elias

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Passion•Pride•Unique

Twist and Shout 10 Years of the

Disney Hall Fornascetti

LA

Tunnel Vision to Bridge East to West?

The Art of the Fashion Plate


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They Call Him Junior

Letter to our editor Elias Mireles Jr. He talks about his passion for doll collecting.

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START: Food

Order dessert or a second glass of wine? You will be shocked by the answer.

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New York Schuman; the new hot drink everyone Is dying for!

Linda Aguirre not just another pretty face she has a voice & she’s not scared to use it!.

START: Drink

START: Pose

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Romantic old mexico, Olvera Street: Frstive, Culture and History.

This seanson’s most hotest items that will have you wanting more.

START: Scenic

Product

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Quia consendi officid que consentem hil minctot atissit laceritis prorecum

Quia consendi officid que consentem hil minctot atissit laceritis prorecum

Building With A Twist

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Joshua Christensen

Quia consendi officid que consentem hil minctot atissit laceritis prorecum

Through The Lens

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Raja Untucked

Seanson 3 winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race talks about life after the show.


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editor-in-chief elias mireles jr excutive editor yasmin perez features deputy editor sasha brockington beauty director cloe crisell fashion features editor jade shukur seinor editor stefani germanotta associate editor meygan lynch editorial assistant sutan amrull design art diector roxxanna melina perez co-art director sassyn jacobson associate editor jaden rice senior editor eitan perez photo photo director clyde carpenter bookings editor katia siegel fashion fashion director patrica gizelle perez market director dana hoffman men’s market editor alejandro sthal associate market and assesories editor raja gemini fashion assistant yas velgara style editor-at-large fernando smith publisher fianna jacques associate publisher nerva campisi fashion & retail director tessa jarrett beauty director shadi eddington intergrated account director rihanna darwin marketing director alicia fox marking manager trish stratus promotions and marketing designer amy dumas digital director adele garris web designer matthew de la garza web writer dylan vinett web editorial assistant cameron ung web programmer miles purdy glancemag.com

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They Call Him Junior

Elias Mireles Jr

Mostly every gay boy has played with a fashion doll in their life, whether it be the oh so popular Barbie™ or her rivals the Bratz™ doll. I started off playing with Barbie and over the years her look grow tired for me. Then one day I was watching TV and this commercial for the very controversial Bratz™ dolls came on. It was a 2005 commercial for their Treasures collection and I fell in love. I went to my little sisters room and told her about the dolls and that she should ask for them as a birthday gift, since her birthday was coming up. Mind you I come from a Hispanic family and a boy playing with dolls is not excepted so when every I wanted a doll I would ask my sister to get it. She did end in getting the dolls for her birthday and I was in heaven. From that day forward I ended up collecting the dolls. I started off with two dolls (well my sister did) and slowly they just started to multiply. I would save my money and ask my sister to buy them for me that’s basically how I slowly started to grow my collection. As I got older my collection started to grow way more. Sadly in 2008 the dolls got discontinued after they lost a very long court battle with Mattle™ (the creators of Barbie™) over copyrights. I still was able to get a few more dolls before they all got pulled off the shelves. My passion of collecting the big lip, eyed and head dolls was stopped. But two years after in 2010 the court overturned the ruling and gave all the rights back to MGA the rightful creators of the Bratz™ dolls. I was ecstatic by the news and happy to know they would be back. When the dolls hit the shelves I started collecting them again, by now I could drive and I had a job so my collection grow bigger then before. So from starting off with two Bratz dolls and now having around hundred and still counting, my passion for doll collecting hasn’t ended. I can’t wait till the day I adopt my twin girls to share this with them. God know how many dolls I will have by then.

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Here

Food

Order Dessert or a Second Glass of Wine?

By Sally Wadyka

Better Choice: Dessert Sweet tooth, rejoice! While no one is suggesting that it’s healthy to eat a rich dessert, the research is pretty clear: Women should have no more than one drink a day. «There’s some evidence that moderate alcohol intake lowers the risk of heart disease, but one a day is considered the limit for women,» says JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Boston›s Brigham and Women›s Hospital. (Some experts say that having two a couple of days a week is OK.)

There are other problems with alcohol, even in moderation. «Alcohol consumption is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer,» says Heather Spencer Feigelson, Ph.D., a senior epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, in Atlanta. «And while the risk of breast cancer from one glass of alcohol is small, I›d choose dessert over a second cocktail.» But… Since being overweight also raises the risk of breast cancer, as well as of diabetes and heart disease, go easy on the dessert. Sorbet or even a fruit tart is a better choice than, say, cheesecake.

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Drink

New York Schuman The New Hot Drink Everyone Is Dying For!

When I first saw this recipe I knew it had to be good, just reading through the list of ingredients you can’t help but be intrigued. The Bombay Sapphire infusion of apples and pears are echoed in the cider and brandy, then there is absinthe and ginger beer for contrasting but complimentary flavors, and on top of all that the unique addition of Fee Brother Aztec Chocolate bitters. This is certainly not a boring cocktail. It shows off some of the trendy flavors and techniques that are hot and is a great example of the modern mixology at its finest. Adam Schuman of New York’s Fatty Crab did a great job creating here.

Ingredients: * 1.5 oz. Bombay Sapphire infused with dried pear and apples (click for recipe) * 1/2 oz. Lucid absinthe * 1 oz. local apple cider * 1/2 oz. pear brandy (Adam recommends: Massenez Williams Poire Brandy) * 1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice * 2 dashes Fee Brothers Aztec Chocolate bitters * Ginger beer * cinnamon stick for garnish * lemon peel for garnish Preparation: 1. Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice cubes. 2. Shake well. 3. Strain into a highball glass filled with ice. 4. Garnish with a lemon peel and cinnamon stick.

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Pose

Linda Aguirre

Not Just Another Pretty Face She Has A Voice & She’s Not Scared To Use It! Linda Aguirre is a tall stunning green eyed up and coming model based in LA. When not on the runway she loves to loan her time and be a spokes model. She is a proud support of the LGBT community. She her self is an out and proud lesbian. She loves to help her community with her new found fame and is a true role “model” to many people. G: Most models are just pretty face, why loan your time and be a spokes model? L: I believe not enough people are informed about the gay community and our causes and how difficult it can be. G: What is your main focus in the LGBT community right now? L: Main priority for me to get across right now is gay marriage because it will give a lot of benefits to gay partners. It will give gay partners the same benefits that straight partners have. G: Would you like to someday get married yourself? L: Of course I actually am in a happy relationship right now with my girlfriend who I would love to start a family with one day. G: What would you like to see happen in the gay community 10 years from now? L: For there to actually be progress. For the gay community to be finally treated like equals because everyone deserves that opportunity. G: Thank you for your time in your very busy schedule. L: Your welcome & I’m never to busy to talk for my community.

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Scenic

Romantic Old Mexico Olvera Street: Festive, Culture and History

Olvera Street is in the oldest part of Downtown Los Angeles, California, and is part of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument. Many Latinos refer to it as “La Placita Olvera.” Circa 1911 it was described as Sonora Town.

Having started as a short lane, Wine Street, it was extended and renamed in honor of Agustín Olvera, a prominent local judge, in 1877. There are 27 historic buildings lining Olvera Street, including the Avila Adobe, the Pelanconi House and the Sepulveda House. In 1930, it was converted to a colorful Mexican marketplace. It is also the setting for Mexican-style music and dancing and holiday celebrations, such as Cinco de Mayo. In the midst of Downtown industrialization, Olvera Street is a quaint, colorized, and non-confrontational environment. Olvera Street is successful in depicting the quaintness of Mexican culture. The Avila Adobe aside, however, the buildings on the street date from at least seventy years after the founding of the city in 1781, and have little if any authentic association with the city’s founding, or with its former status as a Spanish, then Mexican outpost. Olvera is really a named alley, unusual in Los Angeles, rather than a true street. This can be seen from the fact that most of the buildings originally had their main entrances and addresses on the adjacent and parallel Main and Los Angeles Streets. In addition, the frontages along Olvera Street are uneven, as is typical with alleys. Nevertheless, for virtually all of its history it has been named as a street, sometimes also being identified as Wine Street, in reference to a wine cellar once located there, as well as wineries that once stood nearby. The Plaza-Olvera Street site was designated as a California State Historic 12

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Landmark in 1953. As a tourist attraction, Olvera Street is a living museum paying homage to a romantic vision of old Mexico. The exterior facades of the brick buildings enclosing Olvera Street and on the small vendor stands lining its center are colorful piñatas, hanging puppets in white peasant garb, Mexican pottery, serapes, mounted bull horns, oversized sombreros, and a life-size stuffed donkey. Olvera Street attracts almost two million visitors per year.


LA is Pride

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www.glance.com

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product Bad Kid

Being a bad kid isn’t all bad, especially when you look this adorable. Your on Santa’s naughty list this year.

Bike

Why take a ride on a disco stick when you can ride this nice bike through the city.

Rubber Duck

Pilot Hat & Shades

This is your captian speaking and these are must have ideas for the seanson.

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Bert & Ernie’s long time best friend in the tub can be your best friend in the tub too. Rubber Duck your the one.


Fish Bowl Little Mermiads second

home. Under the sea just doesn’t compare to this.

Wooden Pipe

Puff, Puff give, Puff, Puff give. A wonderful pipe to smoke from.

Mask A fun mask that will transform

you from an ordinary person into Superhero or Villan of the night.

x-Ray Glasses Why should Superman have

all the fun with his X-Ray Vision. Well now you can join him in the fun.

Wooden Hanger

NO MORE WIRE HANGERS! That’s why these are here so Mrs. Joan Crawford won’t have a bitch fit.

Duck Phone

Hello, hello baby you called I can’t hear a thing. Just get this phone and you’ll be able to make a sandwich after your talk.

Cowboy Boot

Ride em’ Cowboy! These are the perferct boots to wear to the wild wild west. Ready to ride a stallion an day.

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The Heart of City

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In Los Angeles, by the time you’re thirty-five, you’re older than most of the buildings.

Delia Ephron

IT’S a town after all. Seen ay night by air, the city seems a large bracelet of lights and pools. It is only 500 square miles but it feels larger. Divided into 80 districts and neighborhoods, at first the city seems disjointed, a bewildering terrain of mountains and valleys that ultimately touch the sea. Second in population to only New York City, Los Angeles could not be more different. One can still hide in the shadows and hills of a vast LA sunset. And more and more people choose to live here, ignoring the proclamation of Woody Allen in Annie Hall “that I don’t want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”

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Building With How a once-stalled Frank Gehry project became one of his triumphs. By Christopher Hawthorne

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h A Twist

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W

ith its exuberant, swooping facade, Frank Gehry’s newest building, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, looks anything but old-fashioned. And yet in at least one way, it’s an architectural throwback. In an era when office parks, suburban developments, and even skyscrapers seem to zoom to completion in a matter of months, the $274 million hall, which opens Oct. 23 with three nights of inaugural performances by the L.A. Philharmonic, recalls the days when significant public buildings sometimes took decades to finish. It wasn’t planned that way, of course. The project had its start back in 1987, with a $50 million gift from Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian. Working with a Japanese acoustician named Yasuhisa Toyota, Gehry quickly produced some very promising preliminary designs. The building seemed destined to be not just Gehry’s most important in Southern California, where he’s lived for nearly 60 of his 74 years, but among the most important of his career. Then, in the mid-1990s, a ballooning budget, fund-raising troubles, and other problems stalled the project. It wasn’t 20

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revived until 1997, when it received a new infusion of cash from the Disney family and others. That year saw the opening of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which turned Gehry into a world-famous “starchitect,” doing exactly for his reputation what Disney Hall was supposed to. And indeed the two buildings have a lot in common: Both are composed of a jumble of organic forms sheathed in gleaming, windowless metal panels. (In Spain the material is titanium. In Los Angeles the facade was originally going to be limestone, but budget cutbacks or seismic worries, depending on which story you believe, forced Gehry to go with panels of brushed stainless steel.) Is the long-delayed Disney Hall, then, just a consolation prize for Los Angeles? Does one of the biggest cities in the world find itself in the odd position of playing second fiddle to a Basque regional capital with a population under 400,000? Not exactly. The building is a fantastic piece of architecture— assured and vibrant and worth waiting for. It has its own personality, instead of being anything close to a Bilbao rehash. And surprisingly enough, it turns out that all of those postponements and budget battles have been a boon for the hall’s design. What the finished product makes most clear is


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“The building is a fantastic piece of architecture assured and vibrant and worth waiting for�

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that like plenty of artists, Frank Gehry tends to work better with restrictions, whether they’re physical, financial, or spatial. Without them, his work tends to sprawl not just figuratively but literally. Even though it cost more than a quarter of a billion dollars and covers 293,000 square feet, Disney Hall is a tighter, more focused effort than many of those Gehry has produced after Bilbao, when the commissions came rolling in, his budgets suddenly became freer, and he found himself with clients perhaps less likely to challenge his authority. The hall manages to be at once lean and wildly expressionistic. It looks like a building in which every design decision has gone through two layers of scrutiny: one financial, the other aesthetic. Gehry had many years to tweak the project, and he’s managed to polish it without sacrificing any of its vitality. Like a lot of Gehry’s work, the new building relates remarkably well to the city, though the visual fireworks of its facade and its plush interior spaces may well distract a lot of people from this fact. It occupies a full city block at the top of Bunker Hill, across the street from Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a gilded latemodernist mistake that used to house both the Philharmonic and the Academy Awards and today hosts neither. (The Oscars are now handed out at the new David Rockwell-designed Kodak Theater, a few miles away.) The facade soars, bends, and dives in a number of directions, in typical Gehry fashion, but that movement is always checked by the limits of the city grid. Seen from above, the building looks like a bunch of flowers contained, barely, within a perfectly rectangular flower box. Indeed, that tension—between free-flowing imagination and the limits imposed by physics and budgets—is what defines the building as a whole. 24

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That tension continues inside. There is a small performance and lecture space, for example, that Gehry created simply by stretching out one rounded corner of the huge lobby until it was big enough to operate as a quasi-separate room. It’s a setting for chamber music and pre-concert lectures that didn’t require any new walls or floors or even a stage. It makes something remarkable out of nothing. Other details in the lobby, from the walls lined in Douglas fir to the remarkable treelike columns (whose stocky, branching form Gehry says he stole from the Czech architect Joze Plecnik), promote a dreamlike and otherworldly feel, a detachment from the hustle-bustle and the grime of the city. But the lobby is also open to everybody: You don’t need a ticket to walk through it, as is the case in many concert halls. This is an old-school public space in the tradition of Grand Central Terminal or Bertram Goodhue’s lowslung central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, which is only a few blocks away from the new hall. There is still more productive tension inside the auditorium itself, which holds about 2,200 people and during daytime performances will be naturally lit by mostly hidden skylights and one tall window. The free-flowing, organic forms that Gehry loves to use are offset by the rigorous acoustic demands that any architect of a concert hall has to contend with. (In an auditorium of this kind, every exposed surface, from balcony railings to seat upholstery, can affect how the orchestra sounds.) As it turns out, Frank Gehry and concert halls are well-matched. Acousticians have realized over the last few decades that convex—or outwardly bulging— curves can be very effective, bouncing and dispersing sound waves


Frank Gehry

produced by an orchestra. (Concave curves, on the other hand, can trap sound.) And in buildings from Paris to Seattle, Gehry has produced what easily qualifies as architecture’s most varied and complete collection of convex curves. There’s no definitive word yet on whether Disney Hall’s acoustics are indeed good; the orchestra’s first performance is still a few days away. But the early word from the musicians, who began rehearsing in the new auditorium over the summer, has been positive. All of these dualities are fitting for a concert hall. An attraction of going to the symphony is trading in your regular self for a better-dressed, more cultured one. Symphony orchestras these days are looking for ways to attract younger, hipper audiences as their core supporters grow older, while at the same time preserving the sense of refuge that will always be classical music’s main drawing card. Gehry’s design cleverly explores both sides of that divide: It is a building where the members of a democracy can go to feel refined, to be lifted from the everyday. Gehry, along with a few of his more admiring critics, likes to define himself as a combination of artist and architect. That job description suggests that he envies the kind of pure creation that painters and sculptors can indulge in, distant from the demands of zoning boards, engineers, and French horn players. But in fact the Disney Concert Hall seems to make the opposite case about his talents. It’s full of evidence that Gehry is an architect in the most public-minded and collaborative senses of the word—that he’s a master at figuring out ways to allow inspiration to serve practicality, and vice versa. a large garden.

Frank Gehry was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto, Canada. He moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager in 1947 and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen. His father changed the family’s name to Gehry when the family immigrated. Ephraim adopted the first name Frank in his 20s; since then he has signed his name Frank O. Gehry. Uncertain of his career direction, the teenage Gehry drove a delivery truck to support himself while taking a variety of courses at Los Angeles City College. He took his first architecture courses on a hunch, and became enthralled with the possibilities of the art, although at first he found himself hampered by his relative lack of skill as a draftsman. Sympathetic teachers and an early encounter with modernist architect Raphael Soriano confirmed his career choice. He won scholarships to the University of Southern California and graduated in 1954 with a degree in architecture. Los Angeles was in the middle of a post-war housing boom and the work of pioneering modernists like Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler were an exciting part of the city’s architectural scene. Gehry went to work full-time for the notable Los Angeles firm of Victor Gruen Associates, where he had apprenticed as a student, but his work at Gruen was soon interrupted by compulsory military service. After serving for a year in the United States Army, Gehry entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he studied city planning, but he returned to Los Angeles without completing a graduate degree. He briefly joined the firm of Pereira and Luckman before returning to Victor Gruen. Gruen Associates were highly successful practitioners of the severe utilitarian style of the period, but Gehry was restless. He took his wife and two children to Paris, where he spent a year working in the office of the French architect Andre Remondet and studied firsthand the work of the pioneer modernist Le Corbusier.

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Juli

Through The Lens

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ius Schulman

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By Elias Mireles

ven if you’re confused by the fork in the driveway, which slopes up to the Edenic apex of Laurel Canyon, or don’t recognize architect Raphael Soriano’s mid-century design landmark, you can’t miss Julius Shulman’s place. It’s the one with the eightfoot-high banner bearing his name an advertisement for his 2005 Getty Museum exhibition “Modernity and the Metropolis” hanging before the door to the studio adjoining the house. As displays of ego go, it’s hard to beat. Yet the voice calling out from behind it is friendly, even eager “Come on in!” And drawing back the banner, one finds, not a monument, but a man: behind an appealingly messy desk, wearing blue suspenders and specs with lenses as big as Ring Dings, and offering a smile of roguish beatitude.

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in a series of lyrical tableaux that invested the high-water moment of postwar American optimism with an arresting, oddly innocent glamour. Add to this the uncountable volumes and journals featuring his pictures, and unending requests for reprints, and you have an artist whose talent, timing, ubiquity, and sheer staying power have buried the competition in some cases, literally. Shulman’s decision to call it quits in 1986 was motivated less by age than a distaste for postmodern architecture. But, he insists, “it wasn’t quite retiring,” citing the ensuing decade and a half of lectures, occasional assignments, and work on books. Then, in 2000, Shulman was introduced to a German photographer named Juergen Nogai, who was in L.A. from Bremen on assignment. The men hit it off immediately, and began partnering on work motivated by the maestro’s brand-name status. “A lot of people, they think, It’d be great to have our house photographed by Julius Shulman,” says Nogai. “We did a lot of jobs like that at first. Then, suddenly, people figured out, Julius is working again.” Shulman’s decision to call it quits in 1986 was motivated less by age than a distaste for postmodern architecture. But, he insists, “it wasn’t quite retiring,” citing the ensuing decade and a half of lectures, occasional assignments, and work on books. Then, in 2000, Shulman was introduced to a German photographer named Juergen Nogai, who was in L.A. from Bremen on assignment. The men hit it off immediately, and began partnering on work motivated by the maestro’s brand-name status. “A lot of people, they think, It’d be great to have our house photographed by Julius Shulman,” says Nogai. “We did a lot of jobs like that at first. Then, suddenly, people figured out, Julius is working again.” “I realized that I was embarking on another chapter of my life,” Shulman says, the pleasure evident in his time-softened voice. “We’ve done many assignments” Nogai puts the number at around 70 “and they all came out beautifully. People are always very cooperative,” he adds. “They spend days knowing I’m coming. Everything is clean and fresh. I don’t have to raise a finger.” As regards the division of labor, the 54-year-old Nogai says tactfully, “The more active is me because of the age. Julius is finding the perspectives, and I’m setting up the lights, and fine-tuning the image in the camera.” While Shulman acknowledges their equal partnership, and declares Nogai’s lighting abilities to be unequaled, his assessment is more succinct: “I make the compositions. There’s only one Shulman.” In fact, there seem to be many. There’s Shulman the photographer, who handles three to five assignments a month (and never turns one down “Don’t have to. Everyone’s willing to wait”), and the Shulman between hard covers, whose latest book, the three-volume, 950-page Modernism Rediscovered, will shortly be published by Taschen. But the Shulman of whom Shulman seems most proud is the educator. In 2005, he established an eponymous institute in conjunction with the Woodbury University in nearby Burbank, to provide, according to the school, “programs that promote the appreciation and understanding of architecture and design.” Apart from a fellowship program and research center, the Julius Shulman Institute’s principal asset is its founder, who has given dozens of talks at high schools across Southern California.

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ou’d smile, too. At 96, Shulman is the best known architectural photographer in the world, and one of the genre’s most influential figures. Between 1936, when a fateful meeting with architect Richard Neutra began his career, and his semi-retirement half a century later, he used his instinctive compositional elegance and hair-trigger command of light to document more than 6,500 projects, creating images that defined many of the masterworks of 20th-century architecture. Most notably, Shulman’s focus on the residential modernism of Los Angeles, which included photographing 18 of the 26 Case Study Houses commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1967, resulted 28

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“The subject is the power of photography,” Shulman explains. “I have thousands of slides, and Juergen and I have assembled them into almost 20 different lectures. And not just about architecture I have pictures of cats and dogs, fashion pictures, flower photographs. I use them to do a lot of preaching to the students, to give them something to do with their lives, and keep them from dropping out of school.” It all adds up to a very full schedule, which Shulman handles largely by himself “My daughter comes once a week from Santa Barbara and takes care of my business affairs, and does my shopping” and with remarkable ease for a near-centenarian. Picking up the oversized


calendar on which he records his appointments, Shulman walks me through a typical seven days: “Thom Mayne we had lunch with him. Long Beach, AIA meeting. People were here for a meeting about my photography at the Getty [which houses his archive]. High school students, a lecture. Silver Lake, the Neutra house, they’re opening part of the lake frontage, I’m going to see that. USC, a lecture. Then an assignment, the Griffith Observatory we’ve already started that one.” Yet rather than seeming overtaxed, Shulman fairly exudes well-being. Like many elderly people with nothing left to prove, and who remain in demand both for their talents and as figures of veneration (think of George Burns), Shulman takes things very easy: He knows what his employers and admirers want, is happy to provide it, and accepts the resulting reaffirmation of his legend with a mix of playfully rampant immodesty and heartfelt gratitude. As the man himself puts it, “The world’s my onion.” Given the fun Shulman’s having being Shulman, one might expect the work to suffer. But his passion for picture-making remains undiminished. “I was surprised at how engaged Julius was,” admits the Chicago auction-house mogul Richard Wright, who hired Shulman to photograph Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 prior to selling it last year. “He did 12 shots in two days, which is a lot. And he really nailed them.” Of this famous precision, says the writer Howard Rodman, whose John Lautner–designed home Shulman photographed in 2002: “There’s a story about Steve McQueen, where a producer was trying to get him to sign on to a movie. The producer said, ‘Look how much you change from the beginning to the end.’ And McQueen said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who knows.’ And Shulman struck me as the guy who knows.” This becomes evident as, picking up the transparencies from his two most recent assignments, he delivers an impromptu master class. “We relate to the position of the sun every minute of the day,” Shulman begins, holding an exterior of a 1910 Craftsman-style house in Oakland, by Bernard Maybeck, to the lamp atop his desk. “So when the sun moves around, we’re ready for our picture. I have to be as specific as a sports photographer even a little faster,” he says, nodding at the image, in which light spills through a latticework overhang and patterns a façade. “This is early afternoon, when the sun is just hitting the west side of the building. If I’m not ready for that moment, I lose the day.” He does not, however, need to observe the light prior to photographing: “I was a Boy Scout I know where the sun is every month of the year. And I never use a meter.” Shulman is equally proud of his own lighting abilities. “I’ll show you something fascinating,” he says, holding up two exteriors of a new modernist home, designed for a family named Abidi, by architect James Tyler. In the first, the inside of the house is dark, resulting in a handsome, somewhat lifeless image. In the second, it’s been lit in a way that seems a natural balance of indoor and outdoor illumination, yet expresses the structure’s relationship to its site and showcases the architecture’s transparency. “The house is transfigured,” Shulman

explains. “I have four Ts. Transcend is, I go beyond what the architect himself has seen. Transfigure glamorize, dramatize with lighting, time of day. Translate there are times, when you’re working with a man like Neutra, who wanted everything the way he wanted it ‘Put the camera here.’ And after he left, I’d put it back where I wanted it, and he wouldn’t know the difference I translated. And fourth, I transform the composition with furniture movement.” To illustrate the latter, Shulman shows me an interior of the Abidi house that looks out from the living room, through a long glass wall, to the grounds. “Almost every one of my photographs has a diagonal leading you into the picture,” he says. Taking a notecard and pen, he draws a line from the lower left corner to the upper right, then a second perpendicular line from the lower right corner to the first line. Circling the intersection, he explains, “That’s the point of what we call ‘dynamic symmetry.’” When he holds up the photo again, I see that the line formed by the bottom of the glass wall dividing inside from outside roughly mirrors the diagonal he’s drawn. Shulman then indicates the second, perpendicular line created by the furniture arrangement. “My assistants moved [the coffee table] there, to complete the line. When the owner saw the Polaroid, she said to her husband, ‘Why don’t we do that all the time?’” Shulman’s remark references one of his signature gambits: what he calls “dressing the set,” not only by moving furniture but by adding everyday objects and accessories. “I think he was trying to portray the lifestyle people might have had if they’d lived in those houses,” suggests the Los Angeles–based architectural photographer Tim Street-Porter. “He was doing with a totally positive use of the words advertising or propagandist photographs for the cause.” This impulse culminated in Shulman’s introduction of people into his pictures commonplace today, but virtually unique 50 years ago. “Those photographs with young, attractive people having breakfast in glass rooms beside carports with two-tone cars were remarkable in the history of architectural photography,” Street-Porter says. “He took that to a wonderfully high level.” Surprisingly, Shulman underplays this aspect of his oeuvre. The idea, he explains, is simply to “induce a feeling of occupancy. For

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example, in the Abidi house, I put some wineglasses and bottles on the counter, which would indicate that people are coming for dinner. Then there are times I’ll select two or three people the owner of a house, or the children and put them to work. Sometimes it’s called for.” “Are you pleased with these photographs?” I ask as he sets them aside. “I’m pleased with all my work,” he says cheerfully. “I tell people in my lectures, ‘If I were modest, I wouldn’t talk about how great I am.’” Yet when I ask how he devel-oped his eye, Shulman’s expression turns philosophical. “Sometimes Juergen walks ahead of me, and he’ll look for a composition. And invariably, he doesn’t see what I see. Architects don’t see what I see. It’s God-given,” he says, using the Yiddish word for an act of kindness “a mitzvah.” I suggest a tour of the house, and Shulman moves carefully to a rolling walker he calls “the Mercedes” and heads out of the studio and up the front steps. As a plaque beside the entrance indicates,

says this child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. “When I was three, my father went to the town of Central Village in Connecticut, and was shown this farmhouse primitive, but [on] a big piece of land. After we moved in, he planted corn and potatoes, my mother milked the cows, and we had a farm life. “And for seven years, I was imbued with the pleasure of living close to nature. In 1920, when we came here to Los Angeles, I joined the Boy Scouts, and enjoyed the outdoor-living aspect, hiking and camping. My father opened a clothing store in Boyle Heights, and my four brothers and sisters and my mother worked in the store. They were businesspeople.” He flashes a slightly cocky smile. “I was with the Boy Scouts.” We arrive at a sitting area, with a small pool of water, a fireplace, and a large sculpture (purchased from one of his daughter’s high school friends) made from Volkswagen body parts. Shulman lowers himself onto a bench and absorbs the abundant natural pleasures.

“Shulman always says proudly that Soriano hated his furniture,” says Wim de Wit, the Getty Research Institute curator who oversees Shulman’s collection. “He says, ‘I don’t care; when I sit in a chair I want to be comfortable.’ He does not think of himself as an artist. ‘I was doing a business,’ he says. But when you look at that overgrown garden, you know there is some other streak in him.” the 3,000-square-foot, three-bedroom structure, which Shulman commissioned in 1948 and moved into two years later, was landmarked by L.A.’s Cultural Heritage Commission as the only steel-frame Soriano house that remains as built. Today, such Case Study–era residences are as fetishized (and expensive) as Fabergé eggs. But when Shulman opens the door onto a wide, cork-lined hallway leading to rooms that, after six decades, remain refreshing in their clarity of function and communication, use of simple, natural materials, and openness to the out-of-doors, I’m reminded that the movement’s motivation was egalitarian, not elitist: to produce well-designed, affordable homes for young, middle-class families. “Most people whose houses I photographed didn’t use their sliding doors,” Shulman says, crossing the living room toward his own glass sliders. “Because flies and lizards would come in; there were strong winds. So I told Soriano I wanted a transition a screened-in enclosure in front of the living room, kitchen, and bedroom to make an indoor/ outdoor room.” Shulman opens the door leading to an exterior dining area. A bird trills loudly. “That’s a wren,” he says, and steps out. “My wife and I had most of our meals out here,” he recalls. “Beautiful.” We continue past the house to Shulman’s beloved garden he calls it “the jungle” a riot of vegetation that overwhelms much of the site, and frames an almost completely green canyon view. “I planted hundreds of trees and shrubs back there you can see my redwoods,” he says, gesturing at the slope rising at the property’s rear. “Seedlings, as big as my thumb. They’re 85 feet tall now.” He pauses to consider an ominously large paw print in the path. “It’s too big for a dog. A bobcat wouldn’t be that big, either. It’s a mystery,” Shulman decides, pushing the Mercedes past a ficus as big as a baobab. The mystery I find myself pondering, as we walk beside the terraced hillside, is the one he cited himself: the source of his talent. In 1936, Shulman was an ama-teur photographer—gifted, but without professional ambition—when he was invited by an architect friend to visit Richard Neutra’s Kun House. Shulman, who’d never seen a modern residence, took a handful of snapshots with the Kodak vestpocket camera his sister had given him, and sent copies to his friend as a thank-you. When Neutra saw the images, he requested a meeting, bought the photos, and asked the 26-year-old if he’d like more work. Shulman accepted and virtually on a whim his career took off. When I ask Shulman what Neutra saw in his images, he answers with a seemingly unrelated story. “I was born in Brooklyn in 1910,” 30

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“When I bought this land, my brother said, ‘Why don’t you subdivide? You’ll make money.’” He looks amused. “Two acres at the top of Laurel Canyon, and the studio could be converted into a guest house it could be sold for millions.” He resumes his story. “At the end of February 1936, I’d been at UCLA, and then Berkeley, for seven years. Never graduated, never majored. Just audited classes. I was driving home from Berkeley” Shulman hesitates dramatically “and I knew I could do anything. I was even thinking of getting a job in the parks department raking leaves, just so I could be outside. And within two weeks, I met Neutra, by chance. March 5, 1936 that day, I became a photographer. Why not?” Hearing this remarkable tale, I understand that Shulman has answered my question about his talent with an explanation of his nature. What Neutra perceived in the young amateur was an outdoorsman’s independent spirit and an enthusiasm for life’s possibilities, qualities that, as fate would have it, merged precisely with the boundless optimism of the American Century an optimism, Shulman instinctively recognized, that was embodied in the modern houses that became, as Street-Porter says, “a muse to him.” “[Shulman] always says proudly that Soriano hated his furniture,” says Wim de Wit, the Getty Research Institute curator who oversees Shulman’s collection. “He says, ‘I don’t care; when I sit in a chair I want to be comfortable.’ He does not think of himself as an artist. ‘I was doing a business,’ he says. But when you look at that overgrown garden, you know there is some other streak in him.” That streak the free soul within the unpretentious, practical product of the immigrant experience produced what Nogai calls “a seldom personality”: a Jewish farm boy who grew up to create internationally recognized American cultural artifacts icons that continue to influ-ence our fantasies and self-perceptions. I ask Shulman if he’s surprised at how well his life has turned out. “I tell students, ‘Don’t take life too seriously don’t plan nothing nohow,’” he replies. “But I have always observed and respected my destiny. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was meant to be.” “And it was a destiny that suited you?” At this, everything rises at once his eyebrows, his outstretched arms, and his peaceful, satisfied smile. “Well,” says Shulman, “here I am.”


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JC oshua

hristiansen From Project Runway to New York Fashion Week, Designer Joshua Christiansen tells the MODE what the future holds for him.

Joshua Christensen is no stranger to fashion design. This Washington native moved to Los Angeles in 2009 after majoring in Humanities/Art History at BYU. Christensen graduated FIDM in December of 2010, and was picked to participate in Season 9 of Project Runway. Back in Los Angeles, Christensen is currently working on two collections: one for FIDM Debut, and one for New York Fashion Week. 32

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Graham: When designing a garment, what sources of inspiration do you draw from? Joshua: My greatest source of inspiration is the culture around me, and the general feelings I get from being involved in the movements of the people. I also pull inspiration from pop culture such as movies, music and other media sources. G: What are your opinions on current trends? J: I think there are so many people following so many trends that it’s cool for people to find what they’re comfortable with. I may not like all of the trends but it’s cool that the option is out there.

G: How do you intend to differentiate yourself from other designers? J: I am unique as a person and as a designer but I get what a man wants to wear. I will design clothes that work in fashion, business, and life. G: What do you hope to accomplish with your collection for FIDM Debut? J: I hope to show my individuality and perspective in design. My Debut Menswear collection is going to show exactly where I want to go in fashion. This will be yet another step in my conquest for powerful fashion.

G: You were able to build I write quite a bit actually and have G: What’s the next creative a fan base from appearing books full of ideas and creative on Project Runway this writings. I still love studying art, and step in your career? season, how do you intend checking out museums and exhibits. It’s J: Create a Fashion to continue this momentum? important to be as creative as possible. Empire! I look forward to working harder than J: I’m currently working ever before. So many amazing opportunities are on a full mens/womens collection with one of the opening up to me and I have to be prepared to contestants from the show and we are planning take as many as possible. We’ll see what happens on showing in NY fashion week in February. It’s important to just keep going. The best question fans after Debut and NY but I hope to continue on a personal line of clothes working on my Menswear. ask when they meet me is “Are you still designing?” I think a lot of people forget that I am almost I can’t help but laugh and tell them, ‘of course exclusively a menswear designer. My debut I am.’ Not winning the show did not crush my collection and NY half will be my menswear. dreams. I’m more motivated and driven than ever before. Between the Debut show collection and G: How has your personal design aesthetic evolved? the NY collection I hope to become a successful J: I think when I first started designing I designer creating collection after collection. placed limitations on my work but as I grow in design I find that I’m changing. My aesthetic G: You had to utilize a lot of unconventional is powerful, dark and romantic. I think as I materials during your time on Project Runway; has grow this becomes stronger in my work. that affected your resourcefulness as a designer? J: Yes and no. I think the best lesson I learned on the show is that fashion can go beyond the conventional. G: Besides fashion design, what are some other creative outlets that you’re interested in? I’m learning that it’s possible to just let go and really J: I write quite a bit actually and have books full explore the possibilities of design. It’s important of ideas and creative writings. I still love studying not to waste potential in design whether it’s using art, and checking out museums and exhibits. a new material or using new shapes or details. It’s important to be as creative as possible. G: How has the direct competition you received G: What words of encouragement would through Project Runway affected your work ethic? you give to prospective students, or J: I’ve always worked hard but the show has fashion employees in the industry? shown me that I have to work even harder. J: Keep going! Never give up on the dream. There are so many talented individuals in the This is not an easy industry but if this is world and even if I can’t be the most naturally truly your passion, you will sacrifice and talented designer, I can still be the hardest work until you make it. That’s my plan. working; and that will take me even further.

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Raja Gemini Untucked

We recently chatted with Raja Gemini, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 3. Without a doubt this recent season was the most dynamic, action packed, drama filled series the viewers have ever seen! Raja tells us about some behind the scenes stuff we didn’t see. G: Raja Gemini, where are you from? R: I’m from Los Angeles, California. G: When was your first time in drag and what did it feel like? R: I did drag for the first time in high school sneaking out of my parents house, getting in “club kid” costumes and going to clubs in Hollywood in the early 1990s. G: What makes you continue to perform and represent your community as a drag queen? R: I’ve been a performer for almost 20 years now and what keeps me going is the looks on the faces of a captivated audience. I perform to seduce the viewer into vignettes I conjure up in dreams! G: What was your first reaction when you heard the news on becoming a RPDR contestant? R: Finding out I was on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” was exciting and terrifying all at the same time. I was excited to showcase all my talents, but I was a little unsure initially if I would be able to put up with all the various personalities and the drama that could unfold. I try to avoid confrontations, but I will fight for myself if need be.

G: How much tension was there in the hotel during the shooting of the show and were fremenies made? R: There were definite tensions during the competition at our hotel. Although, at the end of a long shooting day, the last thing I wanted to address was negativity. G: If you learned something from this show, what would that be? R: I learned how to challenge myself as an artist and how to talk myself off the edge of cliffs when things became stressful. I learned that I am a lot stronger mentally and creatively than I thought I was before the competition. G: If you were stranded on a deserted island, what three items would you absolutely need with you in order to survive? R: If stranded on a deserted island, I would want to make sure I had a Brita water filter, a stack of gay porn magazines, and suntan oil! G: Pick one – Lady Gaga or Cher? R: CHER! Duh! Even Lagy Gaga would say Cher. G: What are your Top 5 Music Artist on your playlist right now? R: Sia, Lady GaGa, the Carpenters, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Beyonce


January 30 2012



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