Port Issue 31 Leila Mottley

Kieran Culkin Diego Luna Torrey Peters Stéphane Bak Will Sharpe George Saunders Jasper Morrison

Leila Mottley

Kieran Culkin Diego Luna Stéphane Bak Will Sharpe Leila Mottley George Saunders Jasper Morrison

Torrey Peters

design Mario Bellinidesign Mario Bellini

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe

DESIGN DIRECTOR Astrid Stavro

FASHION DIRECTOR Mitchell Belk

DEPUTY EDITOR Tom Bolger

FASHION EDITOR Julie Velut

ACCESSORIES EDITOR Lune Kuipers

DESIGN Astrid Stavro, Sophie Dutton, Alessandro Molent

ART EDITOR Sophie Dutton

PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Rachel Louise Brown

JUNIOR PHOTO EDITOR Jodie Michaelides

SENIOR EDITOR Kerry Crowe

HOROLOGY EDITOR Alex Doak

INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey

SUB-EDITOR Sarah Kathryn Cleaver

EU CORRESPONDENT Donald Morrison

US CORRESPONDENT Alex Vadukul

JAPANESE CORRESPONDENT Ryo Yamazaki

WORDS

Simran Hans, Michael Cera, Antonio Ortuño, Torrey Peters, Leila Mottley, Will Sharpe, Aleks

Cvetkovic, Tara Joshi, Elizabeth Fullerton, Tom Bolger, Ethan Price, Billie Muraben, Hannah Williams, Rion Amilcar Scott, Philip Hoare, Deyan Sudjic, Alex Doak, Laura McCreddie-Doak, Nabil Al-Kinani, Jeanette Winterson, Orhan Pamuk, Anthony Anaxagorou, Steven Pinker, Dylan Holden, Chloe Sells, Andrew Edmunds

PHOTOGRAPHY

Anatheine, Clément Pascal, Mitch Zachary, Hugo Mapelli, Eric Chakeen, Scott Gallagher, Arno Frugier, Sabine Hess, Megan Mechelle Dalton, Sacha Bowling, Benjamin McMahon, Pablo Escudero, Rachel Gordon, Gaëtan Bernède, Nola Minolfi, Thomas Martin, Pat Martin, Howard Sooley, Jonathan Baron, Stefan Armbruster, Iringó Demeter, Olya Oleinic, Cornelius Käss, Grace Difford, Thomas Rousset, Nicolas Kern, Valentin Hennequin, Benjamin Swanson, Leandro Farina, Phil Dunlop, John Gribben, Baker & Evans

ARTWORK

Chloe Sells, Frank Bowling, Nick Drnaso, Salvatore Fiorello

HEADLINE TYPEFACE

A2 Record Gothic by A2-Type (A2/SW/HK) www.a2-type.co.uk

“The living is merely a type of what is dead, and a very rare type.”

SENIOR EDITORS

Dan May, Fashion

Samantha Morton, Film

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Art Rick Moody, Literature

John-Paul Pryor, Music Brett Steele, Architecture

Deyan Sudjic, Design

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Kabir Chibber

Robert Macfarlane Albert Scardino

SPECIAL THANKS

The Production Factory Everyone who has ever worked at, or with, Port

COVER CREDITS

Kieran Culkin, photographed in New York by Clément Pascal, wears ANEST COLLECTIVE AW22

Stéphane Bak, photographed in Paris by Anatheine, wears LOEWE

Diego Luna, photographed in New York by Mitch Zachary, wears ZEGNA AW22

Torrey Peters, photographed in Vermont by Eric Chakeen, wears VALENTINO PINK PP FALL/WINTER 22-23 COLLECTION

Leila Mottley, photographed in Paris by Hugo Mapelli, wears VALENTINO PINK PP FALL/WINTER 22-23 COLLECTION

Will Sharpe, photographed in London by Arno Frugier, wears GIORGIO ARMANI AW22

PUBLISHERS

Dan Crowe, Matt Willey

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono

MANAGING DIRECTOR Dan Crowe

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR

Andrew Chidgey-Nakazono andrew@port-magazine.com

ACCOUNTS

Charlie Carne & Co.

CIRCULATION CONSULTANT

Logical Connections

Adam Long adam@logicalconnections.co.uk

CONTACT info@port-magazine.com

SYNDICATION syndication@port-magazine.com

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Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s a golden age for literature and the arts in general: never before have we had access to such staggering amounts of exciting new work, from all directions, and yet our actual global dramas also seem to be in creasing and unfolding at a similar pace... It’s hard to comprehend where we are at (are we collapsing as a global society? Are we about to hit rock bottom, bounce back and figure everything out?), and so for this issue, we decided to bring in the theme of ‘mirrors’ to explore self, reality and context. Somehow, reflected back to us through this subject, material gathered and got in line, as if urgently wanting to comment on the incredibly strange times we find ourselves living through: motherhood, fatherhood; the power of art to interrogate reality; home as a place of refuge, and working, from a young age, on a particular craft... All these concepts are considered from various po sitions over the following pages, from an astonishing array of talents.

Six phenomenal cover stars from the worlds of film, TV and literature front this issue of Port. Kieran Culkin catches up with

old friend and fellow actor Michael Cera to consider their craft and the unexpected joys of fatherhood, while best-selling author Torrey Peters has an in-depth conversation with Booker-longlisted writer Leila Mottley on the incredible power of fiction. Mexican actor Diego Luna discusses with compa triot novelist Antonio Ortuño his determi nation to keep producing vital stories in their home country (whilst also being the lead in the new Star Wars saga Andor); and rising French actor Stéphane Bak reflects on the beauty of the diasporic stories he embodies. Finally, BAFTA Award-winning writer, director and actor Will Sharpe writes a letter to writing itself: the solace, pain and belonging it has brought him from childhood, and where it might take him next. It’s incredibly charming and beautiful. Elsewhere, historian and biographer Philip Hoare pens a sublime ode to Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage (paired with gorgeous photographs from Jarman’s friend and collaborator Howard Sooley), a place which remains somewhat out of time, yet still talks to us: “Prospect Cottage

was created for Derek Jarman a hundred years before he arrived. It was waiting for him, like a UFO. The tarry fisherman’s cot tage stood naked and alone at Dungeness, surrounded by a dozen or more like it, in their varying shapes and sizes, facing out to the English Channel. This beach was the last of England, the fifth quarter, since it was new land, stolen from the sea. It now receives refugees. You might say Jarman was one of them...”

Alongside our seventh annual supple ment devoted to horology, 10:10, we have also photographed autumn/winter collections and accessories the world over. It would be hard to deny that this is some of the finest styling and fashion photography we have ever produced, accompanied by some of the best writing. The entire issue reflects clearly the hard work and brilliance of those who contributed to it, as well as the beau ty, wonder and mystery of our dauntingly complex world. As a good mirror should.

— Dan Crowe

45 90

Portfolio

Aleks Cvetkovic, Tara Joshi, Elizabeth Fullerton, Tom Bolger, Dylan Holden, Ethan Price, Billie Muraben, Hannah Williams, Chloe Sells, Andrew Edmunds

Stéphane Bak Words Simran Hans Photography Anatheine

Kieran Culkin

Michael

Pascal

Diego Luna

Words Antonio Ortuño Photography Mitch Zachary

Torrey Peters & Leila Mottley Photography Eric Chakeen & Hugo Mapelli

146

173

George Saunders: Still Evolving

Words Rion Amilcar Scott Photography Pat Martin

The Last of England Words Philip Hoare Photography Howard Sooley

Commentary

Will Sharpe, Jeanette Winterson, Nabil Al-Kinani, Orhan Pamuk, Anthony Anaxagorou

Split Screen

Photography Grace Difford Styling Mitchell Belk

Narcissus

Photography Stefan Armbruster Styling and set design Lune Kuipers

“Sometimes the scenes that aren’t published are actually the places where you find the character. In the past, when I used to see guys on Grindr, I used to make them – to see if they truly wanted to come over –buy me sushi beforehand. Not crazy fancy, just a simple tuna roll. I wanted to know how much did they really care? It was like

sending a knight on a quest before you give them your favour – you must go to the restaurant and conquer one Tekkamaki roll! When I was writing Detransition, Baby and laughing about this specific request, I realised that was the voice of my character Reese, that sort of logic and the gender roles that speaks to. In a certain way, that

was a touchstone moment of building the character. It's not at all in the book, but I had to write it to discover who Reese was. Same with the character Ames; so much of them came out of things that just never made it in.”

Read Torrey Peters’ profile starting on p114.

TORREY PETERS, PHOTOGRAPHED IN VERMONT BY ERIC CHAKEEN, WEARS VALENTINO PINK PP FALL/WINTER 22-23 COLLECTION

RION AMILCAR SCOTT

Rion Amilcar Scott is the author of the story collections The World Doesn’t Require You and Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Jeanette Winterson CBE is a British writer. After graduating from Oxford University, she published her first novel at 25. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is based on her own upbringing but using herself as a fictional character. She scripted the novel into a BAFTA-winning BBC drama. Twenty-seven years later she re-visited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. She has written 13 novels for adults, two collections of short stories, as well as children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays. 12 Bytes is her latest book.

Grace Difford is a fashion and portrait photographer based in London. Having studied at Central Saint Martins, she went on to work for Purple magazine under Olivier Zahm, and at Interview in New York. After a protracted period away working in the music industry, Grace then returned to London, where she assisted some of London’s most prestigious photographers. This formative time culminated in her position as studio manager and first assistant for Charlotte Wales. Exposed to the eccentricities of a musical upbringing, it became second nature for Grace to document the transient and robust lives in orbit around her. Her work imbues the everyday with performative, cinematic flourish.

STEVEN PINKER

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won prizes for his research, his teaching, and his books, including The Language Instinct ,  How the Mind Works ,  The Blank Slate ,  The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” He was Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and writes frequently for the New York Times, the Guardian, and other publications.

His twelfth book is called Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

GRACE DIFFORD

Keeping Iceland warm since 1926

WILL SHARPE

Will Sharpe is a multi-BAFTA nominated and BAFTA Award-winning English Japanese writer, director, and actor. Set to star in the latest season of HBO/Sky’s The White Lotus, Sharpe’s critically acclaimed writing and directing for both the big and small screen includes Landscapers, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and Flowers. The latter – a black comedy on Channel 4 tackling mental health – earned him a nomination for a Best Scripted Comedy BAFTA, while Sharpe’s role in the BBC thriller Giri/Haji won him a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor.

MICHAEL CERA

Michael Cera has appeared in the FOX series Arrested Development, and in feature films Superbad, Juno, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Youth in Revolt, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Crystal Fairy and the Magical Cactus, This is the End, and Molly's Game. Cera made his Broadway debut in Kenneth Lonergan’s  This is Our Youth, and also starred in Lonergan’s Lobby Hero, for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Play. He recently completed the Lonergan trilogy on Broadway with a starring role in The Waverly Gallery opposite Elaine May, Lucas Hedges and Joan Allen. Cera can be seen starring alongside Amy Schumer in the critically acclaimed series Life & Beth on Hulu. Currently, Cera is filming Greta Gerwig’s Barbie opposite Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

OLYA OLEINIC

Olya Oleinic is a visual artist whose work is mainly based in photography. Her photographs share a vision unbound by the conventions of an expected aesthetic. Each body of work is rooted in research, each choice considered to suit its character, then tied together with the tailored, always evolving sense of visual direction. Oleinic's images speak through their confident subtlety, the sensitivity of a personal relationship to her subjects, and reflect an embrace of daily observations amidst the climate of complex and ever-shifting social and cultural matters. The themes within Oleinic's work, as well as the means and choices of her practice are based on the ambition of developing a strong community, one with a sustainable progression and a healthy climate within. Born and raised in Republic of Moldova, she currently lives and works in Paris.

ORHAN PAMUK

Orhan Pamuk is the author of 11 novels, the memoir Istanbul, and three works of nonfiction, and is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised Pamuk, ‘who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures.’ One of Europe’s most prominent novelists, his work has been translated into over 60 languages. His latest novel, Nights of Plague, was recently published by Faber.

01

WHEN HARRY MET ALESSANDRO

By Dylan Holden. Harry Styles creates a dream wardrobe with Gucci

Alessandro Michele had just become Gucci’s creative director when Harry Styles asked to meet him. Ready to dismiss the plucky pop star who had just started his solo career, all Michele’s reticence disappeared when Styles rocked up in a “fabulous” fake fur coat. They hit it off immediately, and in the subsequent years their friendship has blossomed through creative exchange, the musician-turned-actor now celebrated as a Gucci guiding star.

If you were to review the pair’s WhatsApp messages, you would see a tableau of shared references to chic 1970s menswear, iconic fits, and all things vintage. You may also notice that their sign off is always the same: “hahaha”. Their first official collaboration together neatly references this neological expression that is both pure joy and a clever combination of their forename initials –

Gucci HA HA HA. Born from Michele’s proposal to create a “dream wardrobe” with Styles, the collection draws on the deluge of snippets and “small oddities” they often send one another. Nevertheless, despite the clear fun they had playing together in the creative sand pit of ’70s pop and bohemian silhouettes, it’s a seriously smart collection.

Mischievously nodding to significant formal devel opments in menswear, velvet suits with peaked lapels sit alongside the unexpected – printed pyjamas, bowl ing shirts, and pleated kilts. Traditional English tailoring has more than a dash of dandyism thrown in. Prince of Wales patterned double-breasted coats and tweed blaz ers are eccentrically accessorised with houndstooth caps, bow ties and neck scarves, whilst whimsically bold prints of cherries, grumpy bears, lambs, and now something of a recurring motif between the two – a big red heart – are found printed or appliquéd on everything from suits to a striking pair of two-tone Chelsea boots. This flamboyant and flared sea of checks, daisy-yellow, plum and chocolate-brown never feels costume-like due to the artisanal processes glimpsed; the delicate construction of a patchwork leather jacket, the hand-knitted sweater vests, or the mother-of-pearl button detailing on shirts.

“Harry has an incredible sense of fashion,” says Michele. “Observing his ability to combine items of cloth ing in a way that is out of the ordinary compared to the required standards of taste and common sense and the homogenisation of appearance, I came to understand that the styling of a look is a generator of differences and of powers, as are his reactions to the designs I have cre ated for him, which he has always made his own; these reactions restore me with a rush of freedom every time.”

Set to be released in October, the 25-look collection was officially presented within Cavalli e Nastri, one of the oldest vintage stores in Milan. There is something rather amusing about the fact Michele had to double check the capsule’s labels on the shop’s storied rails, momentar ily unsure where the retro collection began and ended.

Styling Karlmond Tang

Model Harry Westcott at Select

Grooming Charlie Cullen

Casting Marqee Miller

Photography assistant Eduardo Guida

OWL FARM

By Chloe Sells. A window into Hunter S. Thompson’s home

I grew up in Woody Creek, Colorado, where Hunter’s house was. My mother had owned a restaurant for dec ades that everybody went in and out of, so I knew the cast of local characters well. One evening, at the after party of the documentary Breakfast with Hunter, I bumped into his wife. Anita looked me up and down and asked, “Are you a night owl?” Yes, absolutely. “Would you like to be Hunter’s personal assistant?” I said of course.

Hunter’s home – Owl Farm – was his lair of creativ ity, his nest of security. He had lived there for over 40 years. It was an old rambling cabin set back in a beau tiful part of the Aspen valley, receiving 300 days of sun. All that nature unfolding in your backyard calms the spirit. For somebody like Hunter, who was completely frenetic, coming back to those mountains centered him. You could go outside in the snow and the whole world would light up inside of you with one breath of fresh air. He once wrote that, “It was a very important psychic anchor to me, a crucial grounding point where I always knew I had love, friends and good neighbors. It was like my personal lighthouse that I could see from anywhere in the world – no matter where I was, or how weird and crazy I got, everything would be okay if I could just make it home. When I made that hairpin turn up the hill onto Woody Creek Road, I knew I was safe.”

Inside, the walls crawled with scrawls of writing, quotes and notes on every spare inch, while small holes from ricocheting bullets penetrated the wood pane ling. At Owl Farm you were surrounded by language. His wild and outsized lifestyle would’ve been impossi ble any place else; he needed the space to run around shooting guns, host celebrity friends, and essentially to do whatever he wanted. His best friend was the sher iff, so in some ways, he was the law. He also knew my bohemian family was as weird as he was, so he trusted me, completely. I was at home there.

I would clock out from my day job at 11pm and go work for Hunter (he was nocturnal) doing everything and anything that needed doing until sunrise, then I would get some sleep, hike, work on my photography, day job, repeat. Knowing that I was a young artist trying to make it in the world, one day he teased me that Taschen was making a book of his photographs, and wasn’t it funny that I thought I was a photographer? Cue mocking laugh ter. He immediately felt bad – because really, he was a gentleman – and told me that the only thing in his life that hadn’t been photographed was his home. “Have at it,” he said, “it’s yours.”

The reason this project has seen the light of day is a combination of events, but mostly from being completely overwhelmed six years ago when my husband died and I was pregnant. Amidst everything I still wanted to keep my artistic practice going, as I had worked so hard for it to be viable. I dusted off my Owl Farm negatives from all those years ago, thinking that it would be a quick and easy project to make a book, but I found I was reluctant to put them out in the world. They felt private, and I didn’t want to be reduced to ‘the photographer who was Hunter S. Thompson’s PA’. They were also not enough on their own, they didn’t have any life to them. I took a course in Italian marbling and fell down a rabbit hole, later experimenting with the Japanese technique of sum inagashi, which is more psychedelic. Suddenly, I had found a language that allowed a conversation between the two different types of interior and exterior images. After the marbling, the work popped and made sense, the images had an energy to them.

The photograph of the mountains I’ve shared on the next page is very personal to me. Set within the image is an old ghost town called Ashcroft, formerly home to a silver mine, now deserted. As a kid I would visit its old saloon and late-19th-century buildings. I took that

photograph in the middle of high summer, and if you look closely, the colours in the marbled over-painting pick up all the wildflowers that have spread across the field. It’s a beautiful moment in time at a power ful place in the valley.

I don’t remember the moment when I took the image of Hunter’s desk. I was lucky though, because you have everything there, the cigarette, his iconic holder, and primary tool for writing: his hands. This was not long before he died, and you can see the arthritis creep ing into his fingers. He sat in front of his typewriter every day but was not particularly prolific; there was always an outstanding paper due, a half-finished book, always behind, forever late. It was messy when I was there, and his publishers often pulled their hair out because they couldn’t get him to perform. But here, in this intimate shot (I would have had to stand over him for this angle) you can see his intensity, joy and commitment to writing.

Hunter never got to see my photographs, but I like to think he would have said “hot damn!” which is what he would often declare when revisiting his favourite work, or when someone read it back to him. He has a whole world of lore around him; reams and reams of stories have been published since his death. How ever, I feel this is a real and true slice of his life, and that is ultimately why I pulled it out of the closet. I fig ured Hunter had gifted me this assignment because he was such a narcissist. Ironically, given his suicide, he wanted to live forever. I feel I’ve contributed to that desire.

As told to Tom Bolger

Hot Damn! by Chloe Sells is published by GOST books, out now

LEAVE ROOM FOR PUDDING

By Billie Muraben. Practicing ecology with Cooking Sections

Muhallebici – pudding shops named after an Ottoman speciality of shredded chicken thickened with rice water, sprinkled in sugar and rose water – serve profiteroles, baklava, sütlaç (rice pudding, with a burnt top), and kay mak (a rolled, sour, clotted cream) throughout Istanbul. They are traditionally made with buffalo milk, which has a consistency more akin to cream than cow’s milk, making for full flavour, rich puddings. The use of buf falo milk in Turkey has declined due to the complex ity and cost of keeping water buffalo, as their habitat is compromised by urban development. As part of their research for ‘Climavore: Seasons Made to Drift’ – an exhibition and public programme that considered how to eat as humans change the climate, shown at Istan bul art institution SALT – spatial practitioners Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe) looked into the disappearance of the wetlands in the north of Istanbul, which had been home to water buf falo since they migrated with Bulgarian herders during the Ottoman period. “We wondered: What could be an interesting move to protect the wetlands as free roam ing space for buffalo? And for the herders, who have been taking care of them for centuries.”

The wetlands were formed among the ruins of aban doned coal mines, in flooded pits that became wallows for water buffalo to rest while roaming the landscape. Now the land has been reclassified for real estate, and the wetlands drained. “There has been a cultural shift in the perception and understanding of how traditional dishes like sütlaç or kaymak are made, and how they need the free roaming of buffalo for the production of milk, and for the ecosystem to function.” Cooking Sections met with buffalo herders, and dug a new wallow along a stream, turning the extracted clay into pots for sütlaç and yoghurt. They collaborated with muhallebici, serving buffalo milk dishes (in some cases from the 1,000 pots made with ceramicist Başak Gökalsın), introduced buf

falo milk to the curriculum at the Culinary Arts Acad emy, and produced a new edition of mapping project Between Two Seas, charting the network of buffalo wal lows. “We were looking into different, or new possible seasons that are emerging in the Anthropocene,” says Cooking Sections. “Over the last few years, we have been working on what it would mean if instead of the four seasons in Europe, we identified new seasons in action; periods of drought, periods of flash floods, or alterations to the sea shore, which are non-sequential yet repetitive and underpin contemporary food infra structure and eating habits.”

For this year’s Istanbul Biennial, Cooking Sections elaborated on their research in Wallowland, a project that seeks to preserve the wetlands, and highlight the cul tural and ecological role of water buffalo. “It manifested in two ways, as a series of metabolic surveys, for which we commissioned experts to help us understand the digestive or metabolic relationships between buffalo, and other ecologies – the birds interacting with buf falo on the wetlands, the struggles and dependencies within the context of drought, the grasses, and songs about buffalo written in Turkish, Kurdish, and Bulgar ian. These studies will manifest as an installation in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, and as a manda festivali (buf falo festival) – the first edition of what will be an annual event – which took place in the outskirts of the city, cel ebrating these interactions.” Visitors enjoyed perfor mances, cooking demonstrations, research presenta tions, and an ‘open house’ led by the herders, “almost like a field work day”.

Cooking Sections are known for their ability to com municate the complex narratives and systems that organ ise the world through familiar settings involving food. Their first collaboration, with Forensic Architecture, Modelling Kivalina, The Coming Storm, took place above the Arctic Circle on the northwest coast of Alaska and

Daniel Fernández Pascual ( R) and Alon Schwabe (L). Photography Rachel Gordon

sought to support the people of Kivalina, an Iñupiaq village on the frontier of the climate emergency. “Their food practices organised a lot of the yearly cycles. As the climate changes, it postpones the formation of sea ice, and exposes the shore to storms, changes the terrain, and impacts the seasons.” Cooking Sections interviewed village residents, scientists, and political representatives, making a film and a series of models, seeking to pro duce a new negotiation platform supporting residents in their fight for oil and gas companies to contribute to their forced relocation costs, as the area became inhabit able. “Food becomes a lens that allows you to chart these places in transformation” says Cooking Sections. “It is also a practice that touches every living being of this planet. Food cuts across so many constructed strata of society, and between species. It becomes very effective.”

As their practice progresses, Cooking Sections have maintained their interest in the overlaps between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. This focus has for malised in their ongoing, site-responsive project CLIMA VORE, which has manifested as an exhibition in Istan bul; an installation and performance – of a dining table at low tide, and an oyster table at high tide – exploring the environmental impact of aquaculture on the inter tidal zone at Bayfield on the Isle of Skye; a series of dishes served at museum restaurants across the UK, made with ingredients that improve soil and water quality, and cul tivate marine habitats; a series of interventions and per formances delving into a holistic health model for the human body, the bodies of mussels, and the body of the city of Los Angeles; and a “salmon trilogy”, explor ing the gap between the appearance and the reality of salmon, and their inability to escape intensive farming.

Multi-year investigations have proved integral to Cooking Sections’ intention of practicing ecology, rather than discussing it for one project. “We have been on a big journey in the cultural sector, and there is a certain expectation to respond to the climate crisis. Raising awareness is important, but for us the growing ques tion has been, ‘what does it mean to practice ecology?’

Not only for the duration of an exhibition, a biennial, or other inherited formats, which are in many ways counter intuitive to and ill-equipped for addressing these ques tions”, they note. “We are focused on how we can use the infrastructure available for us to develop ecological

projects in a rooted way. That requires us to continue asking the same question, in order to go beyond the level of highlighting harmful or violent practices, and transform them, or develop alternatives to them. It is a process that takes a lot of time.”

While they tackle complex, intersecting issues, across a breadth of contexts and practices, Cooking Sections settle their work in familiar settings – a festival, a dining table, a shop – with a light touch that makes multi-sca lar investigations accessible and enjoyable to interact with. “The way we work is we start looking into ques tions that we find relevant or, at least for us, urgent to address, and from there we start having conversations with people. As questions emerge, we think about how to communicate those messages to other people, or reformat them into a platform.” For Wallowland, along side the studies and festival, Cooking Sections worked with muhallebici, serving buffalo milk sütlaç and kaymak: “We thought the format of the pudding shop was inter esting, because it interacts with the street, and is in people’s imagination.” During their research, Cooking Sections found that only a few of Istanbul’s muhallebici still source buffalo milk from small-scale producers in the local area, and they wanted to convey the impor tance of local pudding shops supporting the ecology of the wetlands.

There is a long tradition of supportive ecology in Istan bul, with Ottoman bird pavilions – grand mosques and palaces in miniature – built high on the walls across the city; cat houses – made from wood or cardboard boxes – in parks or settled along alleyways; and bostan (com munal urban allotments) for growing and sharing food, and maintaining soil for microbes, insects, and birds. Building and maintaining habitats for other species is thought to bring luck; the practice is also grounded in a belief in the importance of treating animals well, as we can’t ask for their forgiveness. The muhallebici sup port the herders, the water buffalo, the wetlands, the birds who gather there, the people savouring rice pud ding and clotted cream in the afternoon heat, and the stray cats curling themselves around chair legs, purr ing until a prize spoonful is dolloped onto the floor.

Caring for other species, and practicing ecology, is nothing new: “It has been common sense for centu ries. It is just within cities that it has been forgotten.”

EVERYTHING IS WRONG, EVERYTHING IS RIGHT

By Elizabeth Fullerton. Exploring the possibilities of colour and geometry with legendary artist Frank Bowling

It’s not often one meets a modern master; Frank Bowl ing, at 88, undoubtedly is one. In the course of his multifaceted six-decade career straddling Britain and America, the British, Guyana-born painter has moved between figuration, Pop and Abstract Expressionism to create a painting style that is uniquely his own. Watching him at work in his South London studio, chemistry, cooking and magic come into play. Years of experimentation have given him the assurance to use unorthodox ingredients such as Fairy Liquid – it breaks up the surface tension – or Vim, which soaks up the water and liquid paint that typically drench his canvases, leaving a cratered, encrusted effect. A favour ite is ammonia for the way it eats into the canvas and turns gold powder paint indigo. “I can’t pre-read or predict what’s going to happen next. It’s always sur prising,” Bowling says. Only in the last decade has Bowling’s boundary-stretching inventiveness been fully recognised. A major show in 2017 at Haus der Kunst in Munich, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor, marked a turning point and triggered a flurry of acco lades, culminating in a long overdue retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019 and a knighthood from the Queen. Now the exhibitions are coming thick and fast: the second half of this year alone sees two that home in on under-explored areas of his career. ‘Frank Bowling and Sculpture’ at The Stephen Lawrence Gallery in London is the first to consider the connections between his sculptures and his sculptural paintings, and ‘Frank Bowling’s Americas’, opening this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), is the first major survey of the artist’s work by an American institution in more than 40 years and focuses on the crucial period between 1966 and 1975 when the artist lived in New York. Bowl ing left England after feeling pigeonholed in a race box he never wanted to be defined by, despite gradu

Frank Bowling. Photography Sacha

ating from the Royal College of Art with flying colours, being awarded the silver medal to David Hockney’s gold. Guyana has always been a touchstone in his paintings, but Bowling resists lazy identarian readings. What trou bles him even now, he says, is that “because I wasn’t born in England, people make a case for me expressing this painting with a Caribbean eye. Well, I’m still wait ing to see this Caribbean eye.” In America he found his voice, taking inspiration from the “daring of the Abstract Expressionists”. New York was buzzing with artists argu ing about art in bars and on the streets. “You could feel it,” says Bowling. “You somehow bounced the energy from that experience, if you were lucky, straight down on the canvas, say going for a walk down Broadway.” In New York, Bowling became friends with the influential critic Clement Greenberg, who encouraged his focus on formal concerns. Even now he sometimes hears the Abstract Expressionist champion in the night. What does he say? “You nearly had it if you hadn’t fucked it up. You put that blue in the corner over there,” Bowling jokes. Soon after Bowling’s arrival in New York, he had a revelation. While pouring paint on the floor, he fol lowed the light coming through the window and “the paint flowed into a kind of map of South America.” He called his friend, the artist Larry Rivers, who suggested he should use an epidiascope to trace the map outlines more accurately. The discovery propelled Bowling on the path towards abstraction, fusing stencilled maps with spectacular colour field washes and dapples of light and shadow in his acclaimed Map Paintings. Bowling rev elled in the limitless possibilities of abstraction, its refusal to be pinned down by reductive interpretations.

Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, Black Power leaders were calling for African American artists to make work that represented the Black experience. Bowling played an important role in the debate, con tributing magazine articles defending Black artists’ right to engage with any form of artistic expression, and curated a show of abstractionists including Jack Whit ten and Melvin Edwards at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. In the early 1970s Bowling moved into a new phase, using a tilting apparatus to create what he called “controlled accidents” that discharged paint onto the canvas in multiple directions and at dif ferent speeds in his Poured Paintings series. For the Lon don show ‘Frank Bowling and Sculpture’, the curator Sam Cornish brought together a small group of Bowl ing’s unpainted steel sculptures made in the late 1980s and early 1990s alongside canvases from the 1970s to the present to demonstrate the sculptural thinking behind the artist’s painting. “There definitely is a dia logue there,” Bowling tells me. “It’s obvious that sculp ture is principally concerned with form, structure and geometry. But so is painting!” He points to Dutch paint ers he’s looked at, from the 17th-century master Pieter de Hooch to Mondrian: “Those artists used structures in their work that helped me to get to a position where I understood much more clearly what I was trying to do.” While Bowling’s magnificent sculptural reliefs from the 1980s containing everyday detritus from children’s toys to shells are renowned, few people even know of his forays into sculpture. His first was in New York in the early 1970s, a rickety stack of wooden crates. “Don ald Judd lived just around the corner from my loft on

Broadway,” he explains. “His famous minimalist boxes displayed a simplicity and regularity of form that I found engaging, but I wanted to take the idea somewhere else.” (One of his sculptures – resembling a frame for a table stand surrounded by a cube – has the tongue-in-cheek title ‘What Else Can You Put in a Judd Box’.) Back in the UK from 1975, Bowling struggled to get shows despite success in America, where he had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet these long years in the wilderness gave him valuable opportunity for cre ative risk-taking. At that time he was employing pack ing materials and acrylic foam combined with gel, shells and thick paint to build up the surfaces in monumen tal, seething landscapes such as his Great Thames paint ings, which evoke the majesty of JMW Turner and radi ance of Monet. “I’m moved to chuck in anything that’s to hand in the studio,” he says. “I never throw anything away: it adds to the material drama of the painting.” Plastic bags, a visitor’s dress, even his wife’s car keys have all found their way into his canvases at different times. In 1988, he was offered a show at Castlefield Gal lery in Manchester and asked what sculptor he would like to exhibit with. Bowling suggested making some sculptures himself. He scavenged scrap metal from an engineering firm next to his studio and got help with welding. “Doing sculpture and painting at the same time seemed like an interesting way to work out some geomet ric ideas in two and three dimensions. In both the paint ings and the sculptures, it’s about geometry, the way that squares and circles and triangles interact to create stability in form,” he says. Many of Bowling’s sculptures from that period have disappeared or returned to scrap. One, ‘The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat’ after

the neurologist Oliver Sacks’ famous book, sat in Bowl ing’s living room for years, accumulating miscellanea such as a pith helmet and a pair of green woolly socks. He talks of the sculptures as “a bit of fun”, a way of exploring three-dimensional form. “You should have fun with your work,” he insists. “All this business about angst as the only area out of which art can come doesn’t sit well with me.” These are words Bowling lives by. In his studio lined with abstract canvases exploding with colour and myriad pots of paint, brushes and assorted tools, I witnessed the artist bring a painting to life, all the while enjoying himself immensely. Wearing his cus tomary attire of fedora, jacket and cane, Bowling directed family members from his wheelchair with the precision of an orchestra conductor – his health being too poor for the physical labour of his brand of action painting. “Put gel on the edges. No, no, no, you’ve gone putting it on the flat,” he admonishes his son Ben, as he points his green laser pen to a spot on the surface of a vast hal lucinatory canvas thinly stained with rivulets of blue over a layer of red streaks. “Pull the spatula across, you’ve got that right. It’s the imprint of what was left behind that I want,” he says, spraying jets of water from a bot tle. Another canvas was pinned below to catch drips and runs that would mark the start of the subsequent paint ing. Reactions between the materials happen fast and Bowling has to be ready to respond to the unforeseen. Do things ever go wrong? “Everything is wrong, everything is right,” he says. “It depends entirely on the kind of confidence you bring to the work.”

‘Frank Bowling’s Americas’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston runs October 22, 2022–April 9, 2023

EXILE ON ST. JAMES’S PLACE

By Aleks Cvetkovic. An intimate visit to Tom Arena’s tailoring atelier

What kind of image do the words ‘bespoke tailor’ bring to mind? In London at least, traditional tailoring con jures up a little old man in a fusty suit, shuffling about a mahogany-lined workshop with a tape measure around his shoulders and a prickly ‘suits you, Sir’ attitude.

To 45-year-old self-employed tailor, Tom Arena, who’s been cutting and making suits by hand since he was 18, tailoring means something quite different. Pay a visit to his atelier in a quiet corner of London’s St James’s, and you’ll be greeted with rails of sweeping, floor-length suede coats, sharp looking suits in emerald green and burgundy, and a wall above his cutting table plastered with vintage photographs of everyone from Charlotte Rampling to Serge Gainsbourg. It’s an antithetical expe rience for most of Arena’s customers, who are used to having suits made at Savile Row’s oldest and most tra ditional tailors – and that’s the point.

“I want to give clients a relaxed, enjoyable experience,” he says, as we sit together in the front room of his stu dio. “The atmosphere in tailors’ shops can sometimes be quite stuffy. That’s not what I’m about.”

Not that Arena hasn’t done his time working in the hallowed halls of ‘the Row’. He got into tailoring by chance, when he responded to a newspaper advert for a position at Huntsman, one of Savile Row’s most famous (and expensive) bespoke tailors, just as he was gearing up to leave school. “I was just looking at the Evening Standard, clocked an advert for an apprentice cutter and I’d always loved clothes. I thought ‘this could be inter esting’ and I went for it.”

Arena got the job, and as a working-class boy from southeast London who was into “football and indie music,” it was a shock to the system. “It was completely alien to

me, that kind of atmosphere,” Arena says. “Back then, it wasn’t like a tailor’s shop is now. You weren’t allowed to talk – it was totally silent. All you could hear was the clock ticking. You could only address the customers as ‘Sir’, and only when they spoke to you.”

At Huntsman, Arena learned how to measure custom ers, draft their unique paper patterns and cut suits from their chosen fabrics under Brian Hall, one of the legends of the trade. In the 1970s, he and another renowned tai lor, Colin Hammick, were at the very peak of their pro fession, and between them they’d forged an interna tional reputation for quality.

While Huntsman was far from Arena’s dream place to work, starting on Savile Row accelerated his learn ing and taught him to cut a suit using ‘The Thornton System’, the pattern-making methodology that he still uses today. It also gave him his first taste of dealing with VIP clients; Gregory Peck and Gianni Agnelli were both Huntsman customers at the time. “I look back and laugh at some of it. But a lot of it you do remember – the eti quette and lessons like that. It was a great grounding,” Arena says, with a nostalgic grin.

In need of a change, after five years Arena was head hunted to be the new cutter for Paul Smith’s bespoke tai loring service, which was based out of Smith’s legend ary Westbourne House store in Notting Hill. It’s those 18 years at Paul Smith, he says, that turned him into the tailor he is today. “It was far more creative there, and I had much more freedom. Paul [Smith] didn’t get involved too much and just left us to it. They were fun times.”

Cutting at Paul Smith introduced Arena to a differ ent kind of clientele, whom he found more relatable –  “younger guys and creatives in their 20s, 30s and 40s”

– and it also helped him to build out his celebrity client list. He cut suits for Paul Weller, Chris Hemsworth and Liam Neeson, and remembers Gary Oldman and Dan iel Day-Lewis with particular fondness.

“I made the evening suit for Day-Lewis when he won both the BAFTA and the Academy Award for There Will Be Blood. I also made the evening suit for Gary Oldman’s BAFTA and Academy Award nominations for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Then, I was lucky enough to make the suit for his BAFTA win for Darkest Hour. All those projects were extremely special to me. Both are from the same part of London as me and people I admired greatly.” DayLewis even spent a week working alongside Arena in his cutting room, before stepping into the role of cou turier Reynolds Woodcock in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread

This expertise in celebrity dressing has stood Arena in good stead to do his own thing. He decided to establish himself as Atelier Arena in September 2021, and found his St James’s studio. “I felt like I was the right age, and I wanted the freedom to create the kind of clothes that mirrored me and my own personality,” he explains.

So, what can you expect if you pay him a visit? Quite apart from a warm welcome and some beautiful mid-cen tury furniture, music is a huge passion for Arena, and the stereo is always on. “The ’60s and ’70s are always a source of inspiration. The music and the attitude of the Stones, The Seeds, Bowie and Scott Walker are very important to me too, as well as bands like The Smiths, Joy Division and Wire, which were a big part of my life growing up.”

This perspective feeds into Arena’s creations, which range from handsome grey flannel suits to rock-star-wor thy black-and-gold check jackets cut in vintage cloth.

His preferred approach to cutting, as well as his pas sion for hunting out unusual fabrics, sets him apart. “I learned to cut The Thornton System as an apprentice. It was first published in 1885, and it derives from the old English hacking coat,” Arena says. “It’s all about cut ting a jacket with long, clean lines, high armholes and an accentuated waist.”

These principles make for simple, svelte jackets and trousers, but Arena’s deft use of colour and cloth ensures that his clothes stand out. “I like clients to think ‘wow, where did you get that [fabric] from?’” he explains. “It’s about choosing something that’s not garish and not ostentatious, but just a little bit different.” Beyond suit ing, Arena also makes casual suede overcoats, bombers and blousons, and his studio is filled with chic pieces in tobacco and aubergine.

“I always wanted to introduce something else,” Arena says, thumbing an off-cut of suede. “I love suiting and blazers, but there’s only so much you can do with them, whereas you can have a lot of fun with a suede trench or leather bomber.” Clearly, his clientele agrees. He’s only been in business for a year, but already he’s dressed Jack Lowden, Stephen Graham and Gary Oldman. He’s achieved a lot in a short space of time, which begs the question, where does he plan to take Atelier Arena?

“I want to be known for beautifully made clothes,” he says, as our conversation draws to a close. “It’s all about doing interesting things for me – collaborating with peo ple that I admire, whether that’s artists, actors or musi cians. I want my clients to feel elegant, and sometimes to help broaden their horizons a bit. Tailoring should be about creativity. As Georgia O’Keeffe said: ‘I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things that I had no words for.’”

AN UP-HILL CYCLE

By Ethan Price. The next generation of sustainable fashion designers

Sillage: it’s a word used in perfumery to describe what is left behind when you walk by. The impact – it’s what keeps people talking when you leave the room. In fash ion, making an impression is everything. A good out fit should “change the way you walk; change the way you see yourself in car windows”, Central Saint Mar tins graduate Alec Bizby tells me. The main task of a fashion designer is to provide the wearer with impact –glamour, sexiness, absurdity – but this is rarely condu cive to having a lack of impact on the planet. Fashion is silly, whilst sustainability is serious (rightly so, on both accounts). The pairing is often uncomfortable, like sit ting on a bar stool while wearing a very short skirt. But designers Marie Lueder, Rina Hayashi and Alec Bizby manage to resolve this conflict.

With a desire for the “highest amount of creativity with the lowest amount of environmental impact”, Biz by’s entire MA collection cost no more than £100, made entirely from “thrifted curtains, curtain linings and bed sheets”. The used fabric came with its own personal ity – “stains, rips, wear and tear all add to the beauty of

the final garments” – and what emerged was a process that instead of hindering Bizby’s creativity, enhanced it. “Thrifting material means you have to make changes to your plans… It keeps the designs fluid until the final stitch.” Bizby draws inspiration from historical peasant clothing and farmers’ workwear, folk dancing costumes and Welsh ladies’ hats. All pieces are one-of-a-kind, with Bizby having no intention of creating duplicates. “My final goal is to have a tiny brand that makes oneoff pieces for people, which can then be turned into something else afterwards.” He believes this approach is the way to a sustainable future for fashion, but noth ing will change unless large corporations begin to make proper steps towards sustainable practices. “They have to be dedicated to sustainability root and branch, small changes within these huge companies are not enough to make a difference. Capitalism and profit will turn this planet to ashes.”

Also abandoning mass production and focusing on traditional Japanese craftsmanship, Rina Hayashi’s Cen tral Saint Martins’ BA collection inhabits a space between

Jacket MARIE LUEDER Trousers MARIE LUEDER Top RINA HAYASHI Ear cuff KKRREEIISS x MARIE LUEDER Bag RINA HAYASHI Shoes DR MARTENS

clothing and the unexpected sculptural forms that appear in everyday objects. During a road trip across her native Japan, Hayashi became “fascinated by tra ditional crafts rooted in each area”. The resulting gar ments feature dead-stock and second-hand materials from both Japan and the UK (rice paper, sasawashi paper and bamboo for garment construction, alongside Brit ish hand-spun merino wool and viscose) and a focus on techniques that are rapidly being forgotten. “For my sakabukuro chaps, I up-cycled 50–60-year-old Japanese seamless bags which are used for making sake”, she tells me. Hayashi sourced the bags from her grandfa ther’s family, and dyed them using kakishibu, a tradi tional persimmon tannin varnish which continues to darken over time when exposed to sunlight, highlight ing the beauty within the ageing process, and Hayas hi’s love for the old and used. Garments are already ‘fixed’ before being broken or aged – “I use the ikkanbari technique on my sculptural pieces which is a tra ditional way to fix bamboo baskets, like darning on the basket with rice paper.” For Hayashi, sustaina ble practice is linked with taking care of what already exists and the ability to repair and remake from used materials – she loves knitwear for its inherent flexibil ity (it can be deconstructed, re-knitted, and “reborn as new”). Hayashi’s grandmother was a freelance knitter, encouraging and pushing Hayashi with her BA collec tion when the designer wanted to give up, but it was their talks that Hayashi valued the most – ultimately, they were “just girls who love knitting”.

“As I grew up in the countryside,” notes Marie Lueder, “I feel very connected to nature and mother earth in a spiritual way and think about the loss of the connec tion between Gaia and us humans.” Lueder considers the environment throughout every level of her design process – using CLO 3D instead of paper or calico in order to prototype, up-cycling and using dead-stock –while also balancing the emotional and physical desires of her customers. The outcome of a practice that cen tres “passion rather than survival, asking rather than knowing”, Lueder’s clothes are intended as physical creations that provide the wearer with the “mental armour for their survival – for every day and our future.”

Lueder began up-cycling during the first lockdown of 2020, taking models’ unwanted garments and creat ing fresh, one-off pieces. Lueder describes the restric tion of up-cycling as a thrill: “You had just one chance to make the garments rather than working from scratch and making multiple toiles.” Lueder trained as a tailor at Hamburg State Opera, before studying at the RCA and going on to an accelerator programme for sus tainable leadership at Cambridge University in 2021. Lueder believes up-cycling can be the way forward for the industry – “using what is already there but still feeding into that desire to buy something new.” I men tion sillage, already knowing that Lueder created a per fume with Paul Guerlain and IFF; what impact does she want her garments to have? “I want the people to gather, to be able to rethink and regenerate (gender, bodies...) if they feel scared and depressed about the future. A super-positive and excited outlook into their future… that’s what I want them to feel.”

Hairstyling Tommy Taylor

Make up Iga Wasylczuk

Models Harry at Head Office MGMT, KC at Head Office MGMT, Medea at TIDE Agency

CALIFORNIA COUTURE

By Hannah Williams. Paris meets LA in Dior and ERL’s SS23 collaboration

It is a Thursday evening in Venice Beach when the Dior x ERL Spring 23 collection is shown, and a nylon wave is rolling, languid and cerulean, down Windward Ave nue, towards the ocean. In the crest of the wave, the audience watches models walk down its parted centre: hot-pink shorts, bare chests, fur saddlebags, logo tube socks pulled far up above untied skate shoes. Suspended above them the Venice sign glitters in the twilight, the words ‘ERL’ and ‘DIOR’ strung underneath.

Emblazoned in green and orange glitter on the fronts of slouchy polo-necks, ‘California Couture’ acts as both a title and mission statement for the collection. It’s Par is-meets-LA, Dior-grey satin suits teamed with crystal brooches and embroidered sweatshirts, quilted jackets slung over pearl-encrusted knits. There’s a playfulness here, a winking irreverence that nevertheless pays sin cere tribute to the history of Dior. This desire to push boundaries is in keeping with Kim Jones’ tenure as artis tic director of Dior Men’s, with previous collections tak ing inspiration from references as eclectic as the Beat poets, Travis Scott and Parisian statues. Jones talks about how, for this collection, he “wanted to work with some one in a different way; I wanted somebody to see Dior from a different angle.”

In this light, a collaboration with Eli Russell Linnetz, creative director of ERL, feels entirely natural. Born and raised amongst the surfers, skaters and starlets of Ven ice Beach, Linnetz’s chameleon-like ability to turn his

hand to anything he desires – assisting David Mamet on Broadway, directing the music videos for Kanye West’s ‘Famous’ and ‘Fade’, designing the set for Lady Gaga’s Enigma tour, or voicing a character in The Emperor’s New Groove – makes him the perfect choice to embody Jones’ vision of a Dior Men’s that fuses old and new, high art and pop culture, street fashion and couture. Linnetz describes how he and Jones began by exploring the 1991 Dior archive, the year of his birth. As he puts it, “this was during Gianfranco Ferré’s period as artistic director and was a part of the history of Dior that felt completely fresh for both Kim and me.” It’s here that the collection’s maximalism originates: “a coming together of chaos and perfectionism. There’s a collision of moments in time and history throughout the collection, of cross-gener ational and spatial meetings in time.”

The result is a synthesis of downtown Venice Beach spontaneity and 8th arrondissement refinery, an all-Amer ican dream of Paris: surf-inspired shorts, lived-in knits and loose, silky fabrics in the colours of a beach sunset – pale pink, dusky blue, and an intense, heart stopping fuchsia. Yet all the facets that make something unmis takably, quintessentially Dior – an unparalleled flair for tailoring, the iconic Cannage motif – are there, ren dered this time in satin and leather quilting, in flowing pastel suits and padded skate shoes. It is, as Jones says, “both familiar and revelatory; reaffirming why we both dreamed about working in fashion in the first place.”

Styling Karlmond Tang Model Feranmi Ajetomobi at Wilhelmina Grooming Charlie Cullen Casting Marqee Miller Photography assistant Eduardo Guida

Photography Gaëtan Bernède

IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

By Dylan Holden. Stefano Canali on modern masculinity and inner beauty

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” Found in one of the American poet’s many essays on art, this line touches on an aphorism that although may sound mawkish to the jaded cynic, rings true. Namely, that inner beauty illuminates the individual from within, leading them to encounter so much more of life. This concept lies at the heart of Canali’s AW22, a modern take on masculinity that celebrates beauty in the broadest sense of the term, both its “intrinsic and extrinsic values.” With this collection, the storied Ital ian house is dressing the gentleman of today; one who is kind, confident and composed, choosing dialogue over monologue. An accompanying campaign titled ‘Through His Eyes’ has selected talent expanding on these values – acting as ambassadors for Canali’s vision – and begins with CEO Stefano Canali. To mark the editorial series, Port spoke to the head of the family-run business about the hidden treasures of Torino and his hopes for the next generation.

How do you think social media, with its proliferation of images, has impacted ideas of beauty, inner or otherwise?

This is a controversial topic. Social media is an extremely powerful medium. The accessibility of information has spread the concept of ‘inner beauty’ by generating greater awareness, activism, and participation on the part of new generations on very important issues that promote inclusivity. However, we cannot deny that it can also create and spread unrealistic aesthetic ideals.

How does AW22 inform and interpret the new phase of modern masculinity we’re in?

The AW22 collection, with its new, more relaxed approach to sartorial sensibility, introduces innovative items into the male wardrobe such as the cuff jacket with knitted details, which combines the softness of knitwear and the cleanness of tailored shapes. Or the new sahariana safari jacket in cashmere – that paired with matching trousers creates one of the many ‘smartorial’ suits. I feel it is this casualness, this deconstruction, that runs through the collection and conveys both softness and character that can be considered the sartorial expres sion of the new masculinity. Where suiting no longer needs to be armour.

What are some non-fashion causes close to your heart?

Anything related to environmental sustainability. My personal curiosity and sensitivity lead me to take an interest in technological innovations involving experi mental alternative energy sources, from deep geother mal to nuclear fusion to recycling plants.

Who are some of the ambassadors for this project?

For our ‘Through His Eyes’ project we have selected those who devote part of their lives to beauty in the broader sense. They describe how in their business or in their personal lives they promote beauty, positivity, kindness, care and respect. These include, among oth ers, Thomas Ermacora, a regeneration architect and tech-for-good entrepreneur focused on urban sustain ability and community resilience. Having worked with key iconoclasts in urban futures such as Frank Gehry, Jan Gehl, and John Norquist, he stands as one of the new strategic leaders helping transition cities towards more socially inclusive and resource intelligent designs – paving the way for increasingly distributed and opensource societies. Giampaolo Grossi is another, the Gen eral Manager of Starbucks Italy and co-founder of ‘Lusso

Gentile’, an editorial project that has “care, respect and love” as its mantra and which aims to inspire – young and old – through the words and works of visionaries who have shown great talent in their professional and personal spheres. Our photographer for the campaign, Oddur Thorisson, is also part of the series. Oddur is best known for his work with Condé Nast Traveler and he lives with his wife, their eight children, and nine dogs in Piemonte, Italy. His life is devoted to beauty in his photographs and to his family, above all.

Has anyone close to you – family or friends – expanded your understanding of inner beauty?

I was fortunate enough to have parents and friends who taught me through daily examples what really counts in life, the real source of happiness: gestures of love, sol idarity and respect that give meaning to our work and relationships with others, far beyond success and finan cial well-being.

Why was Torino chosen as the backdrop for AW22’s campaign?

What better backdrop for a campaign revolving around the concept of inner beauty than Torino, the city of hid den treasures. Only a city like Torino, that manages to hold so many jewels in its bosom and make such a dis creet and gracious gift of them to its citizens every day, can call itself rich. But rich in rare treasures coloured by all the nuances of the human soul: from spiritual ones, like the Holy Shroud, to aesthetic and cultural ones, such as Guarini’s architecture. There are even treasures that delight the senses, the Turin inventions of gianduia and bicerin

What do you think reveals a person’s inner beauty?

I think two things above all others: care and respect. In everything we do. For other people, for the planet. In business and in one’s personal life. There cannot be inner beauty without these.

How has your understanding of masculinity changed over the years?

I believe that masculinity has gradually softened, is less authoritarian and more authoritative in its assertion. Less bound to clichés of the past, of a phantomatic alpha male. More open to considering kindness as a strength, instead of a weakness.

At the moment, ideas around beauty and masculin ity can be warped and weaponised. What gives you hope for the future, and the next generation?

Precisely the next generation is what gives me hope. Our children, despite the countless sources of disturbance, are also in contact with many positive stimuli; from a very young age they are confronted with the whole world, with cultures and disciplines different from their own. And this helps them to develop greater understanding, discernment, and awareness much earlier. This is then reflected in better capacity of taking responsibility when it comes to issues that affect our lives, such as ecology, gender equality, body positivity, minority rights – to name but a few. Obviously, it is up to us to ensure that our young refine their analytical capacities and sensitiv ity, but my hopes are high.

SELLE ROUGE

By Dylan Holden. The latest chapter in Hermès’ illustrious equestrian history

Thierry Hermès’ first customer was a horse. So goes the long-running joke at the eponymous French house, which first began creating harnesses and bridles in 1837. The gifted leather worker’s distinction was twofold; his deft dual needle stitching with waxed linen threads could only be done by hand, and the custom harnesses were as light, exact and respectful to the animal as possible, uncommon at the time. Soon, the family-run work shop was winning first-class accolades at Paris’ exposi tions universelles, as well as fielding the needs of noble men, emperors and tsars. And, while Hermès went on to gift the world with ready-to-wear and accessory icons – the carrés silk scarf, the Birkin, the Kelly – it remains synonymous with equine élan

No item better encapsulates both its storied past and progressive advance than the saddle. For over a century, artisans at 24 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré have per fected the point of osmosis between rider and beast. Today, the bespoke service begins with an expert observ ing the latter’s character, temperament and mobility. To harmonise the pair’s anatomy and morphology, a skel etal measurement tool then records a hundred contact points on the horse’s back. This precise, unique “foot print” will be adjusted and adapted to encourage the most natural movement, alleviating any possible ten sion and trauma. Crafted by a single person, each one takes roughly 30 hours to complete, and like all good design, their engineering is so intuitive they feel inevi table, almost imperceptible. Yet, how striking a Hermès saddle is, none more so the new Selle Rouge

Oiled in the house’s emblematic colour, then anointed with glycerine soap to nourish the sustainably sourced leather, the ‘Red Saddle’ marks the sum of the atelier’s knowledge.

Created for show jumping and working on the flat –informed by numerous discussions with partner rider and Belgian Olympian Jérôme Guéry – the slim fork of its tree is the result of three years of tests, with car bon losing out to the noble material of beech wood for its suppleness and shock absorbency. Illustrating that its inside is equal to its outside, its mastery is revealed through a visible interior assembly.

“Closeness, balance, stability, comfort and safety are constant challenges when designing a saddle,” notes Ly Lallier, equestrian métier director. “Thanks to a series of innovations, the Selle Rouge rises to them all… It has a deep seat, very open to ensure a comfortable position; the skirt is incorporated into the flaps and the blocks are recessed to avoid any superfluous thickness hampering movement. The single seam punctuated by backstitch ing in saddle-stitch, known as ‘fil-au-trait’, also avoids any unnecessary friction and contributes to its techni cal and aesthetic prowess.”

Émile-Maurice, the grandson of Thierry, summa rised the business’ ethos in the 1920s as “leather, sport, and a tradition of refined elegance”. Much has changed since those words were uttered, but thankfully, Hermès hasn’t cantered far.

THE LAST BASTION

By Andrew Edmunds. The late, great proprietor of the eponymous Soho haunt looks back at over 35 years of business

I rather accidentally bought number 46, Lexington Street. My prints and drawings business was next door, and my landlord since 1973 – Sutton Estates – looked after their parcels of London with paternalistic and benevolent neglect. Before moving in I had to be inter viewed by a gentleman resembling a country solici tor, in a short black coat and striped trousers, to see if I was a ‘suitable’ tenant. They owned the half of Soho where there were no sex shops and they were very wor ried about the fact I was also a book dealer. Presuma bly they thought I had a plan to sell rare pornography. I had originally ended up buying 46 as well as 44 because of complicated fire escape routes with the rear build ings. Simply wanting to secure the print shop I ended up with four freeholds – one of the only sensible things that I have ever done.

In 1985, 46 was a bar called The Last of Cheri. It had the Lincrusta wallpaper which survives to this day, but everything was painted bright pink. The predecessor only sold German wine, so, although they had some surpris ingly good Auslese, it too hadn’t been a huge success. One Friday the young woman who owned it said, “if you give me £10,000 for the lease it’s yours.” I exchanged with her on the Monday. She used the money to get a pitch on Berwick Street Market for a fruit and veg stall, but it didn’t last long either. That’s how Andrew Edmunds Res taurant began.

I have plenty of stories about the restaurant but not all of them can be printed. I remember someone’s trousers being eaten by one of the manager’s dogs, regular inci dents of hair going up in flames during the ’80s, and a louche moment when two customers thought they were being discrete when they disappeared into the lavato ries, only to emerge to a full round of applause. A child has been christened Andrew, in homage to a first date here. One member of staff has been with us for 25 years. A particularly sweet memory stands out; one evening our framed William Hogarth etching – a knife and fork flanking a pie, which acts as our logo – was pinched. 20 years later, days after a review in the Guardian, it turned up in a jiffy bag with a Cambridge post mark. It would have been funnier if it was from Oxford, courtesy of some guilty imbecile from the Bullingdon.

We remain one of the last bastions of ‘Old Soho’. For some, the term wistfully calls to mind watching Francis Bacon get extremely drunk at The Colony Room. But for

many, it meant artisans and specialist shops; solid pro duce stalls that supplied the restaurants. The small 18th-century buildings nearby were multiple occupa tion and once filled with outworkers for Bond Street and Savile Row. We had four butchers, a game dealer, and a large fishmonger within walking distance. Tom Scott, the jeweller, is one of the few survivors from that time. The fundamental change over the years, I suppose, has been landlords being motivated by greed, rather than any sense of community.

We’ve kept our decor close to how we found it for two reasons: idleness and economy. It’s so shabby now that high fashion wants to use it for photo shoots; we’ve gone full circle. I’m happy to say there is an extraordi narily wide age range, a new generation who find us romantic, and old farts like me who simply come here because the meals are sensibly priced. A good top and tail. Our offering is modern European and what one would cook at home, pulled from the bottom of the AGA. Whole baked mackerel, calf’s liver, roast fennel and celeriac, ox tongue or heart. Right from the begin ning, we’ve been using animals almost in their entirety –like St. John – without thinking about it as anything par ticularly unusual. We also boycott all Scottish salmon, because the farms are destroying wild spots.

Suppliers have changed over the years. Nothing comes from the market anymore, except for milk from Soho Dairy, who have single handedly saved the Berwick Street Market. We still use Algerian Coffee Stores & Ger ry’s in Old Compton Street, otherwise I am afraid that everything is delivered now rather than walked round.

Our reputation for wine in part comes from the fact we mark almost as though it was a corkage. Unlike other establishments we do not simply times the price by four, because there is nothing sadder than having gorgeous food and only ever being able to buy the third wine on the list. We try to counter increasingly idiotic prices, but I am afraid that the more you spend the cheaper it gets!

I would be spoilt for choice if I were to have a final meal here. Perhaps a summer pudding, and following in the footsteps of Napoleon in exile, a bottle of Klein Constantia.

As told to Tom Bolger. Mr Edmunds sadly passed away shortly after the interview. We will be raising a glass to him in his won derful restaurant

Ingredients

Braised Lamb

1 lamb shoulder

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, peeled and roughly chopped

2 carrots peeled and in 2.5cm chunks

4 sticks of celery in 2.5cm chunks

2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed Rosemary, chopped

300ml chicken stock

300ml red wine

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Buttered Celeriac Medium celeriac 50g butter Oil

Handful of thyme, chopped 5 sliced garlic cloves

Salsa Verde Sauce

Small bunch of chervil

2 small bunches of flat-leaf parsley

1 small bunch of mint

1 small bunch of dill

3 tsp Dijon mustard

40g small capers, drained, rinsed and roughly chopped 200ml extra virgin olive oil

40g chopped cornichons

Heat the olive oil in a tray, season the lamb with salt and pepper and then brown it off. Remove it from the tray with a slotted spoon.

Add more olive oil to the tray and fry the onion to soften, but not brown. Next add the carrots and celery and lightly brown. Then add garlic and rosemary. Put the lamb shoulder back in the tray, pour over the stock and wine and bring to bubbling. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Cover with parchment and foil and cook in the oven for 4 hours at 1500C.

Before the lamb is ready, peel the celeriac and cut it into chunks. Heat half the butter in a deep frying pan and let it brown a little, add the rest of the butter, thyme and garlic, then the celeriac, and fry it, stirring the pieces often until they are golden and tender in the centre, about 20 minutes. Season well.

Chop all the salsa verde herbs, add into oil, with capers, cornichons and mustard. Season to taste.

Plate everything up and finish with a good dollop of salsa verde.

Photography Benjamin McMahon

Braised Lamb with Buttered Celeriac

By Tara Joshi. Mali comes to Texas in Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin’s new collaboration

For years, singer and guitarist Vieux Farka Touré had been wanting to create a project in tribute to his late father, Ali.

Depending on your areas of interest when it comes to music, Ali Farka Touré’s name is one that will either be deeply familiar to you, or perhaps one you’re not aware of at all. For the uninitiated: Touré was a Malian multi-instrumentalist and singer who is largely con sidered to be one of the greatest guitarists of all time; often called “the African John Lee Hooker”; sometimes even “the godfather of the desert blues”, he played with a rich, melismatic sound which would resonate across the globe like wind sweeping over sand dunes.

Vieux had been hoping to approach a band in the West to collaborate with on a record of reinterpretations and help to share the music with a wider audience than ever before. It was Vieux’s manager who suggested he check out psych-tinged Texas trio Khruangbin, who have long been known for their lush channelling of sounds from around the world. Soon after, Vieux caught one of their shows in London and was convinced they were the per fect group for the project. It was a sentiment which was solidified when he met them: “They met the criteria of what Ali himself looked for in collaborators in his life,” Vieux tells me, “Their popularity did not prevent them from being kind, humble and courteous.”

Ali is not your standard album of cover songs. For starters, Vieux did not show the band the music they would be recording before they entered the studio. “I met Vieux for the first time and we just kind of hit the ground running,” explains Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee. “He didn’t want us to know what we were play ing before we played them, because he wanted it to feel raw.” Although Khruangbin had all been inspired by Ali’s work, that was largely irrelevant to the process: Vieux didn’t give them the song titles until they were done, and it transpired some of the tracks were unre leased: “Towards the end we heard the actual songs and were like, ‘whoa!’” Lee laughs, “Because they were very different tempo and feel-wise – but I’m happy we did it the way we did.”

It was an unusual way of working for the band, who admit their own approach tends to be more method ical. As drummer Donald Johnson Jr notes, “Gener ally we tend to go to a recording session prepared and knowing what we’re playing. We typically like to work out our parts and offer something that’s well thoughtout…” But the sense of trust this necessitated between the two parties led to a calm atmosphere in the studio. “[It was] very relaxed and casual, so it was easy for me to work with them,” recounts Vieux.

The lack of possibility for preparation also meant that the band could bring their own sound to the album – which, of course, was the exact ethos of the collabo ration. “Vieux was so open to what he wanted to do,” explains Johnson, “His whole point coming in was that

he wanted to hear what it would be like for us to play these songs, so he was adamant: ‘play what you would play.’” The resulting record is a sumptuous dream, float ing like a beguiling velvet cloud. Vieux’s unwavering lead vocal and lithe guitar is enveloped by Khruangbin’s plush atmospherics: the deft bass, the shuffling percussion, elating choral harmonies that offer something almost liturgical. “The cultural blend was Texas and Mali,” John son continues, “Vieux obviously had Mali covered in his sound. His guitar is such a prominent part of the record, so we wanted to mould ourselves around that and bring our influence. I think it came out really special. It does sound like Mali came to Texas.”

You can also hear other sounds drifting through the album, specifically Vieux’s faint laughter as he gives the band instructions between songs – it captures the fond warmth and mirth that they all seem to have about those recording sessions. “Vieux is a really light-hearted, joy ous person who laughs a lot,” says Johnson, “He was a pleasure to work with.”

In fact, the cultural melding of Texas and Mali did not stop at the music. “He fed us well,” recalls Johnson with a laugh. “He had this fish and rice dish called la capitaine sangha; he would bring that in and warm it up, and then we’d all sit around in the studio kitchen and eat… And usually after that meal he would take a nap, he’s out! He’s very gracious, always willing to share.”

Lee agrees, “He’s just such a happy, contagious energy to be around – buoyant and jubilant, and I think bring ing food is a really special thing, because it was food that we had never had in that particular context, and he was always kind of a pusher of it on us.” She notes that normally in such sessions they would probably just order UberEATS or similar, so it was especially nice hav ing these home-cooked meals. “The capitaine is really important to me!” she says, before recounting their attempt at returning the favour. “On the very last day we took him to a very classic Houston Tex-Mex restau rant, and they bring out chips and salsa – and he didn’t say anything, but I could tell that he was confused that we were serving something very common. But then the fajitas came out,” she guffaws again, “And then he got it! And then… he fell asleep, and that was it.”

Clearly the collaboration was a success. Vieux tells me that Ali’s dear friend Abdoulaye Konaté, a world-famous Malian artist, provided the artwork for the album: and so it is that his spirit emanates the record both outside and in. Listening back, it’s a record about which both Khruangbin and Vieux are deeply proud.

“It was evident to me that music has no border – and that team spirit is very important in a work like this,” says Vieux, “I am so happy with the result… It is unique and interesting, but it holds the spirit of Ali and treats his songs with great respect.”

Ali by Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin is out now

Laura

Donald

ACTING CLASS

By Tom Bolger. Nick Drnaso reflects on his hallucinatory new book

‘Persona’ is derived from the ancient Greek for a the atrical mask. In Nick Drnaso’s new graphic novel, the façades of 10 strangers who meet at a free acting class soon become irrevocably transfigured. Led by their enigmatic teacher, the attendees – each searching for belonging in contemporary America – find their improv isations, memories and fantasies bleeding into their troubled civilian lives, destroying some, liberating oth ers. It is an ominous, joyous look at the transcendental nature of art and the imagination; the absurd non-se quiturs, traps and alternate realities it weaves when unbound. Drnaso’s award-winning work has been pub lished in 15 countries. He lives in Chicago with his wife and their two cats.

I read that your previous book Sabrina was born from anx ieties and nightmares. What was Acting Class shaped by? In certain pockets of America, I think there is a kind of spiritual bankruptcy and directionless search for meaning. As far as I can tell, for most people, there’s an absence of a strong sense of community. I’m now in my mid-thirties and not having any real religious belief to give my life structure or purpose, or to have any kind of certainty – that was a big factor in settling on the sub jects in the book.

The isolation, sterility and claustrophobia in Sabrina led me to reflect on the possibilities of a group dynamic. How it would be an interesting challenge to develop 10 distinct people and juggle an ensemble. I had a lot of freedom, and the big shifts and movements of the book arose organically. There was always this notion that the acting lessons and scenarios would expand and get more involved, more immersive.

How does your work begin and fit together?

I plot and script things out pretty precisely before I set out a page to start drawing. I’ve already thought through the purpose of a scene and the structure of it, where moments of silence, pause or transition are placed, what purpose they serve. Once I get into the sketching phase I figure out what that’s going to look like, or who the pause is going to rest on or what they’re expressing. When I think of editing the dialogue into sequential images, the language of film translates well. It’s close to storyboarding.

As someone who’s done quite a bit of acting, you cap ture the simultaneous awkwardness and removal of inhibition it can provide very keenly. That’s the highest compliment because my biggest worry was that it wouldn’t ring true. Maybe that’s why I settled on the subject; I’m the complete opposite of a performer. I wondered if I should take a class, but I just couldn’t put myself through it. There was a slight crossover having attended art school, so I could pull from the creative language of teaching. Once I started writing, I realised there was a certain freedom in mak ing John Smith [the acting teacher] not a con artist, per se, but there’s this question of: is he making this up as he goes along? What are his motives?

There are flashes of eerie homogeneity between the character’s faces sometimes. How did you want the artwork to complement some of the ideas explored around conformity and individuality?

Some think of my previous work as reductive, that char acters are featureless or interchangeable. Just for reada bility, I had to introduce more distinct facial qualities. But then, drawing comics makes you streamline and embrace systems, because even working as quickly as I possibly could, it still took me four years. I’m drawing 10 to 15 individual panels a day, so inevitably you expe dite. Sometimes you can get so tripped up in the grind of it that it starts to feel somewhat uncreative. Not ardu ous or unpleasant though, problem solving and figuring out how a page or scene is going to unfold is incredibly stimulating. Since I’m writing beforehand, by the time I’m drawing I’m pragmatic. Perhaps that creates what some people think of as my ‘frozen’ or ‘stiff’ style, but it unconsciously comes out that way.

You previously had to work alongside your comic draw ing; does it feel strange to now do something you love, full time?

Working on comics all day is obviously surreal. I had always thought – like many working artists – that I would figure out how to make art alongside a day job. Having all this unchecked free time is a little strange; imposter syndrome often rears its head.

Sabrina was the first ever graphic novel to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. I know it was disorientating for your work to be placed in that space; has your opinion shifted on this?

From the moment I realised the scale of the profes sional leap it brought, I felt unworthy. Being elected an ambassador to comics was uncomfortable because I shouldn’t be a spokesperson for this broad medium. I know that within my field, what I do is a pretty acquired taste. I think the book being elevated to stand as ‘the ideal comic’ created a weird rift; I was torn between the world of alternative comics and the literary world. I don’t feel like I’m a part of either one of them at this point, which is maybe good, in a way. Personally, prizes don’t move me.

What does?

Sharing work and receiving feedback from my wife; those quiet daily things are a source of validation. Creatively and professionally at this point, I’m thinking deeply – half-praying and waiting for an idea to come along. I don’t have a manic artistic drive; it’s a cautious and critical process. Especially now, when I haven’t drawn regularly in several months, and I’m slowly accumulat ing concepts to go into the next book. That’s the only thing that means I can breathe a little easier. Even if it’s just the smallest, most insignificant idea that I jot down. For me, that’s like gold.

Acting Class by Nick Drnaso is published by Granta Books, out now

LA DOLCE VITA

By Dylan Holden. Why Brioni’s avant-garde history allows its design director to dare

In the wake of WWII, amidst the ruin and rubble of Mus solini’s Italy, Gaetano Savini and Nazareno Fonticoli needed a name for their new venture. The savvy busi nessman and tailor looked north to a collection of Istrian islands – Brijuni – an archipelago that had become an infamous holiday destination for European elites. Their arcadian vision of prosperity and sartorial perfection would be called Brioni, and it would waste little time.

After establishing a boutique on via Barberini, Rome, the pair led an advance guard of firsts. In 1952, they staged the first ever menswear runway show inside the exquisite Sala Bianca at Palazzo Pitti; slim, natural sil houettes and daring colours playing out on lighter fab rics previously reserved for the fairer sex. Its introduc tion of trunk shows – another invention that indelibly shaped modern fashion – had collections shown directly in stores, allowing customers to adapt garments with a made-to-measure service. It is this heritage, according to Brioni design director Norbert Stumpfl, that gives him permission to be free. “Our founders were on the fore front of a revolution,” he reverently notes. “Their fashion was so forward looking, asking, ‘why shouldn’t a man wear silk?’. We are still the go-to for well-crafted tailor ing, but our history means I can be bold.”

A solitary childhood spent drawing the flora, fauna and landscapes of rural Austria initially made Stumpfl consider interior architecture, but at the insistence of his teacher, he enrolled in a nearby school with a dedi cated fashion program. Effectively acting as an appren ticeship, from the age of 13 he learned how to cut and craft patterns, falling in love with the art of clothing.

By the time he was studying at Central Saint Martins he could already sew flawlessly, leading to evening work on Alexander McQueen’s runways. A who’s who of mens wear swiftly followed graduation, with tenures at Lan vin, Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton and Berluti, before he joined Brioni, in 2018.

Stumpfl’s keen attention to detail, construction and textile development in the subsequent years has been rightfully applauded, and always begins with a dive into the brand’s extensive and often surprising archive. Con taining everything from metal ties to a 1950s modular jacket imagined for the 2000s (that transforms into a blouson), the spectrum of garments and fabrics is an invaluable resource. But, this appreciation of the past doesn’t mean he gets lost looking backwards. “Our world is so industrial at the moment, so I’m always pushing our mills to show me materials which create a goose

bump-like effect. New weights, new structures. This is Brioni for me, it can be very modern or classic, but I still want that tactile ‘wow’ effect on the skin.” This sensu ality was well demonstrated in the wonderfully noncha lant SS23 collection, with a precious silk jacquard made on ancient looms by Setificio Leuciano – purveyor to the Royal Palace of Caserta – then tailored into unique evening tuxedos. Soft washed silk, seersucker, satin de cuir, light wools and linen also featured, with sup ple trenches, field jackets and ethereal suits finished in the hues Stumpfl encounters on his walk to work: cognac brown, pink, earth, orange, grey and baby blue. “You often find a Caravaggio palette around Rome,” he remarks, “it might be a fresco or the way the light falls on a wall which gives me the tone for a season.”

Alongside Brioni’s pre-pandemic changing of the guard have been steady but seismic shifts to the wider industry, as well as who the brand resonates with. No longer the sole preserve of CEOs, it is now also attract ing a much younger clientele looking to build their ward robe staples. The current ambassadors for the brand –the talented Mr Jude Law and his son, Raff – reflect this new range. The biggest change that Stumpfl has wel comed, however, is a more expansive definition of who he is dressing: “Our fathers’ generation had completely different expectations of what a man should and could be. We now have much more liberty to express ourselves, are able to show many more facets. I think increasing equality between men and women – and there is still a long way to go – has led us towards a stronger, more sensitive ‘masculinity’ that isn’t afraid to be ‘feminine.’”

This expressive and inclusive understanding of what menswear can be has arguably been a vital aspect of Bri oni from the start; Stumpfl has simply brought this sub tle verve back into focus, full circle. Another celebrated fundamental is the house’s quintessential ‘Roman-ness’, and despite living in the bel paese with his family for the past four years, the designer still retains a curiosity and critical distance to the native way of life. Often discuss ing with colleagues what is the essential quality of the Italian man, they have settled on the notion that he is effortlessly enjoying his life. “Clothes are important to him, but they shouldn’t look that important to him. There is an ease, a personal luxury... Likewise, if you’re wearing one of our suits but want to step into the sea, roll up the trouser legs and get in. Life goes on. You’re wearing the most amazing clothes that should live with you, not restrict you.”

The rising French actor knows what it is to grow up fast, having been a professional stand-up comedian from the age of 13. Seamlessly transitioning to the big screen – with standout performances at this year’s Cannes Film Festival –he reflects on the beauty of diasporic stories and why he’s pushing for greater representation in cinema

WORDS SIMRAN HANS PHOTOGRAPHY ANATHEINE STYLING JULIE VELUT

It is 37 degrees Celsius in Paris, and Stéphane Bak is sweating. The 25-year-old actor is in his apartment and drinking grenadine with lemon ade from a short rocks glass, which I mistake for a Negroni. He cackles. As it turns out, sirop is basically the French version of Ribena. “Are you drinking lean?!” a friend visiting from Toronto had asked a few weeks prior. “I was like, that’s not what I’m doing!” says Bak.

What Bak is doing is trying to catch his breath after a whirlwind year. In the last 12 months, he’s played the lead in Robert Guédiguian’s 1960sset romantic drama Mali Twist, rubbed shoulders with Timotheé Chalamet in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, and featured in LOEWE’s Spring/

Summer 2022 campaign as designer Jonathan Anderson’s unofficial muse. He’s also in two new movies, both of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival: Cédric Jimenez’s Novem bre, a police procedural set in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks, and the luminous Mother and Son, about a single mother who immigrates to France from the Ivory Coast in the late 1980s with her two sons. The latter is directed by Léonor Serraille and stars Bak as Jean, an aca demic overachiever with a fear of fucking up, who is also responsible for his younger brother Ernest (Kenzo Sambin). Jean quickly becomes the man of the house, filling in for his increas ingly absent mother Rose (Annabelle Lengronne),

who in turn is juggling night shifts as a hotel maid alongside a new relationship.

“Everything was different about this pro ject,” says Bak, who explains that Serraille, who is white, based the film on her long-term part ner. “It’s her boyfriend’s story, that she’s got two kids with, so I knew this was personal. She cared,” he says.

Bak’s parents immigrated to France from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like his character, he is the “big bro” in his family. The second eldest of seven kids, he was born in Villepinte and grew up in Le Blanc-Mesnil, two neighbouring banlieues in “the 93”, on the northern outskirts of Paris. “Like Jean, I grew

I was in this environment with older people, having to deal with contracts, not being screwed over, not having my kindness taken for weakness

I don’t want to wake up like Michael Jackson and declare ‘I’m Peter Pan!’ That’s my biggest fear in life

up fast. I was doing stuff that I wasnʼt neces sarily supposed to do as a kid.”

Bak is referring to his former life as a profes sional stand-up comedian, a career he embarked on at the age of 13. “I shouldʼve applied for the Guinness World Record. It’s not a title that Iʼm a fan of, but they used to call me the youngest comedian in Europe. They would present me like that when I would go on stage,” he recalls.

The story goes something like this: Bak had heard that two of his favourite comedians, Jamel Debbouze and Gad Elmaleh, were doing a free show in Paris. He and a friend took “the bus, then the train, then the subway” from the sub urbs into the city, and parked themselves in the

queue. They were third in line, and waited for four hours. When the doors opened, they wer en’t allowed in. “I was crushed,” he remem bers. Bak drifted across the street to the venue opposite, Le Pranzo. Its then-owner, Emmanuel Smadja, wanted to know what a 13-year-old was doing hanging around outside a comedy club at 11.30pm. Bak said he was waiting for his train, and told Smadja about his dream of performing on stage. “He told me, ‘I’ve got this open mic night upstairs – when you’re ready, you come.’”

Two weeks later, he did his first set. “I had six minutes to get ready. I jumped up on stage and the performance was too heavenly! I was like, you can make grown-ups laugh and get a

little bit of money for it?!” Bak would place a hat on stage, for tips. “People would put money in the hat, and then I would buy McDonald’s right after on the way home. That’s how I started.”

Bak’s videos blew up on YouTube and Dai lymotion. He started getting recognised in the street, and booked on French late night shows. “I was maybe 15 or 16, and I would have to perform stand-up comedy in front of Chris Rock or Sacha Baron Cohen,” he says. His life changed rapidly.

Instead of spending his mornings at school (he got kicked out at 13, anyway), he was show ing up to set at 9am, surrounded by grown-ups. “I was working on my computer, trying to find

These people that live next to me, that I know, or that you might run into every day — they’ve got beautiful stories to tell too. I don’t get why we don’t see them on the screen

jokes, going to rehearsal, doing fittings, hav ing to be live on TV,” he says. In the evenings, he’d return home and cook dinner for himself while everyone else was sleeping. “That was kind of a troubling experience. As a kid, that’s not necessarily what I would recommend,” he says. “I donʼt feel like my childhood was stolen from me, but I remember not hanging out with kids.” He’s wary of falling victim to child star cliché, however. “I donʼt want to wake up like Michael Jackson and declare ‘Iʼm Peter Pan!’ Thatʼs my biggest fear in life.”

As a teenager, Bak took acting classes at the Cours Florent, a private drama school in Paris. “I couldn’t afford them,” he says, but when the French actress Isabelle Nanty saw him on TV, she

reached out. She had taught there (Vincent Lin don was one of her former students), and helped to get him lessons. “I had to make a choice,” he explains of the transition from comedian to actor. “My desires, the ones that I had when I was 13, wouldnʼt be the same when I was 18. It’s like the stand-up part in me died a little.”

There is little overlap between the Paris comedy circuit and the world of French inde pendent cinema. “Not giving too much praise to America,” but “we donʼt have a lot of [peo ple like] Jamie Foxx,” he says. “I hope that my path is going to look like something thatʼs very unique here.”

It already is. How many former stand-up comedians are also in Wes Anderson movies? Bak

tells me that the director is actually his neigh bour. “He lives right next to me.” Bak was a fan, and messaged his agent as soon as he found out Anderson was shooting in France. “I sent him a text saying there’s no way I’m not in this movie”. He auditioned, and won a small role as a communi cations expert. Before he knew it, he was on a $16 million shoot in Paris surrounded by actors he grew up loving, like Frances McDormand, Ed Norton, and Benicio del Toro. “You’re like a kid in a candy store,” he says. And in fact, there was candy on set. “The first encounter where I met Bill Murray, I was talking on the phone. I saw him waving at me with a box of chocolates. I was looking behind thinking ‘Surely thatʼs not for me!’” It was.

People would put money in the hat, and then I would buy McDonald’s right after on the way home. That’s how I started

Mother and Son – set to be released in the UK early 2023 – is another milestone in Bak’s jour ney, and is his most complex and finely tuned performance yet. In the film, Jean learns the hard way that he’s no longer a boy. For Bak, the experience is familiar. “I was in this envi ronment with older people, having to deal with contracts, not being screwed over, not having my kindness taken for weakness,” he says. Mak ing money came with responsibilities his peers didn’t understand. It made him grow up fast – so much so that his friends still tease him, declar ing him an “old soul” at 25.

“They’re always saying ‘You’re like, 60! You never want to go out!’” he laughs. This summer, his plan is to spend less time online, and more

time reading. “I just got done with The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr; itʼs a beautiful book about this Senegalese author that enters the French literature scene. A scene that he doesnʼt belong to, necessarily,” he says.

He is drawn to these diaspora stories, which he describes as “still very young in terms of French cinema”. He cites films he’s made like Mali Twist, The Mercy of the Jungle, Roads (with Fionn White head and Sebastian Schipper), and now Mother and Son as examples. He doesn’t want to “talk bad on French cinema” but says growing up as a Black kid in France, he’d rarely see people who looked like him represented in the mov ies. “If it wasnʼt for American blockbusters, you donʼt see yourself,” he states. “I love French cin

ema, and Iʼm a Godard fan, Iʼm an Assayas fan. But these people that live next to me, that I know, or that you might run into every day – theyʼve got beautiful stories to tell too. I donʼt get why we donʼt see them on the screen.”

It’s why a project like Mother and Son feels like a gift. Like Rose, Bak’s own mother immigrated to France and worked as a cleaning lady in the late 1980s. “In some ways sheʼs been damaged by France, too,” he says. He describes seeing her at the premiere in Cannes as “the most moving moment of my career” and says that after the screening, they both cried in each other’s arms. “She could see some part of her life on the big screen. That’s never happened. It doesnʼt happen like that. Thatʼs what Iʼm pushing for.”

Grooming Lorandy for Charlotte Tilbury

assistant Coline Faucon

thanks to The Production Factory, London

Everyone’s favourite sadistic sibling on HBO’s Succession has been in the business since the age of eight. Catching up with an old friend and fellow actor, the multi-Emmy and Golden-Globe nominee considers their craft and the unexpected joys of fatherhood

WORDS MICHAEL CERA PHOTOGRAPHY CLÉMENT PASCAL STYLING JULIE VELUT

KIERAN CULKIN WEARS GLASSES MOSCOT FULL LOOK ANEST

Michael Cera: Cool. I think I’ve run out of things to ask you.

Kieran Culkin: Okay. Well, this was great. Thank you for taking the time.

I think it’s important to establish for the reader that we’ve known each other for 13 years. I’m curious, why do you think we’re friends?

I remember being on the set of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – one of the first times we met –walking around my character’s bedroom. We both clocked the Nintendo and started talking about gaming.

A huge piece of both of our identities; a major first language for me. I was impressed you remembered the squelching sound when you paused the game Battletoads. We have since played a lot of Nintendo together, the game we bonded over the most was Contra. You also gave me a mock Scott Pilgrim NES game which was secretly Super Mario Bros. 3, because at one point I had told you that game is coded in my DNA. I’ll bet you anything you have since lost it and have no idea where it is.

That’s true. It’s unfathomable to me that I lost track of it because I treasured it so much. You

made the fake label and everything. It’s one of the most generous gifts I’ve ever been given, and I don’t have it.

I think we’re friends because I’ve always loved the way that we’ve worked together, how much fun we have.

You’ve been a father for three years now, but you’ve also been busy with work. How have you been finding the balance?

At the moment it’s chaos. You should see this apartment. There’s no such thing as self-care anymore; there’s no time for it. I don’t watch TV, my social life doesn’t exist. After work I am rushing back for their bath-time and bedtime. Recently after filming, someone said, “this was a tough week, go relax this weekend.” I laughed, then started to cry, because sometimes the week end is tougher. I haven’t seen my kids all week, so there’s this emotional build-up to the brief window I have. I then put a lot of weight on it and it becomes stressful, I feel like I’m always trying to catch up. But then my daughter, out of nowhere, will hug my head and whisper, “I love you Daddy,” and it’s the greatest thing in the world. I try to enjoy those moments as much as possible, but I also mourn them, because even tually she’s not going to do stuff like that.

You should listen to the Bruce Springsteen song ‘Glory Days’, it’s about how fast it all goes by. You’ll cry.

I am also realising the value of asking for help. Help, is in fact, helpful. One thing I have kept working on vigorously is me and my wife Jazz’s relationship.

That’s a very important leg of the table that can easily be neglected.

When my daughter was less than a year old we were looking for an apartment and didn’t bring her. Walking down the street, it occurred to me that I could reach out and hold Jazz’s hand, because normally one of us is juggling or hold ing something or other. For a moment we were a couple walking down the street, and when we finished early we were meant to go back, but decided to sit down and get a coffee together. That was so nice.

You’re confident, often hilarious, but then there is another side to you that is introspective and analytical – the opposite of that guy. I think this is used in Succession and you could say that about your character, Roman Roy, too. But then, he’s also a mess… Do you watch the show?

I do, but I’ve never really concerned myself with

I’ve been acting for 33 years now and every time it’s been different. Always, when I think I’ve gotten the hang of it, my process changes for one reason or another

I’m protecting my character and trying to be as true to myself and to him as possible

Grooming Amy Komorowski at The Wall Group Photography assistant Jeremy Gould Styling assistant Kenni Javon With thanks to The Production Factory, New York

how the whole thing fits together because I am solely concerned with my one thing, which is Roman. I don’t particularly care about how the audience is going to gauge the story, view it in its entirety – that’s none of my business. I’m just the guy; I’m protecting my character and trying to be as true to myself and to him as possible. I’m making sure to track Roman so there’s con sistency, that I’m not doing anything that inher ently contradicts what’s gone before. Sometimes Jesse [Armstrong] – who created the show – will ask me, “would Roman do this?” And we figure out what makes sense, feels right. That being said, people flip flop all the time. They’re con stant walking contradictions. So even though it completely tracks that my character has said ‘x’ all this time, he can change course, have differ ent dimensions.

This is your first proper TV job. Is the approach you’ve just outlined one you discovered for it? I’ve been acting for 33 years now and every time it’s been different. Always, when I think I’ve got ten the hang of it, my process changes for one reason or another. I used to want to get off book on the entire script, know my full arc. Now I do the complete opposite on Succession, because sometimes we get rewrites the night before,

ideas and possible trajectories will be cut… This job requires a completely different skill set and muscle memory. I’ve had to adjust. Now I read over a scene before bed to check for any issues, normally show up on set late, do my hair in a rush, make decisions about costume, remember I still have to shave, do one slightly wonky take, and then we figure it out. It all works because I have all-star scene partners like [Sarah] Snook, someone I’ve built such a rapport with that we can discuss a scene we’re about to film, then swap lines if we think they would better suit the other person – with permission from the writers. Whatever your process is, you can’t be complacent. I feel like if I ever get to a place of thinking I know exactly how to do my job, then I’m probably doing it wrong.

I learned a lot from doing the play This is Our Youth with you, that you’re naturally a very pres ent actor. It was a high wire act; I felt like a tra peze artist flying and not knowing what was going to happen. You would always catch me. There were many times when your superpower of presence saved the show. I remember when my phone prop exploded, which I needed for an extremely pivotal, emotional moment, and mid-performance you remembered where the

spare was and retrieved it for me. You learn a lot by doing a play.

You do. Every time could be completely differ ent. On Succession we run whole scenes like a play, but they’re different puzzles to solve. What’s great about the show is there’s an aspect of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Because it’s fluid, the thing comes alive. There’s often no time to rehearse, so you’re forced to be present. It sounds like a simple thing, but it’s not. I never took an acting class but I’m sure you’re taught to actually listen to whoever’s opposite, because they’re doing half the work for you. On stage or screen, you’re relying on the other person and your ability to truly listen.

Alan Rickman once said, “All I want to see from an actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening.”

Burr Steers, who wrote and directed Igby Goes Down, taught me a trick. I was doing a scene with my therapist in the film, and Burr wanted me to get on his nerves without ever straying from the dialogue. I couldn’t figure it out, but he said to watch his behaviour and make fun of him. So, I’m watching him closely and trying to find some thing. In that moment I realised I was really lis tening to him and paying attention to everything

I feel like if I ever get to a place of thinking I know exactly how to do my job, then I’m probably doing it wrong

he was doing. I was so hyper-focused, reading exactly where and how he moved his elbow. It was great because I wasn’t in my head, I was watching the other guy. Thereafter, whenever I felt uncomfortable, I would pull this trick: lock into what my partner is doing and try to make fun of them. I was 18 when we filmed that and it’s stuck with me ever since.

Have you ever been asked to conduct an inter view like I’m doing right now?

No. And I wonder if I would say yes.

You’re not going to return this favour? No, you’re a really generous guy who’s a better friend to me than I’ll ever be to you.

Well, I’ll try not to get nominated for an Emmy so you’re never put in that position. That would be great. You should have been nom inated for Life & Beth; you were fantastic in that.

Thanks man. I like the way you embrace peo ple through roasting. I think you’ve got to be able to laugh, it’s so important. Some of the people I’m most worried about is because they have no sense of humour about themselves. They’ll tell you something that’s maybe weird and you want to poke fun of them to embrace them, in a way.

Whenever I see that, my instinct is poke fun and poke hard.

You’re the king of it. You actually poke so hard I think that you make people drop their guard. Laughing is a way to connect to the larger mind; it’s a way to zoom out, to share, to look back at yourself with others and be part of a larger fabric. I feel that same way. If I were to trip and fall really badly on the street, I actually hope to God that someone laughs. My first instinct is to chuckle when I see it happen to other people.

This next question is actually from my wife. What has been your favourite age?

Four immediately flash up: 12, 22, 32 and 37. Twelve was the first year of the beginning of who I am now. I suddenly understood what I liked, what music I listened to, what clothes I wanted to wear – this is the kind of person I am.

Twenty-two was the last year I was completely unattached, free. I had no partner, no kids, no job. I was not locked down to anything and it was lovely. Thirty-two was when we were doing This Is Our Youth, and getting that job was the result of an eight-year pursuit, a dream. I felt like that was a big step in terms of what I do now; I don’t think I’d be doing Succession if it wasn’t for that formative time. The freedom and fun of it. Finally, I turned 37 just after I became a dad

and of course everything changed. I remem ber shortly after going on vacation – we go to Fire Island every Labour Day – and bringing my daughter. Over five days we just couldn’t figure out how to fit in the activities with friends. One day we were meant to go to the beach with every one but I had to be in; she was napping, dishes needed to be washed and lunch needed to be prepped because Jazz had been up all night. I was so frustrated we couldn’t go, had spent the whole weekend thinking, ‘maybe tomorrow we will, or the day after’… So there I was, washing up, and suddenly I realised how much I loved this little spoon of hers. I looked out the win dow and thought, ‘oh, I don’t get to go to the beach. And that’s okay’. I felt this weight lift off my shoulders because I was 37, life is differ ent now. I don’t need to chase the beach life or whatever it is I used to have. And look at this fucking little green spoon. It’s lovely. It’s actu ally quite amazing. Life is something else. It’s this other, wonderful, magical thing.

There’s a lot in that thought, that surrender. I admire people who have that ability to accept, to dance more eloquently with life.

The first three seasons of Succession are available to stream on HBO Max. Season 4 will be premiering on HBO & HBO Max in 2023

TORREY PETERS

ERIC CHAKEEN

JESSI FREDERICK

MAPELLI

In a Valentino double-cover special, Port is proud to present an in-depth conversation between two of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature. Torrey Peters is the award-winning author of the book  Detransition, Baby, and her collection of four novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, will be published by Random House in 2023. Leila Mottley – the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate – has recently published her debut novel Nightcrawling, a New York Times best seller that has been longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Together, they delve into their respective work, alternative modes of motherhood, and fiction’s ability to reveal how much our lived experience shapes who we are

Torrey Peters: I read your book this week and loved it. I'm really excited that randomly, we get to talk.

Leila Mottley: I'm such a fan of yours, so this is super exciting for me too.

I was listening to some interviews with you and so many people talked about your age. One question was ‘How do you feel about publish ing the book of the summer at such a tender age?’. I would feel weird if people talked about my age in such an alienating way. I don't know what a ‘tender’ age is… Because there's a gen erational difference between us, I'm curious, how do you feel about how your age has been framed in this process?

I knew that this was going happen. When we were in conversations with editors during the submission process, I asked can we not lead with my age. That's all I wanted. They replied that even if we don’t lead with it, it'll be in all of the headlines. And that’s what’s happened.

It's weird, especially because no other author has the first question be about their age.

I'm sorry to make it the first question!

People often tell me, ‘When I was 17 I was doing blank, I wasn't writing a book’ and I'm always thinking, don't be rude to your 17-year-old self because I was also doing all of those things you probably did. I feel the criticism, the judg ment around teenagers, is present when they're talking to me because they see me as an excep tion to adolescence. This implies that all teen agers are doing nothing and are useless unless they're producing something to be consumed by adults. It's a strange environment to con stantly navigate. People might be drawn to me because of my age, and I’m okay with that if it gets them to the book.

I noticed the tone was an interesting kind of ageism. It's not one that I think about myself so much, but it reminded me that the award for

I find myself talking about Toni Morrison a lot, and it has to do with the fact that in the trans scene that I came up in we were doing trans writing for trans writers. A lot of it borrowed from ideas that were forged by black feminists

Detransition, Baby that felt truly good was the PEN/Hemingway, because they stated some thing to the effect of ‘good book wins award for good books’. It wasn't, ‘trans author with trans book wins quite transly’. So, having just gone through that myself, I was looking at the way that your book was talked about, and everything shouted ‘Youngest ever Booker nominee’. If I was you, I'd want to have ‘good book is cho sen for Oprah's Book Club for good books’. I would've loved that. It's so true that you end up getting pigeonholed into this one thing as the defining factor. I initially didn't even think of my age when I was writing it, that wasn't the big thing on my mind. It is a fact about me I lit erally cannot change. And now I'm older, but everyone still perceives me as 17.

It's interesting that age is the one of those things adhered to you. Are there other things that you do want adhered? When reading those

aforementioned interviews, you mentioned Jesmyn Ward, for example, and other writers. Was it important to be identified with black women, and do you want people to mention other sorts of demographics? How do you feel traversing all that?

I love so many black women writers, includ ing Jesmyn Ward, and so to be within that lit erary tradition feels good. At the same time, I often notice that all black authors then get compared to Toni Morrison. It happens every time. Is that the only black author many peo ple know? Because I don't think my work's very similar to Toni Morrison at all. I end up navigat ing the thought of, do I want to be compared with these writers? Because I love and admire their work. But at the same time, I don't want to be them. I often get placed into the narrative of ‘you're going be the next x’ and that can be a limiting way to think about art.

Yeah, I hear you, but at the same time, I find myself talking about Toni Morrison a lot, and it has to do with the fact that in the trans scene that I came up in we were doing trans writing for trans writers. A lot of it borrowed from ideas that were forged by black feminists. Texts like the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, or the work of the Combahee River Collective. Peo ple like Judith Butler make references to black feminists – but when I’m speaking to general audiences interested in queerness, they don't always think about black feminism, but I can be assured they will know Toni Morrison, so that's who I mention. It's a balance for me: splitting the difference between trying to give credit to many thinkers – while also getting an audience to comprehend completely and quickly – and rhetorically, to that end, Toni Morrison is extremely powerful. So much so that quot ing her ends up being effective at explaining even trans contexts.

It's so true. She has this kind of claim on every type of art. She’s an icon. When I'm rereading her work, I am in awe of the craft elements, and I know she often talks about revision as key to her work. I would love to look at her first drafts.

Are there other people you would like to put yourself in with?

Jacqueline Woodson, because of the way she explores black girlhood and queerness in cit ies in a less overt way. She tells stories of peo ple and they all happen to be queer, which fits in line with my work. There are many authors I love who I don't think I am in any way simi lar to, but I've been reading a lot of funny fic tion at the moment. That's something I particu larly enjoyed about your book, the humor. James McBride also uses voice and comedy extremely well. I'm almost done with The Trees by Percival

Everett, which has wonderful elements of sat ire. We're always told to read widely, and I do, but I'm always going to read black women's books first and foremost. For me, that feels like a resistance to the cannon.

How did you feel when you were writing Night crawling?

I wrote it as a deep character exploration into my protagonist, Kiara. During the two and a half month drafting process, I didn't leave her head. That first draft didn't have a whole lot of struc ture to it and had quite a few mundane, unnec essary scenes. However, they helped me under stand every element of her life.

That's very familiar to me. Sometimes the scenes that aren’t published are actually the places where you find the character. In the past, when

I used to see guys on Grindr, I used to make them – to see if they truly wanted to come over – buy me sushi beforehand. Not crazy fancy, just a simple tuna roll. I wanted to know how much did they really care? It was like sending a knight on a quest before you give them your favour – you must go to the restaurant and con quer one Tekkamaki roll! When I was writing Detransition, Baby and laughing about this spe cific request, I realised that was the voice of my character Reese, that sort of logic and the gen der roles that speaks to. In a certain way, that was a touchstone moment of building the char acter. It's not at all in the book, but I had to write it to discover who Reese was. Same with the character Ames, so much of them came out of things that just never made it in. Going back to the idea of being defined by trans ness, what do you see as the core of Detransition,

Baby? I felt this idea of motherhood and want ing it, asking what does motherhood even look like, was an integral question. Did it start there, and how do you think about the book?

There was a little while when I was in my thir ties and had transitioned, thinking, ‘How do I actually live?’ I was looking at my friends, many of whom are trans women, and saw that a lot of us were struggling. Then I would look to the cis women my age and they were all get ting pregnant, building families. Their preoc cupation was motherhood, and it's so hard to tell the difference between what you want and what the cultural script says that you want. I think people don't fully understand the degree to which the cultural script for trans women is just the cultural script for women in general. Because New York women were getting preg nant in their thirties I guessed I should do that.

But of course, I can't, so what does my wom anhood even look like? Obviously it was going to be a book about trans women because that's who I know. What was interesting for me is how much existing scripts and genres already accommodate trans stories. People assume that because it’s a trans book it's going to break the binary and language itself, create its own art form, but I didn’t grow up reading experimen tal trans poetry. I was consuming domestic fic tion. The books that I liked were Mary McCar thy's The Group or Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and ultimately, they're domes tic fiction, stories of families. In some ways, the great American novels are these sprawling family novels. This is totally accommodating of a trans story and I was interested in what happens when you open up this mode to people who haven't traditionally written it. Because my own personal preoccupation at the

time happened to be motherhood, those two things came together.

In reading your novel, I thought how both Reese and Kiara possess an alternative mother hood vibe. There are moments where all of this unwanted emotional work gets asked of Kiara, and her scenes with Trevor feel so alive, are so tender, because it is a kind of mothering rela tionship. Here's this person who actually has a tremendous capacity for emotional care. She shouldn't necessarily have to do it – have it all thrust on her – but there could be a place for it. Absolutely. In her relationship with Trevor, there's this inevitability of her not being able to mother or care for him because of the rejec tion of communal care in our culture and what it looks like for people to step in and be caregiv ers. For Kiara, even if she had the resources, even if she wanted to take him in and continue to parent him, no one would allow that because

People might be drawn to me because of my age, and I’m okay with that if it gets them to the book

I often get placed into the narrative of ‘you're going be the next x’ and that can be a limiting way to think about art

they don't see her as his mother. I think that ties into Reese and her idea of, well, where am I going to fit in all this? Kiara experiences this dilemma, but you know, when you love a child, you'll do anything for them regardless of the outcome.

At the Detransition, Baby stage in my life, it was easy for me to think of trans issues as unique to transness. That's a trap I fell into, because I believed there's a really specific way in which no one would consider me valid as a mother. At the same time, I was encountering phrases like ‘anchor babies’ on the news, people stating this motherhood is legitimate and that motherhood is illegitimate. In writing the book I discovered that this isn't actually a trans issue, it’s a question of, who gets to be legitimate? Do you get asked a lot if the book is autobio graphical?

All the time.

How do you feel about that?

The funny thing is I always want to ask, ‘Is this where you think my stepson came from, 13 years ago?’ I often wonder which of the three central characters they think I am. There is a degree to which I did emotionally pull so much from my life, certain facets of myself, of my friends. But after giving my characters alternate histories and different choices than I've ever faced, sud denly they have a model that’s so unique they end up making different choices. I understand why people ask the question, but my response is, don't you understand what fiction does? It reveals how much our lived experience shapes who we are. The characters will never be me. They haven't lived what I've lived, and vice versa. I just want people to believe in character more, the magic of it.

Definitely. Interviews are so funny. I always get asked, are you Kiara? I don't feel like exposing my entire life, especially because I’m not that far removed from when I was 17, but what they need to understand is that Kiara is her own person. There are ways we merge and ways we veer away from each other. I’ve had people say, 'I know your life is entirely the opposite of Kiara's’ because at some point I had said that I had a bookshelf in my apartment growing up. I found that incred ibly interesting, because they were making the idea of reading and literature synonymous with wealth. They assumed she would never have books in her house, but in my vision of Kiara, there's a bookshelf. That doesn't change any thing else about her life.

Sometimes I want to interview the interview ers. What's next for you? I know you wrote two other books before Nightcrawling; I believe one

of them was in the mode of magical realism? Yes, I was 14 when I wrote that. I wrote a his torical fiction novel when I was 15, then Night crawling when I was 16/17. I've written two books since and l'm almost done with the first draft of the third. I’ve kind of scrapped the other two because sometimes I'll write a book and then just leave it. That's helpful to my process as often I write things that I'm not ready for, but will come back to at some point. Right now I am working on something – I can't say that much about it –that has a very different setting, is more of an ensemble. It’s definitely going to feel different from Nightcrawling. There's such rapid growth between 17 and 20 and sometimes I get scared that people are going to expect me to be the same writer as I was when I was 17. But I'm not, because I'm not the same person.

Did you write it while you're doing all this pub licity? I’ve been having a really hard time writ

ing in the last year and a half because of exactly that. I feel like people want Detransition, Baby part two, and actually, I started that book in 2015. I'm a different writer. My preoccupations are different, but then I'm also aware I have this audience and I don't want to disappoint them. I'll switch between having the impulse to please and then jump to one that wants to shock and reject, like the next thing I write, you're going to be disgusted by it, this is what you get for liking my book! I'm vacillating between the two and have been doing screenwriting sim ply because the weight of expectation doesn't feel as heavy or painful for me. Are you able to deal with that?

I’m always struggling with that lately. I felt so much pressure with the two books I wrote between selling Nightcrawling and it coming out. I’ve decided I'm going to try hard to not think about what anyone else wants and just focus on the books that I want to write. I panic about

once a week that the books I want to write are wrong and there's no market for them. I’ve real ised that you can't really write on tour. People have said they love to write in their hotel rooms, but I’m sleeping! Tour life is insane. I'm trying to process so much and just make it to the next destination, the next interview. I can’t write at all during all that. I’ve slowly started again, but my pace has changed. It's such a different expe rience being the author rather than the writer. Now I'm working late at night when I know no one's going to bother me, yet it's so much harder than it was before. I don't remember having any panic during Nightcrawling because I was convinced no one was ever going to read it. That helped a lot. You can't recreate those cir cumstances when you know that someone will most likely read it.

When I wrote Detransition, Baby, I had self-pub lished my previous work. There are jokes in it

that I was writing for specific friends so I really had a sense of audience, of who this book is for. One of the things that I'm now working hard to understand is this question of, what is there for me, rather than an external audi ence? Did you have an audience in mind when you wrote Nightcrawling, and is that the same audience now?

I was very publicly a poet at the time I wrote Nightcrawling. I'd be performing a few times a week and everyone knew me as a poet. My fic tion was a solitary endeavour, no one read it. I'd write a novel once a year and I don't even think most of my best friends knew about them. I didn't want to change people's image of me. I wrote Nightcrawling with the idea that I alone was going to read it and that is why the book is the way it is, a depiction of my 17th year and what it looked like for me, to be existing in my body at the time. I wanted to create and read a

novel that recognised how scared and vulner able I felt. I thought, if I can read this and feel just a little bit better about the role of fiction, if I can create a book that helps me feel solace, then I'll be happy.

I'm aware that people who I wouldn’t normally ask to read my book, have done so and loved it. I have mixed feelings about this. Because the audi ence, the one I envisioned once I sold the book, was pretty much just teenage black girls. That's a very small percentage of who’s read my book and I'm wrestling with not knowing exactly why so many of these other people like my work. I don't want to change who I write for, because I also think that there are black girls who will find it. I even felt affirmed when I read it back. Part of what I've been doing at the moment is saying I can scrap my work before anyone else reads it and it has still served a purpose, for me. That's been helping: knowing I don't have to show any

one, not my agents, not my editor. Probably the only person who will read it is my partner, but she reads everything I write, and she'll tell me the truth without judgement or permanence. I worry way more than I ever used to while writ ing, perhaps because of the conditions of writ ing when you know there's an audience.

I'm going to take two things from your answer that I loved. It’s so important to remember that you can scrap your work, that actually, you don’t have to follow up. And the other is the word solace. I know that when I'm writing really well, there is a kind of solace. Writing can be a lonely business, but when you get that feeling, suddenly you’re not alone… It was such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for making time while on tour, the emotional space for it. I know how it is. This was so fun. Thank you for talking to me.

There's such rapid growth between 17 and 20 and sometimes I get scared that people are going to expect me to be the same writer as I was when I was 17. But I'm not, because I'm not the same person

From soap operas to space operas, the Mexican actor and director is back as the eponymous rebel in the new Star Wars series Andor. Here, he discusses the mental gymnastics needed when action figurines of you exist, and why he’s determined to keep producing the vital stories he wants to tell –at whatever scale possible –in his home country

WORDS ANTONIO ORTUÑO PHOTOGRAPHY MITCH ZACHARY STYLING MITCHELL BELK

“Antonio Ortuño is an exceptional Mexican writer. I first encountered him as an author through his collection of short stories, La vaga ambición, for which he won the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero award in 2017, and which I recommend going to buy immediately. The sarcasm and irony of his pen left a deep mark on me. Then I read his novel Olinka, and since then I can’t go back to the city of Guadalajara without seeing it differently. Now I am about to start his latest, La Armada Invencible, which according to a friend whom I blindly believe, is his best novel. Ortuño does not stop; he makes his way with writing like few others. Without seeking permission, he writes short stories, novels, film scripts and shares opinions in his column in El País, which is a must read. At the beginning of his career, he wanted to make films, but did not go beyond cleaning moulds and stirring and baking latex in Guillermo del Toro’s special effects studio. It was his later journalistic work that ended up leading him to literature. He wound up as editor-in-chief of the most widely read newspaper in Guadalajara; reviewing texts written by others was his school to approach his own. It seems unfair to me

that he is the one interviewing me. If you knew both of us, you would agree that the interview would be much more interesting if it were the other way around.” – A note from Diego Luna on his interviewer for  Port, Antonio Ortuño

I

If we can believe what we see in the press, there are several Diego Lunas worth mention ing. There is, of course, the star of Andor, the new series from the almighty Star Wars fran chise, whose debut is set for this September. Then there’s the indie film and theatre actor, the movie director, the documentarian, the pro ducer, the artist concerned for his community and his epoch. But there is a common element that unites all these facets: good judgement. Maybe because he was born into the public eye and has lived much of his life there, Luna takes the glitz of showbiz with humour and reflective distance. He builds his daily routine through

work, well-considered decisions, and profes sional seriousness, far removed from the scan dals that tend to dominate the headlines. He is a realist in the land of fairy tales. Or in his case, the universe of space operas.

Diego Dionisio Luna Alexander (Toluca, Méx ico, 1979) is the son of Alejandro Luna, a Mexi can set designer and academic, and Fiona Alex ander, a British set and wardrobe designer, who died in a car accident while filming in 1982. He began his career at only 10 years old, with a minor role in the pilot of the soap opera Carrusel. He became more well known in other soaps: El abuelo y yo (1991), and El premio mayor (1995), in which he played the son of a poor man who wins the lottery and loses control; the show was a huge success in mid-’90s Mexico. And while many a Mexican child star grows up to disappear from the scene, or else resigns himself to the kind of profitable and artistically undemanding pro ductions that traditionally dominate the coun try’s TV channels, Diego Luna had other plans.

I want my freedom to consist of telling the stories I want to tell at whatever scale possible, with the tools I have at hand

It was on the set of El abuelo y yo that he met Gael García Bernal, who would come to be his friend, collaborator, and fellow traveller in mul tiple projects. It’s no exaggeration to say that in their generation of Mexican actors, Diego and Gael are the equivalent of the De Niro-Pacino duo in terms of the quality, reach, and influence of their films. In 2001, the two starred together in Alfonso Cuarón’s film Y tu mamá también, a bold, fresh movie about friendship and sex that won Luna acting awards at the Venice and Val divia Film Festivals and turned him into a ris ing star on the global stage. Although he already had roles in a dozen films under his belt (some as notable as Before Night Falls by Julian Schnabel), Y tu mamá también was the first turning point in Luna’s career, the one that made his mailbox start filling up with offers to come to Hollywood. Since then, Luna has worked on films helmed by Steven Spielberg, Julie Taymor, Woody Allen, Guillermo del Toro, Gus Van Sant, Neill Blomkamp and Tara Miele,

and has shared the screen with renowned actors like Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Forest Whitaker, Jodie Foster, Matt Damon and Javier Bardem. Some of his roles were supporting, yes, but they were significant enough for Gareth Edwards to call on him to co-star in a super-production that went one step further.

Rogue One (2016), with its dark, tragic story and a more grown-up atmosphere than the other films in the series, became a cult favour ite for Star Wars fans. It was also Luna’s first time playing Cassian Andor, a sort of Jason Bourne of space who infiltrates the heart of the galac tic Empire to sabotage their plans. That was a second inflection point for him. His face was featured on posters, toys, t-shirts, backpacks, stickers, and memes, and his voice even ended up in a video game. It’s a mass media presence that very few Mexican actors have ever experi enced, and one that has too often left profession als of any country overwhelmed and exhausted. In the entertainment store, few display cases

are looked at more avidly than the stories set in the universe George Lucas created back in the ’70s. But Luna was unfazed by the attention, and after the box-office smash he went right back to work, starring in the Netflix series Nar cos: Mexico as Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the twisted and charismatic founder of the Guada lajara drug cartel.

It must be said, though, that this is not the case of an actor who makes his name in Holly wood and forgets where he came from. Luna has continued to contribute to Mexican cin ema, and not just in front of the camera. Mul tiplicity has become his brand. He started his directing career with the documentary J.S. Chávez (2007), about one of the best Mexican boxers in history. His debut directing a narrative film came in 2010 with the feature Abel, the story of an imaginative and restless boy who must take on family duties in his father’s absence. Luna was also behind a biopic about the civil rights activist César Chavez (played by Michael Peña),

and Sr. Pig, a road movie set in Mexico and star ring Danny Glover.

Luna has been a producer of several dozen more projects, including documentaries, fiction features, shorts, and TV series. Many of these were supported by Luna through Canana, the production company he founded in 2005, along with Gael García Bernal and other partners. In 2018, the two friends broke away to open a new production house – La Corriente del Golfo –which has promoted projects including the Net flix series Everything Will be Fine and the interview program Bread and Circus, hosted by Luna him self. Just a few weeks ago it was announced that the two actors would share the screen again for the first time in years on the action miniseries La maquina, to be distributed by Hulu.

All this activity (to which we must add his fre quent participation in plays) does not exclude Luna’s preoccupation with social justice. Along with a group of artists, producers, and journal ists, he is part of the direct action platform El Día Después, through which civil organisations carry out concrete campaigns around urgent

social and environmental issues, such as water scarcity, disappeared people, femicides, and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All this is to say that Luna’s feet have never left the solid ground of reality. Not even when he was part of the most fantastic and exuber ant mythology of modern cinema.

II

With a schedule like his, it’s surprising that Diego Luna even had an hour free to talk to me, over video chat from New York. These days find him in the midst of promoting Andor, the series that marks his return to the Star Wars universe. Our conversation meanders and touches on many subjects; Diego is a warm, straightforward guy. On my screen he seems to be in a good mood, dressed in a simple T-shirt and wearing his hair exactly like his character’s (or, alternately, per haps Cassian Andor copied Luna’s hair).

I first met Luna years ago at the Guadalajara Book Fair. We were both part of a public forum on Mexican politics organized by the newspa

per El País, which ended in a dinner with friends in common and a few shots of tequila. In addi tion to the strangeness of partying with a movie star, I was struck by how serenely he accepted being approached by some of the customers at the restaurant where we ate. He signed auto graphs, posed for half a dozen photos, and even acquiesced to watching a magic trick performed by an aspiring magician that involved napkins and fire. “It’s part of my job to listen to people,” he told me then.

We’ve run into each other a few times since then, with or without tequila involved. This time, the conversation is virtual. We talk about our kids (who just keep growing and changing) and the difficulties the pandemic has caused in daily life (and, especially, in the filming of movies), before getting into the unavoidable subject: How does an actor like him hold up under the pressure of participating in a gigantic saga like Star Wars? One that looms so large in the imaginations of millions of people all over the world? Though the question I actually pose to him is not so cat egorical: how does it feel to have a figurine with

As an actor, I have freedom now to choose only the projects I want to do, but as a producer I’m still in the fight

his face being sold in every toy store around the globe? He gives a quick, nervous laugh: “I don’t think the doll looks so much like me. I always say it looks more like Chema (José María) Yaz pik (an important Mexican actor and one of his co-stars in Narcos: Mexico). Though it does have my nose… But I know what you’re asking. It’s very strange. It can be fun if you don’t take it too seriously. But if you think about it too much you can go crazy. It’s those tangential details that can distract you.”

When Rogue One was released, in 2016, Luna became one of a few pioneering actors born in Latin American countries who have earned cen tral roles in the phenomenon of Star Wars. Oscar Isaac, from Guatemala, and Pedro Pascal, a Chil ean, had gone before him in other productions, the former in the saga’s most recent movie tril ogy, the latter in the series The Mandalorian. I tell him that, from a Mexican’s point of view, his starring role seems extraordinary. When he and

I were children in the mid-’80s, it would have been unthinkable for an actor from our coun try to lead a production like Andor. Luna cele brates this evolution, though with some cave ats: “The first time (the producers) called me, I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand what they saw in me. I didn’t see how I would fit into this universe. But the story (of Cassian Andor) is ideal for me: it’s different from others in the Star Wars franchise. There’s no magic in his world, no Jedi knights. It’s a human world that’s more realistic, with people fighting back against the oppression of an empire.”

We recall, then, that the character of Lando Calrissian, played by Billy Dee Williams, was the first instance of an African-American in a leading role in Star Wars. It was in The Empire Strikes Back, in 1980. Decades passed before Latin Americans would have similar opportunities. Luna sums up: “I’m very grateful for the changing times we’re living in. But there’s another part, which is the

one that I care about most, and it’s that in this process of change, the stories we tell are also changing. Otherwise it does no good, right? I mean, the real impact comes from transform ing the stories as well, not just changing where the actors are from.” And he also defends his Mexican accent in English: “If they had asked me to get rid of it, they would have had to find another actor. It wasn’t a choice for me. This is who I am, this is how I speak.”

He goes on: “In Rogue One, no one else spoke like Cassian Andor. It was clear that the charac ter was a migrant, a refugee. Now, we have the chance to tell the story of that migrant.” It’s clear that Luna is pleased with the result, which is “a little more adult, darker, harder,” than the average story of the saga. He highlights the role of Tony Gilroy, scriptwriter of Rogue One and showrunner of Andor: “I really like how he works. The series format allows us to go deeper into the characters, and Gilroy writes stories

When I start to feel too comfortable in a project, I remember that sooner or later it will be time to move on, to do something else

that are very complex, but perfectly developed and explained.”

He says this with all the conviction of a fan who isn’t hiding the fact that he was once a Star Wars kid. Diego remembers how as a child, he had a marker case shaped like Darth Vader’s helmet. He used it right up until high school, when his classmates started to tease him. It’s an enormous leap between that young fan and the actor working on a production where, as he says, “everything is on a large scale: there are whole buildings of sets and offices, thousands of people working, helicopters with cameras flying over you… Just crossing the whole park ing lot is exhausting.” And yet, he still equally appreciates his smaller-scale projects: “I really value being in Mexico, that my production com pany is there, that I’m still paying attention to the specifics that apply to me.”

The contrast between a super-production overflowing with resources and the independ

ent projects that Luna struggles to get up and running in Mexico comes into focus again: “I’m past the romantic phase when I thought that by getting famous it was going to be really easy to get investment and support for the projects I want to get off the ground in my country. Sto ries that are important but that few want to tell. As an actor, I have freedom now to choose only the projects I want to do, but as a producer I’m still in the fight. And I want my freedom to con sist of telling the stories I want to tell at whatever scale possible, with the tools I have at hand. And sometimes you have to get down on the ground and say: I’m going to make this documentary that matters and that no one else wanted to make or finance. And then work on making it take shape, because sometimes it’s not enough for me to just go out there with my voice – it takes effort to make it happen.”

A stable role in a corporate franchise could be considered a jackpot for any actor, given

all the benefits it offers in terms of income, image, contacts, and experience of all kinds. Luna recognises all of that, of course, but he never loses perspective: “When I start to feel too comfortable in a project, I remember that sooner or later it will be time to move on, to do something else. To start something different, something new. And then there’s the challenge I like the most, which is that of telling a story that I want to watch as a viewer, first and fore most. Not to keep thinking only about the kind of stories that have already been made, but to take a step back and try to figure out how the audience thinks.”

Then he laughs and shakes his head: “Sorry if this all sounded like a therapy session,” he says. And he signs off, to forge ahead with this endless job that takes him from the earthly to the galactic, from Mexico to the stars.

Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell

George Saunders is the master of the short story; his idiosyncratic tales of trapped and disenfranchised souls are filled with a wit and tenderness few can match. In conversation with another award-winning writer of the form, the Guggenheim Fellow discusses his latest work, Liberation Day, a subversive collection that often uses an uncanny, dystopian version of tomorrow to question the power, ethics and justice of today

Perhaps there is no way to measure this, but it feels like in the last three years or so, more has happened than even in a typical decade. Statues of Confederate generals and revered white men involved in the transatlantic slave trade have come toppling down. American cities burst into riots as part of a reckoning with police brutality and the country’s long history of discrimination against black and brown people. A gameshow host was elected President of the United States and he proceeded to openly flirt with fascism and flout the norms of governance, and at times, decency. That president’s reign in office ended with hun dreds of his supporters storming the Capitol in a brazen coup attempt. The backdrop to all of this, of course, is the once-in-a-generation pan demic that killed millions around the world and forced nearly the entire globe to shutter in their homes away from work and school. That pan demic, which continues on with no clear end in sight, caused much soul-searching for some, a kind of paralysis (emotionally-speaking) for oth ers. For George Saunders, the months of quar antine and the political chaos that preceded it became an occasion for him to dig deeper into the work he’s known for.

The result is the author’s thirteenth book, Lib eration Day, a short story collection that feels heavy with the fearful gravitas of the last several years, though the presence of the present moment in the book is, as Saunders puts it, “probably two

levels removed from conscious.” Characters in Liberation Day don’t don masks, slather their fin gers in hand-sanitiser, lament the bacchanal of January 6, or complain of the isolation of quar antine, but the confusion of the time makes itself felt in the concerns of the narratives, as if Saunders metabolised the moment and spit it back as short stories that are satirical, sharply observed and deeply humanistic all at the same time. So, we have a story like ‘Ghoul,’ the first he drafted post-pandemic, Saunders says, where workers in a Hell-themed underground amuse ment park surveil and rat on each other for say ing the wrong thing. The price of misspeaking is death-by-mob. In other stories, people attempt to navigate life in broken and fascistic political systems that seem only a few steps away from current life, some find themselves with their minds erased, and instead of their memories they are given idyllic and false versions of his tory. It’s our world in a funhouse mirror, for sure, but you don’t need to squint too hard to see a clear reflection.

Perhaps this sounds like Saunders has reached his old prophet stage and is yelling truths from a carved stone tablet, but it is not that at all. Saunders remains allergic to the polemical. In the past, sitting down to didactically write about things that angered him led to failed sto ries, he says. Saunders, who describes himself as a progressive with all the expected progres

sive opinions, but who, on a casual basis, lacks the skill to articulate those opinions any better than anyone else, chose to let any commentary on the present time bubble up organically dur ing the writing process.

“I’ve always just said that if I try to live with my eyes open, try to develop my politics and my moral, ethical views, then somehow slant-wise that’ll get into the stories,” he notes. “…[I] just approach these things as craft objects, as aes thetic little scale models trusting that everything you know and believe and are confused about will titrate into them, and probably not in ways that are discernable necessarily except maybe in increased truth.”

Many of the stories in Liberation Day were written in the last year and a half, Saunders says, quicker than his normal pace. The pieces explore his persistent themes – the dehuman isation of the individual in the workplace, the obfuscatory nature of corporate-speak, the con stant return of history – but the focus of quaran tine allowed him to not only write faster, but to go deeper, to linger in complexity and contra diction. The result is stories that refuse to hold the reader’s hand, stories that drop them into the strange and go on longer than expected in that unfamiliar space before the payoff.

“That’s where I felt my new confusion about the world showing up, the shapes of the stories tended to be more ambiguous,” he reflects. In

I’ve always just said that if I try to live with my eyes open, try to develop my politics and my moral, ethical views, then somehow slant-wise that’ll get into the stories

addition to the pandemic, Saunders attributes his writing speed and newfound patience for ambiguity to the explorations he did for his pre vious book, last year’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, a craft book based on his teaching in Syr acuse University’s MFA program. In that book Saunders examines how 19th-century Russian authors Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol constructed their stories. To write that book Saunders had to look at their work with a bit more depth than if he had been simply teach ing them. Thinking through those authors’ stories inspired him to be aware of his habits and tendencies, and encouraged him to con tinue writing past points in which he may have stopped in the past. In our conversation, Saun ders often invoked Chekhov as a priest might invoke a patron saint.

“[A Swim in the Pond…] did something to the brain wiring where suddenly I was finding sto ries where I wouldn’t have found them before,” he tells me. “I’d feel an inner Chekhov saying ‘You can push this further.’”

If the shapes of the stories have become more ambiguous, Saunders’s obsessions have remained remarkably consistent. Since his first story col lection, 1996’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, the title story of which Saunders is currently film ing a television pilot, he’s explored the ways in which America tells and re-tells, often invent ing, its history. His sole novel, the Booker Prize

winning Lincoln in the Bardo, is told from the per spective of a cast of hundreds, each attempting (and failing) to tell a unified story about a par ticular historical moment, a time just after the start of the Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln struggled to keep the country together while his own son hovered between life and death. Saunders continues to reckon with his tory in the new collection, most notably in the title story. Wealthy patrons wipe clean the mind of actors (of sorts) and then force them to tell heroic and phony stories of America’s past. In a country that often tells soothing and false stories about its history rather than reconciling with the ugliest parts of the past, Liberation Day can feel like a metaphor for America’s worst tendencies.

“History for me is a good way to kind of say, ‘Well, our current way of telling of life, does it make sense?’” Saunders says. “And if you keep testing it against history you’ll see that it doesn’t actually. It’s always a construction. It’s a power arrangement. And the stories we tell as history are always meant to kiss the ass of power. To whittle away at that is kind of fun.”

Another hallmark of the Saunders story is the playful use of satire on the page. It’s often baked into the structure of the sentences and the paragraphs and is always present in the way the characters see and are seen by the reader. The satiric impulse grew out of his upbringing on the south side of Chicago, Saunders says,

where merciless teasing was a form of affection.

Saunders’ characters are often ridiculous, dim-witted or unlikeable in one way or another, like the main character of ‘Sparrow’, a woman so comically blank and without personality that the narrator tells us “She always seemed to be reading directly from a book on how to be most common.” She meets and falls in love with a similarly unlikeable man, and attempts to develop a personality to attract his attention. The humor in the narrative doesn’t come from mocking the characters, but rather from observing them intensely and with interest. Finding some fondness for a character allows the author and reader to see more of them, Saunders suggests.

“To make fun of something is a very first order thing,” he says. “You do that when you’re a teenager. As you mature you’re like, well ok, making fun is a form of being critical, which is positive, you should be able to do it. But in what we do, the reader will check out pretty early if they see our alignment too soon.”

Saunders, now in his sixties, counts himself as somewhat of a late bloomer, not having got ten the fire for writing until his thirties and not publishing his first book until 40. In our conver sation, he speaks methodically and technically about the craft, betraying his past as an engineer. Challenges within the stories during their crea tion, and the very stories themselves, are prob lems he creates for himself to solve, he observes.

The stories we tell as history are always meant to kiss the ass of power. To whittle away at that is kind of fun

This story-as-puzzle view allows Saunders to see his works as sites for growth as a writer.

“As I was writing the book I thought, I don’t know what this is,” he states. “I hope it’s good enough to stand with the rest of it, but I’m defi nitely learning something for the next book.”

When writing a book, Saunders reveals he doesn’t allow himself to think of the work before him as the main event. The book he’s working on is always practice for the next one, which will be the real book. Even while he worked on Lincoln in the Bardo, the debut novel critics and under-esti mators of the short story form hoped Saunders would write, he kept the feeling that he was work ing out things for whatever the real book would end up being. Working this way, Saunders says, helps him deal with the anxiety of writing, but it also seems to actively foster a mindset of growth and evolution.

“If I think of it that way it is a lower stress thing than if I was thinking ‘I gotta surpass the last thing,’” he notes. “With this collection, what excited me was I got myself into some techni cal situations that were hard. That felt new and fruitful for what will come next. That thing with ambiguity, that was new to me, the idea that you can have a story that could self-contradict

itself into profundity. That was exciting. And it is exciting for me to think about the next thing.”

That next thing is not entirely clear. Saun ders has held the habit of working on a single story at a time and trusting that they’ll eventu ally form into a book. After a project, the well needs to fill. Saunders admits to feeling reflec tive these days. He has developed a new-found respect for writers like Toni Morrison and Philip Roth who continued to produce well into their later years. That’s not always a given, interest or intellect-wise, he notes. Writing is still a love for him and a thing that keeps him vital. He finds a new sense of urgency and sacredness about the work, he says. But also an awareness that just as the flame came on, it can go out. So as long as the gift is there, he contemplates the best thing to do next with it. These continue to be exceptional and bizarre years. He needs time to digest that to find a way for the times to credi bly enter his work.

“All this political and crazy stuff that is hap pening is making the well fill up a little slower, but wider,” he says. “I don’t want to start some thing that doesn’t access that energy somehow.” Right now, working on the CivilWarLand pilot is satisfying his creative urge while he scans the

horizon. The soft-spoken Saunders alludes to a story-in-progress that he doesn’t quite trust. It’s mean and violent, he confides, not his nor mal fare. It’s the type of work the always-evolv ing Saunders needs to sit with to learn what it’s doing before he can call it complete. Another story in-progress he calls glib, and it makes use of the memory erasure trope he used pre viously. He hasn’t yet decided if he’s comforta ble with the returning trope. In the old days he might have tossed the story, but these days he’s more inclined to acknowledge what he doesn’t like and continue to hone the piece and see what turns up.

“To say I’m learning in front of you, that’s a really confident thing to do, that’s a really gen erous thing to do and I think readers respond to that for sure,” he notes. “But at a certain point… you sort of feel like the master plumber comes into the house, asks no questions, does his thing, and leaves with no doubt... That’s the opposite of what we do. We have to be rickety forever, and unsure and neurotic and exploring and learning in public all the time.”

Liberation Day by George Saunders, published by Bloomsbury, is out now

All this political and crazy stuff that is happening is making the well fill up a little slower, but wider… I don’t want to start something that doesn’t access that energy somehow

Cottage

WORDS PHILIP HOARE PHOTOGRAPHY HOWARD SOOLEY

Prospect Cottage was created for Derek Jarman a hundred years before he arrived. It was waiting for him, like a UFO. The tarry fisherman’s cot tage stood naked and alone at Dungeness, sur rounded by a dozen or more like it, in their var ying shapes and sizes, facing out to the English Channel. This beach was the last of England, the fifth quarter, since it was new land, stolen from the sea. It now receives refugees. You might say Jarman was one of them.

This stony bare place was not on any map, like most utopias. Backed by the uncanny atmos phere of Romney Marshes – itself a half-where place with its queer past – and overlooked to the other side by the nuclear reactors that imbued the area with an apocalyptic air, Dungeness was defined by its otherness – a glowing alien pres ence from the future. Anything might happen

there. Prospect’s sharpness – the blackness of its boards against the sea light – was contained in its cabinet-scale. A secret closet, for cottag ing, for heaven’s sake.

When Jarman bought it for the princely sum of £32,000 in 1987, the cottage contained just four rooms – it evoked an absence of space, a punched hole in reality, a portal of strangeness that could be heaven or hell reversed, as William Blake, Jar man’s favourite visionary poet, might have con jured. It became part of Jarman’s performative, predictive dreamscape. Having lived in London since the early 1960s, in a succession of rented rooms and his Thames-side warehouse, where he slept in a glass greenhouse; or his tiny 1930s apartment on Charing Cross Road, ‘the most beautiful room in London’, Jarman had never possessed any outside space of his own to any

extent, which is why his films always appeared to be cabinet pieces.

Suddenly, in 1986, with the onset of his crit ical state, as HIV+, the physical placing of his self, his body, his immediate environment, required an escape, if not an antidote; if not a negative space. A space to echo the confined sites of his life to date.

Tilda Swinton, with whom Jarman found the cottage, recalled that he “made of this wee house, his wooden tent pitched in the wilder ness, an art work – and out of its shingle skirts, an ingenious garden. But, first and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work”. Jarman’s art was enacted here. This was an analogue age. Everything he made was physically made, with his hands. Even the films, cut up out of celluloid exposed to light;

Derek Jarman Prospect Cottage’s garden

like frozen lucent shapes. From the tarry sculp tured collages he began to make on the beach to the object troves, megalith flints and rusty forks that constituted the architecture of his gar den to the apocalyptic filmic visions of The Last of England (1987) and  The Garden (1990), Dunge ness became the shifting stage to enact Jarman’s ferocious resistance to the political oppressions of the 1980s.

Inside the cottage, on the shelves, along side arcane medieval texts and modern erotica stood the china and plaster and spelter busts that Jarman bought from charity shops, ceremo nially beheading them and replacing them with flints from the beach or wound-round whirls of barbed wire. (“Prospect Products”, as Jarman’s life partner and ‘Hinney Beast’, the delectably handsome Keith Collins, jokingly called them).

The interior grew from the inside out. The corridors were tongue-and-grooved. Jarman’s great gothic wooden bed, made in post-mod ern medieval style by Andy the Furniture-Maker, was brought down from the Charing Cross flat where it almost entirely filled the room. Now it was installed in the cottage bedroom where the wind shook the windowpanes. At night the light would fall and the entire place glowed purple and blue. By day, Jarman peered out towards the distant invisible sea and carefully traced over the pages of his journals which he had first written in pencil, inking them in his flowing italic hand, as if he were a monkish sec retary or a recorder of his own oceanic empire on the desolate shore. He sat with his back to England. He was an uncrowned king, and this was no hermit’s hut.

“Most days people came to call,” Jarman’s friend and collaborator, the photographer and gar dener, Howard Sooley recalls. “Neil Tennant lived nearby at Rye, and would come over for a cup of tea. Dungeness can be a bleak and des olate place.  But my memories of that time are full of friendship and laughter.” Sooley’s visits became acts of play. “I remember one morning, when an excited Derek got a nuclear protective suit out of the fishing loft. We decided to pho tograph him in it, dystopian gardening in front of the nuclear power station.”

“It was quite an image,” Sooley recalls. “Derek standing in the suit, raking the shingle by a dog rose.” Suddenly a trio of Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared, apparently seeking to interest Derek in a copy of  The Watchtower. “I’ll never forget their faces,” says Sooley, “as it started to dawn

Prospect’s sharpness –the blackness of its boards against the sea light – was contained in its cabinet-scale

on them that the suit was clear plastic and seethrough, and Derek was naked inside.”

Sooley was a crucial co-conspirator in the creation of Prospect and its garden. His pho tographs would fix the place in the modern imagination when they were published in Jar man’s edited journals,  Modern Nature, in 1990; and later, after Jarman’s death, in a Thames & Hudson book devoted to the garden. These images acquired a certain reliquary status; iron ically, they also had the effect of making Jarman into an ‘acceptable’ artist, since gardeners, in England, will be forgiven any personal sins.

On 2 March 1994, Jarman’s body, now reduced to a blind bag of bones, his handsome face to a shrunken head, lay in state in Prospect’s sun room, a recent extension filled with light. One of the mourners recalls the surreal sight of the

cottage’s presiding spirit laid out in a mortal glittering gown, the same which Jarman had worn for his canonisation as St Derek by the Sis ters of Perpetual Indulgence. He was buried at the nearby churchyard of St Clements in Rom ney Marsh, where the turf appears about to tip Jarman’s body into the sea beyond. His grey headstone bears his name, in that same italic hand, and laid in the soft peaty earth, on top of his bones, rests Keith Collins, the Hinney Beast, who had continued to live in the cottage, and who died suddenly in 2018, now reunited with his partner in death. The air is green, and the lights on the decommissioned reactor flicker, and the night draws in again.

With Collins’ death the future of Prospect was thrown in doubt. Private purchase of the cottage loomed. Thankfully an Art Fund cam

paign rescued it; under the aegis of Creative Folkestone, it is hoped that it will become a place for artists’ and writers’ residences. Yet its pres ervation has its inbuilt self-destruction, as many wonder how this fragile building, as flimsy as Dorothy’s Kansas shack, will sustain the future focus of artists’ residencies and coach parties crunching over the shingle. This outsider’s refuge may not withstand this new onslaught.

It’s as evanescent as a daguerreotype, as flickering as one of Jarman’s early Super 8mm films, and it could yet evaporate in a shimmer of summer heat. Or perhaps, as some of those who remember him suggest, one of Jarman’s last wishes should be acceded to: his per haps mischievous, perhaps solemnly serious request that the entire place be burned to the ground.

Jasper Morrison CBE is a British designer whose objects fit seamlessly into everyday surroundings. The imperceptibility of his work in furniture, lighting, tableware and electronics for the likes of Vitra, Flos and Muji, however, belies its exhaustive research and unique sensibility. Charting his journey from the fringes of the art world and selfassembly manufacturing to mainstream mass production, here he reflects on discretion and the importance of an economy of ideas

WORDS DEYAN SUDJIC PHOTOGRAPHY THOMAS MARTIN

Even as a child Jasper Morrison understood that while some objects and certain pieces of furniture could create what he calls “an atmosphere” that put him in a good frame of mind, others did not. He remembers a room in his grandfather’s West London house as the first modern space that he ever encountered. He noticed that it had bare floorboards, a shag pile rug, and a Dieter Rams designed Braun radiogram, a line-up that he later realised was the result of his grandfa ther’s prolonged exposure to Denmark – for many years he ran Danish Bacon’s marketing effort to Britain.

“It was an early revelation that a space like that could make you feel better. Subliminally I knew I felt good or bad in a place instantly. Discovering that design can cause a change in the atmosphere of a place was vital. Function can be handled, but the atmosphere of an object is its most important quality.”

There were other family influences pushing Morrison toward design. His mother worked for the young Terence Conran, and his aunt Caroline became Conran’s third wife. “‘Not another bloody designer in the family’, Terence said to me once

over the dinner table. It made me determined to make it myself,” he remembers.

Morrison has done a lot of noticing in his life, it’s an essential part of his approach to design. He once filled a book with photographs of things that he had noticed; anonymous concrete chairs, the ingenious repurposing of a slice of pre-cast drainpipe as a lobster pot, a massive, ugly and yet somehow charming bench outside a Japanese railway station. He accompanied each image with a brief speculation on what had brought them into being. He explored the reasons that so many of the fishing rods on Istanbul’s Galata Bridge used the same crude but effective combination of a wooden bracket and a rubber band to hold them in place. He wondered about who the customers might be for a shop full of assorted wheels, some mass produced, others custom made, in the centre of Porto. All of them are good questions of the kind that any designer should be exploring.

Perhaps because his own senses are so highly tuned, Morrison has developed a body of work which sets out to be as discrete as possible.

“A certain lack of noticeability has become a

requirement,” Morrison wrote about his designs in Super Normal, the book he produced with his friend, the Japanese designer Naoto Fukasawa, as a kind of manifesto arguing for a slightly more deft, slightly less careless version of everyday ordinariness. “Design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution. It has become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible, by means of colour, shape and surprise,” he says in the book. It does not come as a surprise that both Fukasawa and Morrison work for Muji.

He may be fascinated by the ordinary, but if there is a British furniture designer born after 1950 who stands comparison with figures from modernism’s past such as George Nelson, or Marcel Breuer, it is Morrison. Even 20 years ago, when Domus magazine published a survey of what it called the roots of design, it was already giving him equal billing with Enzo Mari, the last surviving master of the golden age of Italian design.

The largest object that Jasper Morrison has designed to date is the silver tram car that the German city of Hanover commissioned when it

Emeco Utility Chair sketch

a hat stand formed from a chair base and air conditioning pipe assembled by Jasper in 1986

staged the 2002 Expo. One hundred and forty-four of them were built, and between them the fleet is capable of carrying more than 22,000 people. It is an object on an architectural scale, with Morrison and his team carefully considering its impact on the cityscape around it. At the same time, he also focused on the details: the handrails that standing passengers clutch as the cars negotiate sharp turns, the seats on which some of them can sit, the way in which window glass is framed. At the other end of the scale are his delicate wrist watches for Issey Miyake and Muji. Morrison looked to the Pleats Please clothing collection for references for the Miyake watch. The Muji wristwatch is based on a scaled down version of a wall clock, somewhere between Braun and Hans Hilfiker’s clock for Swiss rail ways. In between these two extremes of scale is a remarkable range of work that encompasses domestic sofas for Cappellini and office chairs for Vitra, television sets for Sony, coffee makers for Rowenta, cutlery for Alessi and lights for Flos.

Morrison grew up with an Anglo-Saxon passion for Meccano and the dismantling of motorcycle engines that was the conventional starting point

for a career in design for his generation. He went through a transformational experience at the Victoria and Albert’s exhibition on Eileen Gray that he saw just before starting his foundation year as a student, and made a remarkably acute drawing of Gray’s Transat chair afterwards. “I knew immediately what I wanted to be when I saw the exhibition.” He went to Kingston, an art school turned polytechnic, and then to the Royal College of Art. But much less usual for a designer, he also spent a lot of time in the company of artists, gallerists and curators. He was a close friend of Paul Kasmin, son of David Hockney’s dealer, John Kasmin, who became a respected dealer in his own right. They shared a space in Kensington Market where the younger Kasmin tried to sell art, and Morrison ran a second-hand art and design book business. The celebrated art dealer and heroin user Robert Fraser, famously portrayed handcuffed to Mick Jagger by painter Richard Hamilton, sold him books when he needed money. David Hockney himself was a customer. Of course, Morrison avidly consumed the content of his stock before finally parting with them. It provided as much

of an education as his professor at Kingston, where he grew increasingly impatient with a course that, as he saw it, was reducing industrial design to the cosmetic repackaging of existing products, and the tracing of details from the work of other people.

Morrison considered leaving. He went to see Ettore Sottsass’s studio in Milan, and met Andrea Branzi who made a vague offer of a job. He found himself at the opening of the first Memphis exhibition. It was the very opposite of unnoticeable, but it had a profound impact on Morrison. Under its influence he even produced a vividly coloured and structurally unstable looking bookcase. It’s an episode that he now writes off as a valuable if embarrassing lesson in failure.

In the end, Morrison stuck it out at Kingston and got his degree. He made a drawing for his final presentation for a side table, based on ready-made components, a sheet of glass, a thick timber strut, and two sets of bicycle handlebars, one to stabilise the table on the floor, the other to support the glass tabletop. It’s a witty, clever and knowing reference to design history. Marcel Breuer is widely believed to have been inspired to

Scale model 3d print of a Mattiazzi Zampa stool

Detail of a red shovel in the Jasper Morrison Shop

design his cantilever steel tube chair by looking at the lightweight but robust frame of his bicycle as he negotiated the streets of Dessau while teaching at the Bauhaus. Achille Castiglioni made a lamp out of a band saw, a car headlamp and a fishing rod. After graduating, Morrison had 10 of his tables made up and sold eight of them for £10 each. “It was reassuring to know that if the worst came to the worst, I could always support myself that way.” One example of that edition was acquired by the Design Museum in 2009, with the help of the Art Fund.

Morrison was equally restless at the Royal College of Art, and he took the chance to study in Germany for a year when he was awarded a scholarship on the recommendation of David Hockney. Morrison spent a great deal of time in the cafes and bars of Berlin, talking about design with his friends, but the experience also gave his work an injection of German seriousness. One of his professors was associated with the Ulm School, where the aesthetic that shaped his grandfather’s Braun radiogram had been born.

Morrison’s first major public exposure was at documenta, an exhibition staged every three

years in the provincial German town of Kassel. In 1987 it was seen as perhaps an even more significant event than the Venice Art Biennale, and for the first time in its history a curator had been appointed to select a number of designers to take part alongside such artists as Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Alessandro Mendini and Andrea Branzi represented an older generation of designers, while Ron Arad and Morrison were presented as new discoveries.

Morrison produced a slightly mysterious News Centre, with Reuters monitor screens on the walls and ticker tape spilling out the wire services. He created an interior setting with a few items of ready-made furniture, including an upended clay drainage pipe, and a coat stand made from a galvanised steel duct, with salvaged chair legs at the top and bottom. There was a map of the world on the wall, a floor made of peg board. The table came from his own flat and had been shipped out from London. There was just enough “atmosphere” to communicate that there was an idea, and an aesthetic sensibility at work.

For the opening Morrison was on hand, snipping items from the constant feed of news spiralling out of the printer, and pinning them to the wall.

“Naively I left scissors, and a bucket of pins, and hoped people would pin up news stories,” he says. In fact, as soon as he had left, the display threated to be overwhelmed by aimless snow drifts of paper from the Reuters machines.

“It was a bit of anti-art. I wanted to be completely factual, without artistic content,” Morrison says now. “documenta was a big deal; I told Reuters, who sponsored me, that 300,000 peo ple would see it. But I was trying to be clever, Norman Rosenthal from the Royal Academy told me, ‘I just don’t understand what you were doing.’”

Much later, his experience of the art world equipped Morrison with the insight to be able to fence gently with Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern in 2016. In a conversation published by Tate discussing the furniture that Morrison designed for the gallery’s second Herzog & de Meuron building, their somewhat tortuous dialogue captures something of the mutual misunderstandings between art and design.

Pegboard in the studio workshop with a development test from the Isokon Iso-Lounge chair project

“People coming to Tate Modern and seeing these different chairs, and different configurations, might wonder if there has been one of those new artists at work who are interested in mimicking design.” Dercon ventured. “So there might be an interesting confusion, then.”

Morrison politely considers the suggestion before fending it off. “Possibly. I’m trying to think which object would create confusion –perhaps the wooden benches…” Dercon prompts him, “Because?” Morrison replies “Because they’re so reduced, so basic in shape.” Dercon falls into the trap Morrison has set for him and suggests “People might think they are minimal art!” Morrison dismisses the suggestion. “They might, but I think they’ve got a bit too much character.” Dercon does not yet realise that he has lost the ping pong match. “Your furniture is often associated with minimal art,” he claims. Morrison dispatches him. “I always hated being called a minimalist, and never understood why people did it.”

In the end it wasn’t his documenta exhibition that pushed Morrison out of the fringes of the art world and self-assembly manufacturing from

ready-made parts and into mainstream mass production. It was a slide show based on his powers of observation. At the same time that Rolf Fehlbaum was commissioning Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid to design their first buildings in Europe for his family company, Vitra, he asked a number of designers to produce experimental pieces of furniture for him. He had seen a version of World Without Words, a presentation that began as a slide show that Morrison delivered in silence and which eventually became a book. It was the first documented example of Morrison’s way of noticing things. He showed, among a lot of other images, chairs by Enzo Mari, 19th-century factory workers demonstrating the versatility of bentwood, the prime minister of Tamil Nadu in sunglasses, 19th-century men in bowler hats, and the interior of the Maison de Verre.

Fehlbaum was intrigued enough to write to Morrison asking him to come up with a chair for him. Shortly afterwards the Italian manufacturer Giulio Cappellini saw the Thinking Man’s chair, which Morrison had designed and was making to order to sell through Zeev Aram’s showroom in London. He turned it into an industrial product,

alongside a series of pieces manufactured in London by Sheridan Coakley of SCP – it was Morrison’s first.

What sparked the Thinking Man’s Chair, a design that Morrison invested a great deal of time and effort in perfecting, was the sight of a traditional 19th-century armchair, stripped of its cushions, awaiting restoration. “It looked so modern that I thought, I have to do a chair that is just structure.” In that it got Morrison noticed in Milan it was an important chair, but it was not an approach to design that he repeated. “I did so many drawings, trying to figure it out, that I thought there must be more efficient ways to work. It really changed my way of thinking about how to do things. Economy of ideas is important, just like an economy of materials.”

All the same, Morrison has not been afraid of experimenting. One of his chairs is entirely made of cork, another refines the plywood cantilever. The Air Chair depends on a technique borrowed from the car industry used to manufacture dash boards by blowing gas to force plastic material into a mould. A single squirt is enough to make

Jasper with a Vitra APC Chair

The archive area of Jasper’s studio

a complete chair without any screws, bolts or other connections. The techniques may be rev olutionary, but the visual language is familiar. “I want things to fit in with a wide range of spaces, which tends to knock out the radical,” he says.

Rather than inventing something that had not previously existed, he refines precedents.

“I have absorbed so much of the past of the international style, that it is in my subconscious, and in my memory. It’s a kit of parts, to use, to reapply, to make things.” It’s an approach that has been consistently successful critically and commercially. “A product by (Philippe) Starck sells like crazy at first, and then slows. We generally have a slow take off, and then a longer flight,” Morrison explains.

After years living abroad, most recently in Tokyo where his wife is from, Morrison divides his time between London and a country house near Hastings. He has had an office in Kingsland Road

for 15 years, the latest in a series in and around Hoxton. One wall is made up of a set of display cases tailored to show some of the many chairs that Morrison has worked on. He has his own small shop there selling the kind of things that he photographs for his books: wooden spoons carved by the Bouroullec brothers’ father. His personal studio space, up some stairs, is a careful and yet unselfconscious exercise in atmosphere. There is a beautiful Saul Steinberg drawing of San Marco in Venice on the wall dating from the 1930s, a West African solid carved version of a bentwood chair, and a well-stocked kitchen, the signs of a life well lived.

Morrison does not need to struggle any more. He spent much of the lockdown writing for Domus and cutting back on his commitments. “I will say yes to existing clients, but I am cutting out the disappointing things, where we are asked to do the same thing that we might have done before.

Chairs I am ok with, but with requests for sofas, I tend to run dry of interesting ideas.”

Fundamentally Morrison is a furniture designer, but he has also worked on some interesting bits of electronic equipment. The Sony hi-fi system looked beautiful but he knew it was never going to work – he had been commissioned by the com pany’s British arm, not the dominant Japanese HQ. “If you have done furniture you can do a bit of product design, but I am better at furniture.” However, you can understand why he was drawn to Punkt, a Swiss start up that manufactured the unsmart phone, a discretely handsome product that Dieter Rams would approve of, with a min imum of functions to avoid the distractions of always being available. “They came to me for an alarm clock. ‘Why do an alarm clock when everybody has a phone?’ I asked. ‘It’s for people who do not like electrical things,” they replied.

He said yes immediately.

Discovering that design can cause a change in the atmosphere of a place was vital. Function can be handled, but the atmosphere of an object is its most important quality

Morrison developed the Handlebar Table, one of his earliest designs, for his final year Kingston degree show. In homage to Hungarian-born modernist architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer – who was reportedly inspired to create a chair in bent tubular steel after seeing some racing handlebars – the table poetically combines beechwood, aluminium and glass in their natural states. It was “a product requiring minimal machining or manual labour to produce,” in part born from the unhelpfulness of the university metalwork technician. Later that year, Morrison showed it at the Coexistence shop in London, and sold it in an edition of 10.

To celebrate the centenary of Gilberto Colombo – the renowned engineer who produced some of the most celebrated bicycle tubing and frame sets, thereby establishing the reputation of brands Cinelli and Colnago – Jasper Morrison and Fabrice Domercq created a one-off bike. Working closely with Colombo’s company Gilco, the pair opted for high performance longitudinally reinforced Hinox tubing, specially developed internal lugs, a hybrid adhesive and welded construction. The deceptive simplicity achieved represented “the past and future of steel in bicycles.”

Taking its cues from a stripped antique chair belonging to a friend, Morrison decided to design a form that was all structure and no closed surfaces. The original prototype of the Thinking Man’s Chair was first displayed at ‘Savage Thrones’, an exhibition in Tokyo curated by Anthony Fawcett and Jane Withers. Finished in red oxide rust-proofing paint, its dimensions were scrawled in chalk and sealed with hairspray as a form of “surrogate decoration”. The assembly of curved metalwork was later modified for an exhibition at Aram, ultimately attracting the notice of Giulio Cappellini, who quickly produced the chair through his eponymous company and launched it at the Milan Fair.

Tasked by Swiss electronics firm Punkt to design a ‘dumb’ phone, Morrison created a mobile that focuses on call making and texting, with direct keys and an intuitive, text-based interface. Made in small production runs using top-grade components, the lean device has a tough, glass-fibre reinforced body treated with the same finishing processes used by manufacturers of professional camera equipment. The second model features an updated design, tethering, and global coverage.

Giorgio Armani x Will Sharpe

Continuing our partnership with Giorgio Armani, we have teamed up for a four-issue Commentary special. Working with leading writers to bring you extraordinary original work, we present here, for the final instalment, a new piece of writing from award-winning writer, director, and actor Will Sharpe

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Hawk Will Sharpe

My Bear Can Talk Jeanette Winterson

On the Question of Privatising the Mandem Nabil Al-Kinani

Nights of Plague Orhan Pamuk

We Are Us Now Anthony Anaxagorou

COVER STORY

ESSAY

Will PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG HAWK

Sharpe

Will Sharpe is a multi-BAFTA-nominated and BAFTA Award-winning English Japanese writer, director, and actor. Set to star in the latest season of The White Lotus, Sharpe’s acclaimed writing and directing for both the big and small screen includes Landscapers, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain and Flowers, among others. Commissioned for Port, the following letter is addressed to writing. The solace, pain and belonging it has brought Sharpe from childhood to the present day; a tool and prism through which to understand himself and the vibrantly chaotic world around him

Hey, I can’t actually remember exactly when we first met. It would have been somewhere in Japan, or at least those would be the first encounters I can remember. There were Spot the Dog books and Bangers and Mash books and I remember finding Not Now, Bernard unreasonably funny. A story about being ignored I guess resonated with a needy two-year-old. Reading it now to my own children, I find the story almost laughably dark. A child who cannot get his parents' attention is eaten by a mon ster. The monster then takes the child's place but cannot get the parents' attention either. In fact, the parents don't even notice that Bernard is gone.

I also remember my dad trying to explain a little how you work, what a metaphor is. There was a book he tried to read to me and in one of the early chapters there was this phrase about "feet kiss ing the cobbles" in the rain. I remember him trying to explain that obviously the feet aren't literally kissing the cobbles – feet can't kiss anything really – but that it sort of helped you to imagine it better. I don't think I got it and also he gave up on reading me the book because I was so easily distracted, but I have always liked that about you, that you can say one thing and mean another. There's something oddly pretty about that.

The first time I wrote a poem it was by mistake and in Japanese. I was six or so. I'd drawn a pencil picture of a hawk and a cliff and had written next to it:

ano taka

sora wo tobu ano taka which translates as that hawk flying in the sky that hawk

The phrases were short and uncomplicated because I was a small child and because I was better at English than I was at Japanese, but I can see in retrospect how there's a formal simplicity to it. My mum was very excited and uncharacteristically moved. The only other time she was like that was when I asked from the back of the car what the sun rays were and if it meant that the sun loved me. I could see her crying in the rear view mirror. Perhaps that was the first time I started to get a sense of how powerful you can be, how you can affect people. I got a sense of how I enjoyed the feeling of expressing myself through you and seeing how it touched other people. I started to write other poems. I wrote

one about "Hachikō", the dog who would accompany his mas ter to the train station every morning and then, when his master died, continued to do it for another nine years until he himself passed away. Hollywood also saw the potential in this story and turned it into a movie called Hachi: A Dog's Tale (pun presumably not intended) starring Richard Gere. I haven't seen it.

When we moved from Tokyo to England, my first creative assign ment in English class was to write a story about a chair. I was laughed at because I drew a picture of a chair next to the story. That was what we used to do at the International School in Tokyo, but evidently not what you did here. It was one of many ways in which I felt out of place. In Japan, we spent weekends at the Tokyo American Club, eating clam chowder soup or hot dogs and fries, going bowling. And the sports I played were basketball and teeball. The first time I played cricket, I held the bat up like it was a baseball bat and honestly it was like this was the funniest thing that had ever happened in the school's history. Even the teacher was in tears laughing.

But you often helped me to make sense of situations like this. You even helped me to fit in at times, or to feel more at home some how. I actually got a good grade for the story about the chair and so the teacher kind of defended me in the end. I also remember feeling how, even if I looked different to most of the other kids, I could still write and speak English just as well as anyone else, if not better. And that made me feel safer somehow, even if I did have a weird International pseudo-American accent at first ("bas ketball" and "tomato" were the last words to go British).

You followed me into my teenage years and helped me to navi gate the hurricane of emotions that come with adolescence. You helped me to articulate romantic feelings, though admittedly this would often backfire. I struggled to get parts in school plays, some times because of how I looked. I remember being told once that the only part I would be right for was Pip and that they wouldn't be able to find a Young Pip who looked like me. In my embar rassingly Rushmore indignation, I said I wanted to stage my own play. The only slot available at the theatre was during A-Levels. So while everyone else was revising I wrote a 90-minute meta-drama and put it on with some friends who were up for it – basically the small circle of us who smoked roll-up cigarettes and listened to Wilco. I hung a toilet from a ceiling. I stayed up till 5am paint ing the floor different colours, fanning out towards the audience for perspective. I filled a bath with water and got drowned in it. People seemed to like it and, by the end of the week, they had to break fire regulations to bring in extra seating so the rest of the students, teachers, parents and kids from town could come see

it. In retrospect, it’s a slightly mortifying story but at the time I felt like Sam fucking Beckett.

I was 17 then. The weekend the play finished I tried to break into a club by climbing up a drainpipe and sneaking in through a win dow. That window did not lead to the club. It led to the manag er's flat, who was eating an Indian takeaway with his mates and playing computer games. They roughed me up, threw me down some stairs and called the police who arrested me for breaking and entering. I said the window was open so I didn't break any thing, I just entered. They didn't like that. They put me in cuffs and in the car. They let me go eventually, basically once they'd frightened me enough to feel I'd learned a lesson. On my way home, I laughed hysterically and couldn't stop crying. I felt high. I felt every feeling. I felt like this was your doing somehow and I wanted to feel like this all the time.

At university, I started to struggle with my mental health. I didn't really know what was going on. Sometimes I felt super-human. Other times I couldn't move or speak. Some of my essays stopped making any sense. I'd hand in 12 pages of stream of conscious ness lunacy about an infinite conical funnel at the base of which sits absolute art, instead of answering a simple question about the themes of a play. My supervisor called me in to ask if I was okay. I didn't know the answer then. I just thought I was weird.

I'm not sure if hanging around with you made it better or worse but I know that we spent a lot of time together. This was also when I was starting to become obsessed with comedy and most of my life was spent trying to work out how to make big rooms full of people laugh. It was intoxicating and addictive. The rest of the time I mostly just smoked weed and felt like a piece of shit. One time we did mushrooms and I befriended a cow who was evidently the best cow, the most polite and noble, far nobler than her friends. I was actually surrounded by quite a lot of cows who were getting stressed out by how loudly I was congratulating the best cow and warning her that a priest might want to sacri fice her. People fishing nearby were shouting at me to be careful. Later I crossed seven bridges and I saw a couple having sex in a field. I asked them if they were embarrassed about how long my left arm was. They thought it was hilarious. My friend had made aubergine and egg sandwiches (genuinely – in hindsight, what the hell) and the eggs had gone a bio-luminescent blue, like those images of plankton on google.

I left university and we started trying to make a living together. We did open mic stand up and played music and I worked in a pub where the landlord listened to Amy Winehouse really loud.

My agents didn't want me to go by my Japanese name ‘Tomo mori Fukuda’ because they didn't want to "ethnicise" me. So I go by Will Sharpe. I'd audition to play maths nerds and people called Michael Cheung and techies sat at dashboards on space ships warning heroes about incoming danger. I'd be asked if I could do martial arts. I could never pass as a white actor, but I could pass as a white writer. So, once again, it was down to us to make things happen.

By now, you knew everything about me. It was you who defined me. You helped me to say things that I didn’t know I needed to say. We did some beautiful things together. It was also, at times, really hard. And when I was down, it felt even harder. Also, we were spending time together now because we had to, not because we wanted to, which everyone knows is a buzzkill.

I started to hate you. I hated that you wanted so much from me, that every time I sat down at the computer you were asking me to cut out pieces of my heart and to haemorrhage you pints of my blood. And to make you laugh while I was doing it. It was like you were reaching a fist down my gullet and yanking at my organs, trying to shake out little shivers of my soul. You kicked the shit out of me day after day and expected me to show up again the next morning like everything was fine. In the end it was just like – fuck you. I didn't want to do it anymore.

But then you'd show up in the dawn, or in the mist, or on the top deck of a bus. You'd scoop me up and fly me around the city. We'd skim the clouds and I'd watch as you showered the Earth with colours and secrets and feelings and ideas. And I'd remem ber that I love you. And that I need you. And that these were the only times, maybe, that I feel properly alive. And I'd forget all the other weeks, when I just wanted someone to run over my skull with a truck so I wouldn't have to think any fucking thoughts anymore. I guess that's why I felt like we could use a little break.

So anyway, it's been a while. I'm sorry I've been absent. Stuff's happened. The world is irredeemably changed. I'm firmly in my thirties. My wife is a superhero. I have actual children. I caught one in our living room. Nothing feels real. How are you? Shall we do this? Can I trust you? Will you dance with me to the edge of this cliff? Am I the hawk? Are you the hawk?

Shall we jump?

Photography assistant Ella Pavlides

Hiroshi Matsushita using Oribe hair care & Kheils

thanks to The Production Factory, London

My Bear Can Talk

By Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE is one of the UK’s most esteemed writers. Following her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she has gone on to write dozens of books – all in print in 22 countries – and won various awards for her fiction and adaptations, including the Whitbread Prize and the Prix d'argent, Cannes Film Festival. The following extract is taken from her most recent work, 12 Bytes, an illuminating collection of essays that draws upon history, religion, myth, literature and computer science to explore the radical manifestations and consequences Artificial Intelligence will have on how we live, communicate and love

Robot...

The word is a Czech coinage from robota, meaning ‘drudgery’ or ‘forced labour’. R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) is a 1921 play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek.

It’s a strange and far-sighted play. The robots do all the work for the self-important humans. Eventually – inevitably – they get tired of this and revolt, killing all the humans, except one, an engineer. On the way to this core-fantasy apocalypse, there’s a robot-rights league, and a misguided heroine called Helena, who wants to save robots who don’t want to be saved, and who discovers there is a robot replica of her. (Maybe Fritz Lang borrowed this idea in his 1927 movie Metropolis, featuring Maria, a fembot replica.)

In Čapek’s play robots are not made of metal. They are biological organisms, spun out of proteins and bacteria, and closer in kind to the low-grade humans in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

That’s the part Čapek got wrong – he couldn’t imagine a substrate not made of meat. His play is really an allegory about what hap pens if capitalists treat workers like machines – but he did kick off the popular sci-fi trope of robots who will someday turn on humans and try to destroy us.

But for all the Terminators out there, our robot-imagination is surprisingly gentle too: WALL·E, C-3PO, R2-D2, Data, the Iron Giant, Baymax from Big Hero. As technology advances, custom ised robots based on your favourite cartoon character will be avail able. What they do will be programmable – my Frogbot will tell stories. Your Frogbot will sing. Linking the programmes links the robots, so that children can share their friend.

For adults the range will be unlimited. A helperbot can guide you round the shops, just as a self-driving car guides itself round town. Mobility scooters will chat with you as you ride along, and if your friend is nearby, your scooter will ‘know’.

Anything we start talking to develops into a relationship. If peo ple can form a bond with the fish in their fish tank – and they do – forming a bond with a non-bio helper won’t be a problem.

So, what are the resistances?

Humans still use the word robot to describe a less-than-human response. It is always an insult. Human responses, though, are

often unpredictable and savage. We are evolved, not made, and we bring to the 21st-century dinosaur traits that are pointing to our demise. Why wouldn’t it be good for children to grow up round a friendly, patient, non-judgemental, not angry creature who can teach a little human not just maths and code, but the virtues of trust and co-operation, of sharing and kindness?

It doesn’t matter if we have programmed the Talking Bear to behave in this way. Human behavioural traits are inherited but they are also learned. How we are raised is a significant determiner of who we are.

Robots won’t be bringing up our children – at least not yet – but they could have a positive and stabilising effect on humans of any age. In my view it is better for a child – or an older person – to have a benign interactive presence in their lives than to be plonked in front of the TV or moving screen all day.

Much of the worry around kids spending too much time on their screens could be alleviated by a robot presence. Talking matters. Therapy is called the talking cure; when humans speak aloud it affects our thoughts, our thought processes and our thought pat terns. Shy children, asocial children, children on the spectrum, children who find communication troublesome, or just kids who need someone/something to talk to, will benefit from a 3D entity that appears to listen. I am not even sure that ‘appears to listen’ is correct. How often do we just need a sympathetic ear? And we all know that we spend half our lives not really listening as someone downloads or lets off steam – and that is fine. There is a presence.

Presence is important. It doesn’t have to be biological. And if it did, prayer would be ineffective. When humans talk to their god, they feel better.

One of the arguments against both meaningful relationships with robots, and our own augmentation with AI technology, is that humans are embodied. Our brain is embodied. Our emo tions are embodied. We cannot experience what it would be like not to have a body – though we can imagine it. In fact, anyone who believes in an afterlife is looking forward to being a no-body.

Whatever you believe about life after death, even the most sec ular of us cannot help talking to the recently dead we have lost. To hold that connection – at least for a while – seems to be pro tective to our mental health. Hold it too long and we are living with a ghost. When we lose someone we love – when they leave

us, or death takes them – what is taken is not only a 3D body; what is taken is a pattern in our brain.

Microsoft filed a patent in 2021 to use social data to build a chat bot of any person, dead or alive. Stored data can be run through a programme to learn how the person might respond. Voice is easy to copy. In theory, your dead companion can be always with you. You can talk.

Google has also filed a patent for a digital clone that can capture someone’s ‘emotional attributes’. This is supposedly to make syn thetic PA services more responsive. In fact, it is likely to be used as a tool of persuasion, probably for predictive purchasing. When there is an emotional connection, we are easier to persuade. So, if your dead husband suddenly likes a dress you are looking at online – don’t buy it to please him.

How will any of this affect and alter the grieving process? How will humans move on if we don’t have to?

We all know people who live in the past. Their most vivid reality isn’t in the here and now at all. But with a ‘live’ chatbot, the past will be the continuous present.

Humans are strange. We focus so much on the body and yet much of our relevant and vital life isn’t embodied at all.

Given our capacity to live outside the 3D world that we can touch and feel, and given the strong non-physical links we can have with others – it is possible to speak on the phone for years – possi ble to connect only by email – then why wouldn’t we be able to form a meaningful bond with a non-embodied system? Or form a bond with a robot that is also an operating system? The thing about AI is that it can be simultaneous. The dream of being in two places at once is easy if you are software powered by electricity.

You could have a social robot at home – several of them if you like – but their physical unit of being is not their only representation. You could leave your actual robot at home, and travel with your operating system only, just as you travel with your phone or lap top. Not only does communication continue between you and your travelling operating system, but your at-home 3D robot is part of the picture, because AI systems can be linked.

Also, the system can subdivide, so that your operating system and your robot can talk to each other, as well as to you. OK, so

they are not ‘talking’ – they are sharing information. The point is, you get the best of both worlds: your PA bot, or your compan ion-bot, or your emotional-support bot, is with you and not with you. This will particularly appeal to Geminis.

Think of all the stories you know where the hero has an invisi ble helper.

In the Greek myths, that helper is one of the gods or goddesses. Ulysses – also known as Odysseus – is aided by Hera/Athena in multiple forms as she guides him back to Ithaca. Zeus comes along disguised as thunder. Then there is Mercury, the non-bi nary heartthrob with the trickster smile. Ulysses expects to meet every kind of creature on his hero journey. What he doesn’t expect is that they will be human. Or even biological life-forms.

The gods arrive for a conversation – unseen but audible – or they manifest in physical form when necessary. Space-time is irrele vant if your helper is non-bio, which the gods are, even though they appear as humans most of the time. The non-human helper brings information – they search the internet faster than we can –and they offer support wherever you are, because they don’t have to book a flight or take time off work. That sounds like AI to me. It’s the Greeks who gave us the go-to myth for geeks (not Greeks): Pygmalion, whose carving comes to life. In its crude version, this is sexbot paradise, a make-your-own-girl-and-then-marryher, but really, we’re talking about retro-fitting an operating sys tem into a robot. In the past, only the gods could do this. Even humans, if we believe the Bible, start out as a clay doll ‘breathed’ into by Yahweh.

In the Old Testament, Yahweh appears as a cloud. As the cloud stores all our data, it is reasonable to assume that the Israelites were ahead of themselves with this particular image of the All Knowing.

A fundamental psychological departure for both Judaism and Islam – compared to the wash of cult religions swirling round in the East – was the insight that the all-knowing deity is invisible and can’t be captured by totemic physical models or images. Hence, in Judaism, the prohibition against graven images and statues. In Islam, we find the beautiful use of abstract patterns to repre sent that which is fundamentally non-human, non-biological, a presence that is connected to us, but that is of a different order. It is difficult for humans to manage abstract thinking without something 3D to hold on to – the Roman Catholic Church under

stood that, and filled places of worship with statues, villages with shrines, feast days with carvings of saints, and gave the faithful amulets, relics, and rosaries in their hands – literally – in order to concentrate on the ineffable and unknowable ‘other’.

It is not until the Protestant Reformation, kicking off in 1517 in Germany, with Martin Luther, that all the 3D paraphernalia of the Catholic Church gets booted out. The Reformation wasn’t just about beliefs – it was about stuff. Even by our consumer ist standards of madness, the Catholic Church was big on stuff. And on dressing up.

The Reformation hated outfits. And baubles. And incense. And chasubles. And big hats. And bells. Out went statues, stained glass, relics, paintings, until there was less and less, until we reached the uber-puritan version of a plain white room and a black suit of clothes.

When I look back at that vast, convulsive, hard-fought and bit ter transformation – whatever your religious beliefs, or none – I wonder whether, psychologically, it points to another milestone on the way to understanding that our true human nature – let alone the nature of anything beyond human – isn’t best repre sented by objects, however beautiful.

Robots will be accepted into our daily lives precisely because they are not human. We think about robots in practical terms – but there is an existential element here too.

Robots will expand our definition of what is alive-ness. And return us to what is a richer understanding of the interplay and inter dependence between embodiment and non-embodiment. While we will use robots as labour-saving devices and helpers for some time to come, I think we are on the road to realising that robots will act as transitional objects for humans as we move towards pure Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

It may be that humans need transitional objects because our bod ies are, in themselves, transitional objects.

Just as our inner life feels independent of our physical life, and just as so much of what we value is thought-dependent, memo ry-dependent, reflective of what is beyond the reach of the body, so I think we will, eventually, be able to let go of our bodies.

Robots will have other existential benefits too.

If humans are going to live longer, thanks to bio-enhancements that slow the ageing process, our goals and focus will change. Life stages will change. We already outsource memory. I imagine us visiting memory banks, where an AI helper will retrieve parts of our past for us – talk us through it. That helper might be a social robot who has been in the family forever. And when we do lose a biological loved one, it may be that we don’t need a replica chatbot to keep that person alive – it may be that our social-ro bot companions can find the balance to help us remember – and later, to let us forget. That’s not neglect of the past; it’s allow ing it to be past.

I imagine that as AI learns to update, upgrade and programme itself, as it learns with us, as well as learns about us, as it shares a life with us, that there will be the little surprises to be found in every relationship. Robotic won’t be an insult; it may become a term of admiration or endearment. How like a robot may be what we say when the current narcissistic desire to make it all about me finally gives way to what we learn from a life-form that is hive-con nected and focused on connectivity as a basic way of sharing.

I could take the dystopian view – these are false connections in a false world. But that would assume that where we are now is the uber-real.

I prefer to believe that where we are now is a stage on the way. We look back, even just 50 years, and we wonder how everybody lived in nuclear marriages, happy or not – when interracial or same-sex relationships were taboo. When single mothers were objects of shame.

50 years ago few people used computers. There were no smart phones. There was no streaming. No social network.

In 50 years from now we will wonder how we lived before AI sys tems and their robots came to live with us. By then, I am confi dent AI will have developed into AGI and humans and alterna tive life-forms will share the planet together.

They won’t be called robots.

On the Question of Privatising the Mandem

By Nabil Al-Kinani

Nabil Al-Kinani is a built-environment professional and cultural producer whose work explores urbanism, sustainable development and spatial politics. His urgent manifesto and blueprint detailing how inner-city communities can acquire the freehold of their buildings through legislative tools and collective action, Privatise the Mandem, was published in May 2022. In the following essay, Al-Kinani investigates the demise of common land, the dire consequences of its commodification, and argues why the ‘regeneration’ of London’s social housing estates remains fundamentally interested in profit rather than people

Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the 1649 Diggers movement, once proclaimed that the Earth is to be a “common treasury for all”. The Diggers were agrarian socialists who vehemently opposed the enclosure of land by the act of raising a physical barrier such as a wall, hedge or fence around previously common land. Com mon land refers to land that is not under the ownership of a state (government, authority or council), or the market (private sector organisations or private citizens); but one that is self-managed by a collective of individuals, i.e. the commoners.

During the mid-1600s, commoners were stripped of their access to what was previously common land, along with all of the nat ural resources it possessed. Access was reserved solely for the landowners and whoever they would grant access to. The Diggers fought this concept of the privatisation of land and the commod ification of the commons, by calling for the abolition of property ownership and disrupting the newly formed enclosures through practices such as land-squatting and planting their crops in the newly enclosed land.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and the act of claiming owner ship of land is largely encouraged – as culturally, the acquisition of land and property is seen as an indicator of success. Econom ically, the market assigns exponential value to land, and proper ties are classified as a lucrative capital asset in the eyes of global finance capitalism.

The present-day Abahlali baseMjondolo movement formed in South Africa in 2005 employs similar techniques to the Diggers, using methods such as land occupations, protest and transport disruptions in order to address housing and land issues in Dur ban. The movement’s mission is to assert the social value of land over the perceived commercial value. In fact, what drove both campaigns is the notion that land is not to be claimed by human beings, because it is owned by a higher deity. A member of the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement asserts that…

“It is a sin for anyone to own land. Land comes from God and it cannot be owned”

The concept of land ownership, as modern society understands it today, was non-existent in pre-colonial South Africa. This is not to say that any and every individual could roam around, unbound by etiquette and decorum – but that the relationship between human and land was of a different nature. Instead of the tradi tional hierarchical system of a “land-owners” possessing exclusive rights and interest over space, pre-colonial South African com munities had put emphasis on a more ecological system. People had obligations to a space, in relation to other people who had also occupied the space. Their protected rights were not limited to “rights over the property” but instead “rights of use”, imply ing that people temporarily had rights over the use of a resource, whilst the resource is in use.

The early human transition into settler lifestyles from nomadic life styles contributed greatly to the commodification of the com mons. As settlers lay their claims on a land, they inherently claim the exclusive “rights over the property” – thus excluding others from the resource which exists in the land and reducing the over all supply of resource to other people. This reduced supply natu rally creates a deficiency in resource, giving “land-owners” an eco nomic advantage over others. This commodification of land and property through mediums such as settler lifestyles and colonial expansion saw the ultimate demise of the commons – land that is unclaimed by humans does not exist anymore.

As highlighted in Guy Shrubsole’s book Who Owns England?, this reality is played out in England, where the majority of land is owned by either the state (public sector, the Crown), or the mar ket (private sector organisations or private citizens). Shrubsole suspects that the unaccounted for land (17%) that seemingly has no owner, is in fact under the ownership of aristocracy that has not registered their claim on land at the Land Registry – as these

estates have been inherited for centuries, long before the crea tion of the Land Registry in 1862.

In his 1968 book Le droit à la ville, French Marxist Henri Lefebvre describes the transformative power that an urban space (the “city”, along with its transformation) has on its inhabitants. He goes as far as to call for the control of urban spaces to be removed from the market and into the hands of the people – naming this con cept, “the right to the city”:

“The right to the city is […] far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts' desire.”

The right of urban transformation was once reserved for com moners, where a collective right over land meant that the trans formation of common land was shaped by its users. But following centuries of enclosure and land-grabbing, the modern landscape has become a patchwork of land parcels under the ownership of the state and the market. And ultimately, it is landowners who solely possess the transformative power of urban transforma tion within their claim.

N.B. the nature of capitalism is the relentless pursuit of self-in terest, as described by philosopher and economist Adam Smith:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

The market’s primary interest lies in the generation of surplus capital, and any urban change within its claim will be shaped by that interest.

Alternatively, state-owned land holds the interests of the peo

ple rather than profit… right? In theory, the state is bound by the Nolan Principles, which are seven values to be upheld by all public servants and elected officials holding offices both locally and nationally. And the first of the Nolan Principles is ‘selflessness’, defined as acting solely in the interests of the public. Therefore, there is an assumption that a landowner who is bound by a prin ciple of ‘selflessness’ would not act in self-interest (thus provid ing its people with access to state-owned land, along with the resources that it possesses).

But in practice the state falls short of the interests of its people, when exercising the transformative power it possesses over its claim. And the source of the majority of all these state failings is the subjective definition of the interests of the people

In the context of New York, USA, notable state urban planner Rob ert Moses had transformed the city to be shaped around the use of motor vehicles, and intentionally failed to design infrastruc ture for public transit systems such as rail and bus services. He staunchly believed that the interests of the people were to traverse America in motor vehicles, and so he designed and constructed approximately 627 miles of motorways for the city inhabitants. By designing for motor vehicles, he had designed out the major ity of non-motor vehicle forms of transit. And consequently, his bias towards a ‘type’ of American who could afford a motor vehi cle (largely driven by his racist and classist views), designed out a large group of users who were limited to travelling across New York via public transportation.

Moses held biases against ‘slum’ areas of New York and would clear the ‘slums’ in order to make space for expressways he intended for the city – viewing the demolished spaces, along with its inhab itants as collateral damage towards the interest of the people he served. His damage has been captured through photography taken at the time, with countless images of trenches cutting through

the Bronx in the 1980s for the Cross Bronx Expressway, displac ing approximately 1,500 families.

Robert Moses stands testament to the destructive power that urban transformation can have on communities, when in the hands of the state. This example of state-backed urban trans formation failings can also be observed in modern-day London, UK, where swathes of urban spaces are falling victim to gentrifi cation – a term first coined in the 1960s by Ruth Glass and pop ularised by Prof. Loretta Lees, it’s defined as:

“The transformation of a working-class or vacant area of the cen tral city to a middle class residential and/or commercial use.”

These working-class areas are usually social housing estates and are colloquially referred to as the “ends”, a term born from Mul ticultural London English (MLE) and which is the result of Brit ain’s history of migration. A sizable majority of non-English communities disproportionally inhabit the “ends”, due to the various socioeconomic challenges that they face in the country. These social housing estates are usually owned by public sector entities, where rent payments are often supplemented through state welfare provision. Similar to the urban renewal process that took place in the Bronx under Robert Moses; numerous munic ipalities have called on the regeneration of the London’s social housing estates due to various reasons – one of which is the eco nomic landscape.

The 2010 UK General Election saw the formation of a Conserva tive and Liberal Democrat coalition government. What quickly fol lowed was a decade-long series of austerity measures implemented across the nation. Budgets allocated to housing, health, policing and public services have experienced steep reductions, reducing local authority resources. Running concurrently, a chronic short age in housing supply fails to meet housing demand. And against

the interest of the people, the state seeks to meet the demand of the market by regenerating social housing estates.

So, why is regeneration of London’s social housing estates not in the interest of the people? Put simply, it does not meet the needs of the inhabitants – but instead displaces them. The net losses of social tenure homes during estate regeneration schemes are due to various constraints experienced by the state – due to austerity measures, much of the regeneration proposals put forward for approval are joint venture partnerships with private sector organ isations called public-private partnerships (PPPs), as the state alone cannot deliver on the housing supply needed to meet the market’s demand. As private sector organisations’ interest pri marily lies in gaining the highest possible return on investment, they lobby the state in order to grant permissions for regeneration projects and to shape housing policies (such as the identification of “Opportunity Areas” for development). And thus, the lines between the state and the market become increasingly blurred.

So, what about privatising the “ends”? Allowing the communi ties who inhabit social housing estates to acquire ownership of the space they occupy means that the power of urban transfor mation is no longer outsourced to the state, but into the hands of the people.

If a community is able to acquire ownership of their urban space, and collectively agree to a new way of governing their space (one that does not seek the self-interests of individuals, but the inter est of the collective) – privatisation has the potential to create a new form of city. One that is shaped by the Mandem.

Privatise the Mandem by Nabil Al-Kinani was published in May 2022

Nights of Plague By Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author, with celebrated books including My Name is Red, Snow and The Museum of Innocence. His latest epic, Nights of Plague – one of its opening chapters shared here, translated by Ekin Oklap – imagines a terrible disease devastating the fictional island of Mingheria, the twenty-ninth state of the ailing Ottoman Empire. Murder, myth, religion and fear are deftly woven to form a faux-historical tapestry that feels both urgent and contemporary

Chapter 3

When Bayram Effendi had felt the first symptoms of illness five days ago, he had not taken them seriously. He had developed a fever, his heart rate had sped up, and he’d felt shivery. But it was probably just a cold he’d caught that morning from spending too much time walking around the Castle’s windy bastions and courtyards! In the afternoon the next day his fever returned, but this time it was accompanied by fatigue. He had no desire to eat anything, and at one point he lay down in the stone courtyard, looked up at the sky, and felt that he might die. It was as if some one were hammering a nail into his skull.

For twenty-five years Bayram Effendi had been a guard in the pris ons of Mingheria’s famous Arkaz Castle. He had seen long-serving convicts chained up and forgotten about in their cells, watched handcuffed inmates walk in a line in the yard for their daily exer cise, and witnessed the arrival of a group of political prisoners Sultan Abdul Hamid had locked up fifteen years ago. He remem bered how primitive the prison used to be in those days (though in truth it still was), and wholeheartedly trusted and supported the attempts that had recently been made to modernise it, to turn it into an ordinary prison or perhaps even a reformatory. Even when the flow of money from Istanbul was interrupted and he had to go for months without pay, he wouldn’t rest unless he had personally attended the prisoner count every evening.

When he was struck again the next day, as he walked through one of the prison’s narrow passageways, by the same shatter ing exhaustion, he decided not to go home that night. His heart was beating alarmingly fast now. He found an empty cell, where he lay writhing in pain on a bed of straw in the corner. He was shivering, too, and had developed an unbearable headache. The pain was located near the front of his head, in his forehead. He wanted to scream, but he was convinced that if he kept quiet, this strange agony would somehow disappear, so instead he gritted his teeth. There was a press, a roller, upon his head, squeezing it flat.

So the guard spent the night in the Castle. He would do this some times—when he had a night shift, say, or if he’d had to deal with a minor riot or a scuffle—instead of going back to his house a ten-minute ride away on a horse-drawn gig, so his wife and his daughter, Zeynep, were not concerned by his absence. The fam ily was in the midst of various preparations and negotiations for Zeynep’s imminent wedding, which meant there were quarrels and long faces at home every night, with either the guard’s wife or his daughter ending up in tears.

When Bayram Effendi woke up in the cell the next morning and inspected his body, he found near his groin, just above and to the left of his perineum, a white boil the size of his little finger. It looked like a bubo. It hurt when he pressed on it with his thick index finger, as if it were filled with pus, but reverted to its orig inal shape as soon as he took his finger away. The bubo didn’t hurt unless he touched it. Bayram Effendi felt oddly guilty. He was lucid enough to know that this boil was connected to the fatigue, the tremors, and the deliriousness he had been experiencing.

What should he do? A Christian or a government clerk or a sol dier or a pasha in his position would go to a doctor or to a hos pital if there was one. When there was an outbreak of diarrhea or contagious fever in a prison dormitory, that dormitory was quarantined. But sometimes, a defiant dormitory chief would put up a fight against quarantine measures, and his fellow pris oners would suffer the consequences. In the quarter century he’d spent in the Castle, Bayram Effendi had seen some of the old Vene tian-era buildings and courtyards on the seafront used not just as dungeons and jailhouses but as customhouses and quarantine facilities (known in the olden days as lazarettos) too, so he was not unfamiliar with these matters. But he was also aware that no quarantine measure could protect him now. He could feel that he had fallen into the grip of some uncanny force, and he slept and slept, moaning and raving in his terrified, unconscious state. But the pain kept returning in waves, until he realized despairingly that the force he was grappling with was far greater than he was.

The next day he managed to briefly gather some strength. He joined the crowds at the Blind Mehmet Pasha Mosque for mid day prayers. He saw two clerks he knew and embraced them in greeting. He tried with much effort to follow the sermon but struggled to understand it. He felt dizzy and nauseated, and he could barely sit upright. The preacher didn’t mention the disease at all and kept repeating that everything that happened was the will of God. As the crowds dispersed, Bayram Effendi thought he might lie down on the mosque’s carpets and kilims to rest for a while and suddenly realized he was drifting out of conscious ness, about to faint. When they came to wake him up, he sum moned whatever energy he had left to hide the fact that he was unwell (though perhaps they already knew).

By now he could sense his own imminent death, and he wept, feeling that this was an injustice and demanding to know why he had been singled out in this way. He left the mosque and went to see the holy man in the neighborhood of Germe who handed out prayer sheets and amulets and was said to talk openly about the plague and the mystery of death. But the fat sheikh whose name Bayram Effendi couldn’t remember didn’t seem to be there. Instead, a smiling young man in a lopsided fez issued Bayram Effendi and two others, who, like him, had come from the mid day payers, a consecrated amulet and a prayer sheet each. Bay ram Effendi tried to read the writing on the prayer sheet, but he couldn’t see properly. He felt guilty about this and became agi tated, knowing that his death was going to be his own fault.

When the sheikh eventually arrived, Bayram Effendi remem bered that he had just seen him at the midday prayers. The holy man was indeed very fat and had a beard as long and white as his hair. He smiled kindly at Bayram Effendi and began to explain how the prayer sheets were to be used; at night, when the plague demon manifested itself in the darkness, one must recite thir ty-three times each the following three names of Allah: Ar-Raqib,

Al-Muqtadir, and Al-Baaqi. If the prayer sheet and the amulet were pointed in the direction of the demon, even nineteen repetitions could be sufficient to repel the scourge. When he realized how gravely ill Bayram Effendi was, the sheikh drew back from him a little. This did not escape the prison guard’s notice. The sheikh explained that even if there was no time to recite the names of God, he could still achieve a good result by wearing the amulet around his neck and placing his right index finger over it just so. More precisely, he should use his right index finger if the plague boil was on the left-hand side of his body, and his left index fin ger if the boil was on the right-hand side. The sheikh also told him that if he began to stutter, he should hold the amulet in both hands, but by that point Bayram Effendi was finding it difficult to keep track of all of these rules and decided to return to his home nearby. His beautiful daughter Zeynep wasn’t there. His wife started crying when she saw how sick he was. She made his bed with sheets fresh from the linen cupboard, and Bayram Effendi lay down; he was shaking uncontrollably, and when he tried to speak, his mouth was so dry that the words would not come out.

There seemed to be a storm breaking inside his head. He kept twitching and jerking where he lay, as if someone were chas ing him, as if something had startled or angered him. His wife Emine wept even harder at the sight of these strange spasms, and when he saw her tears, Bayram Effendi understood that he was going to die soon.

When Zeynep came home in the early evening, Bayram Effendi rallied for a time. He told them that the amulet around his neck would protect him, then fell back into a delirious sleep. He had a series of strange dreams and nightmares; now he was rising and falling with the waves of a roaring sea! Now there were winged lions, talking fish, and armies of dogs running through fire! Then the flames spread to the rats, fiery demons who tore rosebushes apart with their teeth. The pulley of a water well, a windmill, an

open door kept turning and turning, and the universe contracted. Drops of sweat seemed to be falling from the sun onto his face. He felt restless; he felt like running away; his mind alternately raced and froze. Worst of all, the hordes of rats that just two weeks ago had shrieked and wailed their way through the dun geons, the Castle, and all of Mingheria, invading kitchens and devouring all the straw and cloth and wood in their path, now seemed to be chasing him through the prison corridors. Worried that he might recite the wrong prayer, Bayram Effendi tried to outrun them instead. He spent the final hours of his life shout ing with all the strength he had to make himself heard to the creatures he saw in his sleep, yet he struggled to make a sound. Zeynep was kneeling beside him now, trying to contain her sobs as she watched over him.

Then, like many who fell ill with the plague, he seemed to make a sudden recovery. His wife served him a bowl of hot, fragrant wheat soup with red chili, a recipe that was popular across the vil lages of Mingheria. (Bayram Effendi had only ever left the island once in his entire life.) After he’d had his soup, sipping at it slowly as if it were some kind of elixir, and recited some of the prayers the fat holy man had suggested, he felt better.

He must go and make sure they didn’t make any mistakes with the prisoner count tonight. He would not be gone for long. So he’d said, as if he were talking to himself, when he had left his house for the last time without even a farewell to his family—as if he were merely heading for the privy in the garden. His wife and daughter did not believe that he had recovered and wept as they watched him go.

Around the time for evening prayers, Bayram Effendi first made his way toward the shore. He saw horse-drawn carriages, door men, and gentlemen in hats waiting outside the Hotel Splendid and the Hotel Majestic. He walked past the offices of the ferry

companies that operated routes to Smyrna, Chania, and Istanbul and around the back of the customs building. When he reached the Hamidiye Bridge, his strength ran out. He thought he might fall over and die. It was the time of day when the city was at its liveliest and most colourful, and under the palm trees and the plane trees, on the sunny streets, and among all those people with their warm and friendly faces, it seemed that life was, per haps, quite good after all. Under the bridge flowed the Arkaz Creek, its waters a celestial shade of green; behind him was the historic covered market and the old bridge; in front of him was the Castle whose prisons he’d guarded all his life. He stood there for a time, quietly weeping until he was too exhausted to do even that. The orange light from the sun made the Castle look even pinker than it was.

With one last effort he walked in the shade of palm and plane trees down the dusty street with the Telegraph Office, and all the way back to the shore. He crossed the old city’s meandering alleys, near the buildings dating from the Venetian era, and entered the Castle. Witnesses would later say they saw the guard attending the prisoner count outside the door to dormitory number two, and drinking a glass of linden tea in the guards’ recreation room.

But no one saw him again after nightfall. A young guard had heard someone crying and screaming in a cell on the floor below around the same time the Aziziye was approaching the port, but had forgotten about it in the ensuing silence.

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (translated by Ekin Oklap) is pub lished by Faber, out now

We Are Us Now

By Anthony Anaxagorou

Anthony Anaxagorou is a British-born Cypriot poet, fiction writer, essayist, publisher and poetry educator. His second collection, After the Formalities, is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the 2019 T.S. Eliot Prize. The following poem is taken from the award-winning writer’s upcoming collection, Heritage Aesthetics. Channelling his family’s migratory histories between Cyprus and the UK, Anaxagorou’s restlessly experimental work interrogates how nations, citizens and their bloodlines continue to be shaped by the twin forces of colonialism and patriarchy

Sergeant Clerk is the Acorn’s clerk But is prone to get in rages.

If the Wogs give any trouble He puts them into cages.

– The Grenadier magazine, published in British Cyprus, 1958

Boy at the back, why have you come here the wrong way round & why do you struggle to tell the group how many of the tribe you’ve brought along with you?

I love this country (I do) but its yesterday is father-terrifying we swapped a cage for a cage as you do both grandparents splitting mops & bruised plums Christmas ’88

that was my family living with the family from next door the kids by the barbed wire fence playing with prayers they couldn’t use dressing me in a flag that was unlike mine

(God grew into a secret way of admitting trouble)

each Remembrance Sunday I knelt in a field behind the house where only twigs found it in them to bend a shot rabbit running from what I couldn’t see most of life happens behind us or has happened in a different colour the TV in our kitchen lost its mind at my mother’s immigrant face

despite her best shepherd’s pie

my father his briefcase made of genuine leather said boy wherever you stand make sure you can be seen

&

don’t move don’t say another fucking thing

Heritage Aesthetics by Anthony Anaxagorou is published by Granta, November 2022

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Susan Sontag’s diaries reveal a witty fondness for the humble list as a way of conferring value and exploring the realms of her knowledge. Her lists of likes and dislikes have become justly notorious. Here, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and celebrated author Steven Pinker picks up that baton.

DISLIKE

LIKE

Graphs, especially plots of human progress / Irregular verbs / Hardware stores / Beethoven’s 7th / Scala Sans typeface / Humane abolitions (human sacrifice; slavery; executions; corporal punishment; dueling; harems) / Aspirations to new abolitions (extreme poverty; interstate war; nuclear weapons ) / Neon signs, especially on old motels and bars / Children’s speech errors (We holded the baby rabbits; Don’t giggle me!; Button me the rest) / German camera equipment / The mind-body problem (philosophical conundrum and Rebecca Goldstein novel) / Hard bop jazz / Children’s explanations (“Clouds are water vapor; smoke is fire vapor”) / Beachcombing / Astral Weeks / Let It Bleed / Rubber Soul / Derek and the Dominos / Blonde on Blonde / The Band / Blue / Deep analogies / Stereo (3D) photography / Stylish academic writing / Old synagogues / Herons / Long city walks / Paradoxes of behavior explained / Italian racing bicycles / Combinatoriality (words in phrases, bases in DNA, subroutines in programs, thoughts about thoughts) / Danish audio equipment / Perceptual illusions / 1960s British cars / Bayes’ theorem / Ghost signs on brick walls / Billie, Ella, Sarah, Dinah / Driving rural roads / Cognitive illusions / Lighthouses / Game theory / Art, Oscar, Thelonious, McCoy / Colour (experience and theory) / Morbid epitaphs / Style manuals / Alliteration and parallelism (“colour of our skin…content of our character”) / Bennie, Ziggy, Duke, Count / Moby Dick / Klezmer / Hummingbirds / North By Northwest, Vertigo, Rear Window / Streamline Moderne architecture / Huckleberry Finn / Film noir / Show Me (sexiest song ever?) / Jewish humor / Ether Monument (Boston statue commemorating anesthesia) / Pale Fire / Rock concert films, especially The Last Waltz / Tandem bicycling and kayaking / The Godfather Parts I & II / Ghost towns / 1984 / Montreal bagels / English Breakfast tea / Frogs and toads / Isaac Bashevis Singer / Iconography of the British monarchy / Flamboyant solitary wildflowers, like Lady’s Slippers / Pygmalion / Swallowtails / Guernica / The Montreal Canadiens hockey team / Samuel Adams Boston Lager

SUVs / Curse of knowledge (experts who think what’s obvious to them is obvious to everyone) / Chocolate / Plastic signs / Twitter snark / Products bloated in size, features, menus / Property of the British monarchy / Nonstandard abbreviations / Harsh toothpaste / Academese, legalese, corporatese, bureaucratese / Classic soul & rock songs used in ads / Prepared zingers in debates / The Godfather Part III / Mindless copy-editing… / “Safe” meaning “No one disagrees with me” / Humorlessness / Contemporary pop / Leftists who assume all good people are, too / Guns / Contemporary classical / Sameness mistaken for fairness / Weak tea / Statistically illiterate journalism / Noisome dogs / Claims that something “changes your brain” / Language peeves mistaken for errors / Ostentatious erudition mistaken for insight / Clichés / Innumerate environmentalism (banning plastic straws while shuttering nuclear power plants) / Acidic coffee / Mentioning a slur and mistaken for using it / University administrator boilerplate / Soft apples / Pompous dialogue in historical dramas / Baffling user interfaces (press buttons in arbitrary combinations or for two seconds) / Censorship / Brutalist architecture / False dichotomies / Boomboxes on beaches / Rejection of truth, objectivity, reason / Car alarms / Sacrifice confused with virtue / “The kids today” / Single events mistaken for trends / Warm beer / Superhero & fantasy movies / Shocking conceptual art / Authoritarian populist, national conservate, neo-reactionary politics / Religion credited as the source of morality / Establishing spheres of influence, rectifying historic humiliations / Disgusting food in chic restaurants (offal, raw egg, game) / Social media shaming mobs / Proprietary chargers / Science schmaltz (distorting biology for dubious moral uplift)