Double Dot Magazine | New York & Tokyo

NEW YORK & TOKYO

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#07

Double Dot magazine explores the cultural and creative relationship between sister cities— where they part and collide.

New York & Tokyo

Tokyo 東京

Photography

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Photography

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MAMA LOVES YOU VINTAGE 541 Queen Street West, Toronto ON (416) 603-4747

mamalovesyouvintage.com

Hello

Illustrations by Nimura Daisuke

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Editor’s Note

This spring, I was accepted into an MFA program at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Over the summer months I began to gradually move my life from Toronto, a back and forth journey that has been both exciting and hectic. As I write this from my new apartment in Brooklyn, I recognize the impact this transition has had on both myself, and our newest issue.

Taking Double Dot with me into this new chapter is a natural decision. I have always affectionately described the magazine, conceived of as my undergrad thesis, as our little “after school project.” Over the past three years myself and my co-publisher Julie Baldassi, and editor Isabel Slone, who joined last year, have worked tirelessly to keep the magazine alive in the face of our own evolving careers. Now, as our work takes new turns and we get closer to where we want to be in our professional and creative lives, I am excited for Double Dot to grow alongside us.

In Issue 7 ~ New York & Tokyo, something serendipitous took place when several of our contributors connected with their subjects. We paired our contributors with artists whose work inspired and influenced them, and in the process we were able to facilitate some genuine friendship connections.

In a Tokyo coffee shop, Michele Ayoub hung out with photographer Monika Mogi (interview on p. 30), connecting over their shared aesthetic sensibilities, mutual friends around the world, and feeling like a foreigner. And in our New York interview (p. 138), Julie Baldassi, of late a blooming filmmaker, had, in her words, “a nice time” with filmmaker/actor and righteous activist Carlen Altman, bonding over their shared decision to pursue creativity over stability.

We hope that reading our newest issue will be as exciting for you as it was for us to put it together. We hope, like us, you’ll have a nice time. ~ Shannon Jager double dot

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Contributors

Editor-in-chief / Art Director Shannon Jager

Aaron Wynia

Managing Editor / Co-publisher Julie Baldassi

Alexandra Caufin

Andrea Oppedisano Adrian Forrow

Anna Fitzpatrick

Benjamin Freedman Cailin Hill

Editor Isabel Slone

Chandler Levack

Distribution Disticor

David Brandon Geeting

Printing Imageworks

Christopher Delorenzo Chris Berube Duncan Foy Faye Cruz

Gavin Tomson Jed Anderson

Jennifer Cheng Laura Breiling Mai Shimura

Martina Paukova Masako Ogura Max Mertens

Mecca James Williams Issue 7 ~ Cover Illustration and by Eunice Luk Photography by Jennifer Cheng

Michele Ayoub Netty Jordan

Nimura Daisuke Patrick Kyle Sofia Luu

Contact Unit 501, 263 Adelaide West Toronto, Ontario Canada M5H 1Y2 Email info@doubledotmagazine.com double dot

Suguru Azuma

Takashi Ashizawa Tallulah Fontaine Wiley Keiko

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Hatched in Tokyo

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Anti-FOMO

by Anna Fitzpatrick Illustration by Adrian Forrow

by Sophia Luu Illustration by Patrick Kyle

Found

in Translation

by Cailin Hill

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You Are Here!

30

Interview with

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by Wiley Kilieko

Monika Mogi

by Michele Ayoub

On Studio Ghibli

by Gavin Tomson

Tokyo 200

by Duncan Foy

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Seishun

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Air Nude

by Jennifer Cheng

by Suguru Azuma

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NEW YORK

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Intersections

by David Brandon Geeting

102 Over and Under

by Aaron Wynia

112 Where Everybody

Knows Your Name

by Andrea Oppedisano Illustration by Martina Paukova

115 Reality Break Down 1991

by Jed Anderson

120 Tomorrow Gallery

by Alexandra Caufin Photography by Ben Freedman

128 Rat King

Carlen Altman

by Julie Baldassi

148 Am I Supposed

by Tallulah Fontaine

106 NY

138 Interview with

by Max Mertens

134 Apparent Vice

by Chris Berube

Illustration by Laura Breiling

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to Want This?

by Chandler Levack Illustration by Christopher Delorenzo

Anti-FOMO

by Anna Fitzpatrick

Illustration by Adrian Forrow

How

Marie Kondo

helped me make the most of my

“sad little life”

Photography Tokyo

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東京 Tokyo Photography

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The best endorsement for Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up did not come from the accolades it received in the New York Times, nor did it come from any of the dozens of lifestyle bloggers who Instagrammed their progress in taking their homes from super-fucking-nice to super-fucking-nicer.

No, it was the book’s introduction that finally­sold me (Figuratively. I already spent money on the thing – thanks, lifestyle bloggers!), in which Kondo collected praise she’s received from her Tidying Boot Camp. “Your course taught me to see what I really need and what I don’t,” said one anonymous happy camper. “So I got a divorce. Now I feel much happier.”

I have spent my whole life looking for a book that would empower readers to leave their husbands as if in some kind of misandrist fairy-tale! (I have no way to prove that this anonymous praise came from a straight woman, but I can’t DISPROVE it either.) Teach me your ways, Marie Kondo!

Kondo’s book was published in English with Penguin Random House in late 2014, but it was already a bestseller in her home of Japan. Prior to putting her ideas on paper, Kondo gained insight at her consulting business in Tokyo where she teaches clients the right way to tidy up in order to, well, change their lives.

Design

She has a special course on organization for company presidents, and boasts a three-month waiting list for her services.

She is, in short, the shit.

Kondo’s process has been referred to as the KonMari method. It works a little something like this: The key to tidying is decluttering. The key to decluttering is discarding. The key to discarding is by not focusing on what you want to get rid of, but what you want to keep. Put everything you own on the floor, and then pick them up one by one. Does that shirt/book/whatever spark joy in you?

If it does, keep it. If not, chuck it. Be honest. Be ruthless. There is a bit more to it, of course, but you really should read the book yourself.

The appeal of “Throw your stuff away, no really, why do you even have that” makes sense when space is considered a luxury. According to Forbes, TokyoYokohama has a density of 11,000 people per square mile, roughly double that of New York City. Minimalism is an art that Japanese brands have perfected, the effects of which have trickled down to my own city of Toronto. When Muji, the thirty-five year old Japanese retailer of nondescript clothing and housing items, opened a store in Toronto last fall (around the same time as Kondo was published in North America), Canadians lined up in

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Design

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the freezing cold weather to stock up on sleek pens and grey bedding.

Kondo makes reference to Shintoism in her book — the widely practiced Japanese religion — yet her own tidying practices seemed to have developed from her own lifelong neuroses regarding clutter. There is a practicality to her philosophy: Kondo describes a kind of enlightenment from waking up in the morning to a home that is only filled with items that spark joy. She’s curated a home for herself in which everything she owns is either her absolute favourite thing, or kept out of sheer necessity.

My own attempts at KonMari-ing my home were…interesting. I am a book critic. I work from home. I get boxes of books sent to my home weekly. Most of them are kids books, my main beat. Kids books are big, and take up a lot of space.

I had started to purge my possessions, but while my discard pile was sitting in boxes shoved to one side of my room, more boxes kept coming in. It was a Sisyphean task that Marie Kondo did not account for. There was no chapter on “What to do when you get another delivery of picture books about talking potatoes and pirates.” I write this sentence surrounded by piles of books. I failed.

And yet! Kondo’s philosophy continued to reverb through my brain once

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I stopped trying to tidy my place. As the cold Canadian winter came a-tumbling in, I became loathe to go out. Living in a city where stuff happens — like Toronto, New York, and, I’m assuming, Tokyo — comes with a sense of nightly guilt. There is a whole world happening right there, outside your window! Are you taking advantage of it? Every event that you go to, every reading or concert or party that you attend, there are a dozen more better, more exciting ones happening down the street that you are missing. Before the hashtag #FOMO caught on, I ascribed to the much less catchy acronym, #AIMTMOMSLL (Am I Making the Most of My Sad Little Life?)

KonMari ultimately taught me how to chill. She knows there’s a whole world out there of experiences she can never possibly catch up on, and that stressing out about it is a losing battle. Her philosophy about opting in to positivity, about recognizing the abundance of possibilities out there, and choosing to only surround oneself with the best. In other words, it’s the anti-FOMO. If everything you do for fun has been selected with the intent of sparking joy in your life, what does it matter what slips through the cracks?

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Hatched in Tokyo

by Sofia Luu

I

e

ion by Patrick Ky trat l ll us

The secret behind the Tamagotchi craze.

At the height of the Tamagotchi craze, North American ʼ90s kids plucked the egg-sized virtual pet from the shelves at a rate of 15 per minute. Within the first year of its release in Japan, it sold 13 million units. The Japanese creator company, Bandai, didn’t need to employ an elaborate advertising campaign to spread the word about an object that, in 1996, felt like the future. All Bandai really needed was for the toy to be a hit with teenage girls.

The virtual toy was created by Aki Maita, a Bandai employee in her early 30s who, according to an article republished on the Mimitchi fan website, conceived of the idea after watching a commercial about a little boy who insisted on taking his pet turtle to school.

“Precisely how this spawned a computer game, Maita is at a loss to say,” the article notes. In the early ʼ90s, a time when the majority of video games were “for boys,” the idea to tap into the young female demographic was radical, though perhaps not particularly feminist. “It is dependent on you – that’s one reason it became so popular. I think it’s very important for humans to find joy caring for something,” that article quotes her as saying, referring to Maita as “the childless creator.”

Maita hedged her bets that the toy would tap into the Japanese concept of Kuchikomi, which refers to the speed and power of word-of-mouth among teen girls. As such it had to be portable, it had to be kawaii (cute), and it had to make “human-like demands” on its owners.

Shortly before launching the toy to the mass market, a trial run of 200 Tamagotchis were given to teen girls in the Shibuya district. Based on the success of the survey, the finalized product was released to the Japanese market and, eventually globally.

Since its launch, Bandai has sold well over 79 million Tamagotchis, moving beyond the initial target demographic. In North America, the Tamagotchi was a musthave on the elementary school playground – for boys and girls alike.

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Translation

Photograph by Dai Araki

No matter where I was in the world I could never quite recreate the romance and the solitude that I felt during my time in Tokyo.

Found in 翻

訳

で

発

見

images & words by Cailin Hill

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Personal Essay

Sometime around 2010, I was regularly taking pictures of my daily outfits and writing a fashion blog that I wasn’t the least bit embarrassed was titled Hipster Musings. My entire social life consisted of finding other girls on the Internet who were spilling their hearts out via blog form and befriending them. It was around this time I discovered Cailin Hill, an Swiss Milkmaid-looking model from London, Ontario who wrote a blog called the Model Burnbook, named after the hot pink notebook Regina George uses to insult her peers in Mean Girls. (ex. “Trang Pak is a grotsky little byotch”). Model Burnbook was a genuinely hilarious takedown of the fashion industry written by a self-aware insider; a model with a personality an actual sense of humour embedded in an industry where women are paid good money to suppress themselves. Cailin has since quit modeling, but remains in Tokyo where she is married to booking agent Dai Araki. Until recently, her Instagram bio read: “A model retirement plan – wifed up in Tokyo with a blog & some dogs.” Isabel Slone

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Most fashion models are professionally scouted by 13 or 14 years of age.

Around 15 or 16 they visit Tokyo, where they begin their full-time modeling careers. I on the other hand, had just dropped out of college. Twice. I was 23 years old and was working 3 simultaneous part-time jobs to support myself before I got scouted working at the mall.

Yet, with my ‘somewhat’ advanced real-world experience, nothing could have prepared me for the fashion industry. For the travel, for the pressure, but mainly for the self-doubt one feels when they’re living a lie.

For the first time in my life I experienced total seclusion. I was just off a 13-hour flight from Newark to Narita, and I found myself in a long-stay apartment with a TV that only played Harry Potter movies and the Japanese version of QVC. It was me and my thoughts and no Internet. Entire days I spent in a minivan crammed with teenage models, driving from casting to casting until 10 pm.

I spent most of my nights drinking terrible red wine and devouring 1 pound

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bags of frozen edamame beans. Then I would wander, drunk and alone in the city. My behaviour would be considered dangerous at home in Canada, but in Tokyo it was safe. It was normal. There were no predators, just my own negativity chasing me.

Many of the models bonded quickly with each other, but my age left me outside of the friendship equation. I liked being the one they came to for advice, but I found it frustrating to identify with young girls who seemed to be born into fashion. I had spent too long being normal. Gradually I cut myself off from the

Personal Essay

other girls. I felt trapped between two worlds. There were the tourists and there was the Japanese, and I was neither.

But on those evening sojourns, I’d never felt more at peace in my entire life.

I would walk for hours, chasing temple cats and breaking onto rooftops to watch the night sky pulse over Shibuya.

Those nights I felt as though I was watching the world unfold like a film or a lucid dream. My interactions with people were brief and confusing, but my mind had never been more clear.

And then, suddenly, my 3 months were up and I was gone. Home to Canada.

Back to New York, Paris, London. No matter where I was in the world I could never quite recreate the romance and the solitude that I felt during my time in Tokyo.

It was a high that I chased many times.

Tokyo became a feeling, not just a destination. I found myself coming back to Japan at least a half-dozen times before I decided to give up modeling for good.

Sometime later I was living in Brooklyn off of Hewes Station when I got an email

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Personal Essay

from my Tokyo agency; they wanted me back. The allure of Tokyo was too much for me to pass up, knowing that, at 28, it would be my last ticket to Japan. I took that chance and revived my so-called modeling career just for the chance at that bittersweet feeling of isolation one more time. To know what it would feel like to stand on the roof of my Japanese hotel alone at 4 am and think about what might be happening in New York City and why it felt so right to not be a part of it. Again But I slowly came to accept the fact I would tiptoe through closed parks at that I would never leave Japan. I gave night, and listen to cicadas drone. Smoke up on NYC dreams and focused on the packs of $3 cigarettes, and sit in basequality of my life. I was too old for shitty railroad apartments without toilets or ment whiskey bars alongside Japanese party lofts at Jefferson Station with no businessmen, waiting for the last train. air-conditioning or bedroom windows.

Here I had room to breathe. To live a life People often ask me how I can survive without question. living in Japan, with those “lil shoebox And so, on one of those lost nights on apartments” and I laugh, remembering the roof of my hotel in Japan, I decided to all those shitty little New York apartstay in Tokyo. I would work as much as I possibly could for as long as I could unments, loud-sex-having roommates, and boiling summers spent living adjatil they were fucking sick of me and there were no jobs left. Then, I would go home cent to a poultry slaughterhouse. to Canada and sort out my post-model life. “You get used to it,” is what I tell them.

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Illustrations by Wiley Keiko double dot

Graphica

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NEW YORK & TOKYO

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Monika Mogi

Interview by Michele Ayoub Monika Mogi has been working as a photographer for American Apparel since she was 19. On a visit to LA she was scouted by the creative director to model for the company, and ended up on the other side of the camera after showing off the shoot she did for Vice’s photo issue in 2011. Now she has a full time job with American Apparel in Tokyo as one of their main photographers while also shooting for major brands and magazines like Nylon Japan and X-Girl. Oh, and she’s only 23. Her personal work has been featured in Editorial Mag, Ponytale Magazine, Dazed & Confused and Petra Collins’ online gallery The Ardorous.

I recently moved to Tokyo and met up with Monika where we were able to bond over mutual friends around the world, feeling like a “gaijin” (the Japanese word for “foreigner”) in Tokyo, and earthquakes.

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Photography

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Monika Mogi Michele Ayoub So, do you like it here?

I really like it. But I don’t know if it’s because I’m still in a honeymoon stage and open to everything. Do YOU like it here?

Yeah, it’s my hometown really. I’ve been living here since I was 12. My hometown is actually closer to Yokohama, which is the 2nd largest city in Japan and right next to Tokyo. I think I’m just so used to it here.

When I went to New York recently I felt like it was so different. The train system here, everything here, you don’t have to worry.

Things are run really well and everyone is kind of on the same wavelength. That kind of makes it boring in some aspects but really nice in others. It’s a little different for me because I didn’t ever go to a Japanese school, so I am sort of outside of the Japanese mindset that seems to link everyone.

Can you tell me more about that?

I went to a school on a military base, so I was with other American kids for the most part.

Wow. Why? I grew up in Hawaii and California, then my parents divorced when I was 11, and my mom and I moved to Japan.

So when did you start getting into photography? You started making zines when you were 15, that’s really impressive.

Is it?

Interview

Yeah!

These zines are not like cool zines. They’re actually really lame. I probably wouldn’t post them anywhere now. I started contacting this artist management/record label that manages American and European bands that come play in Tokyo, and I would ask them if I could interview the band for my zine. I would get a ticket to the show, take photos, then interview the band on their press day.

When you were 15.

Like 15 and 16. I’m surprised that I had the guts to go out and interview these bands. I don’t even know exactly why I started doing it. It was actually pretty cheesy. My friends and I really got into Lomography around that time. My friend got one and we started taking film photos and we were like, “Wow, film is cool!” and then you know, maybe I used my mom’s camera and kept going.

What pushed you to start publishing? Why put it out there?

I lived with a single mom who was at work every day until really late so I would always just come home and be on the computer. I had a lot of time on my hands to post things I made on the internet. I just got more into taking photos, and started buying cameras for myself and shooting with friends. I realized that anyone could publish anything on the internet and that was around the time I shared more of my photos. I met Petra online when we were 16 and she had a photo blog too. She later made The Ardorous and asked me to join.

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Interview Photography

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That’s so cool that you were sharing your work at 16.

I don’t even think it’s called work. I don’t even know what it’s called. It’s like playing.

Even now I kind of see it like that. I mean, it does feel like that. I just feel so lucky because it’s nice that I can just focus on taking photos and it’s really fun.

That’s probably really inspiring.

That’s why I like doing those bigger magazines. Because you’re communicating to a wider audience. People who read ViVi are high-school girls that might not be that aware of art. So I hope that maybe more nuanced visuals might inspire something beyond consumerism.

It seems you have a lot of international connections too?

I do commercial work mostly in Japan though, sometimes for international publications. But I don’t really do any work overseas. Because I feel like overseas, in America, people know my personal work or photos I showed with The Ardorous. But in Japan I shoot a lot of commercial stuff that is a bit different, maybe even more creative in a way. I’ve never done a shoot in America besides American Apparel for the most part.

I noticed your personal work is reminiscent of ʼ60s Japanese photography but I feel like all the young photographers I’m meeting in Japan seem to be moving away from that and channeling more contemporary western influences. So it’s interesting to see you doing the opposite.

I do notice that too. I think a lot of Japanese photographers don’t really embrace the Japanese culture that much. I’m especially inspired by older generations. I actually really like recreating. I really like Showa Japan. (The era between 1926-1989 when Japan was very economically wealthy and architecture and design were heavily influenced by pop art.) That’s my most favourite Japan. I think I’m a gaijin (foreigner) in a way like that. It’s weird for me in Japan because I’m not necessarily seen as a Japanese person here. My Japanese isn’t that perfect. I can talk and have a meeting. As hard as I try though I’m never going to be a full Japanese person. There are too many finely drawn respect rules that I have a hard time embracing.

What’s it like working in Tokyo?

There are usually like 10 or 15 people behind you watching you work on set. The client says, “we want your style,” but then there are all these rules. I often shoot for a teenage fashion magazine called ViVi, I think it’s one of the highest selling here and very mainstream and very pop, so I initially felt like my photos didn’t really fit with it. All the other photos are usually digital and glossy looking. And most of it is shot by men. But I’ve realized that it is interesting working for them because I get to influence their brand little by little and show people the way that I view fashion and models.

Does that affect your confidence as an artist in Japan?

Yes, it kind of works well in a way though,

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if you use it to your advantage. Because if I was just 100% Japanese and didn’t speak English I would be treated differently. I sort of get a pass on acting Japanese because my Japanese sounds ridiculous and I tell people that I didn’t really fully grow up here.

So I think I can take more control as a director and be a bit more bold. When I’m on a set it’s sort of like a French director trying to speak English. You know what I mean?

I can escape an editor’s micromanagement and do my thing. Maybe that is a good dynamic for a photographer. You see a lot of photographers that work here that are from England or Australia or somewhere.

You’re kind of in this middle ground.

I think in Japan it’s really hard to become a photographer. Because there’s this whole structured system. I’ve met so many photographers in Japan who are like, “I want to be a freelance photographer but I have to finish my 2 years assisting first before I can,” and it’s like, ‘Why!? Don’t you see that in society there are these set up rules and it’s like, who sets these up?’

I’ve definitely noticed it. How are your recent projects going?

I did this project recently called Working Class Beauty, it was the most recent zine I made for an art book fair, and it’s an ongoing project. Basically I’m shooting my friends, projecting myself. I’m really interested in looking at classism right now. I can relate to it more. Because outside my mom’s house is like the Japanese ghetto. And my friend lives in the ‘gangster town’ outside of Tokyo.

Interview

I started to realize that as an adult I am really sensitive about money. I’ve always not liked how the working class is depicted in normal movies or TV shows. Recently I draw all my inspiration from my hometown. I think it’s such a weird landscape. It’s totally manmade. There are factories everywhere and it’s not an urban city at all. Near my mom’s house there are blocks of government sponsored housing. I’ve always been inspired by movies that show class.

I really like the title, Working Class Beauty.

I wanted to say working class isn’t a bad word. I’m actually proud to be working class.

Because of the experiences I’ve had I feel more grateful for how money is spent. Especially in Tokyo consumerism is a problem.

When I first got here I got so anxious because I felt like I would have to spend so much money just to fit in.

I feel like everyone really goes on the trends but it’s not only women, it’s men too. It’s everyone. I feel like I’ve never been that kind of girl. I’ve never spent a ridiculous amount of money on clothes. Most of my things I own are either free or really cheap.

Does being a woman affect your work in Japan?

I was approached by a male editor in Japan for the first time only very recently. I think Japan has changed a bit when you compare the gender gap to 30 or 40 years ago.

But in a Japanese corporate world, there’s still women bringing out tea. Most editors at women’s magazines are women though,

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In the

Japanese

corporate world,

there’s still

women bringing out tea double dot

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Photography Interview

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and I like working with their magazines, but it has categorized me as this girly fashion photographer. Which is OK because that is where I started and it is very natural for me, but I am happy when an editor takes a chance on me with different subject matter too. And I also hope that the future of Japanese fashion magazines isn’t going to always be so gender specific. Like all male editors at men’s magazines, and female editors at women’s magazines.

Do you see yourself staying in Japan permanently?

I don’t know. I always think about this.

Whenever I go to America I feel really culture shocked. I don’t have much interest living in New York for some reason. Maybe for a month but not a long period of time.

I like LA but I can’t drive. I moved to San Diego for 8 months with my boyfriend but I didn’t really have any friends when I was there. I just moved there not knowing anyone or anything. Except for American Apparel. But I feel like now that I know more people it would be fun to live there.

But I don’t know. I’m so comfortable here, I don’t have the guts to move.

Actually what is the difference between New York and Tokyo because I feel like there’s a weird similarity in some ways?

They’re both big cities, fast paced.

Yes, but I think the people are total opposites. I mean there isn’t going to be someone playing a guitar or breakdancing on the Japanese train. I don’t think I know New York enough but just my experience being

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there for a week I do see the similarity of being exhausted by all the people. But then again in Tokyo, while I do live in a big city, I stay in my local area. So I feel I am in a big city but also I’m in my little area.

I’m going to ask you one last but really basic question: what inspires you the most?

Hmm… I don’t know. I guess just always trying to create newer things. I’m never really satisfied. Again it’s like playing. It’s just fun to know that I have all these years ahead of me so I can really develop. I’m not in a rush. Time is inspiring, really. I just like seeing my development, or development in anything.

I think being inspired by time is a really great thing. I never would have thought of that as an answer.

I just thought of it on the spot lol… Were you scared of the earthquake yesterday?

Yes!! I was so scared. I was actually in the middle of karaoke.

What did you do? I’m actually afraid because my apartment is super cheap and made out of wood from the 70s and it shakes so much. I’m afraid it’s going to collapse.

I’m so unprepared. I don’t even know what I would do.

I would be doomed.

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In Hayao Miyazakiʼs films, characters and viewers alike are spectators of the vast unknown.

On Studio

ス タ ジ オ ジ ブ リ の

by Gavin Tomson

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Raise your hand if you spent much, maybe too much, of your childhood drooling buckets over animated films made by Disney, the oligarch of imagination, despot of gullible dreams. “Eye nipples,” is what an old Shakespeare prof of mine once poetically deemed television screens, “because the eye latches on to them like a baby’s mouth to a nipple.” Those of us who grew up in the ´80s and ´90s latched our eyes (and souls) onto Disney films so firmly as to make bottles, soothers, and parents almost irrelevant. That scene where Rafiki holds baby Simba above the remarkably organized jungle kingdom? That scene practically raised me. (Sorry mom.) Generally, Disney derives its narratives from European fairytales and folklore, repackaged for the Toys R Us set. One consequence is that Disney films are thoroughly mainstream, the Ugg Boots of kids movies. Although the storiesˋ modern furnishings are imaginative, ideologically they’re anything but.

Animated films made by Studio Ghibli, a film studio based in Tokyo, are different. Studio Ghibli films (they include My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), to name a few) reject consumerist culture and commodity fetishism in favour of dreamier worlds that often parody or take place outside neoliberalism.

Unlike Disney films, they star heroines­

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The Wind Rises (2013)

more often than heroes. And unlike Disney films they reject ethical and psychological black and whites. Forget villains and heroes: Ghibli casts are a medley of protean figures, round all around. Drooling viewers of all ages must think critically to make sense of them.

Studio Ghibli’s director, the mysterious Hayao Miyazaki, is often deemed “The Walt Disney of Japan,” but this tag reveals more about North America’s propensity for narcissism than it does his work. Disney and Miyazaki share more differences than similarities. The latter’s films are not necessarily better than Disney’s. Nor are they more ‘authentic’ — what does that word even mean? — but for sure they are more ideologically nuanced. Miyazaki himself is a kind of radical, post-humanist luddite. In a profile piece on him by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker (2005), he giddily expressed his hopes for an apocalypse:

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I want to see the sea rise above Tokyo and the NTV tower become an island. I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises, because nobody’s buying­them.

I’m excited about that. Money and desire — all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.

It’s no surprise, then, that in Miyazaki’s films, wild green grasses often take over the screen while characters (humans,

My Neighbour Totoro (1988)

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animals, spirits) play out their comparatively petty dramas on the periphery.

Characters are more so spectators than stars. A quote from Rivka Galchen’s short story, “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire,” comes to mind: “It’s the Kantian sublime, what you’re experiencing. There’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.” Miyazaki’s films evoke the sublime sensation of remembering (or realizing) that individual life itself is but a decaying, little itty-bitty island surrounded by a colossal organic unknown.

You could label Miyazaki’s aesthetic wabi-sabi, an untranslatable Japanese term that sort of means — and here I’ll note that I’m a Canadian white man who knows little about Japan — an organic synthesis of impermanence, incompleteness and imperfection that evokes both longing and melancholia. Another equally relevant and abstruse Japanese terms is mono no aware, which translates, literally, as “the sadness of pathos

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Hakujaden (1958)

or things.” Mono no aware has something to do with the effects and affects of transience and decay and renewal, all of which appear variously in Miyazaki’s films.

Miyazaki was born during the Second World War in Bunkyō, Tokyo.

His father was the director of Miyazaki Airplanes, which made rudders for A6M Zero fighter planes in the war. (“Ghibli” derives from a Libyan word that Italian WWII pilots used to describe the hot Mediterranean winds blowing through the Sahara). Miyazaki wanted to become a manga author until 1958 when, at age 17, he saw in theatres Hakujaden (The Tale of the White Serpent), the first feature-length coloured anime film. The film moved Miyazaki’s “soul,” he recalled in his essay, The Current Situation of

Japanese Movies (1987), and, after stumbling home from the theatre in the snow, he compared his “pitiful situation” to the characters’ “earnestness” and felt “ashamed” of himself and “cried all night.” Hakujaden made him “realise what a fool I was.” It also made him want to change: “Despite the words of distrust I spoke, I yearned for an earnest and pure world…I could no longer deny the fact that I wanted to make something life affirming.”

There are often such tensions in Miyazaki’s films, between trust and skepticism, innocence and experience, earnestness and cynicism, rural and urban, the ostensible purity of artistic desire and the impure consequences of satisfying it. His most recent, and possibly last (Miyazaki recently claimed

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that he’s retiring, but he’s made this claim before), animated Ghibli film, The Wind Rises (2013), is a fictional biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, a real person, whose love for airplanes propelled him to engineer models that ended up being used as weapons in the Second World War. The film prompts viewers to ask: Was Horikoshi an innocent engineer, or was he a war criminal? Is ethics situated in the intent of a gesture or its consequence?

Is creativity inherently political?­Studio Ghibli films revel in such ambiguity. Life is not dyadic, but messy and contradictory, so why not render it this way? Better to be true than reductive. “The problems of our civilization,” Miyazaki has said, “are so difficult that we can’t only put an ‘X’ in a circle and say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” There’s a word in Norwegian that means something between yes (ja) and no (nei): jo (pronounced “yo”). Miyazaki’s films are in their own way jo.

And Miyazaki himself is a living jo.

He’s a creator who’s inspired by apocalyptic destruction. An anti-consumerist

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whose merchandise earns millions. A post-humanist who makes humane films. An environmentalist who promotes nature through artifice. A childish curmudgeon.

Is Miyazaki a hypocrite? Only if you view him, unlike his films, in black and white. The more sophisticated and also generous response is that he’s negatively capable — capable, in John Keats’s famous words, “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Miyazaki doesn’t so much transcend contradictions or differences so much as he navigates them with poise.

This spring, I attended a screening­ of Spirited Away at a grungy music­ venue, alongside dozens of other fans.

Afterward, as I emerged from the dark venue into the sunny spring afternoon,­the daylight imbued things with dreamlike clarity. Wandering homeward through Dufferin Grove Park, an image from Nabokov’s short story, “The Vane Sisters,” came to mind: “I walked on in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball.” Among the grass beside the path a squirrel chewed a slice of pizza. Tree leaves moved in the wind as though trying to tickle the sky. Above me, birds went about their fidgety dramas and I was only a shape passing under them. I was not the star of the organic world. I was just a spectator.

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Tokyo 200 東京 200 In

Duncan Foy’s

last 5 days living in Tokyo,

he photographed

200 strangers.

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What kind of music do you listen to?

I’ve been listening to a Japanese rock duo called The B’z lately, check them out they’re good.

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If you could bring anything to a deserted island what would it be?

My partner.

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What’s your favourite place in Tokyo?

Shimokitazawa is my favourite because it’s so calm and down to earth compared to Harajuku.

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Describe your style in one word.

Punk. I run a punk bar just down the street from here called the Pigs Tail.

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What has been the highlight of your week?

Going on a day trip to Chiba.

Describe your style in one word.

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When you were young what did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a beautician. It’s what my mother did so I wanted to be one as well.

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Seishun é?’ć˜Ľ Art Direction & Photography by Jennifer Cheng Styling by Masako Ogura Model Shiori ~ Holiday Management

shirt and skirt UNIQLO

shirt Hanes pants Marques Almeida

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shirt and skirt UNIQLO shoes Haruta

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shirt Lad Musician hat Photographer’s own

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top and bottom Stylist’s own shoes Little America

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top Marques Almeida x Topshop dress Stylist’s own

Air Nude

Tokyo-based

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Suguru Azuma

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ns tio ec photography and art direction by David Brandon Geeting styling and production by Mecca James Williams, styling assisted by Faye Cruz, hair by Netty Jordan, make-up by Takashi Ashizawa and Mai Shimura, model Tamirys from ELITE

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crop top and bottom SAMANTHA PLEET long sleeve top AREA

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shirt SOPHIE ANDES GASCON jeans GOOD FOR NOTHING EMBROIDERY bralette MARYSIA LEFT dress SAKAYA DAVIS

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coat OMONDI top and bottom KAAREM RIGHT top DEGEN bottom NANCY STELLA SOTO

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top DEGEN bottom NANCY STELLA SOTO shoes MARYAM NASSIR ZADEH LEFT jacket and shorts OMONDI shirt CALLE DEL MAR

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shirt SOPHIE ANDES GASCON jeans GOOD FOR NOTHING EMBROIDERY bralette MARYSIA shoes PRADA RIGHT OMONDI jumper SAKAYA DAVIS scarf BIRKENSTOCK sandals

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SOPHIE ANDES GASCON dress SAMANTHA PLEET shorts ETYTS shoes LEFT OMONDI jumper SAKAYA DAVIS scarf

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Where Everybody Knows Your Name New York’s bodegas endure

by Andrea Oppedisano Illustration by Martina Paukova

The word bodega, Spanish for small grocery store or warehouse, evokes specific details: the classic red and yellow awning wrapped around a corner storefront; large windows advertising calling cards and an ATM; plantanos and slightly dusty dry goods; a lingering cat or two. But where New York’s bodegas differ from your average North American corner store is less physical than it is psychological: as Manhattan’s rapid commercialization is leading to the proliferation of homogeneous, often sterile, mega-chains, the bodega is a class-melding meeting spot at the heart of many communities.

In a place like New York City, the idea of a shopkeeper that knows your name may seem like pure nostalgia. And yet more than 13, 000 bodegas continue to

thrive, especially in the Spanish speaking neighborhoods of the Bronx. Ed García Conde, a lifelong South Bronx resident and founder of the blog Welcome2theBronx, attributes their survival to the fact that bodegas are more than just your average convenience store: The bodega’s role is not limited to the provision of goods; it is a place for social interaction and chance encounters among residents.

“In the [South] Bronx there are no cafés,” he tells me. “Here, the bodega is the café.

People come to chit chat, catch up on local news – they are basically the old version of the Internet. They are not just a throwback to an era when kids played in the streets, these places still exist.”

In the 1989 book about the social and cultural geography of North America,

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The Great Good Place, sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes such places, including­coffee shops, pubs, and public libraries, as “the third space.” If home and work are the first and second place where people carry out life’s daily activities, then the third place is a container that provides the opportunity for informal interactions between neighbours or strangers.

Third places, according to Oldenburg, are important for civil society and integral to any healthy neighborhood.

Walking the streets of South Bronx, it’s evident that bodegas continue to act as a vibrant third place, facilitating public life.

However, with concerns about rising commercial rents and changing demographics – the stuff of gentrification – the future of the bodega is called into question.

It’s not only the private sector that has impacted the fate of New York’s bodegas. Government initiatives, too, have made their mark. In 2009, the Bloomberg administration introduced the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, in an effort to increase access to fresh food and address diet-related illnesses. The program introduced financial

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incentives and tax reductions to encourage the establishment of new and the retention of existing grocery stores across the city. However, since the criteria for eligibility was limited to stores that could meet a minimum size requirement of 6000 square feet or larger, bodegas, which are generally smaller, were disqualified from participating.

The program was successful in increasing the number of grocery stores, but it failed to take advantage of existing community infrastructure, and forced the bodega to compete with larger stores.

As the city itself continues to evolve and grow, so too does the bodega. But despite these changes, people are fiercely loyal to their bodega. So loyal, in fact, people are willing to pay a premium for the convenience of shopping at the corner store. Conde himself admits to visiting his bodega at least a few times a day.

He attributes this to the camaraderie between shopkeepers and their customers.“Where else can you buy something on credit?” he muses, “In a place where the majority of people live below the poverty line, it’s an important detail.”

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Local anxieties and aesthetics influence the Lower East Sideʼs

Tomorrow Gallery

by Alexandra Caufin Photography by Benjamin Freedman

New York gallerist Tara Downs begins our interview with an important addition to my vocabulary: “barncore.”

Downs, a Montreal native turned Toronto artist turned Berlin gallery director turned Lower East Side curator – the most impressive mouthful I’ve heard in a while – is setting up for the June 2015 exhibition at her Tomorrow Gallery, intriguingly entitled Some Versions of Pastoral. The nature-centric exhibition – which hosts drawings of decaying tulips

by Jutta Zimmerman and hand-woven

horse blankets dyed with onion skins

by Dena Yago – riffs off those pesky ecological anxieties that bubble up when trapped in the concrete jungles of urban centres.

Downs explains that Yago is also part of the K-HOLE troupe that conceived the normcore phenomenon. “Dena and I have had a running joke about this kind of hipster, ‘barncore’ fetishism that you’ll see in places like Williamsburg – like a return to making your own rooftop honey, for instance.

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‘Weapon Beside the Bed’ Aleksander Hardashnakov, 2015

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From her Manhattan digs in the Lower Eastside – a neighbourhood some have called the current epicentre of American contemporary art – Downs is in the ideal position to comment on such urban anxieties. Although the space is but a year old, Tomorrow Gallery’s story traces back to before Downs’ relocation to New York from Berlin, where she worked for a stint as director at the Tanya Leighton Gallery. In 2011, the fresh-faced graduate of OCAD University decided to address “the deplorable state of Toronto programming at the time,” by launching a warehouse gallery in the Sterling art district.

At the Toronto iteration of Tomorrow Gallery, Downs showed several thenemerging artists who were rapidly making a name for themselves – including Brad Troemel and his army of ants, Sebastian Black’s abstract painting, and Berliners Calla Henkelʼs and Max Pitegoff’s sculpture and photography, respectively. When said artists picked up lasting international attention, the gallery

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earned for itself a kind of art oracle status, a reputation for sniffing out the best and brightest of experimental. Full of momentum, Downs and fellow co-founders Scott Douglas and Aleksander Hardashnakov closed the Toronto location and made the jump to Manhattan just in time for the top of the 2014 art season, sending a slough of radars blaring with their post-Internetthemed exhibition Eternal September. Ten months later, Some Versions of Pastoral’s art of ecological anxieties addresses another facet of what I’ve affectionately termed, “the plagues of the age.”

The exhibition riffs on a pervasive propensity for “how people fantasize about this kind of pastoral environment while also knowing at the same time that we’ve completely ruined it.” Or maybe it’s a New York thing, she jokes.

It seems that what I had deemed a global trend – after all, we’re all a little anxious about the future of the earth, no?

– has intensified on various local levels in New York, a city with a particular talent for taking bits of collective conscious – like the yearning for a contemporary countryside – and enhancing them, escalating them, and making them tangible.

“I never knew that living in New York, there could be this type of localism,” Downs explains. “I live in the LES and that means something very distinct.

There was a point when like, eight of my friends and I all lived on Broom Street and it was nicknamed Broom City, because everyone would constantly see

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when it comes to New York art culture, this localized pride is as valuable as it is problematic.

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each other. It’s funny, sometimes, how little I’ll leave a ten-block radius…and how provincial New York can be.”

Downs acknowledges that when it comes to New York art culture, this localized pride is as valuable as it is problematic.

“I think most people [in New York] think they have a good handle on a global perspective. I mean, just the Internet bridges most of the gap, but there are strange things specific to New York.

I never imagined that the New York art scene would be so painting-centric. And it makes sense – that history is there. But every single quirky permutation of that? Like these whimsical, nice paintings that are totally harmless and outside of any international discourse. No one outside of New York or maybe outside of America would really devote too much time to this, but somehow that facet exists so strongly.”

Nonetheless, Downs describes her LES spot as inherently positive, good-company vibes. “[Gallerist] Gavin Brown is down the street from me, 47 Canal’s new space is there, and there are all these other galleries opening up so it’s quite exciting,” she says. “It feels advantageous, and I’m also surrounded by programming I enjoy.

[In] the LES you can just hop between one place and the other and kind of map it all out. Those evenings feel so combustible. It’s nice to go into a neighbourhood and do 1, 2, 3 and see different programming riffing off each other.”

When asked how she thinks Tomorrow Gallery might be different, would it have

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Jutta Zimmermann ‘Untitled’, 2015

landed in a different borough, Downs exhales a loaded, “Oh wow,” and explains it’s hard to say.

“I think that there are such distinct stereotypes for each borough in New York.

It means something so different to be a gallery in Williamsburg or a gallery in Brooklyn. And where you choose to land kind of dictates what programming you’re doing and on what scale. It’s a very narrow vision saying that, but at the same time, there is some truth to it.”

That local aesthetics, local anxieties, and local culture all in some capacity influence the programming at Tomorrow Gallery is for Downs a benefit, not a concern. “You do have this kind of international crosswind perforating that,” she says, referencing her participation in art fairs in Miami, Berlin, Paris, and Milan, among others, to keep the conversation complex and multi-faceted.

As we turn to discussing Tomorrow’s on-the-radar artists and upcoming programming, it’s evident that Downs’ has

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Brad Troemel, ‘LIVE/WORK’, 2014

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tapped into a pervasive aesthetic exchange that is circulating the topic of urban existence in epicentres like New York, where the gaze is definitively and perpetually fixated on the future – making Tomorrow Gallery’s name even more evocative.

“A lot of the artists I see are negotiating this disappearing urban culture,” Downs says, pointing to Jason Matthew Lee, who was featured in the gallery’s high profile Eternal September show. “[Jason] does this series where he orders old pay phones online that have been sort of tossed out in New York City and are disappearing essentially from the urban landscape,” she explains. “He’s pointing to the technological obsolescence of them as well.”

Preservation, conservation, the nomadic, and a critique of money as a tool for exchange also find their way into the conversation. “I see people work with very sparse means like bric-a-brac…and what they collect – these very humble materials,” Downs says. “A lot of people engage in the economics of life and work. I think especially coming out of The Crash, it was a huge concern in New

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York, that type of financial precarity that exists. And while that might not be the topic du-jour, it comes out in many sub-currents of peoples’ work.”

A hyper-awareness of physical environments rounds out the pulsing rhythms governing the current spirit in the LES. “Keep in mind that we have such a small space right now,” Downs explains.

“You can kind of conquer this space really easily and set a really distinct tone. So a lot of the exhibitions have been very immersive.”

Case in point, co-founder Aleksander Hardashnakov “laid down an entirely new floor and created this night sky by using an ice pick and picking into the floor and filling it with joint compound so you had this black paint and white specs. He was setting the ground for this kind of celestial and romantic show,” Downs explains.

But as Downs notes, there’s no way to quite nail down the aesthetic conversation happening in the city at large; there are so many occurring simultaneously that the effect amounts to a kind of droning buzz.

Perhaps Downs’ observation about the city’s intensified localism is actually a necessary evil to the survival of its various artistic communities. “[In New York], you don’t feel like you’re in a singular, homogenous scene,” Downs says. “There are art worlds in New York that I don’t even participate in, and it’s not necessary that I would want to.”

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Brad Troemel, ‘LIVE/WORK’, 2014

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RAT K I NG

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November 24, 2014. New York City hip-hop group Ratking is opening for Run The Jewels at St. Louis’s The Ready Room. Ten miles north, in Ferguson, Missouri, a grand jury’s verdict had just announced that a police officer, Darren Wilson, would not be indicted for the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old black man, Michael Brown. As Ratking’s Harlemborn-and-raised duo Hak and Wiki prepare to go on, people scroll through social media’s barrage of photos and video of police with riot shields and batons, peaceful protestors being tear-gassed, and­local businesses ablaze. “You could definitely feel the tension,” says Ratking producer Sporting Life. “If you started watching the images projected through the news, it pulled you into the energy.”

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While it was Run The Jewels’ Killer Mike who grabbed music site headlines that night for his impassioned speech, lambasting the country’s “war machine,” offering support for Brown’s family and the protestors, and expressing fear for his two sons, the two groups’ music shares common sentiments towards 21st century policing in America. Ratking’s 2014 song “Remove Ya” is a scathing takedown of the NYPD’s “stop-andfrisk” policy – which the city’s current mayor Bill de Blasio has pledged to put an end to – begins with recorded dialogue from when a 17-year-old black teenager named Alvin recorded a run-in with the cops.

OFFICER: “You wanna go to jail?”

ALVIN: “Well, for what, for what?”

OFFICER: “Shut your fuckin’ mouth kid!”

ALVIN: “What am I getting arrested for?”

OFFICER: “For being a fuckin’ mutt”

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Then Wiki’s voice comes in, guttural and pointed, over a beat that sounds like whirring sirens: “I’m a mutt, you a mutt, yeah we some mutts,” a reference to his half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican background (Hak is also multi-racial, black and Italian). Ratking’s lyrics are rooted in the skepticism of a young, disenfranchised generation, calling for redress through knowledge rather than violence, and stressing the importance of being acutely aware of your surroundings. “I think as an individual in any city you are, do whatever you can to stay relaxed, stay de-stressed, and try to get as much correct information as possible,” says Sporting Life, a.k.a. Eric Adiele. “That’s the only thing that’s going to see you through the rest of your life.”

On their well-received 2014 debut album So It Goes, they presented a gritty portrait of the five boroughs through the eyes of the two twenty-something rappers, raised on a diet of punk (The Germs, The Ramones, Suicide), NYC rap station Hot 97 (50 Cent, Cam’ron, WuTang Clan), and skate tapes. Theyʼve been praised by publications including The A.V. Club, Pitchfork, NPR, and The New York Times, and touted as the East Coast equivalent of Los Angeles controversybaiting collective Odd Future. Even the trio’s name – a reference to the folkloric and quite literal “rat king” (a group of rats intertwined at the tails by blood, dirt, feces, etc.) – was a terrifying image that’s aptly symbolic for the struggles of living in a seething, grimy metropolis.

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Photograph by Andrew Kass

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Ratking’s lyrics are rooted in the skepticism of a young, disenfranchised generation, calling for redress through knowledge rather than violence.

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Earlier last year, Taylor Swift was named New York’s “Global Tourism Ambassador,” and in a series of cheesy but well-meaning promo videos, the pop star defines NYC vocabulary terms, including “bodega,” “stoop,” and “NoHo.” Suffice it to say, Ratking’s New York City is not T-Swift’s New York City. The group’s New York is Lennox Avenue in the heart of Harlem, Canal Street pawn shops and street traders, and selling weed to NYU students in Washington Square Park. Their Big Apple is half-rotten from gentrification and the politicians who shape its laws and policies, their City That Never Sleeps is in desperate need of a wake-up alarm.

So It Goes borrows its title from the refrain of American author Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and the record’s cover depicts a sprawling map of crisscrossing streets, bridges, and waterways. In another one of Vonnegut’s novels, 1987’s Bluebeard, the narrator of Armenian heritage moves to New York to be “born again” and says, “Nowhere has the number zero been of more philosophical value than United States… and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with its lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.” Hak and Wiki frequently reference how the city was built on the backs of immigrants and civic leaders like Malcolm; “Six million trains to ride one, choose one” goes the hook of “So It Goes,” and a rattling subway car can be heard at the end of “Remove Ya.”

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Owing to the album’s critical success, they spent a large part of last year on the road, playing shows and festivals all over the world. When I reach Adiele, he’s enjoying his first day off at home after completing Ratking’s North American tour.

“This is my first day just walking in the streets without anything scheduled,” says the producer, who now calls Washington Heights home after making the move from Virginia in 2005. “Things are becoming more normal every day I’m back.”

After releasing So It Goes on a major indie label (XL Recordings), being hailed as the saviours of New York rap, and even having a Beastie Boy remix one of their songs (Ad-Rock’s take on “Canal” strips the track to its basics with a sparse bass line), these accolades might make attempting normalcy difficult.

Instead of crumbling under the weight of expectations, they worked on new music while on the road, grabbing studio time whenever possible, and released an EP – 700 Fill – in March for free download via file-hosting service BitTorrent.

While their songs focus on the everyday struggles of living in the city and the dog-eat-dog mentality of its residents, the trio’s approach to recording is more collaborative. The EP features guest spots from several like-minded New York emcees, and Hak and Wiki have recorded separately with artists ranging from Odd Future rapper Earl Sweatshirt to British singer-songwriter King Krule, and Sacramento, California

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hardcore punk band Trash Talk. Speaking to Adiele, he’s just as excited discussing the group’s own music as he is the ragtag community of musicians, skaters, and visual artists he’s found since moving to the city. To that end, they’ve formed Letter Racer, an art collective slash label slash internet radio show to provide a platform for their friends.

Whereas So It Goes was densely packed and unrelentingly bleak at times, 700 Fill sees the group more comfortable with their identities, packing the eight songs with experimental saxophone solos, Sporting Life rapping, and sampled dialogue from an Allen Iverson press conference. Like the debut, they’re still touting their skepticism of a postsecondary education (Wiki on “Bethel”: “Some say I been a fool for a year/But I’m coolin’ I got a career”), and they also continue to articulate the widespread harassment, discrimination, and senseless violence faced by African-Americans, Latinos, and other people of colour in not just New York, but other cities and towns too. In the aftermath of the Ferguson riots, Killer Mike became an unlikely spokesman, penning an op-ed for Huffington Post and appearing on CNN to share his perspective of growing up as a black man in the U.S. and the son of an Atlanta police officer. It’s too early to tell if Ratking will follow in the footsteps of the politically-outspoken veteran rapper and others, but there’s no denying their voices are more important than ever before.

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APPARENT VICE How an ostentatious media office is changing Brooklyn

by Chris Berube Illustration by Laura Breiling

When I lived in New York, I attended one Vice party. It was the worst night I had living there. And I lived through Hurricane Sandy and “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” on Broadway.

I went to the party with a woman my friend had set me up with. Walking into the dive bar under a crummy bridge in Williamsburg, I felt badly out of place. Was I poorly dressed? Or too well dressed? How come I look older than everyone here, even though I’m 23? Wait, are they playing “Lady Marmalade” on purpose or...? I wanted

to express all of this to the person I was with, but she went to dance with some friends and promptly abandoned me at the bar to get drinks.

I ordered two whiskey and sodas. The bartender was mad I wasn’t ordering loud enough. She gave me two PBRs and charged me for two whiskeys anyhow.

I was left at the ring of the dance floor to look at the couples – impossibly beautiful women with homely dudes wearing gold lamé shirts and thick Rupert Pupkin moustaches. One of them yelled at me, since I was gawking at the improbability

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of him grinding with a lithe 19-year-old.

“Looking ain’t free, you piece of shit.” I still do not know what that means. I felt anxious the whole time.

There is something awkward about the growth of Vice Media from scrappy brica-brac Montreal magazine into a global media empire. Vice’s old ethos felt like that party I attended – it was exclusionary and angry and ironic and occasionally, as anyone on the wrong side of Do’s and Dont’s will tell you, arbitrarily mean.

A bit over ten years ago, Vice started getting really big. They made ads for billion dollar companies and started taking money from Viacom. They jettisoned Gavin McInnes, the font of their cruelest feature columns, and some casual maybe-ironic-maybe-not racism and sexism. (Mclnnesʼs various maybepranks included telling people he was “proud” of being a white person, and wearing an Osama Bin Laden t-shirt to book launches.) Back in the day, Vice would openly mock anyone who dared to offend McInnes’s aesthetic sensibilities, which might include homeless people and overweight women. Summing up his questionable ethos, McInnes told the Ryerson Journalism Review in 2005; “All

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this PC fascism has made it very difficult to do normal, uncensored humor.”

There are still elements of the “old Vice” in Brooklyn (see: the bartender at that party I attended, the popularity of Die Antwoord) but the media ‘brand’ itself has changed, and done everything in its power to look like a bona fide media company, not a place for dodgy jokes about people they saw on the street.

Vice is now owned, in part, by A&E, the company behind shows like “Duck Dynasty” and “Intervention.” Shane Smith, the brash co-founder of the company, has said he wants to be the next CNN and that such a goal is “within my grasp.” Recently, Vice launched daily newscasts that look a whole lot similar to other newscasts, but more sweary.

The contradictions and tensions of Vice can be seen in the company’s headquarters in Williamsburg, a white warehouse-come-chill-space near the Bedford L stop. From the outside, it looks like much of north Brooklyn – the building is brick and the street has a stench and texture from generations of trash residue. From the photos posted

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online, the Vice compound looks slick and well-kept inside. There are distressed leather chairs, but also a well-stocked, old-timey bar against the back wall.

Chandeliers dangle from the ceiling. The most photographed section of Vice HQ is Smith’s office, whose centerpiece is a stuffed grizzly bear. Smith boasts about its provenance, claiming it was shot, defensively, during one of the company’s doc shoots in Alaska.

Recently, Joe Biden visited the Vice headquarters. The photos from that day show Biden and Smith waving to a crowd from the top of a metal platform. Both men wore suits and blue ties. They look almost triumphant together, a symbol of how the establishment covets what Vice has: Vice can speak the language of a generation who hate their predecessors.

We’re stuck with the fallout from an economy so bad there’s almost no way to take this world straight.

Vice is quickly outgrowing its current building, and last summer it announced a $20-million plan to move down the road to Kent and South 2nd, to a more sprawling former industrial space.

(The move came after the city offered Vice millions in tax credits to keep

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the company from fleeing to LA.) The new space will have professional postproduction studios and enough room for 500 new staffers – one assumes the grizzly will move there too. The move has been contentious, though, since it has basically priced out all the good places to see music in that part of town.

Grasslands closed earlier this year – it hosted early shows by people like MGMT and TV on the Radio – and the Death By Audio space shut down last winter. The latter was one of my favourite places to see music, period. It had pretentions, but the people who worked there were genuinely passionate fans of experimental music.

I remember the last show I saw there.

They were selling candy below market value out of a cardboard box at the back of the room. Friendly regulars indulged my questions about everything from the bands on the bill to the finer points of recent music by Scott Walker. Everyone was invited to sit on mats on the floor and watch wave after wave of fuzzy projections on the ceiling, as layers of synthesizers droned on in the background.

It was a really good night. I felt a weird sense of peace the whole time.

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Carlen Altman Interview by Julie Baldassi

Isn’t it great when you speak to someone whose work you hugely admire, and they turn out to be both exactly what you expected, but also somehow cooler? In the weeks since speaking to Carlen Altman and editing our interview for these pages, I’ve told – gushed, probably – all my unacquainted friends of her work and accomplishments: She was nominated for a John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award for The Color Wheel, which she cowrote and co-starred in with Alex Ross Perry! She’s shared screen time with Lena Dunham, Joe Swanberg, Stella Schnabel, Hannibal Buress, Ry Russo -Young, and countless other, lesser-known filmmakers of great repute! This fall she’s shooting a film of her own creation called Loners Together, a dark comedy staring her and her mom! But you’d never know it to talk to her. Grounded, awkward, and funny, Carlen quickly transformed in my mind from Movie Star to real human person. We had a nice time. double dot

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What are you up to lately; are you working on Loners Together?

Yeah, I’m going to shoot it this fall. I was initially going to shoot it last summer, but then I shot one scene and I decided it was really overwhelming to act and direct at the same time in New York City with a very low budget. So I’m talking to a director about having them direct it.

I was going to ask if you’re more interested in being behind the camera than acting, but it doesn’t sound like that anymore!

No, not anymore! I do want to direct in the future, but just not this. It stars me and my mom [artist Suzy Friedman], and I think I’m just too emotionally connected to the subject matter.

Cool, your mom is going to be in it?

Yeah, she’s playing my mom [laughs]. She’s not really an actor, so I think it will be good to have like “a real director.”

I’ve seen her in some of your YouTube videos, so – Oh god! [laughs] Yeah. Suzy Friedman.

You’ve worked on some really great projects with really amazing filmmakers – Aw, thank you!

Like Ry Russo-Young, Alex Ross Perry, Lena Dunham before she was Lena Dunham. Were you out there really hustling for those roles?

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No [laughs]. I’m not trained in acting and I’m bad at memorizing things, which is why I don’t really see a career as, like, a Real Actor. I kind of just play myself in things.

You mentioned people I know through school or friends of friends, so all those situations just happened through coincidence and convenience. Any time I’ve gone on a real audition, I’ve never gotten it. It’s only when someone knows me and is writing a character kind of for me that I’m able to actually get things.

You grew up in New York, right?

Uh huh. I hated it.

Really? What was it like?

Really emotionally overwhelming. I just want to live in the woods in a cabin with animals and stuff, and I just feel like I’m really sensitive to noise and crowds. I grew up on 72nd street which is right where the subway station is, and it was just like all stores and so many people, and I didn’t really like it at all.

So even as a kid you were like, fuck this place.

Yeah. I just feel like I take in other people’s energy really easily. Not to sound like a New Age idiot or anything, but it was very draining. I still feel grateful that I grew up here, because I was exposed to a lot of unusual people and cultures and food and stuff that I don’t mean to take for granted.

I thought it was interesting, you said in an interview somewhere that one of

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the things that you love to do in New York is go to these sort of sterile, homogeneous chain stores like Duane Read.

Oh yeah, it’s true.

Capitalism

doesn’t really

encourage people taking creative risks. Because if you lose

your money you can’t eat.

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Why is that?

It’s weird. I was living in California for 3 months until April, and I think now that I’m back I’m trying to embrace New York and not pretend I’m somewhere else – cause I’m going to move back to California in the winter maybe for a few months or maybe forever, I’m not sure yet – so I’m trying to not hang out at Duane Read and CVS as much. But I do in general – [coughs] sorry I just swallowed a flower [laughs] – okay, I’m okay. Hold on, let me just drink coffee...

Um, okay. I like going into stores like that because you can just sit and read magazines and no one whistles at you or panhandles or does something harassing or talks to you, and it’s just really nice music. I mean, it’s not cool music. But it’s just really fun to go in there and read magazines and no one bothers you. So it’s like, you leave your house but it still feels safe.

I totally know what you mean. They just closed all the Targets in Canada, but there was one very close to my apartment and I used to love going in there and spending like 2 hours buying socks and licorice.

Yeah, socks and licorice! And you just zone out and it’s a neutral energy. It’s funny to reminisce about the days of chain stores.

Like, “Ahh, remember when Target was

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here, and then Topshop came in and bulldozed Target?”

Well it’s funny to hear someone from New York saying one of their favourite things is to go in these stores that are all over like the worst parts of North America.

Yeah, cause it seems exotic. I don’t know.

And you said you’re moving to LA in the winter. Is that for work?

[Laughs] That’s just for emotional peace. No, I don’t know. I went away to LA, partially for work, and partially to avoid the winter, and I ended up staying with different friends in different neighbourhoods, and I kind of fell in love with it.

I wasn’t sure if it was like you were going to try and “be in the biz” and do the whole thing.

Yeah, no I don’t feel like I’m in the biz [laughs]. Like I don’t think I would go for pilot season. I mean, I would. I had an agent for like a year and I never really got anything. It was like, “Ooh I have an agent now.”

But I don’t know, I think I’m too awkward in auditions to get a real role. So I have to write my own stuff.

What about Loners Together? What aspects of New York inspired that script?

Well, I’m not like a big movie buff by any means. So many references fly over my head and I never felt like, “I wanna go to film school and make a movie!” I realized that I spent so much time thinking in my head and

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wondering what people do all day, kind of daydreaming in New York, and I feel like I don’t know of any movies that really capture somebody who is just living a life in their head. I don’t really have a dramatic outer life where I’m like, fighting with boys all the time, or fighting with friends or family.

So it was to try and create a character who is frustrated with having to live in the real world while their inner world is what they’re more focused on, which is how I am.

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FILM

What is it like shooting in New York as a real low-budget indie filmmaker? Do you get permits and stuff to shoot on the subway?

Well, now that I’m working with a director, I think we’re going to do it in a more legitimate way. I hate having to think about those things, like permits and stuff, because I want a lot of it to be very free and improvised.

It’s hard to have a YOLO attitude when you have to make people sign release forms.

How did you and Alex [Ross Perry] come to work together?

I used to do stand up comedy more frequently, and we did stand up at the same show. He’d never done it before, but I thought he was funny and he thought I was funny and he was like, “Oh what are you working on, we should try to write something together.” And I was like, “Uh, who are you,” but then I was like, “he’s cool.” I felt like we have a similar sensibility, and Alex was really motivated to make a movie.

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Do you still feel close to that script? as socially unacceptable. There’s a boy No, I don’t feel close to it at all. But I’m who is only attracted to elderly women happy that it happened. It was a good ex- who my character – who is afraid of aging perience. I didn’t think it would go to any – begins to have a crush on. And then he rejects her for an elderly woman and she’s festivals so I’m happy that it became like a like “Ughh I’ve been trying to stay young real movie. my whole life and the boy that I actually The ending of The Color Wheel [which like is only into old women, this sucks.” involves incest] is very surreal. Was that So there is a bizarre love story in Loners something that you two had always imag- Together as well. And Loners Together is ined as the ending? the working title because there’s a show Yeah. A lot of people say that when you now on Fox called like Weirdo Loners watch it for the first time, it seems like it and I was like “Oh no,” and I realized comes out of nowhere, but then if you watch that maybe the term ‘loners’ is too mainit again, it sorts of adds up. Like, for exam- stream twee-hipster now. So I thought ple, Colin [Alex’s character] looking at her about changing it to just Alpha because legs in the dashboard window, and them the main character’s name is Alpha. I don’t like, being in bed together when the previ- know! I think it’s Loners Together. Do you ous scene with Ry’s character [Colin’s girl- like that as a title? friend] he’s feeling so sexually frustrated.

I really do. I like the way it sounds.

You know? It’s all this weird energy. When Alex said, “Let’s write together,” someone Me too, I like the way it sounds. I just wish had said we look like brother and sister. I that Fox show didn’t happen. think from the beginning incest was an element that we wanted to have, but in a way Well it’s not the exact title, so you’re good. that wasn’t too – you know, there wasn’t any Also, there was that movie called Alpha graphic nudity. These people are so alien- Dogs about skateboarders and I think ated and will never really find love with Justin Timberlake is in it? other people, and each other are the only Oh perfect. Yeah, you’re right. That makes people who will really understand them, me happy cause I want to keep it as Loners which is sad. It’s not supposed to be a sexy Together. Okay good, so that’s what it’ll be. scene, its more just like, this sucks. This is probably the closest thing to a real true love [Laughs] Okay. I have another question connection that these characters will have. about The Color Wheel but also broadly related to living in New York. One of the Is there a love story in Loners Together? themes is the balance between having stability and following your dreams, and Yeah, there is. It’s also disturbing, but not

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We should just put

our energies into what we care

about. We only

live once that we know of.

it seems like the idea of New York as a creative capital has really changed, especially through our lifetimes. At this point its so expensive, it seems like a really difficult place to have room to fail – Oh for sure.

– unless you have a financial safety net.

Is that something that you see impacting your people or yourself?

Most of the people I know that have actually made movies have some financial net, whether its their parents or some mystery grant. I feel like it’s really hard to be creative unless you’re upper middle class. I think New York is really hypocritical because it prides itself on being creative, and then people will move in hoping to live in a creative community while their condo is kicking out the creative people they’re romanticizing. It’s very weird. I’m really fascinated with this philosopher/inventor name Jacques Frescoe. I visited him in

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Florida. He writes about what he calls a resource-based economy; he wants to basically automate every job, so that everyone will have a basic income so that everyone will have time to work on their creative passions. I only bring that up because I think that capitalism doesn’t really encourage people taking creative risks. Because if you lose your money you can’t eat. Right now people will just buy condos in New York and keep them empty, as a tax shelter, while all these cool places go out of business and everyone’s rent goes up.

I think that’s happening in a lot of big cities. Here [in Toronto], people are moving to places like Hamilton, which is this post-industrial city fairly close by.

But it sucks because its like, it’s probably going to be the same as upstate New York and even Philadelphia and Detroit. These creative communities start coming, and then richer people realize that it might be a good real estate investment, and in the process of trying to own property in a hip area, they make it way less cool, which is kind of how Williamsburg is, you know?

Williamsburg went out of style in like 2000, it’s not that I’ve lived here so long and I’m like a bitter jerk.

My friend Tennessee Thomas and I are starting an environmental activism website called thedeependclub.com. Tennessee owns this clothing shop called The Deep End Club, and a lot of our friends – people who are in fashion and film – come and hang out and talk about environmental issues and so-

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cial inequality. I feel like, more than any film work, I’m really excited about that.

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FILM

How do you make a living?

I make jewelry which I sell it from my website, and I’ll do freelance kinds of things.

I’ve just been traveling a lot, so it’s hard. I got a job in a vintage store, and then I went away for a week to write with a friend, and then I came back to New York and got fired from that job on Friday! It just sucks because I’m not a rich person so it’s hard to have this YOLO lifestyle. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m just trying to value my time over having and money or savings.

I feel you on that one.

What about you?

Well I had a full time job at as a staff writer at a magazine until a few months ago, and then I got laid off. I’d already been feeling like it just wasn’t the professional community that I wanted to be in.

I’d been involved in some of my friends’ movies, so I just jumped into doing that.

So now I’m making a couple of films this summer and trying to make it work with freelance and odd jobs.

Oh cool, that’s so exciting! I think that’s good what you’re doing. We should just put our energies into what we care about, with the hopes that it will all make money somehow. We only live once that we know of, so I just think we should just try to do what we want to do, but also get out of our heads and think about the world outside of our creative communities.

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PERSONAL ESSAY

OYKOT & KROY WEN

Am I Supposed to Want This?

Living in New York is an accomplishment in itself, but it got me nowhere.

by Chandler Levack Illustration by Christopher Delorenzo

I recently read a great book. In The Best Of Everything, Rona Jaffe’s best-selling 1958 coming of age novel, three women move to New York City in search of love, work, and well, the best of everything. Through their run-ins with the men who won’t propose and the bosses who won’t take them seriously, it reflected the unabashed promise the city offers when you’re a 20-year-old with little to no life experience. The time in your life when you’re nothing but a big open chasm, waiting to be filled. I related because when I was 20, I moved to New York for an internship.

I also wanted and still want … the best of everything.

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It seemed like a haven for intellectuals and artists where the saxophone solo from Saturday Night Live was always playing in your heart.

Let me paint you a picture. It was the summer of 2007. I was an overweight virgin from Toronto, prone to wearing Woody Allen t-shirts and purple Hakim Optical frames. I’d only been to New York once for a four-day visit over reading week, accompanied by a Closeted Gay Roommate that I was in love with. We crashed on the Jersey City couch of my former film school classmate who was then a travel agent. (She has since moved on to create her own line of veggie burgers.)

New York had captured my imagination ever since I was a little kid, but more as a cultural concept than a place people actually lived in. It seemed like a haven for intellectuals and artists where the saxophone solo from Saturday Night Live was always playing in your heart. When me and the aforementioned CGR got out at the 110th/Cathedral Parkway 1 train stop, seeing the city for the first time was almost too much to handle. I couldn’t imagine living in a place where a pre-war building on Edgar Allen Poe Way and a man masturbating from inside a chicken costume both competed for your attention. For someone who had always wanted to live in a movie, New York was ideal. It’s a convenient fantasy for those with a limited scope of imagination.

My sweet friend Liz took us to Times Square, Greenwich Village, Magnolia Bakery. We saw Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, rode the carousel in Central Park, and drank a frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3. I spent the whole trip doubled over with anxiety, so consumed with how to confess my love to the CGR that I barely registered a thing. The last day we arrived at the Met an hour before it closed and ran through the exhibits hand in hand, ancient Egyptians and Andy Warhol paintings and suits of armor flying past us as if we were traveling back and forth through time. Standing in the sculpture garden, I dared myself over and over to kiss him.

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This was all temporarily mine - my intersection at Montrose and Bushwick, the $3 chicken with broccoli combo at the Chinese counter down the street double dot

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So obviously, getting a re-do two years later during a summer internship at SPIN magazine (a publication I had been obsessed with since age 15) felt like such an incredible fluke. Four days before I was supposed to start work, my parents packed their Honda with my luggage and my dad drove me from Toronto towards the airport in Buffalo, New York.

However, we were detained at the border. They took me aside and questioned me for three hours, took my fingerprints and eventually turned me back to Canada saying I didn’t have the proper visa. I wept loudly as my parents suggested that I should just forget about the internship. Two days later, I made my dad drive me through the border again as we told the guard we were day tripping to the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame. I got on a plane.

In the cab heading to my Bushwick apartment, I was amazed by everything – the 24-hour Mexican diners, the curves and lines of the BQE, a nearby gospel house mysteriously called “The Love Chapel.” I got out and immediately saw hordes of Puerto Rican men burning trash on a street called Grandparent’s Avenue.

One of my new roommates, a lawyer from Texas who would promptly move out a week later, let me in. I think I had eight different roommates in the span of three months, including an Australian anarchist who I overheard having anal sex, a Chelsea gallerist on the rebound after a brutal breakup, and a flamboyant guy from Staten Island (who was obsessed with Madonna and his George Foreman grill). This all was temporarily mine – my intersection at Montrose and Bushwick, the $3 chicken with broccoli combo at the Chinese counter down the street. My mom made me promise that I wouldn’t walk around New York after sundown, so I took the L train nine stops to Union Square and went to the giant Forever 21, making sure that I got home before dark. Sitting in my new apartment with nothing but a

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OYKOT & KROY WEN

After a long life of nothing, finally something was happening to me

takeout box, I was excited and terrified. After a long life of nothing, finally something was happening to me.

I remember that summer in flashes – my first boyfriend, a Southerner who chain smoked American Spirits and played Dory Previn songs on his ukulele. The time I did cartwheels with two Hispanic teenagers at the corner of Essex and Rivington.

Sneaking onto the roof of the Chelsea Hotel where I screamed out in surprise to see a naked man staring back at me. Blood gushing all over the sidewalk on 6th Avenue and dripping down my legs, not knowing it was because my hymen had broke.

Seeing Sonic Youth play the entirety of Daydream Nation in McCarren Pool. Ryan Adams saying “hi” like he knew me.

I wore a very unadvisable halter top/tube dress combination from American Apparel and came home 30 pounds lighter, my hair way too long and matted, with suspect bed bug sores on my arms and legs and unflossed teeth. I was absolutely heartbroken to leave. I had become my best self.

Me and the Southerner broke up, but I keep returning to New York. I have a confusing relationship to the city. I don’t have the same ambition coursing through my veins, a sense of self so big and entitled that I could smile back when a schizophrenic guy on the subway tells me I have “the face of a white woman and the body of a Dominican princess.” I am older now and battling depression. There are days when I can’t get out of bed so I watch my room go dark except the light of my phone’s LCD screen. The city has changed, too. The $700 rent I paid is laughable now. And sometimes it feels like the New York I knew in 2007 (a little scrappier and louder) is being absolutely ruined by artisanal jam makers and the kind of white people who are always having picnics. While many of my friends have gotten their extraordinary alien visa and

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Sometimes it feels like the New York I knew in 2007 is being absolutely ruined by artisanal jam makers double dot

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moved there, I feel pulled in different directions. I know New York will always be the brass ring ambitious people reach for.

But it’s tough to reconcile the past with my present self. I keep going back and expecting things to mean the same things they did when I first experienced them. But they can’t.

About a year ago, I went back to New York for the first time in three years with my mom in tow. A short film I wrote premiered at the Manhattan Film Festival (fun fact – this festival is a scam!), so the director, my mom, and I drove down to see it. I was incredibly broke so my mom paid for everything – all my meals, distressed jeans, movie tickets, and iced lattes. In exchange, she asked me to introduce her to strangers as my publicist. We walked down the Highline together, drank at bars on the Lower East Side, ate a sandwich at Katz’s deli. She was (and is still) going through a divorce to my dad after 27 years. I was slowly breaking up (and am still) with my first serious boyfriend who I had made movies and lived with for a while. We were both a little broken and shaken up, a real gruesome two-some, which manifested itself in a strange act of rebellion.

The last day before we left, I took my mom to Brooklyn.

She’d never been, although she kept mentioning she’d gone through LaGuardia Airport before. My mom and I can be combative in our snobbery. Her approach is a real “been there, done that” and my rebuttal is a real “screw you, you don’t know what you’re talking about” – so much that we had a real blow out after she told me she was “over” Central Park. We either click or irrationally, blindly hate each other. It’s always been like that.

While we were walking through Williamsburg, I kept pointing out the places where I had gotten drunk and fell in love and once saw Peter Dinklage walking a humungous dog. I took her to Café Grumpy’s because my mom loves

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Girls. (She’s a Marnie.) On the way there, we walked past a small tattoo parlour on a leafy side street. She walked in and immediately pointed to a butterfly design that she wanted tattooed on her wrist. As our comely Midwestern tattoo artist started the stencil, I signed the consent form, which was funny.

She seemed nervous so I said I would get one too. We’d be together on this, a united front.

I had about a minute to decide what I wanted, so I just told them to write NYC on my arm in tiny letters. Afterwards, my mom and I walked around Greenpoint with big bandages on our arms, so jacked full of adrenalin we kept talking about fighting someone. On the subway, a well-muscled Puerto Rican man asked if we had just gotten tattoos and when we said yes, he smiled and said, “God bless you!” We high fived him and for a moment, everything felt strange and beautiful and chaotic again.

I definitely feel a little stupid about this tattoo, especially when I’m in New York and a halal food cart guy side-eyes me like, “You’re a real New Yorker, huh?” But “NYC” also stands for New York Chandler. It’s sort of a tribute to the audacity I had and the ability to truly put myself out there. The kind of courageous person I’ll allow myself to be; suddenly introducing myself to Lynn Yaeger on the subway, or just exiting Penn Station and dragging my suitcase for 30 blocks because I’m just so happy to fucking be there. I keep thinking about the future and if I’ll ever get that $6,000 visa. Because how can you recapture a time that meant everything to you when you’re now a little cynical, sad and fucked up? But it’s still a part of me. My blood is on the sidewalk.

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zi n a g www.

ma

le d

.c o m

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ub

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Bye

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東京 Tokyo

Photography

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NO. 07

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$12 ~ ISSUE 7 ~ Summer 2015

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