Silverlimbo Two by Obscure Reference

www.adidas.com/ Y-3 COLETTE PARIS • 55 CROISETTE CANNES • DIECI CORSO COMO MILAN • LUISA VIA ROMA FLORENCE • DEGLI EFFETTI ROME • GONZALO COMELLA BARCELONA • EKSEPTION MADRID • KLING PALMA • SOTRIS ATHENS TROIS POMMES ZURICH • ST. MORITZ • EMIS VIENNA REFLECTIONS AMSTERDAM • HOUBEN ANTWERP • SELFRIDGES LONDON • BIRMINGHAM • POLLYANNA BARNSLEY • CRUISE GLASGOW • FLANNELS MANCHESTER BROWN THOMAS DUBLIN

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THOMAS I PUNKT HAMBURG

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QUARTIER 206 BERLIN

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MIENTUS BERLIN

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EICKHOFF DÜSSELDORF

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APROPOS COLOGNE

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OFF & CO MUNICH

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PODIUM MOSCOW

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JAMES MOSCOW

HARVEY NICHOLS RIYADH • AISHTI BEIRUT • CLUB 21 SINGAPORE • JOYCE HONG KONG • D-MOP HONG KONG • REX SHANGHAI • BOON THE SHOP SEOUL • HOLT RENFREW TORONTO • VANCOUVER • ISETAN SHINJUKU TOKYO

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YOHJI YAMAMOTO SENDAI

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SAPPORO

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NAGOYA

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OSAKA

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SELECT BARNEY’S STORES

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JEFFREY NEW YORK

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MAXFIELD LOS ANGELES

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IKRAM CHICAGO

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SELECT NEIMAN MARCUS STORES

/ FOR INFORMATION CALL: PRESS PARIS +33-1-42 0 5100 • pressing@wanadoo.fr • PRESS MILANO +39-02-58105520 • fsoncini@planet.it • BLESS SHOP BERLIN, Mulackstrasse 38, 10119 Berlin • office@blessshopberlin.de• www.bless-service.de

BLESS N째 23 the bringer

For My Mother.

SILVERLIMBO ISSUE 2: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Brian Duong FEATURES EDITOR Chris Piper SUB-EDITOR Nicky Shortridge CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Rani Sheen EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Que Minh Luu ASSOCIATE FASHION EDITOR Dan Jones ART DIRECTION, DESIGN, TITLE TYPOGRAPHY & ILLUSTRATION Brian Duong DESIGN CONSULTANTS Rinzen, Jonathan Zawada FEATURE ARTIST The Kingpins PHOTOGRAPHERS Liz Ham, Lyn Balzer, Anthony Perkins STYLIST Jolyon Mason ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Dan Jones PRODUCTION CO-ORDINATOR Nicky Shortridge FINANCIAL DIRECTOR Kris Webster CONTRIBUTORS Troy Bebee, Nigel Begg, Richard Cann, Angel Ceballos, Geneviève Castrée, Phil

Elverum, Rogers Hammerstein, Marc Hartl, Samuel Hodge, Rjyan Kidwell, Terence Koo, Ghita Lobenstein, Linda Luong, Heidi Maier, Aaron Peasley, Jo Quach, Mel Ratliff, Rinzen, Alison Smith, Kris Webster, Cameron Webb, Annie Rose Wright, Jonathan Zawada SPECIAL THANKS Staff, Contributors, Family and Friends, Kobskii & Mimi Ha, Chris Wu & Popfrenzy, Dorja, Adrian Clifford, Eric Reynolds, Kathleen Lee-Joe COVER & FRONTISPIECE The Kingpins / Liz Ham Copyright © 2004 Obscure Reference, Propriety Limited. The entire contents of this magazine may not be reproduced in any form without prior written consent from the publisher ISSN 1447-3291

“Countercouture” “Excerpts” “Into The Night” “The Nervous System” “The Hawkinsonian” “The Results Are In” “Electrolite” “Cex: Year One” “The Destructor” “Read Between The Lines” “The Dress Circle” “Sweet Surrender” “Levitate Me” “Code Poet” “Flower After Flower” “Outdoor Frequency” “Everything's Gone Green”

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016

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . UNDER COVER

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE BOOKS

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024

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LOUISE HEARMAN

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032

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . XIU XIU

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038

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TIM HAWKINSON

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041

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BELLE & SEBASTIAN

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044

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JUN TAGAMI

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048

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CEX

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054

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MAARTEN BAAS

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056

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . MÚM

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066

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BLESS

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074

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE ORGAN

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076

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . EUGENE SOULEIMAN

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078

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ZOË JAY VENESS

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086

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TORD BOONTJE

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ELEY KISHIMOTO

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090

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LYN BALZER & ANTHONY PERKINS

“Where The Wild Things Are” “Dark Side Of The Mall” “Use Your Illusion” “View Master” “No Hard Feelings” “The Greatest Show On Earth” “Mondo Trasho” “Handle With Care” “I Know You're Out There” “Audio Visual” “About This Magazine”

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098

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TINA KALIVAS

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106

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE KINGPINS

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . RINZEN

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHRISTOPHER DOYLE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SEAN McCABE

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136

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AL COLUMBIA

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144

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LIZ HAM

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148

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ANTONY

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154

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PHIL ELVERUM

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . REVIEWS

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

And so, without further ado, we are proud to begin our second issue with a comic by

GENEVIÈVE CASTRÉE called

“Heavy Thoughts”

THIS PAGE & OPPOSITE:

Under Cover’s Autumn/Winter 2004-05 collection, “But Beautiful... Part Parasitic Part Stuffed”

Weaving danger, suspense and intrigue into his clothes, JUN TAKAHASHI’s ingenious fashion collections have instantly made him a marked man. TEXT

Chris Piper ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

Under Cover

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From Genesis to Revelation, The next generation will be hear me “Police and Thieves”, The Clash

aris. October 2003. Jun Takahashi assails the audience with his defiant brand of fashion. Models in loose-cut shirts and flowing dresses swagger down the catwalk, leather pouches swinging from their hips; bodies laden with tarnished silver and gold jewellery. Dark fabric is roughly stitched with tattered threads; layers of texture merge together. It’s a mediaeval call to arms of the highest order. “Scab”, his debut Paris collection, encapsulated the kind of staunch individualism on which Takahashi had built his name – since the early nineties when he was frontman for punk band The Tokyo Sex Pistols, in which Nigo of A Bathing Ape was drummer. In fact he has a lot in common with friend Nigo, with whom he studied at the renowned Bunka Academy of Fashion in Tokyo. After starting up his Under Cover fashion label fourteen years ago, Takahashi opened the first Nowhere Ltd store with Nigo in 1993, in Harajuku. But the parallels pretty much end there. Where Nigo’s brand of A Bathing Ape merchandise quickly gained iconic status within the über-trendy skating fashionista, Takahashi has turned more to high fashion that incorporates unorthodox street elements: torn and frayed edges, velcro tabs, misshapen jackets, flowing dresses over jeans. He says the inspiration behind the brand name Under Cover is “‘Kyoki’ [insanity] + humour; peace + disorder.” These juxtapositions, or what he describes as “the cohabitation of two opposing concepts”, are central to all his work. Takahashi’s artifice derives from the way he combines Tokyo’s edgy streetwear with the refined sophistication of haute couture. He occupies a unique juncture, at once repelling and also embracing mainstream culture. Some of his clothes have a political message (demonstrated by his Paris debut where models traipsed down the runway in rainbow-coloured burqas), yet at the same time the label has become an icon among the brandconscious, the epicentre of a consumerist culture where trendy young people will fork out AUD$450 for a shirt.

“Rebel clothes” is how 35-year-old Takahashi likes to describe his work. And those who wear his clothes have the “rebel spirit” – they’re “people who care about peace, people who believe in justice, independent thinkers who have an anti-establishment attitude and free spirit,” he says. Borrowing from punk’s spirit of revolution, a reaction to the bland corporate rock of the seventies, Takahashi is leading the way for a new era of Japanese fashion designers who are unafraid to cross boundaries. Although his reserved public demeanour seems at odds with his former role as a punk band frontman, his success to date reveals a ﬁerce ambition that burns deep behind the unfailingly low-slung cap. He once stated, “I don’t really believe it’s possible, but I want to be able to change the world through clothes.” Such boldness is the mark of a visionary who has forged a distinct path and is unwilling to bend to mainstream trends. So when I ask him what direction he hopes to take in the future, his answer is simple. “My way.”

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Interviewed in four chapters with sampled text for questions, we play THE BOOKS at their own game. And the experimental musicians don’t miss a beat, responding in outdated American slang. It’s a story that you won’t ﬁnd on Oprah’s book list. INTERVIEW

Brian Duong, Lyn Balzer, Anthony Perkins, Richard Cann, Alison Smith and Aaron Peasley TITLE PHOTOGRAPHY & ILLUSTRATION

Brian Duong FEATURING

Chris Wu as “Paul de Jong” and Troy Bebee as “Nick Zammuto” BAND IMAGES COURTESY OF

The Books

INTRODUCTION

h! How refreshing! Good morning, gentlemen!1 Welcome to the house that books built: my large rooms wallpapered with other people’s words, through which one moves like a tourist through an English country manor – somewhat impressed but uncertain whether anyone really lives there.2 As you can see it’s still a mess. I haven’t got everything up off the floor yet.3 The narrative incoherence can only put the reader off, and in any case it will have a deleterious effect on the taste of the young, so we must hope that at least they and the less educated classes will be kept well away from these pages, in their own best interest.4 The foreign landscapes and shifting backdrops only served to increase his bewilderment and the insidious feeling that his bewilderment was somehow very closely associated with his present activity; an activity the likes of which he couldn’t properly define or recall, leaving him overwhelmed with the intense spiritual dissatisfaction of having perpetrated a folly of ridiculous proportions.5 Now I look at it again and I think it’s so loaded, it’s not that innocent and that’s actually what I really liked about it.6 It may look innocent, but from that little spot we can monitor the activities of evil-doers everywhere.7 It’s strange how much strength words carry. A word that, by definition, describes an act of union and love becomes a word used out of hatred and anger.8 No one in the house knew that I was reading these books – I don’t think I was allowed.9

CHAPTER 1 Here’s the part that explains why you’re sharing this with your estranged little brother instead of with anybody whose credulity you’d actually value.10 It begins with a stone falling, in the silence, vertically immobile. It is falling from a great height, a meteor, a massive, compact, oblong block of rock, like a giant egg with a pocked uneven surface. On the smooth, flat surface of the sea, just below, the successive, motionless fringes of foam form a series of horizontal streaks that run parallel to the rectilinear shore of the beach. It is hard to tell, because of its no doubt considerable altitude, if the stone will fall on the blonde sand, or if it will split the sheet of water, where, once engulfed, after the spray caused by the impact has risen and fallen, it will leave11 one flow that carries us along. A book is a boat. An idea

is a motor, a paddle, or a bailing pan. It can help us steer a little better than if we are alone in the slop. All art is to remind you that you are not alone. And that if you go with the energy of the way things are and can be, you might just make it through the waves of mundanity and not get swept away by second-rate ideas.12 Imagination doesn’t stop for the past or the future and that makes me both happy and sad.13 When I was listening to that kind of music I was looking at art books, so it was all part of one thing as far as I was concerned.14 The15 Books are functional objects: they have a purpose, which16 unmans you with the frailty of your own defences, and the transparency of your most intimate fears and hopes.17 At once lyrical inventions, technical combinations of an almost mathematical quality and sensitive symbols of Nature,18 their muffled murmuring, coming from lower down, formed a kind of continuo for conversations going backwards and forwards above their heads.19 I couldn’t hear what they were saying but just the sound of voices, like birds, it made me think of 20 something – an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air.21 You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is. You’ve had that feeling?22 The Books: Sure as you’re a foot high, we often hear those wheels turning. But from the perspective of the egg on the anvil, the hammer falling is only audible until the strike. It’s all bark, no bite, because by then it’s too late. Best to be blank. We’re all shook up, but we’re all in one piece. It’s been a hard day’s night, but it’s all butter, no parsnips. We’re reeling in the years, but we’re right as rain. The roof is on fire, but we’re fit as fiddles. We’re looking for love in all the wrong places, but it’s all quiet on the western front. We want to paint it black, but, alas, we’re in the pink. What looks like a gillion gilhooleys are just facets of a single universal thingamajig. From the git-go it was just various aspects of gals and ginks, ladies and germs, dolls and guys, floozies, flappers, flimflammers, stuffed-shirts, geek-fish, dickweeds and the jimcracks between them. Ixnay, for crying out loud! Pay no attention to the flizbos under the counter. The

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bluechippers will blow it. The double-baggers will inherit the earth. A time and a time after time from time to time, gives you time to think. The electric organs will play on.

CHAPTER 2 In the main concourse of the mall, they would have a new promotion each week. One week it was electric organs. We already had one at home but that did not stop Dad from dreaming of buying a new one. All his life he dreamed of recreating what he thought was the perfect23 repeating twochord piano riff sourced from scratchy vinyl, a banjo, a collage of violin fragments, and a sample of a heavily accented woman intoning the nonsense phrase that gives the record its name. But then comes a surprise:24 Nick goes to kitchen. Paul goes to studio. Nick goes to studio. Paul goes to kitchen. Nick and Paul in the studio. Paul and Nick in the kitchen. Paul and Anne in the studio. Nick and Paul in the kitchen. Anne in the kitchen. Paul, Nick and Anne in the studio. Paul in bed. Nick in the studio.25 They just didn’t know what genre you were coming out of. I think they assumed they were hearing things you and I had written beforehand,26 an incantation, a fine

THE BOOKS: Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto

rhyme, half expecting the black earpiece to give me back, like a conch, the susurrus murmur of the sea out there as well as my grandmother’s Hello.27 Were you more concerned to break with the conventional or did you feel at that time that you had particular statements that you wished to put over to people?28 The Books: Sometimes we feel like motherless bastards, throwing the butterfly ball in with the bath water, but as Noam Chomsky almost said, “furiously green ideas sleep with one pink-eye open”. Now, take heed and bet your boots. We are whitebready chalk-talky deep-sleepy conch oceans, except we have Tourette syndrome. We are run of the mill number-color synesthetes. That’s our lot in life: to jobbie and befoul an otherwise yawning Joe Zilch. Blue number fours printed in orange; that’s what it’s all about. It’s a nice job and everyone likes to do it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to give a rat’s ass. That having been said, the maven of malarky herself, in her mash note to the world, noticed, “Tuesday follows Monday; Wednesday, Tuesday”. And to make the cheese more binding, the proof is in the pudding. Reality is such. We admonish the

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kibitzers to keep on kibitzing, and pray that these kyboshers cease this senseless kevorking of innocent killers. But practically speaking, we should all just keep our ears to the grindstone. To question or not to question, that is to be. However, we also do a lot of listening down and sitting. And when all has been said, we need to talk up and stand. Anne roots in a brook and plays like trickles of cold water, Nick twangs the chromosomes of sound, while Paul bows ghosts out of grooves. All that goes through a pipe, believe you it, and comes out the long way. From now on, we walk. Read, eat, sleep, wait, work, feel. What is it that you like to do most?

CHAPTER 3 Plunging and withdrawing in a continuous to-and-fro movement,29 The Books wield a solid musical hand over melodic figures that hint at swooning grandeur without falling prey to florid temptation. Strings swell and chamber bits summon prim Victorian gatherings, but The Lemon Of Pink still sounds like two men sitting in a quiet room, with a machine and enough imagination to30 play together like man and wife, in order to achieve astonishing results.31 An otherwise invisible jiggle can become a turbulent, theatrical wave, or ripple, like a thick, thick, luxurious liquid.32 I could remember the sea33 gradually taking form in my head, picking up force and gaining momentum like its own kind of storm. It was drawing me away from the other kids in a way I didn’t even notice.34 What dreadful noise of water in mine ears! What sights of ugly death within mine eyes!35 You sounded so exotic. It didn’t seem like you could36 burst through his mental partitions, partitions that the crack had effectively shored up, imprisoning his sentience, his rational capacity, behind psychotically patterned drapes.37 What was the breakthrough for you professionally?38 Just tell me about the new continent. I don’t give a damn what you’ve discovered about yourself.39 Don’t knock yourself out or anything, but just make it as descriptive as hell. Okay?40 The Books: Obekaybe, good question. Of course, within the context of software toys for soft, weary boys, we’ve been given a kick at the cat, so here goes nothing. First: butter and egg angels on iron ponies, philandering the meat-markets, swatting at bippies, followed by throngs of ho-dad blowhards hooked on phonetic smack talking tax law. And waiting in the pipeline: hinky high muckety-mucks looking to hit pay dirt, while locking horns with glass armed glamour-pusses. Scattered about to either side, suites of clay pigeons, loosely organized by issue date and market value, centered around self-assigned goodbook-thumpers, snake handlers, and televandalists, incanting various glossolaliae. Then, underground somewhere, the head of all head heads, the big enchilada, the double doolie, made of money, offers up fifty-seven varieties of humongous phony balonies. Quux! But when you least expect it, your goombahs arrive. Ice maidens and icemen among the mackmen’s McGuffins. That’s the epiphany. After twisting slowly in the wind for so long, we notice the air’s transparency and each other. The party gets turned over to the lunatic fringe. Cry if you want to. (Please ignore the blatant self discovery. After all, you are someone you could know.) Again, we sit and listen down, and see the writhing on the wall. It sometimes reads like a history of the exclamation mark, or the promise of life without promise.

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER 4 And that’s a bundle of stolen words and phrases for you, eh? And why not? For all I know you’re one of these people who think the greatest American novel will be written by John Updike or even Terry Southern. Well, where were we?41 Have I told you of driving aimlessly in the mountains, listening to talk radio, searching for the one bit of cheap, commercially interrupted persuasion that will let me put these memories of you back in the canister where you now at least partially reside so that I can live out my dim, narrow life?42 I’s playing soft while Bobby sang the blues. Windshield wipers slappin’ time. I’s holding Bobby’s hand in mine. We sang every song that driver knew.43 I was feeling very good. I’d made up my mind. I was listening to good music. And I had the body of a dead whore in the trunk.44 I think she was not primed for the vr mmmm sound that the car manufactured, because she screamed with much volume,45 “Bust a lock with a rock, don’t need a key to have me, this was your cold discovery.”46 Why do you think I would leave you behind to go on tour an’ then stay away from you for so long?47 The Books: H-E-doubletoothpicks, IZZATSO! Chuck you, Farley, and your whole famn damily! Leave Bobby out of this, fall guy. You don’t know the whole story and now you’re just blowing smoke. Coinkidinkally, we need to do this. That is, to break apart distance itself, which never was more than a word. It’s inherently acey-deucey, and pathologically all over the place, but we’d rather be damned if we do. It happened accidentally on purpose: the whole bad muffler/screaming dead skeezer in the trunk incident. Strange things happen on tour. Not that we go out of our way to invite such situations, but they end up being the things that stick with you after all, and give you comfort during the hard times, when the tree trunk of bad luck crops up, as it does occasionally. It certainly may be something that is happening which is not happening at all: after all, it never changes to stop.

Unused to the company of so many bold lies, a queasy unease seizes the boy with an almost unquenchable hunger to be back home, bored and safe.48 I hate this fucking magazine! These stupid girls think they’re hip, but they’re just a bunch of trendy stuck-up prep-school bitches who think they’re “cutting edge” because they know who “Sonic Youth” is!49 The trouble about living for kicks is that once started, the appetite grows by what it feeds on. You start (say) with fags, and alcohol, but then comes the Purple Heart pedlar, and you find an even more sensational world opening up, via50 different levels of triumph and humiliation. You triumph when you don’t sell out and do the right thing and you get humiliated when you get compromised by yourself or others. Getting to work with people you admire and respect is definitely on the triumph side of things.51 I suspect the reason I couldn’t celebrate the floating world was that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in its worth. Young men are often guilt-ridden about pleasure, and I suppose I was no different. I suppose I thought that to pass away one’s time in such places, to spend one’s skills celebrating things so intangible and transient, I suppose I thought it all rather wasteful, all rather decadent. It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of a world when one doubts its validity.52 If art is the tip of the iceberg, I’m the part sinking below.53 Gentlemen, I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me. Forget all I said.54 The Books: It’s cool, Chicken. Don’t eat your eggs. You only live wrong once, so keep to the left. It’s been real, now back to the salt mines.

ENDNOTES 1. Archer Prewitt. Sof ’ Boy and Friends Econo Combo. Drawn and Quarterly (2000) p27 2. Zadie Smith. “Introduction: Dead Men Talking” in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 (ed. Dave Eggers). Houghton Mifflin (2003) pxxvii 3. Chester Brown. “Showing ‘Helder’”. The Little Man: Short Strips 1980-1995. Drawn and Quarterly (1998) p81 4. Umberto Eco. “Three Eccentric Reviews”. Misreadings (transl. William Weaver). Picador (1994) p128

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5. Al Columbia. “Amnesia”. Zero Zero (ed. Kim Thompson). Fantagraphics Books (1997) p20 6. Veronique Branquinho quoted in Jo-Ann Furniss. “The Double Life of Veronique”. i-D (No. 213: The Bedroom Issue, September 2001) p204 7. Ikea 2004 Catalogue (All prices guaranteed to August 15, 2004 – Applicable NSW, Qld, Vic) p125 8. Mike Allred. Madman: Oddity Odyssey. Kitchen Sink Press (1995) p76 9. Dario Argento quoted in Luca Pizzaroni. “Dario Argento”. Tokion Magazine (The Late Night Issue, May/June 2004) p41 10. David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Abacus (2001) p244 11. Alain Robbe-Grillet and Rene Magritte. La Belle Captive. University of California Press (1995) p15 12. Christopher Doyle. R34G38B25. System Designs Limited (2003) p17 13. Yoshitomo Nara. Nobody Knows: Yoshitomo Nara Drawings. Little More (2001) p52 14. Mike Kelley quoted in Ashley Crawford. “Monster Men” in World Art (Issue 19, 1998) p29 15. Guy Peelaert quoted in Tatsuya Ito, Kyoko Okunaga, Alain Perez “Guy Peelaert” (transl. Tatsuya Ito). Beikoku Ongaku (Issue 18, Summer 2001) p33 16. Ruari McLean. The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography. Thames and Hudson (1980) p120 17. Martin Amis. “Steven Spielberg: Boyish Wonder” in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. Penguin Books (1987) p154 18. Jean-Paul Satre quoted in Jean Lipman. Calder’s Universe. Whitney Museum of American Art / Viking (1976) p261 19. Albert Camus. The Outsider (transl. Joseph Laredo). Penguin Books (1983) p73 20. Garrison Keillor. Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. Faber and Faber (2002) p116 21. F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. Penguin Books (1950) p107 22. Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Penguin Books (1961) p40 23. Michel Gondry. “I’ve Been Twelve Forever” booklet in The Work of Director Michel Gondry DVD. Directors Label / Palm Pictures (2003) p1 24. Mark Richardson. The Books, “The Lemon of Pink” Pitchfork review. October 9th, 2003 <http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/b/ books/lemon-of-pink.shtml> 25. Paul, Nick & Anne. The Books artist page at the Tomlab website accessed on 14th May, 2004 <http://www.tomlab. de/artists/thebooks.html> 26. Thurston Moore. “Susie Ibarra”. Index Magazine (April/ May 2001) p61 27. Sylvia Plath. “Ocean 1212-W” in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Faber and Faber (1979) p119 28. David Bowie. “The Closing Down: Interviews with Tony Oursler, Yoko Ono and Roy Lichtenstein”. Ray Gun: Out of Control. Booth-Clibborn Editions (1997) p96 29. Alain Robbe-Grillet. Recollections of the Golden Triangle.

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Grove Press (1986) p137 30. Andy Battaglia. The Books, “The Lemon of Pink”. The Onion A.V. Club review. (December 17, 2003) <http://www.theonionavclub.com/review.php?review_ id=7096> 31. Whitney Chadwick. Eileen Agar (Women artists and the Surrealist Movement). Thames and Hudson (1985) p147 32. Dave Cooper. “Ripple, A Predilection for Tina, Pt. 1”. Weasel. Fantagraphics Books (1999) p21 33. Frank Moorhouse. “Across the Plains, over the Mountains and down to the Sea”. The Picador Book of the Beach. Pan Macmillan (1993) p125 34. Mary Karr. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir. Picador (1996) p105 35. William Shakespeare, “Richard III”. The Oxford Book of Dreams. Oxford University Press (1983) p60 36. Mary Gaitskill. “Heaven”. Bad Behaviour. Vintage Contemporaries (1989) p174 37. Will Self. “The Nonce Prize”. Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys. Penguin (1998) p230 38. Callum McGeoch. “Give The Drummer Some”. Dazed and Confused (Issue 70, October 2000) p116 39. Bruce Eric Kaplan. Drawing in The New Yorker (October 18 & 25, 1999) p92 40. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye. Penguin Books (1958) p38 41. Hunter S. Thompson. The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955-1967 (ed. Douglas Brinkley). Bloomsbury (1998) p530 42. Rick Moody. “The Mansion on the Hill”. Demonology. Faber and Faber (2000) pp17-18 43. “Me and Bobby Mcgee” (Fred Foster / Kris Kristofferson) Kristofferson. Monument/Legacy (1970) 44. Richard Brautigan. “Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942”. A Confederate General from Big Sur, Dreaming of Babylon, and The Hawkline Monster (Three books in the manner of their original editions). Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence (1991) p187 45. Jonathan Safran Foer. Everything is Illuminated. Penguin Books (2003) p181 46. Bill Callahan (Smog). “Cold Discovery”. Dongs of Sevotion. Drag City (2000) 47. Jaime Hernandez. Love and Rockets (Issue 50) Fantagraphics Books (May 1996) p53 48. Chris Ware. Acme Novelty Library (Issue 13) Fantagraphics Books (1999) p12 49. Daniel Clowes. “Ghost World” in Eightball (Number Eleven). Fantagraphics Books (June 1993) p25 50. Len Barnett. Live For Kicks. The Joint Board of Christian Education of Australia and New Zealand (1964) p10 51. Henry Rollins. “Freak Show”. The Face (No. 63, December 1993) p101 52. Kazuo Ishiguro. An Artist of the Floating World. Faber and Faber (1987) p150 53. Lou Reed & John Cale. “Smalltown”. Songs For Drella. Sire (1990) 54. Samuel Beckett. Waiting For Godot. Faber and Faber (1965) p34

Untitled # 927 2002 pastel on paper 32 x 25 cm

Her unsettling landscapes emerge from darkness in shafts of dim light. Melbourne artist LOUISE HEARMAN describes the wordless poetry of her distinctive vision, glimpsed in hundreds of sensuous paintings and drawings.

TEXT

Mel Ratliff ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

The artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

elbourne artist Louise Hearman paints the landscapes you travel through, the figures that swerve into your daily path the domestic animals that inhabit your spaces – not to mention the strange, the inexplicable and the frequently anti-gravitational. From the 1980s to the present, Hearman has amassed a repertoire of simultaneously beautiful and unnerving images: intriguing and banal, spectacular and humble sights with urgent sensory appeal. The results are storehouses of scenes chanced upon and impressions left lingering after the shock of beauty – poetic documents of landscape, animals, children and natural wonders. Places she has been and seen and, as she says, “maybe places I would like to be in and things I would like to see”. Hearman’s paintings speak with light – irradiated bush scenes, dark Lynchian highways, faces flooded with detail, intensely dramatic skies and spectacularly atmospheric events. Her light reveals and conceals, adding mystery to a child’s head, a field of grass, a dog’s neutral stare. Her paintings also reveal a love of nightlife and nightlives. She has never been afraid of the dark, she says, except once. “When I was little, I had a nightmare where I was in the back of what felt like a wagon. There was total blackness in this enclosure: thick suffocating blackness. I didn’t know which way was up or down and I felt terrible panic, then all of a sudden a light came on and the world seemed to spin round back down to the right way up and there was my mum standing at the door. She had heard me scream and thought there was an intruder in the house. I can still feel the solidity of that total black.” Looking at Louise Hearman’s small oil paintings and drawings, you get the sense that to her the world is less solid and more dreamy, more amorphous, than it is to the rest of us. Figures are summonsed and sentenced to disappear in a lush tangle of brush strokes and shadow. Unrecognisably strange orbs hover in a pregnant state of suspended animation. Anticipation is smeared across the masonite boards on which she paints. Currently spending time in America, Hearman speaks of her arrival in Boston as if a character in one of her own paintings: “I felt dizzy, almost like I could float off the surface of the earth just walking down the street. Maybe that’s because I was on the other side of the world and I didn’t have the same planet alignment to hold me down. It is interesting not having the

confidence that a sense of place gives you.” When asked whether her overseas visit has altered the mood of her paintings, she replies: “I find the strange dim light very fascinating. It takes a while, but I think it will work its way into some of my paintings. When I go home, the light is so bright, I feel like I’m on stage!” Louise Hearman is a very nice person, yet she repeatedly decapitates animals and children, conjures storms and spends her time observing people. She is obsessed with images. She produces hundreds of untitled paintings. “I paint in intense bursts. Then have periods where I don’t paint at all. I would prefer not to have periods where I don’t paint but sometimes I need to take care of other business. I don’t like to feel crowded out when I paint. It’s funny you should think I’m prolific. I feel like I could do so much more if I organised my time better.” Is Louise Hearman living in the right era? She would have made a great romantic in the nineteenth century, and would no doubt have been welcomed into the Surrealist’s elite Parisian circle in the twentieth. “I am very happy with the time I’m living in. The freedom an individual can have at this point in history is fantastic. I feel as though I can go anywhere and do anything, find vast amounts of information, and yet still have space to be quiet and separate if I choose. Art shops are brimming with paper and paint. People are making and recording extraordinarily perfect music that I can listen to at home while I paint. I don’t think I would have had this personal freedom over a hundred years ago.” Will she ever tire of painting? “Actually, the further I get into painting the more I can see I could do. I have always thought that I would like to make some tiny films as well, mainly because of the relationships between music and visual sequences I can see. The problem for me with film-making is that many of my ideas would cost millions of dollars to make and I have never been very good at trying to verbalise my ideas. To raise that kind of money you would need to be able to explain what you intended to do in a language investors could understand. Often when I try to explain myself, my words get bunched up into knots that I can’t unravel: which brings me back to the reason why I think I love painting so much. “I can think things, feel them, hear them and make a picture with them, without saying a word.”

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Untitled # 997 2003 oil on masonite 61 x 79 cm

Untitled # 890

2002 oil on masonite 62 x 73 cm

Untitled # 894 2002 oil on masonite 70 x 75 cm

Untitled # 978

2003 oil on masonite 56 x 61 cm

www.agentprovocateur.com

Agent Provocateur EAU DE PARFUM

XIU XIU: Caralee McElroy and Jamie Stewart

Where does a nice boy like JAMES STEWART go to ﬁnd the gritty reality that inspires his music? The creative driver behind experimental rock band Xiu Xiu provides honest answers to all the tough questions. INTERVIEW & ILLUSTRATIONS

Brian Duong PHOTOGRAPHY

Angel Ceballos

ould you describe your experience living in Oakland, California and the type of people that surrounded you? Well, actually now I live in Seattle but that’s a recent move so Oakland is not so far from my memory and an infinitely more interesting place. The apartment that I lived in was across the hall from a factory that made dildos in the shape of religious figures: Buddha, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the Devil, Abraham etc. It was across the street from a homeless shelter and on a block that I believe is in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in all of the US. Oakland’s fascinating and scary and upsetting and overwhelming. A lot of the people there where archetypes of poverty and oppression and at the same time unique idols of mystery and CHA CHA CHA. It makes me feel a little bit like an asshole to have worked the ultra-classic white, middle class art school tragedy of living in a rough neighbourhood just to see what it is like and obviously coming away from it with no idea because I was able to move away if I wanted to and did. What type of neighbours did you have there? Lots of sex workers and drug dealers and families trying to have things be better for themselves as all families do. In my building though it was just middle class art kids in this fortress in the centre of a ghetto. Very weird. Did you grow up in Oakland? No, Los Angeles. What’s your impression of Los Angeles culture? With some exceptions, most people I've spoken to have written it off as the ass-end of the United States. I will totally, totally, totally defend LA as a wonderful place until the day I die and I cannot wait to move back there. It is funny because I had no idea how maligned LA was until I moved to the Bay Area. I think the Bay Area is jealous that LA does not care that it is hated. I think the Bay Area wants to believe that it is so good that LA must bend to its tiny will. What I love about LA is that it is so vast and so mixed and so weird and deformed and beautiful that you can never ever understand it. It is too big and too forward moving. The biggest difference that I see about LA and the Bay Area (I cannot speak about NYC because I have only visited – but I love it there too),

is that people in LA are inspired to actually get things done and people in the Bay Area are inspired to talk about it for 3 years and then move back in with their parents. LA is about making things happen, not in a show biz way – that exists for sure but can easily avoided – but in a fearless way. It is fucking hot outside though but so what? Fuck sweaters. So you then moved to Oakland and lived in this rough neighbourhood to see what it was like? Well, that was not the primary reason for moving there. My best friend lived nearby and a lot of the musicians I know were in that area. But I did not have to live there and I think the prospect of having my perception of life messed with was appealing to me. It is a little hard for me to reconcile it as a worthwhile or even moral event though. The question of course being is it ever okay for a person who was raised middle class to move into a neighbourhood that is in poverty with the idea of learning or experiencing something? How exploitative is that? I don’t know. Is it okay to use the community you live in for an anthropological pursuit? I have a degree in social work and I think that somehow I used that to justify this to myself. How did you arrive at that decision to move there in the first place? Was there with any preconceived notion of what it was going to be like, or the idea that an environment like that would be a creative catalyst for you? I am a little ashamed that I was looking for this to be a creative catalyst although it really wasn’t. I was working as a teacher in a different but equally impoverished part of the Bay Area, East San Jose, and that was – as far as becoming more intimate with heartache and social hurt – genuinely inspirational and I do not feel guilty about it as I was working in a capacity to improve the situation and had been a resident in that community for several years. Oakland was much more touristic. I am not entirely resolved in the notion that it was not okay for me to do. I did not seek out ways to exploit that environment in a way that caused further problems for it but at the same time I was hoping to internally exploit it for the sake of art and personal growth. I don’t know. There were a lot of musicians that I knew in the area but I did not really find myself spending that much more time with them than I did when I lived an hour away. It was only when I moved away that it became really clear

continued on page 36

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Xiu (Right) Ian Curtis

Bryan Ferry

Xiu (Left) Joan Chen The Smiths Los Angeles

Mike Caralee McElroy

East San Jose

Cory McCulloch

Lauren Andrews Yvonne Chen

Oakland

Ches Smith

Seattle

La ForĂŞt (2005) Jherek Bischoff Miya Zane Osaki

Fabulous Muscles (2004)

Devin Hoff

Sam Mickens

Fag Patrol (2003)

Jason Albertini

A Promise (2003) Aaron Russell

Chapel Of The Chimes (2002)

Charles Mingus Knife Play (2002)

Below is a list of items that aim to describe you. For each item that describes you now or within the past 6 months, select the number [2] if the item is very true or often true of you. Choose [1] if the item is somewhat or sometimes true of you. If the item is not true of you, choose [0]. [0] = Not True

[1] = Somewhat or Sometimes True

I possess a secret talent and/or power (describe): [2] Have you ever seen the gelatinous cube? Well, that's me. I act too young for my age [1] I have an allergy (describe): [2] Ginseng, which sucks. It makes bumps grow on my lips. I argue a lot [2] I have asthma [1] I act like the opposite sex [2] I like animals [2] I brag [0] I lie about my age [0] I have trouble concentrating or paying attention [0] I can’t get my mind off certain thoughts (describe): [2] I am extremely obsessive about money, sex, music, my family, my relationship, being worried, car problems, business, the game Go, the ideas of happiness and sadness, being dissatisfied and God. I have trouble sitting still [0] I’m too dependent on others [0] I feel lonely [2] I feel confused [2] I cry a lot [1] I am pretty honest [2] I am mean to others [1] I daydream a lot (describe): [1] Does worrying count? Do sex fantasies count? I deliberately try to hurt or kill myself [1] I try to get a lot of attention [2] I destroy my own things [0] I destroy things belonging to others [0] I disobey my parents [2] I disobey my boss I AM SELF-EMPLOYED!!!!!!!!!!! so [2] and another [2] I don’t eat as well as I should [0] I don’t get along with friends [1] I don’t get along with strangers [1] I don’t feel guilty after doing something I shouldn’t [0] I am jealous of others [2] I am willing to help others when they need help [2] I am afraid of certain animals, situations, or places, other than home (describe): [1] I am really, really scared of serial killers. I am afraid I might think or do something bad [2] I fall in love with people I don’t know (describe): [0] Is that horribly unromantic or healthy? I feel that I have to be perfect [2] I feel that no one loves me [0] I feel that others are out to get me [0] I feel worthless or inferior [1]

[2] = Very True or Often True

I accidentally get hurt a lot [0] I get into many fights [0] I get teased a lot [0] I hang around with people who get in trouble [0] I hear sounds or voices that other people think aren’t there (describe): [0] My mind is empty. I act without stopping to think [1] I would rather be alone than with other people [2] I lie or cheat [1] I bite my fingernails [1] I am nervous or tense [1] Parts of my body twitch or make nervous movements (describe): [1] Only when I am super upset and not taking my happy pills my body, while I am in bed will jerk around violently. Sometimes I will scratch myself. I have nightmares [1] I am not liked by my peers [1] I do certain things better than most peers (describe): [2] Oral sex (well it's true!) I am too fearful or anxious [1] I feel dizzy [0] I feel too guilty [1] I eat too much [0] I feel overtired [1] I am overweight [0] I hate my body [0] Physical problems without known medical cause: a. Aches or pains [2] b. Headaches [1] c. Nausea, feel sick [0] d. Problems with eyes [0] e. Rashes or other skin problems [0] f. Stomach aches or cramps [0] g. vomiting, throwing up [0] h. Other (describe): [2] I wish that I had cooler answers to the malady section. I physically attack people [0] I can be pretty friendly [1] I like to try new things [2] My workmanship is poor [0] I am poorly coordinated or clumsy [1] I would rather be with older people than people my own age [2] I would rather be with younger people than people my own age [2] I refuse to talk [1] I repeat certain acts over and over (describe): [1] Brushing my teeth, tapping my fingers to my thumb. There used to be way more but [ever since] the happy pills ... I run away from home [0]

I scream a lot [0] I am secretive [1] I am self-conscious or easily embarrassed [2] I set fires [0] I work well with my hands [1] I show off [1] I am shy [0]/[2] Depends. I have a funny way of showing people my love (describe): [2] Making weird songs about them and making fart noises. I give up too easily [0] I have a good imagination [2] I have a speech problem (describe): [0] I stand up for my rights [1] I steal from places other than home [1] I store up things I don’t need: [0] I do things other people think are strange (describe): [2] Show my love. I have thoughts that other people would think are strange (describe): [2] I want to collect tumours. I told this to my mom and she got so upset. Is that really that weird? I am stubborn [2] My moods change suddenly [2] I enjoy being with other people [1] I am suspicious [0] I swear or use bad language [2] I think about killing myself [2] I like to make others laugh [2] I talk to much [0] I joke at other peoples’ expense [1] I have a hot temper [2] I think about sex too much [2] I threaten to hurt people [0] I like to help others [2] I am too concerned about being neat or clean [1] I have trouble sleeping (describe): [0] I used to, but again with the happy pills ... I don’t have much energy [0] I am unhappy, sad, or depressed [1] I am louder than other people [0] I use alcohol or drugs for non-medical purposes (describe): [2] Getting drunk. I try to be fair to others [1] I enjoy a good joke (give example): [2] What's 12 inches long and makes women scream? – Crib death. I am carefree [0] I wish I were of the opposite sex [2] I avoid getting involved with others [1] I worry a lot [2] I am content with what I have [1] I hate what you’re doing to me [0][1][2] I wish it didn’t have to end this way [0][1][2]

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continued from page 33 to me that that had been a motivation for me. The more I talk about it the less worthy it seems. But then again how else do stories get told? Or is that just more rationalisation? You mentioned that you were teaching at East San Jose. Were you teaching kids at a high school? No, preschool kids aged two to five. How did you become exposed to heartache and social hurt in that kind of setting? When you are working with children that age, you are more directly involved with the whole family than with older children. The program was a governmentsubsidised childcare setting and all of the families came from low income households, some in extreme poverty and most of them quite young to be having children. One of the songs on Fabulous Muscles is about a child there whose older brother was molesting him but the whole family lived in a one-room garage and there was no way to separate them at night. I saw the child's father crying a lot when he thought no one was looking. Most of the families there are undocumented workers and the US is very, very unfriendly to people in that position so they were often scared about seeking other services. There are about a thousand sad stories about that place. That's so sad. How involved did you become with these children and their families? It really depended on the particular situation and most of the time it was just to make sure that the child had a safe place to be and had a good social and creative experience at school to balance a difficult one at home. That is not a slag on their parents but the greater economic and community situation of the area. The more serious cases were referred to the social worker and she would then communicate with the staff about what she thought we should do. She was actually quite good and we would have sunk without her. Did the school set certain parameters for you to work within, e.g. sex abuse cases getting referred to a certain department to handle it, “Don't get involved, just do your job,” etc.? Well, that was the case but it was not

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negative. It was to assure that people who were qualified to treat and work with the families were notified and to protect the staff from accusations. It made it possible for us to do our job better. The administrator of the school was as dense as you could get, but there were lots of other people who weren't. What was the general mood amongst other teachers in the school? Mostly tired. It was a hard place to work. Was there any kind of glimmer of hope amidst the emotional turmoil? Oh, amongst the children there was always some hilarious thing that would happen, then something awful, then something adorable, then something truly depressing. I did laugh, as much as I was also left with a pain in my jaw from clenching my teeth. There was a child there who said, “Hey Jamie you see that airplane flying over us?” “Yes.” “I'm gonna FUCK that airplane up!” That is totally, totally funny but then you’ve got to wonder why he is so hostile and why, at four, he has that kind of vocabulary. A lot of stuff like that. Did the school know you were in a band like Xiu Xiu? Yeah. They never heard the music but knew that I played a lot and gave me a lot of time off to tour (in exchange for no health insurance). I would be really embarrassed if anyone heard anything. That has always been a little funny feeling. Why did you end up leaving? I fell in love with someone in Seattle. Wow, moving for love. That’s a pretty big deal, right? Yes. What is it like to be in love? It is funny. It is like being kissed on the cheek to be woken up in the morning and then being electrocuted in the heart to be put to sleep at night. It is complicated and intense and wonderful and awful and all the most obvious truisms that you ever read about your whole life. I am finding them all to have become certainties for very good reasons. It is cool. But it takes a while to become cool, at least for me, and not INSANE. But I am sure it will become INSANE again and then cool again.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Is it ever okay for a person who was raised middle class to move into a neighbourhood that is in poverty with the idea of learning or experiencing something?â&#x20AC;?

Martha Stewart, meet your maker. TEXT

Mel Ratliff IMAGES COURTESY OF

Ace Gallery

Emoter

2002 altered ink-jet print, monitor, stepladder, and mechanical components print: 124.5 x 91.4 x 10.2 cm monitor: 68.6 x 61 x 48.3 cable: 442 cm Andrea Nasher Collection

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im Hawkinson is a mechanic, a composer, a scientist and a choreographer – of sorts. Most people identify him as an artist, and more specifically a sculptor (one of America’s most original). Probably the best way to describe him is to refer to the popular television series MacGyver that was broadcast in the mid-80s and 90s – seven seasons of socially engaged action-adventure that pitted ingenuity and science against violence and wrong-doing. Similarly, Hawkinson creates amazingly clever mechanical contraptions and surreally functional constructions from found items, craft materials and his own body, albeit with much less messianic motives. With a tinkerer’s sensibility, the Los Angeles-based Hawkinson has formed minutely detailed sculptures of birds from his own fingernail clippings (Bird, 1997),

inflated life-sized latex casts of his own body (Balloon Self-Portrait, 1993), and birthed a machine surrogate that repetitively inscribes his own signature (Signature, 1993). He has reinvented the clock by making a single hair tick around the bristle of a hairbrush (Hairbrush Clock, 1996), enlisted a computer to co-choreograph drops of water in his percussive installation (Drip, 2002), and sewn together large tube-like balloons to create a massive, moaning, playable pipe organ (Überorgan, 2000 & 2002). In February 2005, New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art will bring together two decades of wondrous Hawkinsonian gadgetry in the artist’s first major museum survey. It will no doub be a grand meeting of the poetic and the practical that inspired do-it-yourself enthusiasts and awoken jaded art seen-it-alls.

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INTERVIEW

Jonathan Zawada & Annie Rose Wright ILLUSTRATIONS

Jonathan Zawada

STYLE AND GENRE COMPARISONS OF BELLE & SEBASTIAN AND MICK COOKE始S INFLUENCES INDEPENDENT STYLE DEFINITIONS OF MICK始S FAVOURITE ALBUMS A. BELLE & SEBASTIAN B. SLY & THE FAMILY STONE C. THE BEATLES D. JONI MITCHELL E. PANIS ET CIRCENSIS F. MILES DAVIS

LATIN

'71

'70 B.

MICK'S FAVOURITE ALBUMS A. BELLE & SEBASTIAN B. SLY & THE FAMILY STONE C. THE BEATLES D. JONI MITCHELL E. PANIS ET CIRCENSIS F. MILES DAVIS

A. '96

POP ROCK

ROCK

D. '68

FOLK ROCK

'59 '65

POP ROCK C.

JAZZ

FOLK ROCK

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ENERGY EXPENDED BY BELLE & SEBASTIAN BAND MEMBERS AS PERCIEVED BY MICK COOKE

BOBBY

OFF STAGE

BOBBY

ON STAGE

CH RI S

S T UA RT

MICK STEVIE

MICK

RICH

A CH RI

ARD

SARA H

* NOTE MICKʼS CONSISTENTLY EQUAL PERFOMANCE ON AND OFF STAGE, MATCHED IN CONSISTENCY ONLY BY BOBBY.

CONCLUSIONS 1) Mick hates Bobby. 2) Mick tries to come across as being humble as possible without underselling himself.

PERCEPTIONS OF BELLE & SEBASTIANʼS ALBUMS TO DATE A) AUDIENCE REACTION PERCEIVED BY MICK B) PERSONAL APPRECIATION OF ALBUM TO MICK C) BBC RATING D) FANS RATING 10

�

� � �

�

� � �

� � � �

�

� �

�

� �

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Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant

The Boy With the Arab Strap

If Youʼre Feeling Sinister

Tigermilk

CONCLUSIONS Everyone agrees on the quality of Belle and Sebastianʼs albums except for their unbiased fans. Therefore, fans are suckers.

Storytelling

� �

MICK COOKEʼS IMPRESSION OF SHOWS FROM BELLE & SEBASTIANʼS 2004 WORLD TOUR (JUNE 12 – JULY 25)

1) Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, Scotland 2) Glastonbury Festival, Pilton Fields, England 3) Theatrehaus, Stuttgart, Germany 4) Eurorockeennes Festival, Belfort, France 5) Chicobum Park Festival, Turin, Italy 6) Oxegen Festival, Dublin, Ireland 7) Somerset House, London, England 8) The Palais, Melbourne, Australia 9) The Enmore, Sydney, Australia

6. 2.

7. 4.

3. 5.

SIZE OF SHOW AUDIENCE REACTION MICKʼS REACTION 9. 8.

MICK COOKEʼS CALORIE INTAKE VS. CALORIE BURN ON AN AVERAGE TOUR DAY CALORIE INTAKE

1000

CALORIES

CALORIES EXPENDED (PER 1 HOUR)

500

03:00

00:00

21:00

18:00

15:00

12:00

09:00

06:00

03:00

00:00

100

TIME OF DAY (27 HOUR PERIOD)

CONCLUSIONS 1) Touring is hard work. 2) Mick may die at a young age.

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Capturing scenes of urban isolation, Sydney-based Japanese photographer JUN TAGAMIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s images pulse with a compelling light.

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un Tagami’s snapshots of daily life cut an arc through the prosaic like a warm knife divides butter. His pictures isolate ordinary moments – a guy opening his car door, two girls in conversation, a boy asleep on a rug – yet they are suffused with such impenetrable stillness that they take on an almost surreal quality. The green-tinged exterior of a building, the neon-bright lights of a lonely motel, the improbably frozen pose of two close friends, all suggest scenes that are painstakingly orchestrated, the work of an meticulous auteur in the tradition of woodblock artisans such as Hokusai or Sharaku. It’s a surprise, then, to meet Tagami in person. Instead of the clinical Japanese perfectionist, I meet a dreamy young artist and photographer. The 35-year-old Tokyo native, who’s been living in Australia for the last nine years, talks non-stop in a meandering stream of consciousness, often glancing out of the window to pause and reflect. His passion for imagemaking is obvious as the conversation flows, his enthusiasm peaking and troughing like a 10-year-old boy squirming in his chair. Far from being a fastidious technical wizard, Tagami says he takes most of his photos whilst ambling along, listening to music on his walkman, always searching for the perfect scene to match the feelings that the music evokes. Snap. The butter analogy that opened this story is not just a gratuitous journalistic device. It also hints at the gradual changes occurring within Japanese society and culture. Butter was not introduced to Japan until the mid-1920s, when the West began to exert a greater influence, and so it has come to symbolise the westernisation of Japanese culture. The Japanese have a phrase, ‘bataa-kusai’, which literally means ‘stinking of butter’. It’s a derogatory term that can be used to refer to a westerner, or else a Japanese person who has too readily adopted

western practices. It’s a measure of the traditionalist fervour that still predominates: social responsibility and familial piety remain the cornerstones of respectable Japanese life, even today. So artists like Tagami represent a very small percentage of individuals in Japan who have broken out of the mould: the school-to-uni-to-lifelongcompany-job pathway that so many follow. Yet even Tagami wasn’t always one to go against the grain. Although he was raised by artistic parents who ran a traditional Japanese theatre company, Tagami somehow found himself completing a university degree in his twenties, then moving on to a sales job he hated. “It’s really funny because I thought I was very individual and I always thought I would be critical about society and the system, and those kind of things, but it was hard for me to see how involved in the system I really was,” he says. “I went to university because I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I can decide on my career after entering university.’ Then when I started university I thought, ‘Maybe after joining a company I’ll change my mind.’ Then I entered a company, and I thought, ‘Shit, I really have to do something to change or otherwise I’ll be stuck.’” Tagami moved to Australia in 1995, to drastically change his life. He decided to work in a café, hoping to use the experience as an opportunity to get to know ordinary Australians and the way they lived. When he found an ad on a wall looking for a Japanese surfer to star in a short ﬁlm directed by Cate Shortland, he was intrigued and called her to see if he could help in any way. “We met and I showed my photos to Cate, to explain my visual ideas, and she really liked them. She was the ﬁrst person who said my photos were great. We developed the idea for Flowergirl through our frank conversations about Japan and Australia.”

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Chris Piper ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

Jun Tagami

RIGHT & NEXT PAGE:

images from Jun Tagami's new project, Light Love OPPOSITE:

Jun Tagami

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Flowergirl, Shortland’s third short film, tells the story of a young Japanese surfer who’s been living in Australia, but due to head back to his home town soon to take over his father’s butchery business. Having grown to love Australia, he’s filled with trepidation about leaving. His reluctance to go home is compounded by his obsession with his Japanese flatmate, Hana. In many ways, Flowergirl, which won numerous awards worldwide, encapsulates a problem encountered by Tagami and indeed by many young Japanese who have spent time living abroad: the conflict between freedom and social responsibility. Spurred on by the success of Flowergirl, Tagami decided to focus more on his photography and

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eventually scored his first solo photographic exhibition at the Japan Cultural Centre in Sydney, titled Loneliness Love Light. He is now most famous for his small-run series of ‘super mini magazines’ called etisoppo (“opposite” spelt backwards). The magazine is laser printed onto small squares of cardboard that are sold loose in plastic zip-disk cases, with the aim of giving lessestablished artists and designers from around the world the chance to showcase their artwork. After releasing a few successful editions of etisoppo, Tagami briefly returned to Japan to visit family and friends, all the time snapping photos of the urban milieu around him. When he showed the photos of his trip to his friends back in Australia, they urged him to publish them – and so his first ‘super mini photo book’ was created. Love Japan When I’m Away is a tender meditation on place and memory seen through the eyes of a distant lover. He says, “Every time I visit Tokyo, I am surprised to find how much it has been changed. I am lucky because I’ve found the best way to memorise by taking photos.” Tagami recently shot the General Pants “Our People” catalogue and one of his photos of Australian band Decoder Ring appeared in the Asia edition of Time magazine. His next photographic publishing project, Light Love, draws together photos taken in cities around the world depicting all different forms of light, both natural and synthetic. Completely self-taught, Tagami didn’t actually develop an interest in photography until his early twenties, when he started using it as a way to cope with the pressure of his office job in Japan and to express how he felt. “It actually started from drawing: I was always drawing stuff … Photography’s really good to express how you feel. It’s quick, and you’ve got it. But drawing’s more [about] sitting down and it takes time … I’m more about grabbing the moment,” he admits. And with that, he goes back to looking out of the window to quietly reflect some more. His retreat into introspection seems at odds with his talkative nature. But I get the feeling that all the while we’ve been in conversation, he’s really had half his mind on my questions and the other half vigilantly surveying the scene around him, attuned to a melody in his head, waiting for that perfect moment. Snap.

RJYAN KIDWELL has been ďŹ ghting the system since kindergarten. The precocious electronic musician otherwise known as Cex, tells of his Maryland childhood, a place which made a superhero out of him. AS TOLD TO

Brian Duong ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

Ryjan Kidwell

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was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in a neighbourhood called Glen Cove. I can’t remember the socioeconomic or racial make-up of this place but I remember a lot of old, white people. There was only one family with kids that I knew within walking distance from our house. We moved to Baldwin, Maryland, right before I went to kindergarten. Baldwin is middle-class, white-bread suburbia: complete absence of any culture or colour. All the stores close at, like, 6pm, except Blockbuster. I went to grade school in the Cockeysville/Lutherville/Timonium area, which is a little closer to the city, but not very. It's more diverse, though, and a little more alive, but really only seems that way when compared to Baldwin. All my friends lived in Cockeysville or Timonium, so until I got to high school, I really didn’t see a lot of my friends outside of school. Except for Dean, who moved in the development across the street from me in seventh grade.

hen I was real young, my favourite things were toy guns and lasers and bows and arrows and swords. I was all about loading up on plastic firepower with my friends and having Schwarzenegger-inspired adventures in the backyard. In elementary school, I played a lot with my neighbours Kurt B, who was a grade younger than me, and Gagan A, who was a grade or two older than me. Kurt and Gagan didn't get along too well, though. Gagan was always proclaiming himself invincible, except for a certain, obscure weak spot (the eye, the back of the neck), and this weak spot would always be protected by some sort of armour he wore that required 100 missile blasts to even make a dent. This would set Kurt off, who would declare he had a store of secret bullets, each the equivalent of 1,000 missiles when shot from his secret gun. Gagan would then reveal that he had a secret weapon of his own that rendered Kurt’s weapon unusable. But Kurt would have a force field that kept him safe from Gagan's secret weapon, and so on. It usually ended with either Kurt or Gagan storming home. I played a lot by myself, too. I was really into making forts out of cushions and blankets and chairs, and pretending they were helicopters. Also, I liked to pretend the floor of a room was the side of a cliff and use the furniture to scale the cliff, attaching bungee cords to table legs and crawling around on my belly to get from one wall of the room to another. If I could steal a belt from one of my parents’ robes, I would knot something heavy onto one end and use that as a grappling hook.

n sixth grade I realised I was too old for pretend action games, so I abandoned them. But when Dean moved in the next year, we brought them back, not really acknowledging that it was pretty juvenile of us to be running around in his backyard

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at age twelve with his younger brother, Ryan, and plastic shotguns and fake grenades. Nobody at school knew that we were ‘playing guns’ so much – I mean, we were cool seventh graders who liked the cool bands like Tool and Hole. But when the Beastie Boys video for “Sabotage” came out, ‘playing guns’ was re-christened ‘sabotage’ and we were able to proudly fashion fake guns out of binders and blackboard erasers, and dive behind desks during shoot-outs with other kids. Dean got kicked out of school for the first time the next year when a teacher searched his locker and found a toy revolver. I went to his hearing at the school board and told them it was in his backpack because he had spent the night at my house and we were playing with toy guns. We often filled our backpacks with guns for sleepovers, but he hadn't really spent the night at my house the night before: the sleepovers were always at his house. He had a cool mom. She was young – how young, we didn’t know – but she was something like ten years younger than his dad and they had married when she was nineteen. She was really hot, although that didn’t mean very much to seventh graders. I don’t know if my testimony affected Dean’s punishment or not, but he had to go to a school for expelled kids for the rest of the semester. We stayed friends, but not as close as before. When he came back, drugs were totally in vogue, as was sneaking out of the house to go pool-hopping with girls (for the kids in Cockeysville, at least). We lived too far away to sneak out and go anywhere. Dean’s cool mom, though, would always drive him to Cockeysville and let him spend the night, unlike my parents. My parents were suspicious of Dean and I don’t think they trusted his mom very much. I don’t remember how long Dean was back at school before he got expelled again for having a bottle of prescription drugs. I think they may have been his mom’s anti-depressants, but I could very well be totally wrong about that. At that point, Dean and I didn’t hang out much, and “Sabotage” lost its novelty. In the nightstand by my bed, however, were three of my favourite toy guns: two berretta water-pistols, with clips that load in the handle, and a stainless steel derringer I won playing Pokeno at the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland. When I moved from my old apartment to my current place, I needed a bedside table so I went home to get the one from my room. The guns were still in its top drawer and I left them there for some reason. It still feels good to snap the clips into the berrettas.

ccording to my mom, I was a perfect little angel until I was 11. I don't think I caused any trouble ever before that. I loved my little sister. I hated blowing my nose though, and I was pretty afraid of roller-coasters and anything that looked scary. Especially rollercoasters – if we’d met when we were in first grade, you probably would have thought I was a scaredy-cat.

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I wasn’t good at all at athletics and I had never even heard of soccer or lacrosse until first grade when I was suddenly surrounded by guys like Ryan Cox and Andy Sanders who were really good at soccer. They organised games every recess and I was a little resentful, but I kept the resentment to myself and tried my hardest to earn some kind of respect in the realm of sports. I was tall for my age throughout grade school, so people were always telling me I should play basketball like my dad who attended a Catholic college on the Maryland/Pennsylvania line on a basketball scholarship (and who, to this day, plays basketball at least once a week with various men’s leagues he’s in.) I wanted badly to be good at basketball but I never was. I played little league baseball for a few years in elementary school, but I was even worse at that. After sixth grade I decided I hated sports and stopped playing in the little leagues and started loving the Nirvana CD my dad bought. I didn’t realise that music was my hot ticket to adolescent identity until Nirvana blew up, which, if I’m correct, was a little while after that CD had been in our house. But I may be wrong – I was a sixth grader who didn’t have cable, so I didn’t have MTV to properly align my worldview. It’s quite possible I may have just been behind and only thought Nirvana was blowing up to the world once I began to care about them as more than just a CD.

That quickly snowballed into your typical middle-school life, complete with lunchtable drama, clique warfare, persecution of poseurs, and for a while in eighth grade I think I had a weird Messiah complex. I smoked pot at school, got in trouble and pretended I was a “bad kid” for a while.

n suburban high school, at least, kids are RUTHLESS. It’s pretty much a social hierarchy based on one’s willingness to play the role of a generic American high-school student. There’s a big safety net draped around the popular kids and trades are made: parents and the school look the other way and let their kids have keg parties, buy them cars, bail them out and cover up shit for them when they get in trouble with the law ... In return, kids play the role. They don’t try very hard at anything, they stay within the boundaries of what’s acceptable, learn to love the system and make themselves big, fat obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to change anything. It’s a big unspoken trade. And it relies a lot on self-policing. It’s like prison. The prisons in America do nothing to remedy the huge racial problems within the prisons. Most people who know about prison life would say they encourage these problems. As long as the whites are fighting the blacks and the Mexicans, and everybody’s fighting everybody else,

there’s no solidarity, no changes can be affected by the prisoners, no stand can be taken against the prison. Besides, if you’re preoccupied with protecting yourself from rival gangs and inter-gang warfare, there’s a good chance you’ll forget about your real enemy: the system. School works the same way. It’s cruel enough that the majority of kids will either do their best to play the part and get the rewards, or if they won’t do that, will just lay down and stay the hell out of the way, and not make trouble for themselves. The few kids that don’t buy into it will rebel – almost always in worthless, superficial ways, like wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt to school every day – and their peers will punish them for it. There was an article on TheOnion.com after the Columbine shootings with the headline: “Columbine Once Again Safe for Bullies”. It was really funny, but also really sad, because that’s exactly what's happened – all these school shootings have gone down in the past three to four years, and the result has been a tightening of the system, not reforming it or analysing it. Kids who step out of line are now searched, harassed, accused and punished in ways that (surprisingly) surpass the draconian bullshit that used to go down when I was in high school. All in the name of preventing another Columbine, because as we all now know, kids who want to be different shoot people. Now, I’m not the biggest fan of attention-

“I didn’t realise that music was my hot ticket to adolescent identity until Nirvana blew up...”

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“[Popular kids] don’t try very hard at anything, they stay within the boundaries of what’s acceptable, learn to love the system and make themselves big fat obstacles in the way of anyone who wants to change anything.”

starved goth kids who think wearing obnoxious and predictable outfits to school is making some kind of stand in the name of individuality. I hated those kids in high school and I’m sure we wouldn’t get along today if I were to go down to the Magic Cards store and hang out with some. But they’re not entirely wrong, even if the battles they pick are superficial and probably

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not worth fighting. The bottom line is that schools in suburban America teach homogeneity. They’re Pavlovian to the bone marrow: they reward the paths of least resistance. Pick up a lacrosse stick or a football, they’ll reward you. Put on a mini-skirt and pick up some pom-poms, they’ll reward you. Act smart (but not TOO smart), they’ll reward you. Pep rallies, award ceremonies, good grades,

acknowledgment. Play music or make a painting, they’ll toss you a cookie as long as it’s marching band or a figure study. Plan a school dance with the Student Government, you’ll be officially acknowledged as an esteemed leader amongst your peers. But ask questions about why school has to be the way it is, try to organize a group of like-minded students who want to go to a school

they like, try and attend a site-based management meeting, you’ll get your ass kicked. I won’t harp on about the fact that they teach complacency and unquestioning faith in authority – after all, not everyone’s going to be a leader or should be expected to be – except that they teach kids to distrust one another and actively abhor change. Kids learn to become reactionary soldiers who fight against anything that might upset The Way Things Are, even though they have no idea why.

his is the type of bullshit I went through. I mean, a lot of it was my fault. All of it was my

fault, really. I chose to push every chance I got. I thrived on friction. I made everything a battle: even the tiniest, stupidest, pettiest thing. I’m pretty embarrassed about it – I don’t really talk much about my life in high school on the website and when I do, it’s really specific things. I have a terrible fear of seeing kids I went to high school with. I don’t want to deal with somebody who has the image of the ‘me’ that I was back then. I’m sure those kids have really terrible pictures of me in their heads ... I was pretty pathetic. I don’t know what I’m going to do about it – it’s like, once you leave, you have a free ticket to start again

and forget any of that ever happened if you want. It’s a tempting offer, but I feel like I need to come to terms with the ridiculous retard I was for those four years. More like seven years, because I wasn’t much better in middle school.

recently went and re-bought all the Nirvana CDs. I’m thinking I can start at seventh grade and work my way forward over time until I feel that I’m comfortable with what I did and who I was. Not by laughing at it and saying, “Ha ha, those were dumb times ...” or whatever, but by recognizing why I felt the way I did, what meant a lot to me. I’m sounding kind of new age now, Christ. Fuck all that shit: high school = wack. Anyone who disagrees was probably sucking old-people dick by the armful so they could get gas money for their little pink Nissan. “Jeepers, Mr Principal, you’re even bigger than my dad!”

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S TEXT

Brian Duong PHOTOGRAPHY

B. den Herder

M. van Houten

ince the dawn of time, fire – alongside armed robbery, torrential flooding and unsupervised teenage parties – have represented the acme of household terrors worldwide. Yet, despite its continual unpopularity, Dutch designer, Maarten Baas, has made it his mission to bring their frightful souvenirs into our living rooms and introduce fire as our friend. Simply called “Smoke”, the collection’s process of creation begins paradoxically with destruction. Various pieces of furniture are devoured by Baas’s controlled inferno where flames strip the objects of its original colour and form, leaving in its wake a charred, three-dimensional silhouette. Following this, a layer of clear epoxy is applied to strengthen the object for everyday use and ensure its gnarled scars are preserved for life. “By doing just the opposite of what we would do with a respected object,” Baas explains, “I accent the value of the thing itself.” As in life, nothing is deemed too precious to escape the flames of Baas’s fiery wrath and when the object’s pedigree happens to be that of an Eames, Mackintosh or Gaudi, the results are especially alluring. To be sure, this particular brand of titillation is not aroused by Oedipal resentment towards the canon of furniture design, nor does it reflect childish whim at play. Rather, much of the breathtaking quality of Baas’s “Smoke” collection lies in the way it recalls the fallen magnificence of figures such as Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet. By exalting the object’s flaws and vulnerability, “Smoke” becomes the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy.

Where there’s Smoke, there’s MAARTEN BAAS.

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BELOW:

Chaise Lounge 2004 burned antique furniture, preserved with clear epoxy 155 x 70 x 115 cm

RIGHT:

Grandfather Clock 2004 burned antique furniture, preserved with clear epoxy 155 x 70 x 115 cm

And like Shakespeare’s plays, “Smoke” raises several ethical questions about the human condition. One particular reservation relates to the value systems we attach to material goods and how that, in turn, defines our practical and conceptual relationships with them. “It’s funny to see people take off their shoes to protect their floor,” Baas says, “‘Come on,’ I think, ‘It’s a floor, so use it as a floor.’ I think it’s disrespectful to products to put it in a golden cage. Often when I think of my work, I think of ‘respect’. It sounds ironic, but actually it is respectful. It’s not killing it, it’s letting it live. One should use furniture, that’s what it’s made for. By burning I actually already did the most extreme possible, yet it makes the object even more special. So in all things I find an ambiguity, some sort of a second layer.”

MÚM (FROM LEFT): Ólöf Arnalds, Gunnar Örn Tynes, Eirikur Orri Olafsson, Kristín Anna Valtysdóttir, Samuli Kosminen, Örvar Thóreyjarson Smárason

he beauty beauty of of Múm’s Múm’s music music isis that that itit manages manages to to be be he both intimate intimate and and expansive expansive at at the the same same time: time: the the both epic sounds sounds of of organs organs and and strings strings are are brought brought to to epic quietude by by Kristín Kristín Anna Anna Valtysdóttir’s Valtysdóttir’s breathy breathy sing-song sing-song quietude voice. Incongruous Incongruous elements elements are are pieced pieced together together perfectly, perfectly, voice. much like like the the way way the the mind mind unravels unravels the the thoughts thoughts of of the the much day in in dreams. dreams. Electronic Electronic beats, beats, faded faded samples, samples, synths, synths, day strings, clarinet, clarinet, accordians accordians and and percussion percussion merge merge to to create create strings, layers of of texture, texture, gently gently stroking stroking the the ear ear into into submission. submission. layers For some, some, their their music music evokes evokes the the frosty frosty landscape landscape of of For their Icelandic Icelandic homeland, homeland, but but for for me me itit pervades pervades the the their atmosphere with with warmth, warmth, spinning spinning aa delicate delicate aural aural cocoon cocoon atmosphere all around. around. Their Their most most recent recent album, album, Summer Summer Make Make Good, Good, all stirred up up memories memories of of childhood childhood holidays holidays spent spent at at the the stirred beach, stormy stormy nights nights and and friends friends long long since since departed departed –– no no beach, doubt aa long long way way from from summer summer in in Reykjavik. Reykjavik. doubt It’s fitting fitting to to learn learn that that Múm Múm want want listeners listeners to to draw draw their their It’s own responses responses to to the the music. music. Band Band member member Gunnar Gunnar Örn Örn own Tynes has has likened likened itit to to abstract abstract art: art: “In “In abstract abstract art, art, there there Tynes are no no perfectly perfectly set set feelings feelings and and logic. logic. It It isis the the energy energy that’s that’s are important in in it, it, not not the the specifics.” specifics.” Similarly, Similarly, the the band’s band’s important name (pronounced (pronounced ‘moom’) ‘moom’) isis an an invented invented word word of of their their name own, an an onomatopoeic onomatopoeic mixture mixture of of sound sound and and picture. picture. own, INTERVIEW

Chris Piper

The three three members members of of Múm, Múm, Gunnar, Gunnar, Kristín Kristín and and The Örvar Thóreyjarson Thóreyjarson Smárason, Smárason, ﬁrst ﬁrst met met in in 1997. 1997. Örvar Örvar Örvar and Gunnar Gunnar had had been been in in aa band band together together and and were were asked asked and to write write the the musical musical score score for for aa college college theatre theatre piece. piece. Twin Twin to sisters Kristín Kristín and and Gyda Gyda were were part part of of the the theatre theatre group, group, sisters and, as as classically classically trained trained musicians, musicians, they they agreed agreed to to help help and, with the the music. music. Gyda Gyda has has since since left left the the group group to to study study with music full full time. time. For For touring touring and and recording, recording, the the band band isis music expanded to to include include Ólöf Ólöf Arnalds, Arnalds, Eirikur Eirikur Orri Orri Olafsson Olafsson expanded and Samuli Samuli Kosminen. Kosminen. and Their debut debut album album of of 2000, 2000, Yesterday Yesterday Was Was Dramatic Dramatic Their Today Is Is OK, OK, was was internationally internationally lauded, lauded, with with some some –– Today critics claiming claiming itit the the best best electronic electronic album album of of the the year. year. critics Since then, then, Múm Múm has has released released aa split split ten-inch ten-inch with with Spúnk, Spúnk, Since Stefnumot kafbata; kafbata; two two remix remix albums, albums, Please Please Smile Smile My My Stefnumot Noise Bleed Bleed and and Remixed; Remixed; 2002’s 2002’s Finally Finally We We Are Are No No One One Noise and 2004’s 2004’s Summer Summer Make Make Good. Good. and Örvar has has said said he he prefers prefers to to describe describe their their music music Örvar through images: images: “It “It used used to to be be all all libraries libraries and and kids kids on on through bikes in in the the sun, sun, but but now now the the sound sound has has melted melted into into aa bikes valley with with wooden wooden electronic electronic apparatuses apparatuses in in the the middle middle valley and aa tunnel.” tunnel.” Some Some might might consider consider the the description description rather rather and esoteric, but but itit sounds sounds just just right right to to me. me. esoteric, PHOTOGRAPHY

Liz Ham SILVERLIMBO

Ă&#x2013;rvar A 1

Eirikur A 1

ร lรถf A 1

KristĂn A 1

Gunnar A 1

Samuli A 1

From their studios in Paris and Berlin, BLESS are making everyday people think twice about the deďŹ nition of ready-to-wear fashion. TEXT

Brian Duong PHOTOGRAPHY

Lyn Balzer & Anthony Perkins

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or Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, Aikido represents a spiritual retreat from the commotion of the fashion world where they assume the nom de guerre of Bless. Drawn in by its offer of equanimity, the pair began practising Aikido one sweltering summer several years ago and have since turned it into a daily ritual. In English, the Japanese word, Ai k i d o, can be interpreted as, “the way of harmony with the universal energy.” It’s the kind of description that conjures a tranquil image of weeping cherry trees swaying in the cool lakeside breeze. However, when translated into corporeal terms, Aikido resembles something more akin to salvation for the bookish and demure. Shaking off a clingy dependence on brute strength, Aikido’s repertoire of locks, holds and throws employs various physics principles – such as inertia, momentum and circular motion – to synthesise and deflect an attacker’s energy in a manner that protects both parties from harm. Now, whilst we’ve never been ones to advocate loutish forms of dispute resolution, it struck us as a little peculiar that such concessions would be made for an aggressor, especially in the heat of the battle. After all, weren’t the injuries sustained by an unruly adversary part and parcel of dispensing one’s come-uppance? Then again, Far Eastern philosophies have always demonstrated a predilection for paths of least expectance, ¬so perhaps our recent discovery shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. The origin of Aikido can be traced back to a fellow by the name of Morihei Ueshiba, who, during the early 20th century, developed the martial art in response to the repeated treachery of war and power he’d witnessed as a child growing up in Japan. Instead of encouraging the assertion of one’s dominance over an opponent, Ueshiba made a conscious effort to direct the focus of his martial art towards nobler, farther-reaching goals. As Ueshiba saw it, Aikido was a vehicle for “the cultivation of life, knowledge, virtue, and good sense, not devices to throw and pin people.” Aikido’s path to personal enlightenment requires one give serious contemplation to their combatant, and so for our interview with Bless, we decided to engage with Bless’s sparring partners, the so-called “everyday people” who wear Bless – the people who, in Desiree and Ines’s mind, are as much a part of Bless as they are. On e g a i s h i m a s u: Sophie Gateau I’m a Parisian graphic designer working and interested in architecture, movies and fashion. Shino Itoi I do styling in Paris. I’m always inspired to travel to different countries.

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Yoshie Wada-Fiévé I’m living in Paris, which is a privileged place to observe movements coming from different fields. However, I would say that I am most comfortable in Nagoya, where I enjoy the time shared with my parents. My principal occupation is my son who I love so much. Clementine Courcelle I have lived in Paris since I was six-years-old and I really enjoy it. My friends say I’m a big consumer of cultural things like contemporary art, movie, dance, music, concerts etc. I work as a fashion designer but I would not say I work for fashion ... More for the textile industry. I am not what you would call a “fashion” person. Nathalie Dufour I founded ANDAM (Association Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la Mode) in 1991, and Martin Margiela was one of our first winners. His first parade announced a new vision of fashion where clothing was used as a space for research. I was originally born in Nor mandy and lived there before leaving for Paris to study the history of contemporary art. I have two small adorable monsters, Tom and Léna, who are ten and fourteen years old now. I live close to, and work in the garden of the Royal Palace. It’s strange to be within three steps of the house. I spend most of my time in contemporary art galleries, the shops, the Parisian department stores, and those of London when possible! Stephanie Benmussa I love romance. I love history, which is what led me to study antique furniture, works of art, ceramics, silver and glass. Since I’m a collector, I love to go to the flea market every Saturday and desperately look for the one item that will light me up. It is very exciting, although I do it alone because people are lazy and flea markets demand I get up very early. Helene Retailleau I love kung fu. The Bless story begins at a fashion competition that both Ines and Desiree had entered as university students. Ines came from a poor family in Buggingen, Germany, where she grew up having to make her own clothes. As friends paraded around in designer outfits, Ines was at home, diligently honing her creativity and resourcefulness as a fashion designer before becoming a student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna where Vivienne Westwood judged her entrance exam and Helmut Lang was one of her mentors. In contrast, Desiree attended the University of Arts and Design, Hannover and was raised in Fáèth, Germany, where

“So, how then is one meant to interpret the apparent discrepancy between creativity and accessibility within Bless: as an example of affordable art or exorbitantly priced clothes?” much of Desiree’s upbringing revolved around the family’s furrier. Unlike the illustrious faculty that graced Ines’s academic career, Desiree acquired most of her knowledge of traditional haute couture from a Nuremberg tailor who was an interminable shrew. “It was like working in a prison,” she told I n d e x M a g a z i n e’s Ariana Speyer. Although neither Ines nor Desiree ended up winning the competition, they became instant friends and in 1997, founded Bless – a freely evolving company that would service their personal creative needs. One of the “needs” to surface in most, if not all, of their collections, was concerned with challenging existing conventions within fashion. To achieve this outcome, Bless set about obfuscating appearances, functions and meanings associated with certain clothes and objects. Such experiments yielded beguiling results such as F u r w i g s (Bless No. 00), wigs made out of fur; T h e S e t (Bless No. 03), an ambiguous-looking, multifunctional piece of materials with an assortment of pockets, zippers, adornments etc. designed to be worn in a myriad number of ways; C u s t o m i s a bl e Footwear (Bless No. 06) which invited people to assemble their own shoes out of incongruous materials provided; L i v i n g-Room Conquerors (Bless No. 07), clothing for furniture that bestowed objects with temporary new shapes; and B e d s h e e t s Couple (Bless No. 12), where the photo image of a couple was printed onto the bedspread and pillows, giving the appearance of an occupied bed. By surreptitiously disrupting the predictability of humdrum household bits and bobs, Bless offered its fashion-conscious crowd an amusing perception of everyday cultural norms. Sophie The first time I heard about Bless was five years ago in Berlin. I saw of one of their films, it was quite new and uninhibited. After that, back in Paris, I discovered their structure and their clothes. What I really like about Bless are their accessories. They are more like pieces of art as simple accessories. I really like their world, their approach to fashion, and all the connections they develop between fashion, the environment, art etc. Nathalie They are intelligent, sensitive and absolutely inventive. By creating new forms and functions, they handle concepts about our thoughts and way of life with humour, humility, and precision.

Clementine I first heard about them with the fur wigs. I remember thinking it was so smart. And then they came out with the make-up kit, which was not fashion showpiece but still something everybody could wear, something conceptual and accessible. I’m attracted to Bless because it always seems to be obvious, beautiful, useful, smart, and it makes me laugh all at the same time. Shino Bless makes everyday life a lot of fun and I also like how their pieces make my friends curious. Stephanie I love the original ideas and the cut. I am not an everyday Bless person as far as clothes is concer ned, though I love the creativity of the objects, for example the small stones with stickers on it, the brooches, and the very comfortable underwear. Helene I love Bless. Bless is art! Since everything about Bless is a challenge, so too is the act of wearing clothes. Subscribing to the doctrine that “Bless doesn’t exist without the interaction, self-experienced application and love of the user,” pieces like T he Set and Customisable Footwear seek the wearer’s involvement in the construction of the gar ment’s narrative. It makes the point that at the heart of any decent fashion or style is a series of well-infor med choices, one of which begins by inquiring as to who is going to make those choices: the designer or the wearer? While the idea of designers allowing wearers to participate in the design and/or modification of a garment might sound novel nowadays, it’s worth remembering that up until the moment a 19th Century couturier by the name of Charles Frederick Worth – regarded as the first to append a signature label to his outfits – began impressing his tastes upon the public, it was commonplace for a client to dictate the garment’s design to the dressmaker. Eventually though, the client’s independence would be significantly diminished in the advent of industrialisation, which made it more convenient for one to express oneself vicariously through a designer label or brand. Incidentally, it’s precisely this kind of passive consumption that Bless and other like-minded individuals are so resistant towards.

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It seemed that the more we talked about the state of the contemporary fashion scene with Bless’s everyday people, the clearer it became that what was being assessed was not just the quality and originality of clothes but its reflection of society’s aspirations. Shino Unfortunately I think that fashion is branching more into something commercial than some kind of personal art. Clementine I think to create something personal and intelligent, that makes other people think, discuss, react etc. is actually something very rare in fashion. Sophie For me, fashion is interesting as an artform, with its research and concepts. Those properties aren’t always evident in the world of big fashion design. That’s why I’m interested in young designers: it’s often full of new ideas, concepts, and research (for example Bless, Melodie Wolf, Fade. These three are very different but very interesting in the way they deal with fashion). I don’t really find these ideas in big couturiers. But it’s not easy to see or discover all these young designers. I mean, Paris is supposed to be the capital of fashion, but you have to fight if you want to find where to buy some pieces of young designers. Even though I’m sceptical about the direction of fashion, I believe in the art of some designers. I just hope they continue to exist. Helene I don’t care about fashion. Except for Bless. Stephanie It is the feeling of something that happens again and again. I love to update with my mother and grandmother and aunt and vintage shops... I am a bit disappointed because great creators are being copied, and the exceptional loses its sensational effects, though something like a dress by Ungaro cannot be imitated. I love to dress, I love fashion like antiques, where the garments have to be spirited: their lines, history and material make them precious. Yoshie I’m sometimes worried regarding the current state of fashion, which is almost uniform in the big cities. I expect more creativity, more artwork on valued materials. Nathalie In France, everyone knows there’s not much of an industry. Fashion designers here are closer to that of artists. Their steps and the concepts they handle are similar. This is a force, but at the same time, it can be a weakness in an

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international market where all the products tend to be homogenised. It’s only when we discussed the financial cost of being involved with fashion’s cutting-edge that a schism between Bless’s theory and practice began to emerge. There is something disconcerting about the way in which Bless creates items with the alleged intent of enhancing the everyday person’s life, only to set those items’ prices beyond the reach of that very same everyday person. Ostensibly, such prices befit luxury brands like Louis Vuitton or Gucci because of their overt affiliations with the elite, moneyed gentry. They have never claimed to be down with the everyday person, and so have no theoretical obligation to price their products accordingly. So, how then is one meant to interpret the apparent discrepancy between creativity and accessibility within Bless: as an example of affordable art or exorbitantly priced clothes? Are the steep fees a trade-off for producing original collections in a limited run, or are Bless just another marketing-savvy entrepreneur in the industry? Or perhaps the prices are merely there to test the convictions of all ye faithful? As you’d expect, the task of tendering answers to such thorny queries is a complicated one, given fashion’s inseparable ménage à trois with art and consumerism. It was the art critic and curator, Germano Celant, who pointed out that fashion’s dialogic relationship with art and commerce has made it virtually impossible to prevent money and mass production from contaminating its originality and autonomy (and vice versa). For Celant, this symbiotic relationship forms the basis of a holistic understanding of fashion as “an aesthetic object that implies projections and arguments that are at once sociological and anthropological, psychological and technical, economic and creative.” Thus, the oft-used description of Bless’s mischievously antagonistic streak as “anti-fashion” ends up being something of a misnomer. On the contrary, their collections are the total embodiment of fashion, complete with all its anxieties and paradoxes. Rather than provide fashionistas with a safe haven of good design and taste, Bless flirts with the danger of allowing the wearer to look foolhardy. Just as the fear of being hurt is the primary motivation that drives an Aikido student to hone their skill and judgement, it is the fear of looking superficial and thoughtless that drives Bless’s clientele to refine theirs. Arigato gozaimashita.

Aikido references and quotes are taken from T h e Ar t of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba (transl. John Stevens), Shambhala 1992

PHOTOGRAPHY Lyn Balzer & Anthony Perkins at RP Represents MODEL Nika Globokar at IMG Models

Andrew Topham

Although THE ORGAN have set up camp on grounds previously occupied by Eighties rock bands, their stunning debut album proves their presence is more than welcome. TEXT

Brian Duong

THE ORGAN (FROM LEFT): Shelby Stocks, Debora Cohen, Jenny Smyth, Katie Sketch (standing), Ashley Webber

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here’s a scene in the teen horror film, The Lost Boys, where Edgar Frog (played by Corey Feldman) issues a warning to his fellow vampire slayers before entering the climactic battle scene. He says, “It’s never pretty when a vampire buys it. No two bloodsuckers ever go out the same way. Some scream and yell. Some go out quietly. Some explode. Some implode. But all will try to take you with them.” Rock bands, it could be argued, are a lot like these vampires. Once they get their hands on you and sink their teeth in, you’re a goner. You’re changed. So, when listening to The Organ, remember this: as cute and unassuming as they may appear, make no mistake, they will try to take you with them. • The Organ formed in 2001, and features Katie Sketch on vocals, Debora Cohen on guitar, Ashley Webber on bass, Shelby Stocks on drums and Jenny Smyth on the eponymous organ. • To be more precise, Smyth uses the Hammond 123XL Romance Series organ. (A bit of history: The first Hammond electronic organ was built in 1934 by renowned watchmaker Laurens Hammond. With the assistance of an innovative electromagnetic tone generator and harmonic drawbars, the Hammond organ sought to emulate the musical tones produced by the pipe organ by applying the principles of additive synthesis, where a series of fundamental frequencies – such as pure tones or sine waves – were used to create a complex sound). • Having spent a year rehearsing together, The Organ released the Sinking Hearts EP, a snappy collection of pop dirges that convey the anaesthetising sensations of a doomed relationship. • Aside from the evident woe of heartache, Sinking Hearts proved to be a personal triumph of hand-eye co-ordination for Shelby Stocks and Ashley Webber, who, prior to joining The Organ, had no practical experience with their respective instruments. • For better or worse, the Sinking Hearts EP introduced Katie Sketch to the world as the female equivalent of Morrissey. • There’s merit to this comparison, although Morrissey’s vocal delivery tends to be more theatrical at times. Whilst on the topic of comparisons, the following is an abridged version of The Organ’s “similar-to” listing thus far: The Smiths, The Shaggs, Joy Division, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Interpol, Alison Moyet, Blondie, Throwing Muses, On!Air!Library!, Ultravox, Echo and the Bunnymen, Electrelane • The Organ’s follow-up debut, Grab That Gun presents a more assured performance and elaborates upon the thematic groundwork laid by Sinking Hearts. • Grab That Gun rewards its listeners with an addictive collection of strikingly pithy songs, which by Smyth’s estimation, contains “75% dance, 25% sway.” On a slightly incongruous note, it’s worth pointing out that whilst a conservative approach might veil a lack of skill or artistic ambition, the argument doesn’t apply to The Organ’s music (yet) because it’s entirely appropriate for the message they’re trying to communicate. To wit, a young person’s learning experience in an environment lacking in excitement and melodrama, but one who remains largely content with the simple pleasures life has to offer. • The album reaffirms The Organ’s world as a poignant one: bedrooms, basements, cars,

alleys, the playground, the mall, libraries, and the docks, are all tainted with the subtle perfume of adolescent melancholy. • Since its conception, music and bands have enjoyed/suffered aetiological associations with their geographic locale. Popular examples include: Joy Division, The Smiths, The Stone Roses F the morose industrial wastelands of Manchester; Iggy Pop, Derrick May, The White Stripes Fthe jarring brazenness of the world’s automotive capital, Detroit; The Velvet Underground, The Strokes, Interpol F an overwrought and fashion-conscious New York City. That said, if we’re to apply this kind of logic to The Organ, here are some details worth considering: Vancouver is the largest city in the Canadian province of British Columbia, covering an area of 113 sq km. The city’s temperature averages 3°C in January and 18°C in July, with an annual rainfall of 1219 mm. Despite its less-than-desirable climate and crime rate (mostly drug and property related), in 2004, the London-based Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Vancouver – alongside Melbourne, Australia and Vienna, Austria – as one of the most “liveable” cities in the world, a result based on the Worldwide Cost of Living Survey which assessed the level of hardship for expatriates in 130 different cities, and took into account twelve factors under three broad categories of (1) health and safety, (2) culture and environment, and (3) infrastructure. • Nevertheless, songs like “Memorize The City” and the unreleased “Can You Tell Me” hint at the band’s bittersweet feelings for their hometown. • Webber, who frequently rides her bike through Vancouver, recounts one of her favourite hideouts: “I think the best-kept secret in Vancouver is a place I went to this summer. A good friend took me to an old abandoned dock that was once used by longshoremen. After climbing over fences and carefully walking to the edge of the broken dock, we came upon a net that hung over the water like a giant hammock. I felt like a 13-yearold again. It was a beautiful night of drinking and watching the sun go down. There are a lot of beautiful places like this in and around Vancouver.” What’s interesting is how certain spaces (like music genres) can be redefined by people’s experiences within that space, impervious to its original design, function, or condition. Roger Hart, a professor of Environmental and Developmental Psychology at the City University of New York and author of Children’s Experience of Place: A Developmental Study (1978), and Barry Percy-Smith, a senior research fellow at the University of West England’s SOLAR (Social and Organisational Learning as Action Research) program, have pointed out that the relationship between youths and their urban environment is a valuable one. Hart suggests that “secret places” removed from the surveillance of authority figures (read: adults) provide youths the opportunity of engaging in a diverse range of interactions, relationships and situations, all of which aid the development of an individual’s sense of self. • It seems that one of the important lessons to be gleaned from Grab That Gun is that even in the most ordinary of lives, or the saddest of songs, there’s always beauty to be fou – Wha? ... What’s this? Argggh!! Dear God! My neck! My neck! ...

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Wave goodbye to the boring wash and trim, because after your hair has been in EUGENE SOULEIMAN’s hands, you’ll never want to go back.

ugene Souleiman loves hair. Not the musical, but the raw material. Part sculptor and part structural engineer, Souleiman draws endless inspiration from his medium, twisting, teasing, knotting and curling it into exquisite hairy works of art. Starting out as a hairdresser’s apprentice in 1982, the London-based hair stylist has worked with Trevor Sorbie, Toni & Guy, Bumble and Bumble, and Vidal Sassoon, and is currently Creative Director for Tecni.Art/L’Oreal Professionnel. While guiding product direction for L’Oreal, Souleiman divides most of his remaining time between shows for designers like Dolce & Gabbana, Dries Van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto and Hussein Chalayan, to name a very few; and shoots with photographers such as Craig McDean and Steven Meisel, for a host of leading fashion magazines and advertising campaigns. In 2003, he was named Editorial Hairdresser of the Year at the Pantene Pro-V Awards. Souleiman describes himself as “chilled”. He likes to work spontaneously and after years of collaboration with the brightest designers, photographers and stylists in the industry, is entrusted to take risks with cut, colour and length. On a recent shoot for W magazine, photographed by McDean in Niagara Falls, Souleiman contrasted a glamorous, 1950s-style wardrobe with multicoloured, Goth-inspired hair extensions. The images are at once elegant and irreverent. His particular gift is to integrate varied elements, with the hair being the pivotal ingredient that synthesises, or complements or even ampliﬁes the whole. “I’m a diplomat in a kind of way, smoothing things along.” He wasn’t always so relaxed. Sweat ran from his forehead and dripped off the end of his nose while

cutting his ﬁrst head of hair: “I was so nervous, my hands were shaking. I cut the fringe too short.” He describes the haircut as his best mistake. “You make mistakes because you need to: I learnt so much.” As did his client, who left the salon with “a sort of layered page boy” cut. “She really liked it in the end.” Souleiman’s passion for hair is perhaps equal to his love of experimentation. No surprise, then, to learn that he recently styled a collection of 12-inch chess pieces, shaping real hair with an eyelash brush for a chess set created by British artists Dinos and Jake Chapman, exhibited in a group show titled, The Art of Chess. Whatever next? Souleiman has never owned his own salon. “And I’d love to do an exhibition about hair. I just love hair.”

TEXT

Nicky Shortridge ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

Streeters London

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Loss (2003-04) black paper, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable, length 57 cm Jacket by TOM FORD for GUCCI with ZAMBESI silk tops and REBECCA DAWSON lace skirt

One plus one, plus two, plus three ... Applying ancient mathematical sequences derived from nature, jeweller ZOË JAY VENESS unlocks the key to designing perfectly formed objects of adornment. TEXT

Rani Sheen FA S H I O N P H O T O G R A P H Y

Liz Ham J E WE L L E RY P H O T O G R A P H Y

Blue Murder Studios

orget your nine-carat gold chain and signet ring. Jewellery has just been taken to a whole new dimension, with pieces that twist and loop in a little dance of coloured film or varying tones of paper, so beautifully fluid you would never guess their construction was based on a meticulous numerical sequence. Each item owes its final shape to a strict mathematical code, but the appearance is startlingly poetic. Zoë Jay Veness explains: “The beautiful thing about [working with] numbers is that it’s infinite. This idea I had is absolutely endless. I could do it forever and ever, and in so many different directions. It’s really got me excited, because it’s something I feel like I’ve discovered.” Her relatively simple idea has produced some amazingly intricate confections, but the discovery was more mundane than I had secretly hoped. (I had visions of hours of algebraic research, something akin to the blackboard problem solving in Good Will Hunting.) “[I discovered the idea] about three years ago. Whenever I have an idea, I go straight to paper and make models, to understand what the form is like, and then try to translate it to another material. Working with paper, I was really interested in a connecting system that didn’t require any glue. I just dealt with strips to begin with and by folding them over, I realised I could make patterns, and then in order to design a pattern I really had to measure each loop and make sure that [it was accurate] … It was simply two strips overlapping, then I thought I might thread some wire through to see if I could keep it together, and it just moved on from there.” Far from leaving it at that, Veness then set about researching

the idea of numerical sequences and codes as they exist in our everyday lives, with some surprising and lovely results that add another layer of meaning to her designs. “I lived in a flat in Sydney for so long before we moved [out of the city] a couple of years ago, and we never had a garden. My [new] environment inspires me incredibly; there’s no way I’d be making this work if I was still in Annandale. I became really interested in the mystical system that controls everything out there. The way things grow interests me a lot, so I looked at what’s called the Fibonacci series, a system that was recognised centuries ago; the Greeks were really onto it as well. The series comes out in nature all the time – for example, the relationship between leaves on a branch is in perfect proportion, and you’ll see it in the spirals in shells. I’ve put it through the work because it’s a way of getting some sense of proportion, a formal system. A natural proportion: that’s what I’m fascinated by. It connects everything. And it underpins so much design, especially architecture; really fabulous architecture uses those kinds of principles. Anything that comes from nature is really fundamental, I think.” She prefers to keep a balance between teaching at COFA, some retail commissions and boundary-pushing exhibition work. Her recent assessment exhibition for her Masters in Design (Honours) in Jewellery and Object Design, gave the public the opportunity to view her newest collection, as well as snippets of her work from the past few years. The older pieces are made from a dyed plastic film and resemble imaginary undersea life forms – splayed sea anemones in all shades of the sunset that are retail friendly and instantly attractive to the eye. But it is her current collection that encompasses aesthetic

continued on page 82 ABOVE (FROM BACK) : from the series, Ephemeral Sequence I

Ribbon, Oval, Diamond, Rectangle 2002 drafting film, silver, stainless steel wire (photographed by the artist)

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Grey Ribbon (2002) hand dyed drafting film,

silver, stainless steel cable, 7 x 5.5 x 1 cm ZAMBESI stretch Mesh top worn as dress, Shoes by TOM FORD for GUCCI

continued from page 79 beauty, and the kind of thoughtful and emotional input that makes her work a thousand times more desirable than fast-food jewellery. The pieces are crafted mainly from paper – both the brown and news variety – and Veness has chosen her materials for very specific reasons. “The approach that I affiliate with the most is alchemy. The idea of transforming something mundane into something precious … I’ve looked at using everyday materials like newspaper, brown paper and plastic. I’ve got really crude plastic that they put underground to make [tree] root barriers. That took me ages to find and when I found it I thought, ‘Oh! Fantastic!’ And I’m contrasting it with precious materials, to talk about democratic notions.” In the conservative Australian jewellery market, notions of what jewellery should look like and represent are ripe for a good old challenge. “In Europe, there are jewellers who create some really far-out stuff that’s got a real edgy aesthetic about it, and I push that as far as possible because it challenges what we expect jewellery to be like, in terms of being precise and neat and clean ... Not many people in Australia practice using solely non-precious [materials] – using just paper, for example – but it happens a fair bit in Europe. I think it’s because we’re really conservative and there are only so many of us, so the market is obviously smaller. And it’s also about education. People don’t see much jewellery that’s different in Sydney; you’re always bombarded with Goldmark, all that kind of jewellery, and then really high-end Cartier and Tiffany. People don’t really buy paper jewellery as much as you’d like them to.” And especially not for a one hundred and fifty bucks, I wager. “That’s it, that’s their approach. So I’ve looked at other ideas, other than monetary value. I’ve looked at the value of hand skills, emotional input and beauty, but not beauty through precious metals or stones.”

“The beautiful thing about [working with] numbers is that it’s infinite. This idea I had is absolutely endless. I could do it forever and ever, and in so many different directions. It’s really got me excited, because it’s something I feel like I’ve discovered.” On first glance, I certainly didn’t clue into all the research and influences she had applied to the pieces, but it was obvious that they were deeply personal and lovingly crafted, which made me want to reach into the display to pick up a couple. Being exhibited in a gallery and not in a shop window obviously places an object off limits to exploratory touch and try-on, which is frustrating if you love the piece, but does force you to examine it more closely. “Throughout all this work, I thought about the people who are special to me – my family namely. Heaps of stuff happened to us in the past three years and that had a lot to do with [the designs]. Always when I make something, I have someone in mind. I find it hard to make work for the sake of it, without someone or an event in mind. I feel that it has a lot more meaning behind it, whether someone sees it or not, if I make it towards someone in particular.”

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Although the pieces are made with a particular person in mind, Veness doesn’t really envision them being worn by anyone – at least not her most recent collection – which seems to defeat the point for an accessories-obsessed person like me. “I’d love people to wear it, but I don’t expect them to because it’s unusual work. For myself, I wouldn’t really wear the pieces in an everyday setting. They are wearable work, I made them half paper and half metal, because paper scratches the skin and I thought comfort was important. But for me, because I’ve viewed them for so long, I don’t mind if they’re worn or not. And where I live now there’s only my husband and myself, so I actually haven’t seen my work worn by anyone yet. I’ve had them tucked away for so long.” It might be jewellery for art’s sake, but for those of us who delight in finding beautiful things to adorn ourselves with, I hope she doesn’t tuck her work away for much longer.

ABOVE:

White Sands of Jervis Bay Neckpiece 2004 map of Jervis Bay, NSW, Australia, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable length 57 cm

ABOVE LEFT:

Seven Day Cycles Neckpiece 2003 grey paper, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable length 45 cm

OPPOSITE (MAIN):

Numerical Calculations 1 Neckpiece 2004 grey paper, white ink, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable length 57 cm

BELOW:

Renewal Neckpiece 2003 white plastic, polished silver, stainless steel cable length 48 cm

Progression 1, 1, 2, 3, 5... Neckpiece 2003 cream paper, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable length 65 cm

Childhood Memories Neckpiece 2003 brown wrapping paper, gold, stainless steel cable length 40 cm

Progression 1, 1, 2, 3, 5... (2003) cream paper, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable, length 65 cm Seven Day Cycles (2003) grey paper, oxidised silver, stainless steel cable, length 45 cm TONI MATICEVSKI tulle gown with shoes by TOM FORD for GUCCI

Liz Ham at DLM Jolyon Mason at DLM HAIR & MAKE-UP Daren Borthwick at DLM for Renya Xydis concept using Tony & Tina MODEL Julia Ryndych at Chadwick PRODUCTION Christopher Jeney at Pioneer Studios SPECIAL THANKS TO Pioneer Studios PHOTOGRAPHY STYLING

POST

RIGHT:

Garland Light 2003 photographically etched metal length 160 cm

BELOW: chairs from

Happy Ever After 2004

Horse Vase 2001 glass 30 x 15 cm

My goodness, just look at what TORD BOONTJE has dragged in.

Pigeons atop speckled bronzed stations Listen to the traffic’s interminable blare Act as London’s cacophonous salutations To folks who, for whatever reason, live there, Including a designer imbued with the intention Of bringing the allure of outdoor life inside With his celebrated Wednesday collection Comprised of furniture, glassware and lights. Tord Boontje is the fellow-in-question’s name, Enschede, The Netherlands, from whence he came. Now, some credentials, for those who must know them: A graduate from the Design Academy, Eindhoven, Completed an MA at London’s Royal College of Arts, Along with Emma Woffenden, started tranSglass, Crafted blossom chandeliers and mementos of dreams With Swarovski, Moroso and Alexander McQueen. Tord’s work enchants all within the range of ten feet, Tumbling scowls of even the most hardened elite. Like a magician, he transforms dull interior locations Into fairy tale sanctuaries and mythical destinations You read about as a child before going to sleep. Lying there, in bed, you ponder for quite a long time: What is he like? Why does he do it? What goes on in his mind? Might there be clues hidden in his interview replies?

TEXT

Brian Duong IMAGES COURTESY OF

Tord Boontje Studio

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Could you describe what your home life was like in the Netherlands and how it compares to your current experience in London?

One of the key features of your work has been an elegant intermingling of nature-inspired forms with the simple design of domestic furnishings. In light of this, I’d like to find out about your memories and experiences regarding nature. I’ve read that you once spent six weeks in a Swedish forest. Could you describe what that was like?

The We d n e s d a y collection shows a fascination with light, bunnies, horses and floral motifs — in a subtle way, it re-engages the domestic environment with fairy tale elements of fantasy and magic. What were the primary motivations for this artistic direction. Was it a response to things lacking in contemporary furniture objects or living spaces?

In addition to its pleasing surface appearance, there’s a notable ‘human’ quality invested in the way your designs simultaneously refr to one’s past — in particular, one’s childhood — as well as one’s current and future positions. It reminds me of an observation by the late nineteenth century / early twentieth century English arts and crafts designer, Ernest Gimson, who said, “I never feel myself apart from my own times by harking back to the past, to be complete we must live in all the tenses, past, future, as well as present.” What are your thoughts on this?

How has the presence of your wife and daughter influenced the direction of your work? I’d also be interested to hear your thoughts about how your personal living patterns might have changed with bachelordom with the introduction of your wife and daughter.

TEXT

Dan Jones PHOTOGRAPHY

Lyn Balzer & Anthony Perkins ALL OTHER IMAGES COURTESY OF

Eley Kishimoto

ea-cups, wall paper, lingerie, concrete and a double-decker bus. Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto have decorated the world, and they’ve only just begun. The husband and wife team, both fashion graduates, formed the partnership Eley Kishimoto in 1992. Tentatively designing textile prints for Joe Casely-Hayford, Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen, their first, small collection ‘Rainwear’ was produced in 1995. Each print was hand drawn and screen printed onto fabric, every pigment applied separately. Waves of lightening flashes, inspired by Op Art; curling thick Nautical cables; rolling countryside hills: the quirky, playful designs were instant cult hits, crudely copied onto the high street (a true sign of creative success) and are considered near-timeless classics. If you like their sharp use of colour and odd sense of whimsy, these are designs that will never go out of fashion. Working quietly from a workshop in South London, planning leftfield projects and personal designs, Mark and Wakako increasingly see the intricate possibilities of their own prints and the ways in which they can be used. Their first on-schedule show at London Fashion Week was in fact a series of very British tea parties with an Eley Kishimoto tea service. Invitations were rolls of their ‘Flash’ print wall paper. The pair create “surface art,” working to the premise that any surface can be decorated. Prints have been splashed over buses, lingerie and luggage. Their concrete print project took the form of an art installation for Fashion at Belsay, an exhibition by twelve leading British fashion designers at Belsay Hall in Northumberland. The Eley Kishimoto concrete city-scape stood alongside Stella McCartney’s swaying crystal horse, Clements Ribeiro’s coloured sand garden and shoe designer Georgina Goodman’s spiralling shoe leather, soaring up the two story stairwell. The results were remarkable. Mark and Wakako, in a collaboration with 6a Architects, realised that the printing of buildings was an actual, tangible reality. As the pair continue to furnish and decorate objects, buildings and people, Mark Eley and Wakako Kishimoto are

bound to the themes that inform and inspire them: home, family, childhood and a sense of place. The difference in their backgrounds, particularly their childhood experiences, is astounding. “Wakako was born in Sapporo, Japan and then brought up in Takarazuka from the age of three. Her home life was an extension of being at school and one of four children where she felt very safe,” explains Mark, “As a child it never occurred to her that she would leave the house. I was born and brought up in Aberkenfig, South Wales. My home life mainly was made up of trying to be out of the home and only using it as a transient place to eat, sleep, wash and borrow money from.” These memories of childhood affect the pair in differing ways. Wakako agrees that “It was a nourishment in many aspects which probably seeps through here and there, but how evident it is I don’t know.” Mark’s early years, spent wild in the Welsh countryside, had more of an obvious effect: “The motivation and the spirit that’s evident in the work that we carry out now must be effected by my past. I believe that everything carries through and each action stimulates the next.” Thinking about his family, there’s one person Mark feels helped shape the way in which he now works. “My Grandfather was a huge influence in work and play,” explains Mark, “A sign writer, screen printer type setter, theatre manager, bowling champion and a very good walker. So family has an important role to actioning work.” “We now live in a Victorian terraced house in Brixton with our two children,” continues Mark. “It’s happy, messy, warm and comfortable: a play den.” Despite the scale of their industry and the all-consuming side projects (including four design consultancies, a newly launched sportswear collection with Ellesse and two imminent shows in Moscow and Mexico City), it seems as though Mark and Wakako have a firm grasp of the simple things. When Mark is asked what makes their place in Brixton a ‘home’ he answers at once: “To acknowledge that upon any return to the house it welcomes you.”

PHOTOGRAPHY

Lyn Balzer & Anthony Perkins

MARTIN MARGIELA black slip VIVIENNE WESTWOOD for WOLFORD tights Shoes by OLIVIA MORRIS

KAREN WALKER halter dress with WOLFORD tights

Strapless top and black skirt by TINA KALIVAS

REBECCA DAWSON black coat with gingham lining Striped leggings by NOM-D Pink glitter shoes with bow by OLIVIA MORRIS at BELINDA

Plastic lace halter by JORDAN ASKILL MAD CORTES pleated skirt

Cream lace dress by TONI MATICEVSKI Black tulle tutu by ZAMBESI Tights by WOLFORD Shoes by OLIVIA MORRIS

HAIR & MAKE-UP

Sophie Roberts at DLM

STYLING

Jolyon Mason at DLM

MODEL

Marianna Louise at Vivienâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Since emerging with her own fashion label in 2002, TINA KALIVAS’s artistic flowering has positioned her as one of a handful of designers currently invigorating Australia’s sartorial landscape with sciential wit, imagination and sophistication.

TEXT

Brian Duong

PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY

Lyn Balzer & Anthony Perkins

RUNWAY PHOTOGRAPHY

Alex Zotos

01. PHOTOSYNTHESIS 02. PHOTOSYNTHESIS

It is not often that the subject of anthropology arises when viewing a fashion collection, yet it happens to be one of the many sur prising aspects of watching a Tina Kalivas design saunter gracefully by. Her early collections, Bioluminescenc e (2003) and Photosynthesis (2004), explored the aesthetic complexities of flora and fauna in a way that breathed life into Edwin Hubbel Chapin’s remark that, “Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.” Exactly why a nineteenth-century Universalist minister such as Chapin felt the need to make a fashion statement is something of a mystery, however, his point remains. What makes Kalivas’s fashion more intriguing than most is the anomalous nature of her “desire to seem”. A spectator’s casual glance might be suspended by the solicitous colour, cut and drape of a Kalivas gar ment, but it is the atypical composition and multiple thematic fixations of the gar ment that really enkindled their fascination. In Bioluminescence, references to marine wildlife’s use of light – to find food; attract partners; defend against potential predators – were married with the aesthetic ideals of the fifties housewife. In Photosynthesis, Kalivas brought back the theme of light, redefined as a source of energy that allowed the plant kingdom to sprout from the stylistic foundations of the thirties, while discreet nods were given to popular culture icons such as Greta Garbo and Peter Pan. Kalivas’s clothes remind us that when implemented successfully, fashion can bestow upon the individual a competitive advantage over their peers. Just as our biological features offer clues about our genetic health and/or fertility, our clothes bring to the awareness of others our access to resources – be they class, taste, intelligence, money, power, creativity etc. In the wild, “the look” can be crucial to the existence of a species of plant or animal. Likewise for humans, one’s physical appearances can provide compelling evidence to a prospective partner of one’s ability to provide and care not only for them, but also any potential offspring they might have. Only time can tell us how Kalivas fits into the anthropological narrative and evolution of fashion. But if her technical prowess and unyielding curiosity is anything to go by, Kalivas’s species of fashion should continue well into the future, adapting in adventurous and exciting ways that leaves its viewers gasping for the right word. Thankfully, on this occasion, Kalivas was kind enough to provide us with the right word and several more.

“If you have to look for a word to sum up anything I do, my biggest inspiration is otherworldliness. A feeling not of this world or if it is, it’s the stranger thing that nature creates.”

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03. PHOTOSYNTHESIS 04. PHOTOSYNTHESIS 05. BIOLUMINSCENCE

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Can you tell me how you became interested in the subject of evolution and wildlife? I suppose when we were really young, me and my cousins were sitting around talking about how life began. Obviously my parents told me that God created us and that kind of thing but one of my cousins – who was a little bit more out there – said, “Everything started from one cell, from water to volcanoes.” I was at a really young age but it blew my mind. It just completely freaked me out. Then I started going to museums and seeing dinosaurs and absolutely knowing that there was a whole world outside the Bible. Just some of the creatures were incredible! As I got older, I realised that we are all creatures of our environment. Everything evolves a certain way because of its environment and it’s interesting, even down to psychology. I’m really fascinated by how some of those creatures still exist, prehistoric-looking creatures, deep in the ocean that emit their own light for mating or for food. Were there any particular animals which attracted you? I love jellyfish a lot, and I love all sorts of fish and crustaceans (laughs) and things with armour on them. Animals with armour or homes on their back are just incredible. To have your home on your back would be absolutely cool! And then in a silly, practical kind of way, I love cats. I’m obsessed with cats. Fluffy little things to have lying around and to cuddle up to and stuff like that. I’m not artistically fascinated by cats because they’re a part of my life. Instead, I’m inspired by the things I can’t touch which are often the strangest creatures. It’s intriguing the way nature comes up with simple solutions to things like catching food and mating which can be quite a complex task. Yeah, it’s like they’ve got what they need. That whole aesthetic really fascinates me. I just try and use that equal simplicity. Another thing which inspires me is the repetition in nature.

Nature is so clever that it will design, shall we say, a particular species or a particular structure within that species which appears again in another animal, in exactly the same (or very similar pattern). That for me is really exciting and a concept I use in my own clothing. How long did it take you to evolve as a designer? It took me a long time. I worked for amazing designers but it took quite a long time to find my own message. I couldn’t work out what it was, so it took a while. Then I asked myself, “What have I always been fascinated by?” And I realised that Sunday afternoons lying around, really stoned, watching wildlife documentaries was what I’d come back to. David Attenborough’s one of my favourite people. What a dude! Honestly, he is actually one of my very favourite people and he’s such a lovely man. Have you met him? No, if I met him, I’d run off with him! (laughs) You know, his film crew tease him about always wearing the same shirt. He does it for continuity because a documentary takes a long time to film. He wants to take all the emphasis off himself and just be an informer. That’s what I love about that man: he explores the world, he gives us the information and he’s selfless about it. He means it, he wants us to know. I just think it’s beautiful. Another person who completely flipped me over was William S. Burroughs. What I love was just how far he took an idea. He was an outlaw who kind of tucked himself away from society but still knew a lot about people. He had a sur real vision of the future. Very surreal. One of his concepts was that if we were to start living in a space station, we would slowly have to start adapting to different atmospheres, therefore our bodies (laughs) would start changing and we wouldn’t need bones

any more. We would probably just take the form of flesh and use our minds to travel. I’m really interested in the Beat generation and what they experimented with. There was one time when they had heard this theory from a guru that if you stared at the mirror for a certain amount of time eventually you’d disappear. You’d actually lose the sight of your own reflection. I just love the idea that they pushed their creativity. That inspired me even though it’s got nothing to do with fashion. Do you apply nature’s ideas of attraction to what you want your clothes to do? Oh no, not really. I don’t think of it that way. I interpret that into my clothing but then all the sensible questions come into mind and I have to think of how I can make it accessible for another person to understand it. It can be difficult having a conceptual idea and then filtering it all the way down to a top or a jacket. That’s when my practical side comes in and I say, “Well, do I want to wear that?”, “How would I feel wearing that?”, Or “How would my friend feel wearing that?” At the moment I’m only designing womenswear so I start by thinking of a few different women I admire, how would they appear and how they would feel and just relate it back. Could you give examples of the strong female figures you look up to and what it was about them which captured your respect? I love the all-girl band, ESG – they are super cool and portray a realistic outlook of an urban girl’s life. I love Issabella Rossilini in Blue Velvet – I love that she appears weak but her presence is so strong. She is one of my favourite actresses, along with Sophia Lauren who is also classic, beautiful and projects confidence. I am also fascinated and inspired by a feminist experimental filmmaker in the 1930s called Maya Deren. I feel she has such a unique way

of expressing female love, although it was total taboo in her day. She was very clever at playing with political boundaries. Let’s discuss your work cycle. A crucial part of it consciously takes place away from city life. Is it because you find the solitary environment to be more creatively rewarding? Well, I don’t know. I suppose I’m quite interested in self-discovery and how I can detach myself a little bit. In a way, a lot of the times I come up with ideas it’s a little bit more pure. If I find myself in the hustle and bustle of things I lose sight because I’m constantly distracted by other things going on around me. Whereas if I have my own time, I can actually choose what I want to enter my world. This is my world and I choose to watch this film, or I choose this person to be part of my life. Does you ever reach a point where you find the isolation unhealthy? You know what? Sometimes it has. I’ll go through stages of months of not going anywhere or doing anything but then I’ll go through a little stage of just wanting to be out all the time and I’ll do it that way. But when I haven’t been out for a long time and then I do, I find myself a little over-friendly! (laughs) Like, I get really, really overfriendly and over-chatty and I just end up talking about something the other person’s probably not even interested in but I’m just really excited to be around humans and meet other people because I’m not jaded. I hate the feeling of being out so much that I’m jaded by people. I like having my distance and then entering the world and enjoying people. I like going through different phases and moving places. Moving countries has been excellent, it’s been really inspiring. After being in the centre of Hoxton Square – next door to the White Cube basically, where everything’s happening in front of your doorstep – and then all

06. PHOTOSYNTHESIS 07. BIOLUMINSCENCE 08. PHOTOSYNTHESIS

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of a sudden being in Marrickville where we didn’t know anybody has been really exciting. What are your neighbours like? My neighbours are great, all the people on this street are great. It’s industrial, we’re just in here on our own.

09. BIOLUMINESCENCE 10. PHOTOSYNTHESIS

(peering out the window) I wonder what goes on in their houses ... Are they freaky? – Freaky neighbours? We’re the freaky neighbours! I think they look at us and wonder what we’re up to! (laughs) Especially when it all looks depressing in this building and once every six months, or when it’s time for Fashion Week or whatever, there’s all these taxis turning up with all these beautiful girls! (laughing) The neighbour from across the road came over and he stood there waiting for the girls to come out to their taxi cabs and said hello to them all! I was really embarrassed because I didn’t know this was happening! But I love industrial areas. Even when I was in London I lived in an industrial area. I really enjoy it. It’s kind of weird that it is far from nature but you can let your imagination go wild. It’s more interesting. I agree. Not having such a thorough under standing of something – like outer space for example – sometimes lends you a creative advantage as an artist, because you rely more on your imagination. Well, that’s where the whole science fiction element comes into it. That’s the other side of the coin. It’s a marriage between the two. How did you develop an interest in space and astronomy? Well, again, I’m fascinated with earthly things, life, how life evolved, nature and that’s what happens here. But then I think about what happens outside of our earth and it just gets even more mindboggling. I’ve always had a fascination

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with planets and the solar system and what’s out there. I remember my first class when the teacher held up a map of the solar system and said, “This is Earth. This is where we live and these are the other planets that are circulating around our solar system.” I just looked at it and thought, “What?! You mean, it’s not just us?!” There’s so much out there. I remember learning Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto in order straight away. I suppose I love that whole Sixties revolution and how they were all fascinated by the space race and all that kind of thing. I found it a little bit naive but very optimistic. You know, “Wow, we are intelligent. We can travel, we can visit other life forms, there’s plenty out there.” It was very inspiring and quite ambitious. I would love to have been around then. I would have gotten really excited about it. But then it crashed in the Seventies and the news was that really, we’re light years away from colonising another planet and it was mainly a political thing. You know, to get votes, they’d show that we can go to the moon and how great we were. Even though the whole space race thing was political, it did inspire some great art. For a while, the future was a good place to be, whereas now it’s perceived in much darker ter ms. Yeah, we’re going inward now. That period was exciting because we were going outward and we were almost ready to take aliens into our home and have a cup of tea, you know what I mean? It was so exciting. And now it’s all inward. It’s all a bit paranoid: “What if we made a replica of ourselves?”, “Let’s all create robots in the for m of a man!” It’s a little self-obsessed at the moment. I mean, why do we need any more stupid people? It’s strange, even though I’m still quite fascinated by the cloning thing. Maybe that Aldous Huxley book, B ra v e N e w Wo rl d was what scared the hell out of me.

THE KINGPINS

Dark Side of the Mall (2004) PHOTOGRAPHY

Liz Ham

VIDEO STILLS

Nigel Begg

STYLING & MAKE-UP The Kingpins THANKS TO

Jolyon Mason

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Whilst state and international borders separate the members of RINZEN, they remain united by a passion for graphic design. While hate and sensational boarders desecrate the membrane of REASON, they remand your knights by pashing four grafted desires. Wild steak burgers enﬂame RECENT trains and buy parts for crafted devices. T E X T & I N T E RV I E W S

Raymond Westmacott, Hazle Weatherfield, James Watson, Diane Lipton, Harriet Fitzhugh & Brian Duong A L L I M A G E S C O U R TE S Y O F

Rinzen

ABOVE:

Architecture Is ... illustration for Poloxygen

Magazine

OPPOSITE:

Rinzen in Silverlimbo (illustration & design by Rinzen remixing original artwork by Brian Duong)

A CAVEAT. Initially, the fundamental orbit of the verbal exchange with Australia’s internationally-revered graphic design commune, Rinzen – whose youngish constituents include Steve Alexander, Rilla Alexander, Adrian Clifford, Craig Redman and Karl Maier – had been projected to traverse the central precepts governing the design brief ’s negotiation process in such a manner that a theoretical platform could be assembled with the dual objective of explicating a relatively overlooked yet imperative facet of the graphic designer’s practice, in addition to bestowing upon the finished composition a novel structural framework which, at an amoeboid state, would assume the posture, not to mention, demeanour, of an orthodox design brief furnished with a chronological sequence of draft proposals, sketches and pertinent annotations, but as it so happened, all predetermined directives were abruptly forsaken during an informal seventy-five dollar steak luncheon, whereupon certain reputable informants divulged potentially scandalous particulars pertaining to group’s dirty lingerie that insinuated the receptacle at the extremity of Rinzen’s vector rainbow contained more intrigue and portents than their seemingly unimpeachable public profile had formerly disclosed, thus, in the time-honoured tradition of the parlour amusement, “Chinese Whispers” (or to enlist its more politically-correct title, “Broken Telephone”), what follows is a sizzling recollection of furtive conversations that bluster the proverbial lid off Rinzen-related obscurities such as the controversial pruriency embedded within the enclave, their unduly alliance with cloying saccharinicity, and lastly, the folklore surrounding one member’s shadowy past which left everybody wondering the same thing, namely, “What exactly does it take to be a bona fide Goth?” IN SHORT. When offered the choice between the high road and low road, we took the low road. Trust me, I saw the former with my own eyes and, eerily, there was nothing to see except for, maybe, some big words, (pointing at the caveat above) “Oooh look, everyone! Big words! ... And there’s another one!” ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST. “Hello? Are you there?” “Yes. Yes, I am. I’m on the road at the moment. Sorry ...” “Okay. So, just quickly, a question I wanted to ask has to do with whether Rinzen are tough.”

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TOP LEFT:

Gwendolyn t-shirt design MIDDLE (FROM LEFT) :

Giant THB Endpapers (illustration by Rinzen)

Giant THB Cover (illustration by Paul Pope, design by Rinzen)

O Complex

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Ponyloaf cd cover

“What?” “Are Rinzen tough?” “Really? Why do you ask that?” “Because I noticed they always have rainbows and girly stuff.” “Girly stuff ?” “Yeah. Like rainbows and cats and, you know, girly stuff.” “Mmmm, Well, there is Rilla, who is a girl ... but still, I probably wouldn’t go that far. I mean, they also create images with skeletons and darker stuff If you look at the work they did for Pol Oxygen , Paul Pope, ::room40::, Pony Loaf and Regurgitator, it’s definitely not girly stuff, but it’s just as cool.” “Yeah, but they are tough?” “Ummm ...” “Anyway, I don’t know if it’s true, but I heard one of them, Craig, has been working out.” “What? Where’d you hear that?” “All over the shop. I hear he’s got some serious muscle definition going on.” “Well, I haven’t seen him for a while, so I don’t know anything about that.” “Why am I talking to you then? You don’t know anything about anything. What kind of an informant are you anyways?” “Wait, who said anything about being an informant? You’re the one who called up asking all these stupid questions!” “What are you talking about? You’re the one who said you knew Rinzen!” “And?” “And so, you’re supposed to tell me things!” “Things?” “Yeah, things about their personalities that other people don’t know about.” “Why?” “I don’t know ... To see whether it comes across in their graphic design?” “Well, Adrian used to be a Goth. Is that what you mean?” “Go on.” “Karl and Craig told me that Steve told them that Adrian used to be a Goth.” “And?” “That’s it. That’s all I know. If you want more information why don’t you ask Adrian?* Besides, I don’t think you should be going around judging a book by its cover.”

JUDGE A DESIGNER NOT BY THEIR BOOKCASE. The other day, I bumped into a friend, Luke, who I’d not seen since high school. As part of the initial chit-chat, I asked him what he was up to these days, and he mentioned that he was a graphic designer. “Oh really?” I responded, this time with genuine interest, “I’m writing a piece for an article about a group of Australian designers. They’re called Rinzen. Have you heard of them?” He said he had, and added that he knew one of them, Karl. According to Luke, Karl was a really nice and talented guy. “Karl can be really shy sometimes, but he’s definitely a cool guy. Really smart. And, he has the best bookcase of anybody I know.” “Really?” I said, again. This intrigued me. Several of my female friends have told me in the past that you can tell a lot about a person just from looking at the contents of their bookcase. Things such as their interests, the intensity of said interest, their level of education and their organisational skills. “Even if it’s a mess, when I look at a person’s bookcase, I just know,” one of them said, “It gives me an idea of what they’re really about. It’s like I’m looking into their head and finding out what makes them tick.” But it wasn’t just books that occupied these shelves. Almost anything deemed worthy of attention was up there, whether it be awards or trophies, models, photographs, records, CDs, etc. In a way, a person’s bookcase was like an edited anthology of their life, one that was mindful of the fact that it was going to be seen by visitors – and when that happened, judgements were sure to follow. I asked Luke to tell me a little bit more about Karl’s bookcase. “When I stepped into Karl’s room, the first thing that caught my eye was the bookcase, which was easily the most impressive I’d ever laid eyes on. I mean, this thing took up the entire the wall, and was made of a rare species of albino mahogany from Belize. It had hand-carved scrolled cornices with these crazy cephalotus and foliage decorations over a dentil frieze, latticed glazed doors and several small drawers with brass pull handles. When I saw it, I turned to Karl and asked whether he was involved in any illegal trade on the side! Ha ha. Like, I thought I had a fair understanding of Rinzen’s popularity, but who knew they got paid that much for doodling? On a computer no less. If you asked me, I thought it was bananas! So, anyway, there was this thing filled with all kinds of toys and books and magazines, from Japan, Iceland, Turkey, or wherever, and behind one of the bookcase’s concealed doors, was a huge collection of vintage girlie magazines from the Fifties and Sixties, with titles like, let me see ... There was Wink Wink,

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Cocktail, Baby Doll, High Heels ... Minx, Cavalcade, Wench ... That kind of thing. You know how, sometimes, you’ll hear about people buying magazines like Playboy for the articles? Well, with Karl, he buys it for the design. I’m not kidding. When Karl was reading these things, he looked right past the girls and focused solely with the magazine’s typefaces and layout and colours and how it reflected the technology and social trends of that period. It was as if the girls didn’t even exist on the page! And whilst he was talking about all this stuff, I remember thinking, ‘Karl, you sad, sad, man. You are missing out on so much.’ But of course, I later heard from somebody else that he was something of a ladies’ man and had been with several supermodels. It made me realise was that, maybe, I was the person I should be feeling sorry for. You know what I mean? Yeah, so, you know, I think it’s safe to say that Karl’s got it made in the shade.” ALL GOOD IN THE ‘HOOD. Whenever I visited a young graphic designer’s studio, there was always a small community of toys and figurines nearby, many still in their original packaging, loitering around the computer or lined up along bookshelves, frozen in silent protest. Often, I would stand there, gaze into the painted reflection of their pupils, and ask, What cause could you be possibly representing on behalf of your master? What secrets are harboured within your hollow plastic shell? It was a mystery that perplexed me somewhat. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from television detective serials, it’s that solutions to such conundrums can only be procured by sheer gumption; by thinking outside of the box. However, should one fall short in the smarts department, the uncanny intuition of a trusty animal sidekick would always suffice. Luckily for me, I possessed the latter. Iggy had been a birthday present from my older sister. A tall, striking Pharoah Hound with large pointed ears, Iggy carried an elegant, muscular frame covered in a shiny red coat. Moreover, Iggy was a very, very smart dog. When he was seven-years-old, he was able to decipher the meaning of simple nouns and verbs, and, only a year later, was tapping away at the keyboard like a slobbering, canine Kerouac. Admittedly, most of Iggy’s written pieces were unpublishable, but it did little to detract from the magnitude of his achievement. Once the internet had become popularised in homes across the globe, he developed a healthy fondness for web-based research. So, when Iggy overheard my befuddlement about the prevalence of toys in graphic design studios, he scampered away to consult the computer. Several hours later, he came bounding back with a print-out clenched in his mouth. It read: “A LONG TIME AGO PLAYTIME THINKED IS PLAYING REST FROM WORKING AT FARM GET TIRED. CAN SHOUT TOYS FIRST IMPORTANT MEANING IS WHEN 19 CENTURIES WHEN FACTORIES ARE BUILDED. AFTER THEN PARENTS HAS TO WORK MEANS AWAY FROM CHILDREN. NEWER TOYS HAVE TO STOP CHILDREN SAYING “THIS IS BORING!” QUICKER. TOYS GET MORE FANCY BECAUSE HAVE TO STOP AND HIDE HOLE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILDREN SO CHILDREN CAN’T BE SAD. BUT STILL CAN’T FORGET TOYS IS KIND OF LOVE SYMBOL.” As I sat there, reading the report, Iggy looked on attentively, trying to gauge my approval. “IN 1962 MIT MAKE SPACEWAR IS THE FIRST COMPUTER VIDEO GAME. IT MEANS NEW PLAYTIME DON’T HAVE TO THINK AND DON’T HAVE TO NEED ANYONE MORE. DIFFERENT TO OLD TOYS COMPUTERS CAN PLAYED BY YOURSELF. SO NO NEED ANYONE MORE TO TALK

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TO YOU. DESIGNERS AND WORKING COMPUTERS ALONE SO MANY TIMES. SO NEED TOYS TO HIDE HOLES SO DESIGNERS CAN’T BE SAD. THEY KEEP IN BOX AND DON’T SELL IT’S LIKE SAME AS DESIGNERS IN THERE WORK PLACE. THATS IS WHY SOMETHING LIKE RINZEN “NEIGHBOURHOOD” IS REFRESH IMPORTANT BECAUSE DO TO MAKE SOFT TOYS IS PLAY WITH PEOPLE AGAIN. ITS SOCIAL. LIKE IN RMX PROJECT EVERYONE IS TOGETHER LIKE LONG TIME BEFORE WHEN THERE’S NO HOLES. IDEA IS BECAUSE SOMETHING 19 CENTURIES PERSON WITH VERY LONG NAME STARTS WITH L SAY POEMS MUST BE MAKE BY EVERYONE AND NOT BY YOURSELF.” When I finished reading, I lowered the paper, smiled, and pat him gently on the head. “Not bad, Iggy. Not bad at all. I’m still not crazy about the all-caps, but you’re getting there. You even used italics! Good dog! Goood dog!” Clearly pleased with himself, Iggy blushed – as Pharaoh Hounds are known to do – and whipped his tail excitedly from side to side as I stood up, walked towards the kitchen, and got him a treat. * TRICK OR TREAT One of my sources was informed by one of their reliable informants that Karl and Craig mentioned that Steve told them that you used to be a Goth. Can you verify whether this is actually correct? Ha ha. Oh dear ... There is so little demonstrably Goth in my background that it feels kind of disingenuous for me to accept the honour. I do wish I’d had the presence of mind to embrace some sort of overt sub-culture whole heartedly, but mostly my developmental years were spent avoiding attention. I did religiously wear Doc Martins in uni ... This was the early 90’s though. Up until maybe 2002-ish my hair was actually coppery red and not black. My exposure to The Cure was from my brother, who did, at one stage, own a pair of pointy boots, but his friends were more what were called ‘swampies’. They liked stuff like early B-52s, etc. along with The Cure, so it was more New Romantic than Goth. I see these Chinese whispers originated with Steve -– that’s not too surprising. Steve is from Ipswich, where I believe they still burn people at the stake for witchery. I probably had a few dark things in my music collection when we met that maybe scared him, when he was really into Red Hot Chili Peppers. What kind of records might have given Steve the impression? I’m not too sure. Given the timeframe, probably either ‘industrial’ (not my term) things like Einstürzende Neubauten or stuff from the Earache label like Painkiller, Napalm Death, or Godflesh. Did you ever wear lipstick or eyeliner? No, I never even got an earring when it was the cool thing to do in 1988 or thereabouts – I was really nondescript. Had you any idea that there was a great deal of interest in your so-called Gothic past? No, honestly, I think you’ve been passed some Chinese Whispers on the part of my bone-headed colleagues. I’m not terrible talkative which probably invites an aura of mystery. I think if Steve ever used the term, “Gothic” it wasn’t even in reference to the actual as-we-know-it subculture or anything. It’d probably be better if you just ignored whatever gossips you’ve been given, and just make up everything/anything to suit the purposes of the story – I mean, the more unbelievable the better probably – as the truth of the matter is deadly dull and there won’t be much joy trying to wrangle it into the sensationalist form you’re after.

ABOVE:

Dark Samadi

article illustration for Prat Magazine

LEFT:

Giant THB Theme Spread (illustration by Rinzen) FUSE Music Television Screensaver (BOTTOM) Differentville (TOP)

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One more endless day on the Buenos Aires location of Happy Together. My assistant had laid the camera on Tony Leung’s bed in the break. We turned on the monitor, to ﬁnd images from unusual angles. It revealed ideas we would have rejected if we tried to talk them through. We messed the bed up a bit more, half covered the lens with a dirty shirt and some underwear, and the style for a whole sequence was born. I put the camera in a cupboard, underneath the sofa and bed, on a window ledge: anywhere casual, improbable or simply where it hadn’t been before. Sure, this style is a mirror for the discarded feeling Tony has, now that he’s broken up with Leslie for the umpteenth time. But it wasn’t ‘intellectualised’ into being, or even planned. It just seemed visually more interesting and unexpected, and solved the problem of how to shoot this tiny space that we’d been in and out of for thirty days by that time.

Did anything surprise you about working in Australia? After the experience of Rabbit and The Quiet American, I thought I was the Lord of all Rings … and like the Olympics they should intertwine. I believe and work hard toward what is becoming known as pan-Asian cinema. I go alone to Thailand. I have been the only ‘non’ on a Korean ﬁlm. I want a real ‘multicultural’ experience, not the travesty of Lost in Translation saying, “We’re okay, but they are so strange.” When Mad Max was conquering the world, the then Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser admitted, “I got a half page on my State visit [to Washington]. Mel got six pages.” We have a duty to celebrate the real function of our Art. I have a drive to celebrate real cinema, a cinema of ideas in images (as opposed to some fucking marketing ploy or better business practices).

Am I right in saying that the title of your new book of photographs, There Is a Crack In Everything, refers to the imperfections and accidents that are part of the artistic process? “There is a crack in everything … that’s how the light gets through …” is a Leonard Cohen song, and an attitude that applauds the appropriation and celebration of accidents. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. The unexpected, the uncontrollable, the unavoidable and the mundane all impose themselves on the process of a work, and encounter even the most seemingly ordered of lives. It’s about learning to appropriate, to make the ‘cracks’ a positive part of how things get done. It also helps you to find a little distance, to observe. From the intensity of the act of creation, or the proximity of the work itself, one must step back and observe, to let go. Marcel Duchamp declared his Bride Descending a Staircase complete when its glass was cracked in shipment. My first film was a disaster that I am still learning from. Most marriages are cracked and evolve from there. A joke is ‘cracked’ … like the fool in Shakespeare, or a crack in the fabric of the emperor’s new clothes.

What attracts you most about the landscape of Hong Kong? I got a call a few days back from a journalist in Beijing. “Congratulations! Your film is the talk of the internet. And it’s number one.” “What film? What number one?” “Your Korean porn film. Best-selling pirated DVD!” “I haven’t made a Korean porn film.” “Motel Cactus. A film by Du Ke Feng (my Chinese name).” “Motel Cactus is directed by Park Ki Yong. It won best Korean film five or six years ago. It’s an intellectual chamber piece!” “It’s Korean. Porn is all they do now.” “Have you seen it?” “I just read the net commentaries. Will you do more porn soon?”

How do you create your photo-collages? I think of all image-making as ‘therapy’ if it gets me closest to self and clarifies what is most important in life: simplicity of act and purity of mind. Someone else’s work can do that. A walk by the sunset sea does it for many. For me, it is collage and the random process of how they come about, rather than going in with some preconceived idea or plan. I try not to think too much about what I’m doing. I try to be open to what a colour or form suggests, so that the work can somehow find itself. I believe this informs my film work more than any script, or other film or person, I have ever seen. How big a part does the subconscious play in the creative process for you? Why I am not a painter. Poet: “There are words in your work.” Painter: “Sardines is a concept not a word.” (Days go by … one is stuck, the other paints.) Poet: “What happened to your sardines?” Painter: “It didn’t work.” Poet: “Too literate?” Painter: “Not really, it just changed its theme.” Poet: “What’s it called?” Painter: “Sardines.”

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What do you enjoy most about working with directors such as Wong Kar-wai, and actors such as Maggie Cheung and Tadanobu Asano? 1) In a film environment you learn a culture from the inside. Your approach expands, you even see things in a different light. Solutions have to be found, they don’t present themselves. 2) Commitment is what counts. It’s what creates a career as opposed to the number of ‘exploits’, or the up-and-down cycle of fads and trends. 3) Exploitation is easy to smell (it stinks). If a culture attracts, you go into that culture, not the classifieds. Learn to adapt – don’t just expect others to. 4) Lost in Translation is American ignorance and arrogance. Dumb is dumber. Add a copyright sign because they are proud of the fact. 5) It is the way you work based on the amount of technical competence relative to your needs and abilities that might land you certain work. But it’s only having a heart and caring that wins trust. 6) It consumes my life and energy, but at the end of the day if it ain’t Art (though I may aspire to it), it’s only a movie – it’s no big deal. Can you explain some of methods you use in film? The doctor says, “Your spine is bending to the right.” I say, “The camera weighs thirty kilograms. I wear it all day, every day.” She says, “Balance it somehow.” I say, “Beer doesn’t weigh that much.” You’ve mentioned the concept of “the space of a film”. What do you mean by this?

“I think of all image-making as ‘therapy’ if it gets me closest to self and clariﬁes what is most important in life: simplicity of act and purity of mind.”

manoeuvrings; the search to find a space where sound and image are just right; secret pleasures and not feeling quite so alone knowing that someone else is also sharing and wanting, even if they are just looking on. You once described yourself as an outsider in a familiar place. How does this help you as an artist and cinematographer? I have been professional ‘farang’ (Thai for ‘foreigner’) for more than thirty years now. Being a foreigner for most of my life has taught me to take what is given, even when it’s not necessarily what you want. You can’t be too arrogant or demanding. When things get political you have no voice. Learning languages, and living and working with others, demands complicity and respect. Not understanding much of what goes on around you leads you to value the different values of words, actions and images. A foreigner sees with foreign eyes. Eyes that reveal details that locals overlook. Rhythms that they take for granted. Spaces that hide or reveal secrets. Colours that shock. The foreign can reveal. But for real dialogue, a foreign heart must be ‘local’ enough. What was it like working in Australia for Rabbit Proof Fence after establishing yourself in Asia for so long? What Rabbit is for me. 1) It’s a kind of homecoming (like the homecoming the kids achieve), or should I say ‘closure’: to come back to this place I lost so long ago, looking for why and what I left. 2) It’s an ‘honourable’ film, but not in the politically correct sense for me. I know little of the Aboriginal people’s loss of honour, or even the history of White Australia for that matter. I don’t feel any more or less guilty about this historical aberration than I do about all the others I have witnessed in China or Israel, or in the many other journeys of my own life. But the point is to address things. Bringing darkness to light is the main purpose of this film for me. 3) A confrontation of ideals and realities. What was right and wrong in our intentions, and a culture’s conceits? Can one be a good person in the service of bad ideas? What was acceptable now will be different tomorrow. Isn’t that what art and thought tried to teach us? 4) An ‘Asian’ film. Aboriginal ‘law’ is very similar to many Asian visions of our place in this space, of how we should conduct ourselves in relationship to the earth, other beings and the integrity our passage here demands. The complicity of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters in this vindication of all they are is, for me, a small step in the right direction. How does the Australian landscape differ from what you’re more accustomed to in Asia? You can’t light the desert: you have to find its inner light. If you’re patient, the moment will come and the light will cut through all your concepts, your experience and your so-called style, to show you so much you never knew. If only people and societies and politicians spent more time out there, all would be calmer, stronger, and as transient and proud as we are of our people in a film like Rabbit Proof Fence. I don’t want to make beautiful picture-postcard images. In our skies I see no blue, just variations of red, the colour of the desert coming and going, like their day and night: Aboriginal blood and courage. I want to bleach the colour out, not just of a film like Rabbit or Neville’s world, but out of all White governance. If the light is harsh enough, we might all see a little clearer.

atching a film unfold through Christopher Doyle’s lens is a visceral experience: a fuguelike plunge into the unknown. His is a world of surreal colours, unsettling angles and swivelling motion, where blood-red hues capture the plight of lovers and green-tinged darkness amplifies the night. It’s a world where the camera’s adoring lens is attuned to the gentle sway of a woman’s hips, where love is the subtle shift of skin beneath silk. Doyle’s gift is his ability to crack the mundane veneer of everyday life, to reveal beauty in the unexpected: the cracked plaster walls of an old apartment; blank faces of a passing crowd; rain on a window framing a girl’s desolate face. “All film is a balance between the familiar and the dream,” he declares in his recent book of photographs, There Is a Crack In Everything. Doyle’s fascination with the unknown and uncharted first propelled him far from home in the early seventies. As a disillusioned teenager living in the beach-side suburb of Caringbah, Sydney, he dropped out of university and joined a cruise ship – the start of a journey that would take him around the world. After working in Thailand, Paris, Israel and India, Doyle travelled to Hong Kong in the late seventies to study Chinese. It was at this time that his poetry teacher gave him the name ‘Du Ke Feng’, meaning “like the wind”. His first foray into cinematography came by chance soon afterwards. A Taiwanese friend needed someone to help him shoot a documentary and Doyle had the time. Since then, he has gone on to work with Edward Yang on That Day, on the Beach (1983), Chen Kaige on Temptress Moon (1996), Gus Van Sant on his 1998 remake of Psycho, and Zhang Yimou on the multi award-winning period epic Hero (2002), as well as with directors Stan Lai and Stanley Kwan. Doyle also directed, shot and co-wrote his own film, Away With Words (2000), a fragmented story about three people exploring the nature of memory and communication in an urban milieu. Perhaps his most significant working relationship is with maverick Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. During their long collaboration, Kar-wai and Doyle have made Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1995), In the Mood for Love (for which Doyle won the Grand Prix de la Technique award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival), Happy Together (1997) and last year’s intriguing masterpiece, 2046. Although he’s now widely considered a master of his discipline, making films is still an organic emotive experience for Doyle. For him, it’s all about a seduction of the senses. “I’ve made my best films when I have just fallen out of love,” he has said of In the Mood for Love, “That’s the only time someone like me gets a little subdued and reflective, to love only whoever comes before my lens.” In a previous interview you mentioned that travelling first ignited your interest in the possibilities of space. Can you explain how this occurred? The first time I saw others making love, it was in a cinema in Sydney’s southern beaches where I grew up. It was far from Dolby. The speakers were cracked, seats were missing from every row, the screen was stained with all the projectiles it had endured when the surf was not up… but who cared? So much was going in different parts of the theatre that it sounded like ‘Sex Surround’: sex mixed with images glimpsed between shadows and light. All was so much bigger than the drab life in our streets. The sounds were as bloodpumping as the stirrings in my pants. Watching and wanting since then has been for me what both sex and cinema are about: awkward moments and not-so-simple

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Celebrated cinematographer CHRISTOPHER DOYLE, best known for his long career in the Hong Kong movie industry, leads us on an unexpected trip as he describes the organic and sensuous experience of image-making. INTERVIEW

Chris Piper ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

Christopher Doyle

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t the age of seven, a quiet, insular boy named Sean McCabe, happened upon a song in the living room of his parent’s house which, unbeknownst to him at the time, would forever alter the course of his destiny. The song turned out to be none other than “Dancing Queen” by Swedish supergroup, ABBA. It was, as McCabe fondly recalls, “The first moment where I recognized the power inherent in a way a song was written and recorded. In its ‘sound’ – the layers of strings, piano, and dual harmonies of the two women seemed to convey a sense of joy and flirtation that was communicated so easily through the melody and sound of the music. That particular recording is amazing in the sense of its glacial sound and boundless sense of space. In many ways – despite the silliness of the lyrics – it is an amazing piece of pop songcraft that I have grown to appreciate even more the older I get.” Such was the profundity of McCabe’s connection with “Dancing Queen”, that it initiated a deep and longstanding veneration for music which soon manifested itself in visual terms. “One of the first album covers I remember being drawn to visually was Main Course by the Bee Gees,” McCabe remarks, “[It] had an illustration, done in a sort of Art Nouveau style, of the Bee Gees logo with a spoon which curved under the type and held a small, naked woman in a

large hat. I know, pretty druggy imagery, but along with the music, which I loved to listen to, it created this huge sense of mystery, and being a small child, I asked myself, ‘What does this have to do with the music, if anything?’ – It was that mystery which made me stare even longer at it.” As McCabe matured, so did his taste in music and the enigmatic imagery which enveloped it. A pivotal moment occurred when he encountered the works of distinguished English graphic designers, Vaughan Oliver (4AD) and Peter Saville (Factory Records). Among the things which impressed the young McCabe was the sophistication contained in their pictorial articulation of music by bands such as Pixies, Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Joy Division and New Order. McCabe effused in a previous interview that, “[Oliver’s] creative inventiveness and org anic integration of typography and photography is almost without peer in the music world as far as I am concerned.” Of Saville’s impact, McCabe commented, “His classic sense of design, combined with his minimalist approach at times, made me first realize at a young age just how close graphic design could come to being fine art. His most recent covers for Pulp and Suede continue to surprise and thrill me more than most pieces of graphic design that I come across.”

SEAN McCABE explains that graphic designers have feelings too, you know. TEXT

Brian Duong ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF

Sean McCabe

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Adapting these approaches to his own ideas, McCabe exercises a similar fluency with a diverse range of visual lexes which include photography, typography, colour and layout. His artworks for bands like Asobi Seksu, Pas/Cal and On!Air!Library! survey an eclectic range of styles – some taking the form of simple, subtle photographic compositions whilst others flaunt elaborate illustrations or collages. Perhaps McCabe’s most recognisable work to date has been for Interpol’s full-length debut, Turn On The Bright Lights. Shot long before McCabe had met the band, the album’s cover photograph consists of a blank cinema screen, swathed in deep red and suspended in the darkness like a stoic, sentient monolith. Its projection of toughness despite chromatic evidence suggesting otherwise, works in perfect synchronicity with the album’s private, inner turmoil. For McCabe, the image is especially significant since it documents a moment at “the end of a long, intense relationship ... that had suddenly fallen apart.” He even suggests the presence of genuine feelings at the time of the image’s conception might explain its ability to “resonate deeply with the people who are moved by it.” “Somehow, if something is created in certain emotional conditions, the audience can sense and feel that specific energy. It’s almost as if the work were haunted by the emotions of whomever created it.” Part of the emotional sensitivity and intimacy of McCabe’s work has its philosophical roots in Christopher Doyle, an Australian cinematographer whom McCabe regards as “The single most influential creative artist working today.” McCabe continues, “He has an eye for

the moment, and an amazing ability to communicate, through his visuals, the whole history and tragedy of a character, even if they are only onscreen for a few brief moments. I try to keep that concept in my mind whenever I design something or take a photo – I want to capture a moment and leave just enough room for the audience to fill in their own story. I think it’s that unanswered question which makes something more elusive and more powerful. As someone looking at it, you have to work a little for the image or design. I am most moved by any form of art that does this and it is what I strive for in my own creations.” Although formal educational institutions and influences serve to illuminate the mechanics of design, McCabe points out that a graphic designer’s cultural awareness (in areas such as music, film, art and design) can enhance their originality, effectiveness and flexibility within the artform. “I think that the single most important thing any creative person can do for themselves is to constantly have the desire to open up and explore different cultures, approaches, styles, and aesthetics. When I was their age, I constantly searched for things, in order to find my own way, and I think that is why when I approach any subject or creative problem, I constantly have a large pool of mental resources to pull from. You have to educate yourself how to see, how to experience, and take from those things that which you personally respond to. There is no really right or wrong way to design, but there is inexperience and ignorance in terms of approaching some particular situation and being uneducated to think beyond the parameters of what is dictated by the client. In the end, it’s the solution that matters.”

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“AL COLUMBIA’s a genius! I just wish he were a prolific one. He’s also a super gent. I got to spend a lot of time with him in the Tundra Days 1 . I miss him – his work, and personally.” Mike Allred – cartoonist, M a d m a n and R e d R o ck e t 7

“I don’t know what his state of mind is now, but at one point [Columbia] was pretty mentally disturbed. Artistically, he’s a genius ... He’s really an amazing artist, but unfortunately also fucked up, mentally screwed up.” 2 David Cross – comedian and actor, Mr Sho w and Ar rested De v elopment

TEXT

Brian Duong A L L I M A G E S C O U R TE S Y O F

Fantagraphics Books

1. Please refer to page 142 for more information. 2. Quoted from Matt Dornan. “David Cross”. Comes with a Smile #16, Autumn (2004).

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ABOVE:

“The Trumpets They Play!” Blab! Issue 10 (1998)

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l Columbia is an American cartoonist perhaps best known for his ephemeral series, T h e B i o l o g i c S h o w, first published by Fantagraphics Books during the mid-nineties. T h e B i o l o g i c S h o w paraded comics that combined the humorous, rubbery cartoon slapstick of F leischer Studios with the surreal horror pioneered by film directors like Dario Argento and David Lynch. That is to say, T h e B i o l o g ic Sh o w exhibited images that were spectacular, subject matter that was disturbing, thereby inducing laughs that were uncomfortable and an atmosphere that was wholly unsettling. T h e B i o l o g i c S h o w’s main attraction followed the adventures of two young children, Pim and Francie, whose mischief transgressed all manner of social no-nos as they murdered, raped, and jumped into cars with complete strangers. Their escapades harked back to a bygone era when scare tactics were used to edify society’s youth with regard to etiquette, courage and ingenuity. By comparison, most fictional impudent children these days have it remarkably easy. Whenever the proverbial bad apple acts up in a contemporary children’s story, all we can expect them to suffer is a harmless momentary drawback, whereas if the same insolence was to occur within the province of Heinrich Hoffmann’s D e r S t r u w w e l p e t e r or the folktales of the Brothers Grimm, it would have surely been met with strange and severe retribution. These stories were the kind to put the little ones on notice: if they could not comprehend why tucking into another person’s house – irrespective of its delectability – was intrinsically wrong, they deserved to be eaten. If, on the other hand, they were capable of outwitting an elderly cannibal, then kudos (and jewels!) to them. It’s unforgiving object lessons such as the aforementioned that have helped form an integral component of Columbia’s B i l d u n g s ro m a n – or a “novel of formation” which typically depicts a character’s personal development within a defined social order. In comics such as “The

ABOVE (FROM TOP) :

“The Biologic Show” The Biologic Show Number 0 (1994) “Peloria” The Biologic Show Number 1 (1995) LEFT:

“The Blood-clot Boy” Zero Zero Issue 16 (1997) 138

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Blood-Clot Boy”, “Amnesia” and “The Trumpets They Play!”, the central characters’ journey to maturation is set amidst a social order rife with slaughter, sexual deviancy and supernatural phenomena. Not unlike the stories contained in the Bible, it is within this fantastic and bizarre environment that Columbia’s central characters are forced to confront the serious quandary of whether to conform to a society they find morally reprehensible or to resist it and shoulder the burden of being a pariah. Allusions to the Bible feature prominently in Columbia’s work, in particular its exegesis on the subject of evil and its chief propagator, Satan. Where it is not directly referenced in the narrative or dialogue of Columbia’s stories, it pops up elsewhere as sinister background ornamentation. In Columbia’s adaptation of St Jo h n’s B o o k o f R e v e l a t i o n s , “The Trumpets They Play!”, the embodiment of evil is manifest as a grotesque seven-headed fascist. As the beast assumes its throne, towering over an assembly of uniformed minions, we are confronted with an awesome sight that is further magnified by the lens of real-life historical atrocities. When Anton Szandor Lavey, founder of the Church of Satan, was asked to explain the appeal of fascist imagery to Satanists, he replied that, more than anything else, it had to do with, “[T]he drama, the lightning, the choreography with which they moved millions of people.” 3 Columbia’s practice of the dark arts continues the tradition of the horror genre in the way it highlights our collective fear of the unknown – the external forces that allegedly surround us – and also the figurative and literal grossness that lurks within. Whether it takes the form of an unwanted urge, an ailing body or good old-fashioned death, it is the inevitable betrayal of our biology that we fear the most – a fear that, according to popular surveys, is closely followed by public speaking.

ABOVE:

“I Was Killing When Killing Wasn’t Cool” Zero Zero Number 4 (1995) BELOW:

“The Trumpets They Play!” Blab! Issue 10 (1998)

3. Quoted from Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind. L o rd s o f C h a o s : T h e B l o o d y R i se of S a t a n i c M e t a l U n d e r g ro u n d (2003)

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“Ersatz (A Family Name)” The Biologic Show Number 1 (1995)

As a special treat, here’s a quick interview with Mr Al Columbia! Could you explain how the allure of Fascist imagery in your work came about? From the Television! There are several instances in your comics where you have depicted a character’s personal development within a social order that is either difficult to define or downright abhorrent. Does this in any way reflect your relationship with society? Of course not! Could you recount your first memorable encounter with the Bible and the impression it left upon you?

“Amnesia” Zero Zero Issue 20 (1997)

There was a big Bible at my grandmother’s house that had lavish paintings reproduced in its centre pages. I remember being specifically drawn to a painting of Eve in paradise because she didn’t have any clothes on . Not even a fig leaf. It was a real treat and a half. When you think about it, Eve was our very first Playmate. Has your perspective of the Bible deviated over time? No deviations. I still like paintings of Eve, with or without her fig leaf. Do you believe in the idea of a duelling God and Satan? Of Course! What has been the role of Satan in your life? Um ...

“Peloria” The Biologic Show Number 1 (1995)

continued from page 136

he period Allred is referring to took place in the early nineties when M a d m a n and Columbia’s Doghead comics were published by Kevin Eastman’s publishing imprint, Tundra. During this time, the 19-year-old Columbia was an assistant to Bill Sienkiewicz, the artist working on Alan Moore’s twelve-issue magnum opus, B i g N u m b e rs. The series’ complex narrative followed the construction of an American shopping centre in a modest British town and its parallels to the fractal concepts of mathematician, Benoît B. Mandelbrot. Similar comparisons could be applied to the production of Big Numbers , which seemed to possess its own share of chaos. Only two issues in and already the pressure of rendering Moore’s complex saga proved insurmountable for Sienkiewicz, who, by the conclusion of the series’ third instalment, withdrew his services from the project altogether. Saddled with the guilt of having burst Moore’s bubble, Sienkiewicz later confessed to SubMedia magazine (1999) that, “Logistically it was a nightmare. Alan’s writing is so brilliant that the art is at service to the story, it’s requisite. Even though Alan didn’t ask that, it simply is, and so it was encompassing and literally [sic] like biting off more than I could chew.” In the aftermath of Sienkiewicz’s departure, Alan Moore and Tundra approached Columbia about illustrating the remainder of the series. Upon first inspection, Columbia seemed an obvious choice: given his past involvement with the project and the fact that his work bore a close resemblance to Sienkiewicz’s collage-like painted style, Columbia’s presence would ensure a consistency between the artwork of future issues and its primogenitor. What was not immediately apparent, however, was how these deceptively ideal factors would play a pivotal role in the premature cessation of B i g Numbers . When Columbia was officially anointed as Sienkiewicz’s successor on the fourth issue, it was much to the displeasure of Sienkiewicz, who accused Columbia of unscrupulously stealing his thunder and denounced his former aide as “deranged”. According to the events retold in Eddie Campbell’s comic, Alec: Ho w To Be a n Ar t i s t (2001), such aspersions had the effect of making Columbia increasingly self-conscious and resentful about his imitative role in the project, prompting Columbia to describe himself as a “replicant abomination”. Then, in 1992, fiasco turned into folklore when Columbia vanished with the final artwork for issue four of Big Numbers. Exactly what became of the artwork depended on one’s informant: some believed Columbia had kept the artwork, whilst others insisted it had been hacked to bits. In either case, all that remained of the debacle for Alan Moore and Tundra was a tiny fragment of the issue’s artwork found in Columbia’s abandoned studio. Once it became clear to Moore that B i g Numbers was establishing a body count of sorts, he grudgingly called it a day and went on to pursue other less pernicious exercises. Not surprisingly, the chasm of silence left by Columbia’s untimely disappearance was quickly filled with all manner of speculation and conjecture regarding what actually happened. Most accounts cast Columbia in one of two roles: the misunderstood enfant terrible who lost one too many marbles, or the nefarious scoundrel who took Tundra’s money and ran. It wasn’t until 2000, when Columbia emerged from seclusion to unveil what he referred to as “the only definitive statement … regarding B i g N u m b e rs ” on T h e C o m i c s Jo u r n a l message board. He wrote: “I recall it being a lot of fun, actually. I got to fuck a lot of girls, spend money and be driven around London in a white Rolls-Royce

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Limousine (twice!). These are only a few of the luxurious benefits provided by Kevin Eastman, much to his credit and kindness. It is true that Kevin has a big heart – no sarcasm there. I suppose at the very least I should apologise publicly to him for withholding and finally destroying the artwork he paid me to do. True, he never purchased it ‘to own’ and legally he had no claim to it, but still ... ethically speaking, I should have handed it over to him to use at his discretion, according to our contract. I cannot blame him or [Tundra editor] Paul Jenkins (they are indistinguishable in my mind at this point in terms of their stance on all this) for bad-mouthing me all these years. I have even been entertained by some their more imaginative accounts of what happened. “The simple truth is a truth much worse than rumour. At the risk of ruining the mystique surrounding the whole affair I will recount how I remember things to have occurred ... as briefly and as clearly as possible. I was paid $9,200 to complete issue number four of Big N u m b e rs. A lot of times Paul Jenkins was good enough to pay me as I went along, without even seeing the pages. I actually came to like Paul after a while. I felt bad for all the responsibility and pressure that was taking its toll on him. I remember he was often sweating and that his eyes were always popping out of their sockets like they would in a funny cartoon. He had a lot on his shoulders. He was a hard worker. Indeed, Paul’s tireless efforts on his own behalf should certainly be applauded. “However, my opinion that Paul may be a snake in the grass is beside the point and inconsequential to what happened. He actually treated me like a little brother. A very lovable English chap was he. “Okay, don’t tell anybody, but the truth be told, I didn’t even finish the issue – but was paid for it anyway. The reason I tore up the pages was so that I wouldn’t have to admit that I had only completed about half the issue when I quit despite having cashed all those checks. I loved Kevin’s money, I really did. “You see, I never had any intention of staying with the project but merely attached myself to it in order to gain (through Eastman’s money) a certain prominence, at which time I would quit in the manner that we have all heard about. This way, with no visible proof of the artwork, it would always shine as a masterpiece in people’s minds and imagination. I would be reviled by some and made a sort of hero by others who can understand or sympathise with ‘artistic integrity’ and all that punk rock bullshit. “Yes, I am a boy with horns. There is not a single thing I say or do that is not designed with a specific outcome in mind. Any and all rumours about myself were generated and manufactured by me and me alone. Please allow me to introduce myself ...”

Columbia’s barbed communiqué is indeed definitive, though not quite for its clarification of the Big Numbers scandal. Granted, Columbia surrendered enough details to erode the original “mystique surrounding the affair”, however, he compensated for it by piling on a fresh, steaming layer of deceit. No – the missive’s real subject of authority rests in the way Columbia teases the reader with his smarmy and facetious persona. By the time one reaches the rejoinder’s finale, what becomes especially pronounced is Columbia’s desire to preserve the fog obscuring his true self from the public viewing gallery. Aside from inflating his bad-boy sex appeal, it could be construed that the smoke screen was there to shield Columbia’s selfhood against the judgemental sway of others, be they peer, superior, critic or stickybeak. While Columbia may have entered the scene a young lackey, with his identity delineated by the movements of Sienkiewicz, Moore and Tundra, the equivocal elusiveness subsumed upon his departure clearly signalled an end to all of that. In becoming a myth, Al Columbia found himself a free man, constrained by nothing and no one.

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Liz Ham

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Described by Lou Reed as “Heir to the sublime Jimmy Scott,” ANTONY lets us have a peek at the things he keeps close to him at all times. TEXT

Brian Duong INTERVIEW

Brian Duong, Samuel Hodge & Marc Hartl PHOTOGRAPHY

Samuel Hodge

hances are, if you were to ask your closest confidante how you should go about impressing a prospective date, “just be yourself ” would be the foolproof remedy they’d prescribe. Unlike other conventional pearls of wisdom, the inherent beauty of such counsel rests in its absence of preparation, hidden costs and finicky rules. After all, the only thing you’re required to do is show up and just “be”. However, as many of you probably already know, being yourself can be a lot harder and a lot more complicated than first anticipated, especially when your individuality is still a work in progress. Up until the moment we give up the ghost, our personal identities are constantly changing. Often we try to reconcile who we were with who we are now and who we aspire to be. In doing so, we create a secret map of our lives that tell us where we

are in relation to the rest of society and whether we’re steering in the right direction. There are times when everything falls into place, where all is as it should be. But other times, things take an unexpected turn and we find ourselves veering off-course or completely lost. For New Yorkbased singer-songwriter Antony, this is where the most fascinating transformations occur. His latest full-length album with The Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now, acknowledges heartache and suffering as vital fixtures of the human experience. Songs like “Fistful of Love” and “Bird Girl” illustrate how the same despair that threatens to crush the human spirit can inure it, and in some cases, elevate it to a higher plane. As the album’s title suggests, I Am a Bird Now is awash with the theme of metamorphosis. It brings to mind a

To begin, could you tell us a little bit about Chechister, the town you grew up in? It was a small, middle-class, somewhat conservative English town in the ’70s. It didn’t have a very strong flavour. I just remember watching television and going to the park. My family was raised around all the other families so my brother knew their brother so it was just that whole thing. The school I went to was Catholic but because my brother had preceded me there I was pretty much left alone even though I was kind of a weird kid. I was a sissy but my brother was cool so it was okay. My best friend Rachel was the only black girl in the school. Her mother was a little wild because she would come barefoot to the chapel and pray twice a day. She was considered "freakish" because she had a bunch of heavy Catholic/African shit going on. And Rachel was just a scream. I’d like to find her actually... I’ve been thinking

lovely remark made by transgendered writer, Griffin Hansbury, in an episode of T his American Life. He said, “Transition, itself, is in some ways the most romantic undertaking of all. It’s an idealistic adventure, extravagant and kind of unreal. You commit yourself to a feeling, early on in your life and then you do it, believing all the while that the impossible can be made possible. That the great divide can be crossed. It’s a total leap of faith. Like falling in love, you don’t know what will happen when you get to the other side, but you go there anyway.” In a sense, Antony is the perfect candidate to guide us through this strange passage: graceful, compassionate, and androgynous – his music allows us to navigate past our most intimate defences and move us in ways we least expect.

about her. I remember I went back there when I was thirteen (two years after I moved to America) and she had started high school but wasn’t allowed to wear trousers. She had bought a pair of jeans at the flea market which she hid from her mother and changed into when she left the house. I just love Rachel. I also had one other friend who was like a little boyfriend, Matthew. He wasn’t a real boyfriend. We didn’t do anything but he was like my boyfriend. I was the woman and he was the man. He would go into the shop and steal something like erasers from WH Smith and I’d be like, "You can’t steal! Put it back!" (laughs) Or he’d bring me to the alleyway and show me a used condom, you know what I mean? (laughs) We’d be like "Argh! A rubber johnny!" I didn’t know what it was. It was so mysterious. Like, "Does the man pee into the woman??!" (laughter)

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continued from page 148 I understand that you also spent part of your childhood in Amsterdam. What do you remember of that period? It was a very colourful, very liberated city with an air of danger and excitement. I was allowed to dress however I wanted, grew my hair long and wore a lot of jewellery. That was when I developed my identity as an artist. After that we went back to England for about three years and realised with dread where I was living. Suddenly I was a fish out of water. I had a big conflict with everyone and my identity started to become an issue with my peers. Everyone was wearing school uniforms whilst I wore clogs and necklaces and it was just not working. Did you get into physical fights over it? Not at that point, no. You know, I was always playing with the girls. I didn’t want to play soccer so I’d play elastics with the girls and I’d really get into trouble. I’d be sent to the headmaster’s office over it! It’s so intense. I still think about it all the time because I feel so much of my personality was informed by those experiences – my interactions with society between the ages of about seven and fifteen. I developed ideas about my relationship to society at that age. You know sometimes it’s not to my advantage. Sometimes I think I’m more outside of society than I actually am. People think I’m normal, maybe, but because of what happened to me at that age I definitely feel that I’m very far outside of society. I didn’t belong with the boys and I was an anomaly within the girl group. And so you’re living with the girls until you escape to live with the

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queens or whatever. But you don’t even know that at that age. You don’t even know what you are. You’re not even having a sexual impulse, yet you’re swallowing fists for being a fag. I guess a lot of kids can be quiet and not have an issue whereas some kids are hopeless cases. And I was a hopeless case; I was a hopeless sissy. It’s strange how people can be so reactive towards differences and in some cases, give you a hard time because of it. Well, in England they didn’t because they knew my brother but when we moved to America it was a big issue. Think about it, the parameters for a gender were a lot wider in England during the late seventies/early eighties. I mean straight boys were wearing make-up to school, New Romantic boys. My older brother who’s a really normal guy, had friends who were really poncy. Adam and The Ants and everything like that was on television so there was lots of make up, effeminacy and a more a peacocky idea about men. They played a lot more with that in English pop from David Bowie up. But in America it was very cut and dry. Anyone who deviated even so mildly from machismo was considered a fag. At least where I moved to, you were very much outside. Did you ever read that book, Black Like Me [by John Howard Griffin]? It’s about this white guy who’s a journalist during the Fifties and he dyes his face black and goes into the Deep South and does an investigation about what it’s like to be a black person. Because he was a white journalist, it was his discoveries about racism that were a revelation to a lot of mainstream newspapers and publishers. It was the first time that white people had to

“I was always playing with the girls. I didn’t want to play soccer so I’d play elastics with the girls and I’d really get into trouble. I’d be sent to the headmaster’s office over it! It’s so intense. I still think about it all the time because I feel so much of my personality was informed by those experiences.” admit that this happens. One scene in it that I always remember is where he’s hitch-hiking on the road and these white guys would pick him up, and alone in a car with a black guy they’d tell all their dirty little confessions because he was outside, far from the roar of the crowd. I remember in school at that time, the leader of the boys’ club in sixth grade. He was this fat English guy called Martin, an American English boy. He was a really ruddy-faced boy and he was just the biggest hog. There were certain altercations that developed where some of the boys were threatened with criminal charges for being so abusive towards me and as a result some of those boys were forced to invite me over for a sleepover by their parents. So suddenly there I was in the lion’s den in these hideous, heinous sleepovers with my greatest enemies and one of these guys was Martin and I’ll never forget that he took me into the bushes and confessed that he liked Soft Cell. One of the biggest problems those boys had with me was that I liked all this English music. I liked Depeche Mode, Soft Cell ... I liked Laurie Anderson, who’s American, but all of that was popular culture in England in 1981-82. In America it wasn’t popular culture until 1984-85, so I was considered a complete freak. I can never forget them saying, “You like the Depeechey Modey?” because that’s

their way of saying Depeche Mode. But then he took me to the bushes and secretly confessed that he liked “Tainted Love”. He may as well have asked for a blowjob! (laughter) There’s no hope for me in America. I even tried to fit in. One year, I tried to be normal and fit in with the boys. I tried to play basketball. I bought preppy clothes. I bought certain shirts with certain insignias on them. I tried to cut my hair in a certain manner that they would appreciate. Did it work? Oh no, it made them even angrier! It was terrible. So then I said “Fuck it,” started wearing make-up to school and had my own little coup. I was friends with all the most popular girls, so they were my weapon and ultimately I got onto the student council. They used to call me ‘Pumpkinhead’ at the school because my face is really round, so I ran a campaign to become a Spirit Commissioner of the school, saying I’d been visited by a great dark pumpkin in the night. All the children from the first and second grade voted for me and I won! It was such an ironic coup that I won the Spirit Commissioner of the school when I was really its most hated object. I was free and clear but by then I couldn’t have cared less.

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Three words: Indie. Music. God. TEXT

Jo Quach INTERVIEW

Jo Quach & Brian Duong PHOTOGRAPHY

Brian Duong

ou haven’t really heard Mount Eerie until you’ve listened to it through a set of headphones. Only then does the faint breath from your speaker swell into a jungle of sound, chaotic and real, swooping from ear to ear: as if blinking eyes in the treetops of a forest emerge from the darkness and creatures reveal themselves. Owls hoot. Snakes hiss. A bear roars. Beneath it all, a heavy heartbeat drums life and rhythm into the full-length concept album that explores death and rebirth in just over forty minutes. Telling the story is 24-year-old Phil Elverum and his choir of voices – including those of past collaborators Karl Blau, Calvin Johnson and Mirah, to name a few – in an album where, if you listen carefully, the ground quivers and the sky trembles. Beginning his recording career in the back of a record store in Anacortes, Washington (owned by Beat Happening’s Brett Lunsford), Elverum recorded tapes using an old reel-to-reel eight-track, which, years later would become the basis of his future releases. Listening to any of his albums, it’s obvious that Elverum has a love for sound experimentation. The romantic might imagine his ears prick up as high winds howl overhead, carrying a distortion of melodies, but in truth the self-taught producer spends solitary hours in the studio recording and “trying out weird sounds” with different instruments. After moving to Olympia in 1997, Elverum has become one of K Records most prolific artists, releasing five albums as The Microphones, alongside a handful of seven-inches and tapes. The craft of songwriting seems effortless to him. His songs are textured with layers of sound and yet are simple at the same time, brimming with a rare innocence and often heartbreaking honesty. Although essentially a one-man project, guest collaborators have been diverse, ranging from fellow K Records family members, to crowds pulled up on stage and Norwegian hardcore teens. Elverum once said in an interview that he wanted the sound of The Microphones to constantly evolve. In late 2002, upon the release of his fourth album, Mount Eerie, Elverum embarked on a tour across Europe entitled “I’m Never Coming Home”. The tour ended in Norway,

in the dead of winter, where Elverum remained for six months, isolated in a small cabin. Returning home the following spring, he moved back to Anacortes and “broke up” The Microphones, to begin his renaissance under the banner, Mount Eerie. One of the things which struck me with your early performances with The Microphones, was that it tended to be quite theatrical. I went through this weird phase where I was doing very theatrical shows. [Now] I’m getting back into just playing songs. I think I’m finding the value in that. I mean, it was really amazing. Some of those shows were incredible but there’s something about it that seemed aggressive, sort of like, “Hey look at me! Look at how crazy I am!” A lot of good stuff happened too, but I’ve gotten a little more grandmother-like. Can you tell us a bit more about what you mean by getting more “grandmother-like”? In a previous interview, you expressed a similar sentiment, except it was described as a desire to attain a “grandmother’s face”. Oh, for a while I was really into the idea of sinking into myself, trying to look like a grandmother. Trying to exude the polar opposite of the energy that was going on in the bars in Brisbane, where people were trying to hook up all night. Having a grandmother’s face is just being nice to everybody no matter what they’re like. (Offers cupped hands) “Do you want some cookies?” (laughs) It doesn’t even have to be as typically grandmotherly as that. I really believe it’s the default mode for both my grandmothers. That’s how they see the world: with compassion. And it’s a thing worth striving for. What are your grandmothers like? Oh, one of them, my dad’s mom, is pretty much a traditional grandma. She grew up on this farm in North Dakota with really hard weather and became a teacher. She always tries to feed me too much: “Like, seriously, stop feeding me, I am full! I don’t wanna take leftovers home!”

FOLLOWING ARTWORK: “ The idea was borrowed from this book illustrated by Maurice Sendak that we just found called The Bat Poet, about a young bat who can’t sleep during the day and instead, watches the world and sings poems about it.”

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But it’s a thing of love and of having lived through the month, killing time until I got my own place. They were all Great Depression where everything had to be used up. She highschool kids and they had this hardcore band so I got a works really hard, and even though her knees are bad and band together with them and played five shows, which was her vision is failing, she never complains. She’s always like, really fun. Their families kind of adopted me and they gave “Oh, can I get you more of this?”, “Oh, let me get that!” me Christmas presents and stuff. The town worried about You know? She’s always the first person to stand up. She’s me and often asked, “Have you heard from Phil lately? The been like that her whole life. She just serves it to the world. weather’s been bad, I hope he’s doing okay.” But I also My other grandma is the most amazing storyteller. It’s wanted to disappear, so I wasn’t a very good son. I was like, incredible. When I have conversations with her, I feel like “Thanks for the socks. See ya!” I’m having a conversation with my closest friends. Even some of the slang she uses and the way she thinks about Is Norway where Mount Eerie was recorded? issues. I’ve always talked to her about girl troubles and I recorded Mount Eerie before I went there. That’s social things and she just gets it right away. I interviewed the weird thing about a lot of my songs and albums. her once ... She’s going to die eventually and I realised Whatever it’s about, it happens to me after I do it but that I didn’t know that much about her life, so I got a never before. I don’t know how it works, it’s almost tape and just asked her, “Tell me from the beginning. Tell creepy because I’d talk about it in my songs and it would me everything ...” I’m really glad to have that. She’s such come true! I recorded Mount Eerie, went to Norway an amazing storyteller, really funny. She’s really good where, literally, the album happened to me. The album at building up conflict, then was the story of somebody settling them with a resolution going off and living on a and a punch-line, but it’s her mountain alone and dying “I was living totally alone, life that she’s talking about! and being born again. I I want do that to my other didn’t think about it all ... miles from anyone, and grandparents and my parents I’m sure that subconsciously that was pretty interesting: too. I think it’s good to have a I put myself in situations, but going insane.” record. Imagine being able to it was almost creepy. I could listen back to somebody’s voice write a song about winning in thirty years or so. money and I’ll win a bunch of money! It’s remarkable how grandmothers are like that. One day You should try it! I’ll be a grandmother and I (laughs) All my songs tonight wonder if I’ll be like that? will be about winning money! Why not start being like that (sings) “... And then I won now? And why does it just have some money!” I don’t know to be women? Why can’t men what the formula is, though. have that now? Maybe there’s a certain code I have to say it in. Are you still attached to your “grandmother face” theory Did you get a chance to listen to these days? Norway’s indigenous music? Well, yeah, kinda. I still am Yeah, but it’s not what I but I don’t actually use that expected it to sound like. I word. Maybe I’ve accomplished was reading the Viking Sagas it. Actually, my new thing is “babyface” which is similar, before I went there, and actually, on Mount Eerie, the except with a new born baby. Like, this baby was looking last section is what I imagined traditional Viking music at me the other day and it was just like ... (Pulls a face. His would be like. I imagined these intense bearded guys on eyes widen and mouth gapes, staring wondrously.) And it top of mountains, with really long alpine horns going [he wasn’t shy about staring at me. It didn’t have any idea that makes a deep resounding sound into an imaginary horn] it had a face! It was just eyes and whatever it was that was ‘OHHHHH!’ But their traditional music was really fast going on. There was no ego attached to it at all. It was with high-pitched fiddling. [laughs] So, I prefer the other amazing although it’s hard to remember how to do that. version. The native Sami people have music too, but I think it’s more like a horn-and-drums sort of thing. The Sami So you’ve been doing that a lot? radio station I listened to at the cabin was all techno music, Oh no. I’ve just been thinking about trying to see the with Sami singing over the top of it. It was gut-wrenching, world that way. really terrible music but eventually I got into it because it was so absurd. I understand you spent quite a bit of time in Norway. How did you arrange that expedition? Were there any other absurd moments encountered at the I stayed with the person who set up my last show for a cabin? month and put an ad in the paper, to get my own little Yeah. I went crazy! Like, totally out of my mind! I cabin. I made friends in this town because I was there for a was talking to myself for weeks and weeks. I had all

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these different characters in my head. I was living totally alone, miles from anyone ... That was pretty interesting: going insane.

I think the real thing to go for is to be able to have that way of living without having to be a hermit about it. Like last night, for example, it was this really crazy bar scene and I was just trying to retreat into my mind in the middle of it. It would be amazing to be among all the people and all the craziness, yet still have that serenity. That would be good. But I don’t know if anyone can actually do it. I don’t know if it’s actually possible to be calm all the time. I think that’s probably why people in China move into the mountains. Because it’s too much. The world is crazy.

How long did it take you to realise that you didn’t have both oars in the water? It was hard because I lived in this cabin and would take a bus back into town to get more groceries every ten days or so. During the ten days alone I would go so out of my mind. I mean, I would listen to the radio and even though it was in this language I didn’t understand, it would remind me that I was on Earth. But then I’d go for a few days without listening What are your feelings towards this kind of physical to anything and get so immersed in my own universe, I detachment from society? would forget that I existed. Like feeding myself: I just did I think it’s important and has its place. But I think some it without thinking about it. There was food there and then people get too into it. it was in me. I wouldn’t know how it happened. You know what I mean? It was totally unselfconscious. I had so many I guess it also depends a person’s reasons for detaching weird jokes that I would crack myself up with. I’d do these themselves. weird voices and thought I was In Alaska there’s this whole really funny even though there culture of men who just can’t was no-one else around to see relate to society and they just “All my songs it. I’d be waiting for the bus and go out there with their dogs, my mouth would still be going. and live in a cabin and fish tonight will be about I couldn’t stop! I was like, “Act and hunt. They just mentally winning money!” normal!” and punching myself deteriorate so it’s not romantic in the face, trying to snap out at all. But then again, there’s of it. Once I got on the bus I also a hermit tradition in had to bite my lip trying hard China where people are just, in order to pay, go to the seat like, “Ah, fuck the world! I’m and sit down. It was the biggest gonna move to the mountains thing for me to go to the seat and go live in a cave.” That and not totally explode into seems a more healthier reason. nonsense. I don’t know. I think it has to do with how you become Was the insanity limited to detached and how much you voices or did it manifest itself become detached. in other ways? It was just voices. Right. I’m reading this book right now How did you go about pulling about Aboriginal Australian yourself out of this situation? beliefs and the nomadic nature. I just walked around. I It’s so interesting. For some was pretty in touch with the cultures in the world, they’re surroundings and got to know already nomadic, so what’s to the hills around there really well. There was nothing to detach from? It’s their way of life. Still, it’s totally hard to do, but I couldn’t stay in the cabin, even though it was get my head around, because it’s not part of my culture and really cold outside. Mentally, I would have rotted, so I had my mentality. I’m from a tradition of towns and homes, to force myself to put on all my warm clothes and walk houses being fixed, getting your food from a designated around at least once a day to gather wood and get water. farm or a store. A thing I realised when I was in Norway, Stuff like that. I also tried for months to find a route to the was that in most cultures in the history of the world, young top a mountain with no trail, even when it was really snowy. people make this dividing point between when they are I’d get really far up and think, “No, this isn’t it.” I’d go back young and when they are old. They would go out into to the cabin and rebuild my energy for a couple of days. I the wilderness and face themselves or some sort of ritual felt like a real explorer, which was nice. I had this illusion version of it. Even in our culture, I guess, it exists. Like, that I was the only person who lived on the planet and I “What did you do on your 18th birthday?” or “Oh, dude, was exploring it. I went and voted,” or “I went and bought cigarettes,” or “I had sex in the back of truck,” or whatever. There’s still a There are a lot of amazing artists and designers I’ve spoken desire, I think, a human urge, to have some sort of ritual to who find the state of isolation and hermitude to be a defining point between youth and adulthood. That’s what I creatively rewarding environment. Does this kind of thing went to Norway for: to do something really weird, pointless appeal to you? and dangerous, and come out on the other side.

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Eightball #23: “The Death Ray” Daniel Clowes

Fantagraphics

n this week’s episode: Teen loner Andy discovers he’s been hor monally programmed (by his late scientist father) to manifest a super-strength capability triggered by smoking cigarettes. As Andy and his only friend/ally/ provocateur Louie ponder the possibilities of the power, he comes into possession of another enigmatic inheritance, the titular Death Ray – a spacey, aa-oogah car horn-looking ray gun that (in Andy’s hands alone) has the power to zap any object or living being into traceless oblivion. It’s the 1970s and the pair try to realise a career as superheroes, looking for evil to punish and damsels to impress. As you’ve probably guessed, things don’t work out so well. As you flip through this one at the store, the first thing you’ll notice (after the Ditko-era Spiderman flavour of the cover portrait) is the formal similarity to Eightball #22’s “Ice Haven”: “Death Ray”, too, is divided into nominally separate mini-strips (approximating the feel of old newspaper ‘funny pages’) that combine to create the whole story. Where “Ice Haven” used this format to deliver a labyrinthine survey of small-town life (drawing the disparate threads together

into an inexorable existential climax like a Robert Altman film), the “Death Ray” sequences seem to solely represent the filing and internal classification of Andy’s living memories – sorting and colouring the remembrances in ways that give personal weighting and dramatic bias to the events as they are replayed, elevating the mundane into a tidy and desperately meaningful package, and relegating the unwanted (and unjustifiable) to off-panel oblivion – though enough clues remain for a more complete and horrific portrait to present itself to the careful reader. This mode of introspection – lensed through the artifice of pop culture – is much more than a stylistic conceit, it also cleaves the underlying theme and explicit narrative events into a seamless whole, neatly summarised at one point by Andy himself: “Somebody has to impose some kind of structure on the world, I guess. Otherwise everything would just fall apart, wouldn’t it?” Ultimately, it’s not a story about superheroes – nor even consciously a genre critique or parody – but an achingly smart use of the medium to meditate on self-determination, relativistic morality and power. A lot happens ‘off camera’ in this story, complemented by the considered placement of interior monologue in speech balloons. Colour plays a vital role in the telling of the tale, at times even shouldering the burden of imparting narrative information – something easily overlooked on a first read-through. In its peak moments, “Death Ray” stands as the most accomplished display yet of Clowes’s craft combining the expressive immediacy of a documentary film, with his flair for layered meaning and

surreal symbology. At its worst, though, it confirms some past misgivings about Clowes’s oeuvre, failing to quite live up to its rich premise. The casually bitter and misanthropic tone of the story is distancing, and what should be a quietly devastating (in some places darkly hilarious) character study fails to have much weight: the monster at the end of this book would be largely indistinguishable in a police line-up of Clowes’s routine cast of alienated losers. “Ghost World” and “Ice Haven” managed to overcome their embedded cynicism to be reﬂective beyond the scope of their pages, but the same paralysing ennui that hobbled “David Boring” has in many respects also defeated “The Death Ray”. Rogers Hammerstein

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Fourth Estate

he photograph adorning Pulitzer Prize-winning science book, His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine is eerily compelling. Like the fragility and confronting mortality of the story that Jonathan Weiner tells, the cover photograph is haunting, striking and memorable: it captures the bond between the two brothers whose story is at the heart of the book and communicates, so simply, the resilience of those familial bonds. The image is, in many ways, an unintentional visual nod to the sad truth behind the photograph – a testimony, of sorts, to the strength of two brothers in the face of the horrible knowledge that one of them will outlive the other, leaving behind a sibling who, despite his best efforts and brilliant scientiﬁc mind, was unable to save his brother’s life. The shorter of the two men, with his hand resting on his brother’s shoulder, is Jamie Heywood, a Harvard-educated mechanical engineer. Next to him is his younger brother, Stephen, a self-taught carpenter. As kids, the two enjoyed the quintessential American boyhood: annual family camping trips, football, baseball, summer camp and, at family gatherings, arm-wrestling competitions. When Stephen beats his brother, the event becomes a joke, only turning serious when he is diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Years later, Stephen sarcastically tells the doctors about his arm-wrestling defeat, only to learn that it was almost certainly one of the earliest symptoms of the disease. Indeed, as Weiner soberly notes, “ALS is the kind of illness that makes loved ones hope for brain cancer instead. With cancer, at least there was some chance of a cure. With ALS there was no chance at all.” Stubbornly and passionately, Jamie abandons his career as a successful mechanical engineer in order to pursue a cure for his brother’s disease. Weiner understands, better than most, Jamie’s fruitless desire to save his brother’s life because his own elderly mother suffers from a similar disease. Based on that fact alone, His Brother’s

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The Power Out Electrelane Too Pure

ou are in a ballroom in medieval Paris with one-hundred barefoot girls. The sauvignon blanc is ﬂowing and you move sleepily through the deliciously hypnotic “Gone Under Sea”. Then the drums are off, driving the poppy rhythm of “On Parade”, makings you dance, dance, dance

vocals will take time to get used to – almost severe and monotone on first listen, until you let them become what they are – another texture in the album’s aural palette. This music’s like love: don’t try to define it, just wallow in the lovesick melancholy of “Birds”, bite your lip to the sombre defiance of “This Deed” (which takes its cue from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science) or simply swoon in the electromagnetic field that is “Love Builds Up”. The album is packed with reference material. “The Valleys” was fashioned into a gospel inspired a cappella chorus from the poem A Letter Home, by Siegfried Sassoon. “Oh Sombra!” is based on a sixteenth century sonnet by Spanish poet Juan Boscan, which starts with an austere keyboard refrain and finishes in a buzzing, wailing crescendo. Yes, there are sonic footnotes to the likes of Can, Broadcast and Stereolab in here, but these girls haven’t copied anyone else’s homework. Louis Decamps

His Brother’s Keeper: A Story From The Edge of Medicine Jonathan Weiner

Keeper could very easily have become a work of personal mawkish sentiment and reminiscence, or an angry polemic. Weiner, however, successfully negotiates the challenges his subject matter presents, managing to maintain a clinical distance even as personal emotions threaten to overwhelm him. Heidi Maier

ELECTRELANE

like you were at all of tomorrow’s parties, and then some. “Where am I?” you ask. “Why, Toto, you’re in the listening station for Electrelane’s The Power Out.” This Brighton-based all-girl quartet formed in 1998, as the sun was setting on the 1990s Riot Grrl punk-rock movement. Inspired by neu-feminists like Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill) and Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), Electrelane took the term ‘punk rock’ and twisted it into ambient instrumental soundscapes on their debut album Rock it to the Moon. This time round they add lyrics in French, Spanish, German and English. Verity Susman’s

The metronomic drum-and-bass and gripping guitar solos that have characterised Electrelane’s previous instrumental experiments continue in “Take the Bit Between Your Teeth”, with a dark, driving repetition making it a standout track. There’s more drama and infectious pounding rhythm in “Only One Thing is Needed”, before the album closes with the tipsy, discordant piano solo of “You Make Me Weak at the Knees”, a giddy giggle at the whole affair that has just been played out in this listening booth. The Power Out will rearrange reality and make you believe in originality again. Ghita Loebenstein

Freaks & Geeks Deluxe Edition Shout! Factory

“R

emember that time in civics when I tried to squeeze out a fart and it came out ... a poop? And I had to flush my undies down the toilet? Do you think I wanted to tell you that?” And thus Bill Haverchuck explains the importance of truth in friendship. Freaks and Geeks was a late 1990s NBC TV drama series that won both critical acclaim and an army of fans for its painfully hilarious portrayal of adolescent hell in 1980s Michigan. Naturally, its parent network killed the show before the end of its first season. This premature cancellation was in some ways a blessing, as the show remains preserved in a sort of rose-tinted state of perfection, spared the fate of [insert David E Kelley production here], lingering interminably like a stale fart. Seen through the eyes of the Weir children, Lindsay and Sam, the show centres on McKinley High and the fractured subcultures that constitute its student body. Honour student Lindsay abandons her “mathlete” friends to consort with the freaks, apathetic ne’er-do-wells whose rebelliousness she ﬁnds energising after a life of conformity. Meanwhile, Sam and his geeky friends, Bill and Neil,

Underachievers Please Try Harder Camera Obscura Popfrenzy Records

hen mapping out a transect through Scotland’s musical topography, without hesitation Camera Obscura would be marked down close to fellow Glaswegians Belle and Sebastian. Having said that, Camera Obscura still manage to maintain their independence on their second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder, through a simpler and stripped-back approach to songwriting that mixes quiet country with 1960s girl-group inﬂuences, resulting in something beautifully melodious and fragile. To their credit, Camera Obscura has steered away from any overt cuteness or quirkiness. Instead, they concentrate on a simple blend of strummed acoustic guitar

struggle to get past the ﬁlter-feeding end of the social food chain. Essentially, everyone suffers and what makes the show stand apart from others in its oeuvre is that its stories ring true. The writers drew upon their universally tortured childhoods for inspiration and managed to delve beyond mere surface examinations of adolescent issues du jour, creating instead an affectionate remembrance of teen angst. This DVD set has been a long time coming, obstructed by expensive copyright clearances of soundtrack music and low commercial potential, but spurred on by fan demand, and the earnest desire of the show’s cast and crew to reminisce about

how great it all was. In the interest of paying proper respect to the show and frustrated by its premature demise, the Freaks and Geeks creators kept a record of pretty much everything that went on behind the scenes, added twentynine audio commentaries to the eighteen episodes featured, and bunged it all on six discs. In addition to the standard DVD set is the mother of all deluxe editions, featuring two extra discs’ worth of special features for the serious geeks. As far as DVD box sets go, this deluxe edition has no equal – it’s certainly no soulless, change-the-coverpicture-and-call-it-a-limited-edition-StarWars-style merchandising enterprise.

FREAKS & GEEKS

Packaged in faux leather as the McKinley High yearbook, it includes press clippings, diaries, photos of the cast and crew, as well as a grateful nod in the direction of the fans and online communities devoted to the show. It’s all so intensely personal that it almost feels awkward to be privy to this fervent love-in. Que Minh Luu

and electric guitar noodlings, backed with straightforward drumming, and from this foundation embellish each track with tambourines, xylophones, piano, strings or brass. Tiny touches of complexity produce a far better product than may have resulted from jumbling all those instruments together in every song. Camera Obscura’s musical inﬂuences are anchored ﬁrmly in the 1960s, with the music of that era manifested in the ‘doowop’ of “A Sister’s Social Agony”, the surfmusic inspired drumming of “Teenager” and the Supremes inspired backing vocals in “Let Me Go Home”. Founding members Traceyanne Campbell and John Henderson exchange lead vocal duties, the sweet restraint of Campbell matched perfectly with Henderson’s soft resonant crooning. Campbell’s voice in particular is Camera Obscura’s strong point and truly shines during the album’s quieter moments, never veering off into vocal gymnastics or slipping into tweeness.

The Australian version of Underachievers Please Try Harder includes two exclusive tracks, “San Francisco Song” and the short, rocking closing song, “Amigo Mio”. Highlights are the bouncing pop of “Suspended From Class” and “Number One Son”, while the hushed “Your Picture” is a beautifully sparse, melancholic interlude on the otherwise up-beat album, with Henderson’s near whispered and softly hypnotic vocals at the fore. Campbell has her chance to get all melancholic, too, on “Books Written For Girls”, where her breathy vocals are draped from a gentle, country-infused piano and slide guitar. There may not be anything particularly groundbreaking in the sweet innocence of Underachievers Please Try Harder, and Camera Obscura are unlikely to be heralded as the saviours of rock and roll any time soon, but perhaps if they were, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. Cameron Webb

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Game of Death Bruce Lee Hong Kong Legends

ame of Death is a fairly over-produced movie which nonetheless remains a guilty pleasure to watch. Originally aimed at bringing the spiritual philosophy of jeet kune do (Bruce Lee’s own fluid brand of martial arts which broke away from the formality of traditional styles) to the screen, Game of Death now stands as his swan song. Five years after Lee died during filming, the movie was redirected and rewritten by Robert Clouse to add a more Hollywood slant. Editor Alan Patillo attempted to bring congruity to the incomplete film

by using old footage of Lee and an army of look-alikes. It is poignant that the same technique used to keep Lee’s stellar persona alive in this film was also used a few decades later to complete his own son’s movie, The Crow, after Brandon Lee was killed on set. Despite the patchy final product, Game of Death became an unlikely hit. The film tells the story of Billy Lo (played by Lee), on the run after a near-death experience with a crime syndicate run by Dean Jagger and Hugh O’Brien. Add a love story with singer Colleen Camp, an iconic yellow tracksuit and set it to an opening score by James Bond composer John Barry, and you have a blockbuster with international appeal. Lee’s friends Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bob Wall, Chuck Norris and Dan Inosanto also lent their faces to make his last film live, while Sammo Hung worked fifteen days and nights choreographing

the posthumous fight scenes. The DVD has some superb extra features that explain Lee’s ambitions, not only for the film, but for martial arts as well: a master class by jeet kune do sensei Danny Inosanto, George Lazenby’s reflections on Lee and his mysterious death, the Cantonese disco version of the opening and closing credits sung by Norman (Hong Kong’s answer to Elton John), numerous unused alternative scenes, the original film synopsis and a brilliant commentary. All of this allows you to discover more about the legend of Bruce Lee and make your own tribute to the great man. With the ongoing success of this film, Bruce Lee showed Hollywood that Chinese cinema was capable of being enjoyed by a wider audience than just the Chinese. Terence Koo

Pastorialia: Stories George Saunders

refers to a literary genre that appeared at the beginning of the thirteenth century and aimed to facilitate a preacher’s evangelisation of the masses. So, if you’re a fan of the short story form, Saunders is your god. And Pastoralia your Bible. Chris Piper

Hero Zhang Yimou

Bloomsbury

Edko Films

once caring aunt returns from the dead, now foul-mouthed and bossy. Two would-be Neanderthals quarrel in their theme-park caves. A self-help guru makes a living showing others how to stop people “crapping in their oatmeal”. Author George Saunders’s gift is his ability to construct fictional worlds at once hauntingly familiar yet disturbingly surreal. He creates tangential universes with all the elements of our modern world – cheap television programs, funeral parlours, strip bars – but with an eerie twist. In “Sea Oak” the male narrator supports his family by working in an aeroplanethemed strip restaurant called Joysticks. His trailer-park single-mum sisters sit at home all day, addicted to television shows such as How My Child Died Violently. When their kind Aunt Bernie dies the story takes a darkly comic turn. Bernie turns up at the house, zombie-like and horrifically decomposing. Instead of the humble dogooder she once was, she now wastes no time telling them all how to run their lives. And finally, she’s ready to have some fun. “Maybe you kids don’t know this but I died a freaking virgin. No babies, no lovers. Nothing went in, nothing came out. Ha ha! Dry as a bone, completely wasted, this pretty little thing God gave me between my legs. Well I am going to have lovers now, you fucks!” The dark humour in “Sea Oak” is stained by an underbelly of hopelessness, as Saunders magnifies the desperation of the have-nots in a franchise-ridden landscape. His characters are caught in stasis: desperately unhappy with their lives but unable to change their circumstances. “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,” said Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory in the Department of English and American Studies, at the University of Manchester. Saunders, who has worked as a geophysical engineer, a doorman and a knuckle-puller in a slaughter house, has often referred to this statement, and it’s a marvellous way to view his work: as a satire of America’s consumerist dystopia. Yet the six stories in this collection hint at so much more; there is a redemptive quality in these tales. The word ‘pastoralia’

Showtime Dizzee Rascal XL Records

all me old-fashioned, but when I listen to most beat-based music, I am mainly interested in the ways it makes me want to dance. Not only do I want to dance to Dizzee Rascal’s sophomore album, Showtime, I actually want to sit down and let it talk to me as well. That’s not to suggest it lacks funk. It sashays its way in with a jaunty little intro number, “Showtime”, with Dizzee playing top-hatted ringmaster welcoming us to the show. He tells the story of how he “went through dramas along the way” (which have presumably been assuaged somewhat by his Mercury Award). Having established his position, “Stand Up Tall” busts right on in with its jungly, tapping beat punctuated with scratching sounds. He’s gone straight for the 3 am on this one: the dance is a sweaty and quick race to the punchline. Next up, “Learn” wants to know “who the fuck are you?”, and it might well ask. I’m the one listening quietly now while you sweat your little heart out, Dizzee. On “Face”, we’re talking again. “Let’s talk about face/Let’s talk about money”, and he’s making his point, but the clincher soon follows in “Respect”, his nastiest song, and all the better for it. His spare, threatening bass raises the red alert and you have to admire his nuts ’n’ bolts determination when he says, straight to your face, “You people are gonna respect me if it kills you.” It makes me nervous and I like it. He notices, and lets up a little on “Get By”, explaining that he’s from a place where “real-life mothers lose real-life sons”. It hasn’t completely got him down, though; “Dreams” is a positive frolic through his various successes, and as toneless as his singalong chorus is, he’s in a happy place. “Imagine”, though, that’s the clincher. For all his East End bravado and real-life stabbings, he’s an optimist. Speaking to his locals, he asks, “You’ve been living in the grime, don’t you want to climb the ladder of life, the wall of enlightenment?” And despite the lack of grime I’ve been living in, I can only answer, I sure do Dizzee, I sure do. Rani Sheen

et in the third century BC during the Warring States period in China, Zhang Yimou’s Hero is a breathtaking martial arts epic deeply immersed in philosophy and idealism. Jet Li is a mysterious warrior known only as Nameless, who is summoned by the King of Qin (Chen Dao Ming) to receive his reward for defeating the three most feared assassins from the neighbouring kingdom of Zhao: Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung) and Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai). The King entreats the nameless warrior to relate the tale of how he defeated the three assassins, and from here the story unfolds in a series of flashbacks reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Varying versions of the tale are told, each presented onscreen in a different colour. Costumes, sets, props, the very air is saturated each time with a different hue, first black, then red, blue, green and, finally, white. The varying accounts suggest the subjective and elusive nature of truth, the way it is mired in memory and feeling, motives and presumptions. The film weaves these meditations with spectacular action, and creates a moving poetry, both visually and emotionally. Hero is a film about idealism: idealism and its flip side, sacrifice; idealism and how it can lead to the devastation or completion of a life. “Swordsmanship’s ultimate achievement,” says the King, “is the absence of sword in both hand and heart.” But what of the earthly world must be sacrificed for this lofty end? The path to each character’s ideal ultimately crosses the issue of choice, and this juncture contains the real drama and poignancy of the film. When his or her convictions are challenged, each character must decide what must be sacrificed: one’s belief, or that which stands in its way. To follow one’s ideals is one thing. To follow them to the bitter end, another altogether. Such grand and abstract conviction is probably beyond us mere mortals. That’s the stuff of legend and of romance, of emperors and of heroes. Linda Luong

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LYN BALZER and ANTHONY PERKINS Lyn Balzer and Anthony Perkins are photographic collaborators. In a career spanning twelve years, their photographs reflect a commitment to both the Australian landscape and the female form. Lyn and Tony’s work has appeared in Australian and international fashion and photography publications including Big Magazine, M Publication (Frankfurt), Alrighty Magazine (Sydney). With commercial clients including Louis Vuitton, the pair have also been involved in a number of solo and group exhibitions around the world. GENEVIÈVE CASTRÉE Geneviève Castrée was born in snowy Québec city in 1981. She was born a French-speaking baby. She has moved many times and now lives in a little triangle of her favourite places in the Paciﬁc Northwest part of the continent of North America. Her illustrated stories have been published in books and magazines in Europe, Canada and the U.S.A. Also, she often visits locations she has read about once in National Geographic magazine and plays songs that she wrote under the name ‘Woelv’. But really, her main thing is books. So please, check out her latest, (with a record) called, Pamplemoussi. LIZ HAM Liz Ham is a London-born photographer, based in Sydney. Working commercially as an advertising and editorial photographer, Liz has also contributed to recent exhibitions at Stills Gallery, the Australian Centre for Photography, the State Library of NSW, First Draft and Imperial Slacks Galleries in Sydney; the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne; and La Gallerie Photo in Montpellier, France. Collaborations include an installation with Diorama Queens in 2000 at the Carlton Arms Hotel, New York, and numerous projects with The Kingpins artist collective. Liz’s fashion contributions have appeared in Harpers and Queen (UK), Artlink, Australian Style, Vogue Australia, Vogue Japan, Yen, HQ , Oyster, Photofile, WAD Magazine (France). SAMUEL HODGE Sam Hodge is a self taught photographer specialising in documentary photography and portraiture. With a background in film making and video production, Sam worked for a a number of Sydney-based magazines before becoming a contributing editor at Oyster in 2003. His work has appeared in Oyster, Russh, and cult European title Butt Magazine. Fans include American photographer Ryan McGinley, artist Asian Punk Boy and Butt Magazine publisher Gert Jonkers. In late 2004 Sam published his first book, Truth/Beauty/ Cock, a collection of his photographic works to date. He is currently working on a magazine project due to be launched mid-2005. DAN JONES Dan Jones moved from London to Sydney in 2003, where he has continued his career in fashion and lifestyle journalism. Based at i-D Magazine for four years, Jones worked on various projects including copy-writing advertorials and editing the shopping section, ‘i-dmagazine.com’, and contributed to the magazine as a whole.

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His work has appeared in design encyclopaedia Fashion Now, published by Taschen, Attitude Magazine and various online publications. He has also contributed to Harper’s Bazaar (Australia) and Russh Australia. THE KINGPINS The Kingpins are an artist collective of four females based in Sydney. Formed in 2000, they create performance, video and installation netherworlds in galleries, museums and nightclubs. 2004 highlights include: Taipei Biennale Do you Believe in Reality?, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; Gwangju Biennale Grain of Dust, Drop of Water, Gwangju, Korea; I Thought I Knew But I Was Wrong: Australian Video Art, ACMI/ Asialink touring show thoughout Asia; Zeitgeist, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; 2004: Australian Culture Now, ACMI, Melbourne. The Kingpins are represented by Kaliman Gallery Sydney. Contact www. kalimangallery.com QUE MINH LUU Based in Sydney, Que Minh Luu is a freelance film editor. After graduating with a Bachelor of Media, Que took to online video producing for commercial clients such as Telstra and Pepsi Asia Pacific. Her personal work, a series of short films, has won several awards in recent years. A member of the Australian Screen Editors Guild, Que is currently associate editor on various film projects with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

and occasional artist. Having grown up on the central coast of New South Wales, she has made it as far as Sydney: a small journey that has earned her a collection of Bachelors (Visual Arts; Art History and Theory) and strange skills (from managing a cake shop to co-creating the first ever jump rope musical). RANI SHEEN Rani Sheen is a freelance writer and editor, living and working in Toronto. Australian-born Sheen graduated with a Bachelor of Media in 1999, and continued her studies at the London College of Fashion and London College of Printing. A regular contributor to Toronto-based independent publication Eye Weekly, Rani has also worked in numerous editorial and research roles including literary editing, festival programming, and magazine launch projects for international publishing houses. NICKY SHORTRIDGE After graduating with a BA in Graphic Design from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and an MA in Graphic Design from Royal College of Art, Nicky Shortridge began her career in illustration, design and communication. Having lived and worked in London, Hong Kong and Sydney, where she is now based, Shortridge also studies fiction and nonfiction writing and editing.

JOLYON MASON Based in Sydney, Jolyon Mason has been a fashion stylist since 2002. Alongside his editorial work for Australian and international publications including Big Magazine, Oyster, Poster, Yen, Pap Magazine (Helsinki), Mason’s career also encompasses fashion and costume design. His commercial clients include Levi’s and Mambo.

KRIS WEBSTER Working primarily as a business analyst, Kris Webster’s expertise lies in equity research and corporate advising with a creative approach. A graduate of the University of New South Wales, Webster was invited by the institution to lecture on finance and marketing. Webster is also author of a thesis exploring economics in the Asian marketplace and is the creator of flash-based gaming software.

CHRISTINE PIPER Christine Piper is a journalist and editor. Born in Seoul, Piper taught English in Japan and graduated with a Bachelor of Communication with Honours in Creative Writing, before beginning her career as a journalist in Australia. Most recently editor for youth and entertainment title JET, her work has also appeared in Juice, 3D World, and online magazines Urban Cinefile and Superfuture Online.

ANNIE ROSE WRIGHT Annie has always been a fashion designer. And she never studied. For the past six years she has been doing her own labels, Mini & Molly and a second label, Ode to Freddy. She has also designed t-shirt prints for Tsubi and Wayne Cooper. At the moment, she is designing for a slightly more commercial, but still fun, label called Milk & Honey. Belle & Sebastian is her very favorite band.

JO QUACH Jo Quach took Tae Kwon Do lessons in the first grade and has managed to hold onto her white belt for over a decade. As a keen enthusiast of cheese ball sentiment, Jo enjoys throwing impulsive high fives and baking for loved ones. She made her poetic debut in the sixth grade, embellishing Bryan Adams lyrics in love letters she wrote to her neighbour two doors down. After he moved, she channelled her efforts into short stories and zines, surfacing with a hardened heart and a distracting limp tailing behind her. In 2005, she will be travelling to central Europe, speaking in tongues.

JONATHAN ZAWADA Jonathan Zawada is a leading graphic designer in the fields of interactive and digital media. With a background in traditional and digital animation, Zawada is largely self-taught. One of the original founders of design collective The Revolution, Zawada worked on creative strategies, identity design, illustration and interactive media projects for clients such as Coca Cola, Warner and ABC, including a creative architecture project in central Sydney. Zawada’s abstract web-based work for the collective has been archived by the Museum for Applied Art in Frankfurt, and a further project featured in the Valencia Biennale, 2001. Based in Sydney, Zawada’s commercial clients include Royal Elastics, Modular Records, True Alliance, Supply and Feeder Associates.

MELISSA RATLIFF Melissa Ratliff is a writer, curator, musician