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THE MUSIC THAT MATTERS STARRING JESS GLYNNE// THE LA ARTS DISTRICT// A COLLECTION OF PEOPLE.PLACES. THINGS// TINDER: MODERN DATE CULTURE//

THE GOAT TRIBUTE

July 2016

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Creative Circle // angelobuelva.com 2 hello sweetie / July 2016

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7 Note from the Editor THE BRIEF ON THE UNCANNY

9 5th people.places.things STORIES // TIPS // TRICKS // INTERESTING THINGS

14 Products MUST HAVES

17 Frontice

HOW TO FEEL WHAT WE FEEL

19 Falling for Pharrell AN INTERVIEW WITH PHARRELL WILLIAMS

30 Arts District EXPLORING THE LA ARTS DISTRICT

38 Jess Glynne

SINGER/SONGWRITER GETS INTIMATE

46 The G.O.A.T. ICON MUHAMMAD ALI REMEMBERED

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR Stick Around, i like you PUBLISHED BY BUELVA MEDIA EDITED AND PRODUCED

BY CREATIVE CIRCLE CREATIVE CIRCLE INC CCAB 16 2600 AVOCADO NEWPORT BEACH, CA ANGELOBUELVA.COM CREATIVE DIRECTOR ANGELO BUELVA

“You will be shocked kids, when you discover how easy it is in life to part ways with people forever. That’s why, when you find someone you want to keep around, you do something about it.” ~Ted Mosby, How I Met Your Mother No better words have been uttered in the history of human kind...Well maybe there has, but this is so relevant in our day and age. Social media keeps us connected but also separates us further than we have ever been. How ironic it is that people can feel so connected to others virtually, but in real life barely even say hello to one another.

This magazine is a labor of love that aims to connect people physically through fashion, social events, relationships, and entertainment. I love the concept of going off-line and building real substantial relationships with like minded people. Behind the scenes of the print world are passionate loving people who are some of the best designers, writers, producers, artists, and humans you can find.

EDITOR BIG BIRD ART DIRECTOR BERT ASSISTANT DIRECTOR ERNIE ASSISTANT EDITOR OSCAR THE GROUCH EDITORS AT LARGE COUNT VON COUNT KERMIT THE FROG DESIGNER MR. SNUFFLEUPAGUS PHOTO EDITOR TWO-HEADED MONSTER PRODUCTION DIRECTOR ABBY CADABBY PRODUCTION COORDINATOR GROVER

Angelo Buelva EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

PROJECT DIRECTOR STINKY PROJECT MANAGER HOOTS THE OWL

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people.places.things John

“Faahz” Merchant

Faahz is a community organizer, voice over actor and beatbox musician based out of Los Angeles, CA.

Photograph by

Alexi Nee

John “Faahz” Merchant is a long time connoisseur of music. From the age of 8 on he fell in love with Hip-Hop and R&B. In addition to a budding beatbox career he is also an oscar nominated voice over actor for recent blockbuster hits such as Inside

Out and Anomalisa. “For as long as I can remember music has always been my savior and redeemer,” Faahz admits that music is not always easy for him, but has always been there for him. He gets inspiration from things in his daily life such his family, faith, and writing. You can find more information about Faahz and his upcoming shows on his website at faahzmusic.com.

• ANGELO BUELVA

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people.places.things Before you go out check your pulse. Make sure all

your vitals are good so you can go big or go home.

Our fashion guru Ezekiel has the perfect selection of clothing to ensure your vitals are good before you head out the door. From head to toe Ezekiel is in the know. denim.com/vitals

Value Village, a Savers brand, is a for-profit, global thrift retailer offering great quality, gently used clothing, accessories and household goods.

Our business model of purchasing, reselling and recycling gives communities a smart way to shop and keeps more than 650 million pounds of used goods from landfills each year.

Takashi Murakami “In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rianbow” 2014

From LACMA to the Broad, from the Getty to the Huntington Library...Affordable date night ideas that will leave women weak in the knees. The Broad is the newest contemporary

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art museum in LA and is absolutely free. For more date night ideas check us out.

denim.com/artnights Robert Irwin “Miracle Mile” 2013

Street Photographer Ipsanitas captures a day on the tracks.

In essence, street photography is a type of candid photography done in a public place, be it a street, a restaurant or even public transport. It is similar in approach to photojournalism and mostly involves people (and/or animals) in a populated environment (which provides the context of a story told), such as a city. However, street photographers often focus on everyday lives of strangers rather than some kind of important event photojournalists are more interested in. Usually, street photographers try as much as possible to stay unnoticed when photographing. The goal of street photography is to capture scenes unaffected by the author of the work so as to show a natural story and subject.

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people.places.things ERIC KIM

The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide for Street Photography •

If you are a beginner in street photography, all you need is this guide to get started. I was quite frustrated when I started street photography. I had no idea what camera to use, what settings to use, what to look for, how to approach strangers, and most of all– how to overcome my fear of shooting in the streets.

All of the information in this guide are my opinion and isn’t the only “right” way to shoot street photography. But I hope it is a good starting point. Take everything with a pinch of salt– take what you want, and leave the rest.

The first question you might be thinking is: “What is street photography?”

Simply put, street photography is about documenting everyday life and society. I personally don’t think street photography needs to be shot in the street. You can shoot at the airport, at the mall, at the beach, at the park, in the bus or subway, in the doctor’s office, in the grocery store, or in any other public places.

Furthermore, street photography is generally done candidly (without permission and without knowledge of your subjects). However I personally don’t think that street photography has to be candid. You can ask for permission when taking a photograph of a stranger. I don’t think just because a photo is candid makes it any better than a photo with permission. The most important thing in street photography is to capture emotion, humanity, and soul.

Therefore if you are drawn to taking photos in public (of mostly people) you are probably interested in street photography. Also as a side-note, I don’t think that street photography has to include people in it (although the best ones generally do have people in it).

So don’t worry so much about what “street photography” is and isn’t. The most important thing at the end of the day is creating powerful, compelling, and emotional images.

For some of my more in-depth thoughts about the definition of street photography, you can read my article: “What is Street Photography?”

• ANGELO BUELVA 12 hello sweetie / July 2016

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER LINDBERGH FOR hello sweetie MAGAZINE; STYLING BY CLARE RICHARDSON

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s dusk begins to paint a warm summer day in pinks and oranges, Pharrell Williams arrives at a studio in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley whose atmosphere seems entirely consistent with the mystical calm of a man who has lately seemed to float into public appearances on a lotus flower. In a courtyard behind a pair of tall, ivy-framed wooden doors, a mossy fountain babbles and blue jacaranda blossoms pool on the flagstones. Just inside the studio itself, beneath a plaque certifying the multiplatinum status of Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad, a celadon Buddha presides over a couple of music technicians watching a 20 hello sweetie / July 2016

football game and eating M&Ms. One of them uses his knees to squeeze a pillow embroidered with the words “You Have Free Will.” Down the hall, perfectly insulated, Snoop Dogg toys with rhythms for a new track.

Pharrell arrives late. A crew from NBA 2K, the hugely popular basketball video game, has already assembled on a freshly built set, where Pharrell’s avatar will be generated by 68 cameras aimed simultaneously at his head. As if prepping for an MRI, he is asked to remove all metal objects from his person, including several Chanel necklaces whose costume jewels he has replaced with large pearls and jade beads, as well as a set of gold tooth caps he commissioned from a Brooklyn jeweler named Gabby.

(All members of Pharrell’s retinue wear these discreet grills on the sides of their mouths. “It makes us feel like a tribe,” explains his wife, Helen Lasichanh, who also wears a camouflage jacket and shorts embellished with little yellow ducks, by the designer Mark McNairy, and oversize houndstooth stockings.)

Pharrell sits down, and the director guides him through a sequence of facial expressions: Pucker your mouth as if saying Wednesday; wrinkle your nose like a rabbit; squint as though you’re in an old western; glare as if you’re ready for a fight; grin, gape, scrunch, snarl, smirk. Finally, he asks Pharrell for sorrow, and the musician

responds by lowering his eyelids and letting his jaw slacken. There are no hyperbolized frowns or lavish sobs. “Now, that is the best sorrow I’ve seen in a long time,” the director declares. “Most people can’t do sorrow like that.”

A wry smile suggests that the irony is not lost on Pharrell, the 41-year-old singer, songwriter, producer, fashion designer, art collector, philanthropist and, starting this month, coach on NBC’s The Voice, who ascended to superstardom this year on a campaign of universal happiness.

Indeed, 2014 has been a sort of sustained coronation. It began at the Grammy Awards in January, where Pharrell won in four categories, including producer of the year, and where he donned a giant, dimpled hat that became the season’s most contemplated item of haberdashery. It reached its peak when the song “Happy”— penned for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack and repurposed as the first single off his solo album G I R L—topped the charts in 25 countries. In the United States, the single sold more copies in the first half of the year than any song has ever sold in the first half of any year in digital history.

To coincide with the release of “Happy,” Pharrell launched a website called 24hoursofhappy. com, which billed itself as “the world’s first 24-hour music video.” Shot on Steadicam in Los Angeles, it captures one person after another dancing with abandon to the song, whose four

“ IT TOOK ME A MINUTE TO FIND MY PURPOSE; I KNEW SOMETHING WAS MISSING. NOW I WANT TO MAKE MUSIC WITH SOMETHING EXTRA TO IT. I WANT TO MAKE IT FEEL GOOD. ” —Pharrell 21

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minutes are looped 360 times to cover every moment of the day.

The video, a collage of jubilant but also touchingly intimate testimonies to the leveling power of music, unleashed a worldwide phenomenon: Thousands of cover videos appeared across the globe, each one uploaded to YouTube under the name of the city in which it was made.

In May of this year, six young Iranian “Happy” dancers were jailed for their video, which Tehran’s chief of police deemed an affront to traditional codes of behavior. Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, stepped in via Twitter. “#Happiness is our people’s right,” he tweeted. “We shouldn’t be too hard on behavior caused by joy.” When Oprah Winfrey interviewed Pharrell and invited him to view a series of the tribute videos, from Slovakia, Detroit, Malawi, the Philippines and elsewhere, he sat on his stool across from her and wept.

“That was heavy,” Pharrell says of the Oprah moment. We are seated in the studio’s courtyard, and Pharrell wears a yellow leather jacket from the line he designed for Adidas (the first few pieces appear in stores this fall), as well as a one-off carbon-fiber fedora that Adidas deemed too expensive to produce. His jeans, barely suspended by a gray patent-leather Chanel belt, reveal a pair of boxers by A Bathing Ape, the Japanese line he favors, and his Ugg boots come from a limited-edition Comme des Garçons collaboration. (Pharrell calls these his “trust-fund hippie shoes.”) “I think I was just feeling really humbled,” he continues.

“People hoisted my music to a place it had never been before.

It’s like, life is a mosaic, and my song is one little piece. All those other pieces are all those people’s reactions to it.”

Pharrell’s conversation occasionally veers into runic New Age–speak, though it embarrasses him to have this pointed out. His comments have the tidy, affirmative style of a 23

life coach: “Go inward, so that you can go onward and then upward,” he says. At other times they sound like echoes of an ayahuasca trip: “The movie of life is a kaleidoscopic time lapse of co-creation.”

It’s tempting to regard all this as a deft obfuscation, a clever way to keep his personal life out of view. And yet Pharrell glimmers with something like a sense of enlightenment. “It took me a minute to find my purpose,” he says. “I knew something was missing, and then I realized, OK, you’re able to make music; now you have to inject purpose.

I want to make music with something extra to it—a holistic property. I want to make it feel good. I’m not the only one doing this. Kendrick Lamar’s music feels amazing. Adele’s music feels amazing. Alicia [Keys]’s new album feels amazing. The distinction between sounding amazing and feeling amazing— that’s the thing. People, I think, are looking for a feeling.”

With its references to Roy Ayers and Curtis Mayfield, “Happy” tunes in to the moment when ‘70s soul-funk basked in gentle rhythms, twinkling sonic effects and pronouncements of peace and love, when a record player could serve as a refuge from the dangerous American cities of the day. If Pharrell has found the perfect pop-music expression for this era, it’s partly because he is swimming against dark countercurrents. He is a kind of anti– Kanye West, a man who doesn’t spend the bulk of his time—to borrow the title of Pharrell’s debut single as a solo artist in 2003—frontin’.

Pharrell concedes that fatherhood—he and Helen have a five-year-old son, Rocket—may have softened the sharp edges.

But he believes that he has been the beneficiary of a larger movement. “I just think the world felt cold for a second,” he explains, “and we were making music that was callous. The Internet is responsible for all this 24 hello sweetie / July 2016

connectedness, but bad news travels faster than good. People were inundated with tragedy and travesty, and then it was like, what are we so mad about?”

Music dominates Pharrell’s memories of Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he grew up. His mother, Carolyn, a schoolteacher, and his father, Pharaoh, a handyman, listened to a lot of Earth, Wind & Fire and the Spinners. His aunt, who lived nearby, favored the psychedelic soul of Parliament and the 5th Dimension. Later, when his family moved to the suburbs, he heard Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. “Music was ubiquitous,” he recalls. “It was so thick, you could cut it in the air. The songs with the crazy chord changes, which I would always associate with certain colors, were the ones that would keep my attention.”

Pharrell bought records for 10 cents at local thrift stores, unaware that he was on a strict diet of classics. He used to take a whisk from the kitchen, line up the pillows on the sofa and pretend he was a drummer. When he was 12, his grandmother bought him a snare drum and suggested he take lessons.

He developed quickly as a musician, and in his school’s marching band he met a talented Filipino-American saxophone player named Chad Hugo. Both he and Hugo were tapped to participate in a summer program for gifted musicians, where they played in a jazz band together.

“From there,” Pharrell says, “we started experimenting with trying to make our own tracks, using these cheap Casio keyboards and tape recorders, whatever we could get our hands on. It was always gratifying to hear it back.

Still, to this day, when you make something and it feels good, it’s an endorphin release.” Pharrell and Chad called themselves the Neptunes.

He remembers hearing A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum,” off the band’s 1990 debut album, People’s Instinctive Travels and

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“It was like the whole song was the sweet spot of a song, which I didn’t know at the time was called a bridge. It’s the dreamiest, trancy-est record ever.

It’s hip-hop, it’s jazz, it’s meditative, it’s like a Jeff Koons sculpture in the sense that it’s alchemical.

It turns nothing into something.”

Pharrell Williams appears on the cover of D Magazine’s July issue on men’s style. Dior Homme jacket, $4,100, waistcoat, $2,300, and shirt, $660, all diorhomme.com

the Paths of Rhythm, around that time. “That song changed me,” Pharrell explains. “It was like the whole song was the sweet spot of a song, which I didn’t know at the time was called a bridge. It’s the dreamiest, trancy-est record ever. It’s hip-hop, it’s jazz, it’s meditative, it’s like a Jeff Koons sculpture in the sense that it’s alchemical. It turns nothing into something.”

It happened that Teddy Riley, the hip-hop producer who pioneered the style known as New Jack Swing, had a studio next door to Princess Anne High School, where Pharrell was a student. Riley discovered the Neptunes at a high school talent show and signed them upon graduation. They soon established themselves as a production duo, first for hip-hop acts like Noreaga and Busta Rhymes, and then, as their reputation grew, for pop stars such as Britney Spears, whose “I’m a Slave 4 U” became their first worldwide hit, in 2001.

Others followed, and by the summer of 2003, according to one survey, more than 40 percent of all songs played on American radio were Neptunes productions.

The term backpacker, which Pharrell has often used to describe himself, initially referred to the 1980s graffiti artists who carried their rattle cans, markers, spray tips and underground hip-hop cassette tapes in large backpacks. The term then came to describe, often derogatorily, someone who listened exclusively to the nerd-rap subgenre of hip-hop; this person was likely to be a white suburban kid who bristled at the gangsta rap of Dr. Dre and the Notorious B.I.G. Pharrell confesses that when the Neptunes started making millions, he disavowed his backpacker origins in favor of the Cristal-swilling style of the most successful rappers of the time— though with his own wonkish spin: an 18-karat-gold Blackberry and a diamond-encrusted Rubik’s Cube, for example. He suspects that the failure of his first solo

album, in 2006, may have been the result of fans’ recognition that all the bluster was inauthentic.

“I think when I put out my first solo album, the music was just eclipsed by all the braggadocio,” he says. “That was me feeling like I had to be like Jay or Puff. I didn’t realize that that was their story—the story of the struggle to will your way out of where you’re from, to cash in on that, first for yourself, then for other people. But I didn’t see that. All I saw was the planes, the cars, the girls—the ornaments but not the tree they were hanging on. I was making music with and for Jay-Z and Puff, but I was a weirdo in that world. We had A Tribe Called Quest, we had the Fugees, but it seemed like those other guys were running things.”

Though Pharrell the producer has often said that he is happy to be “the guy next to the guy”—the man behind the curtain of an Oz more splendid than himself—by the time he wore his famous hat to the Grammy Awards, it was clear that hip-hop had a new sheriff. He finds it awkward, he says, to discuss the hat and the jewelry and fashion generally, despite the obvious seriousness he brings to the enterprise. “It embarrasses me a bit to be a figure in fashion,” he says. “I think everyone is interested in what they put on, even if you dress conservatively. Whatever you’re trying to mask, the mask itself says something about your personality.” So what does the hat say about him? “Give Vivienne Westwood the accolade,” he protests. “I bought it in London years ago. I just liked it.

I’m as surprised as anybody else that it became a thing.”

But with the hat’s Seussian proportions, Pharrell seemed to be playing with an idea that has fascinated him for a long time—that of the man with the enthusiasms of a boy, a hip-hop Peter Pan whizzing through a world of men preoccupied with the codes of adult sophistication.

This spring he curated an art 27

exhibit in Toronto called This Is Not a Toy, the subject of which was toys for grown-ups. He loaned several canvases from his own collection of works

by KAWS, a New Jersey–born graffiti artist, painter and toy designer, including large paintings of the Smurfs and SpongeBob SquarePants that hang in his exuberant Miami apartment.

(Other furnishings: a fiberglass monkey riding a horse and a life-size facsimile of Agent Smith from The Matrix.) Pharrell recently put the apartment on the market; his family has spent most of the past two years in hotel rooms, and he wants to find a place with a yard for Rocket.

But the hat proves what the art has long argued—that there is room in hip-hop for lightness.

Gwen Stefani, who also joins The Voice this season as a coach, did not realize the extent of Pharrell’s fame until her “Happy”-obsessed eight-year-old son, Kingston, told her that he wanted to be in his next video.

The artists first met years ago, when Stefani’s band, No Doubt, hired Pharrell to collaborate on the song “Hella Good.” “He does something so rare, which is hiphop with an injection of rock,” she explains. “But it’s not aggressive.

It all seems driven from this positive place. He just doesn’t go negative. We have a sort of unspoken connection in that we both love Japan and Japanese style and culture and fashion.

And I think we also have this nerd connection.”

A few weeks later, on Stage 12 in the Universal Studios lot, Pharrell assumes the red-vinyl coach’s seat previously occupied

by CeeLo Green (the artist who, coincidentally, took an original crack at “Happy” before studio execs encouraged Pharrell to record it himself). The Voice is in the middle of season seven’s blind auditions, in which the four coaches— Adam Levine, Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani and Pharrell—are to choose teams, their backs turned away from 28 hello sweetie / July 2016

the contestants as they perform.

The set suggests the interior of a spaceship: Rings of colored lights wrap around the discoid space, and the walls glitter with stars.

Pharrell hears a voice he likes, slams his buzzer and swivels round. He reacts immediately to the young man’s style. “You have tattoos,” Pharrell says, “but you also have glasses.” A familiar type, in other words: a nerd with an edge.

At a time when critics have augured the demise of televised singing contests, and when

judges’ (or coaches’) panels offer a lifeline to necrotic music careers, landing a star of Pharrell’s caliber seems like a coup for NBC. “You want to know why I’m doing this,” he says, as if to preempt any skepticism.

“Producing is what I do every day, talking to people about what they want in their track, giving them advice about what sounds good juxtaposed with their voice and their style. That’s what I’ll be doing on the show, but it’s a huge platform, and it’s about paying it forward. The universe

has been good to me, so it’s like, ‘What can I share with you guys?’

I’m hoping that some person in Iowa can take some of my advice, internalize it and go and be bigger than all of us put together.”

For the moment, there are few juggernauts quite like Pharrell himself. Beyond the music, television and video games is a media empire that includes a pair of clothing lines—Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream, its sister brand. The Adidas collaboration is one of many. Pharrell owns a company called Bionic Yarn that

turns plastics into textiles, and he is curating a line of clothing made from the fiber for the denim brand G-Star Raw. This month, Comme des Garçons will release a fragrance composed

by Pharrell called GIRL, a name that conveniently ties in with his latest album.

Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçon’s founder and designer, is one of Pharrell’s idols, and she inhabits a pantheon that includes Koons, Walt Disney, Coco Chanel, Takashi Murakami and Stevie Wonder—artists

united by a rigorous utopianism, if little else. “These are people,” Pharrell explains, “who had epiphanies and then did something with them. As I see it, you can live two ways. You can live life the way you always imagined it would play out, or you can try to make the thing you dream of making. If you choose the second, get ready for an amazing ride. That’s the ride I’m on.”

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The Arts District in downtown Los Angeles is chockablock with some of the best new dining, shopping and art-viewing in the city—and you can take it all in on foot

Written By: Margot Dougherty Photos: Liz Kuball

30 hello sweetie / July 2016

ARTISTS IN NEED of big spaces and cheap rents have a knack for colonizing neighborhoods the rest of us would run from. Soon enough, the artists’ collective cool rubs off on the place and developers arrive. The painters and sculptors may get priced out, but galleries pop up in their honor. The Arts District, aka the AD, a 50ish-block trapezoid in downtown Los Angeles, has followed this time-honored trajectory with aplomb.

After a slow percolation—a foodie restaurant here, a pricey mixeduse complex there—the zone came to a boil thanks largely to the nearby opening of the Broad Museum last September, which cemented downtown as the new center of the exploding L.A. art scene.

In March came the opening of the Hauser Wirth & Schimmel gallery, furthering the cause. Now the district is a full-blown destination with

a vibrant mix of art and grit, top-tier food and drink and boutiques-cumgalleries selling everything from cashmere knickers to leather settees.

Here are a handful of recommended spots; you’ll find loads more as you amble along—yes, walkable L.A. Keep your head up. Brick grandes dames and larger-thanlife murals rise high above the pavement.

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A+D Museum Dedicated to progressive architecture and design, A+D showcases a spectrum of disciplines. The current exhibit, “Come In! DTLA” exhibits the work of L.A. photographers, sculptors, graphic and industrial designers, as well as a shoemaker’s improbable but inspired takes on footwear. Through June 23. As of Now, a California-modern-boho home shop, is adjacent. 900 E. 4th St., aplusd.org

32 hello sweetie / July 2016

Angel City Brewery The first in downtown’s hopping brewery scene, Angel City is in a factory that once made steel cables—for the Brooklyn Bridge among others; a chute for spools remains. The true-to-its-roots interior and house-made suds— from lagers to a Srirachelada with serious heat—merge the old AD with the new. Craft flights, Ping-Pong, food trucks pulled up to the patio and community events (beer and yoga!) make it a brew hall for everyone. 216 S. Alameda, angelcitybrewery.com

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Zinc Cafe and Bar Mateo

On a recent visit, a labradoodle snoozed in a courtyard shaded with olive trees, and a kitten poked its head from a fashionable tote. Their bipeds dined on avocado toast with poached eggs and quinoa capellini. Inside are more tables

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and a shop selling perfect little everythings—olive-wood cheese spreaders to Ottolenghi cookbooks. Bar Mateo, a warm nook in the rear of the courtyard, serves Bloody Marys made with roasted garlic. 580 Mateo St.

Blacktop Coffee

This tiny affair offers a succinct menu of brews served in artisanalstyle cups.

Hang out on a tree-stump seat outside and watch the comings and goings at HW&S across the way. If the Salt & Straw ice cream truck is parked outside, indulge in a DIY affogato moment. 826 E. 3rd St., blacktop.la

Hauser Wirth and Schimmel // Manuela A new outpost from the blue-chip gallery, the 116,000 square-foot HW&S occupies the turn-of-thecentury Globe Mills complex and was the tipping point in the AD’s renaissance. Along with the soaring main gallery, the premises include three more exhibition spaces, two book shops and a large courtyard.

A restaurant, Manuela, debuts this fall. The inaugural show, abstract sculpture by women, features works by Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson. Through September 4. 901 E. 3rd St. 35

Alchemy Works

Why waste travel time when you can snag a vintage Porsche, Warby Parker frames, a diminutive potted cactus and a Clare V. wallet with just a few standing pivots in this new-breed boutique?

Co-owner Raan Parton also owns men’s clothing and accessories store Apolis, a few doors down, with his brother, Shea Parton, where their global advocacy and environmental concerns are woven into the casual-cool aesthetic. 826 E. 3rd St., alchemyworks.us

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Exterior of Alchemy Works & Blacktop Coffee 37

Jess Glynne: ‘I don’t know what I want now — to be with a guy, with a girl, be with anyone’

by CRAIG MCLEAN 38 hello sweetie / July 2016

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ess Glynne is weary. She’s dressed down in ripped jeans and a bomber jacket, her copper curls are piled on top of her head and her freckled face is pale and makeup-free. Having just returned from California, where she was performing at Coachella, she’s still jet-lagged and is slugging coffee. She spent the small hours in her new flat in Stoke Newington watching YouTube interviews with Amy Winehouse, her curiosity piqued by the trailer for upcoming documentary Amy: ‘I saw that a month ago and I literally had tears streaming down my face.’

Glynne counts Winehouse as a major influence. When she was in her early teens, Glynne’s parents returned from an evening in Soho with a signed copy of the late singer’s debut album Frank, having watched her perform. ‘She was such an important figure in me getting to where I am. She really, really inspired me.’

Like Winehouse, Glynne is Jewish and grew up in North London: Glynne, 25, in Muswell Hill; Winehouse, six years her senior, in Southgate. Both are known for their powerful, soulful voices and their songs share a certain tough-but-vulnerable rawness. And both went through the relationship mill — more of which later.

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‘Although, to begin with, when she first came out, I thought: “I’m f***ed — another North London Jew with similar influences,” ’ says Glynne.

She needn’t have worried. You might not recognise her face (yet) but you’ll almost certainly know the throaty timbre of her voice. In the past 12 months she’s repeatedly topped the charts thanks to a string of hit collaborations, including ‘My Love’, with house producer Route 94, and ‘Real Love’ and ‘Rather Be’ with classical-dance quartet Clean Bandit. The last, 42 hello sweetie / July 2016

released in January 2014, was one of the fastest-selling singles of the year, soundtracked an M&S food-porn ad and was named Best Dance Recording at the Grammys this Feb-ruary.

Glynne celebrated in style: ‘We ended up at Sam Smith’s party, at his house in the Hollywood Hills. It was hilarious. Everyone was there, and everyone was drinking — Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Rita [Ora]…’

She’s not about to spill any party secrets, but suffice to say it was ‘a great night. A big night.’

Now she’s set to be the sound

of the summer. The upbeat floor-filler ‘Hold My Hand’ (her second solo single; the first was the top-ten charting ‘Right Here’, released last June) debuted at number one when it was released in March: expect to see her on festival stages across the country, from Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Norwich this month to V Festival in August, via New Look Wireless in Finsbury Park in July.

It would be easy to assume success has come easily — not least because her mother used to work in A&R for Atlantic Records (her father is an estate agent). In fact, it’s been a long, hard slog.

As a child she sat in her bedroom listening to Whitney Houston, then recording herself singing the songs, but at her comprehensive school, Fortismere in Muswell Hill, attempts to try out for anything music-related were unsuccessful. Aged 15, she applied for The X Factor, but was rejected.

After leaving school, she spent six months travelling, then drifted through a variety of jobs, including a stint at the Finchley branch of LA Fitness, and sales work at Topman in Brent Cross.

There was also, she says, ‘a moment, a party year’, which

occurred soon after returning from her travels. ‘I didn’t know where I was going. I needed some sort of structure in my life.’

Too anxious to take drugs (‘I’m scared that I’ll die’), she turned to alcohol. ‘[I] literally fell into a block of… lostness. You just binge…’ Eventually, she sought help from a psychotherapist, who, she says, ‘mentally got me in a place where I felt I could map my life out’.

It would be easy to assume success has come easily — not least because her mother used to work in A&R for Atlantic Records (her father is an estate agent). In fact, it’s been a long, hard slog.

As a child she sat in her bedroom listening to Whitney Houston, then recording herself singing the songs, but at her comprehensive school, Fortismere in Muswell Hill, attempts to try out for anything music-related were unsuccessful. Aged 15, she applied for The X Factor, but was rejected.

After leaving school, she spent six months travelling, then drifted through a variety of jobs, including a stint at the Finchley branch of LA Fitness, and sales work at Topman in Brent Cross.

There was also, she says, ‘a moment, a party year’, which occurred soon after returning from her travels. ‘I didn’t know where I was going. I needed some sort of structure in my life.’

Too anxious to take drugs (‘I’m scared that I’ll die’), she turned to alcohol. ‘[I] literally fell into a block of… lostness. You just binge…’ Eventually, she sought help from a psychotherapist, who, she says, ‘mentally got me in a place where I felt I could map my life out’.

The confusion and heartbreak inspired much of her writing.

She says her song ‘Don’t Be

So Hard’ describes her state of mind ‘at the beginning, when I started doing everything’.

It was a bittersweet moment — professionally exciting, personally tumultuous. ‘The first lyrics are: “I came here with a broken heart that no one else could see/I drew a smile on my face to paper over me…” That’s literally what happened.’

Still, for all the angst, her album is far from a woe-is-me confessional. Instead, it mixes the house-flavoured pop with

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which Glynne made her name with reflective moments of songcraft. A standout track is ‘Saddest Vanilla’, written with Emeli Sandé and produced by Naughty Boy. ‘That was one of my favourite sessions. The three of us went out for food and were just talking for hours about life.

She’s a really lovely girl. We were talking about growing up and school and bullies, and what we both went through…’ While Sandé was picked on for the colour of her skin in the Scottish Highlands, Glynne had the mickey taken for the colour of her hair. ‘Emeli and I were both these people who were a bit odd... I wasn’t really bullied as much, but I had that segregation — people trying to make you feel a bit different.’ The song — a lush, thoughtful ballad — was inspired by their shared memories of being the only one sitting alone in a school dinner hall: ‘We thought of that person sitting there with their ice cream or cake, crying.’

Celebrity friends, a string of hits, high-level collaborations…

It would be easy for success to go to Glynne’s head. But she still seems to view it all with wide-eyed glee, excitably recounting tales of nights out.

After the Brits, she tells me, she attended the Warner Music party at Freemasons’ Hall in Covent Garden, at which Ed Sheeran was photographed looking more than a little the worse for wear. He’d been celebrating with Glynne. ‘I was saying to him, “You need to stop drinking — seriously!” And he was like, “Ahhh… no…” The next day, she had a photo shoot: ‘I did turn up to that photo shoot feeling really rough, and I felt so guilty!’ she says.

She’s been asking her newfound industry friends for advice

on how to stay grounded.

‘Emeli was amazing to talk to. She really helped me see a different perspective. She’s obviously gone through a lot,’ she says of the singer whose own debut-album success story was followed by divorce.

Sheeran is another confidant, as is Sam Smith who she recently messaged, asking: ‘Dude, seriously, how do you do it?’

She laughs at her flashes of insecurity. ‘You’re like, “Everyone else is fine… and I’m sitting here having a panic attack!” But you talk to them and we all go through it. I wake up every day doing something completely different from the last.’ Which is not to say she’d have it any other way. As she acknowledges, success is ‘a great problem’ to have. ‘It’s not an easy life to live but I would never change it.’

"That was one of my favourite sessions.

The three of us went out for food and were just talking for hours about life."

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ON TO THE NEXT “Tinder sucks,” they say.

But they don’t stop swiping.

It’s a balmy night in Manhattan’s financial district, and at a sports bar called Stout, everyone is Tindering. The tables are filled with young women and men who’ve been chasing money and deals on Wall Street all day, and now they’re out looking for hookups. Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening. Or not. “Ew, this guy has Dad bod,” a young woman says of a potential match, swiping left. Her friends smirk, not looking up.

At a booth in the back, three handsome twentysomething guys in button-downs are having beers. They are Dan, Alex, and Marty, budding investment bankers at the same financial firm, which recruited Alex and Marty straight from an Ivy League campus. (Names and some identifying details have been changed for this story.) When asked if they’ve been arranging dates on the apps they’ve been swiping at, all say not one date, but two or three: “You can’t be stuck in one lane …

There’s always something better.” “If you had a reservation somewhere and then a table at Per Se opened up, you’d want to go there,” Alex offers.At a booth in the back, three handsome twentysomething guys in buttondowns are having beers. They are Dan, Alex, and Marty, budding investment bankers at the same financial firm, which recruited Alex and Marty straight from an Ivy League campus. (Names and some identifying details have been changed for this story.)

When asked if they’ve been arranging dates on the apps they’ve been swiping at, all say not one date, but two or three: “You can’t

be stuck in one lane … There’s always something better.” “If you had a reservation somewhere and then a table at Per Se opened up, you’d want to go there,” Alex offers.

“Guys view everything as a competition,” he elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice.

“Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”

He says that he himself has slept with five different women he met on Tinder— “Tinderellas,” the guys call them—in the last eight days. Dan and Marty, also Alex’s roommates in a shiny high-rise apartment building near Wall Street, can vouch for that.

In fact, they can remember whom Alex has slept with in the past week more readily than he can.

“Brittany, Morgan, Amber,” Marty says, counting on his fingers. “Oh, and the Russian—Ukrainian?”

“Ukrainian,” Alex confirms. “She works at—” He says the name of a high-end art auction house. Asked what these women are like, he shrugs. “I could offer a résumé, but that’s about it…

To be continued hello sweetie August 2016 51