Port Issue 24 by Port

dior.com

GLISS MASTER WARDROBE— VINCENT VAN DUYSEN D.151.4 ARMCHAIR— GIO PONTI

MILANO PARIS LONDON NEW YORK ATHENS BEIRUT BEIJING BRUSSELS BUDAPEST CHENGDU CHICAGO DUBAI GENEVA HELSINKI HONG KONG ISTANBUL JAKARTA KIEV MADRID MANILA MEXICO CITY MIAMI MOSCOW NANJING OSAKA SEOUL SHANGHAI SINGAPORE TEHERAN TOKYO TORONTO

#MolteniGroup

GenerAction Artemide Eliott Sarrey, French, 18 years old Eliott is a robotic enthusiast and the winner of the Google Science Fair Incubator price. He created Bot2Karot, the first robot able to manage your garden by smartphone control.

“O” Elemental

Contents

The Porter Words Alfred Mallory Jo Lawson-Tancred, Alex Doak Vincent Van Duysen, Simon March Kian Samyani, Dryden Goodwin George Upton, Pierre Hardy Helen Jukes, Ruth Rogers Nicholas Blechman

Truth and Fiction The coolest man in Hollywood, Samuel L Jackson, on a career spanning five decades Words ZZ Packer Photography Ryan Pfluger Styling Dan May

78 40 42 44

Contributors Out-Take Editorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Letter

Desolation Angels Photography Tom Craig Creative direction and styling Dan May

The lovely people who helped make the issue Introducing Samuel L Jackson

106

Seditious Joy In the studio with New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most exciting artist, Simone Leigh Words Kerry Crowe Photography Valerie Chiang

90 28

Contents

116

Uncharted Territory Meet Harris Dickinson, the rising star of art house and big screen Photography Jack Davison Styling Rose Forde

128 The Goldsmithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Farm 137 Commentary

Words George Upton Guest Editor Sylvia Whitman Illustration Tamara Shopsin

162

Photography Fabrizio Albertini Words Yosano Akkiko, Marie Darrieussecq Deborah Levy, Jean Rhys, Sylvia Plath Jeanette Winterson

David Chipperfield Coffee in Berlin with Britain's most respected architect Words Fiona Shipwright Photography Eva Tuerbl

Music with Sound and Pictures Inside the mind of a modern renaissance man, Peter Mendelsund Words Dan Crowe Photography Maria Spann

152

Set Piece Photography Eleonora Agostini Creative direction Max Ferguson

176 33

Contents

184

Mist from the Hill Thirty years of the English landscape Words and photography Jem Southam

The Spring / Summer Collections Photography Misha Taylor Styling Rose Forde

198 212 246 256 262 264

Objets TrouvĂ¨s On Waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Edge The First in the Field Stockists Things I Like, Things I Dislike

Photography Marius Uhlig Photography Kyle Weeks Words Alfred Mallory Words Joyce Carol Oates

238 Dark Arts Photography Ilyes Griyeb Styling and art direction Rose Forde

A Kind of Amphitheatre Photography Mehdi Lacoste Styling Rose Forde

220 36

Styling and set design Michael Darlington Creative direction and styling Dan May

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Dan Crowe CREATIVE DIRECTOR Matt Willey

FASHION DIRECTOR Dan May DEPUTY EDITOR George Upton SENIOR FASHION EDITOR Rose Forde SENIOR EDITOR Kerry Crowe PHOTOGRAPHIC DIRECTOR Max Ferguson DESIGN EDITOR Max Fraser ART EDITOR Ling Ko ONLINE EDITOR Thomas Bolger COMMENTARY GUEST EDITOR Sylvia Whitman EUROPE EDITOR Donald Morrison US EDITOR Alex Vadukul AUSTRALIA EDITOR James W Mataitis Bailey INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jo Lawson-Tancred ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITOR Chloë Tibbatts

SENIOR EDITORS Deyan Sudjic, Design Tom Craig, Reportage Brett Steele, Architecture Alex Doak, Horology Fergus Henderson, Food Samantha Morton, Film Nathaniel Rich, Literature CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Richard Buckley Robert Macfarlane Kabir Chibber Albert Scardino Minnie Weisz

WORDS Yosano Akiko, Nicholas Blechman, Dan Crowe, Kerry Crowe Marie Darrieussecq, Alex Doak, Dryden Goodwin, Pierre Hardy Helen Jukes, Jo Lawson-Tancred, Deborah Levy, Alfred Mallory Simon March, ZZ Packer, Sylvia Plath, Jean Rhys, Ruth Rogers Kian Samyani, Fiona Shipwright, Jem Southam, George Upton Vincent Van Duysen, Sylvia Whitman, Jeanette Winterson PHOTOGRAPHY Eleonora Agostini, Fabrizio Albertini, Valerie Chiang, Tom Craig Jack Davison, Charlie Gates, Ilyes Griyeb, Sophie Gladstone Jasper Fry, Lewis Khan, Mehdi Lacoste, Ryan Pfluger Piergiorgio Sorgetti, Jem Southam, Maria Spann, Misha Taylor Eva Tuerbl, Marius Uhlig, Kyle Weeks

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 SYNDICATED ISSUES Port Spain portmagazine.es Port Turkey port-magazine.com.tr ISSN 2046-052X Port is published twice a year by Port Publishing Limited Vault 4 Somerset House Strand London WC2R 1LA port-magazine.com Port is printed by Taylor Bloxham Founded by Dan Crowe, Boris Stringer, Kuchar Swara and Matt Willey. Registered in England no. 7328345 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. All prices are correct at time of going to press but are subject to change. All paper used in the production of this magazine comes, as you would expect, from sustainable sources.

Samuel L Jackson, photographed in Los Angeles by Ryan Pfluger, wears LOUIS VUITTON Harris Dickinson, photographed in London by Jack Davison, wears PRADA “There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.” – Franz Kafka

Contributors

ZZ Packer Short-fiction writer ZZ Packer became known for her 2003 collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, following which she received the Guggenheim Fellowship, in 2005. Addressing themes of race, gender and sexuality, she has been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s and Granta, and is widely critically acclaimed, receiving both the Whiting and the PEN/Faulkner awards. Beginning her education at Yale, she later received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1999, before becoming a Stegner fellow at Stanford. Packer is currently working on her first novel.

Tom Craig Documentary and fashion photographer Tom Craig has been nominated as British Magazine Photographer of the Year three times, and his work has featured in Vogue, i-D, Vanity Fair, Esquire and the Sunday Times Magazine, where he has the regular column ‘Snap Shot’. Craig spent many years of his career travelling and documenting warzones, in collaboration with the humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, the results of which were collated in the essay collection Writers on the Edge. His work is frequently exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, and in 2012 he held a solo exhibition, The Bigger Picture, in London’s Mayfair.

Sylvia Whitman Sylvia Whitman inherited the iconic Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company – the second incarnation of the shop, established in 1919 and a popular haunt of the Lost Generation – from her father, George Whitman, in 2011. Having attended university in London, Whitman returned to Paris when she was 22 to manage the business, continuing her father’s tradition of supporting writers by offering free accommodation in exchange for help in the shop. In 2003, she founded the biennial literary festival FestivalandCo and, in 2010, launched the Paris Literary Prize, which offers 10,000 euros for unpublished work by new authors.

Deborah Levy The poet, playwright and novelist Deborah Levy has twice been nominated for the Man Booker Prize: in 2012 for Swimming Home and again in 2016 for Hot Milk. She entered the theatre at a young age, training at Dartington College of Arts, before gaining early recognition while writing for the Royal Shakespeare Company where her plays included Pax, Heresies and Eva and Moses. In 1989 she was made a creative arts fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Levy is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent.

Ryan Pfluger Known for his sensitive and subtle portraiture, American photographer Ryan Pfluger landed his first cover story for the New York Times Magazine shortly after graduating from the School of Visual Arts, in New York, in 2007. Since then, he has photographed many wellknown figures, including Barack Obama, Tilda Swinton and Caitlyn Jenner, as well as producing several bodies of work addressing themes of sexuality, memory and nostalgia. His latest project, Day of the Lone Wolf, shot over several years, saw him undertake weeks-long road trips across the US, shooting subjects at random.

Jeanette Winterson Acclaimed writer Jeanette Winterson made her name with the semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; published in 1985, it won the Whitbread award the same year. Among her other critically celebrated works are Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Gut Symmetries and Lighthousekeeping. In 2011 she published her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and received a CBE in 2018 for services to literature. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester and a regular columnist for the Guardian.

Out-Take

Samuel L Jackson, photographed in Los Angeles by Ryan Pfluger, wears LOUIS VUITTON

In the denouement of Quentin Tarantino’s postmodern ’90s crime classic, Pulp Fiction, Samuel L Jackson finds himself in the middle of a holdup in a diner. Confirming his bible-quoting gangster anti-hero as one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, Jackson, here as Jules Winnfield, turns the tables on panicky Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth (“Be cool honey bunny!”), eloquently talking his way out of the diner alive and in possession of the briefcase he has been struggling to hold on to throughout the film. The scene shows Jackson at the height of his powers; perfectly poised, an actor in full command of his art. As Tarantino says, “Who else can be seated and move people like pieces on a chessboard?” Inimitable and yet chameleonic, Jackson has been a DJ in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a

snake-fighting FBI agent in Snakes on a Plane, a bounty hunter in Tarantino’s western The Hateful Eight and the Jedi master Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels. Now 70, he continues to dominate the big screen as Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His success is clear: measured in monetary terms his films have grossed more than those of any other actor in the world. But he has also, as ZZ Packer writes, when she met Jackson for Port in Los Angeles, added “depth and complexity to the image of black men,” working to undo racial stereotypes through the sheer volume of his work and his “unapologetically black intensity… a hit job on white sensibilities.” Head to page 78 for the cover story.

WWW.MANOLOBLAHNIK.COM

Editor‘s Letter

Sub-themes sometimes appear, curiously and magically, under their own steam, as an issue of Port comes together. Certain pieces start to gossip, lifting off the page to nod knowingly at each other, or even, in some cases, shout. They have similar interests; they may know the same people, and it creates a singularly nuanced and, I think, uncanny experience – one that often goes beyond what was planned. It’s one of the reasons I love making magazines. Creativity and confrontation emerge as unexpected subplots here, in issue 24. Leading the charge are the mesmerising talents of Samuel L Jackson and Harris Dickinson: Jackson at the top of his game; Dickinson just beginning an extraordinary journey. Both men wrestling with their craft. Raging against the latent racism of Hollywood, the forceful Jackson owns each of his roles, creating subtly dissimilar, standout performances. As author ZZ Packer notes in her profile: “He’s so preternaturally self-possessed, it’s easy to imagine that in some prior life he must have been a sage, high priest, warrior chief or some combination thereof.” It’s a power also being tapped into by Dickinson, a young actor, writer and director who wants to do the right thing, as long as it’s demanding. Talking to me in London, he reflected: “I just want to continue to explore extreme characters – roles that force me to change, to feel uncomfortable.” Simone Leigh, the prodigious activist and artist based in New York, understands the confrontation inherent in creativity and creation for a person of colour. As she tells us, of the current political climate: “I definitely don’t feel intimidated by this Trump culture. It makes me think of the Harlem Renaissance, when Ida B Wells was writing about lynching in the South. There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between this hatred emerging and a blossoming of black culture.” Another theme in this edition is the act of looking. “What do we feel when we look at the face of the person we love or at an anonymous crowd, at the streets we walk every morning or a change in season? How do women look at men? How do women look at one another? What are we looking at when we are stuck to our screens?” So writes Sylvia Whitman, introducing this issue’s commentary section, which she brilliantly guest edits. Whitman presides over perhaps the most famous, certainly one of the coolest, bookshops in the world: Shakespeare & Co, on Paris’s Left

Bank, where I first met her, years ago. She introduced me to her father, George Whitman, who opened the shop in 1951. He requested my biography – as he did of everyone he encountered – and frowned disapprovingly when I told him I was the editor of a literary magazine. “Who isn’t?” he said, and walked off. Whitman, who died in 2011, was a brilliant, intimidating and unusual chap (he was known to trim his hair with a candle flame). I knew that Sylvia, intelligent and warm spirited like her father, and the shop itself, would bring us something that embodied those qualities. She did not disappoint. Amongst other gems, there’s new writing from Jeanette Winterson and Deborah Levy, dialogue from Leïla Slimani and Deborah Landau, and extracts by Marie Darrieussecq and Sylvia Plath. Jem Southam brings us something spectacular to look at. He has, for the last 30 years, been taking large-format photographs of England’s west country, which we publish an exclusive selection of here. He says: “I wanted to make work that wasn't just descriptive of the topography, but which came to describe the lives of the people who lived in these places, on the fringes of rural life.” The images are arresting for their unresolved beauty and stillness but also, perhaps, because we feel that we are in the process of losing touch with nature. “The English landscape is a horror story,” he says, ”industrialised, chemicalised, with insect and bird populations disappearing. But it shows, with this historic undercurrent, how extraordinarily rich and complex each square metre of earth is. If we can understand that, then maybe there’s a chance we can turn things around.” There’s a relationship here with the wonderful novels of author Max Porter (Grief is the Thing with Feathers; Lanny), interviewed on page 52. He shows us how our shared narratives – the good and bad, living and alive in the land – are not hidden, if only we take time to look. As Jeanette Winterson writes in these pages: “Sometimes I am looking for something to wear. Sometimes I am looking at those shapes we call the written word. Sometimes I am looking at you. Sometimes I am looking at myself as time changes me, as it must. And sometimes, because I keep working at it, and life is a lot of work, I get to see what it is I am looking at, and then I get to see deeper. Like space there is no end.” So have a look. Dan Crowe – Editor

C OM I N G SOON V I U S TO RE L O N D O N 5 Up p e r J am e s St re e t

V I U E Y E WE A R Sw is s D e s ig n â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 3D Pr in t e d w w w.s hopvi u .com @ v i ueyewea r

E B I R T C R S O B P U S TO .c ine z ga ma t r po

the poRteR 01

VERDANT ViSiON By Alfred Mallory. Discovering a new lighting system that nourishes plant life

The human is an urban animal. As of 2009, more people live in cities than rural areas; by 2050 it will be two thirds of the world’s population. Yet the cities most of us now live in are increasingly polluted, denuded of green space, and often bordering on inhospitable. Plants – in homes, in offices and public spaces, shopping centres, airports, train stations – are becoming an essential lifeline to the natural world, purifying the air we breathe, improving mental and physical health, and, according to some studies, even sharpening focus and improving productivity. In response to our changing relationships with plants, designers Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) have developed the Gople lamp. Incorporating Artemide’s newly developed lighting system, which uses a combination of red, white and blue light, as opposed to the conventional red/green/blue, the lamp has been designed to aid both human and plant life, providing varying wavelengths depending on the plant’s particular stage of growth, as well as a white light for normal use. Although produced using traditional Venetian glass blowing techniques, which gradually turn white glass into crystal, the Gople lamp shines light on a new way of living, and coexisting, in the 21st century. Photography Charlie Gates

02 STARGAZING

This is the sky above London on the night Port went to press: a dense field of stars – light that has travelled from the deepest reaches of our galaxy. It is a scene that has inspired and guided humanity for millennia: Mizar, at the handle of the Plough, and its neighbour Alcor, were used by the Arabs to test their eyesight; the Beehive Cluster was first observed by Galileo with his telescope in 1609; Arcturus – a red giant, a star nearing the end of its life – was known to prehistoric Polynesian navigators as the ‘star of joy’. This image – specially created for Port by the planetarium team at We The Curious, a science centre and education charity in Bristol – offers a wider, cosmic perspective of life on earth that is becoming ever more hidden from view. It was created as part of a collaboration with electronics manufacture LG, replicating the night’s sky using perfect black OLED technologies. 48

The Porter

NATURAL WONDER By Helen Jukes. The quiet beauty of bird nests and their perilous existence

The hedge-cutters came last week, loud and intractable, hacking at the deadwood. Later, I walked down the lane where they had been working, over frozen mud and broken branches, wood chips and bits of tree. In the hedgerow, now pared, were nests, suddenly exposed. Here in a crook of branch had sat a bird. I leaned closer. A soft hollow, a woven cup. Light and sure and almost not quite possible – that a creature could form a place for itself from so many collected strands. And how improbable, I thought, that this is shelter – this twig, moss, sheep’s wool, horse hair, run of wire, plastic string, spider’s web, dirt. Here, and in the eaves of houses; in the tops of trees; in wall cavities; in grass; in the ground. Rooks, I’ve heard, drop twigs at height over tall trees until, as if by accident, a nest forms. Blackbirds can spend two weeks on intricately woven structures that fall apart by the end of the breeding season; swallows return, year on year, to the same mud-plastered eaves. I once saw a Great Tit nesting inside a traffic cone, and two seagulls setting up behind a satellite dish. How delicate, I thought. How defiant and how fragile and how precarious. 50

The Porter

Photography Lewis Khan

THe GRILl By Ruth Rogers. Since the late ’80s the legendary chef has been serving authentic Italian food at London’s iconic River Café. Here she tells Port what she cooks with at home

When Rose and I started The River Cafe we had a tiny kitchen with a four-burner oven, a fryer and a chargrill. We both had our roots in Tuscan cooking where the grill plays an essential role – for fish, meat and vegetables. As a substitute at home, I use a cast-iron grill pan, which gives the same intense heat. I have various sizes; the pan here is perfect for a whole fillet of beef – which I marinate first in Chianti and rosemary – or, in the summer, a side of wild salmon. The smaller one I use when there are just a few of us, for veal chops, a whole small red mullet, vegetables or sometimes just a piece of sourdough bread for bruschetta. Quite simply, I cannot imagine my kitchen without this grill, nor cooking without it.

Photography Lewis Khan

MATERIAL OBJECTS By George Upton. Novelist Max Porter reflects on the practice of writing and the items and ideas that inspire him

Until recently, Max Porter, author of two novels and winner of the Sunday Times Best Young Writer and Dylan Thomas awards, only wrote on Fridays. An editor with Granta Books, he would spend his week bringing the work of other writers – Han Kang, Eleanor Catton, Sarah Moss – to publication, turning his stories over in his head, until, on Friday, the ideas would pour out. “I’m wondering what I’m going to do on Monday mornings,” Porter says when we meet at his home in Bath, shortly before he is due to leave his editorial role. He recently moved from London, with his wife and three sons. “I’ll have to do other things, write a play, write children’s books, teach… I’ll miss the collaborative nature of publishing, the editorial process. I’ll be lonely in there.” He laughs and gestures to a nearby room – a desk, computer; maps, drawings, bits of text stuck to the wall. It’s there that he will now spend much of his time. “Anyway, half of publishing these days is what you do once the book has come out,” he says, describing the publicity tour for his first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which took him across Europe, to America and Australia – and the award ceremonies he had to attend. “I knew doing both jobs a second time would kill me.” The success of Grief took Porter by surprise. The story of a writer, and his sons, coming to terms with the death of his wife, helped by the mischievous, spectral Crow, has been celebrated for its tender, funny, deeply moving take on love and loss. And yet it was, as Porter says, an accident. “I wasn’t trying to be a novelist,” he explains. “I was trying to answer questions I had for myself about hybridity, poetry and prose, but with no expectations – I didn’t really even expect my wife to read it.” Grief, as it happens, was a critical and commercial success, described as an “exquisite little flight of a story” by the Guardian, and has now been adapted for the stage by Enda Walsh. At the time of going to press, a production, starring Cillian Murphy, is running at the Barbican in London. Grief’s style, the “small, fable-like moments, with a bit of play, a bit of essay”, the use of different voices, is a radical rejection of descriptive, realist prose, but a vote of confidence in a medium that many have dismissed as moribund. “I think the novel will survive because it’s so flexible,” Porter says. “It tells us about ourselves in ways that other forms can’t, and requires of us forms of attention that other forms don’t, and is therefore valuable and rewarding in ways other forms aren’t.” 52

The Porter

His second novel, Lanny, published earlier this year, has a similarly innovative approach to the medium. Set in a quiet village 60 miles outside of London, it follows the disappearance of a young boy through the perspectives of his city-slicker father; his ex-actor, crime-writer mother; the boy’s friend, a successful artist, and Dead Papa Toothworth, a mythical figure that has stalked the village for centuries. The book is a patchwork narrative, a meditation on motherhood, creative relationships and village life, woven with thrilling, devastating precision. And, unlike Grief, which drew closely on Porter’s own experience of losing his father when he was a child, it is entirely a work of fiction. “I’ve built them,” Porter says enthusiastically. “I know how they walk, how they sleep, how they fuck. In one way, it was the most personal thing I’ll ever do, but I made it all up, and that felt really good this time.” Lanny also challenges conventions of book design. As Dead Papa Toothwort listens in to the village, snippets of conversation and thoughts break free from the typesetter’s grid to swirl around the page. At first it’s loose, free form – “fine so long as Jimmy’s mum says so… when I die make me into fatballs for the birds… ten new highlighters from petty cash” – rural, domestic, English; casual sexism, racism; TV, sport, business. But as tensions rise in the village it coalesces, tightening on the page, becoming an almost illegible cloud of gossip, anxiety and speculation. It gives the novel its momentum, its convincing sense of time and place; a testament to Porter’s ear for speech and colloquialism, and how he finds inspiration in the noise and activity of his surroundings. “I don’t need to go birdwatching for six months to write,” he tells me. “I don’t even need the door closing. When I’m in there on a Friday, I listen to music, I stop for tea, my wife will come in and we’ll chat. Dangerous things occur to the writer’s ego when they suggest they need a pure environment that isn’t sullied by the domestic sphere. I want the noise, the spontaneity. I want that sense of humour.” As if to demonstrate his point, Porter’s son can be heard downstairs, singing a spirited and slightly out of order rendition of the alphabet song. I wonder how his work will change, now that he has more than one day a week to write. “I’ve never been the kind of writer who has been able to put stuff on his wall. It’s always been more inward, writing things down in a sketchbook, and now I’m breathing a bit more, and it’s good. I’ve never been able to say that I’m just a writer; I’m quite looking forward to it.”

Photography Jasper Fry

The Porter

CONCRETE BOTTLES These are concrete bottles made by my godfather and best friend, Tony. He was an art teacher at Middlesex University before he retired, and he started casting things in concrete a few years ago: tables; empty spheres as planters. He knows my love for concrete and brutalism, and he made me these out of Evian and Volvic bottles. I think they’re incredibly sexy. PEW END My new book is about a village – not explicitly the village where I spent some years of my childhood, but there were certain aspects I was attracted to. There was a wise old woman, the last survivor of her generation, who lived in the house behind the village furniture factory. The factory had been abandoned in the first world war when her father and brothers went off to the front and never came back. When I discovered it, the woman said I could take what I liked. So I took this: It’s the end of a pew and matches the pews in the village church that were finished and then later copied from their designs. My love of this object knows no bounds – it’s a genuine piece of living English history, made from local wood and half finished. You can see the markings, the skill that went into making it. It doesn’t fulfil its symbolic or liturgical function yet – it’s somewhere in between tree and wood, somewhere in between a piece of wood and a piece of art. TOY JAR This is a jar filled with all the tiny bits of toys from the bottom of my sons’ toy box. I have a great affection for kitsch, particularly this late 20th-century plastic. It speaks to my childhood, when one of these slightly crap build-it-yourself Kinder things would keep you happy for a whole morning. We have an obligation to stop producing this stuff now, and it’s going to become even more poignant and grotesque in that respect, but I can’t help love it. And I’m a multiples fetishist – any of these objects taken out and placed on the table in a set of three looks gorgeous.

BOOK I’m very much into books as lived objects – I turn down pages, I write in them, draw in them, rip pages out, stick things in them. This is a first edition of my first book. I got it from the factory line and carried it everywhere I went: I took it on tour, drew in it. Some of the earliest thinking I did about Lanny is in there; little notes to myself about where I was, maps. It tells the story of a surprising year.

The Porter

CROW Crow has a sacred role in our family – we keep him by the front door and remember to tip our hats to him every now and then, and say thank you, which is weird because the kids in Grief say hello to Crow for very different reasons. I’ve been fascinated by crows for years – they are incredibly intelligent, socially advanced animals; it became a literary fascination, and then an enabler, as the royalties from the book meant we could buy a car and move to a different part of the world. Some years ago Crow fell off the wall and smashed, and I was thrilled. He is always going through the wars and now he carries that with him, it’s part of his beauty. It’s like the whale at the National History Museum: There’s a little wireless radio and a sandwich left inside, because the bloke who was working in there went to the loo when they finished the whale up. Crow has a little chunk of south London in him; he’s got a little chunk of Ted Hughes’ spirit in him.

The Porter

A PLACE TO DRiNK By Nicholas Blechman. The New Yorker’s creative director reflects on his favourite bar in the Five Boroughs

The Long Island Bar opened in 2013 after Toby Cecchini, the bartender who invented the Cosmopolitan as it is known today, sensitively restored it. It don’t remember the first time I went there. It had shut after being in business for 50 years and sat on the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Henry Street, in Brooklyn, as if it had been there forever: The art deco styling, the curved low lights, the concentric mirrors behind the bar, didn’t seem to exist in any particular era. It is timeless, and, as such, so are my memories of it. I knew Toby from Passerby, a bar he ran in the Meatpacking district, where I had a design studio. When I moved to Brooklyn Heights with my wife, Luise Stauss – an area of New York famous for having no bars or restaurants – I bumped into Toby, and he told me how he hoped to renovate a bar across the street that had just shut down. It was a dream that this bar, with its beautiful cursive neon sign, could break the curse of the neighbourhood. And then one day it opened. As soon as you walk in you feel at home. The warm lighting, the old chrome cash register (more reliable than the iPad that was supposed to replace it), the red stools at the bar: it all welcomed you, looking exactly as it had

Illustrations Nicholas Blechman

when the bar originally opened. Toby and his business partner, Joel Tomkins, did a lot to make it look as if nothing has been done. It’s retro without being nostalgic. There’s a lot that makes the Long Island Bar special, like the little booth next to the bar, or the beautiful art deco clock that sits as a kind of centrepiece, or the love and care that they put into the restoration being echoed in the way they prepare the cocktails. And there’s something about the fact it sits on the corner of the street – it has these windows looking out north and east: It really occupies that space well. It feels like a neighbourhood bar. A lot of bars in New York strive hard to bring in a lot of people – you can smell that there’s an investor behind it somewhere, trying to get their return, or some high rent they need to pay; they try a bit too hard to please you. This place doesn’t cater to you too much, and Toby, a bartender with attitude, will always push you to try something more interesting than a vodka tonic. It’s a place where that sort of connoisseurship is respected, where you can sit in a booth and discuss the latest shows in Chelsea, or life at a fastpaced magazine: a place to drink, rather than get drunk. As told to George Upton

The Porter

Photography Piergiorgio Sorgetti

FADe TO BLACK By George Upton. Discovering the inspiration behind Berluti’s SS19 collection

In Berluti’s manufacturing facility in Ferrara sits a wide, square marble table, stained with intersecting rings of colour – semicircles of blue and orange and yellow, arcs of pink and green, dark circular smudges, sunk into the stone. It’s a hard, cold surface, smooth and unyielding, a visual record of the work of the brand’s master colourists, who are responsible for applying Berluti’s distinctive patina to the shoes by hand. It is also, for Kris Van Assche – the creative director of the Italian-founded, Parisian maison – a source of inspiration: His debut collection for Berluti this autumn centres on a print made from an image of the table, repeated across shirts, suits and coats, the smudged colours providing the palette for the rest of the collection. Developed in the ’80s by Olga Berluti, who inherited the brand from her grandfather and uncle, the patina is a closely guarded secret involving a combination of solvents, essential oils, pigments and dyes that are applied to the leather. Designed to age with time, to evolve as the shoe is worn, the process creates unique shades and nuances in the leather, as well as, under Olga’s direction, facilitating the introduction of a new, vibrant spectrum of colours to sit alongside the traditional black and brown. Louis, one of the master colourists at the Berluti factory, took Port through the process: First and foremost, it’s vital to use good-quality products. The material we use, Venezia leather, was developed by Olga Berluti. It is full grain and uncoated, which makes it a perfect base for the patina. We start by lightening the shoe, stripping it back, before we massage it with essential oils that are imbued with natural pigments and different types of wax. Then, using brushes, sponges and cloth rags, we start colouring. The patina effect we often apply, which we call ‘cloudy’, requires two types of colour, one that is transparent and another that we call ‘smoky’. The transition between the two has to be as smooth as possible; to find the perfect balance can take well over an hour. Lighter colours are more difficult to master, as even the slightest flaw shows up, and multicoloured patinas can be particularly demanding as many different colours are needed to achieve the best transition. The biggest challenge, however, comes with dramatic colour changes, such as brown to red, on a pair that has already been worn a lot. On Kris Van Assche’s SS19 collection, he introduced ‘reversed patina’: a base of very dark black on to which brighter colours are added (blue or red for this range). The colour placement has to be carefully considered, depending on the shape of the shoe, so the transition to black remains beautiful. 61

The Porter

BAGS OF TiME By Jo Lawson-Tancred. Bottega Veneta reimagines its iconic bag, the Cabat

When Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro founded Bottega Veneta in an 18th-century villa near Vicenza in 1966, they found to their frustration that the locally sourced sewing machines had only been designed for use with fabrics, and would not process leather of the density required to make durable products. Determined to stay true to their roots, in the Veneto region of northern Italy, they tinkered with the tools available until they discovered that strips of the more delicate and supple Nappa leather could be woven, to gain greater strength. Out of this need to innovate, the brand’s distinctive intrecciato design was born. Though the highly versatile style has been seen on a range of clothes and accessories, the Cabat (the tote bag that debuted in Bottega Veneta’s SS02 collection) popularised the intrecciato. One of the first inventions of the

The Porter

renowned creative director Tomas Maier – who left the atelier last year after 17 years at the helm – it’s central concept is the unique double-faced intrecciato, which, due to its lack of an inner lining, appears the same inside as out. Each bag takes two days and two artisans to produce, with every strip, or fettucce, stretched taut and positioned perfectly parallel to the others. The level of skill involved means that the craft is often passed down through generations and, in 2006, Bottega Veneta established its own school dedicated to the training of future artisans. Still, creation and reinvention remain founding principles of the brand and new creative director Daniel Lee has designed a twist on the classic this season with his Maxi Cabat, which uses just 20 thick – 4-centimetre-wide – fettucce.

Photography Charlie Gates

BLUE iN THe FACE By Alex Doak. Port’s horology editor considers the new refined offering from Vacheron Constantin

Nothing – not the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, or even two world wars – has stopped Vacheron Constantin from making watches every year since 1755. And, if an uninterrupted 264-year activity wasn’t enough to set the Genevan institution apart from every other Swiss name, those watches have never wavered from being exceptional too. You’re looking at every hyperbolic Francophone epithet going: grande dame, haute de gamme, pièce de résistance – the whole neuf yards. Sitting atop Switzerland’s horological tree, alongside Patek Philippe and Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin is a fully independent master of every skill required to craft and fine-finish any kind of mechanical timekeeper. It holds the record for the most complex ever: the 10cm Ref. 57260 pocket watch of 2015, eight years in the making and housing 57 complications from a topsy-turvy tourbillon carriage – the means with which to distinguish civic and solar time, depending on earth’s erratic orbit of the sun. But it’s not all complicated; arguably, Vacheron is at its best keeping things crisp and clean. The dress watches from the Patrimony collection, for example, benefit from a purism that feels more Latin, more cosmopolitan than Photography Charlie Gates

their contemporaries – in most part down to the brand’s continued foothold in the heart of Geneva, rather than the outlying Jura mountains. Inspired by men’s formal daily wearers from the 1950s, the Patrimony’s gently cambered dial lends an almost ethereal expansiveness – a seemingly effortless balance of circular symmetry and harmonious proportions. It manages that rare thing: a simple, slim, round watch that’s immediately distinctive, like a perfectly tailored two-piece in horological form – an especially appropriate sartorial comparison here, as Vacheron’s 2019 collection boasts a trio of Patrimonies in every man’s go-to suiting hue: midnight blue. There’s a wafer-thin, hand-wound two hander; a self-winding three hander with a subtle date window, plus a slightly more involved day-date, whose two retrograde pointers flick back come midnight of every Sunday and 31st. All have exquisitely hand-polished mechanics gleaming through a clear caseback, and all are fit for especially rakish night manoeuvres. For another brand, over 260 years of history could seem a lot to live up to, but Vacheron Constantin has never worn it so effortlessly. 65

NOTES FROM MILAN By Vincent Van Duysen. Finding inspiration in Italy’s design capital

I was always very interested in architecture that exhibited a rigour, or purity, but, following my time working in Italy with Aldo Cibic and Sottsass Associati, I developed an element of playfulness and spirit in my work. Postmodernism was emerging as a recognisable style and that too influenced my outlook. For me, architecture and interior design are closely interwoven, and this interaction is obvious in Italy. The Italians know better than anyone how to make a space, and all objects in it, attractive. They master the art of abitare, the art of living – it’s an approach that boosts my creativity and a concept that I have been developing at Molteni, bringing the brand back to its refined, elegant origins. The time I spend in Milan is always an amalgamation of various impulses. I took this picture from the corner room, on the fifth floor of the Park Hyatt: It’s a place that feels like coming home. Watching Milan waking up or going to sleep – there is a direct view into the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele here – stays inspiring to me. It is something I am drawn to. It is my home away from home. Vincent Van Duysen has been creative director of Molteni&C since 2016.

The Porter

THE SUN KiNG By Jo Lawson-Tancred. Manolo Blahnik’s new line of umbrellas takes inspiration from the celestial icons of the French court

The destruction of the Golden Gate of Versailles during the French Revolution was an impassioned and symbolic act, a visceral tearing down of the Ancien régime, ruled over, at its peak, by France’s most extravagant monarch, Louis XIV. Known as the Sun King, Louis was responsible for moving the French government outside of Paris, and commissioned Versailles’ opulent palaces. The golden mask of the sun god Apollo, one of Louis’s preferred personal emblems, was applied at repeated intervals along the gate – an intricate Baroque masterpiece, produced by Jules Hardouin-Mansart. A visitor’s first impression of the French court, it set a grand celestial tone intended to impress the ambassadors and aristocrats as they passed through. In 2008 the gate was replicated using detailed archived designs and 100,000 gold leaves in an effort to evoke the grounds in their historical heyday. The result is an ornate labyrinth of allegorical imagery, including fleurs-de-lys, cornucopias and crossed capital Ls. For their latest collection of men’s accessories, drawing inspiration from the golden mask of Apollo, Manolo Blahnik has developed an abstracted version of the design for the interior panels of a new range of umbrellas. Produced in partnership with the renowned London-based umbrella makers Lockwood, the simpler, stripped down context underscores the sun motif as both a sophisticated icon of design and, with this unlikely displacement, a wry contradiction of climates. Photography Lewis Khan

THE GUY BEHIND THE COLOUR By Simon March. For over a decade, first in London and now in his Sussex store adorned with multi-coloured clogs, Simon March has been quietly providing a radical, eco-friendly, handmade alternative to massproduced paints

I’ve always been interested in shops. It was the idea of owning a shop, rather than paint particularly, that led me to open Colour Makes People Happy, in Dulwich, London, in 2008. Growing up, I loved places like Brodie and Middleton, the theatrical chandlers on Drury Lane, which was filled with colours and brushes and powders. I wanted to do something similar, and it seemed there was a living to be made in paint. It’s relatively straightforward to make – a blend of only three ingredients: pigment, binder and solvent – but I wanted to present paint in an evocative way. Getting started wasn’t easy, up against huge multinational conglomerates; for example, buying only small amounts of titanium dioxide or resin can initially make it difficult to find suppliers. Over the years, I made contacts, and – having moved the shop, now Marchand Son, to Sussex, six months ago – I can now source my chalk and gypsum locally. I like to keep things small – it’s not like I’m competing with those big companies; in many ways I produce a completely different product. I make everything by hand: You can come and watch me grind the pigments. Creating new colours isn’t possible, but they can be presented in new ways. At very middle class dinner parties people laugh at the names of Farrow and Ball colours. I try to subvert that, to be a bit irreverent, a bit absurd: I started coming up with names for my paints like I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car, Red Stewart or That Guy Will Never Make It Selling Those Shoes. The ideas for names can come from anywhere. Someone once came into the shop and said, “Oh dear, I do hope you’re going to make some money here,” as though she were concerned for me. Another customer responded, “Wizened old Casandra”. It became a new colour; it’s in the collection next to Withering Scorn and I Resent That Snide Remark. As told to George Upton makespeoplehappy.co.uk 68

The Porter

Photography Sophie Gladstone

HOMe AND A WHeY By Kian Samyani. The founder and head chef of Berenjak on bringing traditional Iranian cuisine to Soho

It’s an exciting moment for Iranian food in London: despite the negative light that the country is seen in internationally, some great Iranian restaurants have opened recently. People are becoming more aware of this style of cuisine, and there are now even Iranian suppliers. I opened Berenjak in 2018 with the aim of establishing a restaurant that did Iranian cuisine properly: a relaxed environment, somewhere that doesn’t take itself too seriously – fresh produce, good music, somewhere central. It’s subjective of course: you’ll always think the way you ate as a child, how your mum cooked, how your dad cooked, was best. I set out to try and evoke a sense of that nostalgia, of eating as a family. We get a lot of young Iranians coming in, so we must be doing something right.

The Porter

Kashk e bademjoon was always on the table growing up – it’s a family favourite. I’ve never followed one particular recipe; it’s instinctive. Kashk is a kind of whey that is fermented and formed into balls. Japan has miso and the Italians have Parmesan – ingredients that enhance the dish with an umami flavour: Iranian cuisine has kashk. It can be a challenge to replicate those intimate family meals in a fast-paced restaurant environment, to serve it over and over again and be consistent, but I think – with the help of some authentic imported ingredients – we’ve been able to capture some of the love, care and attention of this wholesome, hearty ancient cuisine. As told to George Upton

Photography Sophie Gladstone

Kashk e Bademjoon Ingredients 5

aubergines

white onion, diced

cloves of garlic, puréed

tsp turmeric 100ml jar of kashk – from a Middle Eastern super market, or any sour yoghurt

TO THE POiNT By Dryden Goodwin. The artist reflects on the act of sharpening a pencil

Sprinkling of crispy onions 300ml vegetable oil Dried mint Salt, to taste Black pepper, to taste

Method Preheat your grill to 200oC. Prick your aubergines with a fork and grill for about 30–45 minutes, or until soft, turning every 15 minutes. Place the aubergines in a bowl and cover with cling film: the steam helps to separate the skins from the flesh. Once cool, peel away the skin and discard, placing the flesh into a strainer to drain for 10 minutes. Return the aubergine flesh to a chopping board, chop roughly and set aside until later. Cover the base of a large frying pan with 150ml of vegetable oil, and fry your garlic until brown. Add diced onion, and fry for about 10–15 minutes until translucent and the edges start to brown, mixing frequently so as not to burn the garlic. When everything is nicely fried add a teaspoon each of salt, pepper, dried mint and turmeric, and mix well. Add the aubergines, turn up the heat and stir continuously for 5–10 minutes, until it’s all cooked down and comes together. Adjust seasoning as necessary and remove from heat.

Mint Oil For the garnish, you will need to make a small amount of mint oil. Heat 150ml of vegetable oil in a pot to 90oC, then add two tablespoons of dried mint and take off the heat, whisk well for a few seconds and set aside. Once cool, this can be stored in a jar for up to a month.

Kashk Take a spoonful into a bowl and whisk until smooth, adding a few drops of water to get it slightly loose. Do the same if using yoghurt. Don’t add too much water or it will seep into your aubergine mix. Once everything is ready, you can dish up. Heat the aubergine mix in a pan, arrange on a plate in a flat layer and drizzle some of the kashk, followed by the mint oil, making sure you mix both well first. Enjoy with hot toasted bread of any kind – preferably Iranian!

A blunt pencil seems dormant or asleep. The act of sharpening fills it with life and potential, swiftly crafted by my eye, hand and blade. The hexagonal lead-filled form spins in my hand as I shave the wood, the sound precise, the smell earthy. If I’m clumsy there’s jeopardy, the lead might break or be cut away. It takes focus to achieve the point: the angle of the cut, not too deep or shallow; checking with touch – when it starts to look good, I rotate the lead into the pad of my thumb. If it is rough or catches, I must smooth and finesse. It’s a fine balance, a sense of anticipation. I am poised to the possibilities of connection, between myself, the observed and the paper; the distinct and sensual ‘talk’ between graphite and surface, as the drawing begins. Photography Sophie Gladstone

SHAPiNG UP By Alfred Mallory. Reflecting on 50 years of B&B Italia’s design classic

The Up5 chair, like many great ideas, was conceived in the shower. Noticing how his sponge would return to its original form after it was squeezed, Gaetano Pesce – the pioneering Italian designer, renowned for his playful treatment of colour and material – was inspired to apply the same idea to a chair. The result, released by C&B Italia in 1969, was distinctive, oversized – half ancient fertility goddess and half space-age technological marvel: As with the sponge, the chair, vacuum-compressed to a 10th of its size for shipping, expanded dramatically when it was released from its PVC envelope. A product of its era, the Up5 – which also came with an ottoman, the Up6, connected by an elastic cord – captured the optimism of the swinging ’60s and the decade’s enthusiasm for manmade materials, but it also owes much to the revolutionary spirit of the student protests a year before. Galvanised by the events of May 1968 in Paris, groups and collectives formed around colleges in Italy, espousing radical ideas about design and plastic creation, rejecting the existing industrial system. Pesce’s chair, with its dynamic, curving form and use of polyurethane, brought these new ideas to C&B, and it quickly became an icon: James Bond lounges on an Up chair in Diamonds are Forever. In 1972, MoMA, New York, exhibited the chair as an example of ‘The New Domestic Landscape’ emerging in Italy. By 1973, C&B, now B&B, had discovered that the leavening agent in the chair was harmful to the ozone layer, and so the Up5 was discontinued. For years a cult collector’s item, the chair was relaunched in 2000 – no longer inflating but still very much Pesce’s voluptuous, iconic design. Now, for the chair’s 50th anniversary, B&B are launching a series of colours alongside a special striped beige-and-petrol-green edition, echoing the distinctive tonal scheme developed by Pesce on its inception. 72

The Porter

Photography Charlie Gates

Right: Inside Arthur Mamou-Maniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s architectural practice in London, where sketches hang alongside prototypes fabricated using sophisticated 3D-printing techniques.

The Porter

PRINTWORKS By George Upton. Discussing the future of architecture with Arthur Mamou-Mani

French-born, London-based architect Arthur MamouMani is synonymous with the emerging technologies that are opening up new, exciting spaces in architecture, such as 3D printing and algorithmic, parametric design. Named as one of the RIBA’s rising stars in 2017, Mamou-Mani came to prominence in 2018 with his commission at Burning Man Festival for the ‘temple’ – a vortex of wood twisting up from the desert floor. Now he is preparing an experimental installation at this year’s Salone del Mobile design festival in Milan with fashion label COS, set to be one of the largest 3D-printed projects ever made. We caught up with Mamou-Mani to discover more about the project, the advantages of digital technology, and his take on the future of architecture. George Upton: How would you describe your style? Arthur Mamou-Mani: It’s the idea of the architect as a maker, and as one who lets the material and other parameters create, rather than having a top-down approach. It comes a lot from my time at the Architectural Association: I learnt that architecture can be the sum of processes, not just arbitrary decisions. GU: What are the benefits of using digital tools, as opposed to traditional processes? AMM: The digital tools, which include not just computers but also robotic tools for fabrication, create a holistic approach to design. The output, the physical models we make, are a direct reflection of a loop one can create now between the digital and the physical world. It becomes an iterative process, and that’s something that

Photography Sophie Gladstone

was much harder to do in the past. I can’t imagine an architect carving a stone by hand and putting the stone into the computer, and then carving again. GU: How did the project with COS come about? AMM: We were building the temple for Burning Man Festival, in 2018, and we got the call to our London office. They sent us a brief – the location, a palace in Milan, made quite a contrast with the Nevada desert – and I liked that it mentioned ideas like the democratisation of fashion, technology, modularity, intemporality. It resonated with the work I was doing. I got excited. GU: Can you talk me through the project in Milan? AMM: The project is based on a modular unit, a sort of bio-brick that is assembled into a series of archways going from the courtyard of the palazzo to the garden, just outside the palazzo. We start with wood, which we are 3D printing, and which slowly becomes this very pure, natural bioplastic. It’s a journey from manmade to the natural, through a technical brick. GU: How do you think technology will come to change architecture? AMM: I think architecture will accept reversibility, the idea of a building that can un-build itself, which is modular and reassembleable, and uses materials that can also go back into the earth. It is something that we will have no choice but to embrace; we have an obligation to find solutions in architecture and construction that are more sustainable, and to think more about the long term.

SOLe TRADER By Pierre Hardy. The fashion designer and creative director of footwear at Hermès considers the trainer’s rise from sportswear to high fashion

Fashion reflects the world around it; it echoes what is happening in society, in the street. It was only natural then that the trainer – comfortable, easy to wear shoes, developed for sport with technology and efficiency in mind, and which gained a certain relevance through street style – would enter the world of high fashion. I wasn’t always interested in trainers. To me they represented big sports brands – I found them pretty unappealing. But then one day I needed a specific trainer that I couldn’t find anywhere, so I made it myself. I found myself appreciating the versatility, the possibilities on offer: the range of colours, volumes, sizes; the ability to go from masculine to feminine very easily. I tried to treat the trainer as carefully and with as much consideration as possible. I wanted to turn this popular and mass-marketed shoe into exactly the contrary: something creative, original and refined.

The Porter

In 1998, under Martin Margiela, I created the Quick trainers for Hermès’s spring/summer collection. It was the first trainer to be made entirely of leather, and it’s still going strong. This season, we’ve created a re-edition of the Quick, as well as a classic trainer, in a standard shape, but with wings, gold embroidery, prints, stickers with animals, etc, as well as new technical styles for training and trekking, using neoprene, nylon canvas and reflective effects. As a designer, training shoes continue to offer a new way to approach footwear. Until we find something that could replace all the attributes they offer, they will continue to be a focus of high fashion – they are a playground for creativity.

As told to George Upton

Photography Lewis Khan

Truth and

Fiction

by ZZ Packer

De facto Coolest Man Alive Samuel L Jackson is a rare breed of film star who defines every film he is in, but it is a mantle that belies the personal and social struggle he has faced. Here he speaks about race, mayhem and a Hollywood career spanning five decades

Photography

Ryan Pfluger

Creative direction and styling Dan May

Previous spreads and this page: Jackson wears Louis Vuitton SS19

1. It’s not every day that Spike Lee catapults himself on to you – and expects you to catch him. But not every day is the 91st Academy Awards. Nor is every man who hurls himself on to you overjoyed at winning his first Oscar after having been snubbed by the academy for 30 years. And not every man on the receiving end of 150 pounds of amped-up, blissed-out Spike Lee-turned-projectile is Samuel L Jackson: Bringer of Bad Ass, Preacher of Profundities, Keeper of the Copacetic. The moment quickly went viral: There’s the 70-year-old Jackson standing like a tuxedoed tree, catching the incoming, purple-suited Lee – at 61 no kid himself – with the ease of flypaper. After a few seconds of dangling with his feet in the air, Lee returns to earth, and the two of them hug it out like newly minted Super Bowl champs. This, however, was not merely one Hollywood celeb congratulating another on a win. This was the merging of two supernovas. Between them, Samuel L Jackson and Spike Lee represent six decades of struggle against the myopic, genteel, often unacknowledged racism latent in the Hollywood system – all while working within it. Long-time friends, with occasional hiccups of disagreement, they have collaborated on six films, beginning with Do the Right Thing, in 1989. There were reminders of Oscar night three decades ago, that evening. Moments earlier, Jackson had stood with his Captain Marvel co-star, Brie Larson, both gaping at the news that the controversial Green Book had just won best original screenplay. The story of a black pianist touring the segregated South while shepherded by his white driver, Green Book seemed to reprise the 1989 film Driving Miss Daisy – yet another movie hinting that chauffeur-client camaraderie is all it takes to solve the rebus of racial inequality. When the safe, sentimental Driving Miss Daisy won, over Do the Right Thing, Lee’s paean to black urban life and protest, neither Jackson nor Lee minced words about their ire. “All I know,” Lee said prior to the 2019 ceremony, “is that whenever somebody’s driving somebody else, I lose.” It was not the first time Jackson had found himself on the losing end of the academy’s penchant for set-pieces of nostalgia. In 1992 he’d hoped to win for his breakout role as drug-addicted Gator Purify in Lee’s Jungle Fever. While the film got mixed reviews, the consensus was that Jackson’s portrayal was a winner. The Cannes Film Festival deemed it so epic that a new best supporting actor category was created just for him. Yet no nomination from the Academy Awards. By 1995, surely, all would be different. There was every expectation Jackson would win best supporting actor for his iconic portrayal of a mob hitman in Pulp Fiction. When the prize went instead to Martin Landau, as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, Jackson let out an unapologetic, “Shit.” Unwilling to don the Oscar-rictus of false felicity then, he certainly wasn’t doing so this year. Yet early in the evening something happened

to shift his mood. He had been asked to present the best adapted screenplay prize, alongside Brie Larson. When she opened the winning red envelope, Jackson speed-read the contents and thundered, “The H-H HOUSE!” In other words Lee had won, for BlacKkKlansman, though the shout-out to Jackson’s and Lee’s shared alma mater likely went over the heads of most of the audience. The House – short for Atlanta’s all-male, historically black Morehouse College – was founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War. Morehouse educated a generation of civil rights leaders, among them Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. After King was assassinated in Memphis, his body was brought back to Atlanta. Jackson, then a Morehouse student, was one of the pallbearers. But that was more than 50 years ago, when Jackson played the flute, had a stutter and wore a modest afro. Today, shaven-headed and six feet two inches of muscle, Jackson is so preternaturally self-possessed it’s easy to imagine that in some prior life he must have been a sage, mage, high priest, warrior chief or some combination thereof. Given liberties to concoct his own look for a role, he’s been known to use this magnetic shamanistic quality to great advantage. Quentin Tarantino says Jackson came up with the “mad kung fu priest on the mountain” look he sports in Jackie Brown. For that 1997 thriller, Jackson plays Ordell Robbie, a murderous arms dealer whose long Confucian chin-beard-in-front and ponytail-in-back combo comes off more Shih Tzu than OG. Jackson’s Ordell is smart but not wise, cunning but not careful. He aspires to the sage’s culture of honour, but his lack of a moral centre renders him merely a master of malice. Then there’s Jackson as the DJ Mister Señor Love Daddy in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, where his character is part palindromic word mix-master, part Greek oracle warning of the forthcoming heatwave and escalating racial tensions. As Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequels, Jackson’s Jedi master is the ultimate galactic sage, wielder of the only amethyst lightsabre in the galaxy. Yet it’s his turn as the formidable Nick Fury in Captain Marvel that cemented his reputation as Coolest Man Alive. The role allows Jackson to combine the sexy swagger of his updated Shaft (coming in June) with the gadgetry and superhero prowess of the Marvel Comics Universe. Not everyone’s likeness becomes so central to a franchise’s foundational character that Marvel gives them a nine-picture deal. Then again, not everyone is Samuel L Jackson. 2. I meet up with Jackson at Los Angeles’ Villa Carlotta on the one day a year it rains in LA. From the windows of the suite, we can see the Mediterranean courtyard replete with Jacarandas and Spanish-style flagstones, but even when the rain finally stops we can’t go out: The hotel staff seem to think we’ll melt.

Jackson is so preternaturally self-possessed it’s easy to imagine that in some prior life he must have been a sage, mage, high priest, warrior chief or some combination thereof.

Besides, post-photo shoot, Jackson’s make-up artist is busy slathering him down with what appears to be the best moisturiser on earth. She begins at the top of his head and kneads the stuff into the entirety of his face, over his eyes and nose and mouth, as if she’s a potter at the wheel, shaping him into existence. When she finishes, he glistens – glows. He looks... oracular. But once Jackson starts talking, he shifts gears from oracle to sphinx. Before I know it, he’s pelting me with questions. If you’ve ever watched a Samuel L Jackson movie before, you’ve likely witnessed the rapid-fire interrogation, the sizing-up silences, the laser beam of intelligence that won’t shut off. First come questions about my short stories: Are they thrillers? Love stories? Hate stories? Softcore porn? Hard-core porn? Then a bit of probing into my writing affiliations: New York Times? New Yorker? New York Times bestseller list? Yes. Yes. Sadly, no. “So you don’t have a niche?” is his summation of my entire writing life. I think about this a little and despair. Jackson moves on to describing his own reading habits. He consumes at least three papers a day, maintains a strict script-reading schedule, then reads to fall asleep – often kung fu crime novels and comic books. “I do a lot of ‘mayhem reading’.” He laughs, tickled at having coined his own catch-all term for thrillers, spy novels, comic books and other male-driven, adrenaline-charged action lit. “I was really stoked the other day, coz I got the latest instalment of Orphan X, which I’ve been waiting for two years.” It has always been this way. Jackson reportedly went nearly a year of his southern childhood avoiding humanity, lost in books. Far from the too-cool-for-school type, he was an excellent student consistently at the top of his class. “Reading Jackson wears Louis Vuitton SS19

has always taken me to this place. Being an only child and spending a lot of time at home, reading was my travel. I could go in my head anywhere I wanted to go, I was immersed.” Jackson traces a straight line from this immersion to his process as an actor. “When I get a character, unless there’s source material, a book or whatever, telling me who that person is, I can do whatever the hell I want. I can sit there and decide how smart he is, how dumb he is, how many brothers and sisters he has. I can decide if he was in the military. I can decide if he talks a lot. What kind of people he likes, or doesn’t. All those things make a difference.” Jackson crafts full-fledged biographies for all his roles, no matter how small. The result is that once he walks into a scene, he ignites it. In Coming to America, he’s on camera for a mere one-and-a-half minutes, as a drug addict stick-up man, but you can’t forget him: He swings open his trench coat to brandish a sawn-off shotgun – aims one blast to the ceiling to announce his intentions, with a hail of sheetrock crashing to the floor. The setting is a McDonald’s knock-off in the middle of Queens, but you might think you were watching a John Ford-era Western. Except Jackson won’t relegate even a stick-up man to the role of mere villain, or consign a drug addict to villainy. “Everybody always goes, ‘Well, he’s a junkie.’ (Jackson does a passing imitation of some priggish, judgmental type.) “Well, no! People do things for a lot of different reasons. I wasn’t playing ‘a drug addict’. I was playing a desperate dude that was coming in there with a purpose. There was a kid at home that needed food, and there was a woman at home that was pressurising him,” Jackson says of the backstory he invented. “I could have gone into McDowell’s

and just stuck a gun in his face and done whatever. But, for me, dude had a sense of urgency.” Jackson’s performances can be so realistic that it seems almost too easy. Online comments abound: “I don’t think Samuel L Jackson was acting here,” or “Jackson was born for this role.” He takes these as compliments. “You want people to look at you when you come on screen, and bring a dynamism that makes them remember you. So even if you get bored with the rest of the movie, you say to yourself, ‘I wonder where he is.’” Jackson is less forgiving of professional critics who underestimate him. “‘He talks loud and he cusses,’” as he describes one frequent putdown, and, “‘You know he plays the same character all the time.’” He adds: “But if you pay close attention, the people all have different speech cadences. They all walk differently, they hold their body differently. The tone of their voices is different, different levels of anger, how they get angry is different.” The unapologetically black intensity of Samuel L Jackson can be like a hit job on white sensibilities. No wonder detractors associate him with a single emotion: righteous anger. They miss the point. His filmography showcases a semi-chameleon-like ability to play every role imaginable: from Captain Marvel’s badass Nick Fury, to the unctuous womanising father of Eve’s Bayou, to the failed hold-up man in Goodfellas. There’s his turn as an FBI agent in the irresistible cult classic Snakes on a Plane (“I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”). As Major Warren, in The Hateful Eight, he is a former army officer who can make a white Confederate blanch at a story about fellatio. He has played a hostage expert in The Negotiator, a 85

Quentin Tarantino, with Jackson as his muse, is helping retell major periods of American history so that the black presence is remembered rather than elided.

computer scientist in Jurassic Park, an avenging father in A Time to Kill. As Elijah Price, aka Mr Glass, in M Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, and its sequel Glass, he is the quintessential mastermind, which perhaps comes the closet to capturing the essence of Samuel L Jackson. As Tarantino once said of Jackson’s performance in the final scene of Pulp Fiction: “Who else can be seated and move people like pieces on a chessboard?” That’s pretty much what Jackson does with a script. “I break it down and see the whole movie in my head,” the actor says. “I go through a whole thing of, ‘This [action] is to move the script from this point to this point, to inform the audience of this thing.’” Whereas method acting prizes shedding one’s own consciousness to inhabit another, Jackson embodies characters. He studied theatre for years at the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, then worked as a stage actor before moving to Hollywood. In acting-speak, Jackson is less Strasberg – who concentrated on purely psychological techniques for extracting verisimilitude – and more Stanislavski, who believed in a holistic, psycho-physical approach. “I’m not a method actor,” Jackson says, amused by the whole prospect of it. “When they say ‘Cut’, I’m done. Coz I gotta talk on the phone with people or do shit. But that’s why you do homework at home, so when you get to work you don’t have to cage yourself with that bullshit.” Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant in Rain Man and Daniel Day-Lewis’s quadriplegic Christy Brown in My Left Foot are the sort of roles made for bravura portrayals that border on exhibitionism. Jackson is after a different kind of virtuosic performance: one that opts for resonance. The result is a certain immortality for his characters. When he plays the bad guy, no one wants to see 86

him get his just deserts. When he plays the buffoon, no one wants the joke to be on him. And when Star Wars’ Mace Windu goes to that galaxy far, far away, it’s hard for us to accept that his death is final. For Pulp Fiction to work, you have to believe that Jules Winnfield will leave his life of crime – not because he’s been caught or regrets having killed others, but because he’s come out of a hail of bullets alive and feels he’s been spared so as to spare others. Pulp Fiction presents Winnfield and his sidekick Vincent Vega (John Travolta) as a kind of hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with Jackson’s character delivering Hamlet-style soliloquies: That requires a great deal of internal consistency to pull off. And if Tarantino is our hipster Shakespeare, then Jackson is his Laurence Olivier. “Quentin’s dialogue is not easy,” writes Pulp Fiction co-producer Richard Gladstein, “and I have seen very gifted actors stumble in auditions. It’s not the amount of words or length of the scene; it’s a specific cadence that Quentin creates and ultimately demands the actor to discover. And if they do, they seem to fly. And no one flies higher than Sam.” But dialogue requires somebody to dialogue with. For Jackson, the biggest challenge is often fellow actors. “Sometimes you meet the person on the other side the day you’re getting ready to shoot. You’ve never seen them before. If they’re not like an A-list actor – not as in good, but [as in] comfortable being on set – they say, ‘Oh my god it’s you!’ and I’m like, ‘Come on man, we’re here to work.’” With Jackson, working always wins out over stardom. “I remember I was doing Sphere with Dustin Hoffman. We finally had our big scene where we’re face to face. ‘Stop, stop,’ he says, ‘I see it in your face.’ And I’m like, ’What’re you

talking about?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh my god, it’s the Dustin Hoffman look on your face.’ And I’m like, ‘Get the fuck out of here.’” He laughs. “And we’d been working together for months by then so it’s like, ‘Dude, I am not impressed by you.’” Jackson has acted in more than 120 films, so he has a few ideas about directors. His favourites are those who come closest to reproducing the exacting stage conditions he knew as a theatre actor. “Quentin rehearses,” he says, “so when we did Pulp Fiction, for instance, we rehearsed to the point that, by the time we started shooting, we knew how many steps there were from the car to the front door of the apartment, the front door to the elevator, and back. We rehearsed that scene around the table. That’s a luxury; that’s a rarity.” 3. The dual American horrors of slavery and Jim Crow left a legacy of black men as filtered through the panopticon of whiteness. American entertainment has reduced black males to the dancing, shucking and jiving of blackface minstrelsy of the 1800s; to DW Griffith’s portrayal of black men as rapacious fiends in The Birth of a Nation; to ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’, a radio show about two stereotypical black men that was voiced by two white men. The point of all of this, according to Invisible Man author Ralph Ellison, “was to veil the humanity of Negroes… and to repress the white audience’s awareness of its moral identification with its own acts.” Many black male actors – Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Denzel Washington – have worked to undo stereotypes. Others, like Will Smith, Danny Glover and Morgan Freeman, have tried to add depth and complexity to the image of black men. While Jackson appears to fall in the latter category, the sheer Jackson wears Louis Vuitton SS19

Jackson wears Louis Vuitton SS19

Hair and makeup Autumn Moultrie at The Wall Group Photography assistants Nicol Biesek and Ryan-Walker Page

volume of his work reaches into the first one as well. “I worked with Morgan,” he says. “I was Morgan’s understudy. Denzel was with us. We were all around together, and everybody develops what they need to be unique, to be different, to present themselves in a different way. And we did.” I have a theory: No recent actor has re-masculated the roles of black men in cinema more thoroughly than Samuel L Jackson, and he wants our view of blackness to match the complexity of his own experience. “My neighbourhood was very diverse,” he recalls. “It was totally black, but it was diverse black. You know, there were all kinds of black people that I came into contact with in my life. So, when I read a script, I can say this person will fit perfectly in that story. And the audience, even in my mind, is still the all-black audience I went to the movies with.” In George Nolfi’s upcoming film, The Banker, Jackson is Joe Morris, one half of a black duo helming a business empire in the 1950s. Discrimination prevents the two black men from representing the business outright, so they are forced to hire a working-class white man to present as the public face of the company. He is adamant about portraying the full diverse swath of humanity – as a black man – whether that involves an ocean movie, a science movie, a tech movie, a dinosaur romp like Jurassic Park, or a military court-martial drama like Assault at West Point. But it’s the newer, superhero movies that allow him to expand the panoply of roles and experiences African Americans can play, and thus be seen by the wider world. To be Nick Fury in Captain Marvel is to claim an agency and autonomy that even Poitier could not; to be Mace Windu in Star Wars is to universalise the superhuman. “It’s important to me that I continue to put those kinds of images out there,” he says. “We are these multifaceted people that do all these different things, look all these different ways, sound all these different ways.” Of course, Jackson wants to enrich not just our understanding of black people, but of humankind in general. “When I do a movie, I’m sort of doing it for me,” he says, “because it’s a movie I want to watch with me in it, and I want to see myself in it in a specific way, as part of the story. And I think there’s a dignity and intelligence inherent in almost every character I play.” Quentin Tarantino, with Jackson as his muse, is helping retell major periods of American history so that the black presence is remembered rather than elided. “I actually wrote the Lincoln letter [in Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight], Jackson recalls. “He says, ‘Okay, you have this letter from Abraham Lincoln.’ So I say, ‘Where am I gonna get it?’ And he’s like, ‘Write it.’ So I wrote it, and that’s the letter that’s read in the movie.” Major Warren of The Hateful Eight “stands for a lot of things”, Jackson says. “He represents something that is stronger than all the

Shot at Villa Carlotta, Los Angeles Special thanks Brian McGrory

shit that’s going on around him. He’s been a slave, he’s been a soldier. He reads people well. He’s smarter than everybody thinks. But he’s in a place where, as soon as you walk in, the way you look defines how smart you are. And that ain’t changed. When you walk into a room and [someone else] gets to decide how smart you are, or how sad you are, what’s going on?” Jackson’s blinkless eyes answer the question: racism. On that subject, Jackson is livid about what Donald Trump has done to his country. “I know what ‘Make America Great Again’ means when I hear it. I’m part of the ’60s in terms of my developing years; I mean, I lived in America during apartheid. I was born in ’48 and grew up in Tennessee in the ’50s. So I saw the signs. I knew where I could and could not go.” He hasn’t forgotten that era. “In entertainment, there is a responsibility somewhere in us to reflect the times that we’re in. And you can do that in the theatre, like my wife [actress LaTanya Richardson] is doing in To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway. As old and well known as that book is, there is still stuff in there that resonates with what’s going on right now. To have somebody who is as under-read and self-centred and greedy running the country... he’s just toxic.” Summing up what he sees to be the venality of Trump and the record-breaking number of members of his cabinet to be indicted or jailed, Jackson quips, “It’s like, everything he touches… You know? If he wanted Hillary to go to jail, he should’ve put her in his cabinet! She’d be in jail.” 4. Samuel L Jackson makes his own rules and doesn’t mind breaking the ones that don’t suit him. Early in the Academy Awards ceremony, he interrupted his duties as presenter to deliver Spike Lee the news that the New York Knicks had won. Why? Because Lee is a Knicks superfan and needed to know, pronto: that’s why. And because Jackson wanted to: that’s why. And who on earth is going to stop Samuel L Jackson from doing what he wants? Samuel L Jackson, the former addict who used to eke out a living on 35 dollars a week, now commands multiple millions for each film. His movies have grossed a cumulative 5.75 billion dollars – the most of any actor in the world. His realm includes both the Star Wars constellation and the Marvel solar system. He is, figuratively and almost literally, master of two universes. “And the winner is...” Jackson intoned, eager to ham it up with the stentorian jollity of a game show host, unfurling the syllables with the sostenuto of an opera tenor, or a sportscaster announcing a winning goal, “Spiiike Leeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Once all the celebratory embraces had run their course, with the audience still swept up in a swoon of satisfaction, Samuel L Jackson handed Spike Lee his Oscar. The two bounded off the stage together. It was – for a moment – as if they’d both won.

Lucas wears jacket HERMÃ&#x2C6;S trousers PT glasses OLIVER PEOPLES top vintage Alida wears jacket DIOR jumper ISABEL MARANT trousers PT glasses OLIVER PEOPLES

PAGES 90â&#x20AC;&#x201D;105

aNGeLS

D A N M AY

C R E AT i V E D i R E C T i O N A N D S T Y L i N G

DeSOLATiON

PHOTOGRAPHY TOM CRAiG

FASHiON

Shirt FENDI cap PASADENA LEISURE CLUB T-shirt vintage

Top: Tracksuit GUCCI Bottom: Shirt FENDI

Dress SAINT LAURENT shoes and socks vintage

Shirt, trousers and trainers GUCCI socks THE ELDER STATESMAN T-shirt vintage

Top left: Jumper and jacket GIORGIO ARMANI Top right: Alida wears jacket DIOR glasses OP Lucas wears glasses OP sweatshirt vintage Middle right: Jumper ISABEL MARANT jeans vintage Bottom left: Shirt MARGARET HOWELL jumper FOLK Bottom right: Shirt and jacket SAINT LAURENT

Glasses OP Trousers PT sweatshirt vintage

100

Top and trousers HUGO BOSS

101

102

Jacket, shirt and trousers GUCCI

Top: Jacket and top LOUIS VUITTON Bottom: Shirt and jacket FENDI glasses OP

103

104

Top and jacket DIOR

Models Lucas Ucedo at LA Models and Alida Sikder at PHOTO/GENICS

Special thanks Tao Ruspoli and Brian McGrory

105

Innovative and radical, Simone Leigh is one of the most exciting artists in America today. Working across disciplines including bronze, raffia, video and even social-practice installation, she is the current beneficiary of the HUGO BOSS Art Prize. Founded in 1996 in conjunction with the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, the biennial prize was created to recognise and support those making a significant contribution to the evolution of contemporary visual arts. Carrying a cash stipend, the award also comes with an opportunity to exhibit at the iconic Guggenheim Museum, New York. Kerry Crowe speaks to Leigh on the eve of her solo show

WORDS KeRRY CROWe

PhotoGRAPHY VALERie CHiANG

SeditiOUS JOY

To meet an artist at the apex of their creativity is one thing; to meet an artist at this point as they are fortified by support, and as the previously marginalised ideas they embody catch fire through public discourse, is quite another. This spring sees both the opening of Simone Leigh’s show ‘Loophole of Retreat’ at the Guggenheim Museum, and the unveiling of her sculpture ‘Brick House’ on Manhattan’s High Line: a 16-foot-tall bronze-and-clay female form, gazing down 10th Avenue. The piece conflates anatomical and architectural imagery from Africa and the American South to create a figure who stands, patiently and resolutely rejecting the whitewashing of women of colour from daily life, while also celebrating a distinct form of female identity: “In any black culture, across the globe, people know what a brick house is,” Leigh tells me. “It’s a reference for a kind of femininity that’s solid and resilient, as opposed to being represented by white fragility; it’s a certain kind of femininity amongst a lot of different kinds.” This year’s opportunities are obviously allowing Leigh to engage with previously explored ideas in wholly different ways. As Port captures her in practice at the Stratton Sculpture Studios, she is working on two seven-foot-tall figurative works for the Guggenheim exhibition. “They’re really quite new,” she tells me. “I’m so excited

about them; they are extending the same formal language that I’ve been using for a long time but at a different scale.” Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 to a family of Jamaican missionaries, in the parsonage of a Nazarene – a white American bible belt – church, where her father was a pastor. Surprisingly, when I ask Leigh about the onset of a sense of being able to creatively reconfigure one’s reality, she traces this back to these, notably unartistic, roots. “When we would come home and tell my father stories of racism, he would laugh about it. He thought it was really funny,” she explains, incredibly. “He thought American racism was ridiculous. He was already 30 years old when he got here, and he hadn’t experienced this idea that he was somehow inferior… It was like he’d gone to Mars.” She draws a parallel with her work: “I don’t accept the rampant fraud in many Western art histories that have produced useless categories like ‘primitive art’; my father’s example showed a quiet, personal, life-long resistance to ignorance. My childhood encouraged a criticality that has served me well as an artist.” The body of work that Leigh has gone on to produce has a notably voracious approach to media and materials. She describes raffia as “pure luxury…

Previous spread, left: Simone Leigh pictured at the Stratton Sculpture Studios, Philadelphia. Previous spread, right: Leigh’s hands covered in a clay slip used for the shell-casting process. This spread: The wax-casting station at the studios.

108

109

all the references and meaning it brings to sculpture are thrilling.” Of ceramics: “This very week I was waiting for something to come out of the kiln and had no idea what the glaze was going to do this time, because I was firing it in a different kiln environment, to a different temperature. There’s a kind of endless exploration in the medium that is just so exciting. “I also like clay; I like working in video and film…” The copiousness of this subject for her is evident. In 2014 and 2016, she mounted exhibitions entitled ‘Free People’s Medical Clinic’ and ‘The Waiting Room’, respectively. The former celebrated, among several influences, the work of the United Order of the Tents, a secret society of African American nurses and carers. The latter honoured a woman named Esmin Elizabeth Green who died on the floor of a Brooklyn hospital reception area in 2008, after waiting 24 hours to be seen. The CCTV footage of this tragedy can still be viewed online and shows a number of hospital staff looking on passively at various times as Green dies. ‘Free People’s Medical Clinic’ and ‘The Waiting Room’ both took the form of interactive social practice installations, offering workshops, healthcare services and classes. However, when I suggest to Leigh that her art is concerned with wellness, she quickly and patiently dispatches my idea: “My work really isn’t concerned with wellness at all,” she states. “I was asked to do a performative work in a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, and our focus was on acts of self-determination. In that particular location I wanted the focus to be on the work of black nurses and the Black Panther Party, and the great contributions they made to culture and society – and the invisibility of their labour, even though it’s so essential; also forms of knowledge that include the wonderful traditions of care that black women have developed over the years. I could have chosen a different field of study, other than medicine. Really it was a symbolic work.” As we talk I get the sense that Leigh’s professional enjoyment is generated, at least in part, by a wry and powerfully incisive understanding of the topsy-turvy time-limited nature of the narrative of white dominance – an amused, insurgent civilian watching on as the emperor shows off his imaginary clothes one last time, before the penny finally, inevitably, drops. “In the US, just the presence of the black subject in art makes people think that there might some kind of cause or advocacy going on, because they see the black body as a problem. There’s this kind of constant drumbeat that you’re asking for help or aid. I’m more saying: it’s about how much we’re helping you, and you recognising that history, and valuing that – rather than needing assistance.” She gives an example: “Ninety-three percent of black women voted for Hillary Clinton. That’s an incredible ability to collectively come together and focus on a common goal and make common sacrifices. We have qualities like that that people depend on, and are coming into view, and I’m really excited about it.” 110

I note that she has an enormous amount of positivity, given the political situation in the US right now – the president’s grasping attempts to maintain the imbalanced status quo and, with them, the galvanising of right-wing extremism. “It’s really a time of a renaissance of black culture, on every level, globally,” Leigh says. “There’s this kind of relentlessness of black excellence that’s more and more evident, that people cannot deny any more. I think that [the political situation] is an American response to what is an inevitability… in that I don’t think the United States will always centre on whiteness in the way it has in the past, or be supported by a misogyny in the way it has in the past. “I definitely don’t feel intimidated by this Trump culture,” she continues. “It makes me think of when the Harlem renaissance was happening, and how that was when Ida B Wells was writing about lynching in the South; so there is a kind of symbiotic relationship between this hatred emerging and a blossoming of black culture.”

Right: Bronze being poured into moulds. Far right: Sand is used to stabilise the moulds and regulate the temperature during the pour.

A flourishing sense of resistance pervades Leigh’s art – an abundant, jubilant sedition. I highlight this delight and pleasure, in spite of the seriousness of her themes, and she says, “I definitely have a big sense of humour and a lot of joy as I’m producing this work. It’s not an enquiry that feels at all a struggle; I don’t feel that the subject matter is difficult. I really enjoy my work.” Nonetheless, the hurdles that lie in the way of an output as complex and multi-textual as Leigh’s are manifold, not least how cultural ignorance can skew interpretation – a problem of which she is acutely aware. We discuss a comment she made previously, that “in Western cultures there is a stated separation between style and substance; an idea of the object and the decoration. Black aesthetics deny this separation.” She expands on this: “For those of us that experienced the history of slavery or marginalisation – where we’ve had to work at the edges and deal with scraps and have an economy of means – a lot of our knowledge has happened on the surface; or through the expression of style; or even using drums as a language. So, when you think of something like the aesthetic of the cool, these really important forms of knowledge don’t exist when you have this wooden idea of the object and the decoration. “In one way it’s about characterisation,” Leigh continues. “So you would have something like a Grebo mask from Ivory Coast or Liberia only come into view in art history to be discussed as decoration that inspired Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, during what is actually called his ‘African period’, believe it or not; and that doesn’t make any kind of sense. Historically there’s a colonial history of describing all the material, culture and all the art and architecture of whole countries as being decorative, so that term becomes incredibly loaded, and so much work has to be done to unpack the socio-historical implications of that – of how it is tethered to the prevalent biases and ideologies. There’s also a gendered description of object and ornament that’s problematic.”

Right: Detail of the handle on ‘Jug’ – a bronze sculpture appearing in the Guggenheim exhibition – as the ceramic shell is removed. Far right: Leigh using a hammer to remove the ceramic shell from ‘Jug’.

111

Above and opposite: Manhattan High Line’s 16-foot-tall bronze sculpture ‘Brick House’ in production.

112

Gendered in the sense that the object is cast as male and the decorative as female? “Yeah. There’s a whole history, for example, of how women’s bodies are treated in European painting and sculpture in which this idea of the decorative is quite sinister. Any labour, craft, fibre – any material that’s associated with the labour of women – is described as ‘decorative’. There are so many iterations where the dichotomy is problematic.” There is an unbounded sense of exploration in Simone Leigh’s body of work as she moves seemingly freely between disciplines. When I ask who helped inspire this creative bravery, the references tumble forth enthusiastically: “Ana Mendieta is an artist who, for me, attainted absolute fearlessness and had such a clear vision. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: she was a black woman artist from Rhode Island who made work in the early 20th century. In 1930 she went to Paris and kept a diary there, and it’s wonderful. At one point she was so poor that she was starving, and she would leave the hospital and go straight back to working, as if she were preparing for a museum show; there was no one telling her that her work was important, but she felt that import.” Leigh’s voice is rich with affection and respect. “And it really all came true; she’s in many museum collections. She came back to the States and started the sculpture department at Spelman – which is a really important, historically black, college. I

have a lot of examples like that… Leontyne Price… The list goes on and on and on.” Our conversation turns to Leigh’s own increased visibility, and the public interest in her work. “Something I find is that I’m often asked if I’m grateful for my success, or ‘How did my success happen?’” she says. “I’m aware of the history where black subjects are asked to be grateful. The inference is that their success has come from some kind of aid, rather than because of their hard work. “Gratitude has its place, and is really important, but I don’t want to participate in that description of me as someone who needed aid, and to respond to a question that would never be asked of someone who wasn’t a person of colour, or a woman. People don’t ask Richard Serra if he’s grateful!” I tell her that, in a similar vein, I have noticed several pieces of commentary claiming she has ‘broken into the mainstream’. She laughs at this observation, and says, “I think it’s a cousin to the question ‘Are you grateful?’ It’s like, ‘How did you get here?’” I do an impression of a bemused journalist remarking that Simone Leigh seems to be cropping up in highly unexpected places lately. “Exactly, exactly,” she says, and she laughs heartily – joyful and knowing. ‘Loophole of Retreat’ runs at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, from April 19th to August 4th, 2019. More information on the HUGO BOSS Art Prize can be found at hugoboss.com.

Left: Detail of moulds. Right: The artist surrounded by fragments of the moulds from ‘Brick House’.

114

115

Dan Crowe

Uncharted Territory Words

Photography Jack Davison

Styling Rose Forde

Harris Dickinson is one of the most exhilarating actors to emerge in recent years – his leading-man appearance

belying a multifaceted talent. Following a breakout role in 2017’s Beach Rats, which

garnered wide critical acclaim, in 2018 he starred in flagship TV drama Trust : Danny Boyle’s portrait of the abduction of oil heir John Paul Getty III.

Having recently filmed Matthias & Maxime with celebrated auteur Xavier Dolan, this autumn

he will appear alongside Angelina Jolie in multiplexes globally in the sequel to Maleficent: “It’s Disney man, of course it’s exciting!”

A bright and sunny Sunday in central London. Dickinson and I meet in Green Park. The Houses of Parliament – in crisis, as is usual now – are partly visible through swaying willow trees. We sit on recently mown grass with clusters of daffodils erupting all around. The Andrea Bocelli hit ‘Por Ti Volaré’ is being performed on a Chinese erhu nearby. Dickinson says he feels like we’re in a Haruki Murakami novel. He plays with the grass as we talk, and we discuss how the city is different, calmer, at weekends. I ask him if he always imagined being an actor: “I didn’t grow up dreaming of Hollywood,” he replies, “but I did make a lot of little films when I was young [in east London]. Mostly me orchestrating my mates. I never acted in my own stuff but I got a taste of it.” Technology, of course, and the Internet has helped: “I had this show with my friend when I was 11. We would upload weekly videos to YouTube. Spoofs of various other films. Then my own material came after that… short films I’d written. I was somehow completely okay with the idea of asking companies for money to make them. I got 1,500 pounds when I was 15 to make a film. I was hustling, man!” Now, only a few years on, he is acting in films with 100 million dollar budgets. Talent emerging from acting school or the theatre can be taken up quickly, but this is meteoric. How does he feel about it all? “Things feel good man!” he enthuses. “There have been some overwhelming moments lately… I met Gary Oldman. He’s…” Dickinson pauses for a moment and looks away, as if words aren’t sufficient. “Gary’s very cool. And acting alongside Ralph Fiennes [in part three of the Kingsman series, in production] is a masterclass.” Dickinson seems adept at maintaining balance in his life, with a calmness that doesn’t feel engineered for an interview setting. “I think my way of dealing with life, in general, is to stay on an even plane. Best to take it as it comes, rather than think about it too much. I just want to continue to explore extreme characters – roles that force me to change, to feel uncomfortable.” The conversation turns to where he may have acquired this desire for uncomfortable

118

work. Could it be his time training, on weeknights and weekends, over the course of several years, in the Royal Marines’ cadet corps (a profession he very nearly entered)? “I think the cadets helped a bit, perhaps, with self-discipline. But Daniel Day-Lewis is such an inspiration for me here; he’s shaped my idea of what acting is, helped forge my view of the industry… how one behaves in it.” He continues: “I find, with acting, you get to learn with each character, and that comes from uncharted territory, which is humbling. It makes you less selfish; that’s what I love about it. You need to feel what these characters think… to understand their psychologies and characteristics, which feeds into your own life. I think that’s why I go for those roles: that, and the need to push myself.” Taking on the feelings and thought processes of someone else and living by them is, we agree, quite a peculiar thing. Dickinson is suddenly gripped by how strange his job is: “It’s getting the chance to live life through other people. It’s really quite weird isn’t it! A lot about acting is feeling it; and once you feel it, it’s actually part of you...” He marvels at this apparent magic. “And then you have to shake it off afterwards, otherwise you lose your marbles, and I need those,” he smiles. It feels like Dickinson could go either way: progressive art-house cinema or Hollywood hero. It’s a wonderful mixture to have; a promise of great range. We talk about how masculinity has changed in movies, from the ’50s teenager to the hardmen of ’80s action films, and I ask him if he thinks things are still changing. “Those films were great for sure – Gene Hackman and Paul Newman being the tough guys; they are amazing actors. But a lot of characters now are being written with much more range, more emotion and depth. Not just for men. I think things are still changing a lot.” How does he feel about the blockbuster action stuff ? “As much as people want escapism, they also want to be immersed in a detailed story. That idea of the hardman just isn’t real anyway. Audiences don’t need a dumbed-down version

of the world: It’s complicated. And that’s what I want to be part of.” Dickinson sometimes tweets his dreams. They often include walk-on parts by directors and other actors, such as one in which he asked Lynne Ramsay for a hug in his local corner shop. “I was on the cusp of tech, so I didn’t grow up on Instagram as such,” he says of the apps that are a fundamental part of kids’ lives today. “My childhood was playing in a forest. I didn’t have a phone until I was 14. I really value that time before the social media explosion. I totally get tech, and use it all the time, but I think it can be really harmful. It’s twisted… social media. You’ve got to strike a balance with it.” I mention a tweet I read earlier, by Mark Frost – co-writer, with David Lynch, of Twin Peaks – which pointed out that there is a single falcon feather on the moon: An astronaut performed the feather-and-heavy-object-falling-at-the-samerate test and left the feather behind. It could be there, in the vacuum of space, for millions of years. “That’s incredible man! That’s the amazing thing about the Internet, about social media. All these little bits of information you wouldn’t normally have noticed. It can bring something unexpected to your life,” he says equitably. “I had a dream about David Lynch recently: He rang me while I was skiing. Dreams can be so cinematic.” I venture that some of these dreams may come true, and Dickinson asks, with disarming sincerity, “Do you really think so?” As we leave the park, I suggest dropping by a nearby restaurant to use their facilities. Approaching the entrance he stops, figuring out faster than me the inappropriateness of my plan; it’s a particularly fancy establishment. He starts to gently mock me: “You can’t just go in there, walk past the diners and use the toilet!” His inner actor kicks in and he animates himself into a proper cockney geezer, arms swinging up and down: “Let me in, yeah? Alright, cheers mate…!” I see a snapshot of him in full flow: open, funny, confident… a young man at the beginning of an extraordinary journey.

Dickinson wears PRADA throughout

122

123

126

Hair and makeup Jody Taylor atÂ Premier Hair and Makeup Styling assistant Christina Phillips Photography assistant Maxwell Tomlinson

Set design Gemma Tickle at East Photographic Set design assistant Leonie Whartona Production Mini Title

127

PHOTOGRAPHY fABRiZIO AlBeRTiNI

GeORGe UPTON

WORDS

fARM

THe GOLDSMiTH’S

Port travels to Bulgari’s state-of-the-art jewellery factory to discover ancient traditions and the value of craftsmanship

Previous spread, left: There are many highly specialised and bespoke machines at the Bulgari factory in Valenza, but craftsmanship is still key.

Previous spread, right: Built on the exact footprint of Francesco Caramora’s workshop, which established a tradition of goldsmithing in Valenza, the smaller of the two buildings on the factory complex features a dramatic glass atrium – the visitors’ entrance – and houses offices. The height of the main factory building, clad in black perforated metal, was informed by the height of Caramora’s original building.

In 1817, the master goldsmith Francesco Caramora moved to a small farming village on the banks of the Po, in north-west Italy. Caramora, who learnt his trade from his uncle in nearby Voghera, had moved there to found his own business and took on apprentices, establishing a workshop recorded in Napoleonic-era maps as the Cascina dell’Orefice, (the Goldsmith’s Farm), as well as an enduring tradition for jewellery production in the town. Today Valenza – a city with the highest number of artisanal gold and jewellery businesses, in a country that is the world’s largest producer and exporter of jewellery – is a global centre for gold-working. And it is here, on the site of Caramora’s workshop, that the luxury Roman 130

Above left: A part, 3D printed in wax, being prepared for casting. It will be attached to a ‘tree’ before it is placed in the ‘investment’, a liquid that hardens when cooked. As it is heated, the wax melts, leaving a void for the molten gold to fill.

maison Bulgari has built its new manufacturing facility. With a floor area of 14,000 square metres, split over three levels, it is the biggest of its kind in Europe. Despite being founded, in 1884, by a Greek immigrant, Sotirios Voulgaris, Bulgari is an inherently Italian brand. With its centre in Rome, where its bespoke jewellery is made, Bulgari draws on the expertise of cities across the bel paese – accessories are produced in Florence, perfumes in Lodi, silk in Como (only for horological expertise and the coveted Swiss-made mark do the Romans cross the border). Building a dedicated jewellery manufacturing facility in Valenza, where Bulgari had long worked with local artisans, was a natural decision.

Above right: A gold tree of rings after casting, the investment having already been removed with compressed air. The rings will be cut from the tree using shears and pneumatic cutting tools, and the trunk recycled. Opposite: Wax trees of various components awaiting casting.

“We, of course, wanted to maintain the Italian origin of our company,” the factory’s director of operations, Nicolò Rapone, tells me when I meet him in the smaller of the two buildings that make up the manufacturing complex – a perfect facsimile of the house that stood on Caramora’s cascina. “But it was just as important to be here for the craftsmen, for that tradition. You can’t find skills like that anywhere else.” There’s snow on the ground when I visit Valenza in late January. The air is clear and sharp – mountains are visible lining the horizon – but the vast glass atrium of the Cascina building is warm in the winter sun. Rapone leads me through a tunnel to the main factory building: a wide, low rectangle of glass and metal, built

131

132

around an airy 600-square-metre courtyard and clad with black perforated panels, set six metres from the building. Allowing light into the three tall levels while ensuring privacy, the panels are the first layer of a security system that includes guards, highly sensitive metal detectors and a sophisticated internal surveillance system. Yet with Rapone, as he swipes his way through security doors, maintaining a commentary on the building, the security is barely noticeable. We briskly cross the courtyard – Rapone detailing the factory’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certification, part of which involves creating a healthy work environment – and find ourselves in the employees common room, where workers stand chatting. The entire ground floor, he explains, is devoted to the employees – a canteen, lockers, a space to socialise. The first floor is for casting – where the various metal components are created first in wax, from which are made moulds that are filled with molten gold – and for the CNC machines, which produce components that have to be made to very tight tolerances. It’s also here that materials are weighed and counted; and kits, with the right components and precious stones, are put together for production. The top floor is reserved for the artisans, the highly trained goldsmiths, setters and polishers, but not, as I presume, because they require the space that offers the most natural light… In fact, when we reach the third floor, the artisans are busy at work in rooms where the blinds are drawn, each workstation a focused pool of light, a halo of complete concentration. The 18 ‘islands’, as the rooms are called at the factory, are a hive of intricate, dextrous industry, set against the constant hum of the filtration system that takes up shimmering air – the gold dust from polisher’s wheel. It’s all clean and new, efficient, state of the art; the artisans’ workflow is organised by computer, each new job being tasked automatically depending on the demands of supply and the workers’ particular skills and training. And yet, watching the artisans at work, as they lean into their workstation, loupe set into one eye, buffing the interior of a ring with precise, certain movements, or else staring deep into a microscope, delicately placing brilliant stones into their settings, it becomes apparent that these artisans are working independently of any set process; they are not following instructions but acting with the discretion of their craft. This skill and experience is, as Rapone tells me, vital to the success of the factory. It’s why, within the corridors, in islands identical to the ones working on retail products, students are being trained in-house, working on inexpensive ersatz versions of Bulgari’s lines, copper for gold, zircon for precious stones. Taken from jewellery schools across the country, the students of the Bulgari Academy are trained over four months before they are set to work on real products. “We are investing in people as well as machinery,” Rapone tells me. But it is not just on the top floor of the factory that skilled manual work is important. “At every stage, components are checked by hand,”

Above and opposite: Other metal components, produced from gold wire and tubes that are continually casted (molten metal extruded through various-sized dies), are then formed using CNC machines or shaped and wound, as here, in two interlocking layers that create the distinctive ‘tubogas’ spring.

133

Above: A ring being polished. The final stage of the process, the assembly, takes place on the top floor of the facility. Here goldsmiths, having received kits from logistics with the correct components and stones, assemble the jewellery, each one tasked according to their skill level and experience. Setters then place precious stones, and polishers finish the products.

Rapone explains. “This is really one of the core values people bring. It’s not possible to do this with a machine.” And whether it’s refining the wax forms before they are cast, making up the kits ready for production (on the Saturday before I arrive, over six hours, the logistics team counted and weighed 10,977 stones), or even the in-house maintenance teams, who keep the CNC machines running – experience and craftsmanship play roles throughout the facility. Despite the scale of the operation, jewellery making, even for big companies like Bulgari, remains an intimate, human process, and one that hasn’t changed significantly in thousands of years. “What we are doing here is essentially the same as the Greeks,” says Rapone. He’s telling 134

Above: A laser welding machine.

me about the lost-wax method, where the design for a component is made in wax and placed into an investment, a liquid that sets around the wax. When the investment is heated, the wax melts, leaving a void that can then be filled with molten gold. Exactly the same process was used to make ancient bronze sculptures, and by Caramora, on the same site as the factory, 200 years ago. “Really, a lot of the modern technology we use is there to help us manage these traditional processes,” he continues. “It’s all about finding an equilibrium, a good relationship between tradition, modernity and innovation.” Later, in Rapone’s office, as he shows me finished versions of the jewellery I’ve watched being made, I think of the ancient bronzes, and

Opposite: The goldsmiths work in one of 18 rooms, or islands, as they are known at the factory. At each stage the products are checked by hand and under microscope.

of the jewellery they’re often displayed next to. Those museum pieces are delicate and intricate, carefully but obviously worked, the slight imprecisions revealing the hand of the craftsman in a way that is not the case with the perfectly formed, perfectly finished, bracelets, rings, necklaces and earrings I’m handling. And yet – just as we seek out rare, precious, expertly crafted objects to wear, to gift to one another, as ancient civilisations did – understanding now the time, skill, tradition and experience that has gone into each piece that leaves Valenza, I can see the same care and attention, the same craftsmanship, evident in those artefacts. Fashions come and go, but on the goldsmith’s farm, much stays the same.

135

News, commentary, reporting, recommendations, culture, and humor in the distinctive voice of The New Yorker. Every day, in your in-box.

Subscribe to the magazine at newyorker.com/save50

I remember, as a young child, tiptoeing through the bookshop – the sun just starting its rise – stepping over sleeping Tumbleweeds and around towers of tumbledown books, the bells of Notre Dame chiming “Good morning” right outside the window. I was filled with a sense of wonder and curiosity, and it’s a feeling that has never left me, even decades later. It is what led me back to Shakespeare and Company in my early 20s, to help run my father’s bookshop, “where the streets of the world meet the avenues of the mind”, and what has kept me here: a wonder and curiosity for the people, for Paris, for the books themselves.

I’ve learned that books are the ultimate objects for wonder and curiosity; every page, every character is a new life, a new skin, a new outlook. And you take it with you. With each book you finish you are a changed person, looking at a world slightly altered… looking at it anew. Books are the embodiment of wonder and curiosity, but the ultimate act of these feelings is looking. What do we feel when we look at the face of the person we love, or at an anonymous crowd, at the streets we walk every morning, or a change in season? How do women look at men? How do women look at one another? What are we looking at when we are stuck to our screens?

Guest edited by Sylvia Whitman

It was with such thoughts that I assembled this collection of stories, essays and poetry around the theme of how we look, or ‘the gaze’. Of course, the gaze is individual. You and I won’t see the same landscape, yet we both come to it with the same inspiration – yes, always back to wonder and curiosity – and we will both leave it, even if ever so slightly, changed. Thank you to my fellow booksellers for the discussions and for helping to find texts: Krista, David, Adam, Ben, Octavia, Karolina, Alex and Linda.

— Sylvia Whitman

Illustrations by Tamara Shopsin

ESSAY

DIALOGUE

EXTRACT

ESSAY

POEM

FICTION

LOOK! OVER HERE!

SHAME AND POWER

JOURNAL FRAGMENT

PAULA MODERSOHNBECKER

IN PRAISE OF MAY

A SPIRITUALIST

THE 18TH

YOSANO AKIKO

JEAN RHYS

DEBORAH LEVY

JEANETTE WINTERSON

JOHN FREEMAN

SYLVIA PLATH

MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

DEBORAH LANDAU LEÏLA SLIMANI Photography Name Surname

137

ESSAY

I first met Jeanette in 2007 when I invited her for tea at the bookshop. Desperately nervous and excited, I attempted to bake her three cakes but then my oven at home broke, so I had to cycle to the bookshop’s kitchen, cake mixture spilling out of my basket. As Jeanette

was arriving, my father threw a book at her head from his third-floor window. He didn’t miss. Yet still she visits us. I think she likes the theatre of it; bookshops are homes for the romantic and curious minded. Pound said that poets need an uninterrupted curiosity to

be able to write anything important. I think that goes for readers, too. The best feeling is when you put down a book and see your surroundings as if for the first time. This is always the sensation I have after reading anything by the formidable Jeanette Winterson.

Look! Over Here! Jeanette Winterson

The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at… TS Eliot – Burnt Norton No 1 of Four Quartets When did you last really look at something? And what was it? Some time ago a woman who wanted to get my attention came to my house. I knew her a little and I liked her well enough. She was personable and attractive. And that’s all. It was a blowy autumn evening. Chilly for the time of year. I went to get us a drink. When I returned she was standing close to the fire. Naked. There was a pause. I said: What do you want me to do? She said: Look at me. It was a powerful act. It is a powerful image. I did look. And as a writer I thought about what it is to be a painter. I thought about looking as an event – a spectacle (and that we used to call eyewear ‘spectacles’), and I thought about looking as translation; the way we interpret what we see. Anais Nin: We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. Mostly, we don’t look. The brain works hard to absorb the world at the level of familiarity. What is known is filed. This is a useful evolutionary survival mechanism. Our routes and routines don’t need attention, and in theory that frees us to be alert for what does need attention. In practise we live in a fog and a blur, not noticing our surroundings, or even our loved ones. You don’t notice me anymore is the sad beginning of the end of a relationship. Remember when you fell in love? How you mapped every millimetre of the beloved? Your forensic obsession with detail? And how the world itself became magnified; the curve of the stone wall, the flight of a bird, the sun rising, the geometry of the city, the wave function of crowds? You saw it all instantly and clearly and with rapt attention. And you saw yourself. Remember your new baby. All babies look alike. Not so. Your baby is unique. The baby looks at the mother. The mother looks at her child. What do they see? They see the world since time began, this gaze, ubiquitous but unique. They see each other. The bond is intense because it is physical, but also because the mother is an eagle now. Who else can see what she sees? And what do we see? The onlookers? We see a mother and child. In every picture gallery, in every church, and in homemade 138

Commentary

shrines all over the world, we find images of the mother and child. This ancient, profound symbol, at once religious and primitive, transcends time and even transcends the impulse that made it. As an image it represents the cornerstone of human life. As a symbol it does more than represent, however beautifully, what we know. A symbol is a multidimensional, immersive, contemplative, nonverbal encounter at the sea-edge of conscious and unconscious knowledge – and here I mean knowledge as gnosis – in the sense that Greek thought had a name for the kind of knowing that is a constellated out of what you have learned, what you have experienced, and what you intuit. This fullness of knowledge is provoked by whatever has symbolic as well as representational value. There are moments we have experienced, gazing at a work of art, gazing into the face of a beloved, whether lover or child, gazing out to sea, or in some profound contact with nature, when life seems to come together. There is unity. There is peace. For some this happens with music or poetry, when the busy world disappears and the inner eye is free to see into the life of things. There’s a story about Picasso’s famous portrait of Gertrude Stein. He was having a terrible time painting her head – in fact he had to finish it when she wasn’t there – but she had advised him: Paint what is really there – not what you can see, but what is really there… This was good advice against representation. Representation can only take us so far – and certainly not into the life of things. Right now, in our world, we live on the surface as never before. We are bombarded with visual images designed to sell us stuff. Models are photoshopped out of all reality. Youth is the only timeline with any status. The daily air raid of images, bombing us from billboards and phone apps, isn’t representational; it’s fantasy. All we can do, if we want to keep sane in this fantasy world, is to shut it out. But all around us too, is human misery; homelessness, ugliness, a hostile built environment, a polluted planet. We shut that out too. And in the city, we don’t make eye contact. Above all, don’t smile at strangers. Beggars? Look away. We walk down a street of blank stares. And when we look in the mirror? Not many people like what they see – or they work obsessively to hone and tone what they see to conform to a fantasy.

But where, then, can we rest our gaze? What are we supposed to look at? Actually? TV. Hours of it. Our avoidant look-away world fetishes the screen. Observe the family at dinner, each busy with their personal screen. Observe ourselves on a train or on the metro, not reading a book or talking, but screen watching. I love technology and what it has allowed. I hate what we are becoming; unable to focus, unable to fix our eyes on an unmediated image. All the content on your screen is mediated. Try this. Take any object – an ordinary coffee cup. A spoon. A bucket. Sit with it for 10 minutes and do nothing but look at it. This is why any object is suitable for meditation. First we find how hard it is to concentrate when there is no story and no distraction. When the narrative pattern-making part of the brain is not involved. When there is no sex, no violence, no arousal or affect of any kind. Second, we realise how weird objects are when divorced from context (what the hell is a tie?). Then we begin to pierce the veil of unreality (the unreality of our lives). This is agitating. Then it is calming. After this exercise with any ordinary object, try it with an object of significance. Like the moon. Or a tree. Try it sitting opposite your beloved. Looking into each other’s eyes. And try it with a work of art. This is truly scary. I don’t think many of us would last 10 minutes with the Mona Lisa. Any fool can stand there gawping and waving an iPad. That’s not an encounter; that’s avoidance. There are lots of people who avoid art by looking at it via their device. But art is not an Instagram account. You have to be there. (Be Here Now.) And that is harder than it seems. I try to look at something every day. That is harder than it seems. I want to keep my eyes open. To notice what is around

me, whether I like it or I don’t. But I want to go beyond that too, and seek out what has a symbolic value, so that I can understand myself as part of history, as part of the imaginative life of the human race against time. When I am in Paris I like to go to the Musée de Cluny to look at the six tapestries of the Lady and the Unicorn, woven around 1500. One of these tapestries is called Sight. This series has been endlessly explained and yet it remains mysterious and unknown. To sit in the half dark with those woven images is both to dream and to awaken. In my dream I become part of the non-time of the tapestry. I am released from my own clock-bound life segments. I am free. Simultaneously I experience an energetic contact – I suppose it is gnosis – outside of the envelope of myself. I am not sleepwalking, I am awake. I see into the life of things. It is clear to me as I sit with the lady and her unicorn that humans communicate best through noncommunicable forms. That is what art is; not representation, not documentary, not linear, not time-bound, not common sense, not really open to explanation no matter how well we explain it. And it is worth trying to explain – always – that the human mind is as mysterious as this lady and her unicorn. Looking. Sometimes I am just looking for the right road. Sometimes I am looking for an address. Sometimes I am looking for something to wear. Sometimes I am looking at those shapes we call the written word. Sometimes I am looking at you. Sometimes I am looking at myself as time changes me, as it must. And sometimes, because I keep working at it, and life is a lot of work, I get to see what it is I am looking at, and then I get to see deeper. Like space there is no end.

DIALOGUE

On 14th January 2019, Shakespeare and Company hosted an event to celebrate the fifth issue of the biannual journal Freeman’s. Taking ‘power’ as its theme, the issue set itself the task of reclaiming the very definition of that word from the narrow interpretation recent political events had foisted upon it, highlighting – as editor John Freeman writes in his introduction

– the “many other vectors of power slicing through life, from the power of generosity to the power of taking over one’s story”. For the event, John Freeman was joined by two of his contributors Deborah Landau and Leïla Slimani. Deborah Landau is an American poet and chair of the NYU Creative Writing Programme. Her new collection, Soft Targets, deals mov-

ingly with the physical vulnerability of the human body. Leïla Slimani is a Franco-Moroccan novelist and journalist whose second novel, Lullaby, won the Prix Goncourt. She has written frankly and powerfully about sex and shame, both in her first novel, Adèle, and in 2017’s Sexe et mensonges: La vie sexuelle au Maroc (Sex and lies: Sexual life in Morocco).

Shame and Power John Freeman

Deborah Landau

John Freeman: So my first question is for Leïla Slimani. In your novel, Adèle, secrets play a large role for different but overlapping reasons, shame being one of the primary ones. Can you talk about the different ways that shame as a power can create community, and also isolate? And what possibilities does that open for you as a writer?

Leïla Slimani

Leïla Slimani: Wow! That’s a very metaphysical question. I was born and raised in Morocco, into a bourgeois family. My parents were not religious at all, but I can remember that my parents used to tell us that you can do certain things: You can have a boyfriend; you can believe in God, or not believe in God, if you don’t want to; you can be a free woman… But just, please, 139

don’t say this when you’re outside. Don’t say it to other people; that’s what we are telling you, and teaching you, because it’s forbidden – it’s not how the majority of the population is thinking. So as a very young child I was like a schizophrenic. I was having two lives – a double life. And I think that’s probably what influenced me to write about those characters who have two faces that they show to the world, and a sort of intimacy that is a secret intimacy. Actually I think that everyone has secrets. A lot of secrets. I think that everyone has a monster inside of them. And I think that, actually, we never know people – we can live with someone for 20 years or 30 years, but we will never really know this person. We are always lonely. That’s what I think. And that’s probably why we have secrets, and that’s probably why there is always something inside us that is impossible to express, that we can’t communicate about – because maybe we don’t really understand it ourselves. And it’s the same for shame. I think that shame isolates. I don’t really see how shame can create a community, as you said. I think that it’s isolating and I think that the patriarchy knows it very well, because that was the best tool that men used to dominate women. “You should be ashamed. Shame on you!” As soon as you are a little girl, you understand it. “Close your legs, shame on you!” “Stay straight... don’t act like this.” Shame, shame, shame… This is what belongs to us, as just little girls. So it’s something very feminine. And I think that men and women don’t understand shame in the same way. But as a very little girl, I knew what shame was because it belongs also to Moroccan education. Someone who is well educated is someone who is ashamed, because you have to be ashamed – in front of power, in front of men, in front of your parents, in front of God. You should be always ashamed. And actually I was never ashamed. So that was a problem when I was a child, because I didn’t have this thing… this tool that men wanted to use against me, and I didn’t believe in God and authority. I was free. JF: I’m resisting the urge to clap. I sometimes felt, reading Adèle, that one of the strategies you employed to deal with shame was to make the circumstances so extreme that it forced your readers to confront the rationality of that shame complex. I wonder if you did that on purpose? LS: Of course. Very often people ask: do you think of your reader when you’re writing? Actually, I don’t. It’s not that I think about my reader; it’s that my reader is with me. I am the writer and the reader. I am the little girl who was reading Anna Karenina and Jack London, and I just want to feel what I felt when I was a reader. That’s the emotion I’m reaching for; I’m not trying just to impress people and to say “Look, I’m a writer!” No, I’m trying just to understand my characters and to love them, to feel empathy for them. And actually I think that maybe what you don’t write is as important as what you do write, and what you don’t write is probably the space that you leave for your reader to be active and to find a place to be in the book. Sometimes I decide not to say this or not to explain that because I want a reader to understand it by himself. You were speaking about shame. I want the reader very often to be embarrassed and to feel very uncomfortable when read140

Commentary

ing, because I think that’s what you feel when you come to know the intimacy of someone. When you are in front of intimacy, you feel empathy. But at the same time you feel some shame, you feel embarrassed. It’s like when you see someone naked for the first time… We can feel excitement… desire… But you can feel also shame and embarrassment. And that’s exactly the feeling I want to convey. JF: Deborah, I wonder if you can talk about how poets and poetry write against this, the forms of shame we were just talking about. Are there any poets who showed you a way to do that, as you were beginning to write yourself ? Deborah Landau: So for years I did write poetry about living in a female body, and poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and Louise Glück were all super important to me. In terms of shame… I don’t know. Poems are made things. So even when they appear to be about something very intimate or personal, by the time they’re on the page or reach your reader, they’re something very different. Experience has been transformed and it’s more about the language. So it’s not like you’re really inviting the reader into your real bedroom. There’s a distance between the poems and the poet. For me, the poems that I’m writing now are really different. I’m still writing about the body, but not so much the personal body. The fear of annihilation goes beyond the self to an imperilled plane where we’re all vulnerable in our soft bodies. We’re all soft targets and there’s so many threats: the threats of global terror, of gun violence, the threat to our democracy, the threats of climate change, and so on. So I’m dealing with a different set of concerns now. JF: Everything you mentioned there has been on the news. I wonder what you think about poetry that has a kind of documentary impulse, that is writing specifically into the moment in a realistic way. And I think you would think of your own poems as different from that type of poetry. Can you differentiate the two and speak to what that kind of verse is doing? I’m thinking of public poetry. DL: He asks the best questions! So it’s been thrilling to see our students and younger poets and newer poets documenting what’s happening in the world right now. And I’m thinking specifically of three alumni who are doing this brilliantly: Javier Zamora, who documents his unaccompanied journey from El Salvador, as a child, to the US; or Solmaz Sharif and her book Look, where she takes the Department of Defence military dictionary to expose how the United States is inflicting violence and covering it up with euphemism all over the world. Or Robin Coste Lewis, who teaches in our programme, and has her brilliant Voyage of the Sable Venus, where she collages the titles of works of art in which the black female figure appears, in order to catalogue and chronicle and excavate that violence over hundreds and hundreds of years. So that’s one thing that’s happening and it’s very exciting. I guess my impulse is more lyric, and someone, for me, who was important is Adrienne Rich; her work Twenty-One Love Poems documents, in a long lyric sequence, what it was like to be a woman who loved another woman in the 1970s, and all the dangers and pains and pleasures and powers of that. Or someone like Carolyn Forché – her poems about El Salvador. But, again,

Someone who is well educated is someone who is ashamed, because you have to be ashamed – in front of power, in front of men, in front of your parents, in front of God. with the lyric impulse to document… and you can say that any poet who’s looking at the world and observing it and bearing witness to it is documenting, right? I mean, how are we defining it? JF: Leïla was talking about how she wants her reader to feel uncomfortable, or feel disquieted. She wants a reaction. And I wonder if you feel a similar desire with your own poetry, when it comes out in the world, other than, you know, that it gets nice reviews, and you win all the prizes, and we carry you in our hands all the way down the Champs-Élysées… It’s what happens! Is there a reaction that you want? DL: I guess I want to just feel like I’ve connected with the reader, with one reader and then another reader and another reader, through language. You know, that’s the pleasure of poetry. You’re alone in your own head; we’re lonely, as you say. But then, through language, through the poem, it’s on the page, and then, you know, you get it. And that connection is everything to me. I mean, for a poet, you have to have small goals, because that’s about as good as it gets: poet to reader, poet to reader, sort of one to one. It’s a different scale. JF: And speaking of one-to-one reactions, sometimes the most personal reaction you get is from a reviewer. I don’t know, maybe you’ve wiped the slate from your memory, Leïla, but you’ve been translated into 42 languages. I wonder if you remember the reaction that Adèle had when it came out here, and what it told you about French culture… LS: I never had a moralising or moral reaction to my book. I never heard someone saying ‘Adèle is not a good person’, or that what she does is bad. But it was very funny because two or three days ago a British journalist asked me a question; he said, “What would you say to a woman who tells you that a woman like Adèle stole her husband?” And I was like: I don’t know. That’s a very weird question! If you read literature like that you can put Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary on trial… all these characters in literature on trial, because they are not good people. None of us are perfect people, and we have done bad things one day or another. So I think that in France, people are good readers as they don’t judge characters. But what shocked me was that everyone was surprised by a Moroccan woman – a supposed Muslim woman – writing about sex. And I thought: Muslims have sex actually, and you know that Muslims can be crazy, and be sex addicts, and can talk about eroticism. It was a little bit sad to see that, actually. JF: You began reporting about those stories while on book tour in Morocco. I wonder if you can talk about that; suddenly you’re getting a lot of attention for a novel, and then you’re speaking to normal women who have read the book. And I wonder how that changed for you, how you thought about your role as a writer, and also the public discourse about sex. LS: Yes. Just after the book was out in France I decided to go on a book tour in Morocco. I went to many cities: Tangier, Rabat, Casablanca, El Jadida, and the first date was like today, in a bookshop, and I had a discussion with the public. Afterwards I

went to a cafe to have a drink, and a woman sat next to me, and she said: “You know, I loved your book very much, and I loved Adèle. I can understand her, because, as Adèle, I lie all the time about my life, and about what I think and about my affairs.” And I felt that this woman wanted to tell me more. So, I was very still; I said nothing. And I was afraid that even if I moved, she would stop speaking. And she spoke for maybe two hours, and she told me so many secrets. She told me about her childhood, she said that when she was a young girl, her mother was nice and gave her an open-minded education, not too religious and not too conservative. But each time she was going on vacation, or to a party, her mother would tell her: “Don’t forget.” And I asked her why she said that. “Don’t forget to stay a virgin,” she said. “The first time I had sex with a man, I could hear the voice of my mother saying, ‘Don’t forget, don’t forget!’ I never had pleasure with a man because I was always listening to the voice of my mother saying don’t forget.” And so I came back home and I wrote everything in a notebook, and, maybe two weeks after, I read what I wrote, and I thought: I need to tell this story; I need to find this woman, and to ask her, would you mind if I publish the story? And then I decided to meet other women when I went to Tangier. The bookshop in Tangier is very well known, and it’s just in front of a bar where there are a lot of prostitutes. It’s a famous bar and very weird. So I decided to interview prostitutes, and they all came to the bookshop. It was fun, and men went with the prostitutes after. And we had readers. It was really crazy. But those women, they were trusting me, because they said that if you can understand someone like Adèle, maybe you can understand us, or at least maybe you cannot judge us. So that’s what was very interesting. JF: When you reveal a lot of secrets about a place that you’re from, sometimes it’s explosive. And I imagine you had to think hard about whether or not to put some of the things that you were told and learnt into the book… LS: Yes, of course. But, you know, if you ask people to be sincere, if you have in front of you a woman who is telling you everything about her life, who is making this effort to remember very bad things, and to tell you about her abortion, about her rape, you have to be honest yourself. So, if this woman has the guts to face her own shame, and her own souvenirs, I must have the guts to do it myself. I think it’s very important. But at the same time, the only thing that I tried not to do is to deal too much with religion, because it was too easy to explain everything with religion. Not everything is to do with religion. It’s a lot about patriarchy, and patriarchy is universal. And you have a lot of stories that could have happened here or in the United States, or somewhere else. And it would have been too easy to say it’s all about Islam. Everyone would read this and say “Okay… It’s just because they are Muslim!” and that’s not true. It’s not because I’m Muslim; it’s because they are women, and very often because they are poor women… Or because they are poor women and not married. So that was very important for me, to not speak too much about religion. JF: For both of you, fear is an element in all of your work, to some larger and smaller degrees. I wonder if you can write about how fear changes your impulses as journalists, as novelists. And 141

that’s… I’m not saying you write with fear, but you write about fear to some degree. LS: Yes. I think that fear is probably the emotion I’m the most obsessed about. I’m someone who is always scared. I’m never ashamed, but I’m always scared. I’m scared when I’m on the street. I’m scared when I’m with my children. I’m scared as a mother, as a woman, as a citizen. I’m always scared. And I very often ask myself, what would my life be if I wasn’t scared? Everything would be possible. If I wasn’t scared, I would do so many things. But that’s what it is: I’m scared. So I tried to write about it, but maybe because that’s the only way I can fight against this fear and can do something with it, or about it, because it’s paralysed me so much that I need to do something. I don’t want to go to a psychiatrist, and I don’t want to speak about it… and it’s too expensive anyway. I would rather write about it. And, actually, the first time I began to write, I discovered that I am fearless: I can do all the things that I don’t do in real life, because I was scared. I can travel, I can meet men, I can have passion, take drugs; I can be drunk and I can jump in the Seine. I can do whatever I want when I write. So that’s a wonderful way to fight against all my fears. And that’s also the subject of my books, because all my characters, they feel this fear, they are scared – and here again I think that women have a very different relationship to fear than men. If you’re a woman, and you have to go out at night, you will be careful about what you’re wearing, because, when you are on the street, you know that someone can follow you, and you know that you can be raped. I think that the fear of being raped is, for me, and for many women, something that we all have with us. That’s probably why I write, because I’m so scared. JF: Deborah? DL: I would say that I’m scared and ashamed. So you’re one ahead of me! Don’t tell anyone. No, I mean it’s a very precarious time. It feels really precarious to me... And I would say that the poems are a way to push back as well. As Wallace Stevens tells us, poetry is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. The imagination is that pressing back against the pressure of reality. So… we might be scared, but at least we have some poems, you know… JF: I’m wondering if you could round off with a reading, Deborah, from your collection Soft Targets? DL: Okay, so on the subject of fear and the difficulty reconciling the ominous big world with the vulnerable precious little world: I don’t know what’s so neo about neo-nazis

— This is my plangent note to the ambassadors of love. (All dreaming now is retroactive.) The radioactive someday is here. Our kings are cranks, crooks, incongruous, they are improper, ill equipped, how is it we pushed the handle down and they popped out? Toasted! And now they sit at the head of our table, can we be excused? Scurrilous scumbags, x-rays of greed, they move themselves up the flagpole, razing the trees. — Comrades, commend yourselves on a job very poorly done. And now what will be? I’m alarmed. Keep your passport handy, keep cash, keep water and batteries, collect your meds and loved ones, just in case, and silence your phone. Stay off the beach, the street, the planet— There must be some mistake. (And the doomsday clock flicks forward, stares us down.) — Into the sheets we slipped, a crisis affixing us to each other again and again. Womb was I, turned out. The babies were a transcript of our making, a panorama of life on its back. Thrice I plunked out the humans, until we’d had enough of such extravagant weather and lay there thinking of the bed, how much of life happens there. At the center of everything the piquant transitory joy and from this even the charred wrecks, even the dahmers nazis bin ladens all flesh fleshed out of wild unmanageable Eros (we’re always a bit dirty with it) — In the birth room you couldn’t think, you were a single moan and tangle, you were an agony, maybe, but also had wings like never before.

they seem a lot like the old nazis to me shouting jews will not replace us in charlottesville in frankfurt marching by my grandmother’s house shouting pretty much the same ought we to get going now 142

galloping seems a good idea

Commentary

Welcome to the love bazaar, let’s dip back into it again, virility! Pheromonal lure of silk slipping off skin, excessive again his kiss, her shudder, as snow petals down a lace of white flowers and our baby sleeps in her indigo crib. Such a reckless act, to pop out a human, with the jaws of the world set to kill.

EXTRACT

The complete, unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath was the only book I took with me for a one-month trip to Cuba when I was 20. I went with my friend Rosie, who took

Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. Both copious, they proved to be excellent companions. I was endlessly surprised by the beauty and power of Plath’s prose. There

are a few passages (like this one) that have remained with me ever since, the way a much-longed-for kiss or the first taste of ripe fig stays with you forever.

Journal Fragment Sylvia Plath

From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 2000, ed Karen V Kukil. Used by permission of Anchor Books.

New Year’s Eve: 1956 Cold roast beef, hunks of bread and red wine in a fat glass carafe for supper in the Gare de Lyon: outside the window, trains steaming in their cradled tracks, people running, rushing with duffle bags, suitcases; an already out of date Christmas tree blinking colored lights on and off in chains: is it a code? Colored lights saying Merry Christmas in morse code? to the initiate who know. There is some rhythm hidden for those who wait and watch the flashing combinations of red, green and blue lights. Carrying bags, square gray vanity case, olivetti, black umbrella, climbing steep steps to train, lugging cases, compartments filling with joking sailors in blue, stocky wrinkled peasants pulling ham sandwiches out of bulky leather bags. Finally, a blue compartment 3rd class, settling in, tearing off the loue tags and feeling guilty. Eight o’clock. Whistles, people pushing past compartment, bumping suitcases. A porter bringing luggage for a couple: vivacious blonde in big gray fur coat, unshaven legs, caramel=colored loafers and black skirt and jersey, slightly untidy, rather enchanting, playing up to her companion, a stolid restful man, rather stocky, with a pleasant ugly face which became beautifully alive and craggy when he smiled. At last, the shriek of whistles, the yell of porters and the moment of intuitive silence. The train began to move. Off into the night, with the blackness of a strange land knifing past. In my mind, a map of France, irregularly squarish, with a minute Eiffel Tower marking Paris toward the north, and a line of railway tracks, like a zipper, speeding open to the south, to Marseille, to Nice and the Cote d’Azur where perhaps in the realm of absolute fact the sun is shining and the sky is turquoise. Away from sodden mud and cutting winds of gray Cambridge, away from the freezing white frosts of a cold gray london, where the sun hung in the white mists like a bloody egg yolk. Away from the rain and wet feet of Paris, with colored lights wavering in the gutters running with water and the Seine flowed gray and sluggish by the quais and Notre Dame lifted two towers to a lowering, thick, curded gray sky. On the train: staring hypnotised at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up the moments

of the mind like the chant of a broken record: saying over and over: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping. The pretty blonde turns out the light and it is warm and dark in the compartment with the blinds into the narrow corridor pulled down, and the night landscape outside the window slowly slowly coming alive in a chiaroscuro of shadows and stars. For we are leaving the thick clouds and smoky ceiling, we are plunging through into clear moonlight, first edging the thinning clouds like curded cream, then breaking forth pure and clear, in a spinning blueness. Single lights and clusters in villages. Then the weird whiteness of roads, as if made of broken white shells, or trails of bread crumbs left by the babes in the woods. Stars now too against the sky, turning in spirals, growing to look like Van=Gogh stars, and the strange black trees, wind=blown, tortuous, twisted, idiosyncratic pen-sketches against the sky: cypresses. And quarries, steep like a cubist painting in blocks and slanting roof=lines and rectangular whitish shacks, bleached in the light, with geometric shadows. Then blackness again, and land lying flat under the clear moon. Drowsing for a while, stretched out on my back on the narrow compartment seat, with the good weight of Sassoon, sleeping fitfully, on my breast. And underneath always the tireless language of the train wheels, rocking us gently, within a network of steel. Slowing, calming, into lights of Lyon, and rousing from a dizzy coma to jump down the steep train steps onto the platform where vendors are selling bottled drinks and sandwiches. We buy a bottle of red wine and two large soft rolls of white bread with ham in side. We are very hungry and rip into the large soft sandwiches with our teeth, drinking down the wine in a white paper cup, finishing the peanuts we brought in a little paper bag and the cellophane parcel of dried figs, and finally the three small tangerines, which we peel, smelling the sharp fragrance as the porous skin tears open, spitting the slippery white seeds into a brown paper bag which we put under the seat with the empty wine bottle and the crisp little coats of peanuts, scattered about whispering underfoot. 143

Hours leap or delay on the luminous dial of Sassoon’s watch. Between dozing and waking to stare out into the night, straining to see, to evoke the colors locked into the all-comprehensive blackness, France runs past. Secret, hidden, giving only the moon, rocky hills now, with clotted patches of whiteness, perhaps snow, probably not. Then, lifting my head sleepily once, suddenly the moon shining incredibly on water. Marseille. The Mediterranean. At last, unbelievable, the moon on that sea, that azure sea I dreamed about on maps in the sixth grade, surrounded by the pink, yellow, green and caramel countries the pyramids and the Sphinx, the holy land, the classic white ruins

of the greeks, the bleeding bulls of spain, and the stylized pairs of boys and girls in native costume, holding hands, splendid in embroidered silks. The Mediterranean. Sleep again, and at last the pink vin rosé light of dawn along the back of the hills in a strange country. Red earth, orange tiled villas in yellow and peach and aqua, and the blast, the blue blast of the sea on the right. The Cote d’Azur. A new country, a new year: spiked with green explosions of palms, cacti sprouting vegetable octopuses with spiky tentacles, and the red sun rising like the eye of God out of a screaming blue sea.

ESSAY

Marie Darrieussecq gave a reading at the bookshop in 2016. It was the first time I met her, though years earlier I had read her debut novel, Pig Tales (1996) – a forceful feminist story about a woman who gradually metamorphoses into a pig. It was one of the first books I ever read in French. Hear-

ing her speak that night, I was (we all were) spellbound by her brilliant intelligence and humour, and so, the very next day, I picked up copies of nearly all her work. This exquisite passage is extracted from her book on painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the first woman artist to paint a nude self-portrait,

and also the first artist to paint herself pregnant. Modersohn-Becker spent her life visiting Paris again and again, in an effort to nourish her artistic life. Darrieussecq writes on the subjects of motherhood and women in the arts in refreshingly honest, direct and poignant ways.

Paula Modersohn-Becker Marie Darrieussecq

The works on display in the basement of the museum are by women. The ceiling is low and the lighting is bad. Nowhere ever before have I seen to what extent women’s art is considered to be inferior to art. Upstairs, well lit: Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kirchner, Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee. Downstairs, in the shadows: a mess of statues from antiquity mixed up with contemporary videos. Goddesses, motherand-child paintings, queens: the only connecting thread is that these works are by women or represent women. Hidden, out of the way, behind a huge TV, is Paula’s masterpiece, Self-Portrait with a Camellia Branch. The situation is all the more perplexing given that the museum makes use of this self-portrait in its publicity materials: it floats vertically on a twometre-high banner in the main street. In reality, the painting is small. Sixty centimetres by thirty. She stares at us. Such suffering, says Michel. A very sad expression, agrees Hans-Jürgen. The two men even wonder whether they could glimpse tears at the base of the shining eyes. She has chosen to paint herself backlit. She leaves the viewer 144

Commentary

in the light. She seems to have the shadow of a smile on her face. But two furrows turn down the corners of her mouth. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her tulip-shaped hand holds a camellia branch, and she wears a heavy amber necklace. She is frowning slightly, concentrating. She is painting, that’s what I think. Which does not discount other interpretations: bitterness, disappointment in marital life, artistic isolation. But she is not settling any scores here. Her gaze is primarily fixed on her own painting and on the mirror where she is examining the shape of her features. It is a self-portrait of a woman painting. It is this self-portrait that the Nazis chose, along with another self-portrait, a full-length nude, in order to denigrate her work as part of the modernist, degenerate art, Entartete Kunst movement. This Worpswede artist, risen to fame after her death, is a huge disappointment. Her vision is so lacking in femininity, and so vulgar… Her work is an insult to German women and to our farming culture… Where is the sensitivity, the essence of the feminine-maternal spirit?… A revolting mixture of colours, of idiotic figures signifying farmers, of sick children, degenerates, the dregs of humanity.

Translated from the French by Penny Hueston

Whether it’s in museums or galleries, there are inordinately fewer women painters exhibiting than women being exhibited, and the latter are very often naked. In Paula’s work there are real women. I want to say women who are naked at long last: stripped of the masculine gaze. Women who are not posing in front of a man; who are not seen through the lens of men’s desire, frustration, possessiveness, domination, aggravation. Women in the work of Modersohn-Becker’s are neither coquettish (Gervex), nor exotic (Gauguin), nor provocative (Manet), nor victims (Degas), nor distraught (Toulouse-Lautrec), nor fat (Renoir), nor colossal (Picasso), nor sculptural (Puvis de Chavannes), nor ethereal (Carolus-Duran). Nor made of ‘pinkand-white almond paste’ (Cabanel, whom Zola made fun of ). With Paula there is no getting-even at all. No sign of rhetoric, or judgment. She shows what she sees. And also: real babies. The history of art has given birth to countless versions of a horribly rendered little Jesus at the breast of a sceptical Madonna. A face like a monkey, an old man’s neck, suckling that conjures up at best a cow, at worst a game of carom billiards – one red ball and two white balls. No, the babies in Paula’s paintings are babies I have seen in the flesh, never in paintings. The wide-eyed, concentrated, almost fixed gaze of the little person sucking. The hand on the breast, or the closed fist. Just a crease for a wrist. Floppy neck. Plump legs without muscles. Arms that are sometimes thin. Ruddy cheeks, or pale, but never the same complexion as adults. And, around them, Paula’s oranges, round and full. When little Elsbeth touches Paula’s breasts in the bath and wonders about them, Paula replies lyrically, ‘Breasts hold a wonderful secret.’ The origin of the world: right there in her breasts. It’s already scandalous that little humans come out of women’s vaginas, but that breasts are used to provide food, well, that amounts to theft, misappropriation. It’s hard to picture Manet’s Olympia with a newborn at the breast. As for the Virgin’s vagina, now we’re entering the realm of madness. I don’t know if there is such a thing as women’s painting, but men’s painting is everywhere. When Paula visits the Louvre, the paintings of only four women artists are on display: Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, the first woman to have graced the walls of the museum; Constance Mayer and her allegorical paintings; Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and her portraits done in pastel; and Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot, a more recent woman artist, whose work was exhibited in the Louvre at the beginning of the 20th century. In a letter from Rilke to Clara about the 1907 Autumn Salon, he talks about a whole room devoted to Berthe Morisot, and a wall devoted to Eva Gonzalès; it was sufficiently unusual for him to have mentioned it. Whether it’s in museums or galleries, there are inordinately fewer women painters exhibiting than women being exhibited, and the latter are very often naked. And when, in the reign of Napoleon, Constance Mayer painted naked men, she was greeted with boos and jeers. They paint women. ‘They’ implies here the universal masculine pronoun, centuries of the masculine gaze. In the spring of 1906, Paula is reading The Masterpiece by Zola. In this novel, inspired by Cézanne, the woman, the model, grows older; her flesh sags and her painter husband comments that “pouches of fat were forming under her armpits”. By the end of the novel, the woman is naked, ashamed, abandoned in the icy studio: “She lay there, as if dead, like a white rag, miserable, done for, crushed beneath the fierce sovereignty of Art.” When Paula paints nudes, a century after Constance Mayer, no one dreams of rebuking her for her immodesty. She was able Following spread: Copyright Wiki Commons

to learn anatomy without having to go into hiding, and she was not alone: the female students of the art academies she attends, as well as her contemporary Suzanne Valadon, all work on nudes. But to go from there to painting herself nude... Her most famous self-portrait, the one people talk about when they talk about her, is at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen. She is naked to the waist, standing three-quarters on, with a big amber necklace and small pointed breasts. Her belly is swollen. Four or five months pregnant. Although she was not in the habit of writing on the back of her canvases, here we find these words: “I painted this at the age of thirty, on my sixth wedding anniversary, PB.” But the dates are impossible to determine. On the 25th of May 1906, Paula was not pregnant. A month earlier, she was specifically explaining to Otto that a child was not on the cards now, and not with him. And yet here she is, holding her belly in that proud and protective gesture that many pregnant women have. The Modersohn-Becker experts, all 30 of them, debate the issue. They bring up her diet. Too much cabbage and too many potatoes. The self-portrait of a bloated woman: care for a bit more soup? But she could just as easily have been imagining herself pregnant. Making a game of sticking out her belly, arching her back, her navel protruding. Just to see. The self-portrait as auto-fiction. She paints herself as she would like to be, and as she imagines herself: she paints an image of herself. Beautiful, happy, a little bit playful. And, take note: It is the first time. The first time that a woman has painted herself naked. The gesture of taking her clothes off and setting up in front of her canvas and going ahead and doing it: Here is my skin; I’m going to show my belly, and the shape of my breasts, and my navel… The nude self-portrait of a woman, one-on-one with herself and the history of art. Is it because models are expensive? Is it deliberate? This healthy, sporty, pretty, well-rounded, nudist German woman loved her body. The act of painting herself naked has nothing to do with narcissism; it is work. It is all there for her to do. Using either a mirror or a photograph; all there for her to discover. I don’t know if she is aware of it: of being the first one to do it. In any case, she always looks happy naked. Rainer Maria Rilke ‘Requiem for a Friend’ For that is what you understood: ripe fruits. You set them before the canvas, in white bowls, and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colours. Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, moulded from inside, into the shapes of their existence. And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped out of your clothes and brought your naked body before the mirror, and you let yourself inside, down to your gaze, which remained strong, and didn’t say: This is me, instead: This is. 145

POEM

Jeanette Winterson has said: “I go to poetry the way some people grab an espresso; for an energy shot, a hit of warmth, and to clear my head.” With that in mind, I’ve started reading a poem first thing in the morning at the breakfast table, out loud to anyone awake enough to listen, but mainly to myself. This is by Yosano Akiko, a Japanese poet from the early 20th century who is so cool and sexy and mod-

ern. I’ve selected it for this spring issue because it celebrates the change in season, and also because it makes me reflect on seasons changing – how this act of nature now seems precarious given the current environmental situation. The poem will appear in our upcoming book of poetry about Paris, which will be edited and published by Shakespeare and Company, Paris, and released in autumn

In Praise of May Yosano Akiko Translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato

May is a fancy month, a flower month, The month of buds, the month of scents, the month of colors, The month of poplars, marrons, plantanes, Azaleas, tree peonies, wisteria, redbud, Lilacs, tulips, poppies, The month women’s cloths turn Light and thin, the month of love, The festival month Kyoto residents In twirled crowns, arrows on their backs, Compete in horse races, The month girls in the City of Paris Choose for the Flower Festival A beautiful, noble queen; If I may speak of myself, It’s the month I crossed Siberia, crossed Germany, Longing for my love, And arrived in that distant Paris, The month to celebrate our fourth son, Auguste, born last year, With irises, swords, and streamers, The breezy month, the month of The blue moon, of platinum-colored clouds, When the bright sky and the hemp palm Outside the window of my small study Remind me of a Malay island, The month of honeybees, the month of butterflies, The month of birth when ants turn into moths And canaries hatch their eggs, 148

Commentary

2019. It includes around 45 poems with contributions from, among others, Carol Ann Duffy, James Baldwin, Andrée Chedid, Edna St Vincent Millay, Julio Cortázar, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Anna Akhmatova, Mahmoud Darwish, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Joyce Mansour and Charles Bukowski – alongside the French greats, such as Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Hugo, Prévert.

The sensual month, the month of flesh That somehow incites you, The month of Vous voulez wine, of perfumes, Of dances, of music, and of songs, The month of the sun when Myriad things inside me Hold one another tight, become entangled, Moan, kiss, and sweat, the month Of the blue sea, of the forest, of the park, of the fountains, Of the garden, of the terrace, of the gazebo, So here comes May To toss at us a giddiness Sweet as the lemonade you suck with a straw From a thin, skinny glass. Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology, Routledge

FICTION

Oh Jean Rhys! Her books are like dimly lit cafes where you sip red wine while observing the patrons tucked into the darkness around

you. There is melancholy in her writing, and yet it’s bewitching. Good Morning, Midnight, so evocative of Paris, was one of the first

books I read after returning to the city in my early 20s. Here is a short story from her 1927 collection, The Left Bank and Other Stories.

A Spiritualist Jean Rhys

‘I assure you,’ said the Commandant, ‘that I adore women – that without a woman in my life I cannot exist. ‘But one must admit that one has deceptions. They are frankly disappointing, or else they exact so much that the day comes when, inevitably, one asks oneself: Is it worth while? ‘In any case it cracks. It always cracks.’ He fixed his monocle more firmly into his eye to look at a passing lady, with an expression like that of an amiable and cynical old fox. ‘And it is my opinion, Madame, that that is the fault of the woman. All the misunderstandings, all the quarrels! It is astonishing how gentle, how easily fooled most men are. Even an old Parisian like myself, Madame... I assure you that of all men the Parisians are the most sentimental. And it is astonishing how lacking in calm and balance is the most clever woman, how prone to weep at a wrong moment – in a word, how exhausting! ‘For instance: A few months ago I was obliged to break with a most charming little friend whom I passionately adored. Because she exaggerated her eccentricity. One must be in the Photography Name Surname

movement, even though one may regret in one’s heart the more agreeable epoch that has vanished. A little eccentricity is permissible. It is indeed chic. Yes, it is now chic to be eccentric. But when it came to taking me to a chemist and forcing me to buy her ether, which she took at once in the restaurant where we dined: and then hanging her legs out of the taxi window in the middle of the Boulevard: you will understand that I was gêné: that I found that she exaggerated. In the middle of the Boulevard! ‘Most unfortunately one can count no longer on women, even Frenchwomen, to be dignified, to have a certain tenue. I remember the time when things were different. And more agreeable, I think.’ The Commandant gazed into the distance, and his expression became sentimental. His eyes were light blue. He even blushed. ‘Once I was happy with a woman. Only once. I will tell you about it. Her name was Madeleine, and she was a little dancer whom some sale individu had deserted when she was without money and ill. She was the most sweet and gentle woman I 149

have ever met. I knew her for two years, and we never quarrelled once or even argued. Never. For Madeleine gave way in everything… And to think that my wife so often accused me of having a sale caractère…’ He mused for a while. ‘A sale caractère… Perhaps I have. But Madeleine was of a sweetness… ah, well, she died suddenly after two years. She was only twenty-eight. ‘When she died I was sad as never in my life before. The poor little one . . . Only twenty-eight! ‘Three days after the funeral her mother, who was a very good woman, wrote to me saying that she wished to have the clothes and the effects, you understand, of her daughter. So in the afternoon I went to her little flat, Place de L’Odéon, fourth floor. I took my housekeeper with me, for a woman can be useful with her advice on these occasions. ‘I went straight into the bedroom and I began to open the cupboards and arrange her dresses. I wished to do that myself. I had the tears in my eyes, I assure you, for it is sad to see and to touch the dresses of a dead woman that one has loved. My housekeeper, Gertrude, she went into the kitchen to arrange the household utensils. ‘Well, suddenly, there came from the closed sitting-room a very loud, a terrible crash. The floor shook. ‘Gertrude and I both called out at the same time: What is that? And she ran to me from the kitchen saying that the noise had come from the salon. I said: Something has fallen down, and I opened quickly the sitting-room door. ‘You must understand that it was a flat on the fourth floor; all the windows of the sitting-room were tightly shut, naturally, and the blinds were drawn as I had left them on the day of the

funeral. The door into the hall was locked, the other led into the bedroom where I was. ‘And, there, lying right in the middle of the floor was a block of white marble, perhaps fifty centimetres square. ‘Gertrude said: Mon Dieu, Monsieur, look at that. How did that get here? – Her face was pale as death. – It was not there, she said, when we came. ‘As for me, I just looked at the thing, stupefied. ‘Gertrude crossed herself and said: I am going. Not for anything: for nothing in the world would I stay here longer. There is something strange about this flat. ‘She ran. I – well, I did not run. I walked out, but very quickly. You understand, I have been a soldier for twenty-five years, and, God knows, I had nothing to reproach myself with with regard to the poor little one. But it shakes the nerves – something like that.’ The Commandant lowered his voice. ‘The fact was, I understood. I knew what she meant. ‘I had promised her a beautiful, white marble tombstone, and I had not yet ordered it. Not because I had not thought of it. Oh, no – but because I was too sad, too tired. But the little one doubtless thought that I had forgotten. It was her way of reminding me.’ I looked hard at the Commandant. His eyes were clear and as naïve as a child’s: a little dim with emotion… Silence… He lit a cigarette. ‘Well, to show how strange women are: I recounted this to a lady I knew, not long ago. And she laughed. Laughed! You understand… Un fou rire… And do you know what she said: ‘She said: How furious that poor Madeleine must have been that she missed you! ‘Now can you imagine the droll ideas that women can have!’

FICTION

Deborah Levy is intellectually astute, poignant – almost to the point of rawness – and still, at times, uproariously funny. There is

something sensual to her writing, which I always enjoy. It’s an invitation to flaneur alongside her, to see the world through

her, through her life – one determinedly and vigorously lived.

THE 18TH Deborah Levy

My former lover and I bought a mansion in Paris. A crumbling mansion. It had so many rooms that I had not yet had a chance to see all of them. Later, I discovered it had a swimming pool. Gregorio and his wife were there. One evening when I was wearing a backless silk dress, I knew he was watching my back while he prepared sea urchins for the feast. When I asked him if they were fresh, he said, “It depends on what time of the day or night we eat them.” Gregorio was convinced he had bought these urchins on the Rue des Abbesses. It was true that my mansion might be located somewhere near there. We could hear the bells of Sacré-Coeur ringing. Earlier we had watched tourists gather around a statue of Dalida, near Rue Giron. Some of them reached out to touch her 150

Commentary

breasts because the guide said it was lucky to do so. I looked into Dalida’s bronze eyes and she stared back. “What a good time we’re having?” she messaged to me, as I walked up the hill, towards my vast new property. There were other people who had come to live in the house with us, mostly quite handsome literary men. One of them, I discovered later, was a Czech poet. In the morning he set off via the Rue des Trois-Frères to buy croissants. Yet when he arrived back at the mansion, he was sad to tell us the boulangerie was closed on Tuesdays. We had nothing to eat for breakfast and no milk for coffee. Gregorio volunteered to make his way to the Rôtisserie Dufrénoy to buy chicken and potatoes. I said I would come with him, but his wife pointed out that no one eats roast chicken and potatoes for breakfast.

It might have been spring because the flower shops in Rue Lepic were full of mimosa, yellow and powdery. A man was selling bunches of narcissi near Métro Abbesses, three bunches for five euros. He must have picked them in haste, perhaps in a park. They were odd lengths and some were so short they did not fit into a vase. His brother was selling chestnuts. He roasted them in a tin which he had placed in a steel shopping trolley. When they were ready he wrapped them in a cone made from a map of the métro, the yellow line, C1 Pontoise on the top left-hand corner. I went to fetch my friend, Kiama, from the Gare du Nord to show her my mansion. We detoured down Rue du FaubourgSaint-Denis to taste the bhel puri from the stall an Indian vendor had set up on the pavement, opposite a shop selling mobile phones. “Everyone needs to call home,” he told us as he poured tamarind sauce over the bhel puri. Kiama seemed disapproving of my mansion. “I can’t believe you have moved into this crumbling place just to be near Gregorio,” she said, “and why is the front door to the house always open?” I gazed at the subdued but glowing pink plaster walls. The reception room was magnificent with its vast marble floor and many threadbare Persian rugs. When I looked up I saw an attic room with books on the shelves and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. Gregorio told me it was obviously a place that could be my study, and he quoted a line from Apollinaire: “The rain so tender the rain so gentle.” “Yes,” I replied, “Everyone needs a phone to call home when it rains.” When I finally discovered the swimming pool, I called out to Kiama to come and admire it. She wasn’t that interested and asked me if the other people living in the mansion were paying rent? I said they were not. We both stepped into the pool. Kiama stood up to her waist in water. It was tense waiting for her to swim. She lingered on the edge looking out through the glass windows at the garden, which could be described as “grounds”. Fleetingly, I noticed the fig trees needed watering. Kiama told me that the people living with us should pay rent, otherwise I would go bankrupt. Later, I was walking with my former lover while all the people who were living in the mansion followed behind us. We were making our way towards the stairs that were near the Dalida statue, in the direction of Métro Lamarck-Caulaincourt. We were all very close and loving. I knew that this was a better way to live, to not be alone, to live in a large mansion with my affectionate former lover and other people – especially with the added erotic charge of Gregorio being there too. I whispered to my former lover, “Kiama says we must ask the others to pay rent otherwise we will go bankrupt.” I heard the people behind us, mostly quite handsome literary men, mumble, yes, yes, but not very convincingly. The Czech poet had threaded a sprig of mimosa through his button hole. Some of the literary men were touching Dalida’s breasts. “Return to your mansion,” she messaged to me. “I used to have one near here, too. If you see a black cat in your garden, it’s mine.”

Kiama (watched by Dalida’s bronze eyes) told me sternly that I should protect my grounds from poachers. Apparently, it would be a good thing to put in a gate with a code. All the apartments and houses in Paris had gates and doors that required codes to enter. Kiama’s words broke my dream. It was devastating to discover that I no longer owned a mansion. Its loss felt very raw. I lay awake trying to get back to my property, but no matter how hard I tried, I had no code to open the gate to my grounds that so badly needed watering. After a while, I realised that all the literary men who were not paying rent were my former lover. Thank goodness that Gregorio had been watching my back. It wasn’t lost on me that the mansion was crumbling, the fig trees were dying, the front door was always open, the Persian rugs were falling apart, but I was still happy, almost unbearably happy, that the mansion itself had been so grand. I was a dreamer who owned grounds and even a swimming pool. Above all, I wished that I had claimed the book-lined study. I knew that some sort of change in my life was moving nearer to me after I dreamed about that mansion. The breeze from the Seine was doing odd things to my hair. It made it softer, frizzier, harder to pin up in a chignon. For the first time in a long while, I let my curls hang loose to my shoulders. There was so much to enjoy in Paris, but I still wanted to find that mansion in my dream. I looked forward to the swimming pool, to planting herbs and flowers in the grounds, to the unseen rooms and to lying on my back on the frayed Persian rugs, listening to the bells of Sacré-Coeur. The reception room felt like a life waiting to happen, somewhere between the present and the future. Yes, those unseen rooms were an exciting prospect. I was in mourning for two weeks after Kiama broke my dream. Eventually, it occurred to me that Paris itself was the aphrodisiac, and not Gregorio. I was happily living alone in the Paris of Apollinaire and the gilets jaunes. I kept coins in my pockets for the accordion players on the métro and had found my local boulangerie. It was not in the Rue des Trois-Frères. In the small park near my rented studio apartment, I glimpsed the hibiscus and daffodils poking through the French soil. They reminded me of home. When the shower did not work, I made my way to a hammam. The woman in charge gave me black soap made from olives and olive oil. I rubbed it over my body and sat in the steam, feeling less melancholy about the loss of my mansion. Later the woman massaged my feet with hot argan oil. When I returned home I noted the gate to my tiny apartment did indeed have a code. The last letter was V for Validate. All the same, I was still furious with Kiama when we met in a cafe on the Rue des Abbesses, on the day of the fierce hail storm. We shared a bowl of ouefs cocotte au Cantal and sipped coffee as balls of ice bounced on the pavements. “You demolished my mansion,” I said to Kiama. “You bulldozed my property,” but she wasn’t listening. It was Sunday and she was pleased to be with me in Montmartre, oohing and aahing over the ouefs. 151

PHOtOGRAPhY M A R i A S PA N N

AN i NTe rVi eW W I TH PeTER MeNDELSUND

MUSic with Words and Pictures

He has been a dishwasher, a butler, a lorry driver and a classical pianist. Yet Peter Mendelsund is perhaps best known for designing, as art director at the Alfred A Knopf publishing house, many of the most recognisable book covers of the last 15 years. He is currently heading up a redesign of 162-year-old The Atlantic magazine while also completing his second novel. Born in Cambridge (the Massachusetts version), Mendelsund lives in Manhattan with his wife and children. Portâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s editor, Dan Crowe, talks with him about creativity, the future of art and the importance of neurosis

Dan Crowe: You’re working on a lot of things right now. Do you ever feel overwhelmed? (Please tell me you do.) Peter Mendelsund: I certainly do! I need a number to call, for encouragement: “What you’re working on is fabulous, Peter. You’re going in the right direction, Peter. Keep going…” I have a quote on my wall: “Exciting new voice. Abject failure.” There is no intermediary position for me. DC: How did you get into book cover design? PM: I didn’t study design. I’m not sure that anyone needs to. I stumbled on the profession in my early 30s. I was casting around for work, requesting interviews with people in various métiers to find out what their jobs were like. As luck would have it, I was granted an audience with the famous book designer Chip Kidd. He began to describe his day, which seemed to consist of reading good books and then making art inspired by them. What could be better? DC: Which other designers inspired you, at the outset? PM: Alvin Lustig, a designer at publishing house New Directions. The work he created in the ’50s and ’60s was wonderful, totally abstract, really gorgeous and colourful. Paul Rand was another – constructivist and often abstract. When I started, everything in book design was figurative, representational, photographic and literal. As a lover of literature, I was quite put off by that, so I set myself the mission to try and bring back some abstraction. Nowadays everything is abstractions

154

and drawings and patterns, and very few photographs on books of fiction. Though, funnily enough, there are more and more photographs in books of fiction now. DC: That makes me think of your covers for W G Sebald novels, which use photographs alongside prose. What were the challenges designing those covers? PM: They were hard, but interesting. If there is visual material inside, it becomes indelibly associated with the book, and so begs to be used on the cover. The problem with Sebald is that his black-and-white found photos are so sullen, saturnine and hard to parse without the accompanying text that any covers made from them would dissuade shoppers from purchasing the books. So I lied a little on those covers, made them colourful, and so made the novels seem a bit splashier than they actually are. DC: Sebald seems pertinent to our times. PM: The reason he has had such an impact is that his books destabilise the hard border between fiction and nonfiction. The found photos in his novels seem to illustrate his texts, though these texts are fictions, so right there you encounter a disjuncture. But further to this, the novels are clearly memoiristic auto-fictions of a kind. So when you read Sebald’s novels, you are being confronted by real evidence of real events, used to illustrate an entirely different set of events, which are themselves fictional versions of a third set of real events… It’s dizzying. But it also pre-

figures the ‘post-truth’ moment we are living through, in which nothing constitutes ‘proof ’ of anything anymore. DC: Which of your covers are you happiest with? PM: I really enjoyed working on Joyce’s Ulysses, a book I’ve always loved. The cover’s success involves quite a light touch – there’s not a lot of design in there – but it adequately represented the book. Kafka is another. His books in the US were always very grim looking, so it was great to have something colourful, showing the humour of what’s inside and giving a new generation a different vantage on who Kafka was. I think book covers can change the way you read, ultimately. DC: You seem fond of ‘literary’ or ‘difficult’ writers. PM: I always enjoy it when writers acknowledge on some level the conventions they are cleaving to. I’ve come to realise that ‘non-realist’ or ‘experimental’ fiction doesn’t have to be difficult. I learned this lesson from Italo Calvino, after having powered my way through many of the last century’s canonical heavy hitters: Joyce, Pound, Kafka, T S Eliot, Beckett, Céline, Woolf, etc. I cherished this body of work, which had changed me as a reader at the molecular level, but I was left with the distinct impression that the standard bearers of the experimental tradition were a pretty joyless bunch of depressives, bigots, nihilists, solipsists, suicides, elitists, anti-Semites, weird-beards and odd-bods. Sometimes each of these ticking many boxes at once.

DC: But not our Calvino. PM: No. One day, a professor of mine, perhaps sensing that I needed a palate cleanse from too much of this age-of-anxiety malcontentism, suggested I read Calvino. So I bought the whiteand-green Harcourt paperback of If on a winter’s night a traveler, opened it to its first page, and found myself being addressed directly by the author: “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate…” Who, me? “… Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone….” I was hooked! Who wouldn’t be? DC: You ended up working on some of his covers… PM: Jump forward 20 years. I come into work

and there is an email with the name ‘Calvino’ in the ‘from’ section. It was Italo’s daughter, Giovanna, who wanted me to work on a reprint of her father’s works. We produced, I think, 26 Calvino titles together, and it was a total blast. DC: Do you still look closely at book covers? PM: When I was working as a designer, I thought book covers very important indeed. I saw them as a framing for an author’s work; a first point of contact between reader and work; a shared space. I still believe this, though I just pay less attention to it all now. DC: When reading novels for work, were you often thinking: “I can write these”? PM: It took 10 years of making covers before I began to wonder why I was working so hard at making an appurtenance, rather than the important thing itself. So I started writing. And very early on I realised that design, fun as it is, cannot hold a candle to the expressive potential of fiction writing. I haven’t looked back. DC: But you’re also redesigning a magazine. Are you spreading yourself thin? PM: I worry about amateurism. People tend to look at those who work in multiple fields as being, at best, passable in all of them. I’d rather be very good at one thing. But if something isn’t working, with either writing or designing, I can always move over to the next channel. I find incredible freedom with that. New perspective. See things from a higher altitude.

DC: Does switching channels help with inspiration then? PM. The most mysterious stage in the creation of a novel is the first one, when the material is generated. God knows where this comes from. And, in a way, who cares? Either it’s fruitful material or it isn’t. I think it’s crucial as a writer or designer or composer not to be worried about making a fool of yourself. I have taught myself to repress shame and self-doubt, and just get on with it. But shame is important for the later, editorial portions of the creative process. That’s when you absolutely need to ask, “Oh God, what was I thinking when I wrote this?” And then delete it. DC: Were you creative as a kid? PM: I was made to play the piano from age four by my father. I was kicking and screaming, but he always said I would thank him. There are certain art forms which require so much technical work that you really must start young. My Dad just wanted me to be able to do it well. DC: Why? PM: We grew up with my grandparents, who were from the Warsaw ghetto. They had a series of old world values – you know, that there were only a couple of ways out of the shtetl, one was science and the other was classical music. These didn’t really apply in the ’70s and ’80s anymore, but for some reason, in the house I grew up in, they did. They had very old-world ideas about what it meant to be a cultured person. So there were times when someone would lock the

I worry about our species’ willing, impetuous, unreflective commitment to the new, always-connected, anti-humanist collective.

155

156

157

door of the room and say, “Come out when you can play this.” But when I was 10 or 11, I heard something and thought, “Wow, that’s beautiful. I would give anything to be able to do this.” It was something trite like Chopin’s G minor ballade. I thought, “That is God’s voice.” DC: You became professional… PM: Yes. But by the time I really was proficient, at graduate school, I recognised how many people on the planet were better than me. To make a career as a classical pianist, you can’t just be good; you have to be a prodigy of nature, a genius. And I wasn’t that. DC: But you still play? PM: Every day. I continue to think I get better, which is easy when there is no one listening. I work hard at it and keep learning. It’s a habit. It’s like sleeping or eating and if I go away on holiday I get itchy not being able to play. But after work it helps me think clearly about things again. It puts my house in order. I need it. DC: What can’t you do? What are you bad at? PM: I’m not a good cook. I’m the guy who always cleans up after meals. DC: What is more important to you: music, design or writing? PM: Music is the most meaningful to me, the medium which feels truly indistinguishable from pure feeling and thought. Writing, to me, is a

Because I have no time to write, most of my writing (and editing) takes place in transit: on trains, in elevators, waiting in lines, etc. As a result I have a robust collection of notebooks in which to scrawl whatever idea I’ve recently had. Also pictured here is my new novel being edited, and a pile of Beckett novels, which I’ve recently re-read.

158

second-order medium, one which can describe and evoke. Design is a distant third, in that it decorates. Though this could all change of course.

tion the various other neuroses attendant to art making: vanity, neediness, obsession, compulsion. Neurosis is crucial.

DC: Your first novel, Same Same, is an exploration of creativity and culture in a technological age. Where is tech taking us? PM: I worry about our species’ willing, impetuous, unreflective commitment to the new, always-connected, anti-humanist collective. Same Same was really meant to contend with just one small facet of this tech-triumphalist madness. Namely, the ways in which complex things – objects, people, emotions, ideas – are replaced by simpler signifiers, which are themselves reduced into even simpler ones. In the end, we are left with “ :) ” and “FML” to represent a world which was previously rife with complexity, nuance, meaning. In other words, what we’ve gained in terms of convenience, by shoe-horning the world into digestible chunks, we’ve lost in terms of knowledge of that same world. The world has shrunk as connectivity has increased. This is puzzling, and troubling.

DC: In what way? PM: Well, in terms of the actual work itself, in terms of actually getting the job done, it’s always a good idea to assign roles to one’s various neurotic tendencies. For instance, early on in the creative endeavour, one needs to plumb one’s depths – one’s unconscious – and discover all of the sludgy and unformed raw material which comprises the rough form of a work. This job goes to the neurotic. But then, out of that muck, order must be found. That’s when the editing, erm, superego should step in. When neurosis creeps into the part of the work which properly belongs to the superego, something has gone wrong.

DC: To what extent do our neuroses inform our creative work patterns? PM: The counterfactual urge – to ask oneself “Why this, and not that?” – is the source of all art. And it is, itself, a neurosis. A rubbing-up against the grain of the natural and the normative. So there is no novel or sonata or painting without the neurotic psyche at work – not to men-

DC: Can you tell me a story in 100 words about how you are feeling today? PM: The day I finished writing the book was the day I met P—. At first, he was shy (or perhaps it was snobbery), and he refused to shake my hand. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said, letting my hand fall. I took him to a local café and ordered for both of us. He used my fork. We parted awkwardly. That night, my phone rang. It was him, I knew this, though there was no sound but the dull hum of the connection. The next day he embarrassed me at the office. Now it is like this.

A display vitrine in my living room. I swap out these items with some regularity, but currently I have a Rodchenko; a limited-series book of Marianne Moore poems; a first edition of Ulysses; an old edition of Gauguin’s Noa Noa and next to this a corner of Matisse’s magazine Verve, featuring one of his paper cutouts on the cover (plus assorted nonsense).

160

161

PHOTOGRAPHY E VA TUERBL

WORDS FiONA SHIPWRiGHT

D AV i D CHiPPERFielD

Crossing disciplinary borders and encompassing global and local perspectives, Sir David Chipperfield has been a vital force in shaping contemporary architecture since he founded his practice in the mid-1980s. This year, with the completion of several major cultural institutions, and construction starting on his first New York high-rise, he confirms his role as one of the great living practitioners. In Berlin, at one of Chipperfieldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s four international offices, Fiona Shipwright talks to the prolific British architect about the essential, human qualities which drive his work

“I think the modern movement tended to ignore people’s sentimentality. Being intellectually correct is not always the justification for doing something; emotions also come into it. Doing what we do gives us the opportunity to put these emotions into perspective.” The ‘we’ in that answer refers to David Chipperfield Architects (DCA); the ‘I’ to the Englishman who lent his name to the international practice he founded in London in 1985, and which now also has offices in Berlin, Milan and Shanghai. I have arrived at DCA’s Berlin campus for an interview with Sir David the individual, but he will invariably answer my questions with reference to Chipperfield the collective. As for emotion, the architectural firm is renowned for an approach that considers buildings as containers of and canvases for memory. This ranges from projects sitting somewhere between reconstruction and renovation, such as last year’s new masterplan for the Royal Academy of Arts – still resident in the 19th-cen-

tury Burlington House – to brand new constructions such as The Bryant, an elegant foray into the genre of the Manhattan high-rise. One of DCA’s most celebrated works, which opened in 2009 after a 16-year-long process that involved as much contestation as it did construction, remains the rebuilding of the Neues Museum in Berlin. An intricate ship of Theseus manifest in brick, each remaining room and fixture of the 1855 structure, which had been left a ruin, was individually attended to. Ten years on, DCA have just handed over the keys to a brand new building, the James Simon Galerie, also located on the city’s Museum Island – a UNESCO world heritage site and, as a witness of Nazi parades, Allied bombs and the fall of the East German state, an inadvertent storehouse of German collective memory. The success of these Berlin works in particular is why, more than any other, the word that tends be mentioned with reference to Chipperfield is ‘context’, usually as part of the phrase ‘contextually aware’. This is something of a mis-

Previous spread left: Sir David Chipperfield at his architectural firm’s Berlin campus. Previous spread right: Chipperfield climbs the stairs to his private residence, situated above the office space.

164

Below: Works in progress. With offices in Berlin, London, Milan and Shanghai, DCA is engaged with projects across the world.

nomer given that all good architecture should be contextually aware – and more to the point contextually relevant. But what is particular to this architect and his work is the precision-focused and often long-lasting engagement with, not just a site and its physical environs, but the people, materials and histories associated with it. “With the Neues Museum we witnessed a city’s emotional attitude towards itself, and the buildings with which it has a historical relationship. That was always part of our consideration, even before that project.” Moreover, in contrast to some other contemporaries who have acquired the ‘starchitect’ label, the emotional dimension of Chipperfield’s architectural output rarely takes the form of dramatically staged scenography. Instead, it is characterised by a sense of extraordinary restraint as well as patience – the latter arising as much from the slow tedium involved in the (re)construction of buildings as it does out of principle. “I feel very jealous of a theatre performance, where there’s

Opposite: Located on Joachimstraße, in Berlin’s Mitte district and within walking distance of Museum Island, the DCA campus comprises the firm’s German HQ, a three-level residence for Chipperfield and the publicly accessible Kantine restaurant.

168

Previous spread: The wood section of DCA’s material library.

Opposite: The interior of Chipperfield’s apartment reflects the architectural approach of its resident – precise in terms of form and choice of material, but never austere ‘design for its own sake’.

somehow an identifiable ‘finished’ moment,” he says. “For us, it’s more like ‘Yes it’s open, but the doors aren’t quite finished; they haven’t moved into the second level yet…’ Even when it’s open, you have a strange ongoing relationship with a building.” Born in 1953 in London, Chipperfield spent part of his childhood in rural Devon – an environment he recalls as being “very tactile, I’m full of memories of very physical and spatial things” – but which he has no regrets about leaving in his early teens to “become an urban animal”. Studies at Kingston School of Art, and the Architectural Association followed. During the early part of his career, with a number of house and shop interior commissions, along with several projects in Japan under his belt, Chipperfield was already hinting at a preference for restraint. He wrote in his 1994 book Theoretical Practice of limits as being “the latent power of architecture”. Though he has spent the intervening 25 years transcending boundaries –

Above: An interior shot of the DCArenovated Neues Museum hangs in the open-plan living space.

from the interdisciplinary to the international – the architect stands by this thesis, expounding upon it that “it’s true of all creative things, that we have to manipulate the limits ourselves. The limits are those that you choose. The things you don’t want to be limited by, you tend to ignore.” But he does concede that in 2019 there are some limits that cannot be ignored – not by architects or anyone else: “The issues that we’re going to have to deal with more and more, like climate change, mean that we are going to have to accept more regulation.” This attitude runs counter to the image-driven PR machine that drives high-level contemporary architecture and is ever hungry for the kinds of gravity-defying works that can be organised into listicles and awarded end-of-year rosettes. “Technically, we can do anything now; we can make a building stand upside down on its head – but why? The limits are now more intellectual than technical. A century ago, architecture was always trying to push the limits. Today we can go as tall as we

want, as thin as we want, as glassy as we want. The question now is: why would you? Limit is not just about the fact that you can’t push further somewhere, it’s the idea that you’ve decided that you shouldn’t push somewhere.” He pauses. “I’m very suspicious of design for its own sake.” Chipperfield’s notion of appropriateness has much to do with his being a product of an architectural generation who believed that they were designing more than merely the built environment. “Post-war, everyone was building a new society. So professionally, the training was very anchored in making the world a better place.” This is a doctrine that, in his view, is now at odds with the manner in which much architecture is practiced in his native country. “The private sector has now become the patron, instead of the state, and everything that used to be architects’ bread and butter – social housing, schools, libraries – has disappeared, because the private sector has no interest in building those. As architects we are left flapping around, try169

The limits are those that you choose. The things you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to be limited by, you tend to ignore.

170

A model of the Bötzow Berlin development, built on the site of the former brewery, which was bombed during World War Two.

ing to still ‘do good’ but our opportunities to do so are fewer and fewer.” “We’re dealing with many high moments, the cathedrals of culture and so on, but, as for all architects, we would like to be more embedded in things that make everybody’s life better.” Chipperfield appears to be doing his bit more than most, however. There is, for example, his experience helping to establish the Fundación RIA in Galicia that brings together politicians, residents and scientists to ‘support holistic development’ along the Ría de Arousa estuary in Spain. In 2002, Chipperfield completed a house for his family on the waterfront of the fishing village of Corrubedo in the region, and so began “a strange accidental relationship with a quite vivid part of the world”, and an opportunity to contribute to the future planning of a local context as his professional profile became global. There is also a general drive which stems from that other, less accidental relationship with another vivid part of the world, though the architect is nonetheless quick to dispel the idea of any long-running green credentials. “I wouldn’t say that our entry into repair and issues of reconstruction have been directly driven by climate change or a growing responsibility to sustainability; they have really coincided with the issue of Berlin.” And with that we are back to the German capital again. After three decades in the business, Chipperfield has built everywhere from Belgium to China, and has been particularly involved with works in Spain and Italy, but nowhere is more integral to his and his firm’s practice than the city famously damned to be ever becoming and never to be. Accordingly, profiles have often made much of his Britishness within the context of Germany – a thread that can neatly encompass references to fellow Brit and former colleague Sir Norman Foster’s new Reichstag dome of 1999. That narrative seemed enduringly reliable thanks to its deeply entrenched, one-way chronology of progress and continental fraternity. But this is the post-EU-referendum universe, where Europe and its politics have acquired new fault lines. The kind of break in history that Chipperfield’s architecture has so often attended to in Germany is now consuming his native land, and the patience and restraint that imbues his architecture does not extend to his feelings on this subject as a committed European. “Where is the evidence that surrendering close relationships with our nearest makes us more worldly?” he asked in a public memo to the Royal Institute of British Architects in April last year, just one of many pieces he has penned since 2016 asserting that “Surely we, as architects and planners, understand better than most the developing challenges of our times.” We happen to be speaking during the week that Theresa May has been met with the largest parliamentary defeat in modern times by putting her Brexit deal to a vote in Westminster. Chipperfield’s rage at the ongoing ructions is tempered only by a deep sense of weariness. “Everyone asks ‘How will be your business be affected?’ Well, hell to that. For us it’s not a big problem; if we have to shift everything to Berlin and Milan then

fine – it has never been about that. So, then people ask ‘Well, why are you moaning so much?’ But it’s not about me; the biggest issue is cultural, and what Brexit will do to us as a society.” Later this year, DCA will complete another high-profile project involving a historic building in Berlin, the five-year-long refurbishment of Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, a modernist masterpiece in steel and glass that first opened in 1968. With the success of Chipperfield’s other work in the city, it’s hard to imagine the task having been entrusted to anyone else. Working alongside Mies’s grandson Dirk Lohan on the ultimate temple to the ‘less is more’ maxim means that the architect’s hand will be more pared back than ever before: “Once we put it all back together again, no one will know the herculean task that it was.” That rather suits the architect who, despite being sought out for the gravitas his name can add to projects, always looks forward to watching his work being subsumed by context. “As soon as a building becomes nature, then you feel more comfortable. The idea that it’s yours… I find that very uncomfortable.” This architectural project has once more proved to be an opportunity for putting emotions into perspective, both the memories a city has of a specific building and also those concerning the different contexts Chipperfield is personally engaged with. “Again, I say thank god for the cultural climate that exists here in Germany, because I just don’t think it would have been possible to do something like this under cost-saving, project-management English conditions.” He wishes that the timespans he has been afforded on projects such as this were not exceptions to the rule: “In London, planning work can be like going to the supermarket every day when you’ve got no fridge.” These differences underscore why a collective philosophy remains so important for Chipperfield and DCA. At a macro level, that means ensuring each office recognises aspects of its counterparts’ culture that might be beneficial: Berlin apparently could do with being as nimble as London; London could be better at knowing what Milan is currently up to. And on a smaller scale, it means ensuring that the architects he employs pay attention to their own context just as Chipperfield has throughout his own career: “If you’re not careful, they arrive in the morning, go to their desk and work on their one thing without looking up.” As we walk back through the Berlin campus, which includes a private residence for Chipperfield, he points out the Kantine – a lunch venue open not just to DCA employees, but anyone who happens to be passing by the open courtyard in Mitte. Kantine is typically Chipperfield in its simplicity of materials and contextual appropriateness: a clean, concrete-walled space illuminated by floor-to-ceiling windows and minimal furniture. Thoughtful architectonics aside, it is also typical of its designer through its relationship with its neighbours – buildings and people alike – evidencing his belief that as an architect, “even in the most modest way, you try to find opportunities for social engagement.” 171

Henley River and Rowing Museum

Completed 1997

Location Henley-on-Thames, United Kingdom

Set against the water meadows south of the Thames, the Henley River and Rowing Museum building was Chipperfield’s first major commission in the UK. Inspired by the traditional local river boathouses, the museum consists of two long parallel forms, constructed using oak panels and raised on concrete pillars – a feature that protects it from rising tides. Walls of glass blur the division between the exteriors and interiors, and the airy gallery spaces are brightly lit by skylights. The museum, housing a significant collection of rowing boats in two gabled halls, can be directly accessed via large external doors.

172

Hoxton Press

Completed 2018

Location Hackney, London, United Kingdom

A landmark example of the ongoing housing redevelopment by Hackney Council, Hoxton Press is a collaboration with Karakusevic Carson Architects, consisting of two hexagonally shaped residential towers placed at the corner of the 1950s Colville Estate. With one red-bricked eastern tower of 16 storeys and another darker, grey tower of 20 storeys, the pair have a dynamic effect on the skyline and open up the space bordering Shoreditch Park. The 198 apartments within are arranged in concentric bands, spanning outwards from the lifts and staircases, past ancillary spaces to an external ring of bedrooms and living rooms that lead out on to balconies, giving the façades a richly faceted surface. ChipA perfield has described the towers as “the first ’60s-looking brutalist housing since the ’60s”.

173 A

Neues Museum

Completed 2009

Location Berlin, Germany

In 1997, David Chipperfield Architects won an international competition for the restoration of the Neues Museum, designed by Friedrich August Stüler and built between 1841 and 1859. Chipperfield’s approach to the building, left in ruins following the second world war, was to fill the gaps in a way that complements rather than rigidly completes Stüler’s original plans. Key structural elements remain intact, such as the sequence of rooms and the capacious hall, but earlier ornamentation is unrestored, drawing attention to the building’s history, and the interiors take on a more stripped back, contemporary feel. While the emphasis was partially on repairing pre-existing features, the building also features extensions: the South Dome and the Northwest Wing, with its Egyptian court built from recycled brick. The sensitive renovation won the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2011.

174

Photography Name Surname

175

SET P IECE

PANERAI LUMINOR DUE £13,000, panerai.com

176

P H OTOGR AP H Y

That cushion case and hinged crown guard are unmistakable, but all resemblance to Panerai’s usual fare stops right there. Instead of a butch 47mm diameter and ultra-legible stencilled dial sandwiched over a burning layer of luminescence (just like

El eo n o r a Agosti n i

the sub-aqua instruments originally supplied to Italy’s elite combat divers during the war) we have a long-overdue slimline version that brings things down to a unisex 38mm across – longoverdue because that voluptuous case shape has always been begging for a

slinky makeover. Red gold framing an ivory dial, with (still luminous) babyblue numerals, makes it all the more glamorous.

Cre ativ e d i rec ti o n

BULGARI OCTO ROMA £5,100, bulgari.com

The Roman jeweller will say that the monumental forms of its Octo are nurtured by the octagonal motifs adorning their hometown’s Basilica di Massenzio, but it was actually a range introduced in the mid-noughties by watchmaker Gérald Genta, in tribute

Max

to the iconic octagonal designs populating its titular founder’s CV (see Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak and Patek Philippe’s Nautilus). In recent years however, Bulgari’s virtuoso designer Fabrizio Buonamassa has truly made the Octo his own, by paring

F e rgus o n

things down to something quite unlike anything else. The 110 facets milled from a single piece of metal are now 58 with the rounded-out Roma, yet still retain the Octo’s look and feel – both statuesque and chic, yet for a younger, more cosmopolitan customer.

177

A LANGE & SÖHNE SAXONIA THIN £17,900, alange-soehne.com

178

It’s not all about the Swiss when it comes to fine watchmaking. But, in Germany at least, it seems a similarly bucolic mountain setting is essential – all the better to bestow detached serenity upon their master uhrmachers. Crafted deep in the valleys of Saxony’s

former silver-mining region, in the village of Glashütte, this particular masterstroke from Germany’s finest harnesses a different metal to realise a dial that sparkles like its home town’s night sky. The so-called ‘blue copper’, or goldstone as it's more commonly

known, dates back to 17th-century Venice – a crystallised mixture of silica and copper oxide that glistens like aventurine and brings a welcome dose of romance to Lange & Söhne’s Teutonic sobriety.

PATEK PHILIPPE ELLIPSE REF. 5738R £23,620, patek.com

Some will cite the golden ratio; less artistic sorts, a US freeway gyratory spotted from a plane by a Patek Philippe executive in the ’60s, but one thing’s irrefutable: the proportions of the 50-year-old Ellipse are so divine that they have never been changed.

This anniversary edition is larger than ever but – thanks to the Genevan grande dame’s hand-crafted Calibre 240 mechanics with micro-rotor embedded, rather than spinning on top – retains a slender 5.9mm profile: perfect for the tightest of French cuffs.

Special-dial editions have famously been commissioned as gifts for Middle Eastern royalty and the soft forms lend themselves effortlessly to Patek’s ladies’ collection, but the Ellipse’s proportions of 1/1.6181 feels especially sumptuous in this men’s ‘Jumbo’ edition.

179

ROLEX CELLINI DATE £13,800, rolex.com

180

It’s one of the most recognised brands in the world, let alone watch brands, with even the most casual observer knowing a sporty Rolex Oyster case – the watertight gamechanger of the ’20s, which made it Switzerland’s

biggest brand and James Bond’s first choice. Less well known are its Cellini dress watches, which may not be fit for a spot of scuba but benefit from every other expertise that Rolex quietly and constantly hones, from antimagnetic

mechanics, to elite-level precision, to self-sculpted gold cases. No wonder the collection is named after an Italian Renaissance polymath.

CARTIER TANK CINTRÉE £55,500, cartier.com

On the 100th anniversary of Cartier’s classic Tank, in 2017, its legendary Cintrée or ‘Curve’ iteration of 1924 was skeletonised to dramatic lightdrenched effect. Still stretched and elegantly arched to embrace 46mm

of your wrist, evolving the original Tank’s relatively unassuming rectangle (despite said rectangle being inspired by the footprint of WWI’s formidable ground-attack vehicles of the same name), not only does the architecture

of the Cintrée’s exposed mechanics form the dial itself, but they reflect the actual architecture of the art deco era. It’s a flamboyant unisex status symbol – best served with a cold Manhattan on a balmy Manhattan evening.

181

AUDEMARS PIGUET CODE 11.59 SELFWINDING Price on request, audemarspiguet.com

182

January’s Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie showcase in Geneva usually throws up a few surprises across the 30-odd watchmakers who exhibit. But safe to say the brand on people’s lips this year was Audemars Piguet and its otherwise

unassumingly elegant CODE 11.59. The first new collection in years, finally plugging a circular hole in an otherwise octagonally shaped portfolio, it was the round sandwich of faceted case band, skeletonised strap attachments and sci-fi numerals that brought on the

vapours. But now they’ve dissipated, it’s clear that AP is simply challenging itself for the future – just as their octagonal Royal Oak caused so much controversy in 1972, yet went on to become an icon.

Creative Assistant: Emily Dessi Makin

BREITLING PREMIER B01 CHRONOGRAPH 42 BENTLEY £6,700, breitling.com

The dramatic turnaround of every pilot’s favourite watchmaker (if they’re not already Bremont or Rolex diehards, that is) continued apace over winter, with Breitling’s hyperactive new (exIWC) CEO Georges Kern unveiling the super-slick Premier collection to

global press gathered in north London. To the Navitimer aviator range and rebooted Superocean diving watches, Premier contributes a land category, alongside air and sea, conveniently opening new roads for Breitling’s Bentley Motors partnership – one

of the most fertile car-llaborations on the market. Rendered in the vehiclemaker’s trademark Racing Green, it is powered by Breitling’s own highoctane mechanics, Calibre B01. A fitting accessory to the next-gen, mile-gobbling Continental GT.

183

Published in 1989, Jem Southam’s The Red River was a groundbreaking visual meditation on the industrialisation of the English landscape, establishing him as one of the most important living photographers of the genre. Here he reflects on a body of work – produced in the subsequent three decades – that returns to the site of his original survey in the south west of England, exploring the effects of post-industrial decline

In 1982 I went to live with my brother in Camborne, a town in the west of Cornwall. For centuries it had been the centre of the tin-mining industry in the West Country, and over the course of several years I walked around the area, recording the effects of industrialisation on the landscape for a piece of work, which was published as The Red River. I finished the project and moved to Devon in 1987. It was the same month that the last tin mine in Cornwall closed, but I’ve been going back, intermittently, ever since. The project was initially influenced by a photographic tradition that came out of the 19th century; early topographic studies made with largeplate cameras… documents of the landscape. I started off making pictures like that, and I can remember a day, quite vividly, standing on a hill, taking a photograph of a hamlet near where I was living, and feeling detached from the scene I was trying to capture. I imagined what it would be like to flow down that hill, to wend my way through the gardens and the houses. I wanted to make work that wasn’t just descriptive of the topography, but which came to describe the lives of the people who lived in these places, on the fringes of rural life; to get closer to the lived culture of the landscape. I named the series after a stream that had been heavily polluted by the process of crushing ore, and which the project had centred around, but I wasn’t trying to make a comment about the environmental degradation of the area. I’m not a polemicist or a documentary photographer – I’m interested in the tapestry of the landscape of this unique area, the rich seam of association. My pictures describe, of course; they depict a particular part of the world – but I’m more concerned with how landscapes are something we imagine, something we construct. When 184

we look at a photograph of a landscape, we’re looking as much at a projection of the cultural, social, historical, literary connections we have with that place, as we are with an actual physical landscape. The Red River was a description of a culture, and of a place, but also an investigation of how we carry imagery in our minds. My pictures are never planned. I walk until there’s something that stops me in my tracks, that makes me want to take a photograph. It’s why this new body of work, The Moth has taken 30 years to bring together. It is a slow process of accumulation that shows how these mining districts are changing, the small details: the gardens, once distinctly Cornish, changing as garden centres started to appear; the houses that have been painted different colours, where once they were all the same; the TV dishes that have been installed, the plastic windows put in. Much has stayed the same; it still feels the same, but the story is darker. I am photographing, now, the residue of the industrial revolution in rural Britain; a return from a Blakean landscape of satanic mills to an archaic one, which evokes something of the richness of the myths, the narratives, the history of this place. I would never want to suggest this work presents a romanticised vision of England. We’re an extremely brutal, exploitative and yet inventive group of people, and the English landscape is a horror story – industrialised, chemicalised, with insect and bird populations disappearing. But it shows, with this historic undercurrent, how extraordinarily rich and complex each square metre of earth is. If we can understand that, then maybe there’s a chance we can turn things around. As told to George Upton

185

PhOToGRAPHY JeM SOUtHAM

MiST fROM THE HiLL

186

188

189

191

192

193

195

196

197

HeRMÃ&#x2C6;S

T HE

SPRiNG /

S U MMER

B O T T E G A V E N E TA

C O LL E CTIONS

P h o t o gr a â&#x20AC;&#x201C; phy Misha Taylor

S T Y LiNG RO Se fO rD E

200

HUGO BOSS

201

GiORGIO ARMANI

202

SAiNT LAURENT

203

LOUIS VUiTTON

204

BERLUTi

205

206

PRADA

207

CANALi

208

CORNELiANi

209

MARGARET HOWell

210

FENDI

DIOR

Hair and makeup Hiroshi Matsushita using Oribe Hair Care Casting Leila Hartley Photography assistants Pedro Mendes Faria and Aurèle Ferrero Styling assistants Christina Phillips and Charlotte Dunn Models Rishi Robin at Rebel Management and Ninan Thomas at Premier

211

OBJETS TROUVÃ&#x2030;S

Sandals and belt BOSS

PhotOGRAPHY Marius UhliG

StyliNG AND SEt DESiGN MiCHAel DARliNGTON

Printed silk ties and scarf CANALI

Brique Saffiano leather bag and Runway sunglasses PRADA

214

Andy Demesure glazed calfskin leather loafer and lambskin leather hat BERLUTI

215

Calfskin leather shopping bag ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA COUTURE

216

Black deerskin espadrilles GIORGIO ARMANI

217

Leo animal-print belt pack BURBERRY

218

Technical check shorts and bucket hat PRINGLE OF SCOTLAND

Styling assistant Harry Bradbury

219

Ki N D AMPHiTH EATRE

PHOTOGRAâ&#x20AC;&#x201C; PHY

M ehDi l AcoSte

StYliNG RoSe forde

Previous spread left: Shirt, trousers, jacket, hat and shoes GIORGIO ARMANI

Below: Shirt and trousers TIGER OF SWEDEN jacket DUNHILL Opposite: Shirt HUGO BOSS trousers CORNELIANI coat CERRUTI shoes MANOLO BLAHNIK sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES

223

Below: Shirt LOUIS VUITTON trousers MARGARET HOWELL

Opposite: Shirt, jacket, trousers, hat and shoes GIORGIO ARMANI

Opposite: Shirt, jacket and trousers PRADA

Below: Shirt CMMN SWDN trousers CANALI shoes MANOLO BLAHNIKÂ

227

228

Shirt PRESIDENT’S AT MR PORTER blazer and trousers BERLUTI

229

Opposite: Top and jeans FENDI shoes CHURCH’S

Below: Shirt PRESIDENT’S AT MR PORTER overshirt JACQUEMUS AT MR PORTER shorts HERMÈS

231

Previous spread left: Shirt, trousers, belt and shoes GIVENCHY Previous spread right: Hat and shorts LOEWE scarf and top ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA shoes CHURCH’S

Opposite: Shirt and trousers DIOR shoes MANOLO BLAHNIK Below: Jacket CORNELIANI shirt FRED PERRY FOR MARGARET HOWELL

235

Below: Top JACQUEMUS AT MR PORTER trousers BOTTEGA VENETA Opposite: Hat LOEWE scarf and top ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA

236

Mehdi Lacoste at Visual Artists Hair and makeup Hiroshi Matsushita using Oribe Hair Care Photography assistant Harry Burner Styling assistants Christina Phillips and Connie Ng Model Etienne de Testa at Super Model Management

DARK ARTS

PHOTOGRAPHY i LY e S GRIYeB

All ACCESSORieS FROM feNDIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SS19 COlleCTiON

STYLiNG AND ART DIRECTiON ROSE FORDE

SET DESIGN ANAiCK LEJART

240

241

242

243

244

245

246

CLOTHiNG 2 MONCLER 1952 THROUGHOUT

ON WATERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S EDGE

CREATiVE DiRECTiON AND ST YLiNG DAN MAY

PHOTOGRAPHY KYLE WEEKS

248

250

251

252

253

Hair and makeup Alice Coloriti Photography assistant Luke Bell Doman Models Jethro Jaftha at My Friend Ned, Jessie Crichton and Jeremy Pelser atÂ BOSS Models Cape Town

255

M A L L O RY

JACQuES LUC AUTRAN

1987 L A U R E AT E

Below: A victim of the civil war in Mozambique, evacuated on a stretcher. Marins sans Frontières’ work in Mozambique became the organization’s longestrunning operation.

WORDS ALFRED

First IN THE FIELD

For over four decades, Rolex has been recognising and advancing the work of some of the most significant figures in applied technology, cultural heritage, environment, exploration and science and health. Port looks back on the history of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise

The Rolex Awards for Enterprise were established in 1976 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Rolex Oyster, the world’s first fully waterproof watch. Designed in 1926 by Hans Wilsdorf, founder of Rolex, the Oyster quickly became a byword for daring and adventure, accompanying Mercedes Gleitze as she became the first British woman to swim the Channel; Lord Clydesdale in his biplane, as he became the first to fly over Mount Everest; and Sir Malcolm Campbell on his successful land-speed record attempts on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. First granted 16 years after Wilsdorf ’s death, the Rolex Awards were established to celebrate this spirit of endeavour and enterprise, in figures who sought to improve life on this planet, whether through technological and scientific innovations, conserving endangered species and ecosystems, or protecting indigenous cultures and providing clean water, energy, shelter, food and healthcare in low-income countries. Given, not to recognise past achievements, but to enable and advance future work, the programme has benefited millions of people in more than 60 countries since it began, 40 years – and 140 laureates – ago. Following the announcement of the 10 shortlisted nominees for 2019’s award – and ahead of the naming of five winners in June – Port takes a closer look at three exceptional previous recipients. 256

Images courtesy of Robert Guegan

French engineer-turned-sailor Jacques Luc Autran witnessed first-hand the difficult conditions faced by the isolated communities of the Maldive islands. With at least a five-day boat journey to the nearest doctor, the islanders endured a high infant-mortality rate and an average life expectancy of just 46 years. Recognising that behind the white sand beaches and tourist resorts lay a serious need for coordinated medical help, Autran conceived of a floating medical centre, outfitting,

over the course of five years, a rusted trawler he had bought for scrap, named Le Listaos. Marins Sans Frontières, a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving conditions for low-income island people, was founded by Autran and doctor Martine Le Fur in 1984. Le Listaos received her certificate of seaworthiness in 1986, and, with the help of the Rolex Award, set sail for the Maldives from the French ports where she had been fitted out. Together

with the local authorities in the Maldives, Autran and Le Fur successfully undertook a programme of immunisation, allowing them to treat individual medical cases. Autran went on to help similarly isolated communities in Haiti, Madagascar, and Mozambique – where he carried out his most extensive work. Today, Marins Sans Frontières continues his work, building boats to bring medical workers, drugs, vaccines and food to some of the world’s most isolated and underprivileged people.

Top left: Autran and Dr Samad Abdullah, public health director of the Maldives, standing at the wheel of Le Listaos.

Top right: Dr Martine Le Fur, who accompanied Autran on Le Listaos, in the surgery room. Bottom: Le Listaos at sea.

257

LUC JEAN-FRANÇOiS DEBECKER

1978 L A U R E AT E

Below: Engraving at R’Chek Dirhem, near Brézinav, Algeria, documented by Luc Jean-François Debecker in 1977, showing a person with hair in plaits.

258

Images courtesy of Georgina Herrmann

One of the first five receivers of the Rolex Award, Luc Jean-François Debecker worked as an industrial surveyor, pursuing a passion for prehistoric cave art, harboured since he was a teenager, in his spare time. Having set out to catalogue the impressions of ancient man – the crude paintings of hunting, of bison, wild horses and cave bears, of hands and perhaps even the first-ever portrait – by the time Debecker was granted his award in 1978, he had visited some 50 caves in southern

Middle top: Debecker in a cave. For almost 30 years he has overcome obstacles to visit more than 150 caves and document the world’s oldest art collection.

Europe. In the two decades since, still working in his spare time, that figure rose to 150, spread across Europe and North Africa, with Debecker compiling a database of more than 5,000 photographs of Stone Age art. Though often hidden deep within cave systems – far deeper than the caves’ subsequent occupants, smugglers, would dare to go – the art Debecker catalogued is in an ever more precarious condition with the modern threats of pol-

Middle: Two horse-like animals and hands, from the Pech Merle cave, Lot, France.

lution and climate change. The rapid deterioration of the famous Lascaux paintings stands as a stark warning. This decline makes the work of Debecker – who, thrillingly, may have been the first to see these paintings in as many as 35,000 years – essential for the study of cave art by future scholars. With his body of work we can come far closer to understanding our earliest ancestors, providing an insight into not just their daily lives, but also their very human drive to create.

Middle bottom: Debecker showing images from the vast database of information he has built, which has led to a new and important understanding of populations in Europe 40,000 years ago.

Right: Hand, Pech Merle cave, Lot, France.

259

GEORGiNA HERRMANN

1996 L A U R E AT E

Below: Georgina Herrmann and a colleague in front of the Great Kiz Kala monument in Merv, Turkmenistan.

260

Images courtesy of Georgina Herrmann

For over a thousand years, from around 114 BCE to 1450 CE, the Silk Road – the ancient trade routes stretching across the Middle East and central Asia – was a vital link between the continents. Playing a significant role in the development of civilisations across these regions, cities grew up around oases along the route; first as places for travellers to rest and then as vast cities, far greater in size than centres in Europe at the time – cultural centres with libraries famous across the world. Merv, in the Karakum Desert in Turkmenistan, one of the most significant

of the Silk Road cities, is today a ruin of some 60 monuments from three walled cities, dating back around 4,000 years; rather than build on top of the existing city, in Merv, as an old city was abandoned, a new settlement was built adjacent, offering, centuries later, a unique opportunity to study the evolution of the settlement over time. For years relatively unknown and unexplored, today, thanks to the work of British archaeologist Dr Georgina Herrmann, and the support of the Rolex Award, Merv has been protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999.

Top right: Herrmann outside the Shahrior Ark, the ancient library in the Sultan Kala, Merv. Bottom right: Unglazed pottery from Merv. Herrmann and her team have

Together with Turkmen and Russian archaeologists, Herrmann founded the International Merv Project in 1991. Her work has been vital in understanding how the people of Merv lived and worked. Awarded an OBE for her work in 2001, Herrmann’s discoveries have helped rewrite the history of the period; establishing, for example, that crucible steel, and cotton, were produced there far earlier than originally thought – as well as preserving the site for future generations and study.

made groundbreaking discoveries about the ancient city, such as indications that complex water management and irrigation systems were used to grow cotton as early as the fifth century CE.

261

ABC A LANGE & SÖHNE ARTEMIDE AUDEMARS PIGUET B&B ITALIA BERLUTI BOTTEGA VENETA BREITLING BULGARI BURBERRY CANALI CARTIER CERRUTI CHURCH'S CMMN SWDN CORNELIANI COS

DEFGHI alange-soehne.com artemide.com audemarspiguet.com bebitalia.com berluti.com bottegaveneta.com breitling.com bulgari.com burberry.com canali.com cartier.com cerruti.com church-footwear.com cmmn-swdn.com corneliani.com cosstores.com

JLMO JACQUEMUS LG LOEWE LOUIS VUITTON MANOLO BLAHNIK MARGARET HOWELL MOLTENI&C MONCLER OLIVER PEOPLES

262

jacquemus.com lg.com loewe.com louisvuitton.com manoloblahnik.com margarethowell.co.uk molteni.it moncler.com oliverpeoples.com

DIOR HOMME DUNHILL THE ELDER STATESMAN ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA FENDI FOLK FRED PERRY GIORGIO ARMANI GIVENCHY GUCCI HERMÈS HUGO BOSS ISABEL MARANT

dior.com dunhill.com elder-statesman.com zegna.co.uk fendi.com folkclothing.com fredperry.com armani.com givenchy.com gucci.com hermes.com hugoboss.com isabelmarant.com

PRTV PANERAI PASADENA LEISURE CLUB PATEK PHILIPPE PRADA PRESIDENT'S PRINGLE OF SCOTLAND PT ROLEX TIGER OF SWEDEN VACHERON CONSTANTIN VIU

panerai.com instagram.com/pasadenaleisureclub patek.com prada.com presidents7bell.com pringlescotland.com pt-pantalonitorino.it rolex.com tigerofsweden.com vacheron-constantin.com shopviu.com

IN ADDITION TO GLOBAL KIOSKS, TRAVEL HUBS, AND NEWS STANDS, PORT CAN BE FOUND HERE

Also available on the entire VistaJet fleet, vistajet.com HOTELS 41 HOTEL ANDAZ HYATT THE BENTLEY THE BERKELEY BLAKES BROWNS THE CADOGAN CHARLOTTE STREET HOTEL CHELSEA WYNDHAM CLARIDGES HOTEL CONNAUGHT CORINTHIA COVENT GARDEN HOTEL DEAN STREET TOWNHOUSE THE DORCHESTER EGERTON HOUSE THE FORBURY FOUR SEASONS HOTEL THE GORE THE HALKIN HAYMARKET HOTEL HILTON PARK LANE JUMEIRAH CARLTON TOWER JUMEIRAH LOWNDES HOTEL

41 Buckingham Palace Road 40 Liverpool Street 27–33 Harrington Gardens Wilton Place 33 Roland Gardens Albermarle Street 75 Sloane Street 15–17 Charlotte Street Chelsea Harbour Drive 49 Brook Street 16 Carlos Place Whitehall Place 10 Monmouth Street 69–71 Dean Street 53 Park Lane 7–19 Egerton Terrace 26 The Forbury Hamilton Place 189–190 Queens Gate 5 Halkin St 1 Suffolk Place 22 Park Lane 1 Cadogan Place 21 Lowndes Street

KNIGHTSBRIDGE HOTEL THE LANDMARK THE LANESBOROUGH THE LANGHAM MANDARIN ORIENTAL MARRIOTT MARBLE ARCH MARRIOTT PARK LANE THE MAY FAIR THE MILESTONE MY HOTEL BLOOMSBURY NUMBER SIXTEEN THE PARK LANE HOTEL THE PELHAM HOTEL THE RITZ ROYAL GARDEN HOTEL SANCTUM SOHO HOTEL SANDERSON HOTEL THE SOHO HOTEL ST PANCRAS SWISSOTEL THE HOWARD W LONDON WYNDHAM GRAND LONDON THE ZETTER HOTEL

9 Adam Street 40 Dover Street 67 Dean Street 28 St James’s Street Rose Square 18 Clifford Street 9 Halkin Street 127 Piccadilly 7–12 Gracechurch Street 24 Ludgate Hill 8 Northumberland Avenue 170 Kensal Road 24 Hertford Street 25 Northumberland Avenue 53 Park Lane 16 St James’s Square 191 Portobello Road 62 Chamber Street 87–88 Mount Street 23 Mecklenburgh Square 45 Dean Street 162 Chiswick High Road 20 Portman Square 24 Endell Street 116–123 Pall Mall

THE IVY CLUB KENSINGTON ROOMS THE KINGLY CLUB LANSDOWNE CLUB LES AMBASSADEURS CLUB LONDON CAPITAL CLUB MORTON’S MEMBERS CLUB NAVAL & MILITARY CLUB NEW CAVENDISH CLUB OXFORD & CAMBRIDGE CLUB PENZANCE ART CLUB PORTLAND CLUB QUEEN’S CLUB RAC CLUB RAC CLUB EPSOM RENDEZVOUS THE ROOKERY ROYAL BRITISH LEGION CLUB ROYAL OCEAN YACHT CLUB ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE ROYAL THAMES YACHT CLUB SHOREDITCH HOUSE SOHO HOUSE TRAVELLERS CLUB THE WATERMARK CLUB

10 Beaufort Gardens 222 Marylebone Road Hyde Park Corner 1c Portland Place 66 Knightsbridge 34 George Street 40 Park Lane Stratton Street 1 Kensington Court 11–13 Bayley Street 16 Sumner Palce Piccadilly 15 Cromwell Place 150 Piccadilly 2–24 Kensington High Street 20 Warwick Street 50 Berners Street 4 Richmond Mews 379–381 Euston Road 12 Temple Place 10 Wardour Street Chelsea Harbour 86–88 Clerkenwell Road

CLUBS ADAM STREET ARTS CLUB BLACK’S BOODLE’S CLUB THE BROMPTONS BROOK’S CLUB CALEDONIAN CLUB CAVALRY AND GUARDS CLUB CLUB QUARTERS, GRACECHURCH CLUB QUARTERS, ST PAUL’S CLUB QUARTERS, TRAFALGAR THE COBDEN CLUB COLONY CLUB THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB THE DORCHESTER CLUB EAST INDIA CLUB ELECTRIC HOUSE THE ENGLISH MARTYR’S CLUB THE GEORGE CLUB GOODENOUGH CLUB GROUCHO CLUB HIGH ROAD HOUSE HOME HOUSE LONDON THE HOSPITAL CLUB INSTITUTE OF DIRECTORS

9 West St (Front door) 131–137 Cromwell Road 4 Kingly Court 9 Fitzmaurice Place 5 Hamilton Place 15 Abchurch Lane 28 Berkeley Square 7–9 Babmaes Street 44 Great Cumberland Place 71 Pall Mall Chapel Street, Penzance 69 Brook Street Palliser Road 89 Pall Mall Woodcote Park Clubhouse, Epsom 14 Old Park Lane 12 Peter’s Lane 247–249 New King’s Road 20 St James’s Place 1 Wimpole Street 60 Knightsbridge Ebor Street 40 Greek Street 106 Pall Mall 35 Scrutton Street

263

Things I Like / Things I Dislike

Joyce Carol Oates 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 has become justly notorious. Here Joyce Carol Oates picks up that baton.

LIKE “Gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights”, Gala apples, Bartlett pears, Bing cherries, scent of moist lilac, “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, In a Lonely Place, Out of the Past, the Dream Boxes of Gloria Vanderbilt, That Old Black Magic, “What is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil”, Black Mirror/White Album, Magritte/Banksy, Hopper/Rothko, Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe, Niagara, Some Like It Hot, ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye’, Peggy Lee/Nina Simone, Jeanne Moreau/ Catherine Deneuve, Julianna Margulies/George Clooney, Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert/Larry Wilmore, Imogene Coca & Sid Caesar, Key & Peele, Steve Martin/Tony Trischka, Bill Monroe/Earl Scruggs/ Dock Boggs, Saul Steinberg/Roz Chast, Marlon Brando/James Dean/Paul Newman, ‘The Golden Vanity’, ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Banks of the Ohio’, Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger, Joan Baez/Bob Dylan, Hoagy Carmichael/Leonard Cohen, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, Martin Luther King Jr/ Malcolm X, Robert Mitchum/Humphrey Bogart, Montgomery Clift/Burt Lancaster, From Here to Eternity/On the Waterfront/East of Eden, Jack Johnson/Muhammad Ali, Willie ‘The Wisp’ Pep/Sugar Ray Robinson, Harry Smith’s Old, Weird America, ‘Let It Be’/‘Hallelujah’, Bertolucci/Scorsese, Homicide: Life on the Street/The Wire/The Americans/Fauda, Oz/The Sopranos, Jerry/Elaine/George/Kramer, Charles Darwin’s attentiveness to his cat’s “six or seven” distinctive voices, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Ramón y Cajal/Charles Gross, Arthur Dove, Red Sun, “A poet can survive everything but a misprint” – Wilde, hope – “the thing with feathers”, no-kill shelters, Weegee/Diane Arbus/Vivian Maier, calico cats, black & ‘tuxedo’ cats, Bengals, tabbies, short-hairs & long-hairs, “Sure was glad to get out of there alive”, Winslow Homer, John Marin, Charles Burchfield, Charles Dodgson/ Lewis Carroll, “Curiouser and curiouser!”, awe, compassion, patience, kindness, sympathy, quiet car, Chopin’s Preludes, Nocturnes, Études, Ballades, piano music of Béla Bartók/Erik Satie, Lang Lang, Claudio Arrau, Murray Perahia, Jane Eyre/Wide Sargasso Sea, Zion Park/Yosemite/Death Valley, Ansel Adams/Andrew Wyeth, Gregory Crewdson/Gerald Slota, Edinburgh/London/Paris/Rome, haunted Venice, that special editor!, giant tortoises of Galapagos, “The thing in itself beautiful”, Where have you gone, Anthony Bourdain?

DISLIKE Wishing the terminally ill a “speedy recovery”, embarrassment of dogs and cats made to wear ‘cute’ costumes, chaos/entropy, bagpipes, piccolos, Salvador Dalí/Jeff Koons/Damien Hirst, Brexit/T***p Dark Age, “Ignorance is bliss”, “Never give a sucker an even break”, “America First!”, collateral damage, family values, anti-abortion/anti-vax, Breaking News/Fake News, Electoral College, voter suppression, Confederacy, deregulation, No Refunds, “Entitlements”, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET, SALE PRICES SLASHED, “Can’t you take a joke?”, “Where’s your sense of humour?”, “Where were you born?”, “What are you so angry about?”, “What was she wearing when she was raped/murdered?”, mansplaining, #MakeAmericaFakeAgain, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat”, “Don’t let the cat out of the bag”, “Why is your writing so violent?”, blind faith, nylon, rayon, acrylic, plastic, Styrofoam, banter, “Heathen” – “Infidel” – “Blasphemy”, xenophobia/”Patriotism”, “A woman is a muse or she is nothing”, cruelty, ignorance, stupidity, disturbance in the quiet car, “Millennial” – “Boomer” – “Gen X”: clichés, kettles acquiescing to being called black by pots, goose-liver pâté, tripe, head cheese, blood pudding, bagpipes in cemeteries, waiting rooms, infusions, chemotherapy, “Cheer up!”, “Smile!”, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” – (Matthew 19:25-26), God the father, God the son, God the holy ghost, “A sucker is born every minute”. 264