Port Issue 25 AW19

P O RT AUTUMN / WINTER 2019/20

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MAYA HAWKE / EDWARD NORTON / CILLIAN MURPHY / NICOLE FLATTERY / ITALO LUPI AM HOMES / DEYAN SUDJIC / LISA MCINERNEY / DANNY DENTON / FORMAFANTASMA

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CONTENTS

The Porter Words John Pawson, Cillian Murphy, Thomas Bolger, Reiss Smith, Billie Muraben, Hannah Williams, Dan Crowe, Thea Hawlin, Megan Logue, Alex Doak, George Upton, Martine Assouline, Francesco Panella

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43 Maya Hawke The free-spirited rising star of screen and airwaves strides out in Manhattan Words Claire Marie Healy Photography Clément Pascal 36 38 40

Contributors Out-Take Editor’s Letter

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The lovely people who helped make the issue Introducing Maya Hawke

Life Must Be Lived as Play – Plato Photography Yiorgos Kaplanidis Styling Alex Petsetakis

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Edward Norton Words Matthew Specktor Photography Tom Craig Styling Dan May

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CANALI.COM 26

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P H OTO G R A P H Y BY ZO Ë G H E RT N E R

N O C TA M B U L E

BY KO N STA N T I N G R C I C

201 9 F LO S .COM

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CONTENTS CONTENTS

The Porter Words John Pawson, Cillian Murphy, Thomas Bolger, Reiss Smith, Billie Muraben, Hannah Williams, Dan Crowe, Thea Hawlin, Megan Logue, Alex Doak, George Upton, Martine Assouline, Francesco Panella

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Land of Giants Photography Frédéric Lagrange Styling Dan May

Italo Lupi At home with the irreverent icon of Italian graphic design Words Francesca Picchi Photography Alessandro Furchino Capria

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Against the Grain Words George Kafka Footprints Photography and set design Anaïck Lejart The Autumn/Winter Collections Photography Frankiewicz & Rozniata Maya Hawke Blue Pearl Photography Josh Hight The free-spirited rising star of Leaves to a Tree Words George Upton screen and airwaves strides out in Manhattan Words Claire Marie Healy Formafantasma Photography Clément Pascal Exploring the possibilities

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and limitations of design with the Amsterdam-based duo Contributors Words Deyan Sudjic Out-Take Photography Editor’s Letter Renée de Groot

Styling Rose Forde Creative direction and styling Dan May Photography Paul McLean

The lovely people who helped make the issue Introducing Maya Hawke

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Edward Norton Words Matthew Specktor Photography Tom Craig Photography Name Surname Styling Dan May

Photography Ilyes Griyeb

McCarren Park A portrait of a park Words and photography Ramak Fazel

Life Must Be Lived as Play – Plato Photography Yiorgos Kaplanidis Styling Alex Petsetakis

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CONTENTS

Desafinado Photography Vava Ribero Creative direction and styling Dan May

254 185 Commentary 302 Stockists 304 Things I Like, Things I Dislike

Words Danny Denton, Dead Centre, Nicole Flattery, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, John Kelly, Lisa McInerney

Guest editor Cillian Murphy Illustration Joni Majer

Words AM Homes

274 Rocket 88 Photography Joachim Mueller-Ruchholtz Styling Ola-Oluwa Ebiti

Remain in Light Photography Piczo Styling Rose Forde

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M A S T H EA D

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 Sophie Dutton ONLINE EDITOR Thomas Bolger COMMENTARY GUEST EDITOR Cillian Murphy EUROPE EDITOR Donald Morrison US EDITOR Alex Vadukul AUSTRALIA EDITOR James W Mataitis Bailey INTERIORS EDITORS Huw Griffith, Tobias Harvey EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Reiss Smith WORDS Martine Assouline, Thomas Bolger, Dan Crowe, Dead Centre, Danny Denton Alex Doak, Ramak Fazel, Nicole Flattery, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Rich Gilligan Thea Hawlin, Claire Marie Healy, AM Homes, George Kafka, John Kelly, Megan Logue, Lisa McInerney, Billie Muraben, Cillian Murphy, Francesco Panella John Pawson, Francesca Picchi, Reiss Smith, Matthew Specktor, Deyan Sudjic, George Upton, Hannah Williams PHOTOGRAPHY Prosper Assouline, William Bunce, Sadie Catt, Valerie Chiang, Tom Craig, Ramak Fazel, Frankiewicz & Rozniata, Alessandro Furchino Capria, Rich Gilligan, Ilyes Griyeb, Renée de Groot, Josh Hight, Esther Huguet, Yiorgos Kaplanidis, Frédéric Lagrange, Anaïck Lejart, Paul McLean, Isaac Marley Morgan, Joachim Mueller-Ruchholtz, Clément Pascal, Piczo, Vava Ribeiro Luca Strano

SENIOR EDITORS Deyan Sudjic, Design 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

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.

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Edward Norton, photographed in Tuscany by Tom Craig, wears BERLUTI Maya Hawke, photographed in New York by Clément Pascal, wears LOEWE “A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”

— George Bernard Shaw 34

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.

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CONTRiBUTORS

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Cillian Murphy Having spent the early years of his career in theatre, Irish actor Cillian Murphy broke in to the mainstream aged 26 in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. Established in Hollywood, he received critical acclaim for appearances in Batman Begins, Red Eye and Inception.

In recent years he has become well known as the lead in Peaky Blinders, the BAFTAaward-winning BBC drama. Passionately involved in the arts (he pursued a brief rock career before finding success in acting), Murphy spent part of 2019 hosting his own BBC Radio 6 Sunday-afternoon show.

Nicole Flattery Irish author Nicole Flattery released her first short story, ‘Hump’, in 2015, while working as an intern at a publishing house in New York, having recently graduated from Trinity College in Dublin. ‘Track’, published in 2017 won the White Review Short Story prize and the same year she signed with Bloomsbury to release a collection of short stories and a novel. Released in 2019, Show Them a Good Time is a collection of stories about women, men and their modern roles.

Nothing Special will be published in 2021.

Frédéric Lagrange An interest in photography was initially Frédéric Lagrange’s excuse to travel. Since the Brooklyn-based French national first picked up a camera, he has been turning his itinerant lens on the world and carving out a niche between fashion, portraiture and travel photography. Lagrange has documented his travels through over 80 countries for the likes of the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler and multiple international iterations of Vogue, whilst shooting campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Hermès and W Hotels. His work also features in the American Photography Annual, and he is one of only 30 worldwide photographers sponsored by Kodak.

Vava Ribeiro Rio de Janeiro’s beach culture permeates the work of photographer Vava Ribeiro, who grew up in the city and remains a keen surfer. Having attended design school and pursued painting lessons in Rio, he moved to New York to begin his career as a photographer, but frequently finds himself drawn to the coast in his work – which has been exhibited in France, Brazil, Japan and the Netherlands and has appeared in Dazed, Purple and the New York Times.

Lisa McInerney Until 2015 Lisa McInerney was known as Sweary Lady, a pseudonym she coined for her celebrated blog, Arse End of Ireland.

Chronicling her life on a Galway council estate, McInerney ended the project to embark on a literary career. Her debut novel The Glorious Heresies drew from the experiences she documented online, and won both the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Desmond Elliott prize. It was optioned for the small screen in 2017, the same year that McInerney released her follow-up novel, The Blood Miracles.

Claire Marie Healy London-based writer and editor Claire Marie Healy is currently editor of Dazed.

Having read literature at Cambridge, she graduated with a master's in digital-media theory from Goldsmiths in 2015 before joining the culture magazine as features editor. She has profiled the likes of Chloë Sevigny, Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola, with her writing – which has also appeared in AnOther, Vestoj and Buffalo Zine – usually concerning film, fashion, photography and the internet. In her work, she likes to view culture through the lens of young women; her online column for AnOther, Girlhood Studies, considers how visual culture has shaped ideas of girlhood through time.

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OUT-TAKE

COVER STORY MAYA HAWKE

Maya Hawke, photographed in New York by Clément Pascal, wears SALVATORE FERRAGAMO

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Maya Hawke likes to walk when she’s being interviewed. If, one afternoon in early September this year, you were somewhere between Second Avenue and 14th Street in New York, you might have seen the actress walking and talking while on the phone to this very magazine. She has a relaxed attitude that betrays her approach to an industry fixated on social media and ‘the next big thing’. She was walking too, as Claire Marie Healy notes, in Los Angeles – a two-hour trek from one audition to another – when she got the call to tell her that she’d been cast in season three of Stranger Things.

Who walks in LA anyway? “19-year-old New Yorkers do,” she smiles.

Like her mother, Uma Thurman, and her father Ethan (Port cover star for issue 19, in fact), Hawke is an actor who seems most comfortable doing things differently, often choosing art-house productions: working with Gia Coppola and, elsewhere, starring as experimental novelist Kathy Acker. Nevertheless, she is establishing herself globally in her breakout role as the girl-next-door-with-hidden-depths, Robin, in Stranger Things, and has released an album as a singer this year.

Playfully, Hawke is going places: “I’ve always just followed the joy, followed the things that have made me happy.”

Read the profile on p70.

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EDiTOR'S LETTER

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For this issue – our 25th, no less – the acclaimed actor (and all-round decent human) Cillian Murphy guest edits our 32-page Commentary section (pp185–216). Murphy drew inspiration from a luminous creative moment currently taking place in his native Ireland, where he recently returned to live. He writes: “It is a common narrative for Irish artists to move away for an extended period and then return in later life. This journey has felt like a sort of reconciliation with my Irishness.”

Murphy joins a coterie of artists who returned to Ireland after a degree of exploration abroad. His return, he says, “brought back into sharp focus all that is great about this small island. As a nation we have always been a cultural heavyweight, but it is the vitality and the gentle power of this new creativity that has struck me since I moved home.”

He brings much of that creativity into our pages: exciting new fiction and non-fiction from Nicole Flattery, Danny Denton and Lisa McInerney, poetry from John Kelly and Doireann Ní Ghríofa, plus a play extract from progressive theatre company Dead Centre and photography from Rich Gilligan.

The result is a snapshot of an island urgently retelling its story – a country which, nonetheless, remains interested in the outside and otherness. Humour and humility play a large part in this section of the magazine – as it does in the country as a whole; we are immensely thankful to Cillian for collaborating with us on it.

Elsewhere in the issue we have had the fortune to work with other fiercely creative individuals: Edward Norton (Fight Club, American History X; p82), who recently wrote, directed and starred in Motherless Brooklyn, based on Jonathan Lethem’s extraordinary novel of the same name; and the captivating

actor-singer Maya Hawke (Stranger Things, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; p70), both lead the way in our double cover stories.

The absolute don of Italian design, Italo Lupi, and the young design duo Formafantasma (interviewed

by Deyan Sudjic) show us different ways of looking beyond what we already know. Artist Trevor Paglen reveals how artificial intelligence is learning to perceive the world, and the big business that’s behind it; and photographer and artist Ramak Fazel showcases an art project centred around a public space in NYC that has recently bloomed into life – McCarren Park, documenting how the everyday can become something transcendent, magical even.

There is also, nestled within these pages, our annual horology supplement TenTen – redesigned by the inspiring London design studio Pentagram – with its own bounty of people and stories.

We have photographed and commissioned stories all over the world, from Patagonia to South Africa, New York to Paris, and enjoyed some great food along the way, with the Italian restaurateur Francesco Panella. But one thing said to Murphy

by Zambian-born, Limerick-based songwriter Denise Chaila (p46) sums up the feelings in this issue: “I have the agency to create myself. I am entitled to name myself. I am entitled to claim what I stand for instead of waiting for someone else to christen me with an ill-fitting identity.”

As you will see herein, having the agency to create oneself, to claim what you stand for, is the finest starting point for creativity of all.

Dan Crowe – Editor

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“BEAUTY LIES IN THE DETAILS OF THE GRANDEST STRUCTURES, AND THE FINEST.” ORA ÏTO,

CREATOR OF SHAPES, WEARS THE VACHERON CONSTANTIN TRADITIONNELLE.

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PORTER 01

A PLACE TO HANG YOUR HAT

By John Pawson. Remembering the writer Bruce Chatwin

I was studying at the Architectural Association in London when I first met Hester [van Royen], an art dealer who would become my first wife. She lived in the flat next to mine, and one day, when I was locked out, I had to climb across her balcony. I ended up doing her flat, knocking through the walls myself. She was renting the place and so of course the landlord kicked us out, but it was my first proper foray into architecture.

Bruce Chatwin – who was friends with Hester – saw it and asked me to do his own tiny flat at the top of an old apartment block in Belgravia.

Bruce was quite specific. He wanted somewhere light and airy that he could lock up and leave, somewhere he could ‘hang his hat’, as he said. It was to be spacious and minimally appointed but the few possessions he brought with him were exquisite: a sofa made for the empress Marie-Louise; a birchwood table and stool, designed by Alvar Aalto; a hanging of parrot feathers from the back wall of a Peruvian sun temple – every object had a story. Whether it was exaggerated or even made up was irrelevant to me. He was a storyteller, and you treasured every moment you had with him.

Looking back, I’ve realised I’ve learned more from my clients than I’ve been able to give, and it’s especially true with Bruce. He was a great writer, of course, but he was also approachable and generous. He gave me a leg up when I was just starting out, and when he came to write about the flat I had designed for him, he articulated what it was I was trying to do. It gave me confidence. When I did the minimum, a lot of my ideas came from Bruce.

I miss him. When he fell ill he told everyone that he had an incredibly rare disease, caught from a dead whale on a beach in China. The reality of that disease, which took away so many people so quickly and suddenly, was too awful. You wanted to go along with his version…

As told to George Upton John Pawson is an architect and designer 43

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RiVE DROITE

By Thomas Bolger. The creative director of Saint Laurent’s paean to the art book

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Photography Esther Huguet

Ed Ruscha once said that his books are “a collection of readymades”. Real Estate Opportunities, published by the artist in 1970, presents a sequence of black-and-white photographs of land for sale in LA County, the juxtaposition of vacant lots and empty structures a commentary on the everyday banality and transience of American urban life. Moving away from the craftsmanship of the livre d’artiste of the past, Ruscha showed the potential of the book as a site of artistic expression in an age of mass production and, in works like Real Estate, established a new way of thinking about photography and publishing.

Seen alongside works by Richard Prince and Jurgen Maelfeyt – whose LIPS, a series of closely cropped red-lipsticked mouths, was published in 2018 – at the new Saint Laurent Rive Droite concept stores, his influence is clear.

In addition to the artists books, the condoms, furniture and toy cars, the stores – curated by Saint Laurent’s creative director Anthony Vaccarello – are a personal celebration of art publishing, with Nan Goldin’s Biesenthal and Collier Schorr’s Wrestlers next to vintage copies of

Vogue and Self Service, monographs on Hockney and Warhol, and a collection of Richard Avedon’s portraits captioned by Truman Capote.

“I wanted to propose a larger vision of Saint Laurent, beyond the clothes, accessories and campaigns,” explains Vaccarello, “to reach some people who wouldn’t necessarily come to Saint Laurent, but who could – through this boutique – better understand the universe I’m trying to create.” An inversion of Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche line – the couturier’s prêt-à-porter range with which he opened his first boutique in 1966 – the Rive Droite store is situated on the northern, or ‘right’ side of the Seine in Paris, and has been conceived by Vaccarello as a cultural hub, hosting exhibitions and performances alongside its extensive library of rare books. “I have always seen Saint Laurent more as an attitude, a lifestyle,” Vaccarello says, discussing the inclusion of books like Real Estate Opportunities. “Ruscha was so closely connected to the art world. I wanted to evoke that spirit.”

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iRiSHNESS iS NOT A MONOLiTH Interview Cillian Murphy. Denise Chaila, one of Ireland’s most exciting musicians, discusses identity and creative freedom

Cillian Murphy: You have described your music and poetry as “giving voice to a transatlantic odyssey, exploring identity, belonging and home – from the heart and mind of a diasporan dreamer”. Can you expand on that?

Denise Chaila: Growing up, I often found myself in liminal spaces. I was continually transitioning between cultures, countries, cities and social groups… languages that gave me more questions than answers. I struggled to find a sense of belonging or to understand how I fitted into the broader social narrative. It bred a feeling of intense isolation that has haunted me into adulthood.

Eventually, I decided that that particular crisis had gone on for long enough. I had to try to throw away the shame of ‘not quite belonging’, or not being good enough, and reframe my way of thinking.

I do not belong to nations or countries or cultures. If anything, they belong to me: I began with that.

I have the agency to create myself. I am entitled to name myself. I am entitled to claim what I stand for, instead of waiting for someone else to christen me with an ill-fitting identity. This, for me, expresses itself through song, music, journal entries that become poetry. My music is nothing if not a celebration of a hard-won freedom.

and diversity in the artists and musicians making music in Ireland right now.

DC: It’s hard to pin it to any one thing. I might say it’s conviction; I think Irish artists are being empowered to add their voices and experiences to an international musical conversation and stand eye to eye with anyone on a global stage. Ireland has a distinct identity that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world. There are stories and sounds which are uniquely a product of this island.

These sounds do not respect stereotypes, and Irishness is not a monolith.

I believe empowered people naturally empower other people and enrich their communities. This is fertile ground.

No more travelling overseas for opportunities to ‘make it’.

We’re comfortable with the waves we’re making right here.

This momentum will be felt wherever it needs to be felt.

CM: What are you working on at the moment?

DC: Things I’m excited about! I’m wrapping up work on the follow-up project to my Duel Citizenship EP. Every track on the new record will be produced by MuRli, the legend himself. He’s a genius – honestly.

CM: Which artists have been and are inspiring to you?

DC: I’m lucky enough that I never have to look too far from home. I’m from Limerick – among other places – so I guess an emphasis on lyricism and poetry is ‘on brand’ for us. MuRli and God Knows inspire me daily. MCs like Hazey Haze, Strange Boy Nature and Young Phantom keep me proud to stay repping the southwest. Further afield, Kano, Skepta and Wiley. Janelle Monáe and Lauryn Hill. Beyoncé. Beyoncé. Beyoncé. (She could be this whole list to be fair.)

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Duel Citizenship barely scratched the surface of who I am.

This project is a much more significant expansion on that, a deeper dive into myself as a person and as an artist. I still feel like I’ve barely begun. It’s a beautifully frustrating feeling. I took advantage of how fluidly you can wrap singing, rapping and poetry around each other, and found myself using my voice in unexpected ways.

It’s really been a journey.

Outside of music, I often find myself watching old Eartha Kitt interviews or fixating on Maya Angelou’s poetry. The way they communicated the truth of their lives has always moved me deeply.

All of this has only been possible because of the community around me. My peers and mentors consistently stress that working on music ultimately means working on yourself; so, while I’m tackling that lifelong project, definitely stay on the lookout for this new record in the next few months.

CM: Have you any idea what might be fuelling this amazing moment in Irish music? There seems to be such energy

Cillian Murphy guest edits our Commentary section, pages 185-216

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Photography Rich Gilligan

Styling Aisling Farinella

Chaila wears leather cut-out coat dress FENDI

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04

A GOOD YARN

By Reiss Smith. Tracing the history of merino wool

Of all the crimes once deemed worthy of capital punishment, exporting sheep is one of the most extraordinary. Yet with merinos, the breed prized for its fine, soft wool, for centuries only found on the Iberian peninsular, the kingdoms of Spain jealously defended their monopoly on the precious yarn. From the 14th century, merino wool became one of the region’s main exports and a vital source of revenue for church and nobility, and the roads between the southern plains used in winter, and the summer pastures in the northern highlands, shaped the landscape and fortunes of the country.

It wasn’t until 1723, when a small flock of merinos were presented to Sweden, that the sheep would leave the peninsular, and over the course of the century gifts from subsequent Spanish monarchs to relatives in Saxony, Hungary, Prussia and France (where Louis XVI established the Rambouillet breed at the royal farm), saw merinos being exported around the world. From the Dutch colonies in southern Africa, to Australia and New Zealand, precise breeding and temperate weather established the high performance, water-resistant and thermoregulating fabric prized by luxury brands today.

Australia and New Zealand continue to be among the world’s largest and finest producers of merino wool, even if, with the rise of fast fashion, immediacy is taking precedence over quality and integrity, resulting in diminished animal and human welfare. Hugo Boss seeks to address these issues with its Traceable Wool initiative, which follows the path of six pieces in a special capsule collection. Every stage of the process is meticulously supervised, from the welfare-and-sustainability-accredited New Zealand farms, where the wool is sheared, to Reda, the 150-year-old family-run weavers in Italy, and the brand’s workshop in Turkey, where the wool is fashioned into jackets, trousers and outerwear. Each of the six pieces from the capsule collection are typical of Boss – understated, sharply cut – and now, completely accountable.

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Photography William Bunce

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FORMAL POETRY

By Billie Muraben. Commemorating Carlo Scarpa’s Brion Cemetery

Giuseppe Brion, the founder of Brionvega – the electronics company famous for the Cubo television – died in 1968. His wife Onorina, wanting to memorialise her husband, extended the family plot at the local cemetery of San Vito d’Altivole, the village in the shadow of the Dolomites where Brion was born, and approached the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa to design his tomb.

Scarpa stood between the ancient and modern; in Venice – the old, crumbling city where he was born and lived – the architect introduced a modernism sympathetic to the canals and palazzi: the Olivetti showroom on St Mark’s Square; the Biennale ticket booths and the Venezuelan pavilion in the Giardini; the renovations of the Gallerie Dell’Accademia and the Fondazione Masieri.

But it is his work with the Brion family, the only project he would “go to look at with pleasure”, that is his most studied and visited, and, ultimately, the place where he would be buried.

It started, simply, as a tomb, but between 1970 and 1978 the memorial would grow to include a chapel and meditation pavilion, all set around pools of water and surrounded by a garden, approached and enclosed by tall cypress trees. Rendered in concrete and ornamented Photography flickr/seier+seier

with tile and glass and metal, the elaborate stepped surfaces evoke ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats, which raised temples closer to the heavens – a motif that echoes throughout the cemetery, creating bands of light and shadow, cutting through and framing rooms, corridors and terraces. The steps, submerged in water, moulded into concrete, seem either to lead to something or nothing; it’s disorienting, but in a way that appeals to the subconscious, inviting you to move through the space.

Scarpa described the complex as being designed with a sense of “poetic imagination”: “Not in order to create poetic architecture, but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry.”

It’s a place rich in material symbolism, from the use of interlocking circles, which represent husband and wife; to the bodies of water, between and beneath the cemetery buildings, both life giving and morbid, the Nile and the Styx; and the way nature is left to grow over and around the structures. “The place for the dead is a garden,” Scarpa said. “I wanted to… approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life – other than these shoe boxes.”

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06

THE ViEW FROM THE HiLL

By Hannah Williams. Considering the city from one of London’s few successful housing estates

The best view in London belongs to the benches next to the bandstand in the Horniman Museum Gardens, where the concrete folds into the sloping grass. Look northwest and you will see the usual sights – the ice-blue steeple of the Shard rending the clouds; the Walkie Talkie, with its wheezing, asthmatic stoop; the phallic helter-skelter of the Gherkin, all Motorola Razr and hair gel and New Labour. They speak to a kind of noughties excess; a vision of London’s overwhelming desire for power and commerce. Owned by autocratic governments and property conglomerates, occupied by bankers, law firms and luxury restaurants, they are strange and foreboding, boasting of their domination to the skies of the City.

It’s easy to feel angry when you see those skyscrapers.

They make you think of other towers that burned black into the dawn; of people lying on beds of damp cardboard outside the champagne bars and hotels; of the people scraping and slaving to afford rat-infested flats. There has been a 50 per cent increase in homelessness in London since 2010, but there is no regular accommodation available in the Shard or the Walkie Talkie or the Gherkin, and their lights shine throughout the night regardless.

The reason the Horniman Gardens offers the best view in London is not due to its panorama of the City and its glass sarcophagi of skyscrapers, but instead the sight that dominates the horizon to the west: Dawson’s Heights. The postwar housing block sits, tumbling, jagged as a loose tooth, on a hill, its sandy exterior a constant against the seasonal affectations of the trees that surround it – blending with the orange-brown foliage of autumn, standing stark against the black ribbons 50

The Porter

of winter, a backdrop to the lush greens of spring and summer. Dawson’s Heights looks modern, space age – more so than any glass and chrome building, blinking wanly in the sun – and yet it is unknowably, incredibly old. Unmistakably human – there is a clear seam of inspiration running from the smooth, ancient rocks of Göreme, through the pitted tuff of medieval Sorano, to the clay of SE22 – it is also oddly organic, as if formed by the snow and water of a distant ice age.

Unlike the skyscrapers to the northwest, Dawson’s Heights is entirely residential, built solely to house people: “those in most urgent need of homes”, its architect, Kate Macintosh, told the Guardian. It was designed when she was 27, fresh from working on the National Theatre with its architect Denys Lasdun. The National’s influence is clear – the lines of concrete that should be harsh, discordant, instead arranged into something harmonious. There’s a humanity in the touches that give the National Theatre its warmth – the feathered grain in the walls that comes from the wooden beams used to hold the concrete, the sunlight that reflects off the Thames and spreads through the atrium; never self-conscious, but constantly aware of the reasons for its use, of why and how people need to interact with the space – Dawson’s Heights shares this spirit of generosity towards its inhabitants. It embodies a holistic attitude to architecture; by placing the requirements of its users above other demands, structure and aesthetics are not placed at odds, but as inextricable: flowing and melding, transforming each other. The split levels, growing stalagmite-like out of the trees and the grass and the rock, not only allow it

Photography Sadie Catt

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to settle into the hill it’s built on, but ensure its acoustics are well balanced; that sound disperses rather than accumulates in one area. It also means that light enters all apartments equally, meaning that even in December the strange grey-yellow glow of the winter sun seeps through the rooms. No one is overshadowed, no one overlooked.

Everybody has an outside space, a balcony for plants or bikes or deck chairs. There is a playground, where people from across the local community bring their children.

The decline of Britain’s social housing in the wake of Right to Buy is well documented: Estates that once represented a gleaming future, that offered low rents and spacious flats, were suddenly left without funding, pockets sold off as councils scrabbled for money. Even now, with the reappraisal of brutalist buildings and the fight to save social housing, modernist estates are being torn down.

The Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle, its gargantuan facade the slate grey of London skies, was sold to developers, with existing residents forcibly evicted from their homes. Their compensation was 40 per cent of the market value. All of the new flats built on the site have been sold to foreign investors before they even went on sale to the UK market. Even the ‘success stories’ of social housing have downsides; an average flat in the Barbican estate – vertebrae that reach into the sky, flowers dripping from balconies – now sells for around £1 million.

Rejected for listed status, Dawson’s Heights balances precariously in the middle, threatened by, both developers, circling, hungry, and by gentrification that displaces the very people it was built to house. And yet it continues to thrive, still a vision of a better city, a city built for its people. The London we want to look out on.

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Photography William Bunce

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RUNAWAY SHOW

By Reiss Smith. A homage to the effortless cool of Cary Grant

As he walks through a bustling Grand Central station, sidling past police officers and newspaper headlines calling for his arrest, Roger Thornhill pulls a pair of sunglasses from his breast pocket and disappears into the crowd. With characteristic sangfroid, he sneaks on to a train which will take him out of New York and towards Chicago, where he hopes to find the man who can vindicate him.

It’s a pivotal scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s much-celebrated North by Northwest, cementing Thornhill’s transition from civilian-mistaken-for-spy to fugitive-fleeingfrom-a-murder-he-didn’t-commit. Cary Grant clearly relishes the role, drawing closely from his off-screen persona. One of the Golden Age’s definitive leading men, Grant was – and remains – a standard-bearer for well-heeled style. “He had great taste,” as his daughter Jennifer Grant puts it. “But above all it was his innate elegance: in his movement, his thought, and the way he put himself together.”

It is precisely this élan, this untaught urbanity, which led eyewear brand Oliver Peoples to approach the Grant estate for a first-of-its-kind collaboration.

Drawing inspiration from that oft-referenced scene, the Cary Grant frame marks the only time the actor’s name – here a discreet CG monogram taken from Grant’s personal stationary – has been lent to a brand. The glasses, with their distinctive round lenses and keyhole bridge, come in a case the colour of Thornhill’s famously unruffled suit, fit for carrying them through the trials and tribulations of life on the run.

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MARTiN ROWSON: WHY i DRAW

By Dan Crowe. Discussing the importance of satire with the political cartoonist

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In a world beyond parody, what role can satire play?

Indeed, with global events and local politics seeming like they’ve taken too many steroids, can satire even exist anymore?

I’ve loved Martin Rowson’s work for many years and once asked him if he would draw a cartoon for the small literary magazine I was then editing. He responded almost immediately with a brutal two-page takedown of the liberal Guardian-reading so-called ‘intellectuals’ who made and bought such esoteric little journals. It was harsh, but brilliant.

That was back when Tony Blair was the bad guy, and it seemed like now would be a good time to catch up. I ask Rowson – who himself, it should be noted, draws for the Guardian, and has done for many years – if is there any point in satire these days.

“Well, in short – yes. My cartoons help people to feel a bit better about the hideous psychopaths who run our country. Inequality has dogged our species for at least the last 5,500 years. Sometimes we need a break. It’s natural to taunt the people who have placed themselves in positions of power.”

We talk about the value of collective striking – to join the voices calling on governments to do more for the climate crisis, and the value and function of humour in such times. I ask him how wit can help. “Laughter is one of the things we humans do best, mostly because it makes us feel better. I’ve been convinced for years that laughter is a hardwired evolutionary survival mechanism that helps humans navigate our way through life without going mad with existentialist terror. That’s why we laugh at all those terrifying things like death, sex, other people and the disgusting stuff that pours out of our bodies on a daily basis.”

The political cartoon has been a device for jest for centuries, but with sometimes horrific consequences, such as the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris.

I ask what it is exactly about a cartoon that upsets the subject, more so than, say, a well-reported opinion piece. “There appears to be something exquisitely intolerable to the serious mind about mockery when it’s visual. Largely this is due to the way the visual is consumed: Rather than nibbling your way through text, however incendiary, a cartoon floods the eyes; it gets swallowed whole.”

Do you know anyone personally who has been endangered by drawing a cartoon? A knowing and frustrated chuckle. “Yes. Erdoğan, the Turkish president, has imprisoned my friend and colleague Musa Kart in Istanbul for a bogus 16-month sentence for ‘treason’. Erdoğan had been pursuing him since 2005, when Musa drew him as a cat, and this superman couldn’t cope with being portrayed as a cat. So my friend is in prison. That really brings the whole thing into sharp focus: These people really are a bunch of useless, whining cunts.”

It’s hard not to agree, and tempting to fantasise about how things would be if only artists or musicians were allowed to govern. I mention this idea. Another chuckle. “Power attracts a certain type, and it’s always been dangerous standing up and saying ‘The king is no better than us’,” he says. “In fact ‘the king’ is probably worse, as he wants to be a king. So artists would make lousy despots. I mean, the Gestapo infamously drew up a list of British cartoonists due for immediate summary execution following a successful Nazi invasion of Britain. Some say drawing is a primitive magic, but really it just pricks their enormous egos.”

Photography Luca Strano

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Has he ever received death threats? “Death threats come with the territory. Since the advent of the internet, people around the world who are disgusted or enraged by my cartoons have been able to threaten to kill me via email. Over the years these have included Muslims, Zionists, Republican Americans, a few angry Chomskyians, Catholics, Russians, some Serbs, and, I imagine, a large number of teenage boys locked in their bedrooms ‘having a laugh’.”

We talk about how, in the West, we like to think we are tolerant – about our history of open-mindedness. “The British have the longest uninterrupted history of the toleration of satire, since parliament accidentally suspended the Royal Licensing Act, in 1695.

Statesmanship is a game. If you can’t deal with being depicted with big stupid ears, you are hardly able to be able to deal with a sterling crisis or, god forbid, a war.”

But, perhaps – exacerbated by social media and the rise of the far right – this is changing. I ask him how he feels about what’s happening now and how it’s inspiring his recent work. “In 2015 I was depressed with the state of politics. With David Cameron, everything was terribly asinine. It had nothing to do with ‘us’, or anything apart from wealth. Then everything exploded with Brexit and the rise of fascism, and fascism is what it is.

But this new bunch is just extraordinary. Boris Johnson is the world’s worst orator. The man can’t talk; he lands the punchline of a joke like the Hindenburg. This leather satchel of lard now happens to be our prime minister, and the British state is like a playpen lined with mirrors for psychopaths, like Boris Johnson, to preen in front of.”

He pauses. “I’ve been drawing political cartoons for the last 37 years. I don’t know where the inspiration comes from; I’m yet to understand how it works.

People ask me if my job makes me angry, and it does sometimes, but then I spend a few hours making a cartoon and everything seems a little bit better. Until the next day.”

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VOiCES FROM THE WiLD

By Thea Hawlin. Exploring the music of the ecosphere

Bernie Krause first recorded the sounds of the natural world by chance. In 1968, while making an album with fellow electronic-music pioneer Paul Beaver, it fell to Krause to source a natural soundscape in the park.

He feels lucky that it did: “As soon as I switched on my machine and heard the breadth and detail of the habitat through my headphones, I made the decision then and there to find a way to record those sounds for the remainder of my life.”

Krause was only 30, but as a musician, and a representative for the fledgling Moog synthesisers, he’d already collaborated with many musicians and directors. Most famously he was one of the repeatedly fired and re-hired hands on the set of Apocalypse Now. Yet in 1979 he quit the world of music and film and began the “refreshing” transition to bioacoustics. “Working at sea, in the forests and plains, made me feel alive and connected to life in a way that no other activity did.”

Following a PhD in biophonics, Krause published The Great Animal Orchestra, which detailed his work recording natural environments around the world. It caught the imagination of Hervé Chandès, director of Paris’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, who envi-

sioned a large public installation based around Krause’s soundscapes. Converted into particles of light by London-based studio United Virtual Artists, the recordings became a responsive, three-dimensional electronic artwork; an immersive experience in which ribbons of light travel across the walls of the gallery, visualising the depths of the sound-worlds.

Krause’s archive includes more than 5,000 hours of recordings from 2,000 habitats; of the 15,000 species recorded, around 50 per cent come from habitats that have since been destroyed. “Everything about this installation speaks to the issue of climate change,” he says.

“Every habitat represented is now either completely gone, or so seriously compromised that it is unrecognisable.”

But Krause is optimistic about the project’s impact: “Hopefully, once visitors experience the splendour of the world expressed here, they will be inspired to respond in ingenious ways… The future belongs to those who can hear it coming.” Nature, as Krause makes clear, is a universal language – one we need to listen to before it’s too late.

The Great Animal Orchestra runs until December 9th at 180 The Strand, London

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Photography William Bunce

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REBOOTED

By Megan Logue. Tracing the path of the monkey boot

As creative director of Alexander McQueen, Sarah Burton doesn’t just produce well-crafted, wearable collections; the designer, responsible for Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, also ruminates on the idea of identity – or, more specifically, British identity – translating these lofty ideas into the quotidian medium of clothing.

British heritage has been the lifeblood of the brand since its inception, and this season Burton found herself drawn to the post-industrial landscapes of her Macclesfield childhood. She focused her research on post-war northern England; when economic optimism gave way to the privatisation boom initiated by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. As culturally rich as it was politically tumultuous, the period saw the explosion of the northern soul movement, skinheads and the emergence of fresh sub-cultures – post-punk and new wave.

A compelling dichotomy exists at the heart of Burton’s collection: a rose-coloured nostalgia and a gritty realism that are particularly apparent in the designer’s interpretation of the monkey boot. Although a stalwart – thanks to its ready availability and modest price – of British countercultural wardrobes of the time, itself a harking back to the mods and the 1960s, the boot’s origins themselves are contested. As (urban) legend has it, they descended from Czechoslovakian army boots, produced during the interwar years and sold in surplus stores in the United Kingdom. True or not, there’s no doubt that the monkey boot’s association with the Eastern-bloc adds to their allure.

Burton’s version, with its exaggerated proportions and stacked soles, accentuates the distinctive tractor tread. Crafted from patent calfskin leather and finished with a combination of contrast stitching and silver hardware, the humble boot, appropriated and reappropriated over decades, is elevated by the designer’s modern touch. It’s in this, her uncanny ability to take the everyday and turn it into something new and unique, that Burton’s philosophy comes full circle.

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APPLE OF MY EYE

By George Upton. Ways of seeing in the digital age

The work of the Berlin-based US artist Trevor Paglen explores hidden systems of surveillance and power structures in the 21st century. Photographing military installations with powerful telephoto lenses, capturing images of stealth drones and undersea internet cables, and working to expose the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme, Paglen’s practice reaches further than journalistic documentation, asking viewers to question the social and political structures, pervasive and unseen, that shape our way of life.

As he prepares for a new exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London, Port spoke to Paglen about the latest focus of his research – artificial intelligence systems.

What draws you to explore these hidden power structures?

Put simply, I’m interested in learning how to see. We see with our eyes but also, increasingly, with the technologies we build, whether that’s cameras or sensors or drones or artificial intelligence systems. We also see with our cultural backgrounds, we see from the moment in history that we’re in, and we see through the lens of economic systems that we’re embedded within. I don’t think you can easily pick these things apart.

Where did the interest in AI come from?

I was working on a film about Edward Snowden, called Citizenfour, which developed out of my work trying to understand how mass surveillance infrastructures operate. I had been looking at institutions like the NSA, or the GCHQ in the UK – these huge, global, essentially military, surveillance agencies – and came to realise there were other institutions that are a hundred times bigger called Google, Amazon and Microsoft. They’re very similar in many respects, especially in the way they collect and use data. From there, you encounter AI pretty quickly – it’s an essential part of data collection at that scale.

What should we know about AI? First of all, the word intelligence is quite misleading. AI is statistics; it’s non-linear algebra, which begins to demythologise AI – it immediately removes these conversations about AI being able to take over the world by itself.

On the other hand, AI is everywhere and it is increasingly built into our infrastructures, with the people that run these systems extracting as much data as possible about our daily lives, and, of course, the goal of extracting all that data is ultimately to make money. All that information about your behaviours and habits is sold to insurance agencies that will modulate your insurance premiums and credit agencies to modulate your credit ratings.

AI is not passive, but actively sculpts our lives in ways that will financially benefit the massive corporations that operate at this scale.

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recognise different objects. Say you want to distinguish between apples and oranges, you can build what’s called a neural network and give it thousands of pictures of oranges and thousands of pictures of apples, and it will ‘learn’ to identify what an apple is and what’s an orange.

This is an incredibly simplistic example – in real life it happens at a much larger scale.

The piece at the Barbican draws from one of the most prominent training sets, ImageNet, which was developed by Stanford University and published in 2009 – a set of 15 million images organised into about 20 thousand categories. In the words of the set’s founders, it’s an attempt to map out an entire world of objects – it’s crazy how extensive it is. The work consists of a montage, going from concepts that we think are not particularly controversial, like an apple – a concrete noun – to something like an apple picker, a more ambiguous concept: Your definition of an apple picker might be completely different to mine.

The piece explores how machine learning systems are being trained to see. The training sets establish ‘natural’ or absolute definitions of things that are entirely historically constructed – for example gender, when the only way to know someone’s gender is to ask them. So the method of classifying in this way becomes problematic very quickly.

What will be the implications of AI for art?

I mentioned that we might both agree on the concept of an apple, but actually the first piece in the Barbican show, before you see anything, is an image of a Magritte painting that says ‘Ceci n’est pas une pomme’, and yet it has been classified by the AI system as an apple. Who gets to decide what an apple is? Is it the artist, the viewer or the machine learning system?

Will the primacy of the artist not always be there?

You don’t know! I think I’m one of the few people to have actually opened up these training sets and looked at the images and how they are categorised. When you do, you see the assumptions – the categorisation – which is really very regressive; a kind of physiognomy. These images, these taxonomical structures are being built into infrastructures around us all the time, and they operate autonomously; you are not able to challenge how you, or anything else, is being seen.

You can see how, the worse the assumptions are, the more potential there is to harm the most vulnerable sections of society. There’s an urgent need for people to do more work opening up these systems, to try and understand how they work technically, but also the kind of politics that are being built into them. Technologies are never neutral – they actively shape society according to certain rules. There are always winners and losers.

How does that take form in your recent work?

I’ve been looking at training images – the images that are fed into AI systems in order to teach them how to

From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ runs at the Barbican Centre, London, until 16th February 2020

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Artwork Trevor Paglen

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MAKiNG WAVES

By Alex Doak. Overdue limelight for Tudor’s just-flashy-enough frogman

As you’ll read in our special watch supplement, TenTen – enclosed with this issue of Port – 2019 has been a big one for chronographs. Not only have TAG Heuer and Zenith celebrated the 50th anniversary of their respective trailblazers, both bringing self-winding capability to the stopwatch wristwatch for the first time, but Bulgari also unveiled nothing less than the thinnest-ever iteration of a notoriously bulky contraption – all the requisite pushbuttons, column wheels, levers, clutches and spinning rotors squeezed into a wafer-thin 3.3 millimetres of intricate mechanics.

So, it’s understandable that something as knockout as Tudor’s Black Bay Chrono S&G diving watch flew under the radar (or rather swam under the sonar), overshadowed literally and figuratively by the bulbous contours of its cousin, the Black Bay P01. It’s another fitfor-purpose Black Bay, which manages that rare thing on the crowded retro-reissue watch-scape: to distil the coolest features of Tudor’s military-issue waterbabies, strapped around the wetsuits of French and US frogmen throughout the ’60s and ’70s, while keeping things contemporary and never slavishly faithful to the past.

This extends to the tech, as much as the design.

Under the bonnet are mechanics based on the concertedly 21st-century B01 engine, from chronograph wunderkind Breitling. Now with the boardroom in mind as much as a boat, a judicious smattering of precious metal has also been thrown into the bargain (the ‘G’ to steel’s ‘S’ in S&G), all while continuing to operate as a bona fide 200-metre diver, thanks to all manner of gaskets and screws securing the pushbuttons.

For £4,890, it’s hard to understand quite how Rolex’s now not-so-little brother, Tudor, does it. Decades of satisfying the demands of budget-restricted navies probably has something to do with it. But still: for that money, Tudor deserves as much limelight as TAG Heuer, Zenith, Bulgari, and then some.

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Photography William Bunce

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Photography Prosper Assouline

LA COLOMBE D’OR

By Martine Assouline. The hidden Provençal artists’ escape

In 1931, a smart and tasteful man established a restaurant in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a beautiful medieval hilltop village in southern France. The place only had three rooms but there was a view across the hills from the terrace, and the light of Provence, and, with many artists leaving Paris during the Second World War for Free France, little by little La Colombe d’Or became a favourite of painters and sculptors.

Paul Roux came to be friends with his new artistic clientele, which included Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. An aged Matisse would get his chauffeur to drive him to the hotel, just to have tea in his car with Roux. The artists came to be part of the fabric of the place and Roux started to collect, sometimes buying, sometimes taking a painting in exchange for room and board. Today the artwork there is incredible – paintings

by Miró, Chagall, Matisse, some ceramics by Picasso and Léger, a mosaic by Braque and a Calder mobile by the pool; but for the family, building such an incredible collection came naturally.

I don’t remember when I first visited, but my husband, Prosper, and I came to know Roux’s daughter-inlaw, Yvonne, who would tell us stories of that time – of

a mobile that Calder installed in the house, for example. Calder had returned three months later to find it painted red, and asked Paul what had happened. “Oh, you know, it was white on a white wall, and nobody could really enjoy it, so we decided to paint it red.” The whole family is like that, crazy and charming at the same time.

When our son was born, Prosper and I wanted to start something that we could run from our apartment in Paris.

We decided to make books, the kind we wanted to find in bookshops. Prosper has always been a very visual person – he was always taking photographs of La Colombe – and I write, so we started with the story of the hotel. It took some convincing but eventually the Rouxs agreed, and in 1994 we released our first publication as Maison Assouline. In the 25 years since, the book hasn’t been out of print and Maison Assouline has become an international publishing house with stores around the world.

We still go to La Colombe d’Or – it’s now run by Paul’s great-grandson and is still this rare mix of calm and culture; a place with a real history where you can escape the bustle of the world around you. It’s a special place.

As told to George Upton

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CACiO E PEPE

By Francesco Panella. The rich tradition of simple cooking

I knew I wanted to work in the restaurant business after I fell asleep in Antica Pesa, my family’s restaurant in Rome.

I had grown up there – watching my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents working hard to keep the business going, and, though I was only a child, I spent the whole night there. It was just like sleeping at home. I knew that was where I should be.

The restaurant was always open at Christmas and I remember one year my nonna making us sit for lunch before we started work – just the family, no customers.

We ate cacio e pepe and I can still remember the spice of the freshly ground black pepper, the creamy salty cheese.

It’s still my favourite comfort food, to this day.

The recipe has been in our family for generations – my nonna learnt it from her mother. During the First World War, she and other nonnas from Trastevere would gather at the top of Gianicolo Hill to buy pecorino and parmesan from the local shepherds. It’s how cacio e pepe became such an iconic recipe; women like my great-grandmother

using cheap ingredients that were plentiful during the war to prepare simple, comforting dishes.

My nonna taught me that it is always important to use the best ingredients and that, although the recipe is simple, it takes practice to find the correct technique to properly combine the cacio (cheese) and a splash of pasta water for the sauce. When I moved to New York to open Antica Pesa, in Brooklyn, we were concerned that the water might affect the way the recipe tasted. At first we tried to import water from Rome but quickly found New York water was as good, and, luckily, it is one of the few cities in the world where you can truly find any ingredient.

Whenever I eat cacio e pepe, I am transported back to my family in Rome. It’s a way to connect with that culture and history, even if only for a brief moment.

As told to George Upton Francesco Panella is a restaurateur who runs Antica Pesa in Brooklyn and Feroce at the Moxy Chelsea in New York

The exact recipe is a closely guarded family secret; below should serve as a basis for experimentation.

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Ingredients

Method

Spaghetti Pecorino Romano Parmigiano-Reggiano Freshly ground black pepper Warm pasta water

Boil a pot of water and cook the spaghetti with salt. In a bowl, grate the cheese and mix with pepper; add a big spoonful of warm pasta water. When the pasta is ready, drain and add to the bowl. Mix quickly to the right consistency and serve with freshly ground black pepper.

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Photography Valerie Chiang

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MAYA H

HAWKe THE FREE-SPiRiTED RiSING STAR OF SCREEN AND AiRWAVES

CLAiRE MARiE HEALY AS SHE STRiDES OUT MEETS

iN MANHATTAN

CLéMENT PASCAL STYLiNG ROSE FORDE PHOTOGrAPHY

This spread and previous: Top, trousers and boots GIVENCHY

Opposite and next spread: Jumper and leather skirt SALVATORE FERRAGAMO

Maya Hawke likes to walk. Especially, it turns out, when being interviewed. “When I have an interview I have to be walking, otherwise I get too nervous,” she says. If, one afternoon in early September, you were somewhere between Second Avenue and 14th Street, you might have seen the actress walking while on the phone to me (several of her friends did). It reminds her of a ‘walk and talk’ in a movie, she says – a term which sounds best coming from her true-blue throaty New Yorker accent, a voice you would be happy to let wash over you for hours.

She was walking, too, when she first heard she had been cast in Stranger Things, “…Through Los Angeles,” she recalls. “I didn't Uber there, because it was too expensive, and I don't know how to drive, so I would just walk everywhere, which takes a long time. I was on one of these two-hour journeys from one audition to another, and I got a call to say that I'd gotten the part.”

No one walks in LA, it goes without saying, but, as Hawke quips, “19-year-old New Yorkers do.”

The image of the actress commuting on foot to Hollywood auditions speaks to the chilled vibe she has projected since stepping into the public eye, an attitude that feels remarkably contrary to the crowded bunch of other actors on the crest of Generation Z. Though she had a lead role in the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Little Women (a role she left the Juilliard drama school for), Hawke’s introduction to celluloid stardom proper came this year, via roles in indie disaster movie Lady74

world (think Lord of the Flies with eight teenage girls), and a small but pivotal role as a Linda Kasabian-inspired character, Flower Child, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But it’s her casting as Robin in Netflix’s much-loved sci-fi show that has rocket-launched Hawke into the public consciousness. What’s more, despite being new to television’s most obsessed-over ensemble cast, her performance really stuck, making a deeply felt impact among the show’s fandom that has sealed her place as one of her generation’s most exciting actresses.

“You know, I wasn't totally sure if I was ready to step into this giant cultural thing, like Stranger Things,” she admits. “But after having met Joe Keery [Steve Harrington] and [show creators] the Duffer brothers… just the energies that they have, and the creativity, and the spontaneity, and the playfulness… I didn't feel like I was doing a giant Netflix behemoth; it felt intimate.”

In season three, Robin is introduced as a server at Scoops Ahoy, the shopping-mall icecream joint, where Steve – former arrogant jock turned sensitive fan favourite – is also working for the summer. As the threat of the Mind Flayer returns, Robin, Steve and Dustin (played

by Gaten Matarazzo) discover the Russian infiltration of the town and embark on a mission to save Hawkins, America and the world (duh). In a series in which established cast duos spend their time making up and breaking up, the odd-couple of Robin and Steve add much-needed hilar-

ity, and, in the end, tenderness. Hawke’s stubborn and gently self-deprecating Robin hits all the right marks, something that might be down to the work she put in to give the character a vivid off-screen life. “I wrote pages and pages of journal entries about her life,” she describes.

“As the seasons progress, I'm sure the Duffer brothers’ vision of her will be different to what I’ve been imagining, but I don't think it matters. What matters is that she felt full. She felt like she had a life outside of monster bashing, and Russian bashing.”

In a season of high-speed car chases, interrogation by torture and ambiguously corporeal CGI blobs fit to put you off your morning Eggos, the most moving moment was a conversation between unlikely BFFs Steve and Robin, which takes place in a bathroom stall. “It matters a lot in the long run,” says Hawke of the scene, in which Robin comes out to Steve. “Both to the integrity of a show and the impressions a show makes on its viewers, which are mostly young, and from all over the world and all different political backgrounds: Action is a real uniting force in the world.

“It's funny because it doesn't feel that drastic or extreme to me,” she continues, of her rising fame among that fandom. “But I know that if any young person is prepared to handle it, probably it's me, just because of the way I grew up.”

Hawke’s parents are actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. They divorced when she was

Hat and dress LOEWE

At the mere age of 21, it’s clear Hawke has dedicated herself to her craft, with an enthusiasm for what acting can do in the world that feels like it expresses something of her personal beliefs. To her, it actually matters. Her choices matter.

seven. We don’t talk about them much, but they come up in interesting ways throughout our conversation, like when she calls the way we watch young kids growing up on Stranger Things the “big budget Boyhood, the movie Richard Linklater directed with my dad”, or describes her happiness when she realised the woman who did the stunt work in her scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the same as Thurman’s on Kill Bill.

Maybe it’s because she’s not an LA kid – both her parents have famously side-stepped Hollywood for the East Coast, and more interesting arthouse roles, including theatre – but Hawke seems a world away from the average progeny of fame. The Maya you see on Instagram or television interviews seems goofy, unposed; leading an impromptu Macarena on the set of her new film, or getting excited about wearing the same Gucci suit as Harry Styles.

But the closest we’ll get to the real Maya, says Hawke, is in her music. With a debut album coming later this year, Hawke debuted two singles, both open-hearted, folky love songs, in August: ‘Stay Open’ and ‘To Love a Boy’ (watch the latter’s video to see Hawke hamming it up in full nylon mermaid costume). I wonder whether, as an actress, Hawke approaches her gigs in an actorly way. “Every moment in a live show is the only moment you're gonna get, right?” she replies. “I'm still trying to figure out my on-stage persona. I've been really animated and cartoony and haven’t talked at all – it's… practicing, you 80

know? I have to practice in front of everybody now, instead of in private, but that's okay.”

It’s tempting to think that Hawke, with her Polaroids and vintage-leaning style, might align herself with a decade she wasn’t born into. But despite coming of age in one of the most tumultuous periods of US political history, she says she loves all eras, even her own, most of the time. She was with her drama-school friends as the horror of the 2016 election night played out: “And then we woke up in the morning, and I had to participate in a ballroom dancing competition.

At 8am in the morning. To pop music. It was kind of an iconic moment, when all the different classes come to support the new freshmen in this ridiculous competition, where some people are really good, and some people are really bad; but we were all so depressed! You know, there was something about the heinousness of having something like this happen, and being forced to dance, that filled me with a sense of like: ‘The world will keep going; it's not over.

Y'all have to keep living here, and being alive, and doing this, and figuring out what it means.’

I think it ended up being a positive experience: not Trump being elected… the ballroom dancing competition – just to be clear!”

Earlier this summer, Hawke wrapped on Mainstream, Gia Coppola’s long-awaited follow up to Palo Alto, in which she stars alongside Andrew Garfield and Nat Wolff. A tale of the dark heart of social media, Hawke hopes it will make a

Styling assistant Sophie Tann Hair Christopher Naselli at The Wall Group using R+CO

similar impact to that of its predecessor: “Palo Alto was one of the first movies I thought really captured the spirit of my generation, so I hope we captured something similar, and revolutionary.” The day after we speak she is travelling to Toronto Film Festival to promote Human Capital: a tale of “crime, class and guilt”. She also hopes that a short she filmed this year, inspired

by Kathy Acker’s journals, will see the light of day soon. At the mere age of 21, it’s clear Hawke has dedicated herself to her craft, with an enthusiasm for what acting can do in the world that feels like it expresses something of her personal beliefs. To her, it actually matters. Her choices matter.

“I’ve always just followed the joy, followed the things that made me happy. Like that book… ‘The Mind-Blowing Habit of Tidying Up’, or whatever it is,” she laughs, her voice now breathless after pounding some 50 blocks of Manhattan. “The amazing thing, and the difficult thing, about this business is that you're always reinventing yourself, every day. Every time you pick a new job, you make a new choice, always a choice. And it's exhausting to make choices, really exhausting, and hard. But it's better, I think, for me at least, to keep having to choose some of my life.”

You could take that as a telling sentiment for a girl born under mega-fame, but maybe it just speaks to Hawke’s forward momentum, which, propelled by her talent, doesn’t look like slowing any time soon. Walk; don’t walk.

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Shirt and coat GUCCI

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“You’ve got a head like mine,” Edward Norton says, quoting himself – riffing, actually – on the screenplay he wrote for his recent adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning novel Motherless Brooklyn, which the actor also directed and in which he, also, stars – “always boiling over and turning things around”.

We’re on the phone and these words – which Norton is offering to me as evidence, some sort of indication of what drew him to play the character of Lionel Essrog, the Tourette’s-afflicted detective at the centre of Lethem’s novel, and which moved him to spend nearly 20 years piecing together his film (the book was published in 1999, and Norton optioned it shortly thereafter) – ring out in a way that feels revealing.

“Some people call it a gift, but it’s a brain affliction all the same,” Norton adds, completing the line which in the film is spoken by Michael 84

NORTON WEARS BERLUTi AW19 THROUGHOUT

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WiTHOUT MANY PEOPLE REALiSiNG iT, EDWARD NORTON iS ONE OF THE MOST iNFLUENTIAL MEN iN HOLLYWOOD. ON AND OFF THE SCREEN, iN THE MULTiPLEX AND THE ART HOUSE, FOR NEARLY THREE DECADES, NORTON HAS BEEN QUiETLY SHAPiNG CONTEMPORARY CiNEMA — THE WRiTER, DiRECTOR AND ACTOR, SPEAKS TO MATTHEW SPECKTOR

K Williams (as compelling here as he was in The Wire), but which Norton suggests is a kind of key, a way that he, as an actor, could understand a character with Tourette’s Syndrome. (“I think actors tend to be pretty mimetic, with an instinct towards mimicry and the sound of people’s voices,” he adds. “I’m thankful I don’t have what I would call the paralysing aspects some people with Tourette’s seem to experience, but acting has always been a place for me to channel that kind of love affair with words.”) All this seems true to me – I’ve never known an artist whose gift didn’t feel like an affliction to them at least some of the time – but as I’m on the phone with Norton, who’s calling from the Telluride Film Festival, where Motherless Brooklyn just had its premiere, I feel a little shock of recognition at the line, just as I had when I saw a screening of the film a few weeks ago. Maybe it’s because

I think the films that I’ve been drawn to tend to reflect the moment, and I think I’ve been pulled towards characters who are paradoxical in some way, who are struggling with competing forces... in trying to figure out who to be.

everybody’s head seems to be boiling over a little bit these days, and the hectic slaw of meaning-and-interpretation that would live inside a Lionel Essrog’s head could be familiar to anyone who’s ever felt trapped inside their Twitter feed; maybe it’s because the words, like Norton’s performance, and indeed like the movie itself, simply feel achingly and gratifyingly personal. Norton has made at least a portion of his career playing characters with a certain volcanic undercurrent – for example, the unnamed protagonist of 1999’s Fight Club – but on the phone, of course, he doesn’t seem to be “boiling over” at all. He’s affable, attentive and – this is the pleasure of it, for me – searchingly intelligent. I find myself leaning into his occasional silences and pauses, the way one does in any good conversation – leaning into that distinctive voice that is familiar to most moviegoers, melding as it does a certain warm vulnerability with a faint, adenoidal trace of sarcasm – with a kind of suspense, anticipating whatever flash of insight 86

he’ll be able to offer next. Motherless Brooklyn is an excellent film (and, perhaps astonishingly considering its complete assurance, only Norton’s second as a director, after 2000’s Keeping the Faith), but it is also a vibrant reinvention of a classic noir detective story, replete with so many of the traditional hardboiled tropes – wary narrative voiceover; a creamy jazz score; a byzantine plot involving corrupt city officials – that feels not just ‘new’ but in fact pointedly contemporary in its relevance. The film’s villain (even if, like so many of the truly great noirs that preceded it, like Chinatown or A Touch of Evil, Motherless serves up a ‘villain’ of such relish it feels a bit reductive to call him one) is based on Robert Moses, the legendary ‘master builder’ of 20th-century Manhattan, and played by Alec Baldwin. The character also has certain resemblances, in his venality and unchecked aggression, in his naked racism and New York-real-estate chicanery, to another former developer who looms large on the American stage in 2019.

“The funny thing is, I finished writing the screenplay in 2012,” Norton says, when I ask him about just how pointed these resemblances are intended to be. “We were heading into Obama’s second term, and I wondered – in a good way – whether some of these things I had written about might be moving into the rearview mirror.” He laughs, ruefully, before asserting that the character, who doesn’t exist in Lethem’s novel, is, of course, nevertheless fiction. “There’s great freedom to doing it [as fiction]. There’s a reason Chinatown made [the character of Los Angeles’ legendary water baron] William Mulholland into ‘Hollis Mulwray’ or Citizen Kane was about ‘Charles Foster Kane’ rather than William Randolph Hearst. You get to distil things that way.

Baldwin’s character is informed by Robert Moses, but also by [late segregationist politician] Strom Thurmond and all kinds of other people.”

Sure, I say, but when I press him a bit on the point – that the decision to transplant the setting of Lethem’s novel from the 1990s to the 1950s,

and to invent a very different narrative for Lionel Essrog to move through, seems an unusual one, albeit effective – he responds as someone with a keen sense of American history (indeed Norton was a history major during his undergraduate studies at Yale University). “I think noir is a unique tradition that’s allowed us to look under the veneer of the Pax Americana, to peel back the surface of the national narrative a bit and view the shadow life that’s always been there. You look at a film like Chinatown – which is set in the 1930s but made in the 1970s, as we’re losing the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal is coming to light. The film isn’t directly about either of those, but really it’s saying the whole edifice of mid-century America – those things, and others – is built on a crime of massive proportions.”

True. And while the success of Motherless Brooklyn rides on precisely this ambiguity – a period movie that feels acutely about our present moment, while at the same time seeming like its emotional and dramatic resonances would hold true in any

other – Norton’s greater body of work as an actor suggests a similar consciousness of the long view, a mind that is always working to find a wider and more plausible context in which to exist. (“America has right now what a Latin American friend of mine who works for Univision calls ‘the Big Man Problem’,” he tells me. “A strange affinity for the guy who has the bravura to say ‘Me and no one else.

I am all that is needed.’”) As he and I discuss certain benchmarks from his long and variegated career –1999’s Fight Club comes up, of course, as do the previous year’s American History X, 2006’s Inside Man, 2014’s wonderfully resurgent Birdman – one thing that recurs is the notion of the longtailed success, alongside the feelings of risk, of possible failure that are always present inside the creative process. “When we were making Fight Club,” he tells me, “we were having so much fun. All of us who were inside the bubble, making it – Brad [Pitt] and Helena [Bonham Carter] and [David] Fincher were laughing so hard. We thought everyone was going to get it.” History,

of course, has validated this view, as the film now holds an enduring, and deserved, popularity, but at the time Fight Club’s reception was mixed. (“I think some people may have felt indicted by it,” Norton says. “They might not have been able to see it as funny (at the time).”)

Still. As he and I press deeper into questions of long-range success – Norton offers a funny story about the great Czech filmmaker Milo Forman (who directed Norton in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt) being advised to change the ending of his 1975 masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest after screening it for his peers Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, each of whom offered their own characteristic solution for how to do it. It becomes evident that Norton doesn’t care so much about the quick fix, the short term pleasures afforded

by Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality, and that he cares more about work that might startle a viewer out of complacency. He mentions Spike Lee as “one of the great American filmmakers of 87

the modern era” – we share a moment discussing what it was like to see Do the Right Thing in a theatre in 1989, what a robust awakening that offered for members of Generation X like ourselves – and notes, “There’s no question in my mind that I’d rather do less work and have it be possessed of that quality, that energy that can engage some of the moral and political conundrums of the age that we’re living in, than do stuff that is just the cinematic equivalent of soy lecithin, that is… non-nutritive.” He laughs. “When I look at things I really love,” he adds, “like Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies, which I think are the masterpieces of my generation, some people get them, and some people don’t, but in the long tail these are the movies that count. There’s this conversation that takes place within the immediate that is full of all kinds of distorting factors, and then that fades away and you’re left with what’s actually there.”

Maybe Norton has always approached his work in this way. He seemed to arrive fully formed as an actor, with what one might consider a ‘star turn’ that lacked a star’s vanity – a performance powerful but not pyrotechnic – in 1996’s Primal Fear, in which he played a choirboy accused of murdering a priest. It was all there from the beginning: the overwhelming likeability, the coiled violence, the ability to hit all the stops on the moral spectrum, from a guileless sweetness to an amoral cruelty, effortlessly; the beauty of his performance is in how complete your buy-in is as a spectator, from moment to moment. In a sense, all of Norton’s performances have been such turns, perfectly calibrated to the movie they’re in, so he never seems to be dominating. It can be easy to forget how much strong work Norton has done, that it’s been 25 years (a long career for any leading actor), of playing everything from scout leaders (in 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom) to crusading attorneys (in The People vs. Larry Flynt), from children’s show hosts (2002’s Death to Smoochy) to honourless thieves (2001’s The Score). You could chalk this up to the fact Norton clearly has no real interest in assuming the mantle, the peculiar burden, of being a certain kind of Hollywood Star, and yet, for all the evident integrity and iconoclasm of a man who believes his work should be to some extent confrontational (the word ‘antagonistic’ crops up as a label of approval several times in our conversation as he speaks of those directors he particularly admires, like Fincher and Lee; and at one point he bemoans the fundamental passivity offered by both contemporary studio filmmaking and our current ‘golden age’ of television alike, saying “It’s getting dangerously close to something like The Matrix. We’re turning people into copper-tops to just… sit in the dark and tune out.”), you realise he hasn’t avoided the star-making machinery either. After all, he’s done a Marvel Comics movie (2008’s The Incredible Hulk) and appeared prominently in what might be considered other studio ‘franchise’ films like 2012’s The Bourne Legacy or 2002’s Red Dragon (in which his FBI investigator follows in Jodie Foster’s footsteps going toe-to-toe against Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter). It’s not like he’s opposed to these entertainments, or turning them down on principle.

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“The thing about actors,” Norton says, “is that we gig. Sometimes we just want to make a cheque and sometimes we want to try something different. I think the beauty of being an actor is that you get to be a journeyman, in the best sense. You get to be a traveller through different worlds of experience.”

He says this, it seems to me, with characteristic humility. For all the talk of antagonism and confrontation that winds through our conversation, there’s no feeling that ‘gigging’ for Norton means simply phoning it in. He can speak of not wanting to make ‘non-nutritive films’, of being less and less interested in studio blockbusters and programmatic entertainment, but he’s equally good in those roles. Still, as we talk into the afternoon, we keep circling back to certain films – Fight Club, Inside Man, American History X, Motherless Brooklyn itself – that represent, to me, the best of Norton’s work as an actor, and (it feels, to him, perhaps) the most personal or valuable work he’s done, and it becomes clear that Norton’s forte is work that involves a sort of moral hinge: characters whose existence on the ethical spectrum is complex or slippery. This is true, of course, of his reformed white-supremacist skinhead in American History X, and of his bruised, sleepwalking office-drone-turned-schizophrenic-terrorist in Fight Club, but it’s also true, even, of Lionel Essrog, whose more overt likeability is balanced by a surface ugliness, and by the great care Norton has taken to draw a world that is filled with shades of grey. When I ask Norton about this, or rather about what he thinks might connect the roles he’s chosen over the years, he laughs.

“I’m sure you’ve seen that great Scorsese documentary about the young Bob Dylan, No Direction Home. There’s a bit in there where a reporter asks him the meaning of one of his songs, and Dylan goes, ‘I don’t know what it means, I just wrote it. What do you think it means?’” He pauses as we take a moment to genuflect before Dylan’s command, his inclination to protect his creative impulses, and then says, “No, really. I went to the Shanghai Film Festival once, when they were doing a little retrospective of my movies. It’s wild to go to something like that, and realise these films are still living and finding their way. I don’t read Chinese, but I kept seeing a certain phrase on a banner across some of the posters. I asked my host what it meant, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s the theme of your movies.’ I asked what it was, and he said, ‘The search for the spiritual centre in the new youth generation.’” We laugh, and he says, “Seriously, I’ll take it. That’s pretty good.”

It is pretty good – leaving aside the fact that the ‘new youth generation’ has been supplanted by still-newer ones in the years since Norton burst on to the scene as a markedly Generation-X-representing presence – Norton’s characters do seem to be active in their searching, as does the man himself. Norton makes the amusing point that he and the other principals involved in the making of Fight Club used to liken the movie privately to the previous generation’s The Graduate (“Think about it: Tyler is Mrs Robinson, Marla is Elaine, and the narrator is Benjamin.”), but then notes, “I think the films that

I’ve been drawn to tend to reflect the moment, and I think I’ve been pulled towards characters who are paradoxical in some way, who are struggling with competing forces… in trying to figure out who to be.” It’s a good answer, and less anodyne than it sounds when Norton frames this in explicitly Gen-X terms, noting that his generation has been slower than its predecessors to embrace adulthood, and that several of these movies, including Motherless Brooklyn, are centred around characters who are struggling, indeed, to do exactly that.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room in contemporary Hollywood – or contemporary culture at large, for that matter – to feature this struggle. Movies are preoccupied with superheroes and spectacle, and the questing intimacy of a film like Motherless Brooklyn feels rare. Over the years, there have been occasional assertions that Norton might be difficult to work with – fabled clashes with American History X director Tony Kaye, and with Marvel over The Incredible Hulk – but it feels, in our conversation, like the actor merely has a standard of endeavour, that there’s no particular egotism or stubbornness involved. He’s just not interested in roles that aren’t entirely up to snuff. (Norton’s friend Danny DeVito, who directed the actor in Death to Smoochy, puts it to me this way: “I was a huge fan of Edward’s even before we met, but I found that he’s also collaborative, inventive and dedicated.”) It’s an appealing thought, at a time when the ethical bar, in America certainly, appears to be slipping, and (as one looks at the panorama of mainstream Hollywood cinema, at least) the aesthetic one might seem to be slipping too.

As we wind down our chat, discussing Norton’s admiration for Warren Beatty’s underrated and massively ambitious 1981 film Reds, I keep thinking about the ambition involved in Motherless Brooklyn: its linguistic play and energy, its historical sweep and awareness, a deep intelligence that never collapses to the level of the merely ‘brainy’. It’s a lot to keep straight, all those threads and strands that move through it, but he does so with aplomb.

“It was important to me that Lionel not wind up simply entrapped in his own problems,” Norton says, speaking of the movie’s end. “There was a version [of the script] where I felt he should be more hardboiled and cynical, but ultimately it was more moving to me that he should find the bandwidth to engage with the wider world. That he… move past [cynicism] to become an adult.”

That’s how it’s done, I think. If there’s a bequest that Norton’s work – this film, and others – has to offer, it’s this: an engagement of such cynicism (and apathy, and reflexive irony – all those deflective emotions that are bound up with the idea of ‘Generation X’ to begin with, and which still resound more than ever through the tapestries of modern life), and an ultimate refusal of it, after an honest fight. As I ring off of conversation, I can’t help but think of those words with which we began it: “You’ve got a head just like mine.” Any creative person – perhaps any empathic human being, just now, in the boiling global context of 2019 – would be lucky, indeed, to think so.

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PHOTOGRAPHY I LY E S G R I Y E B

AGAiNST THE GRAiN

George Kafka travels to Le Marche, the ancestral home of Tod’s, to uncover how nearly a century of shoemaking heritage is adapting to a changing global market

Toni Ripani moves cuts of leather between his hands like they are one with his own body. He pokes and pinches at different sections, feeling for depth and texture; he runs his palm across the surface in search of blemishes. His hands appear rough but they are soft when shaken and delicate in their appraisal of the sheets.

He is particularly fond of the wrinkled edges of the leather. Like the grain of a plank of wood, these marks speak to the former life of the thing that lies before him: an anatomical object that describes both beast and shoe.

Ripani, 72, is head of the leather department (and something of a celebrity) at Tod’s, the luxury shoe manufacturer based in Le Marche, eastern Italy. In the main foyer of the campus’s central building, a Vanessa Beecroft photograph shows Ripani, uncharacteristically stony faced, amidst a line-up of models draped in raw cuts of his beloved leather. The photo documents a performance by Beecroft in celebration of the craftsmanship of Ripani and his colleagues on the factory floors. “He was very emotional that day,” notes Andrea Della Valle, whose father,

Previous spread, left: The original table used by the company’s founder, Filippo Della Valle, now exhibited on a plinth outside the prototyping workshop.

Previous spread, right: Tools used to mark the holes on the sole of the brand’s iconic driving shoe, the Gommino.

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Dorino, was head of the company when Toni began working with the family, in 1974.

Della Valle is, today, the vice-chairman of Tod’s; his brother Diego is the chairman and CEO. Amidst the corporate minimalism of their campus, itself in the centre of an anonymous industrial park close to the Adriatic coast, the handprints of a tight family business run deep: The rustic cobbler’s desk where Filippo Della Valle, Diego and Andrea’s grandfather, began the business, in the early 20th century, is displayed on a shiny metallic plinth outside the prototype workshop. The bicycle Dorino used to get around the campus stands in an entrance foyer, untouched since his death in 2012. And the campus itself was designed by Diego Della Valle’s wife, the architect Barbara Pistilli. When it opened in 1998, it was pioneering in providing lifestyle facilities for its employees, with a gym and library, as well as a kindergarten for up to 28 kids.

Even the street on which the campus sits is named after Filippo Della Valle, and on the walls in offices and on the factory floor are portraits of

Below: ‘Per Adriano’, a sculpture by Polish artist Igor Mitoraj. The Tod’s campus features many artworks from the Della Valle’s collection.

Right: The main building of the Tod’s campus in Le Marche, designed by architect Barbara Pistilli, the wife of Diego Della Valle, Tod’s chairman and CEO. Together with two facilities nearby, it is the biggest production centre for luxury footwear in Italy.

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Dorino, complete with cane and throne, at once a supreme leader and a dearly departed patriarch.

Unsurprisingly, a number of employees, alongside Ripani, have stuck around for decades, out of loyalty to a dynastic enterprise that echoes the lineage of other Italian business families: the Lavazzas, Bulgaris and Ferragamos.

Even the Medicis may be a fitting comparison, considering the paternalistic and patronal role the Della Valle family plays in both local and national public life – their cultivation of a reputation that exceeds the luxury of their handmade leather shoes. Like the Medicis, the Della Valles are self-professed lovers and patrons of art, and the Tod’s campus is littered with sculptures and trophy objects, both commissioned and bought, in a way that is entertaining and occasionally incongruous, such as the juxtaposition of Anselm Kiefer’s 2005 painting ‘Dein und Mein Alter und das Alter der Welt’ beside the body of an F1 Ferrari. Beyond Le Marche, the Della Valles are familiar to a broader public: Until recently Andrea was the owner of Fiorentina Football Club. Meanwhile Diego has been celebrated in the Italian media for his multi-million-euro

Left: Toni Ripani, head of the leather department. Ripani has worked at Tod’s since 1974, joining when Diego’s father, Dorino, was head of the company.

role in the restoration of the Colosseum. When a major earthquake struck Le Marche and surrounding regions in 2016, the Della Valles built a new factory at Arquata del Tronto to assist with the region’s economic recovery.

In the workshop for prototypes, a craftsman is filing a foot-shaped block of wood. With his own left foot, he tightens a leather band strapped to a wooden paddle that holds the block in place.

Small adjustments narrow the ankle, curve the toe and flatten the bridge. He works with his eyes and his fingers, using no notes or technical drawings. His movements recount more than a decade of experience, a precision that crafts the wooden profiles around which Tod’s samples are moulded. To his right, a wall of wooden moulds – all right feet – document just the last four years of shoemaking at the factory.

Beginning as a lone cobbler at the turn of the 20th century, Filippo Della Valle started to manufacture shoes under the family name in the 1920s. Tod’s the brand was born in the 1970s under the guidance of Dorino and Diego (the Della Valle name was deemed unsuitable for a

Below: An artisan hand-stretches a leather upper on to a shoe. It’s a step that requires a great deal of experience and corrects imperfections in the leather, ensuring an even finish across the whole shoe.

growing international market). Through the ’80s and ’90s, the company grew, acquiring the brand Fay and launching Hogan to reach a broader, predominantly North American market. Today, with 4,800 employees, over 250 stores worldwide and an annual turnover of nearly ¤1bn, Tod’s is a modernising heritage brand competing for attention in the rapidly changing luxury world, replete with capsule collections, sideline collaborations, exhibitions and ‘drops’.

Marrying the traditional values of Tod’s and the Della Valles with the Virgil Abloh-influenced evolution of the market is an ongoing challenge for the business. In February this year the company hired Michele Lupi, a former editor of GQ, Rolling Stone and Icon Design in Italy, as ‘men’s collection visionary’. “I had written an editorial asking myself how a big luxury company can take their classic lines and combine them with this new movement – younger people, teenagers who want to have luxury goods from big companies,” explains Lupi. Diego Della Valle read the piece and invited Lupi to meet. “He told me,” continues Lupi: “‘In a year from now, all the companies will take on editors from around the world.

Below: The upper is hand sewn with a waxed thread which ensures the shoe’s rigidity and allows accessories like buckles and metal masks to be applied.

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Not to do public relations, but content. That’s the big difference, because in the near future big companies like mine will be more like a media company.’”

Thus, at this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, Lupi oversaw an installation by architect Andrea Caputo comprised of a series of shelters, each housing video interviews with contemporary figures, such as designers Formafantasma and illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli, discussing contemporary life and work. The installation promoted the newly launched Tod’s No_Code project, which blends handmade craftsmanship and tech aesthetics. With its allusions to changing contemporary lifestyles, streetwear and the influence of digital culture, Tod’s No_Code is an attempt to introduce the more traditional hallmarks of the brand to millennial markets. The hybrid line is selling particularly well in China.

Back on the factory floor, in the central building of the Tod’s campus, a shoe pops out the oven.

It’s a slim, slip-on suede piece, designed to sit below the ankle in two shades of blue; lighter in the vamp and tongue, darker in the lining of the

Left: The leather department, where artisans assess materials, ensuring they are of the best quality and suitability for the intended use. All leathers used in the factory come from certified tanneries and suppliers.

collar. The sole, dotted with rubber ‘pebbles’, runs around the bottom of the heel and half way up the counter. This is the driving shoe, or gommino in Italian, Tod’s quiet icon. The driving shoe is a lightweight loafer, designed for comfort and a sturdy grip on the floor of an automobile.

The shoes rose to popularity during the boom of the Italian car industry during the 1960s.

Tod’s handmade version was launched in the ’80s, and today the brand is more or less synonymous with the style, like a Clarks desert boot or Converse baseball sneaker. Usually spotted as part of a smart-casual look in the UK, the shoe takes on a more comfortably elegant position in an Italian context. Rolling through the production line on the Le Marche factory floor – from the close stitching of its structure, to the fixing of its form around a plastic mould, the gluing of its sole, and eventual boxing and packaging, all by hand – it’s easy to imagine these shoes on the feet of the someone incredibly chic, probably driving a Ferrari, careering along an open road, perhaps away from the stable family heritage of Le Marche, in the direction of unknowable destinations to come.

Below: A finished shoe – the new Mocassino Carrarmato.

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PHOTOGRAPHY YIORGOS KAPLANIDIS

STYLING ALEX PETSETAKIS

ALL ACCESSORIES FROM GUCCI BELOVED

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Alex Pettyfer is a difficult man to pin down. Perpetually in motion, working and travelling around the world – flitting between his native England, Europe, the US and South America – Pettyfer’s career has followed a distinctly varied path. After a textbook first act (a child model turned actor, his breakthrough came in the teenage espionage thriller Stormbreaker), adult fame followed with the leads in a trio of Hollywood blockbusters in 2011 and 2012 (I Am Number Four, Beastly and Magic Mike). But Pettyfer has come to take his cues as much from time spent away from the screen than on it.

In 2008, Pettyfer – who had by then swapped Hertfordshire for America’s West Coast – read for a role in Back Roads, a difficult story of familial dysfunction. The production collapsed, but the project stayed with him. Years later, when he was making tentative first steps towards a career behind the camera, he secured a deal to produce and star in a new updated version of the script. After two directors walked away from the project, Pettyfer stepped up and the film was released in 2018, as his directorial debut.

In its aftermath Pettyfer appears to have reached equilibrium. A multi-hyphenate, involved in every aspect of his craft, he left LA in 2017 to live a nomadic life, stopping wherever took his fancy. Now, as he tells Port, he is beginning to put down roots – even if, when we speak, he is on the road again.

Port: It sounds like you are always on the move, Alex!

Alex Pettyfer: [Laughs] Yes it seems that way. I’ve just been in Greece, and I’m going to New York for a few days before I fly on to Vietnam to start a new film. I’m going to have to keep an eye out for magpies though – every time I’ve been en route to the airport and seen ‘one for sorrow’, I always miss my flight.

I don’t actually have a home at the moment. I had been in Los Angeles for about 11 years and, off the back of making Back Roads, decided that I wanted to come back to England. I was editing the film in Soho, trying to find somewhere to live, but everything kept falling through.

I ended up staying in a hotel for six months – the rate I’d negotiated was less than what I was paying every month in LA. I was 27, single, without responsibilities, and realised this was a pretty amazing way to live, going from hotel to hotel, place to place. So I’ve been doing that for the past two years.

these memories, I was jealous of Hemingway’s objects, the sentimental value they had.

Port: How did those years travelling feed back into your work?

AP: I think anything you do when you go to another culture or a new environment – these experiences you have – affect how you work. I was in Mexico, for example, and met someone in a bar who took me to these Mayan ruins that were guarded by cartels. I spent the night with the guy’s family – me speaking really poor Spanish, them speaking broken English. It brought the experience of a whole different set of people into my life, which would never have happened if I hadn’t been travelling. And I took some great photographs; it’s the one thing I always have on me – my camera.

Port: What attracts you to being on the other side of the lens, to taking photographs and making films, as opposed to acting?

AP: I fell in love with photography through Dennis Hopper. He would go on these great road trips after he finished a film, as he did when he hung out with the Hells Angels, documenting everything. When you look back at his pictures you’re really seeing a moment in time, even in those pictures of the plains, just him riding his bike across America – there are so many shots that made their way into Easy Rider.

So I started taking photos on set, of the people I love working with, the experience of being there, and of travelling – I used it as a sketchbook. When I came to direct my own film, I had all these old photos of Louisiana that I had taken while I was working on a film in the state, which I used to inform the aesthetic for the film.

Ah I’m lucky! I’m seeing one for sorrow, two for joy! Thank fuck for that!

Port: How did you find the experience of directing?

AP: As an actor, you’re hopping from one film to another, and when you’re on set you’re immersed in your character. The experience I had as a director, on a film that I was also starring in and producing, was so much more involved. Everyone is coming to you to advise on various aspects of the film – you are very aware of the fact that it takes a whole team of creative people to make a film.

Port: Do you think you’ll keep it up?

Port: Will you continue to direct?

AP: Well the past couple of months I’ve been thinking about finding a place, a home where I can put some roots down but still travel. I was in Cuba and visited Hemingway’s house – I found myself being jealous of all the things he had collected from around the world. I had been detached from this kind of materialism – I didn’t have anywhere to keep anything even if I did want to buy things. But, even though I write a journal, even though I have

AP: I would love to, though you put so much of yourself into a film, it’s really about finding an idea I like. In the meantime, I’m in a show called The I-Land, and another film Echo Boomers, and then there’s the first film that I’ve produced with my production company, Dark Dreams. I’m putting down roots; I’ve seen two magpies – it’s an exciting time!

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Hair Jacopo Finocchi Makeup Maria Pia Saragnese

FOOTPRINTS

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ANAÏCK LEJART

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CANALI

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TOD’S

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DIOR

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HUGO BOSS

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RALPH LAUREN

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PRADA

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GUCCI

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MARGARET HOWELL

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Styling assistant Sophie Tann Casting Leila Azizi for SuĹŤn Hair and makeup Adam Garland for Authentic Beauty Concept Model Tamsir Thiam at Bananas Models

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Land of Giants

Patagonia is a place of mountains and empty steppes, of earth turned by glacier and river and lake. Split by the Andes between Chile and Argentina, it tapers into the Antarctic Ocean at the end of the South American continent: “The furthest place,” as Bruce Chatwin once wrote, “to which Man walked from his place of origin.”

It remains one of the least populated areas of the world, untroubled by human intervention, explored from the air by only a few intrepid aviators.

OUTERWEAR PARAJUMPERS AW19 THROUGHOUT

STYLiNG DAN MAY

PHOTOGRAPHY FRÉDÉRiC LAGRANGE

Port joined Jaime Fernández of Barraco Lodge, in the wild, untamed land of giants.

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We never intended for the lodge to be public – the tourists would all go to the lakes in summer, not the mountains. I came here to ski in ’88, flying a little plane over from Chile, and fell in love with the incredible turquoise river that runs past. I found

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a house that had been the home of the local chief of the Mapuches – the indigenous people who resisted the Spanish – and renovated it, always trying to stay true to the traditions of those people, using the same materials, the same style.

Three or four seasons ago we opened the lodge to the public. I think it’s been successful because it is authentic – you feel like you

are in the home of a friend, not just a boutique hotel, and we can offer some incredible experiences: skiing volcanoes, jet boat tours, helibiking…

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Beautiful lakes surrounded by vast glaciers; the sea; flat valleys with hidden spots to fish – they are all within 15 or 30 minutes of flying.

It’s a landscape that changes so much with the seasons; it’s all

snowy peaks when you fly in winter, when, before that, in the autumn, there is so much colour – reds and yellows and oranges. I like it best in winter though, that’s when it’s most impressive.

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The main challenge is the wind.

They call it the ‘Roaring Forties’, and then the ‘Furious Fifties’ down at Cape Horn – the further south you go the windier it gets. Being at latitude 37 we don’t get a constant wind, but when a front passes by,

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usually from the Pacific Ocean, there is high wind, bad visibility, rain. If you run into trouble, if the engine in the boat fails or the helicopter doesn’t start, you are suddenly in a critical situation: It’s a long hike to get to safety.

Most of all it’s the solitude that kept bringing me back here. You’re really alone and always discovering new places – hidden coves or peaks or valleys. For this shoot we went up to a lake called ‘The Unexplored’,

so called because it’s very difficult to get there by foot, bike or horse.

You have to use a helicopter. We might be the only people who go there, and when we do it is a different landscape, new scenery again.

Production La Casa Films and Stills Special thanks to Axel and all at Barraco Lodge

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BLUE PEARL PHOTOGRAPHY JOSH HIGHT

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 D A N M AY

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Hair and makeup Tyler Johnston at One Represents using Redken and Armani Beauty Models Othmane and Amir Casting Fred Fantun Productions Special thanks to Belaid at El Fenn, Marrakech

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WESTWORLD

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Photography Name Surname Cloudbust Thunder rubber knit trainers PRADA

PHOTOGRAPHY WILLIAM BUNCE CREATIVE DIRECTION AND STYLING PAULINA PIIPPONEN The Sprint polyamide powder sunglasses VIU EYEWEAR Photography Name Surname

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Leon 40 leather shoes SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO Photography Name Surname

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Printed PVC Name and cotton belt CANALI Photography Surname

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Silk-blend jacquard smoking jacket GIORGIO ARMANI Photography Name Surname

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Knee-length StormSurname Cuir leather boots BOTTEGA VENETA Photography Name

Deluxe leather neckSurname pouch BOSS Photography Name

Set design assistant Sarah Henning

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RAYMOND ANTROBUS WEARS CLOSED SPRING 2020 THROUGHOUT

WORDS GEORGE UPTON

PHOTOGRAPHY PAUL MCLEAN

STYLiNG DAN MAY

LEAVES TO A TREE

I meet Raymond Antrobus at Keats House in Hampstead. It’s late August and we sit in the quiet gardens, watching families with small children, old women coming to sit on the grass and read the paper. It’s here that, between 1818 and 1820, the great romantic poet lived and composed some of his most celebrated works – including, under the still-standing plum tree, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ – and the stately whitewashed house is an appropriate place to meet a rising young poet. But Antrobus’s connections with the house run deeper. As a founding member of the Keats House Poetry Forum, he has made it once more a place of living poetry, hosting openmic events every last Sunday of the month, with poems bookended by Keats readings.

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I ask what significance a poet who died 200 years ago can have to the thriving spoken-word and slam-poetry scene in London, which Antrobus has been an integral part of since 2007.

“Poets like Keats give young poets a vision, a conversation to carry on,” he tells me. “I feel a lot of poets, a lot of writers, if they don’t have a dialogue with the people who came before them, as well as the people who are there with them… there’s something missing.”

Antrobus was born in Hackney in 1986 to British-Jamaican parents who were passionate about poetry – William Blake and Miss Lou. As a child, he had poems blu-tacked to his bedroom wall and would recite along with his father’s tapes.

“It’s only when I came to teach poetry,” he says,

smiling, “that I realised how unique that was.”

Antrobus is profoundly deaf (the medical term for a total, or near-total absence of hearing); he wasn’t diagnosed until he was six.

“More than anything else, it’s isolating,” Antrobus says when I ask about the experience of growing up deaf. “A lot of the deaf experience is being surrounded by people, being surrounded by language, and being completely isolated.” We discuss the struggle of being deaf in a hearing society, the challenges of living with an invisible limitation, and the distinction between deaf and Deaf experiences: those who are born deaf, who identify as culturally deaf (capital D) and those who have become deaf, whose association with deafness is more medical than cultural

(lowercase d). He tells me about friends from deaf school – three, all male – who took their own lives. “Their deafness was a huge factor in that. I used to go to deaf clubs; I was part of a deaf football team at one point. I left that world for some time and when I came back into it, it was the same people. There was a longing for more. They needed more from life.”

Antrobus went to several different schools, both deaf and hearing. He is bilingual, fluent in both English and British Sign Language – trilingual, even, as he says to me, in that his father would often speak Patois. But for Antrobus, language was always learned deliberately – constructed with the help of voice coaches and audiologists, dependent on finding

hearing aids that worked for him, on learning how to sign. Like his mixed heritage – which in his poetry he suggests as a state of being accepted as neither black nor white – Antrobus’s deafness creates an otherness in perceptions of him, a focus on race and disability that often dominates conversations about him and his work. “I never wanted to be associated with any of those things that made me different,” he says, looking out across the gardens. “It’s only in coming to think more creatively, in spending more time with poetry, that I have been able to craft these things into an empowering framework. People say to me, ‘Oh, you write about deafness,’ when really it’s much more basic than that. It’s connection. It’s language.”

Published in 2018 by Penned in the Margins, Antrobus’s first collection, The Perseverance, elides his own experiences of deafness and of race, of his parents – his father’s descent into alcoholism, his mother’s dementia – with the imagined experiences of deaf figures from the past: Helen Keller, Laura Bridgman, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard. It is personal and frank, and yet The Perseverance speaks, in its rumination on language, to a more universal experience of marginalisation. The collection gives voice to those who – through centuries of oppression, of ill-informed theories and therapies – were unable to speak for themselves; his sensitivity to voice, his careful rendering of tone and timbre – poignant in a

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“I never wanted to be associated with any of those things that made me different. It’s only in coming to think more creatively, in spending more time with poetry, that I have been able to craft these things into an empowering framework.�

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poet who had to fight to hear and be heard – reminds us that our ability to communicate, to listen as well as to speak, is a privilege. “Deaf voices go missing like sound in space”, he writes in ‘Dear Hearing World’. “I’ve left Earth to find them.”

In one of the most arresting moments of the book, Antrobus includes Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Deaf School’, methodically redacting every line. Now Hughes, as Antrobus writes in the poem that follows ‘Deaf School,’ is “alert and simple”; he who “lacked a subtle wavering aura of sound and responses to Sound.” The inclusion of the poem is particularly significant as, in 2013, Antrobus became one of the first to graduate from Goldsmiths with an MA in spoken word education – “I went in as a poet, but I came out as a poet

Hair and makeup Teddy Mitchell using Givenchy Mister

teacher” – and has gone on to teach in both deaf and hearing schools. “It’s about trying to connect, not just trying to teach, but to learn, to explore with the students,” he explains. It was a formative experience – while writing The Perseverance, Antrobus was poet-in-residence at two deaf schools. “I was constantly asking whether the book, whether my experience, the history I was discovering about the history of the deaf community was relevant to the young deaf people I was meeting. I knew the book was finished once I realised I could hear who and what I was speaking to, and from.”

Ironically, in March of this year, The Perseverance won the Ted Hughes Award, as well as the Rathbones Folio Prize in May – the first time it was awarded to a work of poetry –

and the Somerset Maugham Award in June; the year before, ‘Sound Machine’, from the same collection, won the Geoffrey Dearmer prize, judged by Ocean Vuong. It is vindication for a poet who fought to find his voice in a hearing world that “erased what could have always been poetry”. Yet, as Keats wrote to his friend, John Taylor, from the house where we sit and chat, “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”. For Antrobus it comes sure and certain, blossoming into shape and colour, lyrical and bold.

Port has partnered with Closed for a series of stories profiling poets who are encouraging social change through their work. See port-magazine.com for more.

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PHOTOGRAPHY TOM CRAiG

CREATIVE DiRECTiON AND STYLING DAN MAY

AfTer HOURS

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Hair and makeup Tyler Johnston at One Represents Casting Troy Fearn at D+V Management Models Freddie Dennis at Elite, Luke Cousins at IMG and Darwin Gray at Storm Location Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club

E B I R T C R S O B P U S TO a ag m rt po

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EXTRACT

FICTION

ESSAY

PHOTO ESSAY

POETRY

FICTION

POETRY

CHEKHOV'S FIRST PLAY

IDEA FOR A FILM

IRELAND(S) 2.0.

TOWN

PAIDIR / PRAYER

MATTRESS

TWO POEMS

DEAD CENTRE

DANNY DENTON

LISA MCINERNEY

RICH GILLIGAN

DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA

NICOLE FLATTERY

JOHN KELLY

COMMENTARY Guest edited by Cillian Murphy

Illustrations by Joni Majer

Actors are peripatetic creatures.

Over the years, I have developed a routine for dealing with the places where I unexpectedly find myself spending time. Sometimes they possess a great natural beauty – immense flatlands, a mountain range, coastline; often they are more prosaic, chosen because they feature a large derelict mine or quarry, an abandoned zoo, abattoir or factory.

My routine consists of taking an open-top bus tour, in order to familiarise myself with the landmarks. If there is no tour bus, I walk. I locate a supermarket and a bookshop, and then a park where I can run. Then I hibernate and work.

That is the routine, generally. When I was younger it would involve some element of socialising but now, not so much. The result of this routine is that I spend a lot of time thinking about home. For 14 years home was in London, but for the last four it has been in Dublin. That is where I live, as opposed to spend time.

Being at home in Ireland has been a hugely positive experience for me. It is a common narrative for Irish artists to move away for an extended period and then return in later life. This journey has felt like a sort of reconciliation with my Irishness. It brought back into sharp focus all that is great about this small island.

When I was asked to curate this section for Port, I wondered if I could use the opportunity to explore this reconciliation, and engage with some of my favourite Irish artists working today. Ireland appears to be in a very healthy creative place at the moment. As a nation we have always been a cultural heavyweight, but it is the vitality and the gentle power of this new creativity that has struck me since I moved home.

I hope that, in this section, these artists can transmit some of that energy to you.

— Cillian Murphy 186

EXTRACT

Dead Centre are one of Ireland’s most exciting theatre companies. I first saw their production Lippy at the Young Vic, in London, in 2015 – a truly haunting and original piece of work. Since then artistic directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd have continued to write and direct shows that fearlessly investigate and deconstruct their medium, while always delivering unpredictable and memorable nights in the theatre. Here’s a taste of some of their work: two extracts from a new piece… But for the real deal get yourself to one of their shows.

Chekhov’s First Play Dead Centre

As they enter, the audience are each given a set of headphones.

A red curtain.

The Director enters, holding a gun, stands in front of the curtain.

He is dressed as himself. He goes to the microphone.

Ok, I’ll be offstage so I won’t distract you, I’ll just be a voice in your head. If you’re anything like me you already have a voice in your head anyway, so tonight you’ll have two. Hope it’s not too strange. It can feel a little intimate. Like even though everyone can hear this, it feels like I’m just talking… to you.

Looks at single audience member.

The Director. (whispers) Hello. I’m the director. Thanks for coming to – (out loud, off mic) Oh, you need to put your headphones on in order to hear me. (Back to microphone, whispers) Hello. I’m the director. Are all your headphones working? Let’s do a quick sound check: you should be hearing this in your left ear (they should) and you should be hearing this in your right ear (they should). Our production manager will swap them out if anyone has a faulty set.

Thanks for coming to tonight’s performance of Chekhov’s First Play.

You’re probably wondering why you’re all in headphones. Well, I did a version of this show last year and it went ok, but, talking to people afterwards, it became clear that a lot of people didn’t really get it, they didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. And that’s understandable because Chekhov’s first play is really complicated and messy… so I thought I’d set up a director’s commentary to explain what’s going on, what it’s about, and why you should like it. Personally, I always need things explained to me, especially art. I’m the kind of guy who goes to an art gallery and spends all the time reading the writing on the wall next to the paintings. I hardly ever look at the paintings.

And a lot of theatre, too, can feel complicated and inaccessible, especially these old plays, the classics. But they’re worth doing.

They tell us so much about the world we live in now, they ask the big questions: who am I? What kind of a society do I want to live in? What do I want?

Chekhov was 19 when he wrote this and, as you’ll see, it’s not a very good play, but it’s hugely ambitious. It’s like all his other plays were in there, waiting to get out, all his ideas. This gun, for example. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the idea ‘Chekhov’s gun’ – it’s the idea that if you have a gun in a play… if you… if there’s a gun then you fire it… erm… actually I’ll explain that later… erm…

How are you? Comfortable? Make yourself at home. A theatre seat actually is sort of a home. It’s legally your private property for the duration of the performance. I found this out the other day.

Pointing gun at audience member.

That, even if you hadn’t come tonight, I couldn’t re-sell your ticket, as that seat is your private property.

Taking gun away.

And property, of course, is one of Chekhov’s main themes…

See, that’s the sort of thing I’ll be doing throughout the commentary, unpacking key themes, making connections… And I know this microphone is very sensitive, so I’m sorry if you can hear me breathing, it’s a bad habit of mine.

Let’s get started.

Goes to leave but then stops.

And I recommend keeping the headphones on, but if there are any members of the audience who are comfortable with the classics, feel free to take them off at any point and enjoy the play, as Chekhov intended.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Chekhov’s First Play.

CHEKHOV’S FIRST PLAY A spotlight appears on a single audience member. The audience member slowly rises from their seat and moves forward on to the stage. They are hearing a different track from everyone else. They are receiving private instructions. They are Platonov.

The sound of the city. Traffic and electricity.

Platonov moves to the table and sits down.

So, hopefully this commentary will make things clearer.

Everyone looks at him.

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Commentary

Everyone moves over to the table and sits.

TRILETSKY. No they’re shite.

Platonov pours shots of vodka for everyone.

GLAGOLYEV. What do you mean?

They pick up the shot glasses.

TRILETSKY gets up on the table. The others throw food at him.

One, two, three: everyone drinks.

TRILETSKY. Because in one of those cities you can be at a party having the time of your life but you just know that somewhere else on the top floor of some building someone is having a better time, in a better life… you just KNOW that Kanye and Kim or David Bowie or Björk or Marina Abramović or somebody rich or Prince or an actual royal prince or the fresh prince, Will Smith or Zadie Smith or Miranda July or Anton Chekhov or Kate Bush or Kim Noble or Miley Cyrus or Billy Ray Cyrus or P Diddy or Brangelina or Kate Moss or Simon Cowell or Angela Merkel or Lena Dunham or Eric Cantona or Michelle Obama or Chris Eubank or Jay Z or Dennis Hopper or Marlon Brando or Elvis Costello or Snoop Dogg or Tyler, the Creator or Jim Jarmusch or Jackie Chan or Salman Rushdie or Yanis Varoufakis or Harmony Korine or Castellucci or Vladimir Putin or Will Oldham or Miet Warlop or Nicki Minaj or Thomas Ostermeier or Michael Myers or Matthew Barney or Christopher Brett Bailey or Tino Sehgal or Steven Seagal or Andy Lee or Simon McBurney or Justin Bieber or Kenneth Goldsmith or Macaulay Culkin or Anna Wintour or the fella out of the fuckin’ Arctic Monkeys are out there somewhere, having a better time than you. But here, in Dublin, there’s no such thing as famous people. There’s just us, Platonov. Think about it. What else is there? This might just be the coolest party in the whole country.

Music starts.

All dialogue is now pre-recorded. The performers lip-sync their lines.

They are losing their voices as they are losing themselves. At once liberated and truncated.

ANNA. How could you make us wait so long? It feels like we’ve been waiting a hundred years. It’s good to see you. Now we can have the fireworks.

The demolition ball bursts into flames.

They all dance. It is a choreographed number. Platonov stands front and centre, and is obviously lost.

SASHA stops dancing and looks at her husband. She looks closely, and perhaps suspects he isn’t who he says he is. The others dance, synchronised.

SASHA. Are you ok? You’re acting funny. Come and sit down.

Where have you been? You’re always late. You’ll be late to your own funeral. The late Platonov! Do you have a light? Do you even… smoke? I can’t remember. You’re like a stranger to me.

Anyway, we can stay for a bit but then can we go? I don’t feel great. You don’t look so good either. Have you changed your hair? No, that’s not it. Have you changed your… face?

The others gradually finish dancing and the evening continues. They have been liberated by Platonov’s arrival and swirl around the stage.

We only hear them when they are close to Platonov.

ANNA. Let me get you a drink, Platonov. Or something stronger?

Now you’re here we should get a little high, don’t you think. Let our hair down. Be ourselves.

ANNA shivers.

ANNA. Someone googled me.

TRILETSKY. Here, man. Do us a favour? Would you play us that song? You know, the one we used to sing together in college?

Christy Moore. The one about the airport.

He puts the guitar in Platonov’s hands.

I love that song. Go! GLAGOLYEV. (Takes away guitar.) I hate your singing.

TRILETSKY. Irish music is the best in the world! Ireland’s the best country in the world.

GLAGOLYEV. It is and it isn’t.

TRILETSKY. I’ve been to London, and New York, whatever, and Berlin. Barcelona. Paris.

GLAGOLYEV. Great cities.

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FICTION

Danny Denton is from Cork, which also happens to be my hometown, but this is not how we met. We met after I read his first novel The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow (it absolutely floored me) and bumped into him at the Borris Festival of Ideas and Writing (a beautiful festival – highly recommended). Since then we have become good pals and he is a kind of literary oracle for me, introducing me to the work of countless writers and poets. He edits the Stinging Fly, an excellent publication designed to promote new writing in Ireland, but above all he is a superb writer.

Idea for a Film Danny Denton

—in which, in 17th century Japan, two tramps caught in a wilddark storm come across the empty house of Bashō, by the river Sumida, and, desperate for shelter, they enter.

CUT TO— INT. BASHO HOUSE. NIGHT. The two tramps move through the dark of the house, calling gently, ‘Hallo? Hallo?’ as trees fling wildly about beyond the window (á la Kurosawa). They soon realise that while the place is lived in, it seems temporarily abandoned [proof in closeups], and so they decide to take shelter there for the night.

But go back.

Opening scene could be Bashō himself penning a last haiku at his humble pine desk [w. mumbly, ruminating voice-over; the lines, perhaps, of a haiku at first comprehensible only (seemingly) to himself ], before setting off from that modest, tworoom, timber homestead on the banks of the wide Sumida… In his setting off, pay close attention to movement (channelling K again), with the wind blowing the trees one way, and perhaps the river flowing the other, and Bashō moving with or against one/both. Cut his body shape with or against the angle of the trees, and the angles of the neighbouring rooftops…

Of course, first and foremost you’d have to visually explain [perhaps in that opening montage?] how Bashō was a poet from the 1600s who set out one day from his home on the outskirts of Edo [OTS shot of writing, of pen and inkwell; cut to finishing, to standing; cut to road, to farming neighbours waving good luck; cut to the wind in ancient mountainside cedars; cut to flowing river], leaving with only the clothes on his back and his writing materials in his cloth satchel, with little interest in provisions or possessions, with interest only in poetry and beauty, in bringing the world and the splendour of nature to life on paper, in the 189

Commentary

brand new & spontaneous form of the haiku. [problem: how to visually harness the spontaneity of the haiku, a form meant to capture and instil permanence to the fleeting wonder of a natural moment (in stark contrast to short-form mass media today)?

Could a voice-over depict the haikus with matching imagery, a sort of doubling of word and vision?]

And there would be an interesting doubling/comparison to be drawn too, in the film, with regard to the idea that Bashō— the noble poet who has set out to tramp, to sleep upon a grass pillow in his weather-exposed skeleton—is probably a ways out in the storm, his aging bones rattling within his soaking wet and sagging skin, while he has unwittingly granted shelter to two tramps, who are at just that moment shuffling curiously around his house [continue to cut back and forth between the two scenes: B on the road, grimacing in a sort of satisfied way into the face of the storm, & the tramps in the house, cautiously inspecting his left-behind possessions: a couple of wooden plates and bowls perhaps; a bamboo ornament from a visit to Kyoto; a smudged scroll that was a gift from another poet… (close-ups on all these objects, invoking, through lighting, a sacred nature to them)].

Such doubling should invoke the importance of experience, being out there on the road, in the weather, but of course the inverse too, the idea of two lifelong tramps over-exposed to experience, to weather, finally finding shelter.

Perhaps the two tramps access the house through a broken window, whereby you could be quite symbolic in blocking two dirty, smelly tramps crawling through a window, from a rugged outside space (wilderness) to a safe, calm inside space (shelter)… [and if through a window, chance for some clowning as they climb in clumsily? (think Chaplin/Keaton: doubling on their own depictions of tramps too of course)] Or perhaps it is only a little shack—there on the mighty Sum-

ida, coursing through 17th century Japan—and there being no locks on the rickety old door, which is of course being severely tested by the storm, they simply lift the latch and walk in? Or maybe the storm throws the old door open for them?

Bashō’s gaff for sturdiness, for leaks—he’s knocking on the walls, pulling at the legs of the table, stretching to peer into the corners of the windows (beyond which the storm rains harass and batter and lash).

Now, also, there’s the problematic use of the term ‘tramps’…

Given everything that’s going on it feels right that the film must consider the issue of housing and homelessness, but tramps fits more with the romantic notion of roaming the land, as Bashō did, and notions of the American train-hopping hobos; it speaks of a choice… It doesn’t speak of forced evictions, of families living in guesthouses and being kicked out in the mornings to walk the towns and cities all day, of families living in cars, their windows filled with sleeping bags and black bin liners of clothes, of women and men in tents on church steps, or on narrow, streetlamp-pooled city laneways… Could use ‘homeless’—‘Two Homeless Take Shelter at Bashō’s’—but then, given the current epidemics of alcohol and heroin addiction here, you might say ‘homeless’ and the film board decision-makers might see/imagine/ think addicts… Two lads break into Bashō’s gaff looking for money or meds… Suppose it would depend on how you might portray/dress/ cast/etc the ‘tramps’…

And anyway, the best way to avoid those sorts of prejudices is to exhibit the depth and singularity of these characters within the world of the film. To give them tics & whirs, habits & memories…

And names of course. Some nod to Beckett would be nice, his sort of clowning names… Plum and Jolly… Dom and Colly!

Dom and Colly to wear the faded cotton clothes of years on the road (days & months & years being travellers of eternity, as Bashō himself said), colourless, old to the point of appearing shredded. A particular shoe to be held together with that reinforced silver duct tape, the tape itself filthy and ripped and flapping with each step. Exploring the poet’s home they drop things; they knock things; they ooh and aah at things; they pick at what scraps of food they find in the cupboard (such clowning, using unrealistic & exaggerated blocking to exhibit their senses of alienation from safe inside spaces).

Or not. Why not instead show their individuality in the way they inspect the place; the way Colly lifts objects; the way Dom rubs surfaces to appreciate them? These two men have lived long full lives, have been reckoning the world since their own births.

Indoors, the two of them should act out (or re-learn) the long-repeated movements of two humans: lifting, considering, replacing, leaning, checking, etc… Have all their lives been a rehearsal for this house, these moments? Or are these moments a rehearsal for living again? Indoors, are they in fact remembering?

Dom is bald; Colly has a loose shaggy head and beard of salt and pepper (continue to double/create dichotomies like this: double everything until everything is doubled and everything is then a simulacrum of everything else; then: POW!). Dom’s the sort of engineering one; Colly’s the artistic one. Dom checks

CUT TO: EXT. WOODLAND. DAY. Nostalgic lemon light dappling dry leaves and branches; children frantically at work on a den they’re building in a copse of trees: birch, ash, alder, oak, ferns in shade… This is Dom’s memory.

Under Dom-as-child’s supervision, they’re lashing branches into corners using bindweed, making a sort of bower shape but tall and squared. [Dom to be identifiable by a facial (cheek?) scar that’s fresh in the memory but old and worn in Bashō’s house. Of course the scar itself is symbolic of other, more traumatic memories]. Perhaps he’s a boy of ten in this memory, and he’s got some of his pals gathering leafy branches for camouflage and with another of them he’s tying the structure together with the lengths of bindweed.

DOM: Come on ta fuck, lads, will ye! We’ll never get it finished at this rate! (to his friend, grinning) Fukkin wait til Micky sees this!

The hut ties in nicely. More doubling. We make huts and dens and camps as children, in preparation for making homes as adults. That, and perhaps to give ourselves private spaces to grow up in. To test out our ideas about being human.

So that would be a great early flashback scene [flashbacks to be tastefully delivered! quick, fleeting & beautifully lit].

Colly’s memory I’ll come up with later, but should be perhaps more mature and sombre, involving a now lost wife (or husband?), and children. Back in Bashō’s, while Dom reports his structural findings, Colly will read and decipher aloud the various poems on hangings and scrolls (& in drawers) around the house.

The obvious problem, of course, is TIME. I want it to be Bashō’s hut by the river in ye olde Japan, with the willows hanging down over the banks, the flow lazy and purling (post-storm), a wooden pier here or there, but equally want Dom and Colly to be Irish men of the 20th/21st century. Christ, why does everything have to be done in tenses, in time? It’s such a fucking pain in the hole! Could abandon time perhaps? Reference/hint at some time machine at the start and completely fuck with the dimension as a whole? [maybe: at a certain point cut from the two tramps in the hut, to Bashō, walking the road out of an ancient wooden town, stopping perhaps to admire a cherry blossom or a red acer, pulling the ink pot from his satchel… rise from close-up of cherry blossom to sky, then (POW) drop from sky down to a shimmering modern city—Dublin, Grand Canal Dock, say, with a smattering of homeless people under the bridge between the Facebook and Google buildings there… then a plane suddenly looming, mid-turn from take-off, between the two build190

The whole idea being that the film is distinctly Irish, but setting it in Basho’s Japan is a way to also make it universal. Because that’s the thing about art, right? ings as it rises into the sky, filling the sky with its enginesound as it rises… would be a nice nod to Ghost In The Shell and also a cool way to fuck time out the window…] Or maybe just leave it unexplained, and the two lads are outcasts of time the same way they’re social outcasts (metaphor!)?

Anyway, someday, somewhere down the line, someone’s gonna come up with a way to bend/flatten/usurp time, and when they do we’ll be like gods; we’ll see all of time ahead and behind like places on a map and we’ll be able to watch the map change as we act. Perhaps Dom and Colly are gods in that sense. Perhaps the plot hook of the film is to figure out how they got there and whether they’ll ever get back. Perhaps the viewer spends the whole film waiting for the reveal of the time machine these two bums have inadvertently stumbled into. (note: ‘bums’).

And maybe Colly discovers a postcard on his person. The postcard was given to him in a doorway on Patrick St. in Cork (because, actually, why does everything Irish have to be about Dublin?). This man—who had been rushing past in a panic— stopped suddenly, looked down at Colly, and then felt his breast pocket, then his trouser pocket, and looked at Colly again, almost aghast, and…

COLLY: (scratching salt & pepper head as he regards the postcard he’s just pulled from his pocket) Now where did I get this? (the eyes are wet/liquid as a smile broadens and he remembers) Ah yes! That foreign fella gave it me on Pana. Seemed in a fierce hurry.

DOM: (looking over his shoulder from an inspection of a rattling window) What is it?

COLLY: A postcard. This fella gave me a rake of change— about nineteen euro—if I would promise to post it for him.

He seemed in an awful hurry so he did.

DOM: (back to his inspection) Some fella just gave it to you?

COLLY: Yea. A sort of businessy look to’im. Seemed very stressed. Said he was in a mad rush and that I could have all his cash if I’d just promise to buy a stamp out of it and make sure it was posted before the weekend. A worldwide stamp he said.

DOM stalks over and they inspect the postcard together. It’s a postcard of Irish cottages, perhaps.

degrees. Suddenly they’re not coming to you with the paw out for another ‘loan’, or looking for a few nights on the couch and not even having the dignity to ask for it; sort of just staying anyway, each night in the front room a kind of very last minute do you mind if I just crash here… question. It might be shame, theirs or yours. It might be friction, an argument. Or maybe you are cruel. You can’t love someone enough to embarrass yourself for them. You hear less and less from them, and more from those who might have seen them; you hear less about where they were, and more about where they might have been seen. A doorway? A hostel? Someone’s couch? Or they’ve ended up in England, you hear, and you imagine them on the ferry over, destitute, seeking some old connection or some fifth/sixth/seventh chance, hoping for change. And yet, even though they’re on their last legs, they’re still doing that thing: that cupping of the chin and the half-smile, as if, whatever he’s reading he knows an awful lot about it, and has thought about all that he knows an awful lot, and yet is only going to let out that wry smile by way of letting anyone who’s watching him know that he’s a clever, wise person. As if he isn’t in a position of catastrophic fear and self-loathing and regret. A person, no matter how much you’ve shared together, can fade from your life. They end up in Edo-period Japan, in a wilddark storm… It probably is your fault. Too selfish.

Not patient enough. Not persistent enough. Poor Colly. Maybe he caused it himself in the sense that he was responsible for his actions, but why did his loved ones let him fade? Aren’t we all entitled to loved ones? To not have them give up on us? And then again, who knows who is out there, remembering him— good memories or bad. What would they think if they were to see him braving the storm to deliver that postcard now? Would this small act of kindness serve to prove his worth? His love for the world? Would they forgive him whatever it was he did?

Time passes, Colly, my friend. The hair goes white and frosty.

DOM: (walking away from Colly, who is staring at the postcard wet-eyed and mumbling) You send that postcard and that’s one eura less for you and me. Not to mention the personal physical danger of going back out in that storm… (Dom being the economical one…)

The scrawled writing on it will be hard to decipher, and one strand of the narrative will be figuring out the cryptic/indecipherable message, what address is on it, etc. Another strand would then be Colly’s moral dilemma about whether to venture back out into the storm to complete his quest and mail the card. He did make a promise after all, and to a benevolent stranger at that…

Though, of course, from where did a person send mail in 17th C Japan? Either way, Colly should become increasingly agitated and obsessed about his duty re: postcard [exuding an increasingly addled state, hinting at mental problems]; the postcard will come to mean something to him far beyond a paid favour to a stranger; it will become about his lifelong failure to fulfil promises, to carry out his duties as a father, a son, a brother, his failure to communicate, to keep in touch. A tramp/homeless person is someone who inevitably loses touch. And by degrees. Who eventually ends up outside your sphere of visitation, of experience, because they are outside society. You swear it’ll never happen to one of yours—to someone you know—but they ask one too many favours, they miss one too many payments, lose themselves to one too many binges, and they begin to disappear by

End of first night = End of first act.

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CUT TO: Bashō, the wide-eyed old poet, who pitied monkeys their cries, tramping—stick in hand, satchel over shoulder—the dusky country road, the liminal world between day and night, humming to himself the riceplant songs of the far north, cotton fairies swirling in the air around him (and perhaps the distant bark of a dog in the rain); cut to Colly on his back on a makeshift camp bed in Bashō’s house, staring at the postcard in the gloom; cut to Dom lying awake in the bed in the other room, staring at the ceiling; cut to the dark road; cut to the roar of wind in the mountain cedars; cut to the black river, full and quiet now that the storm has passed; fade to black (remember that sense of movement—many ways—you want to maintain throughout).

The whole idea being that the film is distinctly Irish, but setting it in Bashō’s Japan is a way to also make it universal. Because that’s the thing about art, right? That great art is particular in

detail but universal in feeling. Or is it to transmit (sort of telepathically) a universal message/feeling about a theme/issue that anybody can relate to? Or is it to just reach one person? Or is the function of art to deconstruct the lies reality presents to us every day when we get up, get dressed for work, listen to the radio. Or is it to provide perspective or comfort from these reallife problems, those everyday lies… (Though, what if it was art that was the farce?) Or is the thing just to entertain, to distract; pure escapism? Perhaps the piece is simply an expression of the writer’s yearning for Japan…

Perhaps the time machine is a methodone treatment clinic doorway on the banks of the Liffey… or a particular room in a particular hostel shelter on a hill in Cork City. Or maybe the postcard is the time machine, and on it is written a haiku by Bashō (silence… temple… cicada… rocks…). Are Colly and Dom to be trapped forever or released forever? And what of Bashō, the poet, the artist, out there in the storm, on the road, in his weather-ex-

posed skeleton, literally soaking up experience; what is to become of him? In real life, he stayed on the road for years, wrote several books, most famously The Narrow Road To The Deep North. What a title! But what if he hadn’t? What if he turned back? What if, in the film, in a moment of fear, of faltering, he said to himself that it was all too overwhelming, and he tramped back that 17th century road, the rains and the winds now at his back, hurrying him along, no time for haiku now, just the desire for shelter. Shelter. And what if, collapsing back in his rickety old door and slamming down the latch behind him and drawing breath, relief lifting from him like steam, what if he then came face to face with two lifelong tramps, there with him in the room, in his house, two miracles of existence, two accidents of evolution like himself, like us all? What then?

Anyway, never mind; it’s completely unfilmable.

Anyway, it’s just an idea. Another fucking idea in the face of it all.

ESSAY

I mentioned in my introduction to this section a new creative energy at play in Ireland today. Politically things are different. There are many forces at work internally and externally. For all of the country’s recent transformation into a socially liberal state, I am also aware that there are many issues that are not ideal, that are in fact shameful and need addressing. I’m a huge fan of Lisa McInerney's work – do read her novel The Glorious Heresies, it’s a wonderful book. She has very kindly contributed this essay on the state of our nation, in which she talks a fierce amount of sense.

Ireland(s) 2.0.

Lisa McInerney

It’s not going out on a limb to say that we Irish are partial to upheaval. Plantation, partition, famine, migration: We’ve been through so much upheaval that we define ourselves by O’Casey’s “states o’ chassis”. We can cope with chaos. We feel formidable for coping with chaos. Like Father Ted’s housekeeper Mrs Doyle, we like the misery. So on August 6th, when, at the Féile an Phobail leaders’ debate in Belfast, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar warned that a united Ireland would mean a “different state” and a “new constitution”, he might have been labouring – or buckling – under the misapprehension that everyone would think this overhaul a woeful prospect altogether.

Reunification will happen only by consensus in the North and in the Republic, but it doesn’t have to be a condition of our forging a new Ireland. As a thundering nationalist, it’s my duty to realise that Ireland is far from perfect, that she might benefit from a spit and a polish, if not a gutting and refitting.

It bothers me that ‘nationalist’ is an ugly word now. As I understood it, growing up bouncing between Galway and Cork in the ’90s, it was the softer form of ‘republican’, meaning that you were passionate about all 32 counties of your country, but not to the point that you’d get lairy over it. It meant self-determination, being smug about our collective soundness, knowing the 192

words to A Nation Once Again, and never giving Le RoyaumeUni douze points in the Eurovision. It didn’t mean building walls or breaking unions or obsessing over flags. It was positive, community driven, rather left-wing.

Recent political trends recommend lexical redefinition.

Frowns skitter across pals’ faces if we talk about notorious amadáin Trump, Farage, Orbán, Salvini or Le Pen. What use have we for the word ‘nationalist’ in the age of Brexit and climate change and refugee caravans? There seems to be a fundamental breakdown in terms if the left-wing, inclusive, comforting nationalism we espoused could have anything to do with this far-right screeching. To be united by fear or hate is to not be united at all, and unity is the cornerstone of nationalism, is it not?

This definition is colloquial, of course. When your country is divided, the nationalist goal tends to be the romantic one, and that nationalism can also be used to promote the divide et impera tactic doesn’t make a lick of sense at all.

It’s easy to be romantic about Ireland. Likely this is the case with any underdog country. Ireland has not invaded or enslaved and till very recently had no wealth to speak of, and is, therefore, not grabby about resources. When recent history is characterised by casting off shackles and facing fearlessly the mistakes of the past, it’s even easier. In particular, there were the marriage equality and abortion referendums in 2015 and 2018, each won by a landslide. Of the abortion referendum result, Varadkar said, “I believe today will be remembered as [...] the day Ireland stepped out from under the last of our shadows, into the light.”

Leo Varadkar should be the perfect Taoiseach for today’s Ireland. Young – our youngest ever, taking office at the age of 38 – openly gay, the son of an immigrant, educated and accomplished, he is also quite right-wing, quite cold, slow to show his hand... a bit of a cute hoor, we’d say. “You all must love him,” I’ve been told, abroad, and it’s sad that I’m compelled to let our admirers down by retorting, “He’s an awful bollocks.” (Now, the Irish will call anyone in a position of authority or influence ‘an awful bollocks’: The parish priest, the bank manager, Bono, Maura from Love Island... I’ve even heard one heathen say it of our patron saint, Michael D Higgins.) It’s a tough task to be fair, for Ireland’s problems are many and no one Taoiseach can be expected to triumph over them all. Any one of those problems could have been the breaking of Leo, if Brexit hadn’t trundled in and driven us to distraction.

Possibly our friends in the UK are sure that it’s only their social problems that are ignored thanks to the rabid elephant in the room, but it’s the same this end. Brexit has profound implications for Ireland’s economy and our fragile peace, and so rightly it takes up our public servants’ attention. Varadkar could be otherwise engaged; his counterparts in the north should be otherwise engaged. Ireland is suffering the same greed-driven housing crisis as many of our European neighbours. As a result of 193

Commentary

this, and of our underfunded mental health services, homelessness is on the rise. The Republic’s health executive is a bloated, bureaucratic nightmare. The citizens of the six counties of Northern Ireland don’t have access to abortion services, nor do they have the right to marry someone of the same sex. Power-sharing in the North has collapsed. Prejudice is grand so long as the target is a member of the Travelling community. Asylum seekers in the Republic are stifled by the system of direct provision, where the state provides for basic requirements while curtailing access to work and third-level education. “The whole system is designed to remove one of the core human needs – imagination, the ability to dream,” says asylum seeker and LGBTQ+ activist Evgeny Shtorn, who fled persecution in Russia.

Despite, or perhaps because of all of this, political disengagement is common. When nationalism either means ‘frothing bigotry’ or ‘solidly performs Come Out Ye Black and Tans at parties’, it’s easy to disregard the concept of public duty, to absolve yourself of your obligation to act on what’s going wrong. We Irish are susceptible to inaction, not so much because of frothing bigotry, but a little because of Come Out Ye Black and Tans.

Romanticised nationalism, the kind you hear in song, is the kind that comes from enduring life in the shadows. The Irish inferiority complex is the reason for our collective pessimism, suspicion of authority, begrudgery, love of a good lie, capacity for schadenfreude, tolerance for shifty politicians and intolerance for those who develop ideas above their station. These characteristics are symptoms of an illness contracted from occupation, the tyranny of doctrine, generational poverty and inequality, emigration-as-culture, the loss of a language. The Irish – in the North and in the Republic – have a propensity to form an unhealthy relationship with their own state, enabling and enduring in cycles, because the Irish haven’t yet shaken off the suspicion that whinging is all we’re good for.

The Irish employ black humour because the Irish are scarred. The Irish laugh because otherwise we’d never stop keening.

So we’re frustrating en masse, but in smaller numbers we’re astounding. So much progress is driven by individuals, community groups and grassroots activism. All over the island, campaigners throw their energies into beautifying their cities, fundraising for mental health services, supporting people living in direct provision, providing for the homeless. And if there’s anything that’ll make you weep into your cup of Barry’s tea, it’s the spontaneous #HomeToVote movement, where Irish citizens living abroad came back to vote in those historic referendums, because they knew their own power, and recognised their duty.

Perhaps it’s a case of divide et impera strangely being the right tactic to deal with our inferiority complex. In Ireland nothing ever works how you think it will.

By rights, our politicians should be motivated to perform with that individual energy. If the grassroots movements are indicative of national reimagining, Leo’s feared gutting and refitting

PHOTO ESSAY

I don’t relish having my photograph taken. Strangely I know a lot of actors who feel the same way...

I have worked with Rich Gilligan several times over the last decade, and for him I make an exception.

He is a proper artist, one who understands how powerful, emotional and elusive an image can be.

Town Rich Gilligan

A brief Q&A between Cillian and Rich on the nature of the following photo story Cillian Murphy: Can you tell me how the project was born?

Rich Gilligan: This body of work came about as part of a collaborative book project, published by The Salvage Press in Dublin in 2018. Jamie Murphy (who designed, typeset and letterpress printed the entire book) approached myself and the poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin to create fresh bodies of work somehow connected to Dublin. The brief was open to our interpretations and we worked independently until Jamie made sense of our individual narratives and combined the work through the layout of the book.

CM: It seems that you were seeking to represent Dublin in detail and texture rather than scale. Would that be accurate?

RG: Yeah, that's true in a sense. I guess the fact that I grew up in Dublin and that it's a place I know in great detail means that the work inevitably becomes personal, and, although I no longer call Dublin my home, I still feel a strong connection and familiarity to the city. The challenge with this work was to try to represent the distinct atmosphere and rhythm of the city relative to my own personal experience without the work feeling overly representational or sentimental.

CM: Can you tell me about being an Irish artist living and working in the states, and what that brings to your work?

RG: Living and working in New York, I do find myself tuned into a different frequency. There exists a heightened sense of my Irishness, but also a strange feeling that the place is constantly changing and evolving in your absence.

CM: Ireland seems to be experiencing a very fertile period across the arts: music, literature, visual art… Do you have any insight into what alchemy might be at play in creating this moment?

RG: It's rare that while a movement is actually happening, people have a chance to pause and acknowledge it. After moving to NYC I found myself almost exclusively listening to Irish music and reading new Irish writers. For a long time I attributed this to some form of nostalgia, but, on reflection, I've realised it's simply because there is so much incredible work consistently coming out of Ireland that it's almost impossible to keep up.

There is something uniquely visceral and confident about these new voices, and that is what stands out most to me. When that fresh confidence is mixed in with raw talent, things get really exciting. I'm not entirely sure what has driven this creative surge, but I like to think it may be one of the few positive forces that often come out of a downturn in the economy; like somehow now we're witnessing the fruits of the creativity that was happening at such a challenging time.

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POE TRY

It was the previously mentioned Stinging Fly (thanks Danny) that introduced me to the work of Doireann Ní Ghríofa. She writes prose and poetry in English and Irish, and frequently participates in cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing poetry with film, dance, music and visual arts. I am thrilled to be able to include here this beautiful poem, in both English and Irish.

Paidir / Prayer Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Paidir

Prayer

Trí sheomraí m’óige, síothlaíonn gaoth agus cloisim í, nuair a sheolann sí boladh na hoíche tríd an gcuirtín:

In my childhood bedroom, the wind is shivering the curtains, drawing the scent of night in – wet cement, coal-smoke, fox’s piss.

stroighin á mbaisteadh ag smúr báistí, deatach guail, sionnach óg ag scaoileadh le mún.

Aithníonn mo ghlúin an áit inar chrom mé

Every night of my girl-years I knelt here, my lips trembling with inherited words and inherited fears. On my fingertips,

im’ chailín, mo bheola beo le focail naofa, m’aigne faoi dhraíocht ag físeanna beannaithe, agus boladh seile ar mo mhéara.

the smell of spit on skin, while behind my child-eyelids, such clenched visions would spin – red

Géar, an dealg agus dearg, na scoilteanna a las an dorchadas ar chúl mo shúile, gach oíche gur ghuí mé anseo, ar mo ghlúine.

fissures, thorns, weeping women – every night that I knelt and begged my small desires from the dark that fired behind my eyes.

≈

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Anocht, le cách faoi shuan, ar bharraicíní a tháinig tú chugam, le suí ar an leaba romham, nocht.

Tonight, you tiptoed to my door while everyone else slept to sit on my bed, naked.

Líníonn solas sráide naomh-luan ort, geal agus buí, agus táim romhat, a chroí, mo shúile, mo lámha, mo bhéal,

Yellow, your streetlight halo, as once more, I kneel in the dark below, my eyes up-cast, rapt, and from my lips, those old words leap:

ag urnaí, tite ar mo ghlúine arís, ag guí.

Oh god, oh god, oh please.

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FICTION

Nicole published her collection of short stories Show Them a Good Time this year. It's one of those books that I put in friends’ bags and insist they read. They always do… it’s an addictive collection, very dryly funny, dark and smart. Enough said; here’s a new story from her.

Mattress Nicole Flattery

Each mattress was wrong for your weight. I tested them in the shop, lying back, my feet in the air, a shape under-lit in the bed shop. My production designer sat on the mattress opposite, her body alive with impatience. Certain people need to feel their time is precious and it’s being wasted. It gives them a sense of personal importance. Yesterday, under my supervision, she stood over an enamel sink, scrubbing it so it resembled the sink we shared. She is young, doesn’t understand adult feelings. It’s a mattress, she said, it will look the same on-screen. But that would be a compromise. That would be pretending in a way I’m unwilling to. She doesn’t understand that I’m trying to reach you with this film.

We hang things on the walls. Items come through the letterbox and are pushed roughly under the door. Bills, pamphlets for marches—we’re filming in a real apartment block. Under my roof, as the crew scurry around, throwing themselves against surfaces, it’s strictly 1985. It is 1985 and you’re chopping a cucumber and I’m peeling an orange. You’re sipping from my grandmother’s teacup and I’m arranging the cutlery. But we’re having structural problems. The apartment is an exact likeness but that plant was greener. That plant was thinner. There are certain things the production designer can’t help me with. Men keep coming and going, removing and replacing. The production designer sits, alert in surveillance mode, like a guard dog. We’re several weeks behind schedule. I’m staying in a friend’s house a few streets away, but I hang around the apartment block at night. I want something to happen. I want someone to steal from me.

Come out kids, I whisper, I had parents I couldn’t rely on either.

Let’s play. I wear my greying hair in a low bun; my clothes are unremarkable but expensive. Flat shoes for moving fast in the dark, like an animal. On arts shows, I’ve been described as cold and austere but in possession of a fine sensibility. Once, I was described as that when I was present, in the lights, sitting comfortably on the couch. I felt like I had been put through a meatgrinder, my skin and blood splattered all over the presenter’s suit. I was only twenty-eight. Afterwards, the presenter apologised to me in a doughnut shop. He was simply reading from the notes. The notes never prepare you. In truth, it had a lot to do with his own ego. I forgave him. I was charmed by this admission of male ego. He wiped sugar off my lips. I married him a few months later. You could know all this. I’m afraid if someone found me out here they wouldn’t steal from me. I’m afraid they wouldn’t touch me at all.

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The mattress sagged in the middle and the springs dug into our backs. We found the discomfort funny. I’ve lain down on several of my crew’s mattresses—they’ve been sick in these beds, had sex in these beds, and yet here I am, patting them down with my old-woman hands saying, no not right, not this one, like fucking Goldilocks. They all seem vaguely disappointed when I find their mattresses lacking, although I think they’ve long moved past the point of wanting to impress me. Every single one of them wants to quit. They’re annoyed by the detail of it, the disproportionate amount of attention we’re paying to everything. I watched their faces when we painted the eggcups.

They demonstrate some entitled behaviour they probably learned in film school. That’s where I learned my entitled behaviour.

Mostly, they seem irritated by me. They’re staying with me out of loyalty and a love for my first film, a social-realist drama that had a supernatural effect on them. And now they wait for me to grow up and change, like a girl who remains patiently in a relationship long after the early promise is gone. While they wait, I go to mattress shops. I go to mattress shops and ask myself which pillows you would use if you were still here.

My favourite person from the crew is the man who reupholsters the furniture. He shows me swatches of material and I match them to our old apartment. I like the way he speaks to me, or doesn’t. He feels no need to crow about art in a way that makes him sound intelligent—that cruel filmese they are all fluent in. He prefers furniture to people. He tells me about his girlfriend who recently admitted to cheating on him. He wears old bowling shirts that give him a goofy, gentle appearance. While he works, he listens to a show where three women discuss the issues of the day in a mocking and distant way as if they are the sole occupants of a safer planet. He wants to learn about women from these loud, hostile creatures. He and his girlfriend had a bit where he pretended to be jealous of every man she knew. It flattered her. It was such a good routine that he forgot to actually pay attention to every man she knew. She has removed furniture from their apartment. It’s either going to be an immensely cordial break-up or he’s going to slit his wrists. They are always the only two options, I say. On the show, one of the girls, her voice smug, high and ridiculous, says she has broken up with her boyfriend. ‘I’m going to be a mess,’ she announces. I can’t imagine anyone so ironical even registering pain. ‘Do you think she feels anything?’ I ask Daniel. ‘Everybody can be hurt,’ he says, after a while. He is nearly finished our bedroom. It is exactly like we

had it, down to your favourite chair, the unread books on the bedside locker. We sit on the bed frame. I think about him ripping off my tights, tearing his hands up my legs. ‘Not so fast,’ I would say, an attempt at control. He would smile weakly, continue and, afterwards, be so disgusted he would feel physically sick and confide in only one sensitive friend. For several years he would be reminded of my body by abstract objects—a pair of clogs, a toothbrush with frayed bristles. We don’t have sex. We don’t do anything but watch a woman in office clothes outside take a lungful of smoke. Daniel asks me what my best film is, where to start essentially. ‘My first,’ I say, ‘is the best.’ On the radio the laughing girls float away like silver helium balloons.

The night I met you we were doing karaoke. It was a dark room with a stained, velvet couch. When I pressed a bell, drinks appeared. You sang Wicked Game. Your voice was like a cold, hard orb. I could see it bobbing nervously in your throat. Nobody loves no-one. Another girl had brought you. I don’t remember much about her; she was needy, heavily perfumed, on the periphery. You were her friend from school, a small village in the north of England, visiting London for the weekend. Afterwards, lying on our mattress, you told me your friend was embarrassed of you—the way you walked, your excitement at the city.

She bribed your silence by buying you drinks. But you sang. I told you we should have been the ones that were embarrassed. Us, getting money off our parents for equipment, the stupid, novelty ashtrays we flicked our cigarettes into at our competitive dinner parties; we were disingenuous, weak. We should have been embarrassed. I think of you standing hesitantly in front of the screen as the lyrics scrolled. I hear your voice. I think sometimes I will unclasp my handbag and your voice, that heavy orb, will be inside, mixed in with receipts and old make-up. I’ve missed you for a very long time.

I would reach into my handbag and hold your voice in the palm of my hand.

We lived like a family then— it’s something I’m trying to make clear to the production designer. The apartment has to have a communal feel, but the bedroom has to be for us alone. The mattress is crucial. It might have to be made to my exact specifications. The rooms themselves are like different cities, each with their own independent atmosphere. The production designer rolls her eyes at my descriptions. She rolls her eyes, or she walks away. The first time we were together we left the sheets in terrible disarray; you lay in the mess as sweet and innocent as a nun.

There were always people from college over. We lived like a family then. What I mean is we were argumentative, dysfunctional and incapable of recognising that dysfunction. When they were in the apartment, you would use any excuse to step out, for fresh air or cigarettes or more wine. You hated their assured tones.

You hated my assured tone when I was with them. One night, my career on my mind, permanently on my mind at twenty-five, I repeated a quote from a critic in The Village Voice, a critic from a time when art mattered. We were always drawing distinctions

like this—when art mattered, when it did not. ‘The only place that should hand out awards are dog shows,’ I declared brightly, my arms wide. You—a bit drunk, a bit dangerous—leaned over and mouthed ‘Good doggie,’ at me. I’m not sure who saw. I was curious what you meant then. I’m not really curious anymore. I’ve been told we’re exactly five weeks behind schedule.

One afternoon, we visited a gallery and walked right by the exhibition. It was a room full of white doors of varying sizes with long silver handles. When we realised our mistake, we circled back. The doors were fakes, built snugly into the wall; you couldn’t open or close them. They lead nowhere. We stood for a short while in the bindingly white room. In the brochure, we read that each door represented something to the artist. ‘That’s what growing up was like,’ you said, ‘lots of doors, but when you tried to open them not one budged.’ You were not self-pitying but matter of fact. It was the most you had said about your home life, although I had speculated. You were in terrible form then, not eating or sleeping. We had coffee in the museum cafe and I suggested we go and see the watercolours, the Victorians.

‘None of your friends ever talk about films,’ you said abruptly.

You stirred your coffee clockwise.

It might have been on your mind for a while. ‘You talk about yourselves in relation to films, or what you would do if you had a chance to make one, but you never actually talk about how they make you feel. It’s blank.’ You were triumphant. Despite your black mood, you wanted me to know that you had been paying attention. Later, I felt compelled, perhaps because what you had told me about your family, to tell you a story of mine.

I recounted how, when I was a child, I was watching a film with my father and he had fast-forwarded a scene of two women kissing. I was maybe about ten.

He had to stand up to reach the VCR. It was supposed to be cute— my father getting clammy, me sitting upright, still and face-forward like I was in church, the women chasing each through a washing-line of crisp, white sheets in soft-lighting, the scene skidding and eventually stopping elsewhere. You winced, I remember. I think you were already beginning to hate me then.

The production designer took me aside today. The depressing meetings, the silent lunches, the decimated budget—it had been leading to this. ‘You’re making a film, just making a film,’ she said.

‘I’m trying to forgive myself.’

‘I think you’re too close to this project.’

‘I hate that word.’

‘What?’

‘Project. Projeeeeeeeeecccctttttt.’

That silenced her. I can tell she’s the type who wants an easy life. Well, slow the cars down and shine an accusatory light on every single person who wants an easy life. There’s no such thing.

She wears jeans and little boots. There’s something of the uniform about the women who work with me. I can’t imagine her as 214

young, or in college but, of course, she was. And she would have, after weeks, or months, of watching movies made by authoritative men in black clothes, caught a glimpse of you, turning slowly to face the camera in a playground, and became obsessed. That shot, your idea, is the one taught in classes. You, who only loved the cheap and tacky, are on a curriculum. I think that could raise a smile. I remember you perused my screenplay and diagnosed my main problem: ‘You don’t know a thing about poverty.’ We began again, both of us, with a single blank, white page. You left me to go out during the day. You were not the compulsive type, not like me, who wanted everything eternally clean and tidy.

You returned one evening with a postcard of Frida Kahlo’s ‘My Birth’. The bed looked exactly like ours but it contained a single, distorted body, blood on the sheets. ‘That’s me,’ you said, ‘giving birth to you.’ Every night you over read what I had written. It was hard to look at that postcard, in the end.

When you get there, you won’t want it. You didn’t stay around to see me become a figure of the arts. Last night, this figure of the arts climbed into a skip and retrieved a decaying mattress.

I paid £10 to a scrawny, teenage boy to drag it back. It was only when the production designer found me sitting on the pissstained, yellowing mattress, that I think she realised all of this effort wasn’t just because of my vanity. I think it’s right, more right than the actress we’ve cast, who only really resembles you when she lowers her eyes. We’re going to re-upholster the mattress. Then I will make the bed with the correct, fitted sheets, and it will be the apartment we shared. I feel I could step outside of it, as if it’s only a miniature model. If I stood on the street, I might look up and see you, at twenty-five, turning out the light. I would like to see that—you doing some housekeeping, fiddling with the kettle, getting ready for bed. I wonder if you ever watched the film, if it even interested you then. Probably there was something tainted about it. I’m not sure you knew how impressive you were in it. The morning you left, you

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must have walked across the estate, in a determined straight line, and stepped on a bus. You went back north, to your family who you didn’t like. When I try to picture you on that bus, I see only a shadow. You sent me a postcard years later. ‘I hear you’re mean now. Smiley face.’ I was too polite, not demanding enough—a trait you despised. You must have read an article about my behaviour somewhere. I kept the postcard. I can see you in the back of a cinema, looking tired, but then, as the film begins, lighting up.

When I was in my forties, and the internet arrived, I watched a lot of interviews with female directors. They talked about even the tragedies of their lives with a great, regal indifference. I figured they would show me how to live. I looked for you too, and I found you. It wasn’t hard to trace your girlfriend. She had some complaints about a power shortage. It needed to be fixed immediately because her partner was ill, her partner was very sick in bed and she was scared in the dark. The electricity company never replied. On-screen, the female directors, those little despots, gestured to the sea—calm, serene—as if in private communication with the natural world. I found another photo of your girlfriend, a year or two later, in a local newspaper. She was doing a triathlon for her partner who had recently passed from ovarian cancer. She was smiling; she looked strong.

When she crossed the finish line, she wouldn’t be gasping for breath. When the film directors were asked about their careers, the sum total of their work, they shrugged or smirked. This is what it amounted to—all that glory. I still can’t think about you, alone and scared, in an unknown bed. We start filming tomorrow morning.

It’s just an imitation and when I stand in it, it feels like an imitation. But outside the door, two seconds before I step inside, it feels real. The crew are all here now. The table is set. The first scene is a dinner party. We’ve used a white tablecloth. The bed is made. I’m ready to start.

POE TRY

John Kelly is one of Ireland’s finest broadcasters and writers. He has for many years presented some of the best-loved and most critically acclaimed music programmes on the Irish airwaves. He is a novelist and a poet (his most recent collection Notions is a beautiful thing), and I am very honoured to be able to present two brand new poems here.

Two poems John Kelly

1981

It was May of that year – posters were up and black flags flew and, just beyond the bridge, swallows, out in numbers, looped their scribbled patterns on the Erne.

and all I wanted to be was out in a boat – off to the islands where the perfect skeletons of feral goats lay exactly where they’d fallen, without thinking, in the grass. Islands with cuckoos and Sheela na Gigs. And pathways made by hares.

Summer’s possibility had begun but I was still at school, enduring the last few weeks of term when the hours thickened and the clock stuttered back and forth to half past three

If, on the way back, a chopper – a Lynx or a Gazelle – zoomed across and buzzed the boat, and a soldier from Blaydon-on-Tyne lined you up in his rifle’s sight, what else could you do but hold your course?

Go home. Do your homework. Watch the news.

Synecdoche or Metonym

For a week I gazed at Ithaca – mythic, wasp-waisted island across a glittering three-mile strait.

My very first earthquake and, much like a bomb, it’s impossible to properly recall –

And one day, as light clouds drifted and the pareidolia took hold I saw the wise Penelope on plumped-up

the boom, the blast, the shudder, the falling masonry, the after-silence and dark speculation of it all.

pillows, and long-suffering Odysseus, full-bearded, strapped to a ship that quickly faded to a wisp.

Years ago, I tried to write about our most notorious one – I was lying in my bed that morning too.

Coffee grounds smoked in the ashtray.

I drank cheap Cephalonian white and even though libations had been made,

The sound of coffins falling, tumbling at the gable wall. No good!

A bomb’s a noise remembered only

when the shadows of two paragliders darkened the day and cooled my skin I knew the Gods were moving in.

when another one goes off – or a ruined house collapses down a hill into an olive grove.

Was it Zeus, the Cloud-gatherer?

Or worse, the Earthshaker?

I feared the latter and, sure enough,

Is it synecdoche or metonym when Enniskillen – as in another Enniskillen – means a bomb with very many dead?

the next morning at seven, in what I took to be a bomb, Lord Poseidon shook me wide awake.

Outside, the wasps were mad with figs, cats asked questions in the shade, swallows swooped to kiss our turquoise pool.

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The work of Italian graphic designer Italo Lupi is instantly recognisable: the logotypes for Cinelli, Fiorucci and Miu Miu (which he “designed in five minutes”), the playful drawings for the covers of Domus, the countless posters for art exhibitions and design fairs.

Irreverently co-opting traditional visual culture and the work of great designers and artists, Lupi blends the old and new to create an innovative, elegant familiarity. Francesca Picchi meets the godfather of grafica at his home in Milan – an ancient palazzo, appropriately modernised

PHOTOGRAPHY ALESSANDRO FURCHINO CAPRIA

Previous spread: Italo Lupi in his home in the centre of Milan. Lupi’s conversion of the top floor of an ancient palazzo, split over several levels, has created a continuous space flooded with light.

Above: Enzo Mari’s manifesto for the design company Danese hangs in the passage to the living room.

Every morning, Italo Lupi crosses the colonnade of an austere 17th-century palazzo in the ancient heart of Milan, negotiating the narrow streets that lead past remains of old walls, Roman theatres and Longobard towers. He descends into the subway to reach his studio in the post-industrial periphery of the city, in the quartiere of Lambrate, where, in the post-war years, the Lambretta scooter emerged as the antagonist of the Vespa. Lupi, now in his eighties, works with just one assistant, but, surrounded by his books, objects of inspiration and the tools he needs to give shape to his imagination, he is far from solitary. ‘Graphic design’ falls short as a 220

Opposite: Icons of Italian design – the anonymous folding chair and the Arenzano lamp designed by Ignazio Gardella. Together with the poster for a Gustave Courbet exhibition at Palazzo Reale, these objects express the tension between modernity and tradition in Lupi’s work.

description of his craft; Lupi’s contribution is wider, even if simply as a tireless promoter of the elegance of modernity.

As the editor-in-chief of Abitare magazine from 1992 to 2007, Lupi influenced a generation of young creatives who could count on him for support, or, at worst, a polite taunt and a prodding to do better. Many photographers, illustrators, journalists, curators, designers and architects harbour an affectionate gratitude toward Lupi – those who, without his inclination to offer fledgling professionals a chance to prove themselves, would not have not obtained the first credentials so necessary to building a reputation.

Milan has a proud tradition of architecture magazines; as fertile spaces for elevated conversation, the best among them are not only a means of expression but a stage for the personalities of architect-intellectuals who aspire to have a bearing on their peers. Above all, there was Gio Ponti, the founder of Domus, whose magazine was much like he was: eclectic, generous, kaleidoscopic, a bit frivolous. It is easy to imagine that he transposed to its pages the commentary that usually remains enclosed within the walls of the most animated salons.

After Ponti’s death, the helm was taken by Alessandro Mendini, and after him by Mario Bellini,

Via Vallarsa 8 20139 Milano Telefoni: 02.570404161 Telefax: 02.5520106

Dal 1920 cliches, fotolito, elaborazione di immagini per la stampa

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I M M A G I N I Above: Poster for Fotolito De Pedrini, a prepress studio in Milan. The stones that form the alphabet were patiently collected by Lupi’s young son Michele on a beach in Versilia, Tuscany.

P E R

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Opposite: Cover for Shop magazine, 1970. Formed by a group of young architects from the Polytechnic University of Milan, the magazine confronted the latest issues in architecture surrounding shopping centres; Lupi was art director.

who was editor-in-chief from 1986 to 1992. Called aboard by Bellini as art director, Lupi radically revamped the publication’s appearance, starting with holes that he punched in the cover to show the page beneath. It remains an oft-referenced aspect of his design.

“I wanted to invent something for the new course embarked upon at Domus,” he says when asked how the idea came to him. “I thought that anyone picking up a magazine with a hole in the cover would want to open it to see what’s underneath. It pleased Bellini – he was behind me all the way.”

While Abitare – where Lupi had his next 222

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publishing position – can be described as a smart way to keep up to date with design, it is also one of the most eloquent portraits of the designer’s creative thinking: a mixture of generosity, true intellectual curiosity, light-hearted fun and a love for everything that is intelligently designed. For Lupi, every page is a new frontier; the template exists, but is constantly questioned and broken out of, making space for playful interventions that show the joy of designing. It is plausible that Lupi was inspired by Bruno Munari and his way of “working on pages as if tuning a violin”, as Umberto Eco described seeing the eclectic Milanese artist and designer in action

at the prestigious Bompiani publishing house.

“I am interested in graphic design being at the service of the content,” says Lupi. “This is why it is natural to change my approach in accordance with each project at hand.”

Lupi defies easy categorisation. His versatile, multifaceted talent harks back to the Italian humanist tradition, which was interested in every aspect of human life; but he is also a typical child of post-war Italy and a gifted architect, endowed with an unusual degree of curiosity for every product of the human mind. This curiosity has seen him take diverse forms of expression (graphic design, posters, books, magazines,

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Opposite: Sitting on the terrace of his apartment in Milan.

Above: Traditional paintings from Lupi’s family collection.

periodicals, exhibition displays, advertising and interiors) as one big playing field where he can exercise his imagination. If there is a special quality that has distinguished his generation of architects and designers, it is the irrepressible propensity to always start from scratch, to dismantle conventions, to create space for the unexpected, even if just a small playful detail.

As a boy Lupi was witness to the many forms of resistance devised by his free-thinking Piedmontese family in the face of fascist propaganda. From this education Lupi developed an instinct to call into question absolute truths, and

to sense the ridiculousness of those who take themselves too seriously. Beneath his impeccably cut clothes, his kind manner and gracious ways, Lupi is quietly subversive.

“Having trained as an architect, I am very aware that architecture is a much more serious and complex craft than that of the graphic designer, who instead has the difficulty of needing to invent something new every day; this is probably what brings me to depart from the beaten track, to embark on flights of fancy for which there might not even be a need.”

One of the most remarkable moments of his career involved the influential Milanese clothing 225

Opposite: Wooden and glass doors with light iron frames run full height, emphasising the continuity of the space and opening up perspectives through the house.

Above: Lupi’s poster for the 39th International Design Conference ‘Italian Manifesto’ in Aspen, 1989.

designer Elio Fiorucci, and established Lupi in the history of fashion. While Milan had been shrouded in the gloom of politically fraught years during the 1960s, Fiorucci had introduced the city to a free, transgressive spirit, à la ‘swinging London’, and he asked Lupi if he could incorporate his brand’s spirit – lively, joyous, chaotic, unconventional – into a new visual identity.

Lupi’s now iconic logo, with two winged cherubs, remains one of the most enduring and recognisable images the designer has produced.

However, Lupi tends to play down his endeavours. When we speak about his work with Fiorucci he is at pains to mention the many subsequent

graphic designers who adapted his design into various forms.

“I was looking for contrast. I wanted to do the opposite of what everyone would expect, knowing everything that Fiorucci had done up to that moment,” he explains of the project. “I thought up something that contradicted the image he had built until then, in his catalogues populated by wonderful, uninhibited young ladies. I wanted to do something 19th century. From the Victorian prints I had collected during my trips to London, I chose a picture of two Victorian cherubs. It was instinctive, and it worked well.”

Lupi’s work is distinguished by these

broad-ranging juxtapositions and irreverent associations. In the 1980s, with the great masters of modernism having reached a status not far from veneration, together with the illustrator Steven Guarnaccia, Lupi devised a promotional campaign for Domus magazine composed of a series of highly colourful masked portraits of Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto and Gio Ponti. It was a mischievous idea that offered a wry take on the unwieldy contemporary sense of identity. Posters from the campaign lined the streets of Milan during the Salone.

Having nurtured a passion for printed matter since he was a boy, Lupi remembers one 227

The cover of Un Sedicesimo, a bimonthly graphic-design magazine limited to 16 pages, with each issue edited by a different person. For his edition, Lupi paid homage to his

inspirations in design, architecture, cinema and design. The cover uses a typeface taken from a late-19th-century French sign-painters’ handbook.

moment in particular that confirmed his passion. “There were these publications handed out by British soldiers in the months after Victory Day in 1945; they were distributed in cities that had been liberated from the Nazis. After many years of rhetoric and propaganda, it was easy to lose your heart to pamphlets and booklets that showed a new, different world.” This lesson in imaginative freedom became the seed of his passion.

Lupi has long been fond of England, an affection that was reciprocated in the form of a title – Honorary Royal Designer for Industry – bestowed upon him by the Royal Society of Arts in 2002; 228

Prada catalogue from 1989–90.

Working with Miuccia Prada and her ‘right hand’ Manuela Pavesi, Lupi used varied printing methods to augment images by famous photographers.

and for 40 years, Lupi and his wife Maria Luisa had a house in Kew, west London. Living there for long periods of time strengthened his appreciation of the free-spiritedness he felt in the English capital, but it also gave him a more nuanced, critical view of the city: “You need to really love London in order to understand the eccentricity, non-conformism, courage; the correspondence between the city’s architecture and the young culture of its inhabitants. Yet this gives you the freedom to criticise the often vulgar new buildings, which are accepted as examples of vital contemporaneity. It gives you the freedom to denounce the incredibly regretful obliteration

Opposite: Paul Rand’s celebrated IBM poster – a masterpiece of graphic design – visible through the doorway to the dining room.

of important parts of the city’s history – they are razing entire neighbourhoods.”

He recalls once arriving in London by plane and seeing, among the identical liveries of the other airlines, a line of British Airways planes, each with a different tail design. “Those eight different liveries had such a strong sense of identity that playfully drew all those diverse designs together. This is what I’ve tried to do throughout my career, which has been varied and covered many different disciplines. I think that in each of these fields you have to question the tried and tested methods already in place. If you can find the cracks, you can have fun.”

Studio Formafantasma is leading the way for a new generation of designers confronting the complexities of their role in a fractured world. Director of London’s Design Museum Deyan Sudjic speaks to the Italian, Amsterdam-based duo about the possibilities and limitations of the industry today

fORMAfANTASMA

PHOTOGRAPHY RENÉE DE GROOT

Previous spread, left: Simone Farresin.

Previous spread, centre: Inside Formafantasma’s studio in north Amsterdam, with the shelves displaying prototypes and books.

Opposite: Farresin and Trimarchi’s desks in the seven-person studio.

Above, left: Farresin and Trimarchi discussing prototypes for the Italian furniture brand Cassina.

Above, right: The area surrounding the studio in north Amsterdam, an industrial district that has become a centre for creative industries.

Previous spread, right: Andrea Trimarchi.

In the 10 years since they graduated from Eindhoven’s Design Academy, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin have not shied away from tackling big themes in their work. Colony, produced by the pair in 2011, was on one level a set of beautiful blankets, commissioned by the Libby Sellers Gallery in London with collectors in mind. Yet on closer inspection it became an exploration of Italy’s inglorious colonial history in Libya, Ethiopia and Somalia, and the interplay of that history with the present-day tragedies of migration across the Mediterranean: woven into the exquisitely soft mohair wool were images of colonial postage stamps and urban plans. A year earlier, Autarchy had discussed the self-imposed frugality of an imaginary community, though the title also echoes Mussolini’s attempts to use self-sufficiency to get around League of Nations sanctions after his assault on Abyssinia. When Tri-

marchi and Farresin presented the project at the Milan Salone del Mobile – and they could hear an overexcited Enzo Mari, the godfather of radical Italian design, holding forth on the installation before they even got through the door – the pair knew they had arrived.

Formafantasma’s practice is insightful and unexpected: Ore Streams, initiated by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Milan Triennale curator Paola Antonelli, was a threeyear exploration of the impact of electronic waste; Botanica imagined a world without plastics. But their output, whilst attention grabbing, is also smart and stylish.

Yet Simone Farresin is disarmingly candid about the importance of being realistic in our expectations of what design can deliver. By using computer waste to create very costly, elegantly sculptural desks embellished with gold

harvested from smart phones, Formafantasma are not suggesting that they can save the world one recycled hard-drive at a time. Instead, Ore Streams offered serious original research into the precious, toxic materials that go into a circuit board or a monitor, and what happens to them once they have been discarded. They raised challenging questions about the difficulties designers cause by making objects hard to take apart. And, alongside the research, by creating objects with the presence to display in museums, they are making an effective cry for attention: ‘Just look at how valuable all these materials we abandon in life-threatening toxic dumps in Nigeria and Cambodia really are.’ Extinction Rebellion it is not.

“I understand them, but there are different levels of intervention possible,” says Farresin about the environmental movement. “Recycling 233

Paper and foam mock-up for the Delta collection

is not a solution. We need radical and visionary ways of thinking.” However he does share a pessimism about the future of the planet with the Extinction protestors. He takes the view that, in the long term, we are most likely not going to make it as a species and that the best we can hope for is a dignified exit. Farresin quotes Paola Antonelli: “As she says, ‘We are not going to survive’. We all know that we will die. But does that mean you stop trying to live, or do you live hopefully and with dignity?”

Formafantasma is at present a seven-person studio, set between the local Islamic centre and a Polish supermarket in an Amsterdam suburb, far removed from canal houses and museums. Trimarchi and Farresin are in the middle of another of the long-term self-initiated research projects that have defined their practice, even as they continue to work with such high-design manufac236

Material research for the De Natura Fossilium project

turers as the Italian lighting company Flos, Hermès and J&L Lobmeyr.

The current focus for the pair is the timber industry, and the results will form the basis of an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, opening next March. The Serpentine has given space to design only twice previously in its history, with exhibitions by Konstantin Grcic and Martino Gamper. “It’s intimidating when we look at who has shown there,” says Farresin. “It’s all going to be new work for the exhibition, nothing from the past. It is a challenge that requires a lot of self-reflection.”

Formafantasma is interested in the way timber is used, and what it offers. “It’s a living material, one which raises ethical questions about how we produce it. We will look at forestry, at how wood is cut and what the parameters should be when you strive for sustainability. Trees absorb CO2;

it is stored in the wood. Whenever you make an object from wood there is CO2 in it. When it is destroyed, more is released. If the object does not last longer than it took for the tree that it came from to grow, you are doing damage. Objects should outlive trees.”

Every new generation makes its mark by shunning all the most embarrassing traces of its immediate predecessors, and is then disconcerted to find that its own successors will eventually go on to reassimilate the very ideas it rejected. In the 1980s, when Trimarchi and Farresin were born, postmodernism was in the air and Philippe Starck was just setting out on a career based on whimsical shape-making and three-legged chairs. Greed was good, and the cult of celebrity was everything. This was the moment that the reputation of designer Victor Papanek was at its lowest.

Craftica bladder container prototypes

The design landscape could not be more different now. Papanek, who was born in Austria, went to school in Britain and spent much of his life in the US, began his book Design for the Real World with the ringing declaration “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few of them,” and then suggested that “by creating whole species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed.”

It’s an attitude that reflects the preoccupations of so many younger designers who try now to use their work to criticise a culture that produces single-use plastic bottles, fast fashion destined for landfill, unnecessary air travel and a meat-based diet.

Formafantasma share those worries, but have their eyes open to the complexities that are involved

A maquette in balsa wood

in trying to resolve them. “As a student, I found Papanek fascinating but naïve. We are more sceptical.” Unlike Papanek, Trimarchi and Farresin are prepared to use the language of design to make highly political statements about these subjects that look disarmingly beautiful, and they have the skills and sensibility to do so.

They are also ready to create more mainstream products, such as the ExCincere tiles, conceived with the materials specialist Dzek using volcanic lava ash from Mount Etna – but they remain cautious about what they take on. “The furniture landscape is boring; even major companies are not pushing things forward, which is very disappointing. You get asked some very old-fashioned questions, like ‘Can you design a sofa?’, ‘Can you design a lamp?’”

Papanek described his position as being anti-design: He took the view that any kind of formal lan-

guage was essentially manipulative and dishonest, and that almost any relationship between design and commerce was unacceptable. Formafantasma have more to offer.

“We don’t believe in no form, though our name reflects that form is not the dominant part [Formafantasma translates as ghost form]. In the moment we live in, we cannot be ideological; things are more grey. We have to live with ideological and ethical ambiguities. It’s difficult for designers – you face the complexities of the world and are asked to participate in an exercise to rethink the profession.

“As a young designer, to approach all these problems can be overwhelming. We encourage our students to be exploratory, but not to be ashamed of scaling down ambition – you can scale up later – and, ultimately, be conscious that design has its limitations.”

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Studio Formafantasma Case Studies

Project 1: Ore Streams

Ore Streams is a three-year investigation into the recycling of electronic waste, documented through virtual and physical media. Referring to the rivers of discarded material – the fastest growing waste stream – which flow freely across national borders, the project explores this new, developing industry, highlighting the often poor working conditions in recycling centres in developing countries and the inappropriate disposal of toxic components. A website acts as a digital

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Photography Name Surname

dossier for consumers and manufacturers with case studies on planned obsolescence, instructional films on recycling methods and product disassembly, and a visual essay tracing the movement of minerals from an asteroid to the iPod. The project also consists of a prototype line of office furniture made from recycled computer parts and found objects that act as a ‘Trojan horse’, initiating a conversation about what Formafantasma calls “above ground mining”.

Commissioned by: National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and Triennale di Milano, Italy

Photography Name Surname

Year: 2017-2019

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Project 2: Colony

Commissioned by: Gallery Libby Sellers, UK and Textiel Museum Tilburg, Netherlands

Year: 2011

Formafantasma’s research-based practice often involves various narrative threads that span multiple projects, presented through innovative uses of craft and mixed media. Colony follows the 2009 ceramic series, Moulding Tradition, with an investigation into the complex continuing geopolitical issues around Italy’s colonial history in North Africa. The three mohair wool blankets – each named for a capital city held

by Rome until the mid-1940s: Tripoli (Libya), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and Asmara (Eritrea) – explore the effects of Italian imperialism on native urban planning, and the current relationships between ex-coloniser and colony. Architectural landmarks and maps of migration flows are woven together with historical texts, such as the recently reactivated Friendship Treaty, by which Italy returns migrants to Libya alongside investment in the country.

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Photography Name Surname

Project 3: De Natura Fossilium

Commissioned by: Gallery Libby Sellers, UK

Year: 2014

“Mount Etna is a mine without miners – it is excavating itself to expose its raw materials.�

as a material for design. Informed by the work of Ettore Sottsass, De Natura Fossilium takes an elegant, varied approach, incorporating research into the tensile properties of volcanic fibre as a sustainable alternative to carbon fibre, the use of glass made from remelting rocks found on Etna and the CNC cutting of basalt. The works, presented through Gallery Libby Sellers in London,

include a coffee table made of stacked geometric forms, carved from basalt and joined with brass; a clock composed of three faces (for keeping seconds, minutes and hours respectively) that records the time in different ages of volcanic sand; and a series of box-like sculptures made from mouthblown volcanic glass, a nod to the countless illegal homes to be found at the foot of the volcano.

Following the dramatic eruption of Mount Etna in November 2013, which sent a vast cloud of dark smoke into the sky, covering nearby villages and cities in debris, Formafantasma was led to investigate the culture of lava in Sicily and its potential

Photography Name Surname

241

PARK

MCCARReN

From elderly Polish couples on bikes to families congregating for smoky cookouts and hip parents who’ve fled the East Village, McCarren Park is New York’s unsung green space, a cousin of Central Park, which is becoming an emblem of the perpetual change in the city. Here, photographer Ramak Fazel takes Port through the images he took over several weekends there, uncovering the stories, activities and moments that unfold when people come together

WORDS AN D P h o t o G R A P H Y RA M A K FAZ E L

Previous spread: Among New York City’s most desirable residential neighbourhoods, the enclaves of Williamsburg and Greenpoint geographically bracket Brooklyn’s McCarren Park. Within this park complex the historic residents of north Brooklyn, including Polish, Hasidim, Latino and Italian communities, intersect with more-recent millennial arrivals. This blending of demographics and leisure habits results in a unique space that contributes to north Brooklyn as a hub in a redrawn New York City.

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Above: Outdoor seasonal barbecuing within designated areas is one of the most cherished features of McCarren Park. Spaces are mostly assigned on a first-come first-served basis. With the help of his daughters, Sincere Barrett watches over a newly installed double-headed grill.

One week later – as Luis Corchado and his wife Michelle celebrate their daughter Alena’s 8th birthday – the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation rules that gatherings over 20 people must apply for a cityissued permit.

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Whether it is on the football pitch or on top of a cooler, impromptu games are an integral part of park life.

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Clockwise from top left: A flowering Redbud; Russ, the unofficial historian of McCarren Park, often found on a bench at the northern Lorimer Street entrance; Ramon Bloomfield, who has used the park for 20 years, with his sons Edgar and Lucas, doing early morning baseball practice; alternateside-of-the-street parking – which dictates on which side of a street cars can be parked on a particular day – allows for the swift removal of strewn leaves and debris. Resident drivers jog near their cars while they are vying for parking spots.

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Previous spread: The grassy area behind the field house.

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Above, clockwise from top left: Among the organised sports in the park, American Football is practiced with relish by members of the Automotive High School located within the park boundaries; an unruly kite is flown on a moderately windy Sunday; during the summer, Kiki leads exercises on the newly refurbished running track; a patchwork-painted Ford van idling along Bedford Avenue.

A group, mostly of South American work colleagues from Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia and Mexico, gather for their annual summer picnic.

It’s a chance for them to introduce families to one another, a break from their work as food-delivery drivers.

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Pool rules note that “unbound periodicals tend to blow around and create litter.� On their inaugural visit to McCarren pool, Tiffany and Mathew came prepared with reading material.

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Built in the mid-1930s as one of New York City’s largest public swimming pools, the McCarren Park pool was abandoned in the 1980s. It remained closed and gated, lingering as a blighted feature of the park, until 2012, when, after a multi-year renovation, it reopened with great fanfare. The pool is the size of three Olympic ones, with 14 lifeguard towers overlooking the bathers, enforcing New York City park rules.

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PHOTOGRAPHY VAVA RiBEIRO

CREATiVE DIRECTiON AND STYLiNG DAN MAY

D eSAf iNADO

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Previous spread: Luka wears shirt DIOR

Opposite: Luka wears jacket and shirt GUCCI Above: Aghata wears top and skirt BALLY

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Luka wears top and trousers LOUIS VUITTON

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Aghata wears shirt LOUIS VUITTON bikini LES GIRLS LES BOYS sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES

Luka wears jumpsuit FENDI

Luka wears jumper CELINE sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES

Aghata wears dress PRADA

Aghata wears dress GUCCI

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Below: Luka wears jumper CLOSED trousers HERMÈS Opposite: Luka wears cardigan and shirt PRADA trainers GUCCI shorts STYLIST’S OWN Aghata wears cardigan PRADA bikini LES GIRLS LES BOYS trainers GUCCI

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Opposite: Luka wears shirt LOEWE trousers PT Below: Aghata wears bikini LES GIRLS LES BOYS jeans PT

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

Luka wears jacket and top SAINT LAURENT trunks MODEL’S OWN Aghata wears shorts and bikini LES GIRLS LES BOYS hat STYLIST’S OWN Styling assistant Ellie May Brown Casting Thais Mendes at Squad Models Models Luka D’Saint at Squad Brazil and Aghata Lima at Ford Models Rio

ROCKET

PHOTOGRAPHY J O A C H I M M U E L L E R - R U C H H O LT Z

88

STYLING OLA-OLUWA EBITI

Previous spread: Jameel wears blazer and trousers GIORGIO ARMANI belt PRADA shoes STYLIST’S OWN Left: Hussein wears shirt MARTINE ROSE cardigan PRADA boxer frills MARVIN trousers MARGARET HOWELL belt STYLIST’S OWN shoes PRADA Right: Yasin wears top and trousers BOTTEGA VENETA sheer top ANN DEMEULEMEESTER blazer LUKE DERRICK

Yasin wears top LANVIN trousers LUKE DERRICK shoes OLUBIYI THOMAS

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Left: Hussein wears shirt and trousers GUCCI scarf as belt BALLY blazer CANALI boots LOEWE Right: Jameel wears shirt LOEWE jacket PAUL SMITH feathered tie STYLIST’S OWN

Left: Hussein wears shirt PALOMO SPAIN trousers and cummerbund GIVENCHY coat LANVIN shoes MANOLO BLAHNIK Right: Hussein wears roll-neck and trousers DIOR shirt LUKE DERRICK

Left: Yasin wears shirt, tie and blazer BURBERRY Right: Yasin wears shirt STYLIST’S OWN suit BERLUTI shoes MARTINE ROSE

Photography assistant Nicolás Ruivo Digital operator Dan Douglas Models Yasin Mohammed at Etow and Hussein Abdulrahman and Jameel Hussey at The Squad Styling assistants Avery Krafka and Christelyn Batalla Hair Jose Quijano Hair assistant Joel Phillips Makeup Jimmy Owens at D&V Management Set design Charlie Spike Casting direction George Raymond Stead Producer Allison Petillot

STYLING ROSE FORDE

Remain in Light

PHOTOGRAPHY PICZO

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Previous spread: Ottawa wears coat, knit and trousers BRIONI Nick wears top BRIONI coat and trousers HERMÈS Benjamin wears top BRIONI coat and trousers HERMÈS Opposite: Nick wears blazer, shirt, tie and trousers SALVATORE FERRAGAMO socks FALKE coat and shoes GIORGIO ARMANI Above: Nick wears coat and shirt ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

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Above: Ottawa wears shirt and tie MARGARET HOWELL coat, trousers and shoes PRADA socks LONDON SOCK COMPANY 290

Opposite: Ottawa wears blazer and trousers GUCCI

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

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Ottawa wears blazer, shirt and trousers BERLUTI

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Above: Benjamin wears coat, knit and trousers FENDI socks FALKE shoes SANTONI Nick wears top and trousers FENDI socks FALKE shoes SANTONI sunglasses OLIVER PEOPLES 294

Opposite: Nick wears coat, shirt and trousers LOUIS VUITTON

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Above: Nick wears coat and knit DIOR Benjamin wears jacket DIOR shirt MARGARET HOWELL 296

Opposite: Ottawa wears coat, shirt, trousers and shoes SAINT LAURENT

Benjamin wears jacket, shirt and trousers CELINE shoes SAINT LAURENT socks LONDON SOCK COMPANY

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Above: Nick wears coat BOTTEGA VENETA shirt and tie MARGARET HOWELL

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Opposite: Nick wears coat, blazer and trousers HUGO BOSS shoes GIORGIO ARMANI socks FALKE Ottawa wears jacket, knit, trousers and shoes HUGO BOSS socks LONDON SOCK COMPANY Benjamin wears jacket, shirt and trousers HUGO BOSS

Production and casting Gracie Yabsley at LG Studio On-set production Cami Lewis Styling assistants Sophie Tann and AurĂŠlie Mason-Perez Hair and makeup Hiroshi Matsushita using Bumble & Bumble Models Nick Fortna and Benjamin Lessore at SUPA Model Management, Ottawa Kwami at Wilhelmina

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STOCKiSTS

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RADO RALPH LAUREN ROLEX SAINT LAURENT SALVATORE FERRAGAMO SEIKO TAG HEUER TOD'S TUDOR ULYSSE NARDIN VACHERON CONSTANTIN VIU EYEWEAR ZENITH

rado.com ralphlauren.co.uk rolex.com ysl.com ferragamo.com seikowatches.com tagheuer.com tods.com tudorwatch.com ulysse-nardin.com vacheron-constantin.com shopviu.com zenith-watches.com

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HOTelS ClUBS 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 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

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 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

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 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

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THiNGS I LiKE / THiNGS I DiSLIKE

Susan Sontag’s diaries reveal a witty fondness for the humble list, as a way of conferring value and exploiting the realms of her knowledge. Her lists of likes and dislikes have become justly notorious. Here AM Homes picks up that baton

Like

Being absurd/silly/Talking in bad accents/ Schubert’s ‘Trout’/A picnic dinner at home/Drinking alone/Laughing, ideally with others – not at them/ Landscapes/Train travel/Jeanette Winterson/ Ladybugs/Bach/Rachel Whiteread/Susan Sontag’s ego/Time travel/Dogs/Paris/Howard Hodgkin/Collecting strange items/Other people’s stupid conversations/Ironed sheets/Babies/ Cake of almost every kind/Leonard Cohen/Mark Rothko/Pens/Patti Smith/Paper/Jimi Hendrix/ Typewriters/Saying good morning to strangers/ Adventure/A good cry/Watching animal videos/Ice water/Aperol spritz/Olives/Cheese and crackers/ Daydreaming while looking out of windows/Walking in Paris/Walking on the moon – in my dreams/ Sylvia Whitman and David Delannet, owners of Shakespeare & Co, in Paris/Going to a lecture on a subject I know nothing about/The warmth of LPs – especially with a couple of clicks and scratches/ The resonance of wood instruments/The sound of a cello/The Who/Marriage/Glenn Gould/Joy/ Blue M&Ms/The sound of a vacuum cleaner in the room next door/The wind in the trees, rain on the roof, thunderstorms/Margaret Atwood/The sound of my mother laughing, the lists my father used to make, the respect my grandmother taught me/Joyce Carol Oates/Wandering/Blondie/Nina Simone/ Scones and jam/Rachel Maddow/Libraries’ wood panelling/Cheese sandwiches/History/Art/The smell of my uncle Irwin’s cigars, and my auntie Carol’s accent/voice/My grandmother and her many brothers and sisters all at the same table arguing/ The power of images/Joan Didion/Pictures my child makes/The smell of Katherine’s neck/The ACLU/Poems my child writes/The power of nature/ The power of nurture/The fact that one does not exist without the other/Greta Thunberg/The feel of turning a page/Flea markets/Finding what I’ve been searching for/Bearing witness/The ocean/ Lakes/Mountains/Walking in the autumn leaves/ Meditating in a group/Being a passenger/Inspiring others/Anonymous acts of kindness.

Dislike

The inevitability of so many things/Fatigue/ Misplacing my phone daily/Losing a sock/Leaving something behind in a hotel/The smell of urine on the streets of NYC/Stepping in shit, whether literal or metaphorical/Things that are inanimate and yet seem to desire to kill me: slick marble floors, uneven sidewalks, potholes/Rough sheets/Dirty bathrooms/The smell of cigarette smoke/Being called Amy, I really do go by AM/Vacations – too stressful/Spelling – dyslexic/Security checkpoints/ Immigration agents who believe they rule the world with their rubber stamper/Men with guns with no sense of humour/Men with guns in general/The moral failure of the US Republican Party/The lack of action within the US Democratic Party/Facebook posts where people have updated their profile picture/Self-absorption/That anyone thought Brexit would be good for the people of England/ The phrase “Out of an abundance of caution”/ Navel-gazing in the absence of action/Avoidance in myself or others/The flush of fear-stomach drop/ The arrogance of youth/The invisibility of middle age/Not having enough time to think, to write, to ponder/Not having enough money to think, to write, to ponder/The sensation of tripping and falling/Physical pain/Exercise/The 24-hour news cycle that just repeats itself every 20 minutes/ Aggressive people/Hostility/Ego/The posting of rude comments online – trolling/Poisonous plants/ Anything that causes itching/Panic attacks/ Anything that restrains me/Any person who clings too tightly – except children/Shellfish/Hierarchy/ The idea of eating an octopus/Those who fail to take action to improve the lives of others/The blankfaced, searing white glow of a computer screen.