I think. I was into building and growing food—other people were into communicating with dolphins.” To Harriet Bye, another Albion settler, the Whole Earth Catalog and other similar publications enforced gender stereotypes. Even the catalog’s introductory statement catered to a male perspective. So, with a collective of other local women, Bye created a female-oriented magazine called Country Women in 1972, mailed out from Table Mountain Ranch. “We had to do [a publication] that directly spoke to women being able to take on a lot of these things that were considered men’s work,” she tells me. Country Women had themed issues like “Women on the Land,” “Anger and Violence,” and “Sexuality,” but it also offered advice for, say, how to deal with an outbreak of white cabbage moths. The magazine was launched the same year as Gloria Steinem’s Ms. and found a similar audience, with its distribution at one point hitting 9,000 copies. We’re sitting outside her wood-shingled home, a short drive from the commune. Bye first bought land in 1969, on her 26th birthday, securing an acre and a half with a $750 down payment and a $40 monthly mortgage. She built this house herself, affixing the shingles in a pattern that wasted the least amount of material, initially using a cookie sheet as a T square. In those days, she says, everyone salvaged material. Part of this was principle, part of it was practical. Most new settlers didn’t have a ton of money, Bye among them. At one point she came upon a house in San Francisco where the windows were being removed and the contractor offered them to her for free. Bye launched a reused-window business that her husband still runs. A good portion of all the hippie homes in the area got their windows from her. There are fields of them stacked across her property. “It’s obvious now that we have limited resources,” Bye says. “They are beautiful things, so who wants them destroyed?” A few roads over lives Ted Thoman, a tall, soft-spoken man with a long white ponytail under a Greek fisherman’s cap. He designed his seven-sided, single-room house around the windows he’d scored, the biggest one from the side of a gas station. “Windows are cheaper than a wall,” he tells me over a breakfast of eggs and coffee inside his light-filled abode. After we eat, Thoman sets down a metal tube used to tighten nuts and bolts. In the small opening at the top are hefty buds of weed grown on his property. “An aftermeal digestive?” he offers. Up a ladder is a 12-windowed attic loft, once the bedroom for two kids and now webbed with wire for drying weed. Back-to-thelanders started cultivating marijuana for their own consumption in the mid ’70s, and in the ensuing decades, their isolation, dedication to the crop, and general disregard for the law would turn Humboldt County into one of the epicenters of America’s illegal cannabis industry. By the 1980s, former hippies who had once disavowed materialism were turning hefty profits; some built private “pot palaces” and became disconnected from the communes that first brought them into the countryside. Not Ted Thoman, though. He grows for himself and his friends. When we leave, he hands me a full baggie for later.

to no money demands feats of creative resourcefulness. Back in the 1970s, free building materials were everywhere—if you knew where to look. Jon Turner’s house, a two-story, gable-roofed structure in Mendocino County, is fabricated from 2,000-year-old redwood logs he pulled out of the Albion River. CONSTRUCTING A HOME WITH NEXT

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O f f t h e Gri d His ceiling is the height of a gymnasium because he couldn’t bring himself to trim the ancient logs, he explains. He never put a single architectural sketch on paper. Turner wears a leather jacket and a white handlebar mustache; in an adjoining garage, he rebuilds Harley-Davidsons. When he first moved here, from San Joaquin County, just east of San Francisco, he eked out a living as a commercial fisherman. But he found that a century’s worth of logging detritus made it hard to navigate the river. So one day he put on goggles, dove into the muck, and discovered buried treasure. The detritus was actually the butts of redwood logs, called “sinkers,” that nearby mills had discarded over the past century. Turner was savvy enough to know that this was the best part of the best lumber on earth, wood with a tight grain and no knots. And the logs were killing the river—redwood is toxic to the river ecosystem, and the logs trapped silt, contributing to the depletion of the local salmon population. Turner was determined to extract the logs, but not even the California Fish and Games Commission had figured out how to do so without ripping up the riverbed. At a junkyard he scored four militarysurplus fiberglass pontoons, which he says were used during World War II to clear land mines from rivers. These pontoons each held up a custom-fabricated steel A-frame, from which he dropped a winch line affixed to a pair of century-old logging tongs he’d sink to the bottom of the river in the hope of latching onto a submerged log. With luck, tiny bubbles would emerge. “Then you’d get this whiff like raw sewage,” Turner says, “and you knew it was starting to break loose.” Turner has piles of the logs in his front yard, the biggest of which, he says, is 11 feet in diameter. With about 96 percent of old-growth redwoods in California already plundered, it’s illegal to touch one today. Turner has never intended to sell his materials, but he collaborates with an architecture firm near Lake Tahoe specializing in chalets. He shows me a magazine featuring one of his projects, for

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“That’s what came out of the ’60s, the sense that you could create your own reality.” —M O NT Y L E VEN S ON

Below: The steam room on Monty Levenson’s property in Mendocino County. Opposite, from left: Levenson’s wife, Kayo, displays her work mending his jeans; Levenson plays one of the shakuhachi flutes made in his workshop.

which he’d constructed a two-story wine cellar and a redwood slide that goes from the upstairs into a game room. Turner fabricated the slide himself, bending the wood by creating incisions in the top, a technique he perfected on a piece of celery. After a few years on the property, Turner faced every back-to-thelander’s worst nightmare when a building inspector showed up at his home and cited him for a host of infractions, including a lack of grade stamps on his lumber. He says he’d searched for a grader to approve the quality of his lumber but, with the mills long gone, was unable to find one. So he researched the qualifications required to hold the position, which appeared to be the possession of a rubber stamp used for this purpose. Turner had one made up. He claims the inspector came back round and checked the infraction off his list. That was the easy one, he says. For years he fought other alleged violations. Known as getting “red-tagged,” these coding citations became a means of harassing the community. In 1974 state inspectors deployed low-flying planes to search out illegal structures across Mendocino County. A task force patrolled the hills, tagging premises with notices that deemed them “unfit for human occupancy.” The fines were unfeasibly high, frightening many off the land. I was told of a Vietnam-veteran neighbor who was so triggered by the planes he ran screaming for cover each time.

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 Correcting the building code infringements led to absurd alterations. Inspectors told Ron Blett that two doors were required between a bathroom and a kitchen. So he installed a wall made of two doors. “The inspector counted the doors and checked the box,” he recalls. “Not everything made sense.” Ultimately a group of Mendocino commune residents fought back against the capricious regulations in court, helping to establish a new code designed for owner-builders who sought to live inside their homes. Monty Levenson still grows angry when he thinks back to the inspectors’ regulations. “They were trying to put people away for exercising a fundamental human right: to create shelter and manifest their personal freedom,” he says. “It’s a money game. I couldn’t afford to go to a lumberyard. And the quality of that material was inferior. It’s bullshit. It’s ironic that the state destroyed the entire area, and then when we move onto it they’re like, ‘Oh, let’s play fair here.’ But they underestimated us.” in isolation. Residents of these communes didn’t seek an escape from society so much as the chance to create it anew: a generous, civic-minded, highly social culture with regular potlucks and solstice blowouts. “We were kindred spirits forging a world we wanted to live in,” Richard Evans explains. “Connected to the earth, sustainably and organically.” Michael and I are driving Evans through Humboldt County to visit some old friends, blasting a reggae show on KMUD, the communityfunded radio station he helped found. Evans didn’t get rich growing pot, but at times he made enough to survive, and rallied those who were better off to support a range of community initiatives, from the radio station to a volunteer fire brigade to local schools. He now serves on the board of a community center organizing camping trips for at-risk kids. We’re headed to see an example of his three-dimensional stained-glass-window installations. To build them Evans tweaked THE MOVEMENT WASN’T ABOUT LIVING

the mathematical principles he loved in geodesic domes, reimagining them in multicolored glass dodecahedrons and polygons. Over the decades, he’s created scores of these windows for hippie homes across California, but he’s only aware of a few that remain intact. Evans was inspired by similar windows at Druid Heights, a communal outpost formed in 1954 in the Muir Woods National Park that he loved to visit. It was known for its extravagantly experimental hand-built architecture, for low-key performances by musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, and for being the final home and resting place of the philosopher Alan Watts, credited for popularizing Eastern thought and spirituality within the American counterculture. Evans found that sculptural stained-glass work was a natural fit in this pocket of strange organic forms, inspired by mandalas and the dwellings of Pacific Islanders. But when Michael and I later trudge through the ruins of the structures, now overgrown with nature, we can’t find anything that looks like his artistry. All the glass has been smashed. It feels like the remnants of a lost alien civilization. Evans left Narnia in the late ’70s and returned to San Francisco. “Being the only gay person for 2,000 miles was no fun at all,” he admits. In the city he fell in love and soon persuaded his partner to move up to Alderpoint, in Humboldt County. They built their own house, where they lived happily for 13 years, until his partner died of complications from AIDS. The disease was poorly understood back then, and particularly dire in rural areas. Evans is now a volunteer counselor in a Bay Area support group for those diagnosed with AIDS. Late in the afternoon, we arrive at the home (and weed farm) of Tommy and Karen Hessler, who’ve been close friends of Evans’s for more than 40 years. The three rarely see one another these days, and they hug excitedly. Tommy dresses like a farmer: cowboy hat, shirt tucked into jeans. He and Karen built this rambling home themselves in 1972 and has kept it off the grid, installing solar panels— back-to-the-landers were early adopters—and watering crops from a well on their property.

O f f t h e Gri d The Hessler family is soon to launch its own prepackaged weed brand on the market, called Amaranth Farm. Tommy claims to be one of the first weed farmers in Humboldt County, having started his operation in 1969. It’s just one of many successful crops they’ve farmed over the years. Their vegetables have been found in plenty of local restaurants and grocery stores. Now he’s dedicated to passing on his knowledge: A recent college graduate is working on their farm, learning how to cultivate crops. “Once you teach a man how to shelter himself and feed his own face, then fuck you,” Tommy explains. “You can say that to everybody. It’s a powerful thing. They don’t want to teach you that. In fourth grade they should put seeds in your hand. They want control. But nobody else is in control—you are.” Yet the obtuseness of weed laws drives him nuts. It took the couple years to get the necessary permits. Karen had to use her iPad to navigate the intricacies of “track and trace,” the process by which each individual plant receives a barcode and can be followed from seedling to dispensary shelf. It’s all too much for Tommy, who rarely even uses his cell phone. Luckily, the Hesslers’ adult children help them run the business. The farm supports the family, and the kids are committed to keeping it alive. At the front of the house is one of Evans’s stained-glass window installations, looking like a giant purple chrysanthemum. Inside, new colors appear as the sunlight streams through: blue, maroon, and orange. The Hesslers have looked after the artwork over the decades, and it’s still in near perfect condition, a mark of its craftsmanship. Evans beams as he looks at his handiwork: “The integrity of color on the glass tints hasn’t dulled over time.” of a commune but retain their stake in the property, ownership can become a tricky issue. Often co-owners will refuse to sell their share because of ideological reasons—many members of Northern California’s communes acquired land to liberate it from logging and developers. This is why large, expensive swaths of land sometimes remain uninhabited even after all members of a commune have long since decamped. On a cold and foggy morning, we set out to explore one such abandoned commune, based on a tip and vague directions. It’s said to be located many miles up and down twisty, muddy logging roads and over streams with plywood bridges in an area of Humboldt County that’s recently come to be known as Murder Mountain. The moniker isn’t for the treacherous roads. Since the 1990s, the burgeoning cannabis industry has brought cartels and gang violence to the region. We’re nervous about taking wrong turns. Popular wisdom here says you should never go down a dirt road you don’t know. As the sun pierces through the gray sky, we turn a sharp corner to come upon multiple structures frozen in time. The commune was once known as the Nonagon, named after the nine-sided main house. We step inside the decaying abode to find it empty and surprisingly pristine but for mouse droppings and an antique fridge. A spiral staircase has a raw branch as a handrail; the door latches are out of The Hobbit. Deeper in the brush, we find a smaller cabin, its roof sagging so low its collapse seems inevitable. This home is literally about to go back to the land. Few know it exists here, and I wonder whether Michael and I will be the last to see it standing. As I walk through the door, Michael starts taking pictures as if it might collapse then and there. Inside, a few volumes on hermetic philosophy and a soggy copy of Ram Dass’s Be Here Now still sit on a shelf. Some kind of animal has left a nest in the closet. A mandala tapestry is pinned to the ceiling. There’s a rocking chair in the corner. The original members of this commune have moved on or passed on, and much as I’d like to know their stories, there’s nobody here to tell us what happened.  WHEN MEMBERS TRICKLE OUT

D AV I D J A C O B K R A M E R I S A W R I T E R B A S E D I N L O S A N G E L E S . T H I S I S H I S F I R S T S TO RY F O R G Q S T Y L E .

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The collapsing roof of a structure at the long-abandoned Nonagon commune in Humboldt County.

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They were a syndicate of street artists who became a family, and a revolutionary force in the world below 14th Street. Since their late-’90s heyday, some members became famous. Some died. And one, Kunle Martins, endured years of struggle—homelessness, addiction, jail time—to finally get the acclaim he always deserved. 126

By Noah Johnson Phot og ra p h b y R ya n M cGi n l ey

Downtown

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Kunle Martins and Dash Snow on the Lower East Side, 2001.

Downtown living as a portrait artist, rendering friends and loved ones in graphite and charcoal on found scraps of cardboard. His living room has been converted into a studio. When I visited, one large wall was covered in nude portraits he had made for a show, “S3ND NUD3S,” which opened this past spring at Bortolami Gallery, in Manhattan, to rave reviews and a coveted spot in the upper-right quadrant of New York magazine’s Approval Matrix. For Martins, the recent gallery show may have further reinforced his acceptance in certain New York art circles, but he’s been famous downtown for years. He’s perhaps best known as EARSNOT, the founder and de facto leader of IRAK, legends of New York’s downtown scene since the late ’90s. IRAK is a graffiti crew, a squad with a penchant for shoplifting, an art collective, and a community who have spent the better part of three decades together as a family. Its members include world-famous artists and notorious derelicts alike, and they created a downtown revolution that influenced the shape of art, fashion, and culture on a global scale. The story of IRAK has been decades in the making, and has seen some of the earliest members catapulted into art-world stardom—Ryan McGinley, Dan Colen, and Dash Snow among them. Now, years later, the group’s founder is arriving at a kind of recognition that has long eluded him. Graffiti is a world Martins first waded into as a freshman in high school after noticing a classmate filling the page of a notebook with tags and bubble letters. That student, who went on to become the legendary hand-styler GESHU (like many graffiti writers, he doesn’t publicly use his legal name), took Martins around the city and introduced him to the world of New York graffiti, instructing Martins on which writers were in which crews, who had beef with who, who was considered good, and who was a toy. Already a preternaturally skilled draftsman (and shoplifter), Martins began filling notebooks with his own tags, and was soon boosting art supplies to hone his craft—first markers and notebooks, then spray paint. He and GESHU would meet early in the mornings, before commuters were out on the streets, to bomb storefront security gates with spray-painted fill-ins. Midway through his junior year, Martins dropped out of school and left home for good, bringing along his skateboard and a few cans of spray paint. During the day he wandered, tagging and shoplifting until other kids got out of school. Then they’d meet up at Washington Square Park or Astor Place or the Brooklyn Banks or Union Square.

he ran away from home, 16-year-old Kunle Martins was skating in midtown Manhattan with a couple of friends. They were on 42nd Street, near the Port Authority Bus Terminal, when they ran into Martins’s father, who was waiting for the bus. “Fola,” said the elder Martins, using his son’s middle name. “Come on, we’re going home.” It was 1996, just as the New York skate scene was blowing up, and brands like Supreme and Zoo York were gaining a foothold downtown, exerting a strong pull on the young Martins. He’d been going to high school at the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, on 116th Street. That was part of the problem. He wanted to attend the art high school, LaGuardia, where he could develop his gifts for drawing and playing the flute. But his parents blew it for him, he says, and he missed the audition. By his account, things at home weren’t great in general. Martins’s father, a Nigerian immigrant, was a sharp-dressed man who ran a magazine for the growing Nigerian-American community and a P.R. agency. His mother was, as Martins put it, a “farm girl” from Virginia. Not so long ago, they lived in a nice high-rise on the Upper East Side. But that didn’t last. Money got tight. They drank and fought. They drifted to East New York, in Brooklyn, but got kicked out of that apartment, and were now living out of a hotel in New Jersey. Meanwhile, certain compulsions drew Martins away from home. From a young age he was a prolific shoplifter, and he was beginning to write graffiti, leaving home early in the morning to catch tags on the way to school; he was also crazy about meeting men, especially older daddy types. Martins had been in New York his entire life, but he always suspected the city had more for him. In 1995, when he was 15, Larry Clark’s Kids came out, a film depicting the downtown New York skate scene in all its gritty, horrifying glory, and that was it for him. “I was like, this is what’s going on?” Martins said. “There’s only one way I can experience this: I kind of have to leave home.” By the time Martins ran away, he’d already decided he wasn’t ever going back. But he’d never said no to his father before, and as they confronted each other on 42nd Street, he hesitated. Then his father raised a hand, as Martins recalls, slapped him hard across the face, and took the skateboard out of his son’s hands. Martins’s friends watched this unfold, unaware that this angry dude was Martins’s dad. One of them crept up from behind and snatched Martins’s board, and the three took off down Ninth Avenue. As they skated away, Martins started to explain the situation, but suddenly they were swarmed by police cars. Port Authority security must have called the cops on them for skating, Martins assumed. The friends bolted in different directions, but Martins made it only a couple of blocks before he was cornered. The police officers drew their guns and shouted at him to get on the ground. “I was like, dude, overreact much?” Martins said. He was cuffed and pinned on his belly to the sidewalk. The officers shouted at him, demanding to know where he put the gun. “I didn’t have time to think that I was going to be killed,” he said. “I was just like, Oh, this is crazy, you guys are crazy.” Martins didn’t have a gun. Eventually, the cops let him go, embarrassed by the mix-up. “And all that happened within 10 minutes,” Martins said. He’d already made the decision to flee his home, but it was at this moment that he decided to leave his biological family for one of his own choosing. He knew that his new life would come with violence and chaos and danger. But, he said, “It was everything I wanted it to be. It was basically like that every day for a few years. Everything was crazy all the time.” A COUPLE OF WEEKS AFTER

41 this year, lives in a spacious twobedroom apartment at the northern end of Manhattan. One of the bedrooms has been converted into a wardrobe, which houses an archive of sneakers and streetwear that would bring any hypebeast to his knees. Over the years, Martins has worked for Alife and Supreme, lending his artwork to their designs and imbuing those brands with a unique street cred. These days he primarily makes a M A RT I N S, W H O T U R N E D

P h o t o g r a p h by B ru ce LaBr uc e

Dash Snow and Dan Colen in the East Village, 2004.

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Kunle Martins sleeping, in Ryan McGinley’s bed, 2000.

P h o t o g r ap h by R ya n McGin le y

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Downtown

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P h otog raph by K ai Reg an S tudio /Ar chive

Fa ll/W inte r 202 1 At night he’d sleep on the trains, pinballing between Manhattan and the outer boroughs. He stole everything he needed: food, clothes, paint. Meanwhile, he had met a kid from Bushwick who went by the name WAK STF—a break-dancer, graffiti writer, and, not unusual in this scene, fellow shoplifter. When graffiti writers first emerged in New York in the 1970s, they stole paint to bomb trains, and in the spirit of outlaw culture, that’s been the custom ever since. For both Martins and WAK STF, racking was the preferred nomenclature for those thefts—boosting seemed too retro, and stealing was too obvious. Martins had been cycling through different tags and crew names when WAK STF suggested IRAK. It was a brilliant double entendre, evoking both a pastime intrinsically connected to graffiti and the recent war in the Middle East, which was still dominating headlines. But Martins wasn’t feeling it. Most crew names were three letters, and they were almost always acronyms: RYB—Running Your Block—for instance. Martins tried IRAK out a few times, but it didn’t stick at first. Soon after meeting WAK STF, Martins started rolling with another graffiti writer from the Bronx called REHAB. Together they boosted goods that they could sell for a profit to bodegas uptown. But Martins was having some problems with kids in the Bronx—at one point they stole some North Face jackets that he’d stolen himself. So he began to gravitate toward downtown. He dressed more like the skaters and ravers who hung around Astor Place and Washington Square Park, and he and REHAB fell in with a crowd they affectionately called “the crispy white kids.” Martins got to know the regulars—“all the downtown loser kids who were dropping tabs and buying drugs and smoking weed and going to raves,” he told me. That’s when Martins leaned into using the tag EARSNOT. At first it was meant to be a rejection of graffiti norms—short names that sounded cool and were mostly illegible to people who weren’t fluent in tagging. Martins wrote EARSNOT in big, perfectly lucid script, and people took notice. Occasionally he’d add IRAK to the tag, and that stuck, too. REHAB started writing it as well. The IRAK crew was born. Martins quickly made a name for himself downtown. His persona was as distinctive and compelling as his tag. He customized his huge pants with panels of fabric to make the legs even wider. He was tall and loud and aggressive. He came out as bisexual, then gay, and would fight anyone who challenged his sexuality. Friends recall stories about him beating the socks off someone for calling him a homophobic slur, then getting down to shout into the face of his opponent, loud enough for everyone to hear. “I was super into the showmanship of it,” Martins told me. “I’d beat people up for calling me a faggot or whatever, and then I would tell them, ‘Now go home and tell your daddy that a faggot fucked you up.’ ” “I became this sort of downtown omnipresent guy, like man about town,” he added. “Just always around.” Through their magnetism and savvy promotion, Martins and the crispy white kids continued to grow the IRAK graffiti crew, and soon

Opposite page, bottom row, from left: Tim Badalucco, Agathe Snow, Donald Cumming, and Aaron Bondaroff. Second row: Dash Snow, Sophie Smith, Ryan McGinley, Kenji Ukigaya, Joey Semz, and Ricky Lee. Third row: Ben Solomon, Kent Ochjareon, Simon Curtis, Jason Dill, Damany Weir, Nate Smith. Fourth row: Filippo Chia, Nico Dios, Dan Colen, Kunle Martins, Tim Artz, and Steve Powers. Top row: Craig Costello and Tino Razo. Industria Studio, New York, 2004.

“What is every angry, horny, self-centered, half-depressed, halfmanic teenager looking for? You’re looking for a fucking reason, and for people to share it with.” — B E N S O LO M O N

more tags appeared on walls next to the IRAK name: SACER, KSER, GLACER, SETUP, AREA, SEMZ, KENT, FANTA, SEMEN, and NEKST. “It was like I sort of had built this thing that was like a little gazebo of shelter from the sun and the rain that my friends could come and hang out in,” Martins said. Dash Snow was the most dedicated writer among them. He had recently left a therapeutic boarding school for “troubled” teens and approached graffiti with abandon, writing every chance he got. Everyone knew Snow came from money—his grandmother Christophe de Menil was an heiress to a French oil-technology fortune and one of contemporary art’s greatest patrons. But, as Martins recalled, any doubts about Snow’s credibility were quickly dispelled by his commitment to “fucking shit up.” “Dash brought a different level of dedication to vandalism and graffiti,” Ben Solomon, an IRAK member who works as an artist and filmmaker, told me. “He was like this missing piece of the puzzle. And it was a catalyst. Dash came back and had this energy and access and dedication. We were like, ‘Oh, shit. Okay.’ ” By this point, IRAK weren’t just repainting downtown; they were rewiring it, making new connections between cultural movements. They brought together skateboarders and fashion models and ravers and blue-chip artists and legendary Bronx graffiti writers and less legendary wannabe vandals from New Jersey. We take for granted that all of these worlds are constantly colliding—fashion and art and music are now all part of one cultural spectrum—but that wasn’t always the case. With Martins as a kind of spiritual leader, those who fell under the IRAK umbrella weren’t seeking out others who were just like them. That’s exactly what they were trying to escape. They were looking for people who were different, as different as they were themselves. “What is every angry, horny, self-centered, half-depressed, halfmanic teenager looking for?” Solomon asked me. “You’re looking for a fucking reason, and you’re looking for people to share it with. You know? The bond that formed over these simple, superficial things like graffiti, like a jacket, like wanting to be tough, or wanting to be cool or not wanting to be cool—that’s just the entry point. What is so dope about IRAK is that the bond ran a lot deeper than that, and has propelled everyone to where they’re at today.” By 1999, IRAK was everywhere. Anywhere you looked downtown you’d see an IRAK tag. “It was evident,” Nico Dios, an IRAK member and cannabis entrepreneur, told me, “that we were rocking very hard.” was in high school, working at a skate shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he first met Martins. This was in 1994. After school, McGinley and his friends would hop on the PATH train into the city to skate at Astor Place or the Banks or Union Square, where Martins was often hanging out. When McGinley met him, Martins was known to most as Kool-Aid, because that’s what the name Kunle sounded like. But the two didn’t grow close until a few years later, when McGinley came out as gay. “I was searching for a community of people that were interested in the same stuff I was, which was skating and graffiti,” McGinley said (although he himself never wrote graffiti). One afternoon, he recalled, “Someone said to me, ‘Hey, you should talk to EARSNOT, because he’s gay.’ And it was sort of unbelievable to me, because he just didn’t present as queer.” Later that night, McGinley nervously approached Martins at Astor Place. “I was really timid and super shy,” McGinley recalled. “I said, ‘I have a question to ask you. Someone told me you’re gay.’ He was like, ‘Who’s asking?’ I said, ‘Well, I am, because I’m gay.’ Then he’s like, ‘What?! Ryan, you’re gay?! Fuck yeah!’ We had this big moment where we hugged and it created this immediate bond because there weren’t any gay skaters at the time.” After McGinley graduated from high school he went to Parsons School of Design, in downtown Manhattan, and in 1998 he moved into an apartment on East Seventh Street. “It was kind of a skater flophouse,” McGinley said. “Everyone would come and hang out and stay there.” RYAN M C GINLEY

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From top: Martins in New York, 2000; McGinley and Martins, 1999; Snow and Martins at Jeffrey Deitch’s Grand Street gallery, circa 2001.

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By that point the IRAK universe had expanded. McGinley introduced Martins to Dan Colen, a tall and game-for-anything artist from New Jersey. Colen was then going to the Rhode Island School of Design, but he’d visit the city to hang out with McGinley and Snow and Martins. Around this time, McGinley started to jokingly claim to Martins that he was in IRAK. “I’d be like, ‘Well, you don’t even write graffiti,’ ” Martins told me. “And he would laugh it off or whatever. But then I realized that a lot of my good friends didn’t actually write graffiti. And they had a lot to offer.” With McGinley and Colen down, the purpose of IRAK became more vivid, and the eclectic character of the crew took shape. “It’s the reason I wanted to move to New York,” McGinley told me, “and why I think many people do: to create a community. Everyone who is part of IRAK came out of some kind of chaos in their family. We all were magnets to each other, and we all were searching for a new chosen family.” Martins and Snow, in particular, seemed destined for each other. They came from disparate backgrounds, but they had a similar charisma, a very high vandalism IQ, and the kinds of differences that made them better as a team. Snow was wiry, fearless, and intensely paranoid. Martins was tall, built, and deliberate, a fortress of bravery and self-confidence. “I think that they really respected each other,” McGinley said, “first and foremost, as graffiti artists and people who are really dedicated to their craft and willing to go to the edge to get their name seen and promote the crew. Just a healthy sense of rebellion and danger.” “They really complemented each other,” said Cheryl Dunn, the filmmaker and photographer whose documentary about Snow, Moments Like This Never Last, was released this summer. “They were both estranged from their family. They were street kids and they connected on this beautiful level. I don’t think that either of them really dwelled on their background. They were like, this is who I am. They were really living in the moment and surviving. And together, they had a better chance of survival.” For some, survival meant a place to sleep at night. For others, it meant an opportunity to become an artist and thrive in a creative community. By the end of the ’90s, the IRAK family included graffiti writers from all over New York—they were white and Black and Asian and Dominican, gay and straight, guys and girls, lovers of hip-hop and punk rock, practitioners of fine art and vandalism. No longer the misfits of Astor Place, they were at the vanguard of hanging out. Their first spot was AREA’s parents’ town house in SoHo—there they could smoke freely and drink forties in the basement. Then there was Le Poeme, a French restaurant run by the mother of Snow’s then girlfriend and later wife, Agathe Snow, where IRAK would party almost every night. McGinley’s apartment on East Seventh Street was another locus. And later, Snow’s apartment on Avenue C. “I think we all wanted to live in a similar world,” Dan Colen told me. “Which was not a reality at the time. And we tried to create that fantasy. Of course, we went out and we partied, but that really wasn’t our priority. It wasn’t the real core experience we were looking for, which was the much more intimate exchange.” Inevitably, there were drugs. Not just weed and ecstasy and LSD but Special K, coke, angel dust, quaaludes, and heroin. There were wild, endless nights. IRAK were famous for tagging downtown, but it was the lifestyle as much as the graffiti that spread their legend beyond the downtown scene. As IRAK grew, McGinley was developing as a photographer, constantly taking pictures of the crew and eventually starting to publish them in Vice. In 2001 the magazine, then a free glossy catering to the emergent Williamsburg hipster class, published a story by filmmaker and writer Bruce LaBruce called “The Vice Guide to New York Graffiti,” which ran along with McGinley’s photos. The story chronicled several nights out with the IRAK crew, including McGinley, Snow, Martins, and another IRAK writer dubbed Semen Spermz. Snow was 19 and married to Agathe by then. He was, LaBruce wrote, “diminutive and cute as a fucking button, with epic tattooage and a killer smile.”

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Martins on East Seventh Street, in the East Village, 2000.

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Downtown “That one particular night I was writing about was mind-blowing because we were watching the inauguration of Bush while high on opium and God knows what else,” LaBruce told me. At one point, they went to the roof of McGinley’s building so he could take photos of Snow, who danced on the ledge seven stories above the pavement. LaBruce found that he could hardly watch. “That encapsulated for me how intense they were and how reckless,” he said, “but also really super passionate and damaged—like they were invincible or fearless.” Another night, they made their way to a trendy spot where they drank for free and did lines off the table. Outside, Snow lit a pile of discarded Christmas trees on fire. Someone called 911 and the IRAK crew split. The next day they returned to the scene to find that the blaze had set a car on fire and that, according to LaBruce, it “may have slightly exploded or something.” Snow had left town before the sun came up. The thing that was truly indelible about the IRAK crew wasn’t just the marker tags and spray-painted fill-ins that covered the city, or the drug binges and street fires and notorious fights. It was the intense intimacy and shamelessness in how they carried themselves, as seen through McGinley’s lens. They seemed to always be naked, strung out, dripping in blood and semen and God knows what else, passed out in bed together or tenderly holding one another. “Even though it was wild and crazy, there’s a certain sincerity about it,” said LaBruce. “That Kunle and Ryan and Dash were all these little glamorous dreamboats. They were all very magnetic and photogenic. They were just super open-minded and they recognized that this was problematic in those scenes. I don’t think you can underestimate the fact that Ryan and Kunle are both queer.” At the time, graffiti and skateboarding were not just full of latent homophobia but intensely anti-gay. “But they didn’t make it into a cause or anything,” LaBruce continued. “By their own coolness and their own amazingness, they make the case that it was cool to be queer.” artistic ambition, as a young teen, was to make a drawing for everyone in the world. He especially wanted to get them into the hands of people he didn’t know. “They’re going to be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” he told me. “And it’s like, ‘Cool, you don’t like it, awesome. I’ll just keep Johnny Appleseeding drawings to people who don’t want them.’ ” His graffiti followed a similar impulse. EARSNOT was meant to be noticed by everyone, not just graffiti writers. Martins said he wanted to infect people with the idea. And it worked. Not long after he started to write EARSNOT, he started hearing people talking about it. “I remember the rush of emotion,” he told me. “It’s kind of like drinking or smoking weed for the first time. It was like, ‘What?! Name recognition, this shit is dope. I’m going to do this again.’ ” Inherent to graffiti is a kind of paradox. As McGinley explains it, “Graffiti is a compulsion. There’s a specific kind of person—somebody who wants everyone to know who they are but to remain completely anonymous at the same time.” And that compulsion could be all-consuming. “Kunle and Dash were never not tagging,” said Colen. At times Martins would write 50 or 75 tags in a day. He was so prolific that, in a sense, his dream to make a drawing for everyone in the world came true. But eventually his chaotic lifestyle began to catch up with him, and in some ways his path began to diverge from the rest of the crew’s. “I was still racking,” Martins told me, “but every once in a while I would get caught or go to jail, and it was wack. And Dash was just living with his grandmother and able to go out every night and party and write graffiti. And I was still doing that, but I had to go to work the next day and figure shit out. If I got caught and went to jail and got out, I had this case with a public defender and it was hard fought, and I might have to do time. It just sucked more. I had to be smarter about it.” At the same time, McGinley, Colen, and Snow were on their way to art-world stardom, and Martins played no small part in their success. “He was profoundly inspiring,” said Colen. “His whole persona was really incredible. It had an immediate impact on my work. Most artists’ MARTINS’S EARLIEST

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Dash Snow in an abandoned building in Lower Manhattan, 2001.

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Downtown work is about themselves in many ways, but when I met Kunle I was still very young and developing as an artist and in a way engaged in that idea for the first time where it was like, ‘Well, it has to be about me.’ And like, ‘What about me is it about?’ Then to meet somebody whose persona was so vivid and clear, so much clearer than my own—he’s consistently been a source of inspiration.” In 2003 and 2004, McGinley had solo shows at the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1. Snow was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2006. Colen began showing at Gagosian Gallery in 2006. In 2007, the three of them were featured on the cover of New York magazine under the headline “Warhol’s Children.” The story was actually a profile of a very reluctant Dash Snow. Martins made a brief appearance as “a guy named Ace Boon Kunle,” who gives a brief, lovely soliloquy about shoplifting. (“I’m smooth,” he says in the New York magazine story. “I’ll make it sweet.”) “I think it was a complete travesty that [Martins] wasn’t on the cover,” said Blair Hansen, who in the aughts worked at the gallery Peres Projects, which represented Dash Snow and Dan Colen, and who has recently curated a show featuring Martins’s work. “Especially now that I know from Dan that he was a beacon for Dan and Dash so much. That was really where the river of influence started, so he should have been on the art journey with them.” That journey wasn’t always as glorious as it may have seemed. “It’s like rich, pretentious, snotty bullshit a lot of the time,” Hansen told me. “Dash didn’t want to deal with that any more than he had to, and

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“I hope that kids know how important IRAK was, and just how it lived in the crevices of the street. I always keep underlining and underscoring it.” —V I RG I L A B LO H

Martins in front of the Rivington Club store in New York, date unknown.

it sucked his soul in certain ways. I would imagine that Kunle would have observed that and it immediately, really turned him off. Also, to be honest, maybe the heroin turned him off. Maybe he was just like, ‘Who are all these fucking clowns playing with this shit like it’s fun or cool, and it’s just not?’ ” Snow, Colen, and McGinley may have had mixed feelings about the rarefied world of fine art, but they used the opportunity to push their work into provocative new dimensions. For “Nest,” a 2007 installation by Snow and Colen at Deitch Projects, the SoHo gallery, the two, along with a couple dozen friends and other artists, re-created one of their infamous hamster nests. What’s a hamster nest? It’s when the artists “tear up phone books, roll around in their mess, and do drugs until they feel like hamsters,” the critic David Velasco explained in Artforum. Meanwhile, Martins had started working at Rivington Club, a boutique for the streetwear brand Alife, which had opened on the Lower East Side and quickly became a nexus for all things downtown, with EARSNOT squarely in the center. He launched the IRAK streetwear brand, which he’s been operating on and off ever since—mostly selling just enough of the graphic tees, hoodies, and hats he designs to give some away to friends. But he didn’t exactly see the opportunities for himself that were available to Colen and Snow and McGinley. “I was a super angry dude, which was welcomed in the late ’90s, early 2000s,” Martins told me. “I was needed. Downtown was not super friendly. I was so mentally immature or whatever. I was so involved with myself. I was very self-absorbed and friends with Ryan and Dash and Dan who had super white-hot art careers. It’s like, ‘I’m the talented guy! Come on, give me money!’ ” Success, money, infamy, and credibility came to those three young artists with apparent ease. Martins’s life was more complicated. He didn’t have all the same privileges. His personality was too big. He was intimidating and aggressive. He was Black and he was gay. And so he wasn’t as easily marketable for the gallery system or the New York press. What Martins got, at the time, was just the infamy and cred. Still, it was a scene in which cred very much mattered. Virgil Abloh recalled for me what it was like hanging out downtown in those days: “Kids like me and Heron Preston were like a generation of young scrappy kids, just hanging out on Orchard Street and Lafayette, skating in between the Lower East Side and SoHo and Chinatown. And we were seeing Kunle, A-Ron [Bondaroff], Ryan, Dash, they were sort of like the seniors, if you will. And we were like the freshmen.” Abloh would go on to launch his own global fashion line, Off-White, and become the men’s artistic director for Louis Vuitton. Last year at a fashion event, he wore an IRAK hat as an acknowledgment that Martins had helped pave his way. “There’s just so much talk, and buzz, and boom within streetwear today,” he told me. “When I copped that hat, I was like, ‘I hope that kids know how important IRAK was, and just how it lived in the crevices of the street.’ Obviously I’ve made a career, but I’m linked to that. And so I always keep underlining and underscoring it.”

IRAK’s legacy as a kind of street-level incubator for up-and-coming stars of the downtown scene was solidified. Martins was celebrated and revered as a gatekeeper and a force of influence, but his private struggles were far from over. In 2005, he appeared in the graffiti documentary Infamy, in which he’s seen tagging the streets of New York and working at Rivington Club. Soon after the film’s premiere, police came to the shop and arrested him. Unlike many graffiti writers, Martins hadn’t concealed his identity when he was being filmed or photographed. He was outraged, but not entirely surprised. “I’m not some dirtbag loser graffiti writer,” he told me of his mindset at the time. “I’m Kunle Martins; I happen to write graffiti. I’ve got a lot of stuff inside of me. I don’t know where it’s going or how it’s going to end up, but I don’t want to box myself in as a ‘graffiti writer.’ So yeah, I’m putting my face out there. I’m not ashamed of anything about myself. I just didn’t naturally feel the shame. And then, when they came and arrested me, I’m like, ‘Okay. Touché.’ ” Martins’s arrest resulted in five years of probation, which meant he was subject to drug tests. For the first time in his life, he had to try to keep his nose clean. “I was angry at everyone else for being able to party and write graffiti when they wanted to,” he said. “I had to go to work and I was mad at the world. There were no parents that I’m close to that I can just go back home to. I have to pay my own rent. I have to do this drug program. I have to do probation. There are no lawyers. Only public defenders. It’s just me. And I fought for all these other weirdos. I was the one making sure that they didn’t get beat up at these parties. I was the one that was the inspiration for all their artwork. And now who’s looking out for me? Nobody. I was angry for so long, had resentments against everybody for so long, just because I just felt like everyone else was reaping all the benefits from my hard work.” The recession that began in 2007 set Martins back even further. The Alife offices where he spent most of his time eventually closed, and in 2010 he lost his apartment. It took a while for him to realize that he BY THE MID-2000S,

P h o t o g r ap hs b y Al ain Lev it t

Ryan McGinley, Kenji Ukigaya, and Joey Newfield ride around the East Village in a limo, date unknown.

wasn’t just couch surfing—he was homeless again. “I was like hanging out with people just so that I could eat without telling them that,” he said. A friend suggested he go on food stamps. Joey Semz died in 2007. Then Snow died of a reported overdose in 2009. Crew members Sean Griffin, Joey Newfield, Kent Ochjaroen, and Jesse Geller would all pass away between 2012 and 2020. “Everyone thinks they’re invincible,” recalled Solomon. “Joey Semz dies, we’re like, ‘Damn, I guess we’re not invincible.’ And then when Dash died we’re like, ‘Oh, shit. We’re really not invincible. The invincible guy died. That’s fucked up. What are we supposed to do?’ ” Martins never got into shooting heroin, and he was vocal in his disapproval of it to those in IRAK who did. He had his own substance issues—E and K and crystal and coke, which were around the gyms, gay clubs, and sex parties where he was hanging out when he wasn’t with his art and graffiti friends. But by 2010, when he became homeless for the second time and was forced onto food stamps, drugs and graffiti were no longer interesting to him. His friends were dying, and in 2011 his father, with whom he had recently reconnected, died, too. “It was like, ‘I don’t really want to hang out with people. I don’t feel good,’ ” he recalled. “I was a little estranged. I had just gotten off probation, but everything seemed to get worse. None of the work that I was putting in during probation paid off. I was in my thirties and had nothing to show for it. And my other friends were mega famous. And it just made me feel really bad.” Martins was homeless until 2013, when he finally got his own place in a low-income housing unit in the Bronx (where he lived until last year). There he could finally begin trying to settle into a normal life. He got a job at a supermarket in Brooklyn Heights, but it didn’t last long. Then in 2017 he was hired by Supreme, where he worked in both the Brooklyn store and the warehouse. But that didn’t last either. Eventually he started making art, at first pieces based on his tag, MEANWHILE, TR AGEDY STRU CK IR AK.

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Downtown which he sold via Instagram. But he was also doing some portraits again—he’d made a few over the years, though he’d mostly discarded them or given them away. One of those early portraits now belongs to Colen. “The thing with Kunle that’s so amazingly wild is that he defied all universal norms for the concept of beauty,” Colen said. “The men that he’s always been with are very specific—they’re not young, and they’re not thin. They’re not the things that we typically think of as the most desirable thing. This drawing, it was one of either his boyfriends or somebody he had a crush on, and it had a real tenderness to it. You would think Kunle is a crazy artist who makes crazy-ass shit. And what he makes is the most classical thing, but it’s timeless and in a way it’s almost the hardest thing to do, right? Because people have been doing it forever, but he does it in such a special way.” In 2018, Martins started dating the artist Jack Pierson. (The two are no longer together.) They first met in Florence a decade ago when the two of them, along with other IRAK-adjacent artists and downtowners, modeled for a collection by the designer Adam Kimmel. When they met again at one of Colen’s openings, the connection between them was confirmed. They shacked up almost immediately. Pierson saw that Martins was constantly being asked to participate in art shows, and he, along with Timothy Curtis, a graffiti friend who had entered the gallery world, encouraged him to push his work in new, more challenging directions. “Usually they wanted a tag or a taglike thing,” Pierson told me. “And Dan Colen and I thought, If you’re going to be in these art shows, do something a little different. You do these beautiful portraits. Develop it. He took the suggestion, I think. And the sensibility was always really raw and immediate, and very sensitive and considered at the same time.” Martins’s mission as an artist has always been about connecting with people—bringing people into his world, or bringing a little piece of his world to them. “Graffiti is a means to an end of making friends,” said Pierson. “And so is portraiture on a certain level. Kunle saw that what he wants most of all is to be part of a community, and especially a community on the streets of New York.” But there were old habits that died hard. During their first few months of dating, Pierson observed Martins smoking weed daily and would learn he was doing coke occasionally, and one day he confronted his partner: “Oh, I see. You’re a drug addict. I’m in love with a drug addict.” By then, most of the surviving members of IRAK had all gotten sober. But Martins felt like he didn’t need to go through that process, that his drug use didn’t rise to the level of friends’ who were on heroin. “So I was like, ‘I told you guys not to do that. I don’t have to get sober.’ ” But Pierson’s comment struck a chord. “That was the first time somebody called me a drug addict,” Martins said. “That’s when I got sober. I’ve been sober ever since.” In 2019, at the New York gallery Shoot the Lobster, Martins had his first solo show, “Portraits: Looking Like a Snack.” The canvases were discarded pieces of cardboard on which Martins had drawn his friends, family, and lovers in pencil from passport and driver’s license photos. In 2020 he had another solo show of portrait drawings, this one at the Lower East Side gallery 56 Henry. “His time finally fucking came,” Blair Hansen, the curator, told me. “This guy is such a fucking superstar. It’s just written in him so deep.” Martins spent decades carrying IRAK on his shoulders, but he never got the chance to explore his own art practice. Through his portraiture, he’s forging ahead with a new kind of self-assuredness—and carrying the IRAK legacy in every pencil line. “I don’t really know anyone else in that group who chose a format and really sunk into it as hard as he did,” Hansen said. “He is able to excavate other people through his portraiture because he is so solid. It just is easy for him to see others and easy for him to connect to others, and easy for him to imagine himself in proximity to others. Those drawings convey that ease and intimacy, and they’re so unfussy and uncomplicated, and just so direct.”

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Martins has found other ways to explore a more direct approach to design. The IRAK brand has been steadily releasing new products for a few seasons, with eagerly anticipated drops online and at Dover Street Market. On IRAK’s Instagram page, Martins promoted new gear in photo shoots with McGinley, Colen, Solomon, and other O.G. members of the crew. And he’s recently explored other projects, too: A Supreme x Comme des Garçons SHIRT collaboration used his handwriting as a graphic motif on shirts, pants, and leather jackets; he released a sneaker with Adidas (a re-creation of one that first came out in 2007); and he recently collaborated on tees with Colen’s Hudson Valley nonprofit, Sky High Farm. The anger of his younger years is mostly gone, replaced with a deep sense of gratitude. “I’m super lucky to be alive right now,” Martins says. “I’m super lucky to be able to make stuff that other people like. I used to wish for years

COURTESY OF JEFFREY DEITCH.

that I could make a living at making art and that I would just be happy and not have to be angry all the time. And that’s how my life is today. I don’t have to be angry.” Success in the art world came to Martins much later than it did for many of his friends. But it seems that it came at the right time. “It’s one of the most ridiculous parts of human nature, but it can be really challenging to watch your friends succeed,” Colen told me. “I think, as an artist, there’s a paradox that’s built into success. In so many ways success is like the antithesis to our original goals as an artist, to subvert and explore transgressive ideas, you know? In a crew of friends, it’s a complicated thing to navigate. I think in many ways it was too complicated for Dash to navigate. There’s no right way to do it, and if anything it’s the hardest to succeed at a young age.”

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Dash Snow and Dan Colen’s “Nest” show at Jeffrey Deitch’s gallery, 2007.

The remaining members of the original IRAK will tell you they’re still a family. “We’re still alive,” McGinley said. “If you look at our crew, so far we beat the odds. There’s a lot of people who have passed away from suicides or from drug overdoses. When Kunle and I get together, we talk about that a lot. There’s a perseverance and a spiritual reason that we’re still around.” For Martins, it seems, the reason they’ve endured has never been clearer than it is today. “Absolutely everyone has trauma,” he told me while we sat in his home studio. “It doesn’t define me. I’m not the things that have happened to me. I’ve survived all those things. It’s actually a really great story. Today’s the best day of my life so far. Yesterday was the best day of my life before today. And so on and so forth.”  N OA H J O H N S O N I S G Q ’ S G LO B A L ST Y L E D I R E CTO R .

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Downtown

Martins at a studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn, September 2020.

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Ph otog raph and art wor k b y Ed Temp leton

For our cover story on Jonah Hill, see page 64.

Sweater, $450, by Aimé Leon Dore. Pants, vintage. Sunglasses, $750, by Jacques Marie Mage.

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